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Title: Terpander; or, music and the future
Author: Edward J. Dent
Release date: July 24, 2025 [eBook #76559]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1927
Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TERPANDER; OR, MUSIC AND THE FUTURE ***
TERPANDER
TERPANDER
_or_
MUSIC AND THE FUTURE
BY
EDWARD J. DENT
[Illustration]
New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Published, 1927
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_All ancient writers who mention the progressive state of music in
Greece, are unanimous in celebrating the talents of TERPANDER. Several
writers tell us that he added three strings to the lyre, which before
his time had but four. Plutarch, in his “Laconic Institutions,” informs
us that Terpander was fined by the Ephori for his innovations. However,
in his Dialogue on Music, he likewise tells us that the same musician
appeased a sedition at Sparta, among the same people, by the persuasive
strains which he sung and played to them upon that occasion. There
seems no other way of reconciling these two accounts, than by supposing
that he had, by degrees, refined the public taste, or depraved his own
to the level of his hearers._――BURNEY.
TERPANDER
I
In the early years of the present century a certain learned and
cultivated musician, then about eighty years of age, was heard to
say, as he came out from a concert at which works by Debussy had been
played: “Well, if this is the ‘music of the future,’ I’m very glad
I shan’t live to hear it!” Debussy has passed over to the classics
since then, but there are still plenty of music-lovers, many of them,
too, not more than middle-aged at the most, who feel apprehensive
about the future of music. Wherever they turn, there seems to be
complete chaos. The music of the present day is for them an unending
succession of hideous noises. There are some who, remembering that in
their own lifetime they have passed through periods when even Brahms
and Wagner, Richard Strauss and César Franck seemed unintelligible,
are yet resolved not to be baffled by Schönberg and Stravinsky. They
study contemporary music with perhaps little pleasure, but with
passionate interest and curiosity. Yet they are inevitably conscious
of difficulties which do not appear to have confronted them before.
They can see in the music of the early twentieth century some clear
continuance of the classical tradition; in the later music they can
find nothing that gives them even a faint hope of being able to
understand it――some day if not now. They find themselves in the
position of a man who sets out to learn a language which has no
connection with the Indo-European stock. It is bad enough to have to
master a new alphabet; one may possibly, by dint of strenuous effort,
commit to memory a vocabulary of words which bear not the remotest
resemblance to any in French or German, Latin or Greek; but when
it comes to tackling an entirely strange system of syntax for the
expression of unfamiliar ideas, the mind revolts and the student asks
whether all this jargon can really have any significance at all. And
the student of modern music is made still more sceptical by the fact
that the musicians whom he respects among the apparent initiates are
seldom in any agreement as to which of the various conflicting systems
of music is to be regarded as the expression of the true faith. Can you
tell me, he asks, often with genuine humility, of one living composer
whom you wholeheartedly accept as a great creative genius, in the way
in which you once accepted Beethoven, or Brahms, or Wagner, as the
case might be? The hardened critic hesitates, names tentatively this
or that musician――No, replies the other firmly; there seems to be no
one whom you can name without some qualification. And to scepticism
he adds fear. The new music, he begins to feel, requires not merely a
new and unaccustomed intellectual effort: it demands a new outlook on
life altogether. It may affect and disturb fundamental principles such
as most people prefer to leave untouched. It may be in truth what the
old fogeys of the past have always said of it: it may be “positively
dangerous.”
Let us consider our fundamental principles. Let us forget for a moment
all this contemporary turmoil and ask ourselves what is honestly our
attitude to the classics that we revere. Music, it has often been said,
appeals to us in three ways. It affects us first by the mere sensuous
beauty of sound; as we become more familiar with the art, it works upon
our emotions, and finally we learn to contemplate it intellectually.
_La musique est l’art de penser avec les sons._ To the musician who has
been brought up on the classics this definition of Combarieu’s sums
up his most complete experience. The three forms of appeal summarily
described above divide listeners conveniently into three categories,
but it is a very rough division, and the same person may at any one
time of his life and experience find himself in any one of the three
groups according to the particular work which he may be hearing. But it
may be safely said that the large majority of those whom we can call
music-lovers belong to the class for whom the appeal of music is mainly
or exclusively emotional. The first group, those who are affected only
by the physical quality of musical sound, may be disregarded here.
And it must be remembered that any one who is sufficiently musical to
enjoy what we colloquially call “a tune,” however simple, has at least
the germ of intellectual appreciation; he recognizes that a tune has a
definite rhythmical shape and a definite tonality, even if he is not
able to say so in technical language. But most people, when they listen
to music, do not want to be bothered with formal analysis; they want to
have their emotions aroused. The analysis of their musical experiences
is a very complicated matter and far beyond the scope of this book.
There are many people who fear that if they acquired a knowledge of
the structural principles of music they would lose all their pleasure
in it. They are confirmed in this belief by finding that persons who
are learned in the science of music undoubtedly lose pleasure in much
that satisfies the emotional requirements of the uninitiated, and may
in some cases appear to have lost pleasure in hearing any music at
all. The fear is groundless. The character and quality of the pleasure
may change, and undoubtedly does change as a result of ripening and
decaying age; but no one, even among those who detest all modern music,
however sadly he may say _si vieillesse pourrait_, would admit after
personal experience that the essential joy of music was destroyed by
knowledge.
In default of knowledge, the “emotional” group of music-lovers,
eagerly desiring to find some significance in the music which they
hear, often try to translate it into some other language with which
they are more familiar. Some listeners maintain that music gives them
positive sensations of colour. There are many who in listening to music
consciously construct pictorial images. Others will seek to interpret
it as meaning something that could be expressed in terms of literature.
Experiments have generally shown that when a number of listeners are
asked to give their impressions of the same piece of music agreement
hardly ever goes further than to such vague indications of character as
the composer himself might give in his conventional Italian directions
for performance, except in cases where the composer has deliberately
set out to evoke some literary or pictorial image or has employed
some well-worn conventional device for the awakening of familiar
associations.
The psychological process of musical creation has hitherto eluded
all scientific research. No satisfactory result can be obtained from
comparing the recorded utterances of the composers themselves as to
what induced the composition of their works or what they intended to
express in them. People who are inclined to interpret the music which
they hear in literary or pictorial terms are naturally attracted
by definitely descriptive music, and readily produce evidence in
support of the theory that all composers set out to write music with
a deliberately descriptive intent. But the history of music shows us
clearly that deliberately descriptive music rarely stands the test of
time. There are plenty of examples to be found of acknowledged great
composers such as Byrd, Purcell, Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven,
who have now and then set out to be descriptive; and in almost every
case we feel that their descriptive music is on a far lower level than
their non-descriptive music. Indeed, in many cases it is painfully
ridiculous both as pure music and as description. If it can be saved at
all, it is only by concentrating attention on its purely musical aspect.
The trained musician is content to take music as music and nothing
else. It is a logical and reasonable language, although it cannot
be translated into words. Writers on painting seem now to be pretty
generally agreed that the “story” of a picture has nothing to do
with its value as a work of art; that depends upon line and colour
alone. It is nearly half a century since Walter Pater wrote that “all
art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” It was yet a
generation earlier that Hanslick put forward his theory of musical
beauty. That theory of “abstract music” did not satisfy the age of
Wagner and Liszt; but although Hanslick failed to work out his theory
as fully as he might have done, its further implications have come to
be accepted with surprising cordiality by a generation of musicians
whose art would probably have filled Hanslick himself with the most
unspeakable horror.
Music expresses itself and nothing else. A work may be dramatic,
illustrative, or even descriptive in certain aspects; but unless it
is intelligible simply as music alone, constructed on its own purely
musical principles, apart from all external considerations, it must
fall short of perfection as a work of musical art.
II
Those who have been brought up on the music of Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms can readily accept this theory of musical æsthetics. It is
eminently satisfactory as an interpretation of all that we commonly
call classical music. There are many people who do not want to listen
to any other kind of music. They have heard of great names in the
days before Bach, but they are easily inclined to take the view that
such composers as Purcell and the elder Scarlatti were merely the
necessary forerunners who prepared the way; that Palestrina was an
exceptional and unaccountable expression of a peculiarly exalted age
of religious belief, and that any one belonging to an earlier date can
be dismissed as a primitive interesting only to the antiquary. But
at the present day the antiquaries are coming into their own. Both
in England and abroad there is a vigorous revival of interest in the
music of the centuries before Bach. After long years of dusty research
the antiquaries have at last begun to convince a younger generation
that a great deal of this so-called primitive music can be given life
in performance, and performance has shown that it has a surprisingly
vivid power of appealing to the emotions of modern hearers. Leaders of
contemporary music indeed are clearly feeling that pre-classical and
even mediaeval music has in many cases a more intimate affinity with
that of our own day than the music of the last two hundred years. It
has even come to exercise a definite and admitted influence on the
technique of modern composition.
To dissect out the causes and effects of this tendency would be a
complicated and difficult task for which there is no space here. But
there is one point which is a matter of common knowledge to the trained
musician, and the general musical public is probably more or less
aware of it though unable to explain it in technical language. From
the year 1600 to the year 1900, roughly speaking, all Western music is
based on the same fundamental principle of _tonality_. All music is
composed in a key. One note is adopted as a centre. The remaining notes
of the octave are brought into various clearly defined relationships
to it. They may further be arranged in groups, sounded simultaneously,
known as chords. Each of these chords has its own fixed arrangement
and its fixed relationship to the centre. What has been done for one
note of the octave may be done in exactly the same way for any other,
forming what we call the key of that note. The musician may shift from
one key to another in the course of his work, but it is understood
that he must make his main key clear and definite at the outset and
must re-establish it again with equal decision at the end. In the early
years of the seventeenth century the efforts of musicians were directed
chiefly to establishing one key clearly and towards the training of
audiences to grasp the first principles of the system. As they became
more and more accustomed to the system the composers were able to
extend and elaborate it. The interrelations of notes and chords became
increasingly subtle and delicate from the days of Monteverdi to those
of Wagner; but the fundamental key-system and the rhythmical system
which is inseparable from it remained always precisely the same. The
language of music developed steadily and rationally just as the English
language has developed from Shakespeare to Swinburne. It is no wonder
then that most musicians regarded its foundations as indestructible.
Its grammar was codified by Rameau early in the eighteenth century,
and later theorists saw no reason to repudiate the main principles
of Rameau’s doctrine. In the passionate stateliness of Rameau’s own
music, in the gigantic dignity of Handel, in the genial _Gemütlichkeit_
of Bach, we see the same lucid and logical precision of language. It
was only natural that eighteenth century criticism should regard the
music of earlier centuries as crude and barbarous. The nineteenth
century approached the older music with a more penetrating sense of
scholarship, but could not help reading it in the same spirit. An age
of antiquarian research inevitably tended to consider its discoveries
as historical documents to be examined in the dry light of theory
rather than as the expressions of intensely passionate humanity. The
music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was interpreted according
to the system of Rameau, for no other system could be conceived. If
under these conditions it failed to make any emotional appeal, that
did not matter: reverence for antiquity discouraged the unveiling of
passion.
III
The development of all kinds of historical studies during the past
half-century has caused a wide and by no means learned public to take a
keen interest in the life of the past and in its artistic expression.
We can no longer quietly accept the doctrine that music began with
Bach, or even――as Victor Hugo suggested――with Palestrina. The
architecture, sculpture and painting of the remote centuries, as well
as their poetry, bring the ancient and mediaeval world vividly before
our eyes and minds. We cannot help seeing that music must have been no
less important in the lives of our ancestors than it is in our own;
indeed, it often seems that in those far-away times the art of music
exercised an even more cogent influence than it does now. How can it
be, we ask, that people so strangely susceptible to the power of sound
and at the same time so consummately accomplished in the other arts
should have left behind them an art of music which we can only regard
as crude and primitive?
If we attempt to consider this question seriously we shall soon find
that we are confronted with fundamental problems of æsthetics. First of
all we must rid ourselves of the habit of regarding music as something
printed on paper which can be played on the pianoforte. Modern
civilization easily leads us to take it for granted that whatever has
been written down or printed is clearly fixed and recorded for all
time. But the real music is not that which is written down: it is the
sounds which are made by those who perform it. A physician cannot cure
his patient merely by giving him prescriptions to read. The written
notes, even those of our own day, require imaginative interpretation;
they require, too, an interpretation based on tradition and experience.
Complicated as it is, our contemporary notation is very inadequate,
although we of to-day are thoroughly accustomed to the practice of
conveying information by written signs. It is only natural that in
centuries when very few people were able to read or write words at all
the notation of music should have presented still greater difficulty.
We can see from early documents such as the ecclesiastical manuscripts
of the tenth century that if music was written down it was not in
order that complete strangers should be able to read it clearly and
accurately at sight, but merely to serve as a reminder to the singer of
what he had already committed to memory by ear.
The records of the other arts are solid material facts, things of
wood, metal or stone which are always before our eyes. The music that
was contemporary with them has disappeared into silence, but that
does not necessarily prove that it was not worth preserving. Yet we
may well ask ourselves another question: is any art worth preserving?
From the historian’s point of view everything is worth preserving as
a historical document; but if we judge works of art from a purely
æsthetic standpoint can we honestly say that the art of the past has
any value for us?
Directors of museums and galleries may perhaps be shocked at so
heretical a question. But if, as so many art-critics have suggested,
music is the ideal type of art we may legitimately approach the
subject from a musical point of view in preference to a pictorial one.
The records of the other arts are solid material facts: temples and
cathedrals, statues, panels, canvases. Compared with a symphony that
may last an hour in performance, they are almost to be considered
indestructible and eternal. If on hearing the symphony we find that
it gives us no pleasure, it is soon over, and we need never hear it
again. Once the cathedral has been put up, it is more trouble than
it is worth to take it away again. A second generation may think
it hideous, a third takes no notice of it, a fourth venerates its
antiquity, yet another decides to find it beautiful. The statue or the
picture meets with a similar fate, but as it is less bulky, it can at
least be sold, bought and sold again. It may acquire value as a rarity,
for every material work of art is unique, whereas a piece of music
can be reproduced as many times and in as many different places as we
choose. The owner of a picture by Titian possesses property which is
his and his alone. He might say the same of an autograph manuscript by
Beethoven; but he cannot possess the symphony itself――that belongs
to the world at large. The autograph may fetch a thousand pounds at
auction, but it is no more than a piece of dirty paper. You can hear
the symphony played for a shilling.
The fundamental question at issue is this――is a work of art a complete
and finite thing, beautiful when it left its maker’s hand, beautiful
now and for ever, or is it frankly transitory, a momentary expression
of a momentary experience, speaking as a rule only to those who
belong to the same generation? The art dealer and the museum director
naturally take the first view. If you have paid some huge sum for a
picture, you may hesitate to burn it as soon as you are tired of it.
You must at least go on pretending to admire it. And since material
works of art are always before us, it is natural that philosophers
should have started to construct their artistic theories from an
architectural or pictorial point of view. It is perhaps inevitable
that the criticism of music should borrow phrases from that of the
plastic arts, because music is an art so entirely complete in itself
that it has never yet evolved an adequate vocabulary of technical
terms, let alone a vocabulary in which its nature can be described
to the non-technical reader. But although there may be something to
be said for Goethe’s famous comparison of architecture to “frozen
music,” it is with poetry rather than with the plastic arts that music
more legitimately may seek affinity. Literary critics have never yet
succeeded in defining what poetry is; but we can at any rate say that
what distinguishes poetry from a statement of the same idea in prose
is chiefly the presence of qualities which are common both to poetry
and to music. It has been clearly shown, for instance, that the lyric
poetry of classical Greece employed devices of construction which are
curiously similar to those of Beethoven. Habit induces us to imagine
that the value of Beethoven’s music depends on our conventional
scale and the harmonies derived from it; but though we are bound
to admit that every artist is limited by the peculiar qualities of
his materials, whether they be words, marble or musical sounds, we
know that they cannot be turned to artistic account unless he has
chosen them, imperfect as they are, to serve him in the expression of
something conceived in his imagination――something of which he himself
is definitely aware although he cannot communicate it to others without
this material presentation.
That which is common to poetry and music is not a metaphysical figment.
It may often elude analysis; but at present it has hardly been
investigated scientifically. It ought to be possible to find out a
great deal more about it, and to find out a great deal more about what
constitutes the “poetical” quality――to use the epithet in a familiar if
not very accurate sense――of musical interpretation, for these things
are problems of actual physical sound.
The close connection between music and poetry would indeed be more
immediately apparent if people of to-day had not acquired a distorted
view of poetry by reading it in silence instead of reciting it aloud.
Cheap printing and popular education have given readers――poets too,
perhaps――an entirely false set of values. People talk of the beauties
of Greek poetry; how can they have any idea of them when the most
learned scholars admit that nobody knows how classical Greek ought
to be pronounced? They are in the same position as a musician of the
future might be if he studied the scores of Beethoven without any idea
of what a tone or a semitone was. They know what the words mean, but
they are in much the same case as the man who sees nothing in a picture
beyond the story which it tells. This preoccupation with the “story”,
natural and inevitable as it is, has dominated the whole conception of
art; it has even contaminated the conception of music. It is necessary
to draw attention to it here, because it constantly distracts the
attention from the fact that all the arts are in a perpetual state
of change. We see the human form represented in the plastic arts and
are inevitably tempted to judge them according to their skill in
representing it faithfully. We read about the common experiences of
human life in poetry, we accept translations from other languages
without demur, and take pleasure in the sense of human continuity. The
stability of material works of art gives us a false idea of æsthetic
permanence; we are easily induced to take an analogous view of poetry.
But in actual fact language, which is the material of poetry, is in
constant flux; we are so well aware of that fact that we have almost
ceased to notice it. Language changes because it is, if not the most
immediate, at least the most useful, of our means of expression. The
most immediate means of artistic expression is music, and consequently
music is of all the arts the most subject to change, perhaps the most
subtle, certainly the most transitory.
IV
The art of music undergoes change, as does language, because it adapts
itself to the expression of changing views of life. “Everything new,”
says Frazer, “is apt to excite the awe and dread of the savage.” The
active and exploring temperament seeks new experiences intellectual
as well as physical; the temperament that is sedentary and passive
shelters itself behind what is already well established. It dreads
novelty and dreads it particularly in music――that is, if it is
susceptible to music at all――for the very reason that music is the most
immediate means of expressing innermost experiences such as mankind
often fears to express in the more easily misinterpreted medium of
words. Music has at all times been strangely associated with fear. From
the earliest days it was the confederate of magic and religion. Even
in classical Greece it was regarded as a thing of danger if not kept
under the severest control. Sir Henry Hadow has pointed out that in the
whole of classical Greek literature there is not a word of what we can
call musical criticism, that is, criticism of music simply as an art
in itself. But although moralists discussed it from a strictly ethical
point of view, their very fear of it shows how powerful must have been
its influence on those who enjoyed it. The absence of critical writings
does not necessarily imply an absence of artistic feeling or artistic
discrimination. It is a matter of common knowledge that the Greek word
for “music” covered a far wider field than the word does to-day. Music
was to the Greeks practically inseparable from poetry, so that we find
on the one hand that their poetry absorbs much of the inventive skill
which we now consider to be more appropriate to music, and on the other
hand that music comes in for a good deal of the ethical censure which
is more likely to be due to the poetry. Fortunately artists have at all
times been reluctant to submit to the tyranny of moralists.
Although practical experience may force us to admit that the perpetual
change to which music has been subjected during the course of centuries
makes it impossible for us to arrive even after prolonged study of
documents at a complete understanding of the art of the remoter past,
it is nevertheless interesting to make the attempt for the sake of
deepening historical knowledge. If we cannot enter into the life of
our ancestors without studying their arts as well as their politics,
we must certainly pay as careful an attention to their music as we do
to their architecture or their painting. The historians of music have
only recently begun to set forth in a tentative way the evolution of
musical forms. They have paid little or no attention to the varying
relations of music to the other arts and to life in general. Nor have
they considered seriously the history of musical appreciation. But if
we are to understand the significance of music at various periods it
is obviously of interest to discover at what date music began to be
regarded as an independent art――independent, that is, not merely of
poetry, but also of magic, religion or ethics. And this will further
lead us to the closely connected question of its varying psychological
appeal.
The rough division, suggested in a previous chapter, of that appeal
into the three aspects, physical, emotional and intellectual, will at
least serve to provide us with an experimental basis. If we find it
unsatisfactory we shall at least hope to make our minds clearer as
to its real nature in the process of submitting it to a historical
test. There is, too, another well-known classification of artistic
experience under the adjectives “Dionysiac” and “Apollinian.” The
latter coincides, if I understand it aright, more or less with what
I have called the “intellectual” appreciation of music; but the
“Dionysiac” view of music seems to require more searching analysis. It
is clear that the Dionysiac view of music must be very much the older,
as well as the commoner, of the two. The remoteness of Greek art of
all kinds has caused most people to regard it in a very chilly light,
although modern archæology has gone some way towards correcting this
view. But it is highly probable that even to the more intellectual of
Greek music-lovers music (using the word in our normal sense) was more
frankly a matter of physical sensation than cultivated musicians, at
any rate in England, would willingly admit it to be for themselves.
It was pre-eminently vocal, and as the Greeks were a Mediterranean
people with a very clear and concrete outlook on life, its appeal to
them might be more reasonably compared with that of opera to South
Italians. To people vividly conscious of all physical things singing
naturally implies intensification of the personality――including
the physical personality――of the singer. This will account for
Plato’s intimate conjunction of music with bodily conditions and his
consequent apprehension of its possible danger to morals. Evidently,
too, the associational appeal of music was then already recognized
and deliberately exploited by composers, though here it is difficult
to separate clearly musical from purely rhythmical and poetical
associations.
The Romans seem to have regarded music merely as an amusement. There
are plenty of people in all countries to-day, even in Germany itself,
who take the Roman view of music. It does not necessarily preclude
the view of music as an art by those who practise it for the mere
amusement of others, although it tends to lower standards because it
inevitably encourages commercialism. Among the early Christians we at
once perceive a return to the fear of music as a dangerous thing. It
could only be tolerated as the “handmaid of the Church”; but though
that doctrine is still being preached, musicians have rebelled more
and more resolutely against the acceptance of the ancillary position.
St. Augustine’s famous description of the effect that music had on him
shows how apprehensive he was lest music should become a more potent
influence than dogma. Others, less sensitively susceptible to the voice
of music than Augustine, speak of it as a thing purely subservient.
The most illuminating phrase is that of St. Basil who compares the
use of music in association with doctrine to the physician’s use of
honey to disguise the unpleasant taste of his medicines. Yet it is
clear that during the first thousand years of the Christian era there
was developed in the shadow of the Church an art of music which was
highly sophisticated and self-conscious. The ecclesiastical view of
music had at least this to be said for it, that it caused music to be
written down. It had for ritual reasons to be definitely fixed in an
authoritative record, whereas the music of the profane world, composed
for the delight of the moment, was not recorded and has therefore been
lost for ever.
V
The mediaeval development of musical notation has an important bearing
on the history of music as an art. It brought music into direct contact
with the graphic arts and must have helped to suggest that the melodies
written in a book were no less beautiful and no less permanent than
the pictures which illustrated the text. The monks who invented
notation in order to preserve liturgical music intact and uncorrupted
from the vain errors of sinful man did as a matter of fact thereby
provide him with the means of developing his error scientifically. It
occurred to someone that secular music could be recorded in notes as
well as sacred. The alphabet ceased to be practically a monopoly of
the Church. The social status of the musician rose as soon as notation
made it clear that the composition of a piece of music could be a
thing apart from its performance. When music can be read from notes
its hearers inevitably begin to realize that the individual performer
has no exclusive property in it. His voice may have lost none of its
thrill, but the listener knows now that interpretation is not the same
thing as spontaneous creation. If a song or a dance tune is thought
worth the trouble of writing out, it means that it is held to be worth
preserving. The musician who made it begins to take rank with the
learned clerk instead of being classed with tumblers and acrobats,
rogues and vagabonds. The cultured amateur makes his appearance in the
ages of chivalry.
Music, considered as a fine art, belongs to the privileged classes
alone. No doubt the illiterate people had their songs and dances, but
the ordered progress of musical development was of necessity carried
on mainly by those who could read and write. It is in this period
that the musical styles of East and West are sharply differentiated by
the discovery of the principle of harmony. Harmony, the simultaneous
sounding of two or more different notes, is so indispensable a part of
music to-day that many people find it almost impossible to conceive
of an art of music based on melody alone. The most unlearned are so
accustomed to the sounds of harmonic music that although their natural
instinct inclines them first towards pure melody it may be doubted
whether they can recall an ordinary tune without at least some vague
half-conscious recollection of a harmonic basis to it. This suspicion
is confirmed by the fact that many tunes have become widely popular
in which the melody has at moments no significance apart from the
underlying harmonies.
The early history of harmonic experiment is still a matter of
controversy; but whether it came from the Netherlands, from England or
from Scandinavia, it undoubtedly originated in the North of Europe,
and for several generations the chief focus of musical development was
centred in Flanders. This geographical factor has its significance.
Melodic music is individualistic, harmony is co-operative. When two
voices sing different notes simultaneously in a piece of music, they
are obliged to show a certain consideration for one another. In the
first place they must not try to shout each other down. Secondly, they
must agree to accept some common system of rhythm and pace, if there
is to be ordered principle of consonance between them. And if their
music is to be pleasing in its general effect, they must accommodate
their voices one to the other so that they blend agreeably. Each of
these points involves a certain self-sacrifice and subordination of
the individual to the community which is fundamentally irksome to
the Mediterranean temperament. The distinction between composer and
performer becomes sharper than ever. The history of musical composition
from the time of _Sumer is icumen in_ (1260) to that of Josquin des
Prés (c. 1445–1521) shows the persistent effort of musicians to
curb the recalcitrant independence of the individual parts in the
interests of harmony and order. The writing down of music no doubt
helped considerably towards this. The tradition of extemporary singing,
even in harmony, was kept up for a very long time, but it is obvious
that awkwardnesses which might be overlooked at a single _impromptu_
performance would be submitted to criticism and correction when they
had been set down on paper. The Netherland school of the fifteenth
century devoted much study to intricate technical devices, and we see
here the most conspicuous example in early times of music in which
emotion is completely sacrificed to mechanical ingenuity. It need
hardly be said that this elaborate art was employed exclusively in
the service of the Church. The extreme examples of it can hardly
have afforded any listener the opportunity of enjoying the sensuous
pleasure of sound, either in single voices or in the combinations of
its harmony. Nor can we imagine that it was a type of music which
evoked associative images. A product of the intellect it certainly was;
but Apollo must have been as little responsible for its inspiration as
Dionysus. It was discipline; and at any rate its poverty of melodic
invention, its passionless indifference to sensuous beauty and its
rigid obedience to rule may have represented the three monastic virtues.
VI
Yet some of the very composers who devoted their time to the solution,
or construction, of such futile puzzles were themselves pioneers of
what we can call modern, as opposed to mediaeval, music. With Josquin
the Renaissance in music may be said to begin. His sense of harmony
might be compared with the dawning sense of perspective in painting.
The true history of the part played by music during the Renaissance has
yet to be written. Here only a few salient points can be touched upon.
The invention of printing brought music within the reach of a far wider
circle. The cultivated amateur comes more and more into notice. The
leaders of music in the earlier period were still the Netherlanders.
They overran Italy and came into contact with Italian poets. The
offspring of this union was the madrigal. The output of secular music
from the presses of Italy was enormous, and it was soon imitated in
other countries. Music was still to a large extent under the patronage
of princes, but instead of being a rare luxury for the enhancement of
courtly splendour it became a universal ornament and pleasure of all
cultured society. This is especially observable in Elizabethan England.
What is important to realize about the secular music of the sixteenth
century is that music was no longer the monopoly of a close corporation
of professional musicians in which the distinction between composer and
performer was very indefinite; it was written very largely with full
consciousness of the enjoyment which ordinary people could derive from
the actual practice of it. As music becomes more and more one of the
normal delights of cultured life, it becomes less and less of a mystery
and more of a conscious art. Josquin and his school had laid the firm
foundations of the classical language of music. If we take a long
view of the history of the art from ancient times to the present day,
concentrating our attention mainly on secular music, which obviously
expresses the genuine musical feelings of mankind, rather than on
church music, which in spite of the natural impulse of composers has
always been subject to anti-artistic restrictions of style, we shall be
convinced that the revolution associated with the name of Monteverdi
and the beginnings of opera was a small matter compared with the
establishment of the harmonic system a century and a half earlier.
The ecclesiastical composers had undoubtedly made important
contributions to technique. For one thing, the mere length of the
works required gave them space in which to work out their technical
devices completely. Secular music, with its swifter interplay of
emotion, required a more compressed style, an art of vivid suggestion
rather than of exhaustive discussion. From the beginning of the
sixteenth century onwards music moves gradually faster and faster.
Its development assumes in the listener a knowledge of what has gone
before. Madrigals were arranged for the lute, just as nowadays operas
are arranged for the pianoforte. A good deal had to be left out in
the process of arrangement, but some acquaintance with the original
might reasonably be presupposed. Music thus develops as an art of
associative suggestion. Naturalism plays its part, probably under
the influence of naturalistic painting. Often enough the results are
ridiculous, but the general effect, viewed at the distance of time, was
to enrich the musical language. The intimate association of music with
poetry sometimes led the musician into dangerous paths. An interesting
contrast is exhibited by Byrd and Marenzio. The Italian is vividly
descriptive and illustrative; only his strong sense of key prevents
his work from becoming fragmentary and disjointed as he follows every
suggestion of his poet. Byrd is never literary; he is perhaps the
greatest pure musician of the whole age. He represents the perfect
Apollinian type, Marenzio the Dionysiac, and it is odd to find the
Mediterranean romantic and the Northerner classical.
VII
The appetite for music increases in the seventeenth century and
the development of musical drama brings the commercial aspect into
prominence. It is the age of the theatrical and rhetorical style. It is
an age of speed. There was little music printed, but much circulated in
manuscript. This does not mean that the general output was less than
before. The manuscripts are much more easily legible than the printing
from type; only engraving, rarely practised outside England, can rival
them. It is the century of “figured bass,” a system of notation which
enabled a composer to write down a mere outline of his accompaniments,
leaving them to be filled up _extempore_ by the player. It saved time
in composition, time in writing out; copying by hand took less time
than type-setting, and there was no need to multiply copies to any
great extent. By the time that the copyist has made one the composer
has produced another work, and his public want the very latest. One of
the things that strikes us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is the incredible fertility of composers. Operas, cantatas, quartets
or symphonies――it is nothing unusual to find composers reckoning them
in hundreds. And we cannot dismiss this copious output with contempt.
It is easy enough to say that one work sounds very much like another,
and that even the greatest men have their moments of dullness; but even
for people who have not specialized in antiquarian studies there is a
vast quantity of this music which still seems to have power to stir the
emotions. It must have been composed in a hurry, performed in a hurry
and thrown away in a hurry; it is a marvel that at this distance of
time we can still feel that even if we do not want to hear it often we
are still glad to hear it once.
The agitated rhetoric of the seventeenth century becomes in the
eighteenth a convention of grandiloquence. The intellectual basis
of the classical key-system proves to be a foundation upon which
structures of extraordinary massiveness and dignity can be reared. The
immense productivity of the age was only made possible by the frank
acceptance of convention, even in the case of those rare composers
like Domenico Scarlatti and Haydn who systematically made fun of it.
This acceptance of convention was stabilized by the fact that there
had been time for the long accumulation of tradition. The constant
demand for new music was in no way inconsistent with the preservation
of tradition; it was preserved not so much by the practical revival of
old music as by the absorption of its style into what was contemporary.
It is significant that the eighteenth century marked the beginning of
the study of musical history.
VIII
It is during the eighteenth century that the classical symphony
becomes a power that could seriously threaten the supremacy of vocal
and dramatic music. The chief centres of symphonic activity are those
places where northern and southern musical culture met――Vienna,
Mannheim, and in a lesser degree Paris. It was in the north that the
preparatory work had been done long before, in the music meetings at
Oxford and in the _Collegium musicum_ of German universities. That
movement towards instrumental music was largely due to the amateurs.
It must not be forgotten that the orchestra of Prince Esterhazy for
which Haydn composed symphonies was made up mainly from the domestic
servants of the household. The Conservatoire at Vienna was founded
by amateurs in order to provide them with help in their own private
performances. The symphony, along with the string quartet and the
sonata for harpsichord or pianoforte, was the means of transferring
the musical expression of the Italian opera to the homes of people who
had no opportunity of entering an Italian theatre. The operatic aria
became idealized and transfigured in the process just as a hundred
years later the operatic melodies of Bellini were transfigured in
Chopin’s nocturnes. The spiritual result may be looked at in two ways,
according to our temperament and our point of view. We may say that
this transference conveys music to a higher æsthetic plane in that it
removes it from the direct contact with physical human personality to
a region of suggestion, association and evocation. Or we may say that
in losing this direct contact we are losing touch with reality, that
we are sentimentalizing the art until we prefer pretence to truth.
It is at this stage of musical history that the fundamental æsthetic
problem becomes acute, although it must have existed for centuries
beforehand. That the problem was felt to be acute at the moment is
shown by the appearance in 1750 of Baumgarten’s _Æsthetik_, which was
the starting-point of modern æsthetic philosophy.
It has often been said that in the eighteenth century the musician had
no other function than to accompany the clatter of dishes at princely
dinner-tables. Even if this were strictly true one might at least reply
that in this respect the aristocracy of the eighteenth century did more
for the art of music than their descendants. The music of that period
may have been conventional, courtly and designed to give pleasure;
but if so, its freedom from emptiness, vulgarity and triviality is
astonishing. Church and State may have deliberately encouraged the
“light-hearted gaiety of the Viennese” in order to distract their
thoughts from the more serious problems of politics; but music in those
days was at any rate still an art, not a mere commercial product. At
the same time the printing presses were active. A symphony might have
been composed for the entertainment of a prince, but as soon as it was
printed it became accessible to audiences outside the aristocratic
circle. It was an age of “sensibility”; fine feelings, sighs and tears
were all the fashion. Music begins――we can see it in Couperin, in
Boccherini, in Mozart too――to display the quality of refinement, a
quality which in a later generation was to have a disastrous effect on
the vitality of the art.
IX
The outstanding characteristic of the nineteenth century is its moral
fervour. The religious preoccupation of Victorian England is only a
small part of this age of aspiration. In most countries of Europe
philosophy, science, literature, art, and social life bear witness to
the ethical passion, even in the cases of the most indignant revolt
against it. It dominates music from the time of Beethoven onwards; and
even now it is not entirely extinct in the musical world. The spirit
of the French Revolution transformed the musician from a lackey to a
prophet. Mozart was cut off just as he had recorded his vision of the
new age in _The Magic Flute_. Beethoven proclaims it in the _Choral
Fantasia_ and illuminates it still more intensely in _Fidelio_, in
the _Choral Symphony_, the _Missa Solemnis_ and the last quartets.
One cannot class Beethoven with the Romantics any more than Kant or
Goethe. Romanticism stood not for enlightenment but for the reaction
against it. The Romantics were like men who after an earthquake return
to the ruins of their city to see what they can recover from them. It
was not always their own property that they recovered. The aristocrats
had lost their material privilege, but they were still determined to
remain a class apart. The Catholic revival, on the Continent even
more than in England, was the assertion of aristocracy as a moral
principle. It affected music apart from the music that was definitely
liturgical because it brought about a revival of interest in Palestrina
comparable to the revival of interest in Dante. The emancipation of
the artist from feudal servitude encouraged him to assume something of
the privilege of the aristocracy. The typical figure of this movement
is Paganini, from whom are descended Liszt and a multitude of minor
musicians who made it their life-work to play the prophet in public.
The mechanical developments of the new century contributed to the
development of the new outlook on music. As travelling became easier
and music-printing cheaper concerts increased in number and increasing
newspapers gave them increasing publicity. “_Seid umschlungen,
Millionen!_” sang Beethoven, and the millions were embraced, though
perhaps not quite in the way in which Schiller and he had intended.
The modern musician is often tempted to see nothing in the art of
the past century but pretentiousness. It is not altogether just to
accuse the century of megalomania. Isolated musicians, such as Liszt,
Berlioz and Wagner, were certainly possessed with the idea of their
own greatness. One might say the same of Beethoven himself; but in
Beethoven’s case the consciousness of his own greatness was inseparable
from a deep feeling of humility and an overwhelming sense of duty.
Beethoven was no respecter of persons, but he had the philosopher’s
intuition of his relation to humanity and of humanity’s relation to
the universe. Undoubtedly many artists of the nineteenth century
were stimulated by his example to attempt works on a needlessly
colossal scale, especially in Germany, where metaphysical studies have
always influenced a circle that extended far beyond the professed
philosophers. An ethical view of music became more and more strongly
marked in Germany; during the latter half of the century it made itself
felt in England, and to a slighter extent even in France. By the end
of the century there was a very definite tendency to regard music as a
form of free religious worship, expressing and stimulating mystical
experience for temperaments which could no longer be satisfied by
dogmatic theology.
X
It is at all times difficult to draw a line between religious
exaltation and rhetorical pretentiousness. A consideration of the
technical means of expression in music may help us to clear our minds.
Since the middle of the fifteenth century music has exhibited a
perpetual struggle between counterpoint and harmony, between what are
sometimes called the horizontal and vertical tendencies of the art. The
horizontal conception of music is, as all musicians know, the primary
musical instinct to sing and to elaborate the art by the combination
of voices each singing its own independently expressive line and
achieving further emotional force by the ordered clash of dissonance.
The vertical conception cannot really be separated entirely from the
horizontal, for it has grown out of it. It derives its emotional force
from the assumption of periodic stresses, and the study of harmony is
therefore inseparable from that of rhythm. It is regular rhythm which
gives different kinds of chords their æsthetic and the quasi-logical
values.
Melody represents individuality and counterpoint the interaction and
conflict of individualities. Harmony represents the community as a
whole under the direction of the mind which has created the music.
It is therefore natural that as music comes to be associated with
communal feeling on a large scale, with such ideas, for instance, as
the universal brotherhood of man, it should tend to become more and
more predominantly vertical in method. The ordinary music-lover can
realize this from his recollections of Bach and Handel. Bach’s music
is mainly horizontal in tendency. It is music for small groups of
performers, seldom suited to interpretation by large bodies. Handel’s
music, in which the vertical method is far more conspicuous, gains
rather than loses by the multiplication of voices and instruments, and
for this reason Handel is to most Englishmen the ideal composer for
occasions of national ceremony. The emotional effect is intensified
by the actual increase of sound and along with this by the rhythmical
unanimity of the chorus or orchestra. The ordinary man seems to be
curiously susceptible to emotion at the sight of several hundred
people doing exactly the same thing at one moment, as in military and
gymnastic displays, even though the movements executed may be not in
the least interesting in themselves.
The communal feeling which is at the back of most of the music of
the nineteenth century finds its technical expression in blocks of
chords and in strongly accentuated rhythms. A typical example is
the theme which opens the _finale_ of Beethoven’s C minor symphony.
_Lohengrin_ and _Elijah_ are full of instances. In some cases the
impression may be no more than momentary, a mere two or three chords,
but the trick makes its effect. It becomes too obviously a trick in
the hands of Liszt. As a pianist he could not help being attracted
by it. The mechanism of the pianoforte suits full chords better than
the complication of counterpoint, and the percussive action of itself
exaggerates rhythmical stresses. It was the ideal instrument for
Liszt’s grand heroic manner.
The pianoforte was the amateur’s instrument as well as the _virtuoso’s_.
The nineteenth century is the age of the amateur pianist. Music became
the pleasure of the rising middle class, for whose domestic consumption
an endless flood of polite and agreeable music was printed after the
examples set by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Whatever the present age may
think of those two composers it can safely be said that no musicians
have ever been regarded by the general musical public with so widespread
and so heartfelt an affection. Whoever easily recalls the lines
As for some dear familiar strain
Untir’d we ask, and ask again.
Ever, in its melodious store,
Finding a spell unheard before――
must surely connect them in immediate memory with the _Scenes of
Childhood_ or the _Songs without Words_.
It used often to be said of Mendelssohn that “he had nothing to say,
but said it like a gentleman.” To that I may add the observation of
one of my own teachers: “When Mendelssohn couldn’t think of anything
else to say, he said his prayers.” Is it surprising that the England of
Thackeray adored him? To Mendelssohn and Schumann we owe the fashion
of what used to be called “characteristic pieces”――quasi-pictorial
exploitations of certain idioms which at once established themselves
as universally recognizable conventions both of technique and of
sentiment――all those “hunting songs,” “spinning songs,” barcarolles,
cradle songs, wedding marches and funeral marches. At this distance of
time they may have the charm of old-world refinement. But considered
historically, what they brought into music was a multitude of insincere
_clichés_. Mendelssohn and Schumann are themselves remembered for
their very genuine merits. The style which they represented was
absorbed into the work of followers whom it is equally impossible to
forget as well as into that of the innumerable hundreds of purely
commercial composers. Romantic _cliché_ reached its apotheosis in the
symphonic monstrosities of Gustav Mahler. But between Mendelssohn
and Mahler there came others――worthy in some ways of our deepest and
sincerest respect――who from their own high seriousness became victims
of the impressive platitude. Ethical fervour led them only too fatally
into reverent pomposity.
All this false sentiment was diffused universally by the pianoforte;
not merely by the enormous multiplication of instruments and of
performers thereon, but by the intrinsic acoustical character of the
instrument itself. For the sound of the pianoforte cannot press onwards
like that of the voice, the wind instrument or the violin. That is why
“horizontal” music is in reality impossible to it; the most it can do
is to recall the memory of something heard before. It can do this with
extraordinary subtlety. The sudden impact of the hammer on the string
gives it even in its most delicate moments a far clearer articulation
than the voice or the singing instruments. Its whole art is an art of
evasion, illusion and association. It was the ideal instrument for the
romantic temperament. It suggested melody, it intensified harmony; it
falsified the values of both.
The pianoforte naturally attracted intelligent musicians of all grades
because it seemed to place the whole of music within the grasp of two
hands. Singing came to be regarded as something almost vulgar, the
more so since nature has not always distributed voices and brains in
equal proportions. As the ethical view of music deepened, musicians
of serious intention turned more to the stringed instruments than to
the human voice. The instruments could do so much more, they could run
about faster, they had in practice a cleaner accuracy of intonation
and a more extended compass. It was easy to forget that after all they
were nothing more than instruments, and indeed the very fact that they
were instruments seemed to give them a magical character that appealed
mysteriously to the romantic mind.
XI
Professor Weissmann has well pointed out that in the romantic days the
orchestra dominated music because it was made to represent the unseen
supernatural forces against which mere humanity struggled in vain.
And the orchestra appealed to many sides of human temperament. It was
the appropriate instrument of an age of machinery, and mechanical
invention rapidly increased its powers. It appealed to the megalomania
of certain types of genius, as well as to the philosophical worshipper
of the infinite. It appealed to the plain man by its discipline, by its
presentation of a number of nameless individuals doing the same thing
at the same moment, and in later days――now, perhaps, more than ever
before――by the sight of this huge force controlled and directed by the
apparent inspiration of the _virtuoso_ conductor.
The great singers, the few who have reached the highest summits of
fame, have always wielded an incomparable power over their hearers.
But that very element of personality which gives the supreme singer
his greatness distracts the listener on any level but the highest.
Personality is a capricious thing, and in singing, more than in
any other form of music, the listener’s judgment is liable to be
distorted by temperamental considerations which have nothing to do
with art. In the case of the instrumentalist they can be more easily
set aside. Personality is what human nature values more than anything
else in the artist. We see it at its plainest when a singer faces
an unsophisticated public; when the public is less simple-minded
and inexperienced, when the music put before it is less direct and
immediate in its expression, the judgment of personality may be
misleading, and may easily mislead artistic judgment. A vigorous
personality may delude the public into accepting bad music as good;
certain types of music, on the other hand, may falsify the judgment of
personality. These statements represent merely the obvious extremes;
what must be remembered is that this interaction may vary subtly from
moment to moment even during the course of one piece of music.
The multiform appeal of orchestral music bewilders even those who
deliberately listen to it in an analytical frame of mind. The
difficulty is complicated by the luxuriant growth, during the last
hundred years, of what is called “programme-music”――music that sets
out to describe or illustrate some idea that can be expressed, and
often better expressed, in a literary or pictorial form. To dissect
out and trace the history of all the means of emotional stimulus in
such modern orchestral music as has become generally popular――such
names as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Scriabin will
give a sufficient idea of the category――would require a whole volume
of highly technical analysis. Fortunately there are many music-lovers
who have heard enough music to grasp intuitively, if vaguely, certain
principles, conventions and technical methods which they are unable
to describe in words. They will recognize how “picturesqueness” is
achieved by the exploitation of conventional idioms: how these idioms
evoke associations not merely with things outside music, but far more
widely with the recollection of music of past generations as familiar
to them as it was to the composer who exploits it. They will recognize
conventions of sound without sense――strings of notes that perhaps
once had musical value but have now become mere formulæ, rushing winds
and roaring waves “full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.”
They would have learned also, one hopes, to mistrust the composers
who delude their audiences, perhaps delude themselves too, with a
shimmering veil of indeterminate harmonies, and to mistrust no less
those who with an aggressive air of sincerity and directness assume the
solemn pose of mystery and chivalry.
XII
Those who live on the outskirts of the world of music may say that they
cannot get as much of it as they desire; those who are in the midst
of it are painfully aware that they cannot escape the overwhelming
flood. The commercialization of music has led to overproduction. This
is apparent enough in England, where commercialization has fostered the
spawning of a thoroughly degraded type; in Germany the over-production
has been a greater danger because the vast complexity of the musical
industry has encouraged respectable mediocrity. It is not to be
wondered that plenty of musicians would be glad to make a clean sweep
of all the music of the past and start fresh from the beginning. We
cannot; it is a hopeless delusion. Even if we could make the clean
sweep, we are still men of the twentieth century; we cannot return,
for just one aspect of our lives and that perhaps the most direct
and immediate, to primitive savagery. Civilization has forced us to
remember what we ought in the nature of things to have forgotten.
Commercialism has always been only too glad to throw dust in our eyes
with the pretence of culture. We tell people that they ought to know
and love their musical classics. Being out of copyright, they can be
reprinted cheaply. Teachers find it least troublesome to teach what
they have always taught; concert-givers play what they have always
played――it is the safest thing and requires the least rehearsal and
study. The casual listener loves the “dear familiar strain.” It is not
as if people knew their classics intimately in a scholarly way. And
the scholar is easily tempted into false judgments under the itch for
research. Old music has its interest for the musical anatomist, but
from an artistic point of view most of it is much better forgotten.
There are some who sadly deplore the popularization of the classics on
the ground that they risk being desecrated. Why not? If some unlettered
person goes into a cinema, hears a fragment of the _Unfinished
Symphony_ for the first time and receives a new thrill, surely it is
all to the good, at any rate for him. If others feel that the vulgar
associations of the cinema have destroyed the music’s beauty for them,
let them have done with it, throw it away as a worn-out thing and
turn to something else. We may reasonably say that people who are
the prey of their unwilling associations, unable to view a work of
art with detachment, do not deserve to experience artistic enjoyment;
but at the same time we should do well to admit frankly that music
which cannot survive momentary degradation (and all things connected
with music are and must be merely momentary) is not worth preserving
and reproducing. When we consider the innermost nature of music it is
surprising that any of it should survive for more than a generation.
Some has survived for less, some for far more; but that is no reason
why it should survive for ever. Occasionally some work of a remoter age
is exhumed and seems to have a new significance for us after having
been forgotten for centuries. But its significance is what our own age
puts into it. That is one of the advantages of dealing in the art of
the past; we can do what we like with it. The art of the present, if it
has any vitality, compels us to submit our minds to itself.
The present age revolts from the music of the past century because
of its insincerity and pretentiousness. Musicians of the older
generation will repudiate this charge with indignation. The criticism
is indeed a very summary one, and the man of to-day, if pressed with
cross-questioning, may probably be induced to admit a good many single
exceptions to his universal condemnation. But technical analysis will
show that there is a sounder basis for modern criticism than mere
caprice of youthful iconoclasm. The wealth of harmonic resource which
the nineteenth century built up was derived, as has been shown, to a
large extent from associations, some extra-musical, some intra-musical,
some derived from literary or pictorial ideas, some depending on
recollections of previous music. These two categories interact on
each other again and again, so that it is not easy to separate them
out clearly. Like a system of monetary wealth, the wealth of western
music has become largely a paper currency and with the realization of
this fact values have in many cases become suddenly depreciated. It
may be urged that music as an art has derived enormous benefit from
the tendency to widen the scope of its significance, from its closer
alliance with other intellectual activities and from the deepening
conviction of its ethical influence. Is it not childish, it may be
asked, for us deliberately to throw away all that we have gained and
revert to a condition of music in which it shall be at best a mere
entertainment or possibly no more than a physiological stimulus of
dangerous passions?
The lofty idealism of Beethoven and certain of those who came after
him, both composers and interpreters, is a thing which we cannot
possibly deny or ignore; but we may justly question whether the
artistic expression of it is still convincing to modern ears. That
noble and visionary idealism, in its ardent insistence on the
spiritual, tended more and more to suggest that the reality of music
lay not so much in the actual sounds perceived by the physical ear
as in the relations between them, in sounds――or rather in relations
between sounds――never actually heard at all, but induced in the
perceptive faculty by association. The works of Beethoven’s third
period often seem to lead us into a metaphysical labyrinth. But
philosophical language is apt to degenerate into a jargon, and
philosophical music, when it is the product of lesser minds than
Beethoven’s, into platitudinous rigmarole.
“Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.”
Swinburne’s parody has its musical application too. The classical
key-system of Rameau and Bach established a tradition that was academic
in the most honourable sense of the word. It won too much respect.
It had the symmetrical logic of the heroic couplet in poetry. We can
see how in literature the austere reverence for the great academic
tradition inevitably petrifies poetry into what discreet reviewers call
“scholarly verse.” Music followed an analogous course. By the irony of
fate the music of the last century, when it was designed to edify, has
become vapid and tedious; what has survived, quaintly artificial though
its freshness may be, is the music that was made only for ephemeral
entertainment. _La Belle Hélène_ has outlived _Les Béatitudes_.
XIII
It is quite untrue to say that the music of to-day is predominantly
frivolous. The modern composer might well reply that even for those
who cling to the ideals of the past there are plenty of old-world
frivolities that have triumphed over their contemporary solemnities.
The devotees of Haydn, Mozart and Cimarosa easily forget that all these
three wrote music of deeply serious character and that it was chiefly
their serious music which won the respect of their own audiences.
There is not even anything new in the modern composer’s occasional
habit of making a fool of his critics. But the jokes of the old
composers, like those of Aristophanes, often require the elucidation
of learned commentators, whereas in our own day the newspapers provide
the needful commentary, sometimes before the musician makes his joke.
The “verbal hæmorrhage”――as it has been appropriately called――of
musical journalism is responsible for most of the deliberate silliness
recently perpetrated by composers, who in these days are fully alive
to the value of publicity. Music of this type is as ephemeral as the
criticism which it is designed to provoke. At the same time it is
perfectly reasonable that modern composers should occupy themselves in
an artistic spirit with modern dance-forms. They may well take their
place in musical history just as the waltz, the minuet, the pavan and
the galliard have done.
Weakness of inspiration is more evident in the tendency to play
modern tricks with old forms and old styles. The sham antique suite
of nineteenth-century drawing-room music is one of the products
of the past which are now beneath even ridicule; the contemporary
practice of taking a theme which suggests some commonplace of Bach or
Haydn and treating it to a development which suggests an orchestra
of amateurs reading at sight from badly copied parts may fulfil some
useful function in making the idolatry of the classics ridiculous,
but as contributing to the expression of contemporary thought its
value is purely negative. There is enough criticism of music already
without that which is written in notes. It is natural enough that young
composers should wish to shock the respectable and it is very good for
the respectable to be shocked. Music which is intentionally destructive
may help to clear the ground and sweep away some of the romantic
rubbish that still encumbers the minds of us who listen. But the
composers must be careful not to forget that the listeners will be only
too glad to return to the fleshpots of sentimentality if the prophets
of the new generation can give them nothing but emetics with which to
assuage their hunger.
A characteristic of modern music which often baffles the listener of
an older generation is its abruptness. There are various causes which
contribute to this. Abruptness of expression is characteristic of our
time; it is the mark of our speech as well as of our music. Abruptness
is often deliberately assumed by composers as a protest――perhaps
superfluous――against the ceremonial formalities of the older music.
It is sometimes even a new form of sentimentalism, a cult of the
mysteriously fragmentary, a continuation of the example set once or
twice by Schumann. And in very many cases it is due to the examples
of the painters, who have little scruples about exhibiting sketches
which are studies of particular technical problems. A great deal of
modern music is sketchy for the simple reason that a great many new
technical problems have arisen and it is both interesting and necessary
to make studies of them in isolation. The publication of such studies
may often help other people to understand what the artist is trying to
achieve, whether in paint or in sounds. It is the museum habit and the
astuteness of the picture-dealer which have combined to make the public
attribute to these things an exaggerated value, for financial values
easily become confused with moral ones. In the case of musical studies
of this type it is perhaps more often the composer who attaches the
exaggerated value and the public that is disappointed at not obtaining
it.
The most frequent accusation brought against modern music is that
it is devoid of melody. It is an accusation which has been made for
at least a hundred years. When it is made to-day the modern musician
may point out that many of the most advanced teachers of composition
insist on their pupils practising the composition of real independent
melodies, that is, of melodies which do not depend on an implied
harmony. The ordinary lover of melody is hardly capable of realizing
what this means, and the most gifted pupils generally find it an
unexpectedly severe discipline. What the plain man understands by a
tune is a melody in simple and obvious rhythm; and he is by now so
accustomed to the classical key-system that its conventional stresses
automatically suggest――even if only half consciously――the conventional
harmonic relations, with the result that he is quite willing to accept
as a tune a succession of notes which in reality is often meaningless
when considered as a pure melody. Our popular hymn-books will provide
plenty of examples. The rejection of the classical key-system makes
this type of melody impossible, and one of the chief reasons why the
present age has rejected the classical key-system is because it is
seeking new and more supple rhythms for its melodic line.
Another favourite accusation, expressed in different ways by different
people, and to most people curiously difficult of expression, may
be generally formulated by saying that modern music is devoid of
feeling, or even that it stimulates and appeals to feelings which are
unpleasant or even morally repugnant. My attempt to put this charge
into a few words is unreasonable, I admit, but I think it more or less
represents the attitude of a large number of people whose conduct is
guided more frequently by good feeling than by conscious reasoning.
Such people feel instinctively that music, more than anything else,
is or ought to be a matter of instinctive feeling. As music-lovers,
they are exactly the people who are most completely under the spell of
association. But as I have already attempted to show, it is just this
tyranny of association against which the leaders of new movements most
energetically rebel. In time they or their successors will accumulate
a new store of associations; for the present they are compelled and
indeed anxious to do without them altogether. If the older listeners
persist in attaching unpleasant associations to the new music, it is
the listeners’ own fault; it is they who by force of habit provide
those associations out of their own good feeling.
XIV
It is by no means the first time that musicians have tried to “return
to nature,” but the difficulty of going back to a state of primitive
savagery presumably becomes greater as civilization becomes more
elaborate. The enthronement of idiocy may for a moment be amusing
but it soon becomes tiresome; these two favourite epithets of musical
journalism are not without their appropriateness. Nevertheless it
is only common sense frankly to face the fact that music is made up
in the first instance of physical sounds. The metaphysical attitude
towards music has given us the last quartets of Beethoven, but in the
general practice of music it has done much to lower our standards of
performance, especially in the matter of singing; indeed among singers
who have deservedly obtained a reputation for high musicianship and
intelligence those purely vocal qualities on which the emotional power
of the voice in the first instance depends are in all countries only
too often conspicuous by their absence. Instrumental music has been
affected hardly less.
It is difficult for the musician who has been trained on the classical
system to adapt himself to this new point of view. He feels inevitably
that he is being asked to lower his intellectual standards. He has
built them up by the application of a lifetime; they have brought him
his most precious experiences and he feels that to desert them is
an act of disloyalty to his most cherished ideals. It is one of the
consolations of increasing years that our intellectual appreciations
are deepened; at any rate we like to think so. But we have regretfully
to admit that increasing years are apt to bring a blunted sense of
emotional values. Our direct impressions are less vivid, our capacity
for enthusiasm shrinks. Before it is altogether too late, before we
lose all sensitive response to the stimulus of musical sound, it
may perhaps be wise to relax our austerity of principle and allow
ourselves to enjoy the primary pleasure of sound as we once did naked
and unashamed. It might yet be the beginning of a genuinely new and
delightful experience if we would risk the adventure.
All art, after all, is an adventure. In the art of the past the things
which directly move our æsthetic emotions are the moments of adventure,
the moments at which we join the artist in perceiving intuitively and
directly something which we know to be artistically true and beautiful
although it is not consistent with the conventional principles on
which the art is based. As culture ripens and art becomes a recognized
and definite part of our spiritual life, conventions are codified and
systematized. In music the classical key system provides us with an
obvious example. We acquire the habit of applying our intellectual and
reasoning faculties to it. But our æsthetic emotions are not stirred
until we are thrown into contact with the irrational. The irrational in
this case does not imply utter intellectual chaos and anarchy any more
than it does in mathematics or metaphysics. The mathematician perceives
a new truth intuitively by an act of imagination, but it is of no use
to him until he can prove it by reason; yet reason is of no use to him
unless he has creative imagination as well. This imaginative plunge
into the irrational is what produces a number of common and elementary
physical pleasures, such as the child’s first attempt to walk and such
diversions as swimming, riding a bicycle and flying, although all
these processes very soon become rational and indeed automatic. We
have analogous adventures in the world of art from the beginning. We
may say that music is to speech as swimming is to walking. The mind
very soon regularizes the new experiences, but the fascination of the
arts is that they are always offering us the chance of further ones.
We do not enjoy music as an art until we have learned to appreciate it
rationally; but at the same time it cannot give us a real æsthetic
emotion unless it confronts us forcibly with a further irrational
element.
It is this irrational reaction which causes us still to be stirred by
the music of the past. We listen to a quartet of Mozart; we recognize
a familiar convention, we are easily set back into a past cultural
period in which Mozart’s language was the language of the day. We
understand every phrase, and we may even run the risk of being bored.
Suddenly Mozart does something which the average music-maker of his
day would not have done; we are thrown off our rational balance, we
have to apprehend directly and intuitively. Our minds have to make some
unfamiliar movement just as our bodies may in certain circumstances
have to make some movement incompatible with normal equilibrium. In
the case of bodily movements practical experience and a knowledge
of mathematics may subsequently show that this unfamiliar movement
is really just as reasonable as walking. Something of the same kind
happens in our artistic experience too. Even Mozart may cease to
interest us. The once unfamiliar experience becomes automatic, the new
harmony becomes a _cliché_.
There need not really be anything so very terrifying about the
abandonment of the classical system. After all, we can always go back
to it when we feel inclined, just as we may take up Dante and return to
mediaeval astronomy. The lurking fear which besets us is perhaps that
if we abandoned ourselves to the artistic adventure of modern music we
might find, not merely that we did not particularly enjoy it, but that
somehow it had made it impossible for us to go back wholeheartedly to
the music of our youth. It is impossible. Everybody has to ask himself
the question and answer it for himself honestly――am I ready and keen
to face fresh intellectual adventures? As age increases, increasing
vanity has to be taken into account. We elderly people are easily prone
to deceive ourselves and to think that we can convince others of the
doctrine that connoisseurship is an adequate substitute for direct
enjoyment.
XV
Some of the composers of the present day appear to be pursuing
adventure in a definitely intellectual spirit comparable almost to
that of the mediaeval Netherlanders. Their admirers often seem to be
somewhat at a loss to expound their music to the uninitiated. They
draw our attention to various technical ingenuities and they insist,
no doubt justly, on the entire sincerity of the composers. As regards
sincerity, it is a virtue with which art has no concern. As regards
technical ingenuities, we have learned too many lessons from the
past. There are many devices which look quite amusing on paper, but
which in practical performance pass unnoticed. To this the composer
may reasonably reply that the perception and enjoyment of technical
ingenuities in performance is a matter of practice and experience;
there is no reason why he should compose music for fools. Ingenuity is
by no means a quality to be despised; there are innumerable moments
in the works of Purcell, Bach and Mozart at which technical ingenuity
has brought about some peculiarly poignant expression of beauty.
Constructive skill――and this is what is really meant by the musician’s
technical word _form_――is what makes music an art; and constructive
skill has to be attained by study and experiment. It is desirable too
that listeners should be trained in its appreciation, not so much by
books and lectures as by the actual experience of hearing.
The composers to whom I have alluded assume in their hearers a long
experience of music in general and also something of that habit of mind
previously mentioned which tends to regard music less as a series of
actual sounds than as a series of relations between sounds. It may be
called a mathematical conception of music, and, like mathematics, it
soon comes to deal with irrational quantities. It is an interesting
question how far the human mind can advance in this direction. To
certain temperaments music of this type is definitely repulsive; but
they often feel no less repulsion towards mathematics and philosophy,
studies which have been closely associated with music from very early
times. We must however beware of being misled by superficial criticism
into supposing that the understanding of such musical complexities
requires a practical knowledge of mathematical or philosophical
technicalities. In the scientific study of musical æsthetics there
ultimately arise problems which bring all three branches of learning
into contact; but in common practice they do not affect either the
composer or the listener. There are writers on music who make use of a
philosophical jargon to conceal their incapacity for clear thinking;
but the truly philosophical habit of mind aims, if but with rare
success, at lucidity.
The practical value of this “mathematical” system of composition lies
not so much in its employment of technical devices which were practised
some five hundred years ago, as in its new method of handling them.
It was a great moment in the history of music when someone first
discovered that two different tunes could be sung simultaneously
and thereby produce harmony. The artistic result of this proceeding
depended on two factors which had to be brought into relation――the
interest of each tune considered by itself, that is, the driving force
which made it perceptible as a continuous tune, and, secondly, the
satisfaction derived from the consonance of the two voices where it
happened to occur. At one period the interest of the tune predominated,
at another it was sacrificed to the interest of consonance. Both
interests are however subject to changes of value in the course of
time. It is clear enough that such composers as Purcell, Bach and
Mozart were deeply interested in the problem of exploiting these two
interests, and of finding out how far the driving force of a tune could
induce the listener to put up with dissonant harmony. We can see now,
at this distance of time, that they positively increased the value of
the harmonic interest by the way in which they deliberately tortured
the ear of the sensitive listener of their own time. Our ears have
become not less but more sensitive to dissonance, more able at any
rate to discriminate between varieties of it. But, as I have already
indicated, this preoccupation with harmony and with relations between
sounds has led to an indifference towards the actual sounds themselves,
and the loss of interest in the actual sounds has certainly brought
with it a diminished appreciation of melody. This is clear, not from
the complaints directed against the unmelodiousness of modern music,
but from the common inability to appreciate the emotional force of
melody as it was conceived by composers of two hundred years ago and
more, composers who undoubtedly were intensely preoccupied with pure
melodic expression.
Certain modern composers are devoting themselves to the same fundamental
problem that interested Purcell, Bach and Mozart――how far the inherent
force of melody can carry the listener over the obstacles of dissonance.
It is not for me to attempt to measure the force of the actual melodies
which they write. This force, too, is curiously complicated by problems
involving various qualities of sound. The harshness of a dissonance may
be mitigated or aggravated according to the instruments which produce
it, and modern musicians are devoting much care to the minuter shades of
what are sometimes called “colour-values.” The name is misleading, like
all expressions which tempt the reader to apply to music the critical
methods appropriate to painting. It has been suggested that music is now
moving towards a phase in which “colour-values” will be the principal
means of expression. The experiment may be tried, and it may well
contribute something useful towards the stock of artistic material. What
this movement really signifies is nothing more than a subtilization of
already recognized harmonic values, for from the point of view of
acoustics it is impossible to draw any clear distinction between what
is perceived as a “tone-colour” and what is perceived as a “chord.”
XVI
The mechanical inventions of recent years have provided us with
increased facilities for the diffusion of music. The present era may
come to be regarded as similar in historical importance to those which
first benefited by the invention of the stave and by the invention
of music-printing. To some extent these changes represent merely the
adaptation of practical conditions to the increase in population. But
whereas the invention of the stave and the invention of music-printing
must in all probability have increased the number of persons who
could read music at sight, the modern reproductive machinery cannot
do more than increase the number of those who confine themselves to
listening. It remains to be seen what proportion of those who acquire
the habit of listening will be stimulated to learn something of the
art of performing. We hear much of the enthusiasm for music amongst
“the masses.” Apparently they are now singing Bach, whereas their
grandparents sang Handel; does it make much difference?
It is said that modern music has lost contact with “the people.” Had
it ever any contact with them, if by “the people” is meant those whose
musical education is not more than elementary? By all means let us do
our utmost to raise the standard of musical education in all classes
of society; but we cannot get away from the fact that at all periods
of musical history the music which really made that history was in its
own day the possession only of a limited circle of highly cultivated
enthusiasts. This is inevitable. The moment we recognize music to be
an art and not merely the instrument of magic we have to apply our
intellectual faculties to the understanding of it. Architects and
painters complain bitterly enough of the public’s unwillingness to meet
them halfway. For the musician the case is still worse; the practical
difficulty of grasping a piece of music in the transitory moment of
performance is one reason, and another is the intensity with which
musical sounds act upon human emotions. It is small wonder if large
numbers of people still regard music as almost magical.
It is the remnant of these primitive beliefs which leads so many
serious-minded and otherwise reasonable persons to take an apprehensive
view of modern music, even though they may consider themselves more
enlightened than those who view the music of all ages with moral
apprehension. The danger, if it exists now, has always existed; people
have always feared that which they do not understand.
“It is difficult,” says Dr. Burney of Plato, “to refrain from numbering
this philosopher, together with Aristotle, Aristoxenus and Plutarch,
though such illustrious characters, and, in other particulars, such
excellent writers, among the musical Grumblers and _Croakers_ of
antiquity. They all equally lament the loss of good music, without
considering that every age had, probably, done the same, whether right
or wrong, from the beginning of the world; always throwing musical
perfection into times remote from their own, as a thing never to be
known but by tradition. The Golden Age had not its name from those who
lived in it.”
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
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