TERPANDER

TERPANDER
or
MUSIC AND THE FUTURE

BY

EDWARD J. DENT

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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.

LIST OF CHAPTERS

I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI

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:

A List of Chapters has been provided for the convenience of the reader, and is granted to the public domain.

Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.