is the mission of music to give expression to feelings; but the
scientific fact remains that the fundamental elements of vocal
music--pitch, quality, and dynamic intensity--are the results of
feelings working upon the vocal organs; and even if Mr. Herbert
Spencer's theory be rejected, it is too late now to deny that music is
conceived by its creators as a language of the emotions and so applied
by them. The German philosopher Herbarth sought to reduce the question
to an absurdity by expressing surprise that musicians should still
believe that feelings could be "the proximate cause of the rules of
simple and double counterpoint;" but Dr. Stainer found a sufficient
answer by accepting the proposition as put, and directing attention to
the fact that the feelings of men having first decided what was
pleasurable in polyphony, and the rules of counterpoint having
afterward been drawn from specimens of pleasurable polyphony, it was
entirely correct to say that feelings are the proximate cause of the
laws of counterpoint.
[Sidenote: _How composers hear music._]
It is because so many of us have been taught by poets and romancers to
think that there is a picture of some kind, or a story in every piece
of music, and find ourselves unable to agree upon the picture or the
story in any given case, that confusion is so prevalent among the
musical laity. Composers seldom find difficulty in understanding each
other. They listen for beauty, and if they find it they look for the
causes which have produced it, and in apprehending beauty and
recognizing means and cause they unvolitionally rise to the plane
whence a view of the composer's purposes is clear. Having grasped the
mood of a composition and found that it is being sustained or varied
in a manner accordant with their conceptions of beauty, they occupy
themselves with another kind of differentiation altogether than the
misled disciples of the musical rhapsodists who overlook the general
design and miss the grand proclamation in their search for petty
suggestions for pictures and stories among the details of the
composition. Let musicians testify for us. In his romance, "Ein
Glücklicher Abend," Wagner says:
[Sidenote: _Wagner's axiom._]
"That which music expresses is eternal and ideal. It does
not give voice to the passion, the love, the longing of this
or the other individual, under these or the other
circumstances, but to passion, love, longing itself."
Moritz Hauptmann says:
[Sidenote: _Hauptmann's._]
"The same music will admit of the most varied verbal
expositions, and of not one of them can it be correctly said
that it is exhaustive, the right one, and contains the whole
significance of the music. This significance is contained
most definitely in the music itself. It is not music that is
ambiguous; it says the same thing to everybody; it speaks to
mankind and gives voice only to human feelings. Ambiguity
only then makes its appearance when each person attempts to
formulate in his manner the emotional impression which he
has received, when he attempts to fix and hold the ethereal
essence of music, to utter the unutterable."
[Sidenote: _Mendelssohn's._]
[Sidenote: _The "Songs without Words."_]
Mendelssohn inculcated the same lesson in a letter which he wrote to a
young poet who had given titles to a number of the composer's "Songs
Without Words," and incorporated what he conceived to be their
sentiments in a set of poems. He sent his work to Mendelssohn with the
request that the composer inform the writer whether or not he had
succeeded in catching the meaning of the music. He desired the
information because "music's capacity for expression is so vague and
indeterminate." Mendelssohn replied:
"You give the various numbers of the book such titles as 'I
Think of Thee,' 'Melancholy,' 'The Praise of God,' 'A Merry
Hunt.' I can scarcely say whether I thought of these or
other things while composing the music. Another might find
'I Think of Thee' where you find 'Melancholy,' and a real
huntsman might consider 'A Merry Hunt' a veritable 'Praise
of God.' But this is not because, as you think, music is
vague. On the contrary, I believe that musical expression is
altogether too definite, that it reaches regions and dwells
in them whither words cannot follow it and must necessarily
go lame when they make the attempt as you would have them
do."
[Sidenote: _The tonal language._]
[Sidenote: _Herbert Spencer's definition._]
[Sidenote: _Natural expression._]
[Sidenote: _Absolute music._]
If I were to try to say why musicians, great musicians, speak thus of
their art, my explanation would be that they have developed, farther
than the rest of mankind have been able to develop it, a language of
tones, which, had it been so willed, might have been developed so as
to fill the place now occupied by articulate speech. Herbert Spencer,
though speaking purely as a scientific investigator, not at all as an
artist, defined music as "a language of feelings which may ultimately
enable men vividly and completely to impress on each other the
emotions they experience from moment to moment." We rely upon speech
to do this now, but ever and anon when, in a moment of emotional
exaltation, we are deserted by the articulate word we revert to the
emotional cry which antedates speech, and find that that cry is
universally understood because it is universally felt. More than
speech, if its primitive element of emotionality be omitted, more than
the primitive language of gesture, music is a natural mode of
expression. All three forms have attained their present stage of
development through conventions. Articulate speech has led in the
development; gesture once occupied a high plane (in the pantomimic
dance of the ancients) but has now retrograded; music, supreme at the
outset, then neglected, is but now pushing forward into the place
which its nature entitles it to occupy. When we conceive of an
art-work composed of such elements, and foregoing the adventitious
helps which may accrue to it from conventional idioms based on
association of ideas, we have before us the concept of Absolute music,
whose content, like that of every noble artistic composition, be it of
tones or forms or colors or thoughts expressed in words, is that high
ideal of goodness, truthfulness, and beauty for which all lofty
imaginations strive. Such artworks are the instrumental compositions
in the classic forms; such, too, may be said to be the high type of
idealized "Programme" music, which, like the "Pastoral" symphony of
Beethoven, is designed to awaken emotions like those awakened by the
contemplation of things, but does not attempt to depict the things
themselves. Having mentioned Programme music I must, of course, try to
tell what it is; but the exposition must be preceded by an explanation
of a kind of music which, because of its chastity, is set down as the
finest form of absolute music. This is Chamber music.
[Sidenote: _Chamber music._]
[Sidenote: _History of the term._]
[Sidenote: _Haydn a servant._]
In a broad sense, but one not employed in modern definition, Chamber
music is all music not designed for performance in the church or
theatre. (Out-of-door music cannot be considered among these artistic
forms of aristocratic descent.) Once, and indeed at the time of its
invention, the term meant music designed especially for the
delectation of the most eminent patrons of the art--the kings and
nobles whose love for it gave it maintenance and encouragement. This
is implied by the term itself, which has the same etymology wherever
the form of music is cultivated. In Italian it is _Musica da Camera_;
in French, _Musique de Chambre_; in German, _Kammermusik_. All the
terms have a common root. The Greek [Greek: kamara] signified an arch,
a vaulted room, or a covered wagon. In the time of the Frankish kings
the word was applied to the room in the royal palace in which the
monarch's private property was kept, and in which he looked after his
private affairs. When royalty took up the cultivation of music it was
as a private, not as a court, function, and the concerts given for
the entertainment of the royal family took place in the king's
chamber, or private room. The musicians were nothing more nor less
than servants in the royal household. This relationship endured into
the present century. Haydn was a _Hausofficier_ of Prince Esterhazy.
As vice-chapelmaster he had to appear every morning in the Prince's
ante-room to receive orders concerning the dinner-music and other
entertainments of the day, and in the certificate of appointment his
conduct is regulated with a particularity which we, who remember him
and reverence his genius but have forgotten his master, think
humiliating in the extreme.
[Sidenote: _Beethoven's Chamber music._]
Out of this cultivation of music in the private chamber grew the
characteristics of Chamber music, which we must consider if we would
enjoy it ourselves and understand the great reverence which the great
masters of music have always felt for it. Beethoven was the first
great democrat among musicians. He would have none of the shackles
which his predecessors wore, and compelled aristocracy of birth to bow
to aristocracy of genius. But such was his reverence for the style of
music which had grown up in the chambers of the great that he devoted
the last three years of his life almost exclusively to its
composition; the peroration of his proclamation to mankind consists of
his last quartets--the holiest of holy things to the Chamber musicians
of to-day.
[Sidenote: _The characteristics of Chamber music._]
Chamber music represents pure thought, lofty imagination, and deep
learning. These attributes are encouraged by the idea of privacy which
is inseparable from the form. Composers find it the finest field for
the display of their talents because their own skill in creating is to
be paired with trained skill in hearing. Its representative pieces are
written for strings alone--trios, quartets, and quintets. With the
strings are sometimes associated a pianoforte, or one or more of the
solo wind instruments--oboe, clarinet, or French horn; and as a rule
the compositions adhere to classical lines (see Chapter V.). Of
necessity the modesty of the apparatus compels it to forego nearly
all the adventitious helps with which other forms of composition gain
public approval. In the delineative arts Chamber music shows analogy
with correct drawing and good composition, the absence of which cannot
be atoned for by the most gorgeous coloring. In no other style is
sympathy between performers and listeners so necessary, and for that
reason Chamber music should always be heard in a small room with
performers and listeners joined in angelic wedlock. Communities in
which it flourishes under such conditions are musical.
[Sidenote: _Programme music._]
[Sidenote: _The value of superscriptions._]
[Sidenote: _The rule of judgment._]
Properly speaking, the term Programme music ought to be applied only
to instrumental compositions which make a frank effort to depict
scenes, incidents, or emotional processes to which the composer
himself gives the clew either by means of a descriptive title or a
verbal motto. It is unfortunate that the term has come to be loosely
used. In a high sense the purest and best music in the world is
programmatic, its programme being, as I have said, that "high ideal of
goodness, truthfulness, and beauty" which is the content of all true
art. But the origin of the term was vulgar, and the most contemptible
piece of tonal imitation now claims kinship in the popular mind with
the exquisitely poetical creations of Schumann and the "Pastoral"
symphony of Beethoven; and so it is become necessary to defend it in
the case of noble compositions. A programme is not necessarily, as
Ambros asserts, a certificate of poverty and an admission on the part
of the composer that his art has got beyond its natural bounds.
Whether it be merely a suggestive title, as in the case of some of the
compositions of Beethoven, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, or an extended
commentary, as in the symphonic poems of Liszt and the symphonies of
Berlioz and Raff, the programme has a distinct value to the composer
as well as the hearer. It can make the perceptive sense more
impressible to the influence of the music; it can quicken the fancy,
and fire the imagination; it can prevent a gross misconception of the
intentions of a composer and the character of his composition.
Nevertheless, in determining the artistic value of the work, the
question goes not to the ingenuity of the programme or the clearness
with which its suggestions have been carried out, but to the beauty of
the music itself irrespective of the verbal commentary accompanying
it. This rule must be maintained in order to prevent a degradation of
the object of musical expression. The vile, the ugly, the painful are
not fit subjects for music; music renounces, contravenes, negatives
itself when it attempts their delineation.
A classification of Programme music might be made on these lines:
[Sidenote: _Kinds of Programme music._]
I. Descriptive pieces which rest on imitation or suggestion of natural
sounds.
II. Pieces whose contents are purely musical, but the mood of which is
suggested by a poetical title.
III. Pieces in which the influence which determined their form and
development is indicated not only by a title but also by a motto which
is relied upon to mark out a train of thought for the listener which
will bring his fancy into union with that of the composer. The motto
may be verbal or pictorial.
IV. Symphonies or other composite works which have a title to indicate
their general character, supplemented by explanatory superscriptions
for each portion.
[Sidenote: _Imitation of natural sounds._]
[Sidenote: _The nightingale._]
[Sidenote: _The cat._]
[Sidenote: _The cuckoo._]
The first of these divisions rests upon the employment of the lowest
form of conventional musical idiom. The material which the natural
world provides for imitation by the musician is exceedingly scant.
Unless we descend to mere noise, as in the descriptions of storms and
battles (the shrieking of the wind, the crashing of thunder, and the
roar of artillery--invaluable aids to the cheap descriptive writer),
we have little else than the calls of a few birds. Nearly thirty years
ago Wilhelm Tappert wrote an essay which he called "Zooplastik in
Tönen." He ransacked the musical literature of centuries, but in all
his examples the only animals the voices of which are unmistakable are
four fowls--the cuckoo, quail (that is the German bird, not the
American, which has a different call), the cock, and the hen. He has
many descriptive sounds which suggest other birds and beasts, but only
by association of idea; separated from title or text they suggest
merely what they are--musical phrases. A reiteration of the rhythmical
figure called the "Scotch snap," breaking gradually into a trill, is
the common symbol of the nightingale's song, but it is not a copy of
that song; three or four tones descending chromatically are given as
the cat's mew, but they are made to be such only by placing the
syllables _Mi-au_ (taken from the vocabulary of the German cat) under
them. Instances of this kind might be called characterization, or
description by suggestion, and some of the best composers have made
use of them, as will appear in these pages presently. The list being
so small, and the lesson taught so large, it may be well to give a few
striking instances of absolutely imitative music. The first bird to
collaborate with a composer seems to have been the cuckoo, whose notes
[Music illustration: Cuck-oo!]
had sounded in many a folk-song ere Beethoven thought of enlisting the
little solo performer in his "Pastoral" symphony. It is to be borne in
mind, however, as a fact having some bearing on the artistic value of
Programme music, that Beethoven's cuckoo changes his note to please
the musician, and, instead of singing a minor third, he sings a major
third thus:
[Music illustration: Cuck-oo!]
[Sidenote: _Cock and hen._]
As long ago as 1688 Jacob Walter wrote a musical piece entitled
"Gallina et Gallo," in which the hen was delineated in this theme:
[Music illustration: _Gallina._]
while the cock had the upper voice in the following example, his clear
challenge sounding above the cackling of his mate:
[Music illustration: _Gallo._]
The most effective use yet made of the song of the hen, however, is in
"La Poule," one of Rameau's "Pièces de Clavecin," printed in 1736, a
delightful composition with this subject:
[Music illustration: Co co co co co co co dai, etc.]
[Sidenote: _The quail._]
The quail's song is merely a monotonic rhythmical figure to which
German fancy has fitted words of pious admonition:
[Music illustration: Fürch-te Gott! Lo-be Gott!]
[Sidenote: _Conventional idioms._]
[Sidenote: _Association of ideas._]
[Sidenote: _Fancy and imagination._]
[Sidenote: _Harmony and emotionality._]
The paucity of examples in this department is a demonstration of the
statement made elsewhere that nature does not provide music with
models for imitation as it does painting and sculpture. The fact that,
nevertheless, we have come to recognize a large number of idioms based
on association of ideas stands the composer in good stead whenever he
ventures into the domain of delineative or descriptive music, and this
he can do without becoming crudely imitative. Repeated experiences
have taught us to recognize resemblances between sequences or
combinations of tones and things or ideas, and on these analogies,
even though they be purely conventional (that is agreed upon, as we
have agreed that a nod of the head shall convey assent, a shake of the
head dissent, and a shrug of the shoulders doubt or indifference), the
composers have built up a voluminous vocabulary of idioms which need
only to be helped out by a suggestion to the mind to be eloquently
illustrative. "Sometimes hearing a melody or harmony arouses an
emotion like that aroused by the contemplation of a thing. Minor
harmonies, slow movements, dark tonal colorings, combine directly to
put a musically susceptible person in a mood congenial to thoughts of
sorrow and death; and, inversely, the experience of sorrow, or the
contemplation of death, creates affinity for minor harmonies, slow
movements, and dark tonal colorings. Or we recognize attributes in
music possessed also by things, and we consort the music and the
things, external attributes bringing descriptive music into play,
which excites the fancy, internal attributes calling for an exercise
of the loftier faculty, imagination, to discern their meaning."[B] The
latter kind is delineative music of the higher order, the kind that I
have called idealized programme music, for it is the imagination
which, as Ruskin has said, "sees the heart and inner nature and makes
them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its
giving out of outer detail," which is "a seer in the prophetic sense,
calling the things that are not as though they were, and forever
delighting to dwell on that which is not tangibly present." In this
kind of music, harmony, the real seat of emotionality in music, is an
eloquent factor, and, indeed, there is no greater mystery in the art,
which is full of mystery, than the fact that the lowering of the
second tone in the chord, which is the starting-point of harmony,
should change an expression of satisfaction, energetic action, or
jubilation into an accent of pain or sorrow. The major mode is "to
do," the minor, "to suffer:"
[Sidenote: _Major and minor._]
[Music illustration: Hur-rah! A-las!]
[Sidenote: _Music and movement._]
How near a large number of suggestions, which are based wholly upon
experience or association of ideas, lie to the popular fancy, might be
illustrated by scores of examples. Thoughts of religious functions
arise in us the moment we hear the trombones intone a solemn phrase in
full harmony; an oboe melody in sixth-eighth time over a drone bass
brings up a pastoral picture of a shepherd playing upon his pipe;
trumpets and drums suggest war, and so on. The delineation of
movement is easier to the musician than it is to the poet. Handel, who
has conveyed the sensation of a "darkness which might be felt," in a
chorus of his "Israel in Egypt," by means which appeal solely to the
imagination stirred by feelings, has in the same work pictured the
plague of frogs with a frank _naïveté_ which almost upsets our
seriousness of demeanor, by suggesting the characteristic movement of
the creatures in the instrumental accompaniment to the arioso, "Their
land brought forth frogs," which begins thus:
[Sidenote: _Handel's frogs._]
[Music illustration]
[Sidenote: _The movement of water._]
We find the gentle flux and reflux of water as if it were lapping a
rocky shore in the exquisite figure out of which Mendelssohn
constructed his "Hebrides" overture:
[Music illustration]
and in fancy we ride on mighty surges when we listen to the principal
subject of Rubinstein's "Ocean" symphony:
[Music illustration]
In none of these instances can the composer be said to be imitative.
Music cannot copy water, but it can do what water does, and so suggest
water.
[Sidenote: _High and low._]
Some of the most common devices of composers are based on conceptions
that are wholly arbitrary. A musical tone cannot have position in
space such as is indicated by high or low, yet so familiar is the
association of acuteness of pitch with height, and gravity of pitch
with depth, that composers continually delineate high things with
acute tones and low things with grave tones, as witness Handel in one
of the choruses of "The Messiah:"
[Music illustration: Glo-ry to God in the high-est, and peace on
earth.]
[Sidenote: _Ascent, descent, and distance delineated._]
Similarly, too, does Beethoven describe the ascent into heaven and the
descent into hell in the Credo of his mass in D. Beethoven's music,
indeed, is full of tone-painting, and because it exemplifies a double
device I make room for one more illustration. It is from the cantata
"Becalmed at Sea, and a Prosperous Voyage," and in it the composer
pictures the immensity of the sea by a sudden, extraordinary spreading
out of his harmonies, which is musical, and dwelling a long time on
the word "distance" (_Weite_) which is rhetorical:
[Music illustration: In der un-ge-heu-'ren Wei-te.]
[Sidenote: _Bald imitation bad art._]
[Sidenote: _Vocal music and delineation._]
[Sidenote: _Beethoven's canon._]
The extent to which tone-painting is justified is a question which
might profitably concern us; but such a discussion as it deserves
would far exceed the limits set for this book, and must be foregone.
It cannot be too forcibly urged, however, as an aid to the listener,
that efforts at musical cartooning have never been made by true
composers, and that in the degree that music attempts simply to copy
external things it falls in the scale of artistic truthfulness and
value. Vocal music tolerates more of the descriptive element than
instrumental because it is a mixed art; in it the purpose of music is
to illustrate the poetry and, by intensifying the appeal to the fancy,
to warm the emotions. Every piece of vocal music, moreover, carries
its explanatory programme in its words. Still more tolerable and even
righteous is it in the opera where it is but one of several factors
which labor together to make up the sum of dramatic representation.
But it must ever remain valueless unless it be idealized. Mendelssohn,
desiring to put _Bully Bottom_ into the overture to "A Midsummer
Night's Dream," did not hesitate to use tones which suggest the bray
of a donkey, yet the effect, like Handel's frogs and flies in
"Israel," is one of absolute musical value. The canon which ought
continually to be before the mind of the listener is that which
Beethoven laid down with most painstaking care when he wrote the
"Pastoral" symphony. Desiring to inform the listeners what were the
images which inspired the various movements (in order, of course, that
they might the better enter into the work by recalling them), he gave
each part a superscription thus:
[Sidenote: _The "Pastoral" symphony._]
I. "The agreeable and cheerful sensations awakened by
arrival in the country."
II. "Scene by the brook."
III. "A merrymaking of the country folk."
IV. "Thunder-storm."
V. "Shepherds' song--feelings of charity combined with
gratitude to the Deity after the storm."