One fact alone should make opponents of programme music think seriously
of their position. The most significant feature of the problem is the
way in which the practical musicians have dealt with it. Whereas most
of the older orchestral music of any value was absolute music, most
of the later orchestral music of any value is programme music; and
the momentum of the latter species seems to be increasing every year.
It will not do to pooh-pooh a phenomenon of this kind, nor to seek to
fasten upon it the explanation that some of the new men write music
depending upon literary or pictorial subjects because they cannot
write music of the other kind. This is like saying that Shakespeare
pusillanimously wrote dramas because he could not write epics--which
is probably a true saying, but quite irrelevant. The point is, why
should Shakespeare, with a gift for good drama, force himself to write
bad epics? And if a man's musical ideas spring from quite another way
of apprehending life than that of the absolute musician, why should
he abjure his own native form of speech in order to mouth and maul
unintelligently the phrases and the forms of another musician whose
mental world is wholly foreign to his? In any case, while some of the
critics have been paternally warning young composers against falling
into the toils of programme music, and recommending them to keep to
the lines of structure as they were laid down by Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven, the musicians themselves have been flinging programme music
right and left to the world. One has only to take up a catalogue
of the Russian, French, German, Belgian, American, or even English
music published during the last twenty years to see how enormously
this form of art has grown, and how the really big men all display
a marked liking for it. You may regret, if you like, that so many
modern musicians should prefer programme music to absolute music;
but you cannot settle the big æsthetic problem involved by shrugging
your shoulders and invoking Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, nor by
airily flinging out a formula or two of moribund æsthetic. And as bad
æsthetic, bad argumentation, are accountable for most of the confusion
upon the subject, let us try to analyse it more closely down to its
foundations.
Programme music--by which we mean purely instrumental (_i.e._
non-vocal) music that has its _raison d'être_ in a definite literary or
pictorial scheme--is not an ideal term for this kind of art; but since
all names which we can give it are open to objections of some kind, we
may as well use this as any other. It must be remembered, too, that
though programme or representative music is indeed differentiable from
abstract or self-contained music, it is not absolutely differentiable.
All programme music must indeed be representative, but it must also
be, in part, self-contained; that is, a given phrase must not only
be appropriate to the character of Hamlet or Dante, or suggestive of
a certain external phenomenon such as the wind, or the fire, or the
water, but it must also be interesting _as music_.[20] On the other
hand, in thousands of works that have been written without a formal
programme, the expression--it may be throughout the work, or only in
parts of it--is so vivid, so strenuous, so suggestive of something more
than an abstract delight in making a beautiful tone-pattern, that it
spontaneously evokes in us images of definite scenes or characters or
actions. Surely no one can listen to the C minor symphony, for example,
and feel that Beethoven's only concern was with the invention and
interweaving of abstract musical themes; here at any rate we feel
that there is much truth in Wagner's contention, that behind the mere
tones a kind of informal drama is going on. The expression comes, at
times, as close to the suggestion of definite thought and definite
action as any symphonic poem could do. Thus some of the qualities of
programme music are found in absolute music, and _vice versâ_; there
is no hard-and-fast line of division between the two. Even in the
most mathematical music that ever pedant misconceived, a human accent
will sometimes make itself heard; and even the most human music--the
music that has its fount and origin and its final justification in the
veracious expression of definite human feeling--must be bound together
by some mathematical principle of form. But we all understand what we
mean by the broad distinction of absolute and poetic music.[21] In the
latter we have a definite literary or pictorial scheme controlling
(_a_) the shape and colour of the phrases, (_b_) the order in which
they appear, (_c_) the way in which they are played off against each
other, (_d_) their relative positions at the end. This it is, roughly
speaking, that distinguishes it from absolute music, where the manner
in which the themes are handled depends upon no conception, external to
the themes themselves, that could be phrased in words.
Now we are often told that when music takes upon itself to represent or
narrate, as in programme music, it is "stepping beyond its legitimate
boundaries." We are told that it is "passing out of its own sphere;"
that it is abdicating the purely musical function, and trying to do
what it is the function of literature or of painting to do; that a
piece of music ought to be comprehensible from its music alone; that
its whole message should be written plainly on the music, without the
necessity of calling in the aid of a programme. If there is anything in
this thesis it will dispose of programme music at once. But I shall try
to show that there is nothing whatever in it--that it is not argument,
but pure assertion. I shall try to show in the first place that so far
from being a passing disease of the present generation, the desire to
write programme music is rooted in humanity from the very beginning;
and in the second place that the argument just outlined could be made
to dispose not only of programme music, but also of the song and the
opera.