I
It is now nearly fifty years since Spencer first published his
celebrated essay on "The Origin and Function of Music." That essay has
been elaborately assailed from many quarters; it has been objected to
as insufficient from the standpoint of æsthetic psychology, and as at
variance with some of the known facts of musical history. Nevertheless
Spencer, in accordance with his general intellectual habit, always
clung tenaciously to his theory, and, without modifying it at all,
returned to the subject in later years only in order to re-asseverate
his doctrine and to repel the critical assaults that were made upon it.
He had no difficulty in dealing with the counter-theory of Darwin--that
music sprang from the amorous rivalry of the males in the presence of
the females of certain species--for Darwin's brief excursion into the
alien field of musical æsthetic was as humorous and unprofitable as a
discussion of bimetallism by Tchaikovski would have been. Then Spencer
dealt with the redoubtable objections of the late Edmund Gurney and
those of Dr. Wallaschek, undoubtedly scoring at times against them when
they had needlessly overstated their own case, though not, it seems
to me, removing the impression that they had successfully attacked
the central point of his theory. Towards the very end of his days he
returned yet again to the subject, in his _Facts and Comments_, and
did me the honour to combat the brief criticism of his theory which I
had put forward in my _Study of Wagner_, asserting that I exhibited a
"confusion between the origin of a thing and the thing which originates
from it," and that some of my criticisms "went far towards conceding"
what I denied. I can only say that while I considered that Spencer
passed over in silence certain of the stronger points I had urged
against him, aiming at a merely dialectical victory here and there by
interpreting my words in a different sense from that intended by me,
I was still quite unconvinced, even by his later arguments, of the
truth of his original theory. I shall try to show that that theory
rests on a misunderstanding of the real nature of music, and on too
ready an assumption of a causal connection between phenomena that
are really only similar, and that it is helped out by unintentional
misstatements as to some of the main factors of the problem. The
question has an interest above and beyond Spencer's connection with
it. The speech-theory of the origin of music has here and there been
adopted as an established æsthetic fact, and æsthetic deductions have
been made from it that must affect our views of current developments
of the art. Wagner--working of course on lines of his own--contended
that song is "just speech aroused to highest passion," and admiring
commentators innumerable have followed him in his error. It is worth
while therefore, as a contribution to a rather obscure point in musical
æsthetic, to try to demonstrate the falsity of the speech-theory, and
at the same time to place over against it a theory of the origin and
nature of music that squares better with the facts of history and
psychology; and this is best done by examining the speech-theory in the
hands of its strongest advocate.
Briefly, Spencer's theory is this: "Variations of voice are the
physiological results of variations of feeling," since "all feelings
... have this common characteristic, that they are muscular stimuli."
Thus according to the intensity and the quality of the feeling, the
tones in which it is expressed will vary in loudness, in _timbre_,
in pitch, in width of intervals, and in rapidity. "These vocal
peculiarities, which indicate excited feeling, are those which
especially distinguish song from ordinary speech." In other words,
excited speech merges into recitative, and recitative in its turn
merges into song; and song "originally diverged from emotional speech
in a gradual, unobtrusive manner." Against this view I argued, in
my _Study of Wagner_, that "it errs in supposing that, because song
exhibits some of the characteristics of speech, the one has necessarily
taken its rise from the other. The resemblances between the external
characteristics of speech and those of song are only what might be
expected, seeing that both are phenomena of sound, and sound can only
vary in the ways indicated by Spencer.... The mere resemblance of song
and speech in their most external characteristics is not a proof that
one is the outcome of the other, but simply that they have certain
causal phenomena in common; while the internal differences between them
are greater than their resemblances." The careful reader will observe,
in fact, that Spencer unconsciously sophisticates his argument from the
very commencement. It is quite true that "variations of voice are the
physiological results of variations of feeling"; it is also quite true
that the "vocal peculiarities which indicate excited feeling"--such
as loudness, high pitch, increased resonance, and so on--are more
pronounced in song than in ordinary speech. But it does not at all
follow from this that _song took these peculiarities from speech_--that
speech got them first, then developed them into recitative, and then
still further into song. To make a symmetrical but artificial chain
of this kind is to beg the question at the outset. Spencer never put
before himself the obvious alternative--"Could not, and would not,
song have had all these peculiarities even if speech had never been
invented? Given, that is, the capacity of men to feel emotion in
varying degrees, would not a strong emotion naturally express itself in
louder, more varied, more resonant tones than a weak emotion--and this
even if man had as yet no language?" Spencer, in fact, simply details
the characteristics of _tone_ as the expression of feeling, and then
illegitimately appropriates them, in the first place, to one order of
tone, namely speech. No one would dream of disputing the physiological
facts which he established in his essay with his usual patient and
scrupulous accuracy. It is unquestionable that, on the whole, a loud
tone in speaking and a loud tone in singing both indicate heightened
feeling; and that in all the other respects enumerated by him, song
and speech exhibit precisely the same characteristics. But this does
not authorise us, in any way, to assert that song has "grown out of"
speech. Spencer argued too hastily from a mere analogy to a cause.
We are prepared to admit--to state the foregoing argument in another
way--that in moments of emotional excitement the ordinary speech of
men becomes more rhythmical, acquires a more pronounced _timbre_, and
generally varies in the ways Spencer has enumerated. What we are _not_
prepared to admit is that this is either a lower form of music or the
stuff out of which music has grown. Our contention is that while the
difference between speech and excited speech is one of degree only,
_the difference between speech and music is one not merely of degree,
but of kind_--we are dealing with similar physiological but widely
separated psychological phenomena; and that this is true not only of
modern music, as Spencer seems to admit, but of that primitive music
out of which our complex modern art has grown.
Moreover, Spencer ignored the new light which modern
physio-psychological research has thrown upon the question, some of
which I referred to in the _Study of Wagner_. Stricker, in his _Du
Langage et de la Musique_ (1885), has, among a lot of statements and
conclusions that need to be taken with caution, at all events made out
a good case for believing that the organs of speech and the organs
of song are controlled by different cerebral spheres. Wallaschek's
conclusions, again, are too important to be passed over in silence by
any advocate of the speech-theory. I venture to quote in full from
my _Wagner_ the passage in which I condensed Wallaschek's argument:
"Further, it is now not only placed beyond dispute that the faculty of
articulate speech has its distinct cerebral centre, but it has been
localised in the third frontal convolution of the left hemisphere
of the brain;" and Dr. Wallaschek, in a brilliant paper, has striven
to show that there must be another centre that controls musical
thought and speech.[39] Without going into Dr. Wallaschek's theory
in detail, it may be sufficient here to note some of his facts and
conclusions: (_a_) "the forming of concepts goes on in a different part
of the brain, and the concepts travel along other channels, than the
expression of the feelings and the merely automatic processes;"[40]
(_b_) children with aphasia (_i.e._ destruction or disturbance of the
faculty of articulate speech) are yet able to sing;[41] (_c_) patients
with aphasia, who cannot speak connectedly upon ordinary occasions, can
sometimes articulate the words when singing a song--the words being
brought up into consciousness by association with the melody;[42] (_d_)
the third left frontal convolution (which controls articulate speech)
is very small in idiots and lower races, who yet are highly susceptible
to music;[43] (_e_) the faculty of musical memory may be destroyed
without disturbing the other mental faculties;[44] (_f_) consequently
"we express ourselves and hear in quite a different manner when we sing
and when we speak."[45] All this evidence Spencer ignored to the last.
Nor does it ever seem to have occurred to him to analyse the state of
mind of a musician at the moment of composition, and to utilise the
result thus obtained in order to throw light on the origin of music.
Had he done this he would have seen the force--which his criticism
of me showed he had _not_ seen--of M. Combarieu's remark that "Mr.
Spencer neglects or ignores everything that gives to the art he is
studying its special and unique character; he does not appear to have
realised what a musical composition is, what are the rules it obeys,
what is the nature of the charm and the beauty we find in it. In
short, we can bring against him a fundamental fact, in comparison with
which everything else has only a quite secondary value: that is, the
existence of a musical manner of thinking (_une pensée musicale_). The
musician thinks with sounds, as the literary man thinks with words."[46]
Here, indeed, is the crux of the disagreement between Spencer and those
who reject the speech-theory as an absolutely inadequate explanation of
the origin of music. What was his criticism of this criticism? "Here,"
he says, "we have a striking example of the way in which an hypothesis
is made to appear untenable by representing it as being something
which it does not profess to be. I gave an account of the _origin_
of music, and now I am blamed because my conception of the origin of
music does not include a conception of music as fully developed. What
is every process of evolution but the gradual assumption of traits
which were not originally possessed?" It will be seen, I think, that
Spencer quite missed the true point of M. Combarieu's objection. We do
not expect that from a theory of the origin of music among primitive
men one should be able to forecast all the later _forms_ into which
music has branched; but we do expect that, since evolution is a
continuous process, the theory of the earlier music should not be at
variance with all the main psychological features of the later music.
We say to Spencer, "Take your theory, and we are unable to work it
out in detail. You assert that the expression of musical thought and
emotion has taken three successive forms--excited speech, recitative,
and music. Well, we find it impossible to leap to this conclusion,
as you have done, merely because there are certain resemblances, due
to physiological causes, between speech and song. We cannot trace
such a process historically--for your own sketch of the supposed
historical process is demonstrably inaccurate in evidence and hasty
in inference--nor can we even _imagine_ the process psychologically.
To us, there is a great psychological and æsthetic gulf fixed between
excited speech and song--_not only between the speech and the song of
to-day, but between the ruder speech and ruder song of primitive man_.
On the other hand, we have a theory that imposes no such strain, either
historical or psychological, upon us. That theory is, that music arises
from a peculiar set of stimuli and peculiar organs of expression of
its own, with which speech not only has nothing whatever to do now,
but never had anything to do, as _fons et origo_. Allowing for all the
differences between our music and that of the savage who blows his reed
and thumps his tam-tam, and for all the differences of general mental
structure between him and us, we can still see that the same causes
which incite us to music incited him. Now no one will for a moment
contend that there is any but an infinitesimal resemblance between a
Bach fugue or a Strauss symphonic poem and excited speech; neither
can we perceive that there was ever any but the faintest resemblance
between the causes that provoked the savage to excited speech and
those that impelled him to his rude kind of music. But _your_ theory,
while it disregards the plain fact that no demonstration could deduce
a Bach fugue from excited speech, and overlooks the mental elements in
primitive man from which the Bach fugue _could_ develop step by step,
invites us to believe that music grew out of something with which we
are unable to correlate it either now or in the most primitive times."
"But," it may be objected, "all this is pure assertion. You simply take
music as it is written to-day, attribute this to something which you
call a 'musical faculty,' or a 'musical manner of thinking,' and then,
having invented this convenient faculty, blandly assume that it is from
a similar faculty that the rude music of primitive man originated. What
you have to do is to prove the existence of this musical faculty, this
specifically musical way of conceiving and expressing things, that, on
your assumption, is innate in the human mind, and needs no help from
speech even in the earliest days of the race." Well, no one, I think,
will question the existence in us, at the present day, of something
that may well be called, in general terms, the musical faculty. For
the musician as we now know him--and, indeed, have known him for some
centuries--music is a means of emotional expression that can function
without the aid of poetry or even of speech. It takes its rise from
its own order of feelings; it has its own self-sufficient manner of
expressing them; it tells its own story to the mind of the hearer; and
neither the feeling, nor its manner of expression, nor its effect on
the auditor, suggests any dependence on speech. The musician, in order
to begin composition, has not to receive a preliminary stimulus either
from poetry, or from any concept or sentiment that could for a moment
be expressed in words. (He may, of course, set poetry to music; but on
the other hand he may not; and it is the self-existing order of music
we are now discussing.) The musician, under the influence of an inward
stimulus of some very obscure kind, may take three or four tones--say
those of the opening subject of a sonata or a fugue--and build with
them a structure ordered and controlled by certain laws purely its
own, having for its object the susciting in our minds of a series of
feelings from which all thought of speech is absent. The musician joys
in building tones together in this way; we in our turn joy both in the
process of building and in the finished edifice itself.
"So far, so good," the opponent may say; "this is what music now is, as
the result of a long course of evolution from its original germ. But
will you assert that primitive man was impelled to _his_ rude music
by the workings of some similar faculty--that, without any reliance,
even in the earliest days, upon speech, and without any intermediate
stage of recitative, he _produced music_, bearing the same relation
to his emotions as the music of Bach and Beethoven did to theirs?"
Well, this is precisely what we do assert; nor do I see any difficulty
in the way of the theory that primitive man came to utter himself in
his rude music by the same psychological processes by which we utter
ourselves in ours to-day. Speech had no more to do with the impulse
to his music than it has with the impulse to ours. Spencer's theory
would have it that first man spoke, then he advanced to excited
speech, that this became more rhythmical and more definite and thus
expanded into recitative, and that from this there emerged song "in
a gradual, unobtrusive manner"--so gradual and so unobtrusive, I am
afraid, that we can neither trace it emerging nor imagine it doing so.
Is it not more reasonable to believe that music first came into the
world when the savage took delight in any tones--those of the human
voice, of a reed, or of a drum--purely _as_ tone, and began to take a
further simple delight in the relations between tones? Need we concern
ourselves at all with speech, excited or torpid? Can we not begin with
mere feeling venting itself in mere sound--as we know it must have
done at first--and draw a line from this straight through all the
music of all the world? Why should we assume that for man to express
his feelings in tone he must first have invented speech, and then have
developed the emotional side of this until it was able to cut itself
loose and commence life on its own account, by some process that is
really unimaginable? We know that feeling vents itself in sound, and
that waves of feeling vent themselves in waves of sound, as may be
observed in the vague crooning of an infant over its toys, or the
moaning of a man in pain. This is one fundamental fact in the origin of
music. Another is the indisputable fact that men, whether civilised or
savage--that many animals, indeed--are susceptible to tone _purely as
tone_; and a further fact is that the primitive organism takes pleasure
in the relations between tones, as may be seen in the boy who keeps
on thumping two tin cans that happen to give out different sounds.
There is surely no need to insist upon the point that both tones and
the relations between tones _in themselves_ interest and charm, in a
minor degree, the savage as they do us. It is from this phenomenon, I
should imagine, not from excited speech, that music took its rise; and
the evidence from the music of primitive tribes, upon which Spencer
drew in support of his theory, does nothing to invalidate mine. In
his original essay he quoted, from his own _Descriptive Sociology_, a
number of passages relating to the song-customs of various undeveloped
races. I cannot, among all these quotations, see one that suggests
that the music of these people was simply a hyper-excited form of
speech. On the contrary, it is clear from his own citations that their
delight was in music purely as music; that their feelings spontaneously
flowed, as ours do, into a system of tones and relations between tones
that existed in and by and for itself, with only the same kind of
dependence upon the words that is exhibited in a song by Brahms or a
chorus by Handel.[47] No doubt the general course of the words controls
the general course of music in some degree, as it does in our own
song-writing; but there is nothing whatever to contradict the view that
savage music, even as our own, springs spontaneously from a non-verbal
emotion, and seeks an expression either absolutely independent of
speech or only remotely influenced by it. The East African, says
Spencer, "in singing, contents himself with improvising a few words
without sense or rhythm, and repeats them till they nauseate." If this
does not betoken a state of mind fundamentally analogous to that of
the absolute musician, it is hard to say what the words mean. Plainly,
what sets the East African singing, what determines that one note
shall follow another, what makes him so indifferent to the sense or
nonsense of the words, is simply the delight in tone _as_ tone, in
the relations of tones _as_ relations of tones, simply the need for
what he feels to vent itself in precisely that way and no other--in a
word, the primitive _pensée musicale_, the primitive "musical manner of
thinking."[48] Abundant evidence can be had to corroborate this, and I
quoted some of it in my _Wagner_. "Speaking of the Iroquois, Dr. Morgan
says that their war-songs are in a dead language, or, at all events,
they are unable to interpret them.... Mr. Baker, too, observed the
meaninglessness of the Indian song."[49] There is not much trace here
of excited speech first becoming recitative and then musical song.[50]
Dr. Wallaschek's conclusions, again, as to the music of savages are as
follows:--
(1) "In primitive times vocal music is not at all a union of poetry and
music. We find, on the contrary, vocal music among tribes which, owing
to the insufficient development of language, cannot possibly have any
kind of poetry. Thus the position of vocal music is quite independent
of any other art. (2) It is impossible that in these cases music arose
as a direct imitation of the natural accents ready made in speech.
(3) Because these texts are neither themselves a language, nor could
the melody _alone_ have been taken from a developed language, for
in such case the words would have been borrowed together with the
music. Entirely meaningless words simply serve to facilitate the
vocalisation." Further, "another striking feature of these savage
songs is _the liberty with which the composer treats the grammatical
structure of the sentence and the logical order of words_. Thus in
many of the Andamanese songs the words in their poetic form are so
mutilated to suit the metre as to be hardly recognisable.... If negroes
sing they keep strict time, and do not allow themselves to be hindered
by any obstacle in the use of the words." Other evidence of the same
kind might be adduced, from which it is quite clear that we are face
to face with a phenomenon on which Spencer's theory throws no light at
all. There seems to be no doubt that there is in the savage, though
of course in a relatively undeveloped form, the same musical sense
as in ourselves, something that has always flown directly, for its
expression, to a mode of utterance of its own, compounded of tones,
relations of tones, and rhythm, which is the natural language of this
sense, and which never needed to pass through the intermediate stage of
imitation or exaggeration of the accents of speech.[51]
Look for a moment at the two theories and their implications side by
side. We know that primitive man, like the animal,[52] is susceptible
to tone, sequences of tone, colour of tone, and rhythm; and that, from
purely physiological causes, a number of his feelings tend to express
themselves in vocal sounds. Now these are all the elements we require
in order to construct modern music. The composer feels strongly, and
is impelled to find an outlet for his emotions in tone. According to
the line of his emotion, so to speak, is the line of his music--the
pure feeling takes hold of the sounds through which alone it can
utter itself, and shapes them, in form, in colour, in sequence, in
intensity, after its own image. We have in primitive man, in a rude
and undeveloped stage, all these elements out of which the modern
music-maker builds his gorgeous palaces. According to the intensity of
the emotion of the savage will be the width of the intervals of his
voice, the resonance, the colour of it; according to the shade of his
feeling will be the shade of his rude melody; and from the _ensemble_
of the qualities of the sounds in which he is uttering himself will
his hearers be able to guess what mood it was that animated his song.
Here, then, are all the elements out of which music _could_ grow,
even if man had never learned to speak three connected words. Yet we
are asked by Spencer to believe that these elements, _sufficient in
themselves to give birth to music_, remained dormant in the human
breast for untold centuries, until man had evolved a fairly elaborate
system of speech--for it must be remembered that Spencer's theory
presupposes not the rude and merely utilitarian speech of the man
only one remove from the beast, but a comparatively highly organised
language, capable of expressing connectedly a savage's thoughts about
something more than his daily physical wants. Some such abstract,
æsthetic, reflective form of speech we are compelled to postulate if we
are to grant the probability of music arising, as Spencer says it did,
from the excited speech of man. Then, when man has slowly and painfully
learned to speak, and had plenty of practice in speaking excitedly, we
are invited to believe that by some mysterious process _music_ arose,
the expression of feeling in organised tone, the delight in tone _quâ_
tone, in sequences and relations _quâ_ sequences and relations. And
all this time the elements out of which this organised system of sound
_could_ grow, which were innate in man from the very first, by reason
of the fact that he had nerves, muscles, and vocal organs, have been
doing absolutely nothing! Though they required only the stimulus of
feeling to call them into being, and though they were receiving this
stimulus day by day, hour by hour, they had to deny themselves for
centuries upon centuries, until they could receive precisely the same
kind of stimulus _after_ man had learned to speak! Is this credible?