If so it seems a late date in which to hurl anathema at programme
music. One would have fancied that that battle had already been fought
and won by Ernest Newman, Frederick Niecks, and Lawrence Gilman, to
name a few of the gladiators for the cause. Why Mr. Aldrich, having
swallowed whole, so to speak, the tendency of music during a century
of its development, should suddenly balk at music which requires
explanation I cannot imagine. However, this would seem to be the point
he makes in face of the fact that at least two-thirds of a symphony
society’s programme is made up of programme music. Berlioz said in the
preface to his _Symphonie Fantastique_, “The plan of an instrumental
drama, being without words, requires to be explained beforehand. The
programme (which is indispensable to the perfect comprehension of the
dramatic plan of the work) ought therefor to be considered in the
light of the spoken text of an opera, serving to ... indicate the
character and expression.” Ernest Newman built up an elaborate theory
on these two sentences, a theory fully expounded in an article called
“Programme Music” published in “Music Studies” (1905), and touched
on elsewhere in his work (at some length, of course, in his “Richard
Strauss.”) He brings out the facts. Representation of natural sounds,
emotions, and even objects--or attempts at it--in early music were not
rare. He cites the justly famous _Bible Sonatas_ of Kuhnau, Rameau’s
_Sighs_ and _Tender Plants_, Dittersdorf’s twelve programme symphonies
illustrating Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_, and John Sebastian Bach’s
_Capriccio on the Departure of my Dearly Beloved Brother_. Beethoven
wrote a _Pastoral Symphony_ in which he attempted to imitate the sound
of a brook and the call of a cuckoo. There is also a storm in this
symphony. The fact that Beethoven denied any intention of portraying
anything but “pure emotion” in this symphony is evasion and humbug as
Newman very clearly points out. From what do these emotions arise?
The answer is, From the contemplation of country scenes. The auditor
without a programme will not find the symphony so enjoyable as the
one who _knows_ what awakened the emotions in the composer. Beethoven
wrote a “battle” symphony too, a particularly bad one, I believe (I
have never seen it announced for performance). It is true, however,
that most of the composers of the “great” period were content to number
their symphonies and to call their piano pieces impromptus, sonatas,
valses, and nocturnes. Nous avons changé tout cela. Schumann was one
of the first of the composers of the nineteenth century to write music
with titles. In the _Carneval_, for example, each piece is explained
by its title. And explanations, or shadows of explanations (Cathedral,
Rhenish, Spring, etc.), hover about the four symphonies. Berlioz,
of course, carried the principle of programme music to a degree that
was considered absurd in his own time. He wrote symphonies like the
_Romeo and Juliet_ and the _Fantastique_ which had to be “explained
from beginning to end.” Liszt invented the symphonic poem and composed
pieces which are only to be listened to after one has read the poem or
seen the picture which they describe. Richard Strauss rounded out the
form and put the most elaborate naturalistic details into such works as
_Don Quixote_ and _Till Eulenspiegel_. Understanding of this music and
complete enjoyment of it rely in a large measure on the “explanation.”
The _Symphonia Domestica_ and _Heldenleben_ are extreme examples of
this sort of thing. What does Wagner’s whole system depend on but
“explanation”? How does one know that a certain sequence of notes
represents a sword? Because the composer tells us so. How does one
discover that another sequence of notes represents Alberich’s curse?
Through the same channel. Bernard Shaw says in _The Perfect Wagnerite_:
“To be able to follow the music of _The Ring_, all that is necessary
is to become familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out of
which it is built to recognize them and attach a certain definite
significance to them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman recognizes
and attaches a definite significance to the opening bars of _God Save
the Queen_.” Modern music is full of this sort of thing. It leans more
and more heavily on titles, on mimed drama, on “explanation.” Think of
almost all the music of Debussy, for example, _La Mer_, _l’Après-midi
d’un Faune_, _Iberia_, nearly all the piano music; Rimsky-Korsakow’s
_Scheherazade_, _Antar_, and _Sadko_ (the symphonic suite, not the
opera); Vincent d’Indy’s _Istar_; Borodine’s _Thamar_; Dukas’s
_l’Apprenti Sorcier_; Franck’s _Le Chasseur Maudit_ and _Les Eolides_;
Saint-Saëns’s _Phaëton_, _La Jeunesse d’Hercule_, and _Le Rouet
d’Omphale_; Busoni’s music for _Turandot_: the list is endless and it
is futile to continue it.
But, Mr. Aldrich would object, in most of these instances the music
stands by itself and it is possible to enjoy it without reference to
the titles. I contend that this is just as true of Strawinsky’s three
pieces for string quartet (of course one never will be sure because
Daniel Gregory Mason explained these pieces before they were played).
However Mr. Newman has already exploded a good many bombs about this
particular point and he has shown the fallacy of the theory. Mr.
Newman concedes that a work such as Tschaikowsky’s overture _Romeo
and Juliet_, would undoubtedly “give intense pleasure to any one who
listened to it as a piece of music, pure and simple. But I deny,”
he continues, “that this hearer would receive as much pleasure from
the work as I do. He might think the passage for muted strings, for
example, extremely beautiful, but he would not get from it such
delight as I, who not only feel all the _musical_ loveliness of the
melody and the harmonies and the tone colour, but see the lovers on
the balcony and breathe the very atmosphere of Shakespeare’s scene.
I am richer than my fellow by two or three emotions of this kind. My
nature is stirred on two or three sides instead of only one. I would
go further and say that not only does the auditor I have supposed
get less pleasure from the work than I, but he really does not hear
Tschaikowsky’s work at all. If the musician writes music to a play
and invents phrases to symbolize the characters and to picture the
events of the play, we are simply not listening to _his_ work at all
if we listen to it in ignorance of his poetical scheme. We may hear
the music but it is not the music he meant us to hear.” And Mr. Newman
goes on to berate Strauss for not providing programmes for some of his
tone-poems (programmes, however, which have always been provided by
somebody in authority at the eleventh hour). Niecks thinks that nearly
all music has an implied programme: “My opinion is that whenever the
composer ceases to write purely formal music he passes from the domain
of absolute music into that of programme music.” (“Programme Music in
the Last Four Centuries.”) But Niecks does not hold that explanation is
always necessary, even if there is a programme.
Under the circumstances it seems a bit thick to jump on Strawinsky for
writing music which has to be explained. Such pieces as _Fireworks_
or the _Scherzo Fantastique_ need no more extended explanation than
the titles give them. His three pieces for string quartet were listed
without programme at the Flonzaley concert and might have been played
that way, I think, without causing the heavens to fall. But Strawinsky
had told some one that their general title was _Grotesques_ and that
he had composed each of them with a programme in mind, which was
divulged. When the music was played, in the circumstances, what he
was driving at was as plain as A. B. C. There was no further demand
made on the auditor than that he prepare himself, as Schumann asked
auditors to prepare themselves to listen to the _Carneval_, by thinking
of the titles. In Strawinsky’s opera, _The Nightingale_, the text
of the opera serves as the programme. There are no representative
themes; there is no “working-out.” You are not required to remember
_leit-motive_ in order to familiarize your emotions with the proper
capers to cut at particular moments when these _motive_ are repeated.
You are asked simply to follow the course of the lyric drama with open
ears, open mind, and open heart. Albert Gleizes, the post-impressionist
painter, once told me that he considered the title an essential part
of a picture. “It is a _point de départ_,” he said. “In painting a
picture I always have some idea or object in mind in the beginning. In
my completed picture I may have wandered far away from this. Now the
title gives the spectator the advantage of starting where I started.”
A title to a musical composition gives an auditor a similar advantage.
No doubt Strawinsky’s _Fireworks_ would make a nice blaze without the
name but the title gives us a picture to begin with, just as Wagner
gives us scenery and text and action (to say nothing of a handbook of
representative themes) to explain the music of _Die Walküre_....
An important point has been overlooked by those who have watched
painting and music develop during the past century: while painting
has become less and less an attempt to represent nature, music has
more and more attempted concrete representation. There has seemed, at
times, to be an interchange in progress in the values of the arts.
(“He [Cézanne] is the first of the great painters to treat colour
deliberately as music; he tests all its harmonic resources,” Romain
Rolland.) Observers of matters æsthetic have frequently told us that
both of these arts were breaking with their old principles and going
on to something new but, it would seem, they have failed to grasp the
significance of the change. Music, as it drops its classic outline
and form, the _cliché_ of the studio and the academy, becomes more
and more like nature, because natural sounds are not co-ordinated
into symphonies with working-out sections and codas, first and second
subjects, etc., while in painting, in some of its later manifestations,
the resemblance to things seen has entirely disappeared. This fact, at
least one phase of it, was realized in concrete form by the futurists
in Italy who asserted that polyphony, fugue, etc., were contraptions of
a bygone age when the stage-coach was in vogue. Machinery has changed
the world. We are living in a dynasty of dynamics. A certain number
of futurists even give concerts of noise machines in which a definite
attempt is made to imitate the sounds of automobiles, aeroplanes, etc.
At a concert given at the Dal Verme in Milan, for example, the pieces
were called _The Awakening of a Great City_, _A Dinner on the Kursaal
Terrace_ (doubtless with an imitation of the guests eating soup), and
_A Meet of Automobiles and Aeroplanes_.
Picasso and Picabia have made us acquainted with a form of art which
in its vague realization of representative values becomes almost as
abstract an art as music was in the time of Beethoven, while such
musicians as Strauss, Debussy, and Strawinsky, have gradually widened
the boundaries which have confined music, and have made it at times
something very concrete. Debussy’s _La Mer_, for example, is a much
more definite picture (in leaning over the rail of the gallery of the
Salle Gaveau in Paris during a performance of this piece I actually
became sea-sick!) than Marcel Duchamp’s painting of the _Nu Descendant
l’Escalier_. So Strawinsky’s three pieces for string quartet represent
certain things in nature (the first a group of peasants playing strange
instruments on the steppes; the second sounds in a Cathedral heard by
a drowsy worshipper, the responses of the priest, chanted out of key,
the shrill antiphonal choruses; and the third a juggling Pierrot with
a soul-pain) much more definitely than Picasso’s latest _Nature Morte
dans un Jardin_.
“Now the law which has dominated painting for more than a century is
a more and more comprehensive assimilation of musical idiom. Even
Delacroix spoke of ‘the mysterious effects of line and colour which,
alas, only a few adepts feel--like interwoven themes in music ...’
and Baudelaire, in another connection, wrote, ‘Harmony, melody, and
counterpoint are to be found in colour.’ Ingres also remarked to his
disciples, ‘If I could make you all musicians you would be better
painters.’ Renoir, who journeyed to Sicily to paint Wagner’s portrait
and to translate _Tannhäuser_, is a musical enthusiast and his work
is music. Maurice Denis tells us that his pals at Julian’s Academy,
those who were to found synthesism with him, never tired of discussing
Lamoureux’s concerts, where they were enthusiastic habitués. Gaugin
announced that ‘painting is a musical phase.’ He speaks continually of
the music of a picture; when he wants to analyze his work he divides
it into the literary element, to which he attaches less importance,
and the musical element which he schemes first. Cézanne, whom Gaugin
compared to César Franck, said, ‘not model, but modulate.’ Metzinger
invokes the right of cubist painters to express all emotions as music
does, and one of the æstheticians of the new school writes: ‘The goal
of painting is perhaps a music of nature, visual music to which
traditional painting would have somewhat the status that sacred or
dramatic music has compared to concert music.’
“This, then, is the revolution in the art of line and colour which has
become aware of its intrinsic power, independent of any subject. In
truth, even among the Venetians, as has been well said, the subject
was ‘only the background upon which the painter relied to develop his
harmonies,’ but the mentality of spectators clings to this background
as to the libretto of an opera. At present, an end to librettos: Pure
music: those who wish to comprehend it must first of all master its
idiom, for ‘Colour is learned as music is.’” (Romain Rolland: “The
Unbroken Chain,” Lee Simonson’s translation.)
So far, in spite of the protestations of horror made by the
academicians, the pedants, and the Philistines, which would lead one
to suppose a state of complete chaos, there has not been a complete
abandonment of co-ordination, of selection, or of intention, in either
art. In fact, it seems to me, that the qualities of intention and
selection are more powerful adjuncts of the artist than they have
been for many generations. In painting colour and form are cunningly
contrived to give us an idea, if not a photograph, and in music
natural (as well as unnatural) sounds are still arranged, perhaps to a
more extreme extent than ever before.
II
I wonder if all the suggestion music gives us is associative. Sometimes
I think so. Was it Berlioz who remarked that the slightest quickening
of _tempo_ would transform the celebrated air in _Orphée_ from “_J’ai
perdu mon Euridice_” to “_J’ai trouvé mon Euridice_”? Rossini found an
overture which he had formerly used for a tragedy quite suitable for
_Il Barbiere di Siviglia_, and the interchangeable values which Handel
gave to secular and sacred tunes are familiar to all music students.
Are minor keys really sad? Are major keys always suggestive of joy? We
know that this is not true although one will be more sure of a ready
response of tears from a Western audience by resorting to a minor key.
In our music wedding marches are usually in the major and funeral
marches usually in the minor modes. But almost all Eastern music is in
a minor key, love songs and even cradle songs. Recall, or play over on
your piano, the Smyrnan lullaby (made familiar by Mme. Sembrich) which
occurs in the collection of Grecian and oriental melodies edited by
L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray.... Even the composers who do not call their
pieces by name and who scorn the use of a programme, depend for some of
their most powerful effects on emotion created by association ... and
a new composer, be he indefatigable enough, can rouse new associations
in us.... Why if three or four composers would meet together and decide
that the use of a certain group of notes stood for the town pump, in
time it would be quite easy for other composers to use this phrase in
that connection _with no explanation whatever_.
III
“It is a mistake of much popular criticism,” says Walter Pater, in the
first two sentences of his essay on “The School of Giorgione,” “to
regard poetry, music, and painting--all the various products of art--as
but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed
quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical
qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical
words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with
it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a
matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite
principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a
special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of
any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the beginning
of all true æsthetic criticism.”
Strawinsky, in a sense, is quite done with programme music; at least
he says that this is so. “La musique est trop bête pour exprimer autre
chose que la musique” is his pregnant phrase, which I cannot quote
often enough. And in an interview with Stanley Wise, which appeared
in the columns of the “New York Tribune” he further says, “Programme
music ... has been obviously discontinued as being distinctly an
uncouth form which already has had its day; but music, nevertheless,
still drags out its life in accordance with these false notions and
conceptions. Without absolutely defying the programme, musicians still
draw upon sources foreign to their art.... The true inwardness of
music being purely acoustic, the art so expresses itself without being
concerned with feelings alien to its nature.... Music in the theatre
is still held in bondage to other elements. Wagner, in particular, is
responsible for this servitude in which music labours to-day.”
The greater part of Igor Strawinsky’s music, up to date, is written
to a programme, but these remarks of the composer should not be
incomprehensible on that account. Somewhat later than the performance
of the three pieces for string quartet, _The Firebird_ and _Petrouchka_
were performed in New York and were hailed by the critics, _en masse_,
as most delightful works. But the music depends for its success, they
said, on the stage action to explain it. I fancy this is true of many
operas which were written for the stage. _Siegfried_, as a whole, would
be pretty tiresome in concert form and so would _La Fille du Regiment_.
And read what Henry Fothergill Chorley has to say about the works of
Gluck (“Modern German Music”): “The most experienced and imaginative of
readers will derive from the closest perusal of the scores of Gluck’s
operas, feeble and distant impressions of their power and beauty.
The delicious charm of Mozart’s melody--the expressive nobility of
Handel’s ideas--may in some measure be comprehended by the student at
the pianoforte and the eye may assure the reader how masterly is the
symmetry of the vocal score with one,--how rich and complete is the
management of the instrumental score, with the other master. But this
is in no respect the case with _Alceste_, the two _Iphigénies_ and
_Armide_--it may be added, with almost any opera written according to
the canons of French taste. That which appears thin, bald, severe,
when it is merely perused, is filled up, brightens, enchants, excites,
and satisfies, when it is heard with action,--to a degree only to be
believed upon experience. Out of the theatre, three-fourths of Gluck’s
individual merit is lost. He wrote for the stage.” That all this is
true any one who, like me, has taken the trouble to study the scores of
the Gluck operas, which are infrequently performed, may have discovered
for himself. I have never heard _Alceste_ and that lyric drama, as a
result, has never sprung to me from the printed page as do the notes of
_Orphée_, _Armide_, and _Iphigénie en Tauride_. I am convinced of the
depth of expression contained in its pages; I am certain of its noble
power, but only because I have had a similar experience with other
Gluck music dramas, with which I have later become acquainted in the
theatre.
This theory in regard to _Petrouchka_ and _The Firebird_ may be easily
contradicted, however. One listener told me that she got the complete
picture of the Russian fair by closing her eyes; it was all in the
music. The action, as a matter of fact, she added, annoyed her. It is
quite certain that the music of either of these works is delightful
when played on the piano; an average roomful of people who like to
listen to music will be charmed with it. _The Sacrifice to the Spring_
was hissed intolerantly when it was performed as a ballet in Paris
but, later (April 5, 1914), when Pierre Monteux gave an orchestral
performance of the work at a concert it was applauded as violently.
Strawinsky has, it is true, worked away from _representation_ (in the
sense of copying nature or, like Wagner, relying on literary formulas
for his effects) in his music, but he has written very little that does
not depend on a programme, either expressed or implied. All songs of
course are “explained” by their lyrics. The _Scherzo Fantastique_ and
_Fireworks_ are programme music in the lighter sense, and naturally
the music of his ballets and his opera depends for its meaning on the
stage action. What Strawinsky means to do, I think--certainly what
he has done--is to avoid going outside his subject or requiring his
listener to do so. To understand the music of his opera you need never
have heard a real nightingale sing, for the bird does not sing at all
like a nightingale, a fact which was not understood by the critics
when the work was first produced, and in _The Sacrifice to the Spring_
you will find no attempt made to ape natural sounds, although there
was ample opportunity for doing so.... Another modern worker in tone,
Leo Ornstein, in the accompaniment to his cradle song (it is the same
_wiegenlied_ set by Richard Strauss, by the way) tries to give his
hearers the mother’s overtones, her thoughts about the child’s future,
etc.; the music, instead of attempting to express the exact meaning of
the poem, expresses _more_ than the poem.
And Mr. Ornstein once said to me, “What I try to do in composing
is to get underneath, to express the feeling underneath--not to be
photographic. I do not think it is art to reproduce a steam whistle but
it is art to give the feeling that the steam whistle gives us. That
can never be done by exact reproduction.... I should not like a steam
whistle introduced into the concert room” (I had shamelessly suggested
it) “... but great, smashing chords....”
Yet Mr. Ornstein in his _Impressions of the Thames_ is as near
actual representation as Whistler or Monet ... certainly a musical
impressionist.
Is anything true? I hope not. At dinner the other evening a lady
attempted to prove to me that there were standards by which beauty
could be judged and rules by which it could be constructed. She was
unsuccessful.
IV
It has occurred to me that Mr. Aldrich meant that he wanted the
juxtaposition of notes explained from beginning to end. Inspiration
is not always conscious ... one feels in the end whether such a
collocation is inevitable or not ... I wonder if Beethoven could have
explained one of his last quartets or piano sonatas. I doubt it. Of
course, on the other hand, Wagner explained and explained and explained.
V