explanation, is not the rock on which Mr. Aldrich splits, so to speak.
He writes somewhere else in this same article: “All he asks of his
listeners is to forget all they know about string quartet music.” Now
this is really too much. That is exactly what Strawinsky does, and
why shouldn’t he? Has not every great composer done as much? To quote
Ernest Newman again (this time from his book “Richard Strauss”), “All
the music of the giants of the past expresses no more than a fragment
of what music can and some day will express. With each new generation
it must discover and reveal some new secret of the universe and of
man’s heart; and as the thing uttered varies, the way of uttering it
must vary also. There is only one rational definition of good ‘form’
in music--that which expresses most succinctly and most perfectly the
state of soul in which the idea originated; and as moods and ideas
change, so must forms.” “The true creator strives, in reality, after
_perfection_ only,” writes Busoni, in “A New Æsthetic of Music,” “and
through bringing this into harmony with _his own_ individuality, a new
law arises without premeditation.” The very greatness of Beethoven is
due to the fact that he made a perfect wedding of form and idea. His
forms (in which he broke with tradition in several important points)
were evolved out of his ideas. Now the very writers who give Beethoven
the credit for having accomplished this successful revolution and who
write enthusiastically of Gluck’s “reform of the opera,” object to any
contemporary instances of this spirit (Maurice Ravel “corrects” with
great care, I am told, the exercises of his pupils. “He who breaks
rules must first know them,” he says. And I have no disposition to
quarrel with this sort of reverence although I think it is sometimes
carried too far. However the critic attempts to “correct” the finished
pupil’s work, from the work of the past--a sad and impossible task).
Why in the name of goodness should not Strawinsky, or any other modern
composer, for that matter, be allowed to make us forget everything
we know about string quartets, if he is able? Some of us would be
grateful for the sensation. Leo Ornstein in a recent article said,
“The very first step which the composer must be given the privilege of
insisting upon is that his listeners should approach his work with no
preconceived notions of any kind; they must learn to allow absolute
and full freedom to their imaginations as it is only under such
circumstances that any new work can be understood and appreciated at
first. All preconceived theories must be abolished, and the new work
approached through no formulas.” And in the same article Mr. Ornstein
relates how, after he had played his _Wild Men’s Dance_ to Leschetizky
that worthy pedagogue murmured, amazed, “How in the world did you
get all those notes on paper!” That, unfortunately, concludes Mr.
Ornstein, is the attitude of the average listener to modern music. A
similar instance is related in the case of Strawinsky. He played some
measures of his ballet, _The Firebird_, on the piano to his master,
Rimsky-Korsakow, until the composer of _Scheherazade_ interposed, “Stop
playing that horrid thing; otherwise I might begin to enjoy it.” And
even the usually open-minded James Huneker says in his essay on Arnold
Schoenberg (“Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks”), “If such music-making is ever
to become accepted, then I long for Death the Releaser. More shocking
still would be the suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like
this music, to embrace, after abhorring it.” These phrases of Huneker’s
remind me of a personal incident. My father has subscribed for the
“Atlantic Monthly” since the first issue and one of the earliest
memories of my childhood is connected with the inevitable copy which
always lay on the library table. On one occasion, contemplating it, I
burst into tears; nor could I be comforted. My explanation, between
sobs, was, “Some day I’ll grow up and like a magazine without pictures!
I can’t bear to think of it!” Well, there is many a man who weeps
because some day he may grow up to like music without melody! Music
_has_ changed; of that there can be no doubt. Don’t go to a concert
and expect to hear what you might have heard fifty years ago; don’t
expect _anything_ and don’t hate yourself if you happen to like what
you hear. Mr. George Moore’s evidence on this point of receptiveness
is enlightening (Mr. George Moore who spoke to me once of the “vulgar
noises made by the Russian Ballet”): “In _Petrouchka_ the orchestra all
began playing in different keys and when it came out into one key I was
quite dazed. I don’t know whether it is music but I rather liked it!”
Still another point is raised by Mr. Aldrich. I quote from the “New
York Times” of December 8, 1915; the reference is to the second string
quartet of David Stanley Smith, played by the Kneisel Quartet (the
italics are mine): “Mr. Smith does not hesitate at drastic dissonance
_when it results from the leading of his part writing_.” There at last
we have the real nigger in the woodpile. The relation between keys is
so remote, the tonalities are so inexplicable in a modern Strawinsky
or Schoenberg work that the brain, prepared with a list of scales,
refuses to take in the natural impression that the ear receives.
This sort of criticism reminds me of a line which is quoted from
some London journal by William Wallace in “The Threshold of Music,”
“The whole work is singularly lacking in contrapuntal interest and
depends solely for such effect as it achieves upon certain emotional
impressions of harmony and colour.” And, nearer home, I culled the
following from the “New York Sun” of December 12, 1915 (Mr. W. J.
Henderson’s column), “This is what is the matter with the futurists
or post-impressionists in music. They are tone colourists and that is
all.” (Amusingly enough Mr. Henderson begins his remarks by praising
Joseph Pennell for writing an article in which the post-impressionist
painters were given a drubbing; this article is treated with contumely
and scorn by the art critic of the “Sun” on the page opposite that on
which Mr. Henderson’s article appears.) In all these cases you find men
complaining because a composer has done exactly what he started out to
do. F. Balilla Pratella in one of his futurist manifestos discusses
this point (the translation is my own), “The fugue, a composition
based on counterpoint par excellence, is full of (such) artifices even
when it achieves its artistic balance in the works of the great German
Sebastian Bach. Soul, intellectuality, and instinct are here fused in a
given form, in a given manifestation of art, an art of its own times,
historical and strictly connected with the life, faith, and culture of
that particular period. Why then should we be compelled or asked to
live it over again at the distance of several centuries?” And later,
“We proclaim as an essential principle of our futurist revolution
that counterpoint and fugue, stupidly considered as one of the most
important branches of musical learning, are in our eyes only the ruins
of the old science of polyphony which extends from the Flemish school
to Bach. We replace them by harmonic polyphony, logical fusion of
counterpoint and harmony, which allows musicians to escape the needless
difficulty of dividing their efforts in two opposing cultures, one
dead and the other contemporary, and entirely irreconcilable, because
they are the fruits of two different sensibilities.” To quote Busoni;
again: “How important, indeed, are ‘Third,’ ‘Fifth,’ and ‘Octave’!
How strictly we divide ‘consonances’ from ‘dissonances’--_in a sphere
where no dissonances can possibly exist_!” When Bernard Shaw published
“The Perfect Wagnerite” he wrote for a public which still considered
Wagner a little in advance of the contemporary in music. What did he
say? “My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may
suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying _The Ring_ by their
technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings
speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has any power to move
them they will find that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is
not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in _The Ring_--not a note in
it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving
musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the
analytical programmes tell us, first subjects and second subjects,
free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with
counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on
ground basses, canons and hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which
have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the
simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort
any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities
of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he
is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching.
The professors, when Wagner’s music is played to them, exclaim at
once, ‘What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabeletta
to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and
why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those
scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in
common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations.
What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked
miracles with two of each? The man is no musician.’ The layman neither
knows nor cares about any of these things. It is the adept musician
of the old school who has everything to unlearn; and I leave him,
unpitied, to his fate.” All Wagner asked his contemporaries to do, in
fact, was to forget all they knew about opera!
VI
This piling up of Shaw on Huneker, these dips into Newman and Niecks,
are beginning to be formidable, but one never knows what turn of the
road may lead the traveller to his promised land and it is better to
draw the map clearly even if there be a confusion of choices. And so,
just here, I beg leave to make a tiny digression, to point out that
the new music is not so terrible as all this explanation may have
made it seem to be. Granville Bantock talks learnedly of “horizontal
counterpoint” but his music is perfectly comprehensible. Schoenberg
writes of “passing notes,” says there is no such thing as consonance
and dissonance, and “I have not been able to discover any principles
of harmony. Sincerity, self-expression, is all that the artist needs,
and he should say only what he must say” but Mr. Huneker points out
that he has founded an order out of his chaos, “that his madness is
very methodical. For one thing he abuses the interval of the fourth and
he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond harmonies,
in which the remotest keys lovingly hold hands do not prevent the
sensation of a central tonality somewhere--in the cellar, on the
roof, in the gutter, up in the sky.” Percy Grainger says he dreams of
“beatless” music without rhythm--at least academically speaking--but
he certainly does not write it. F. Balilla Pratella writes pages
condemning dance rhythms and still more pages elaborating a new theory
for marking time (which, I admit, is absolutely incomprehensible to me)
and publishes them as a preface to his _Musica Futurista_ (Bologna,
1912), a composition for orchestra, which is written, in spite of the
theories, and the fantastic time signatures, in the most engaging
dance rhythms. Nor does his disregard for fugue go so far as to make
him unfriendly to scale; the whole-tone scale prevails in this work.
His dislike for polyphony seems more sincere; there is a great deal of
homophonous effect. Leo Ornstein has admitted to me that his “system”
would be fully understood in a decade or two. As for Strawinsky
... how the public joyfully and rapturously takes to its heart his
dissonances, and even asks for more!
VII
Vincent d’Indy, reported by Marcel Duchamp, said recently that the
philosophy of music is twenty years behind that of the other arts.
VIII
The fact that Schoenberg has written a handbook of theory, explaining,
after a fashion, his method of composition has misled some people.
“Schoenberg is a learned musician,” writes Mr. Aldrich (“New York
Times,” December 5, 1915), “and his music is built up by processes
derived from methods handed down to the present by the learned of
the past, however widely the results may depart from those hitherto
accepted.... There results what he chooses to consider ‘harmony,’ the
outcome of a deliberate system, about which he theorizes and _has
written a book_” (the italics again are mine). Against this train of
reasoning (further on in the same article it becomes evident that Mr.
Aldrich is annoyed with Strawinsky because he has not done likewise)
it is pleasant to place the following paragraph from Chorley’s “Modern
German Music”: “Mozart, it will be recollected, totally and (for him)
seriously, declined to criticize himself and confess his habits of
composition. Many men have produced great works of art who have never
cultivated æsthetic conversation: nay, more, who have shrunk with a
secretly entertained dislike from those indefatigable persons whose
fancy it is ‘to peep and botanize’ in every corner of faëry land. It
cannot be said that the analytical spirit of the circle of Weimar, when
Goethe was its master-spirit did any great things for Music.” Do not
misunderstand Strawinsky’s silence (which has only been relative, after
all). It is sometimes as well to compose as to theorize. Some of the
great composers have let us see into their workshops (not that they
have all consistently followed out their own theories) and others have
not. In one pregnant paragraph Strawinsky has expressed himself (he is
speaking of _The Nightingale_): “I want to suggest neither situations
nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is
in what are called ‘impressionist’ methods” (“Mr. Strawinsky, on the
other hand, is a musical impressionist from the start”: R. A. again) “a
certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tendency towards vagueness
and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the
reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists
as they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find
it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression
in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic or
lyric music. The one essential thing is to feel and to convey one’s
feelings.”
This idea of natural expression becomes associated in any great
composer’s mind with another idea, the horror of the _cliché_. Each new
giant desires to express himself without resorting to the thousand and
one formulas which have been more or less in use since the “golden age”
of music (whenever that was). Natural expression implies to a certain
extent the abandonment of the _cliché_, for, under this principle,
if a rule or a habit is weighed and found wanting it is immediately
discarded.
“Routine (_cliché_) is highly esteemed and frequently required; in
musical ‘officialdom’ it is a _sine qua non_,” writes Busoni. “That
routine in music should exist at all, and furthermore that it can
be nominated as a condition in the musician’s bond, is another
proof of the narrow confines of our musical art. Routine signifies
the acquisition of a modicum of experience and art craft, and their
application to all cases which may occur; hence, there must be an
astounding number of analogous cases. Now I like to imagine a species
of art-praxis wherein each case should be a new one, an exception.”
Even so early a composer (using early in a loose sense) as Schumann
found it unnecessary, at times, to close a piece with the tonic;
and many other composers have disregarded the rule since, leaving
the ear hanging in the air, so to speak. Is there any more reason
why all pieces should end on the tonic than that all books should
end happily or all pictures be painted in black and white? In music
which Mozart wrote at the age of four there are chords of the second
(and they occur in music before Mozart). In books of the period
you can read of the horror with which ears at the beginning of the
nineteenth century received consecutive fifths. Some of the modern
French composers have disposed of the _cliché_ of a symphony in four
movements. Chausson, Franck, and Dukas have written symphonies in
three parts. What composer (even the most academic) ever followed the
letter of a precept if he found a better way of expressing himself?
Moussorgsky avoided _cliché_ as he would have avoided the plague. He
took all the short cuts possible. There are no preambles and addendas,
or other doddering concessions to scientific art in his music dramas
and his songs. He gives the words their natural accent and the voice
its natural inflections. Death is not always rewarded with blows on
the big drum. The composer sometimes expresses the end, quite simply,
in silence. In all the arts the horror of _cliché_ asserts itself
so violently indeed that we find Robert Ross (“Masks and Phases”)
assailing Walter Pater for such a fall from grace as the use of the
phrase, “rebellious masses of black hair.” Of course some small souls
are so busy defying _cliché_, with no adequate reason for doing so,
that they make themselves ridiculous. And as an example of this
preoccupation I may tell an anecdote related to me by George Moore.
“For a time,” he said, “Augusta Holmès was interested in an opera she
was composing, _La Montagne Noire_, to the exclusion of all other
subjects in conversation. She talked about it constantly and always
brought one point forward: all the characters were to sing with their
backs to the audience. That was her novel idea. She did not seem to
realize that, in itself, the innovation would not serve to make her
opera interesting.” Strawinsky’s horror of _cliché_ is by no means
abnormal. He does not break rules merely for the pleasure of shocking
the pedants. In each instance he has developed, quite naturally and
inevitably, the form out of his material. In _Petrouchka_, a ballet
with a Russian country fair as its background, he has harped on the
folk-dance tunes, the hurdy-gurdy manner, and, as befits this work,
there is no great break with tradition, except in the orchestration.
_The Firebird_, too, in spite of its fantasy and brilliance, is
perfectly understandable in terms of the chromatic scale. In _The
Sacrifice to the Spring_, on the other hand, unhampered by the chains
which a “story-ballet” (the fable of these “pictures of pagan Russia”
is entirely negligible) inevitably imply, he has awakened primitive
emotions by the use of barbaric rhythm, without any special regard for
melody or harmony, using the words in their academic senses. There
is no attempt made to begin or end with major thirds. Strawinsky was
perhaps the first composer to see that melody is of no importance in a
ballet. _Fireworks_ is impressionistic but it is no more so (although
the result is arrived at by a wholly dissimilar method) than _La Mer_
of Debussy. But it is in his opera, _The Nightingale_, or his very
short pieces for string quartet, or his Japanese songs for voice and
small orchestra that the beast shows his fangs, so to speak. It is
in these pieces and in _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ that Strawinsky
has accomplished a process of elision, leaving out some of those
stupidities which have bored us at every concert of academic music
which we have attended. (You must realize how much your mind wanders
at a symphony concert. It is impossible to concentrate one’s complete
attention on the performance of a long work except at those times when
some new phrase or some new turn in the working-out of a theme strikes
the ear. There is so much of the music that is familiar, because it has
occurred in so much music before. If you hear tum-ti-tum you may be
certain it will be followed by ti-ti-ti and a good part of this sort
of thing falls on deaf ears.... There are those, I am forced to admit,
who can only concentrate on that which is perfectly familiar to them.)
As a matter of fact he gives our ears credit (by this time!) for the
ability to skip a few of the connecting links. Now this sort of elision
in painting has come to be the slogan of a school. Cézanne painted a
woman as he saw her; he made no attempt to explain her; that pleasure
he left for the spectator of his picture. He did not draw a fashion
plate. The successors of Cézanne (some of them) have gone much farther.
They draw us a few bones and expect us to reconstruct the woman, body
and soul, after the fashion of a professor of anatomy reconstructing an
ichthyosaurus. Strawinsky and some other modern musicians have gone as
far; they have left out the tum-ti-tums and twilly-wigs which connect
the pregnant phrases in their music.... This does not signify that they
do not _think_ them, sometimes, but it is not necessary for any one
with a receptive ear (not an _expectant_ ear, unless it be an ear which
expects to hear something pleasant!) to do so. In fact this kind of an
auditor appreciates these short cuts of composers, gives thanks to God
for them. Surprise is one of the keenest emotions that music has in its
power to give us (even Hadyn and Weber discovered that!). It is only
the pedants and the critics, who, after all, do not sit through all the
long symphonies, who are annoyed by these attempts at concentration and
condensation. (I say the pedants but I must include the Philistines.
It is really _cliché_ which makes certain music “popular.” The public
as a whole really prefers music based on _cliché_, with a melody in
which the end is foreordained almost from the first bar. Of course in
time public taste is changed.... The transition is slow ... but the
composer who follows public taste instead of leading it soon drops out
of hearing. The _cliché_ of to-day is not the _cliché_ of day before
yesterday. According to Philip Hale, Napoleon, then first consul [1800]
said to Luigi Cherubini, “I am very fond of Paisiello’s music; it is
gentle, peaceful. You have great talent, but your accompaniments are
too loud.” Cherubini replied, “Citizen Consul, I have conformed to the
taste of the French.” Napoleon persisted, “Your music is too loud;
let us talk of Paisiello’s which lulls me gently.” “I understand,”
answered Cherubini, “you prefer music that does not prevent you from
dreaming of affairs of state.”) Strawinsky, working gradually, not
with the intention to astonish but with no fear of doing so, dropping
superfluities, and all _cliché_ of the studio whatsoever, arrives
at a perfectly natural form of expression in his lyric drama, _The
Nightingale_, in which there is no working-out or development of
themes; the music is intended to comment upon, to fill with a bigger
meaning, the action as it proceeds, without resorting to tricks which
require mental effort on the part of the auditor. The composer does not
wish to burden him with any more mental effort than the mere listening
to the piece requires and he strikes to the soul with the poignancy of
his expression. (The foregoing may easily be misunderstood. It does not
mean necessarily that there is no polyphony, that there are no parts
leading hither and thither in the music of Strawinsky. It does not
mean that dissonance has become an end in itself with this composer.
It simply means that he has let his inspiration take the form natural
to it and has not tried to cramp his inspiration into proscribed
forms. There should be no more difficulty in understanding him than in
understanding Beethoven once one arrives at listening with unbiased
ears. The trouble is that too many of us have made up our minds not
to listen to anything which does not conform with our own precious
opinions.)
At the risk of being misunderstood by some and for the sake of making
myself clearer to others I hazard a frivolous figure. Say that
Wagner’s formula for composition be represented by some expression;
I will choose the simple proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.”
Humperdinck is content to change a single detail of this formula. He
says, musically speaking, “Make _wheat_ while the sun shines.” Richard
Strauss makes a more complete inversion. His paraphrase would suggest
something like this, “Make brass while the band brays.” Strawinsky,
wearied of the whole business (as was Debussy before him; genius does
not paraphrase) uses only two words of the formula ... say “make” and
“sun.” Later even these are negligible, as each new composer makes his
own laws and his own formulas. The infinity of it! In time the work of
Strawinsky will establish a _cliché_ to be scorned by a new generation
(scorned in the sense that it will not be imitated, except by inferior
men).