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FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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[Illustration: BRAHMS AT THE PIANO]
FROM GRIEG TO
BRAHMS
STUDIES OF SOME MODERN
COMPOSERS AND THEIR ART
BY
DANIEL GREGORY MASON
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1902, by
THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
Published November, 1902.
_To my uncle
Dr. William Mason
who has won the gratitude
of lovers of music in America
I dedicate these studies
with affection and respect_
PREFACE
«Music may be hard to understand, but musicians are men;» so remarked
a friend of mine when I was first planning these essays. The sentence
sums up very happily a truth I have constantly had in mind in writing
them. As all music, no matter what its complexity on the technical
side, is in essence an expression of personal feeling, and as the
qualities of a man's personality show themselves not only in his works,
but in his acts, his words, his face, his handwriting and carriage
even, it has seemed natural and fruitful, in these studies, to seek
acquaintance with the musicians through acquaintance with the men.
But personal expression depends not alone on the personality of the
artist; it depends also on the resources of art, which in turn are the
product of a long, slow growth. Accordingly, if we would understand
the individual composers, we must have a sense of the scheme into
which they fall, the great universal evolution of which they are but
incidents. It is for this reason that I have tried, in the introductory
essay on The Appreciation of Music, to describe some of the fundamental
principles of the art, and to sketch in their light the general
movement of musical history, in order to give the reader a perspective
sense, a bird's-eye view of the great army of artists in which the
supreme masters are but leaders of battalions and regiments. Without
this sense it is impossible truly to place or justly to estimate any
individual.
At the end of the introduction I apply the principles worked out to
determining in a general way how the half dozen composers to be studied
are related to modern music as a whole. My result is that although
they are practically contemporary, they are by no means peers in the
scope and significance of their work. If we arrange them in the order
of their influence on art, which depends upon their power both to
assimilate previous resources and to add new ones, we must pass «from
Grieg to Brahms.»
The purpose of the last essay in the book, on The Meaning of Music,
will be obvious enough. Just as the introductory essay tries to sketch
the general musical environment, as determined by basic principles
and developed in history, in relation to which alone the individuals
discussed can be understood, so the epilogue seeks to suggest that
still larger environment of human feeling and activity on which music,
like everything else, depends for its vitality. The first essay
considers music as a medium for men, the last considers life as a
medium for music.
It would be impossible to acknowledge here all that these studies,
particularly the first, owe to the writings of others. Perhaps the
books which have most influenced my treatment of musical æsthetics are
Dr. George Santayana's «Sense of Beauty» and Dr. C. Hubert H. Parry's
«Evolution of the Art of Music,» though I have got much help also from
Dr. William James's «Principles of Psychology,» from Dr. Josiah Royce's
books, from Mr. Edward Carpenter, and of course from Helmholtz, Gurney,
Mr. W. H. Hadow, and the other standard writers on musical theory.
In gathering the biographical material I have had much cordial and
skillful help from Miss Barton, of the Boston Public Library, for which
I here record my thanks.
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
August 23, 1902.
NOTE TO THE THIRD IMPRESSION
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford has pointed out an error in the story
told of Brahms on page 178. It was not the Cambridge University
authorities who invited Brahms to write a new work, but the
managers of the Leeds Festivals, who, after long neglect of his
already printed compositions, asked him, in 1887, to write them a
new one; whereupon he returned the answer described.
New York City,
May 10th, 1904.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I INTRODUCTION: THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC 1
II EDVARD GRIEG 47
III ANTONIN DVOŘÁK 71
IV CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS 97
V CÉSAR FRANCK 121
VI PETER ILYITCH TSCHAÏKOWSKY 149
VII JOHANNES BRAHMS 173
VIII EPILOGUE: THE MEANING OF MUSIC 203
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
BRAHMS AT THE PIANO Title
From a charcoal drawing by W. von Beckerath
GRIEG 49
DVOŘÁK 73
SAINT-SAËNS 99
FRANCK 123
TSCHAÏKOWSKY 151
BRAHMS 175
I
INTRODUCTION
THE APPRECIATION
OF MUSIC
I
INTRODUCTION THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC
However interesting may be the study of an art through the
personalities of the artists who have produced it, and such study,
since art is a mode of human expression, is indeed essential, it
must be supplemented by at least some general knowledge of the long
continuous evolution in which the work of the most brilliant individual
is but a moment, a phase. The quality of a man's work in art, and
especially, as will be seen in a moment, in music, depends not alone
on the depth of his character and the force of his talent, but also
largely on the technical resources he owes to others, on the means
for expressing himself that he finds ready to his hand. Whatever
his personal powers or limitations, the value of his work will be
determined not more by these than by the helps and hindrances of his
artistic inheritance.
The great edifice of art, in fact, is like those Gothic cathedrals on
which generations of men successively labored; thousands of common
workmen hewed their foundation stones; finer minds, architects,
smiths, brass founders, glass makers and sculptors, wrought and
decorated the superstructures; and the work of each, whatever his
personal skill and devotion, was valuable only because it built upon
and added to that of all the rest. The soaring spires are firmly
based on blocks of stone ploddingly adjusted; the windows, often of
such a perfect beauty that they seem created rather than constructed,
had nevertheless to be built up bit by bit; and all the marvelous
organism of pillars, arches and buttresses is so delicately solid,
so precariously stable, that had one stress been miscalculated, one
joint inaccurately made, the whole would collapse. So it is with the
edifice of art, and particularly with that of music, which depends for
its very material on the labors of musicians. Pigments, clay, marble,
the materials of the plastic arts, exist already in the world; but the
whole ladder of fixed tones on which music is built is the product
of man's æsthetic sense, and had to be created slowly and laboriously
by many generations of men. The successions of chords which every
banjo player strums in his accompaniments were the subject of long
trial by the mediæval composers. The hymn tune that any boy can write
is modeled on a symmetrical scheme of phrases developed by countless
experimenters. It took men centuries to select and arrange the eight
tones of the ordinary scale, and centuries more to learn how to combine
them in chords. And the most eloquent modern works depend on this long
evolution of resources just as inevitably as the Gothic spire rests on
the hewn stones so carefully laid. In the art, as in the cathedral, the
seen rests upon the unseen, the beautiful upon the solid, the complex
upon the simple, the new upon the old. The product of a thousand
artists, music is as dependent on each as the coral reef on the tiny
indispensable body of each insect; and on the other hand the individual
musician, whatever his ability, is great only as he uses the equipment
his fellows have prepared--«the greatest is the most indebted man.»
If, then, we would justly value the half dozen composers who have
done most for music in our day, we must add to our understanding of
them as persons a knowledge of the general development in which they
play a part; we must gain some sense of that great process of musical
growth from which they inherit their resources, to which they make
their various contributions, and in relation to which alone they can be
fairly compared and appreciated. After examining the general course of
musical history, ascertaining some fundamental principles, and applying
these principles to our special judgments, we shall be able to perceive
the greatest musicians of our day in their relations, and to get a
perspective view of modern music in which they shall take their proper
places.
I
If we wish to get an idea of primeval music, to see from what impulses
it took rise, we have only to study the musical activities of children
and savages, in whom we have primeval man made contemporary, the remote
past brought conveniently into the present to be observed. When we
make such a study we find that both children and savages express their
feelings by gestures and cries, that under the sway of emotion they
either dance or sing. To them quiet, silent feeling is impossible.
Are they joyful, they leap and laugh; are they angry, they strike and
shout; are they sad, they rock and moan. Moreover, we can discriminate
the kinds of feeling that are expressed by these cries and gestures.
Roughly speaking, bodily movement is the natural outlet of active
vitality, of the joy of life and the lust of living, while it is the
more contemplative emotions--love, grief, reverie, devotion--that find
vocal utterance. The war-dances and revels of savages, accompanied by
drum and tomtom, are gesticulatory; their love-songs and ululations
over the dead are vocal. In the same way children in their moments of
enthusiasm are wont to march about shouting and stamping in time, all
their limbs galvanized with nervous force; and it is when the wave of
energy has passed and they sit on the floor engrossed in blocks or
dolls that they sing to themselves their curious undulating chants.
Even in ourselves we can observe the same tendencies, checked though
they be by counter-impulses in our more complex temperaments: when
we are gay we walk briskly, clicking our heels in time and perhaps
whistling a catch; in our dreamier hours we are quiet, or merely hum a
tune under our breath. Thus through all human nature runs the tendency
to vent feeling, active and contemplative, in those bodily movements
and vocal utterances which underlie the two great generators of music,
dance and song.
Such activities, however, are by no means as yet dance and song. At
first they are no more than mere reflex actions, as spontaneous and
unthinking as the «Ow» of the man who stubs his toe. The emotion
is felt, and out comes the gesture or cry; that is all. It is the
organism's way of letting off steam. It is not expression, not being
prompted by a desire to communicate the feeling, but merely by the
impulse to be unburdened of it. Before there can be true expression
or communication, there must be two more links added to the chain of
which these automatic activities are only the first. The second link is
imitation. According to a theory widely exploited in recent years, we
tend to imitate whatever we see another do. With children the tendency
is so strong that a large part of their time and energy is devoted to
elaborate impersonation and make-believe, and the entire basis of
their education is acquired through this directly assimilative faculty.
In adults it is less active, but every sensitive person knows how
difficult it is not to imitate foreign accents, stammering, and other
petty mannerisms, and few are so callous that they can withstand the
infection of strong stimuli like the gestures and cries of emotion. The
wailing baby in the street car, who moves all the other babies within
hearing to wail also (if they be not already at it independently); the
dog baying the moon until all within earshot join in the serenade; the
negro at the camp-meeting clapping his hands until the whole company
is in a rhythmic ecstasy--these are examples of the contagion of
cries and gestures. Bearing them in mind, it is easy to see that the
vocal or bodily acts which in the first place are mere reflexes of
feeling, performed with no thought of expression, but only for personal
easement, will generally, nevertheless, prompt similar acts in others.
The performances of the individual will not end with himself; thanks to
the instinct of imitation, they will be very widely copied.
But now--and this is the third link of the chain--bodily acts set
up mental states, and a man cannot gesticulate or vocalize without
feeling the emotions of which his actions are, as we say, expressive.
«We feel sorry because we cry,» writes Professor William James in his
brilliant, paradoxical way, «angry because we strike, afraid because
we tremble;» and whether or not we agree with his extreme view that
the mental state is entirely a reverberation of bodily disturbances,
we cannot but realize that in all these cases executing the expression
tends to give us the feeling. He who persistently smiles will end by
being cheerful, and a moderate amount of sighing or groaning will make
any one melancholy. Above all, the imitation of vocal movements, such
as we all go through at least incipiently when we hear melody, and the
«keeping time» that strong dance-music so irresistibly prompts--these
actions very noticeably set up in us their appropriate states of
feeling. We not only imitate the lip motions and throat contractions of
a persuasive speaker or singer, but doing so fills us with the emotion
that prompts his utterance. Tired soldiers not only step out to a
potently rhythmical tune--that is, they not only imitate the beat--but
they actually feel less weary, more energetic, so long as the stimulus
lasts. Once a bodily activity is set up, no matter how, it arouses the
mental state proper to it; in a word, expression generates emotion.
Obviously, then, if in the first place the natural outlets of emotional
excitement are bodily motions and vocal sounds, if in the second
place the observation of such motions and sounds arouses the impulse
to imitate them, and if finally this imitation produces again in the
imitator the states of mind which first set the whole process going,
then these motions and sounds, these inchoate germs of dance and
song, possess an enormous latent power of expression, and need only
to be systematized to become a wonderfully eloquent language. Such a
language, in fact, is music.
II
At this point, however, it is important not to go too fast. These crude
gestures and cries by which primeval man expressed his feelings, though
they were the germs out of which music grew, were as yet no more music,
which is not only expressive sound, but formed, articulate sound, than
an infant's cooings are speech. So far they were mere ebullitions,
purposeless and formless; before they could become communicative they
must become definite, they must take on some organic structure. Now
gestures, bodily movements, are very easily grouped together by means
of accent. Every walker knows that it is difficult not to emphasize
alternate steps, grouping the unaccented with the accented into a
cluster of two. Every waltzer makes a similar grouping of three steps,
one accented, the other two subordinate. Some such system of grouping
is instinctively adopted whenever we have a series of impressions
regularly recurring in time. Let the reader, listening to the ticking
of a watch, note how impossible it is to attend to each tick by itself.
He will inevitably group them in twos; the accent may come on the first
or on the last of the group, but he cannot hear them as exactly equal,
any more than in walking he can put exactly equal stress on each step.
It was this tendency of the mind to group its impressions on a basis
of equal time measurements and unequal accents that led at the dawn of
musical history to meter or rhythm, which is as persistent in music
as it is in poetry. Metrical form was the natural means of giving
definition to bodily movements, and as soon as it was developed enough
to produce regular, easily imitated steps out of the chaotic gestures
of naïve feeling, Dance was born.
At first, of course, metrical form was stumbled upon blindly. Having
two arms and two legs, men naturally moved with a symmetry that
gradually impressed their minds; obliged by the facts of anatomy to
group their motions in twos, they soon took the hint, and beat their
drums or struck their cymbals accordingly. The primeval dance was
doubtless the march. But soon they began to carry out the principle
they had thus chanced upon, and despite anatomy devised the group of
three. The existence of triple meter is all the proof needed that
metrical form is essentially a process of intelligence, not a physical
fatality; men grouped their steps or leaps or drum-taps in twos or
in threes because such groups were easy to make, to imitate, and to
remember. And once perceived, no matter how, such groupings tended to
cling, to perpetuate themselves. For they were definite, memorable
forms, and they survived all haphazard gestures and vague motions by
virtue of the law that what is adapted to its environment will live
longer than what is not. In this case the environment was the human
mind; and the definite organisms, the metrical forms, survived and
developed because the mind could remember them, while all the vague
gestures out of which they grew shared the fate of what is indefinite,
accidental, inorganic. Thus Dance, which was gesticulation systematized
by metrical form, emerged and grew in the human mind, like an animal in
a congenial habitat.
For a long while the metrical forms that men could perceive and
remember were most rudimentary. Probably it took them centuries to
grasp the simple group of three, the basis of such accent-schemes
as the waltz and the mazurka. Even to-day, psychologists agree, we
are unable to grasp a group of seven, and we perceive larger groups
than three only as compounded of the elementary twos and threes.[A]
But gradually men learned to recombine their groups in still larger
forms, of which the first groups constituted the elements. Just as
in chemistry the basic elements like oxygen and hydrogen, nitrogen
and carbon, can combine only in a few simple ways, but the compound
molecules thus produced can recombine into the myriad substances of
organic chemistry, the sugars and starches and all the rest, so the
simple dual and triple measures of music can be built into an infinite
variety of figures and phrases. In early dance and folk-song a more
and more complex metrical plan thus slowly developed. Two or more
of the simple groups of beats, called measures, were combined into
a larger group, a recognizable figure or motif; then again motifs
were combined into still larger phrases; and finally, as the musical
medium became more definite, plastic and various, phrases were
combined in many different types of design, into complete «tunes.» In
all these regroupings, the wonderful variety of which is one of the
most precious resources of modern music, the fundamental procedure
was the same--elements alike in duration, but different in accent or
significance, were made to cohere in a group or form. Just as in verse
the feet, or elementary metrical forms whose elements are single
syllables of equal duration but unequal stress, are combined into
lines, and later these lines into stanzas, so in music measures are
combined in figures, and figures built up into phrases, and phrases
into tunes. And as the diversity of the possible forms becomes greater
and greater as we advance from foot to stanza, there being few forms
of feet but many of stanza, so metrical form in music becomes more and
more complex as it evolves, and though all music must be built out of
dual or triple measures, it may be built into tunes of an infinite
variety of pattern. Each new complexity, however, must be intelligible;
it cannot be introduced until men have mastered the simpler groups out
of which it is compounded. Beethoven's wondrously intricate texture,
Brahms's soaring phrases, would be meaningless to us had we not
inherited from thousands of ancestors a sense of the system of regular
accents and duration on which their complexities are superposed.
From the days, ages ago, when savages first beat a drum in simple
march rhythm, up to to-day, when Brahms builds up his extraordinarily
intricate fabrics, with their elaborate prosody, their «augmentation,»
and «diminution,» and «shifted rhythm,» the evolution of metrical form
has been single and continuous; each advance has been built on previous
achievements. There are no dropped stitches in this kind of knitting.
Metrical form, however, is not the only sort of form by which sounds
can be combined. It is the natural organizing agent of Dance, which,
as we have seen, develops out of the movements expressive of men's
active impulses; but human nature has also its contemplative side, and
this, expressing itself in vocal utterance, undergoes another sort of
development and results in Song. What, then, are the means by which
Song is defined, by which vocal sounds are organized into intelligible
and memorable forms? Before we answer this question it will be well to
consider for a moment a more general one. What, in general, is a form?
We shall be helped to define a form in general by looking back to the
metrical forms we have just been studying. These, we have seen, are
groups or clusters of impressions, held together by some similarity,
yet also differentiated by some contrast. The two or three beats of
the measure-group are similar in duration, yet different in accent.
And without both the similarity and the difference, the unity and the
variety, they would not be a group. Without similarity they would be a
haphazard collection, a chaos; without difference they would all fuse
together in one indistinguishable mass. In other words, they exemplify
a general fact about forms--namely, that the elements must be alike
enough to be associated, and yet different enough to be discriminated.
If we cannot associate them we cannot feel them as a group; they will
not cohere. If, on the other hand, we cannot discriminate them, then do
they equally fail to make up a form; they simply mingle together into a
homogeneous lump. The organs of an organism must be, then, related, yet
different; the elements of a form must be both similar and dissimilar.
Unless they are both we cannot perceive them as linked, yet distinct.
Bearing this general fact about forms in mind, we may investigate the
kinds of form that underlie Song.
Probably every one who has listened to the whistling of factories
in a large city at noon has had the curious experience of suddenly
hearing amid the meaningless din a pair of tones that mysteriously
mate and merge. The other tones seem entirely accidental; they have no
relation to each other, and give one merely a sense of vague annoyance.
But these two form an intelligible group; we are able to grasp them
together, and we take an indescribable pleasure in thus feeling them as
parts of one whole. Here is an instance of another sort of musical form
than the metrical, a sort that we may call harmonic. Here the grouping
takes place on a platform not of time, but of pitch; the two elements
of the group have no metrical relations, but in pitch they are somehow
related. Now this sort of pitch relationship has played a vital part in
music, a part hardly secondary to that of time relationship; so that an
understanding of it is important enough to delay us here a moment with
some rather dry technical facts on which it depends.
Ordinary musical tones, the notes of the voice, the violin, and the
piano, for example, simple as they sound, are, like ordinary white
light, rather complex compounds of many simple elements. There are in
them seven or eight constituent or «partial» tones, quite distinctly
audible to the trained ear or to the untrained ear armed with
suitable instruments; and these partial tones, produced by vibrations
in the sound-emitting body whose rates are regularly related, bear a
certain fixed relation to each other, like the spectrum-colors that
compose white light. Not only this, but each partial tone arouses
its own proper sensation in the ear by stimulating there one of the
minute filaments called the cords of Corti, each of which vibrates
sympathetically to a tone of given pitch and to no other. Now we are to
imagine that when an ordinary musical tone is sounded, seven or eight
of these little cords immediately start a-tremble, and send to the
brain their messages, which combine there into the composite impression
we name «a tone.» If now another tone is sounded, one which starts
into motion another set of filaments, and if furthermore there is one
filament now set in motion that was also excited by the first compound
tone--if, in other words, the two tones happen to have a partial tone
in common, which in both instances excites the same filament in the
ear, then we shall have a sense of close relationship between them;
they will make together a harmonic group or form. This, as a matter
of fact, is what happens with any two tones that form what is called
a consonant interval with each other, an «octave,» a «fifth,» or a
«fourth.» If tones X and Y, for instance, are an octave apart, the
second partial tone of X will be identical with the first of Y; if
they are a fifth apart, the third partial tone of X will be identical
with the second of Y; if they are a fourth apart, the fourth partial
tone of X will correspond with the third of Y. It is obvious, then,
that all these intervals will give us the sense of harmonic form; for
they provide all the necessary conditions of a form, having enough in
common to be associated by our minds, and enough not in common (their
dissimilar partial tones) to be distinguished. When the partial tone
in common is so high, and therefore so weak, that it impresses us but
slightly, we shall have little or no sense of their being related; such
is the case in the so-called imperfect consonances and the dissonances.
When, on the other hand, all the most prominent partial tones of one
exist in the other, they will fuse into one impression in our minds,
losing the characteristic of form entirely, as is the case to some
extent with the octave and entirely with the unison. But when, as in
the case of fifths and fourths, there are both a distinctly audible
partial tone in common and others not in common, then we shall have
true harmonic forms.
So much technical detail will be forgiven by the reader who can at all
realize how profoundly the entire history of music has been affected
by these acoustic and physiological facts. We have already seen how
folk-music slowly wrought out the complex metrical forms based upon
time grouping. In the same way, ecclesiastical music wrought out,
slowly and laboriously, the harmonic and melodic forms that were based
upon pitch-grouping. For a long time vocal utterance was defined only
by certain simple intervals like the fall of the fourth, which formed
the cadences of Greek dramatic recitation and of mediæval Christian
intoning. Gradually ornamental notes were introduced as approaches to
the final note; these were varied in pitch, and new ones added, until
finally there resulted the ancient modes, precursors of our scale.
Then, when two melodies began to be sung at once, the intervals of
the octave, fifth, and fourth were again called into requisition, and
made the bases of primitive harmony. In the old Organum of the Middle
Ages, two voices, a fifth apart, gave the same melody, just as with the
Greeks, in the process called «magadising,» two voices sang the same
tune, an octave apart. So, step by step, pitch relations were perceived
and utilized. In all stages of the long progress, whether the interval
chosen was the octave or the fifth or the fourth, and whether the tones
were sounded in succession as a melodic step or simultaneously as a
chord, the guiding principle was the same; tones were grouped together
which had pitch-form, which had partial tones in common and others not
in common. A harmonic form, like a metrical form, was always a cluster
of tones that could be both associated and distinguished.
It was a long time before these two means of organizing sound were
used in combination. Until the seventeenth century metrical form was
chiefly used, quite naturally, to define the gesticulatory part of
musical material, the product of active emotion, while harmonic form
gave coherence to the vocal part, the product of contemplative or
religious emotion. Primitive dance either neglected pitch relationship
entirely, as in that kind of savage music which uses only drums,
tomtoms, clappers and such percussive instruments, or used only the
simplest intervals like the fall of the fourth or the rise of the
fifth. And in ecclesiastical Song, all through the Middle Ages,
metrical regularity was not only not sought for--it was avoided. Even
in the highly artistic song of the great choral epoch which culminated
in Palestrina there was no rhythm. Phraseology depended entirely on the
words. Composers avoided anything like an appearance of even sections,
in sharp demarcation, balancing each other, such as we now demand.
They liked rather to have their melodies cross and interlace like the
strands in a basket, making a texture solid but inorganic. To them
coherence was a matter merely of the individual voices; music held
together like a rope rather than like a crystal. Indeed, any deeper
harmonic unity was not feasible until they had gained more experience
in tone relationship. But eventually the secular composers of the
last half of the seventeenth century, among whom Arcangelo Corelli is
a typical figure, learned to utilize both kinds of form, making them
supplement and reinforce each other in all sorts of interesting and
unexpected ways. With Corelli, pure music emerges as an independent
art, beautiful as sculpture and promising new powers of expression. By
his successors this new promise was realized with surprising rapidity.
Constantly growing more independent of extraneous aids, developing,
thanks to the fruitful interaction of metrical and harmonic grouping,
an unprecedented richness and variety, music became in the hands of
Bach and Beethoven a strong, flexible and efficient fabric, adapted
to all phases of expression and capable of forming the most complex
and self-sufficient structures. Evolved from the crude gestures and
cries of naïve feeling by a never-ceasing, ever-widening exertion of
man's intelligence, absolute music has become in some respects the most
eloquent and penetrative of the arts.
III
Form in music, however, notwithstanding its origin as a means of
defining those emotional expressions which without it would have
remained vague, unimitable, and immemorable, is much more than a means
of definition. At first practiced as a means to an end, it soon became
an end in itself. For the perception of relations, the mental activity
which groups impressions, is not merely useful; it is profoundly,
indescribably delightful. Calling the mind into activity just as
sensation calls the senses, it is a far deeper source of pleasure than
sensation can ever be, because the mind far exceeds the senses in the
subtlety, variety and independence of its action. When, therefore, the
primitive musicians first made their syntheses of gestures and cries
they discovered a novel pleasure, altogether more delicious than the
crude joys of sensation and expression. Before they made such syntheses
they had merely enjoyed the sweetness of tones, and taken satisfaction
in expressing their feelings; but when once they learned to group
their expressive tones together, to feel the subtle bonds which bound
them into clear and salient unity, then they felt a joy altogether new
and on a higher plane, they felt true æsthetic delight. Here was not
merely a passive, or at most an automatic process; here was a truly
creative activity, a conscious and free manipulation of materials. Mere
hearing, however delicious, mere expression, however grateful, could
not give this sense of mastery, of comprehension, of insight. Beauty
alone, beauty depending on consciously made comparisons and contrasts,
can give the highest æsthetic delight, the delight in form. And so,
like painters who, using form at first to define their material,
come quickly to a realization of its inherent value, and finally, if
they be true artists, value its pure beauties of line and balance
and composition more highly than any mere richness of color or of
expression, musicians, in the degree of their true musicianship, came
to prize the intrinsic beauty of music above all its other qualities.
Sometimes, doubtless, they carried their devotion too far. In certain
periods and individuals the love of formal beauty has entirely eclipsed
pleasure in expression. Unable to attend at once to expression and
to beauty, many composers, and in some periods all, have devoted
their entire energy to the quest for formal perfection. Thus in the
work of the Netherland masters of early counterpoint, in some of
Bach's ingenious weavings, and in much of the music of Haydn and his
contemporaries, the search for purely plastic qualities goes on with
little thought of the original emotional burden of the material that
is being formulated. To such men form was much more than a means of
defining expression; it was an end in itself, and an end worth a
lifetime of painstaking, devoted effort.
And yet, justifiable as their feeling was, indispensable as their
labors were to that development without which the expressive power of
music would itself have remained rudimentary, it is not to their view,
but to a more universal one, that we must look to find a rounded theory
of expression and form. If it be a mistake to neglect the latter for
the former, as they well saw, it is equally a mistake to prize form
with too exclusive an enthusiasm. For beauty is itself one of the most
potent means of expression. Our minds are not made up of hermetic
compartments, but are so permeable, so conductive, that an eloquent
thing is made more eloquent by being also beautiful. The impression of
beauty reverberates endlessly, intensifying all that is associated with
it. The general atmosphere transfigures every feature. If the whole
is fair, no detail will be entirely without its appeal to our kindled
imaginations, but if the whole is formless, no single phrase, however
impassioned, can affect us very deeply. The truth is, then, that form
and expression in music are as essential to each other as objects
and light in the world of vision. No radiance of illumination will
satisfy the eye if there is nothing to see, and, on the other hand, the
loveliest things will give little pleasure in the dark. To be beautiful
they must be suffused in light. Similarly the phrases of music, to be
truly moving, must be suffused in beauty. The greatest masters clearly
realized this. Bach in his masterpieces, Beethoven nearly always, and
Brahms in his inspired hours, acted on the principle that the two
elements must exist side by side, subtly and potently reacting upon
each other. Their practice, indeed, unanimously confirms the theory
of musical effect which has now been briefly sketched, and which may
be more briefly summarized before we pass on to deduce from it some
general canons of appreciation and criticism.
Music, we have seen, originates in the spontaneous gestures and cries
made by primitive man under the sway of emotion, imitated by observers,
and arousing in them the same feelings. As intelligence dawns, men
see that this triple process of spontaneous action, imitation and
reduplicated feeling affords a basis for a language of emotion, a
language that needs, however, to be somehow defined and articulated.
Articulation gradually follows by means of the grouping in time which
develops the gestures of active feeling into Dance, and the grouping in
pitch which develops the utterances of contemplative feeling into Song.
Eventually the two modes of grouping are combined, and music becomes an
independent art. Meanwhile, the forms at first adopted for the sake of
mere definition become the basis of a new and deeper delight, æsthetic
beauty, which is sought for both as ancillary to expression and for
itself alone. Finally, beauty of form reacts potently on eloquence
of expression, and the most universal composers, recognizing the
interdependence of the two elements, produce the highest type of pure
music, music in which beauty is based upon expression and expression
transfigured by beauty.
IV
The principles we now have before us, interesting as they are in
themselves, must finally vindicate their worth by helping us to form
sound opinions of musical tendencies and of individual composers; they
must provide a corrective for the whims and freaks of prejudice, and a
basis for that intelligent and systematic criticism which takes account
both of a man's qualities and of his defects before assigning him his
place in the general artistic movement. With them in mind, we should
be able to avoid the current one-sided and partial views, and also to
attain that positive insight into the nature of music which alone can
give our opinions sanity, liberality and perspective.
In the first place, then, it will be well to turn their light on
certain dangerous half-truths, which, constantly cropping up in musical
opinions, are hardly less misleading than complete fallacies. The two
most persistent and mischievous of such half-truths are those which
neglect one aspect of the dual nature of music, which ignore expression
or repudiate form. Of the first, the half-truth so frequently
formulated in the phrase, «Music is a kind of audible mathematics,»
it is not necessary to say much. Those dryly ingenious persons who
rejoice in a fugue of Bach much as they enjoy an intricate problem in
calculus, failing to perceive the warm human heart that animates the
skeleton, form a minority which gets little attention from the mass of
music-lovers. The half-truth which neglects expression will not, in the
nature of things, ever gain a large following. Far more dangerous is
the opposite fallacy, which, repudiating form, asserts that expression
is all, that «music is the language of the emotions.» This phrase,
without any qualifications, is the creed of the sentimentalists.
Their ranks assemble all varieties of rhapsodical, ill-balanced
temperaments, from the young girl who «dotes on Wagner» to the old
lady with curls who thinks that «music leads us up to the higher
life.» The sentimentalists sin, perhaps, not so much by commission as
by omission. So far as they are able they appreciate music, for they
feel it emotionally, and, as we have seen, half its reason for being
is its appeal to the emotions. But they fail to realize that it must
be beautiful as well as moving, that all its lineaments of expression
must be held in orderly relation with a larger integral beauty of
form. They fancy that form, which in reality enhances expression, is
somehow at odds with it, that the mind and the feelings are natural
enemies. Satisfied with thrills and tremors, they do not ask, in their
music, for meaning and order. They fancy that to listen heedfully,
attentively, analytically, is somehow to pull out the petals of art
and strew them in the dust. Analysis is a desecrating process. You
should not focus your ears, make the image clear; you should swoon in a
delicious haze of sensation and suggestion. But one can analyze without
dissecting; one can recognize that a flower has petals without pulling
them out; and indeed it is hard to imagine any one appreciating the
true loveliness of a flower, its formed, articulated beauty, without
such recognition. So in music, the true lover of melody will be in no
danger of confusing Beethoven's Hymn of Joy with Schumann's _Warum_
because of the trance of nebulous feeling into which they throw him. He
will pay them the tribute of listening to them attentively, of noting
the various charms of their phraseology and expression as he would note
the difference of meter and effect between a sonnet of Shakespeare and
a song of Burns. Music is not poorer, but richer, for its marvelous
intricacies of structure, and the sentimentality which hates clear
definition is not high sentiment, but misconception or insensibility.
It is a suggestive fact, however, that the sentimental attitude is
found among us, not only in music, but everywhere. It is the tendency
of the day to confuse acquiring with assimilating, to fancy that
wealth of experience is better than self-mastery and intelligent
possession. Heedlessness is our besetting sin. We skim books, «do»
picture galleries, talk at the opera, interrupt in conversation, and
gobble our food. Metaphorically, as well as actually, we swallow more
than we can digest, imagining that if we only subject ourselves to
enough impressions we shall become connoisseurs. We value quantity
rather than quality, in everything from bric-à-brac to education; and
it is quite to be expected that we should reckon the value of music
by the number of shivers it can give us. But we are nevertheless
capable of a wiser attitude. We have it in us to learn that feelings
are of no use until they are related to the central personality,
that impressibility is not yet dignity, that to be informed is not
necessarily to be educated--that, in a word, possession of any sort
is not an external fact, but an inward control. We may take a facile
interest in the sentimentalists and the enthusiasts--the people with
«temperament»--but at heart we know that those passions are deepest
which are most firmly dominated by will, that he is freest who obeys
the highest law, and that «temperament» is after all less vital than
character. We really prefer organization to coruscation. And so in
music we are capable of learning, and knowledge of the principles of
musical effect can help us to learn, that the balance and proportion
and symmetry of the whole is far more essential than any poignancy,
however great, in the parts. He best appreciates music who brings to it
all of his human powers, who understands it intellectually as well as
feels it emotionally.
In these and other ways the principles of musical effect afford
touchstones for the detection of prevalent but erroneous views--views
which contain their element of truth, but are still fallacious
because partial. But the same principles are also capable of yielding
more positive and detailed insight into the nature of musical
appreciation. They illuminate, for example, that perplexing problem
of expression--why it is that from the same piece of music one person
gets so much more than another. The fact is familiar to every one.
Every one knows that of two persons equally sensitive to music on the
sensuous and formal side, of good «ear,» and familiar with the effects
of harmony, melody and rhythm, one will get far deeper meanings, will
be far more elated and inspired, than the other. How can this be? Our
theory of expression gives the clew. We have seen that bodily states
set up by imitation are the basis of musical emotions. Hearing is
always a sort of ideal performing. In listening to a melody we always
feebly contract our throat muscles as if to sing, and the perception
of rhythm is always accompanied by an incipient «keeping time.» These
bodily acts, however faintly realized, set up their appropriate
feelings, the feelings we associate with their actual performance. But
now it should be noted that the richness, quality, and significance of
these feelings will depend in the case of each man on his particular
associations--that is to say, on his entire personal character.
Evoked by similar bodily states, the mental emotions will be always
as dissimilar as the men who feel them. «We cannot conceive,» says
Thoreau, «of a greater difference than that between the life of one
man and that of another.» He might truly have added that we cannot
conceive of a greater difference than that between the feelings of one
man and those of another in hearing the same piece of music, which
excites in both the same tremors and thrills, but vistas of thought
how utterly unlike! Musical appreciation is thus subject to the same
variations which make the ordinary experiences of men so diverse. The
prophet on fire with righteous indignation and the common scold undergo
in anger the same suffusion of blood, the same boiling up of the
organs; yet how different in dignity and value are their sentiments!
And music, by setting up a certain sympathetic turmoil in the organs,
will plunge one man into a selfish opium-dream and will fill another
with the rarest, most magnanimous aspirations. It follows as a
practical corollary that he who would get from music the best it has to
offer must cultivate the best in himself. No fine sensibility in him,
no large heroism, no generosity or dignity or profundity of character
will be without its quiet, far-reaching effect on his appreciation of
music.
If expression depends thus in part upon the moral and temperamental
qualities of the listener, form in equal measure depends upon his
mental alertness. «Form,» says Dr. Santayana, «does not appeal to the
inattentive; they get from objects only a vague sensation which may
in them awaken extrinsic associations; they do not stop to survey the
parts or to appreciate their relation, and consequently are insensible
to the various charms of various unifications; they can find in objects
only the value of material or of function, not that of form.» This is
unfortunately the case with many who consider themselves «musical»;
they enjoy sweetness of sound and the rather vague emotion music
arouses in them, but get no clear sense of its deeper architectural
beauty. Like Charles Lamb, they are «sentimentally disposed to harmony,
but organically incapable of a tune.» But a thoroughgoing love of
music, as will be clear enough by now, must include an appreciation of
all its aspects; and since beauty of form is not only delightful in
itself, but is a potent means of expression as well, insensibility to
it involves the loss of much of what is most precious in music. It is
necessary, then, to train the attention, to listen accurately as well
as sympathetically, to grasp the thematic phrases as they occur, to
remember them when they recur, and to follow them through all their
transformations. We should think that man but slightly appreciative of
poetry who, after hearing a play of Shakespeare, should say that the
words seemed to him mellifluous and that many passages moved him, but
that he had not the slightest idea what it was all about. Yet how many
of us, after hearing a Beethoven symphony, have the slightest definite
idea what it is about? If we would get more than transient, profitless
titillation from music, we must cultivate our attention, learning, to
borrow a phrase from optics, «to make the image sharp.» As we progress
in that faculty we shall constantly see new beauties, which in turn
will constantly react to deepen expression; and if we are so fortunate
as to have also a nature sensitive, tender, and earnest, fitted to feel
the best kind of emotion that can be aroused by sound, we may hope to
gain eventually an accurate, intelligent, and deep appreciation of
music.
V