ORPHEUS
ORPHEUS
OR
The Music of the Future
BY
W. J. TURNER
_Author of “The Seven Days of the Sun,” etc._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Copyright, 1926
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. DEFINITION OF MUSIC 1
II. IS MUSIC KNOWLEDGE OR LIFE? 14
III. THE GENERAL IDEA OF PROGRESS 27
IV. THE IDEA OF PROGRESS IN MUSIC 36
V. ABSOLUTE VALUE 47
VI. EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE 64
VII. BEYOND ALL SENSE 83
ORPHEUS
CHAPTER I
DEFINITION OF MUSIC
The dullest books on literature are the books which begin with a
history of the alphabet. A good history has its uses; however, this
book is not a history but a phantasy or, if you like, a philosophy.
For if it be a good phantasy it will be a good philosophy since all
philosophy is phantasy, or the imagination of love.
_Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle_
We know, however, that philosophy degenerates from that love which
moves the spheres into that love of moving in the tracks of the spheres
which is called the love of knowledge, and philosophers are commonly
men who spend their lives describing the old tracks in which they are
running, and teaching how you also may keep your feet in them. So, too,
musician has come to mean a man who performs music--he plays over again
Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s studies;
_partout il parcourit et parfournit_
This performance of his is a tribute to our weakness and a sign of our
imperfection, and, since we are weak and imperfect, is necessary; but
I cannot state too clearly and decisively at the outset that music
is not the playing or the hearing of symphonies and sonatas but the
imagination of love.
If music is not the imagination of love, if it is not a spiritual
act, what is it? The commonsense reply will be that it is an ordered
arrangement of sounds. But two words of this definition beg the
question. What is meant by “ordered,” and what by “arrangement”? Order
and arrangement imply meaning and significance. Can we have an order
that is an end in itself, is intrinsically satisfying, or beautiful, or
stimulating? But to whom? To man. But take away love from man, and what
is he? What is left is meaningless, even indescribable, for in love all
things exist and have their being. Music is the imagination of love
_in sound_. It is what man imagines of his life, and his life is love.
There are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds of life, and it
is possible that they may not all be imaginable _in sound_. I say it
is possible, I do not say it is probable. We do not know at present,
and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct of mankind has
abandoned sound as a means of expression. And that may happen. There
may be no unending future of music, only a limited future. Or the world
of music may be like the universe of Einstein, “finite but unbounded.”
And this indeed is my belief. It is a finite, a closed world.
Can you express the life of the vegetable world in music? The
imagination of a plant? The tree that rises to the sun throws its
shadow upon the mind of man; you may think you cannot throw that shadow
in music but you can sound forth the _shadow_ of that shadow, turn
the impalpable ghost of light into a ghost of sound, transform those
tremulous visual waves into auditory waves--not in the laboratory of
the physicist but in the laboratory of the mind. The musician may do
this. He may do in a bar of notes what the poet does in a line of
verse--make a unique sensible impression upon the mind. Debussy’s
_Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ makes this impression of a
vegetable world alive in quivering hot sunshine and Debussy’s music
is full of the imagination of a special order of life, the life of
trees, streams and lakes, the play of light upon water and on clouds,
the murmur of plants drinking and feeding in the sunlight, and all
that order of motion and movement which we are in the habit of calling
physical, all that order of emotion which we describe as belonging to
the five senses. I do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of
which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not
be expressed in music.
Music is the most concrete and physical of all the arts as it is
probably the earliest and most primitive. Beasts which cannot draw or
write can make expressive sounds, and the earliest men undoubtedly
communicated by sound before they learned to communicate by written
or painted signs. But whether at the other end of the scale there is
a limit to music’s power of expression no one can say. It is only
possible at this stage in the history of mankind to affirm that up
till now the highest, most spiritual powers of the human mind have
been able to find expression in music. There is nothing in the world’s
finest literature that surpasses what we may find in the world’s best
music, although, as we shall see later, music may have a virtue that is
entirely its own. But it will not surprise us to find ourselves limited
to the work of a very few composers when we ask for music that is as
highly organized as the finest poetry.
Music in this respect has been in the past nearer to painting and to
sculpture than to poetry. As with the plastic arts its swifter and
stronger appeal to the senses is a source of weakness as of strength.
It is a source of weakness because in every artist there is a natural
tendency to slip into what comes easiest in his medium. In music it is
easier to make sounds that merely gratify or stimulate the sense of
hearing and the cruder emotions than to make sounds of a more complex
character which will express the subtler and finer life of a more
spiritual imagination. Infantile music is both easier to compose and
easier to hear than mature music, so the public and the musician find
themselves in a natural league in favour of the rawer kinds of music.
Thus the song of obvious and commonplace sentiment and the jazz tune of
blatant rhythm have universal popularity. Even an animal, one sometimes
fancies might be conscious of such music. Its combinations are so
simple that they may certainly be understood by every human creature.
“All Nature hears thy voice,” one might almost say of the saxophone,
and possibly it is the sort of music to which the mountains would skip
like rams could they but hear it.
All life moves in rhythm. We know to-day that the old distinctions
between spirit and matter are superficial. When I was a student at
the School of Mines at the age of seventeen, learning organic and
inorganic chemistry, we were taught Mendeléeff’s Law which showed that
all the elements were multiples of a common denominator, the atom;
and since then it has been discovered that instead of the atom being
the smallest possible bit of matter, finite and irreducible, it is a
solar system--its sun and planets being bits of positive and negative
electricity. All that is left of the whole structure of nineteenth
century materialism has crumbled away to that word “bits.” We cannot
as yet imagine or think without resting somewhere on “bits.” Our minds
like our feet need a solid something beneath them. It is paralysing to
conceive that the floor we stand upon, the chair we sit upon, consist
solely of rotating electrical forces, but when we think of “bits”
welded together we feel safe again, although actually these “bits” are
a pure mental fiction, and what we stand and sit upon is _motion_. If
the motion stopped we should fall into the bottomless pit, the famous
vacuum abhorred of Nature (alias Tophet in biblical language).
My chemistry teachers would have been as scandalized to think that at
the bottom of their inorganic and organic chemistry there was nothing
but motion, as my music teachers would have been scandalized to think
that at the bottom of the major and minor scales there was nothing but
love. They imagined that these were two entirely different worlds with
an infinite chasm between them. They thought that inorganic chemistry
was absolutely different from organic chemistry, although of course
they would have got into a hopeless muddle had they tried to prove
their belief--but then only fools and geniuses try to prove their
beliefs. Neither my chemistry nor my music teachers could ever explain
anything. One was simply asked to swallow whole and regurgitate whole
what was obviously mere unintelligible rigmarole. Those of us who had
this parrot-like faculty became in our turn Professors of Chemistry and
of Music.
The great creative scientists of this age have disintegrated those
old hard ideas, and it now _appears_ that the Universe is a miracle
of rhythm, and that “matter,” just like man, is kept going, is
maintained as a co-ordinated whole by some electrical urge or spiritual
impulse--at bottom it is perhaps the same thing, although “thing” is
a very inappropriate word. The conception of the “will to live” has
a profounder meaning for us now, and we realize that if the “will to
live” dies in a man the man himself dies. A recent anthropologist,
the late Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, F.R.S., in a book on the decay of
Melanesia, attributes the dying off of the population in certain
islands, unaffected by disease and with an abundance of food, to life
having become devoid of meaning to them after contact with an alien
and unassimilable civilization. They had lost faith in their old
world of ideas without having the power to enter the completely new
and strange white man’s world. With the decay of their ancient beliefs
they took no pleasure in their ancient religious exercises. Joy and
Ritual simultaneously faded. _They lost the desire to live._ Each one
of us goes on living only so long as he desires to live, and the desire
varies in degree.
We have to admit that we use these words “life” and “living” still
without knowledge of what they mean, but it is not necessary, nor do I
think it possible, to know what they mean. Knowledge is not important,
it is life that is important, and we can feel life if we cannot know
it. The only way in which we can know life is by creating it, and it
will be my duty in a later chapter to discuss this.
In the meantime it is clear that the line from Dante which I began by
quoting:
_Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle_
is no idle phantasy but a literal truth. The world about us _seems_
to be material, but exists in rhythm. It is a living world, and it is
kept alive by a spiritual force which we can best describe as love, and
I end this chapter with the definition with which I began it. All art
is the imagination of love, and music is the imagination of love _in
sound_.