IS MUSIC KNOWLEDGE OR LIFE?
What is knowledge? And what is musical knowledge? The latter question
is no doubt included in the former, but we shall see. We know by
experience that it is possible to learn the alphabet of a language. The
alphabet as such has no longer any meaning, that is why it is possible
to use it with meaning--in that form we call language. But, at the
beginning, these perfectly conventionalized, perfectly meaningless
symbols, A, B, C, D, etc., had each a meaning and a very definite
meaning. And those series of meanings (which have now shrivelled
into the scentless, savourless, unembodied twenty-six ghosts of the
alphabet) precluded by their very vitality the possibility of all other
meanings. Their life was death to all other life and not until they
were dead could others live. This strange phenomenon is an element in
the beautiful myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus must not behold the
face of Eurydice when he brings her up from the underworld where she
disappeared, for in the physical vision he will be forever blinded to
the spirit which is returning with him, who is not the Eurydice that
was but the Eurydice that is to be. And the whole life of language is
in this process of continuous dying. Words die by becoming abstract,
then when they are completely dead they come to life again as members
of a more complicated life, the life of the sentence. Sentences die
and become idioms, idioms ideas, ideas theories, theories philosophies
and religions. Every page of prose is a harvest raised from corpses
and under its flowering abundance dead bodies lie thickly buried. Then
a time comes when these extremely complex systems break up and the
words re-emerge in single units again, but with changed countenances
and expressions, to begin a new series of death-and-life existence. But
the letters themselves, of which all words are comprised, are finally
and forever dead--which is another way of saying they are immortal;
for they do not change as words change from one generation to another.
The “o” in dog does not differ from the “o” in god because “o” has no
longer individuality or meaning. What we call “knowledge” is that which
has become fixed and immortal, that which has ceased to live and have
being and is immutable. Obviously we cannot be said to know a thing
which is susceptible of change, which may differ to-morrow from what
it is to-day. Therefore we can only know what is unknowable, because
we only know what does not exist. This is no empty paradox. It is not
a play on the word “exist.” We may say we know the letters A, B, C, D,
etc., because they are the same for everybody; but they are only the
same for everybody because they are nothing to anybody. If I ask you
what A means to you it is impossible for you to tell me, since it means
no more to you than to me. A in itself is nothing, you can neither
think it nor feel it, you can only state it, and so it is, as I have
said, a fact. There are in all our literature only twenty-six absolute
facts. And they are facts merely because there is no life in them.
In music there are also facts, so there is a part of music which we can
say we know. The modern European knows a certain number of musical
sounds which are the facts of music. They can be described in various
ways, but as European musical facts they are twelve semi-tones repeated
in series between two arbitrarily selected points which are the highest
and the lowest notes comfortably audible to the human ear. Each of
these semi-tones is an arbitrarily selected note or vibration number
chosen out of all the masses of vibrations which we call noises by
virtue of an inner unity, a mathematical symmetry which gives it form
and makes it a musical sound. But even this mathematical symmetry is
a fiction, a thing made by the human mind; and these sounds, like the
letters of the alphabet, have no life or meaning in themselves.
But at this point a reservation must be made. For most, possibly for
all, the letters of the alphabet have a varied character, a character
which derives (_a_) from their different shapes, (_b_) from their
different sounds. The effect of their shape belongs to the world of
graphic art, the effect of their sound belongs to the world of music.
We may think of these impressions as the residuary fossils left by
giantlike primitive emotions which have stalked through those other
worlds. A certain artistic use can be made of them, and indeed we find
that every new wave of artistic expression is preluded by a breakdown
of the abstract combinations of symbols in which the symbols had become
most completely devitalized, and a return to a sense of a meaning, a
colour, a life in the symbol itself. This results in simplification,
which ultimately gives place to a new complication. What is called
progress in art consists mainly of this process. Whether there is
another kind of progress underlying this process must be considered in
another chapter.
Now that we have become clear as to what facts are we can perceive what
knowledge is. But I must prevent the danger of a mere logomachy between
reader and writer by stating at once that I am giving here definitions
of “knowledge” and “life” to which we must both adhere. If any reader
likes to give the name of “true knowledge” to what I call life and says
that what I call knowledge is not true knowledge at all, he is welcome
to do so. But I am going to use my own terms, and I shall continue to
use the term “life” instead of so idiotic a term as “true knowledge.”
The knowledge of music, then, is the knowledge of the facts, and the
facts are, as we saw, the alphabet of music, the twelve artificial
semi-tones of the tempered scale. If a musician knows these and
knows those combinations of them which are called intervals--as the
combinations of letters are called words--he knows what the man knows
who knows the letters of the alphabet and has a vocabulary of words.
He may know them by sight, by sound, or by sight and sound. If only
by sight he is in the position of a man who can read and write but
not speak the words of a foreign language; if only by sound he is in
the position of a man who can speak the words of a foreign language
and understand them when spoken but cannot read or write them. The
reader can make this analogy more precise by subdivisions which I shall
not bother to make here. I will merely point out that the ordinary
auditor, the music-lover who is no musician, knows the facts by sound
only and may so know them with greater or less precision and depth of
impression. That he should not know them by sight is immaterial to his
understanding what he hears, although it prevents his communicating
what he hears to anyone else. He is therefore technically equipped to
hear but not to compose music.
Such knowledge may extend beyond the knowledge of the vocabulary of
words or chords to those more complicated combinations which have
also died and become facts--sentences, idioms, ideas; or, in music,
sequences, harmonies, melodies. All this knowledge represents so much
dead life which can be incorporated into a page of music as it can be
incorporated into a page of prose. When sentences, idioms and ideas
(or sequences, harmonies and melodies) have been used over and over
again so frequently as to have become immediately recognizable they
cease to have meaning; because, as I pointed out at the beginning of
this chapter, having been used so often in so many different contexts
they have shrivelled to that residuum or abstraction which fits the
lot. Having shed all individuality they shed all expression, and what
was once life becomes knowledge. For example, what was a feeling in
Wagner becomes merely a major ninth in Vincent d’Indy. When the music
of Debussy was first heard it was an emotional experience. Presently
the intellect abstracted an element which it found commonly in that
experience, and that element was the whole-tone scale. Then everybody
by using the whole-tone scale could write music which superficially
sounded like Debussy’s; but such music had no meaning or life, it was
dead music, mere knowledge. And Debussy’s music itself tended to become
a perceptive and not an emotional experience. There is a universal
tendency to this intellectual formalizing, stereotyping process which
I have called knowledge or death; and contrasted with it everywhere
is a complementary process, the process of creation or life. But the
one is necessary to the other and all experience is the one becoming
the other. Just as life uses death--as when we eat meat and transform
it into living tissue--so art uses knowledge. Music, therefore, is
experience becoming knowledge and knowledge breaking up and becoming
experience, and its especial nature lies not in the experience but in
the medium. Music is the experience of life and death in _sound_.
Has sound in itself any meaning? I mean by this is there a quality,
virtue, life--call it what you will--specifically in sounds and the
combination of sounds which does not exist elsewhere--in painting,
in sculpture, in architecture, in mathematics? I think there is; but
to go further into this would be to transgress the limits I have set
for myself, for here we touch on perhaps the profoundest problem of
philosophy. I shall be content to throw a little light upon it by
analogy. Experience in _sound_ has an individuality which separates
it from experience in the other arts. This individuality in the arts
is comparable to individuality in animal and vegetable life (the
different and analysable virtues of an elephant, a butterfly, a lily
and a violet) and to personality in human life. It is an implicit and
unexplained factor in all that I shall have to say; but we have to
remember that it is the combining, the making of a harmony of this
character or idiosyncrasy with the composer’s imagination of love which
makes music. It is then that musical _form_ is created. What we call
musical genius is related to this individuality in some mysterious and
as yet unfathomable way and it would seem that there are degrees of
musical genius. But it is only when great musical genius is combined
with great human personality that we get what we may call the great
artist as distinct from the merely great musician.