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CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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[Illustration: =VINCENT d'INDY=]
CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS
BY
DANIEL GREGORY MASON
AUTHOR OF "BEETHOVEN AND HIS FORERUNNERS," "THE
ROMANTIC COMPOSERS," "FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS," ETC.
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1918.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
"We live," wrote Stevenson to Will H. Low in 1884, "in a rum age of
music without airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty,
American wood-engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point
etchings that ought to have been mezzo-tints.... So long as an artist
is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher's
needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and
plaudits shower along with roses. But any plain man who tries to follow
the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure.... He
will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts."
What would Stevenson say, I wonder, could he witness the condition to
which this confusion of aims, rapidly spreading since he wrote, has
now reduced all the arts, and perhaps especially music? "Painting
with a flute" hardly sounds fantastic any longer, now that symphonies
have given place to symphonic "poems," orchestral "sketches," and tone
"pictures," and program music has taken the place of supremacy in the
art of tones that magazine illustration occupies among graphic arts.
Anyone who tries nowadays to write mere music--expressive of emotion
through beauty--is more than ever "a commonplace person." The "persons
of parts" are those who give it the quaint local color of folk-songs,
like Mr. Percy Grainger; or who make of it an agreeable accessory of
dance or stage picture, like Ravel and Strawinsky, or of colored lights
and perfumes, like Scriabine; or who spin it into mathematical formulæ
as a spider spins web, like Reger; or who use it as a vehicle for _a
priori_ intellectual theories, like Schoenberg, or as noise for a nerve
stimulant, like Mr. Leo Ornstein.
The reader will look in vain for these names, in recent years on
everyone's lips, in the table of contents of this book on "Contemporary
Composers." In the work of most of them there is, indeed, much of
charm or interest, of vividness, perhaps of permanent power. But the
time when critical appraisal of them can be anything like final has not
yet arrived; and meanwhile there is in their centrifugal tendencies,
I believe, a real menace to the best interests of music. One and all,
they look away from that inner emotion "to which alone," as Wagner
said, "can music give a voice, and music only." They all represent in
one way or another that trivializing of the great art, that degradation
of it to sensationalism, luxury, or mere illustration, some of the
historic causes of which I have tried to suggest in the introduction.
No sincere lover of music can regard with anything but the gravest
apprehensions such tendencies toward decadence.
Fortunately these are, however, powerfully counteracted, even now, by
more constructive forces, carrying forward the evolution of music in
and for itself which was the main concern of the great elder masters
who regarded it as a supreme emotional language--Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms, Wagner, Franck. It is the representatives of this sounder
tradition (despite the programmism of Strauss and the sybaritism of
Debussy) that I have selected for discussion here. They have also the
further advantage of having been long enough before the public to have
vindicated already their claims to permanent place in musical history.
The present volume, it may be added, completes the series of studies of
great creative musicians from Palestrina to the present day begun in
"Beethoven and His Forerunners," "The Romantic Composers," and "From
Grieg to Brahms." For permission to reprint the essays it contains,
acknowledgment is made to the editors of the _Musical Quarterly_, the
_Outlook_, and the _New Music Review_.
D. G. M.
NEW YORK,
January 26, 1918.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION: DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC 3
II. RICHARD STRAUSS 43
III. SIR EDWARD ELGAR 93
IV. CLAUDE DEBUSSY 133
V. VINCENT d'INDY 153
VI. MUSIC IN AMERICA 229
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VINCENT d'INDY _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
RICHARD STRAUSS 45
SIR EDWARD ELGAR 95
CLAUDE DEBUSSY 135
VINCENT d'INDY AS A YOUNG MAN 155
I
INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC
I
INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC
Lovers and critics of modern music who are at the same time interested
students of the social changes which have preceded and accompanied its
growth must often ask themselves whether there is any deep connection
of cause and effect between the two sets of phenomena, or whether they
merely happened to take place at the same time. Have the important
social transformations of the nineteenth century reached so far in
their influence as to the music of our time? Has sociology any light to
throw upon musical art? The question raises a problem as difficult as
it is fascinating; and the suggestions which follow are to be taken as
guesses and hints, intended to provoke fertile thought, rather than as
constituting in any sense a finished theory.
I
The change in the nature of the musical public that has taken place
during the nineteenth century has been gradual but far-reaching. The
essence of it is expressed by saying that at the end of the eighteenth
century music was in the hands of the nobility and gentry, and that at
the beginning of the twentieth it is in those of all the people. Under
feudal conditions it was organized by the patronage system according to
the tastes of the aristocratic few. The thirty most fruitful years of
Haydn's life were spent in the employ of Prince Esterhazy; Mozart, a
skilled pianist as well as composer, was less dependent on his patron,
but his life was probably shortened by the hardships he had to face
after he had broken with him; Beethoven, staunch democrat though he
was, realized what he owed his four patrons, Archduke Rudolph, and
Princes Lobkowitz, Kinsky, and Lichnowsky, and wrote, after the death
of some of them had reduced the value of his annuity: "In order to
gain time for a great composition, I must always previously scrawl
away a good deal for the sake of money.... If my salary were not so
far reduced as not to be a salary at all, I should write nothing but
symphonies ... and church music, or at most quartets." No doubt the
patronage system had its faults and abuses, which have been quite
adequately discussed by critics; the fact remains that under it was
done the supreme creative work of the golden age of music. Greater
than any of its material advantages was the spiritual homogeneity of
the group who practised it. By excluding the lower classes, however
unjustly, they achieved, though artificially, a unity of feeling that
could not then have been achieved otherwise; and as art is in essence
an emotional reaction this unity of feeling provided a soil in which
its seeds could grow.
But with the French Revolution and the passing of feudalism this old
order perished. The proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity,
paving the way for individualistic competition, introduced the epoch of
industrialism and capitalism, in which art, like everything else, was
taken out of the hands of a privileged class, and made theoretically
accessible to all. As the appreciation of art requires, however, mental
and emotional experience, discipline, and refining, a process which
takes time, what actually happened was that those gradually emerging
from poverty through industrialism--the workers themselves and their
children and grandchildren--availed themselves much more slowly and
timidly of these spiritual privileges than of the material ones. There
remained over from the feudal world a nucleus of cultivated people,
sufficiently homogeneous in feeling to retain a standard of taste,
sufficiently numerous to exert an influence on production: these
were the guardians of the better traditions. They were gradually but
steadily interpenetrated and overrun by the emergents, at first in a
minority but rapidly becoming the majority, and remaining, of course,
unavoidably far more backward in artistic feeling than in economic
independence and social ambition. Thus was introduced a formidable
cleavage in the musical public, the majority breaking off sharply by
their childlike crudity from the more disciplined minority.
The situation was further complicated by the presence of a third class,
the idle rich, becoming more numerous under capitalism. It may be
doubted whether their attitude towards art was qualitatively different
in any important respect from that of the frivolous nobility under
feudalism. Both groups regarded music either with complete indifference
or else as an amusement, a plaything, a fad; both exercised an
influence which through its essential artificiality was potentially
perhaps even more baleful than that of the honest crudity of what
we have called the emergent class, though actually less disastrous
because they were a small minority instead of the majority. But the
contribution of this group to the confusion and disorganization
characteristic of art under democracy was greater than that of the
feudal nobles, because their relation to society as a whole counted
more. When they were placed by the emergence of the democratic majority
in a vigorous opposition of attitude to the bulk of the people their
influence no longer remained largely negative, but made positively
for cleavage and disunion. Thus the unity of social emotion on which
art so largely depends for a healthy universality was still further
disrupted.
We find, then, under democracy, not a fairly homogeneous musical
public with emotionally a single point of view, such as existed
under feudalism, but a division into a well-meaning but crude
majority and two minorities, one cultivated, the other frivolous:
all three, but especially the two extremes, held apart by profound
differences of feeling. Despite the inevitability and the desirability
of democratization as the only path away from slavery, such a
disorganization, even if temporary, must evidently, while it lasts,
work serious injuries to art. It is worth while to try, taking frankly
at first the attitude of the devil's advocate, to trace a few of the
more striking of these injuries as they show themselves in contemporary
music.
II
Of the "emergents" who constitute the most novel element in the
contemporary situation, the well-meaning but crude listeners who form
a numerically overwhelming majority of our concert-goers, the effect
may be described, in most general terms, as being to put a premium on
all that is easily grasped, obvious, primitive, at the expense of the
subtler, more highly organized effects of art--on sensation as against
thought, on facile sentiment as against deep feeling, on extrinsic
association as against intrinsic beauty. Mentally, emotionally, and
æsthetically children, they naturally demand the childlike, if not the
childish.
There seems to be something far deeper than accident in the coincidence
of the rise about 1830, that is, about a generation after the French
Revolution, under Berlioz and Liszt, of that program music which is
generally acknowledged to be peculiarly characteristic of our period,
with the invasion of concert-halls by masses of these childlike
listeners, as eager for the stories that music might be made to suggest
as they were unprepared to appreciate its more intrinsic beauties.
They were drawn by the "program" before they grew up with the "music."
Lacking the concentration needed to hold all but the simplest melodies
together in their minds, pathetically incapable of the far greater
range and precision of attention required to hear synthetically a
complex work like an overture or a symphony, they were puzzled or bored
by Beethoven, and in their helplessness to follow a musical thread
could only grope in the dark until they found a dramatic one. Such
a clue in the labyrinth was the "program." They hailed it with the
delight of the comparatively unmusical person in opera, who considers
it the highest type of music because it supplies him with the largest
apparatus of non-musical commentaries (scenery, gestures, words) on the
music he cannot understand. Program music, a sort of idealized opera
with scenery and actors left to the imagination, fulfilled the same
indispensable service for the novice in the concert-room.
The immense popularity of the program idea, from that day to this,
is evidence of its complete fitness to the needs of its audience.
It says to them, in effect: "You have little 'ear' for music, and
take no more joy in the highly organized melodies of a Beethoven
symphony or a Bach fugue, with their infinite subtlety of tonal and
rhythmic relationships, than in the most trivial tunes. Never mind: I
will give you two or three short motives, clearly labeled, that you
cannot help recognizing. This one will mean 'love,' that 'jealousy,'
that 'death,' and so on.... You are not fascinated by, because you
are unable to follow, the creative imagination by which such masters
as these build whole worlds of musical beauty out of a few simple
themes--an imagination as truly creative as that which carried Newton
from the falling apple to the law of gravitation, or directed the
infinite patient delving in detail of a Pasteur or a Darwin. Never
mind. Remember the story, and you will know that during the love scene
the composer must be developing the 'love' motive.... You are even more
indifferent to the broader balance of part with part, the symmetry and
coöperation of all in the whole, harder to grasp just as the concinnity
of a Greek temple as a whole is harder to feel than the charm of a bit
of sculpture here or the texture of the marble there. Never mind. I
will give you a structure in sections, like a sky-scraper. Section will
follow section as event follows event in the plot.... In short, the
story shall be 'All you know, and all you need to know.' It shall be a
straw that will keep you from drowning as the inundation of the music
passes over you, and that will save you the trouble of learning to
swim."
Of course, this does not mean that music of a high order cannot
be associated with a program, or that the two cannot be not only
coexistent but fruitfully coöperative. They are so in many a
representative modern work--in Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration,"
for instance, or d'Indy's "Istar," or Dukas's "L'Apprenti Sorcier,"
or Rachmaninoff's "Island of the Dead." What is meant is that the
program idea derives both its popularity and its peculiar menace in
large measure from the stress it places on the appeal to something
outside music--to association, that is--at the expense of the appeal
to music itself, and thus from the official sanction it seems to give
to what is essentially an unmusical conception of music. The program
school of composers is the first school that has not merely tolerated
but encouraged, elaborated, and rationalized the conviction of the
unmusical that music is to be valued chiefly not for itself, but for
something else. How dangerous such a compromise with the majority
may be, both to public taste and to the composer, is startlingly,
not to say tragically, illustrated by the steady tendency of the
greatest master of the school, Richard Strauss, to become more and
more trivially "realistic" with each new work, and by the complaisance
of the public in paying him vast sums of money for thus progressively
corrupting it. In every one of his symphonic poems, from the exuberant
"Don Juan" (1888) to the surprisingly banal "Alpensymphonie" (1915),
glorious pages of music have alternated with silly tricks of imitation,
as for instance the splendid development of the husband theme in the
"Symphonia Domestica" with the bawling of the baby; but in the latest
we have the maximum of imitation and the minimum of music. Apart from
their gorgeous orchestral dress its themes are with few exceptions
commonplace, dull, and pretentious. Except in one or two passages
they are not imaginatively or significantly developed. On the other
hand there is no end of "tone-painting," much of it a revamping of
the distant-hunting-horns, rustling-leaves, and warbling-bird-calls
which have been timeworn theatrical properties of music ever since
Raff's "Im Walde" and Wagner's "Waldweben"; some of it more original,
like the pictures of sunrise and sunset with which the work begins and
ends. In these associatively vivid but musically amorphous passages
melody, harmony, rhythm, key disappear in a strange opaque cloud of
tone, realistically representing night--the kind of night to which the
German wit compared Hegel's Absolute--"in which all cows are black."
The same childish realism which made Wagner show us his dragon on the
stage instead of in our own imaginations introduces a wind-machine in
the storm and sheep bells in the mountain pasture. In all this we see
an artist who was once capable of writing the introduction and coda of
"Death and Transfiguration" taking his art into the nursery to play
games with.
But the effect of music on childlike audiences, indisposed to active
mental effort and all for taking music passively like a kind of tonal
Turkish bath, reaches its logical extreme not in the program music of
which Strauss is the most famous exponent, but in that superficially
different but fundamentally related movement known as impressionism,
which is led by the other most discussed composer of our day, Debussy.
Strikingly contrasted as are these two leaders of contemporary music
in temperament, in artistic aims, in technical methods, their æsthetic
theories are at one in the slight demands they make on the attention of
an inevitably inattentive public. Both encourage the listener to look
away from the music itself to something that it suggests to him. But
impressionism goes further than programmism. May not those people, it
says, who find organic melody, development, and form fatiguing, and to
whom you give a program to help them out--may they not find the program
fatiguing, too? May not its being prescribed offend their sense of
"freedom"? Why exact of them the effort to follow even the story?
Better to give them simply a title, as vague and elusive as possible,
and foster the mood of day-dreaming thus suggested by avoiding all
definite melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic features in the music, while
enhancing its purely sensuous charm to the utmost degree possible.
Such, carried out with extraordinary talent, is the artistic creed
of Debussy. Just as programmism appeals from music to association,
impressionism appeals to sentiment, to fancy, and to the phantasmagoric
reveries upon which they are ever so ready to embark.
It is noteworthy, moreover, that both programmism and impressionism,
however systematically they may minimize their demands on the
intelligence of their audience, do not abate, but rather tend
constantly to increase, their ministration to its sense. Indeed,
they systematically maximize their sensuous appeal; and though their
characteristic methods of making this appeal differ as widely as their
general attitudes, that of programmism being extensive and that of
impressionism intensive, the insistence of both on sensuous rather
than on intellectual or emotional values is surely one of the most
indicative, and it may be added one of the most disquieting, symptoms
of the condition of modern music.
The method of the program school in general, and of Strauss in
particular, is extensive in that it aims at boundless piling up of
means, a formidable accumulation of sonorities for the besieging of
the ear. Its motto is that attributed to the German by the witty
Frenchman: "Plenty of it." Berlioz, the pioneer of the movement,
with his "mammoth orchestras," and his prescription, in his requiem,
of four separate brass bands, one at each corner of the church,
and eight pairs of kettle-drums in addition to bass drum, gong,
and cymbals; Mahler, commencing a symphony with a solo melody for
eight horns; Strauss, with his twelve horns behind the scenes in the
"Alpensymphonie," to say nothing of wind-machine, thunder-machine,
sheep bells, and a whole regiment of more usual instruments--all these
disciples of the extensive or quantitative method aim to dazzle,
stun, bewilder, and overwhelm. They can be recognized by their abuse
of the brass and percussion groups, their childlike faith that if a
noise is only loud enough it becomes noble. They have a tendency,
too, to mass whole groups of instruments on a single "part," as
Tschaikowsky, for instance, so often does with his strings, whatever
the sacrifice of interesting detail, for the sake of brilliance and
_éclat_. To some extent, of course, all this is justified, even
necessitated, by the vast size of modern concert-halls; but a candid
observer can hardly deny that it is systematically overdone in the
interests of sensationalism. The same tendency is observable also in
other than orchestral music. The piano, treated with such admirable
restraint by Chopin and by Debussy, has been forced by Liszt and his
followers toward jangling, crashing sonorities that can penetrate the
most callous sensorium. The equipment of organs with "solo stops"
and other devices for the tickling of idle ears has turned the king
of instruments too often into a holiday harlequin. Even the string
quartet, last rallying-ground of music against the ubiquitous
onslaught of sensationalism, begins in many modern scores, with their
constant double stops and tremolos, and their "effects" of mutes,
pizzicato, "ponticello," "col legno," and the rest, to sound like a
rather poor, thin orchestra, striving for a variety and fulness of
color beyond its capacity.
The fallacy of the extensive method is that it is trying to satisfy a
craving essentially insatiable. Such an appetite for mere quantity of
sound grows by what it feeds on; luxury breeds ennui; and, as every
sensualist knows to his sorrow, there never can be "plenty of it."
A sense of this futility inherent in the extensive method as it has
been practised in modern Germany and elsewhere has led another school,
chiefly modern French, to try for similar results by a different
method, which may be called the intensive. Such a composer as Debussy,
who may here be taken as typical, aims, to be sure, primarily at
sensuous rather than at mental or spiritual values, but achieves them
by qualitative refinement and contrast rather than by quantitative
accumulation, and avoids exaggeration in favor of a delicate, almost
finical, understatement and suggestiveness. While sonority is as
much his god as Strauss's, he is the connoisseur of subtle, elusive
sonorities, each to be sipped like a wine of rarest bouquet, rather
than an enthusiast of the full-bodied brew. The subtlety of the
methods often leads his admirers to claim a superior "spirituality"
in the aims, but this is a mistake. His school is more spiritual
than Strauss's only as a _gourmet_ is more spiritual than a glutton.
Both schools prefer sensation to thought and emotion, association to
intrinsic beauty, color to line. The difference is that "Pelléas et
Mélisande" is the violet or ultraviolet end of the spectrum of which
"Salome" is the red.
A curious by-product of the cult of the elusive sonority is the
exaggerated, the almost morbid, interest that has emanated from
modern France in novelty of harmonic idiom. One would suppose, to
read many contemporary critics, that the sole criterion of a good
composer depended on his use of some recondite scheme of harmony,
whether based on the whole-tone scale, on the mediæval modes, on
new applications of chromaticism, on the "harmonic polyphony" of
Casella and others, or on the arbitrary asperities of the Italian
noise-makers and Mr. Leo Ornstein. If you wish to be considered an
"ultra-modernist" you may do quite as you please, both as regards
commission and omission, in rhythm, melody, polyphony, form, provided
only you are harmonically eccentric. This insistence on harmony, on the
momentary tone-combination, suggests a predominant concern with the
sensuous side of music which is highly significant as a symptom. It is
a stressing of that which the senses alone can perceive from moment
to moment, without any aid from memory, imagination, comparison, and
other mental acts required for the perception of rhythm and melody. In
short, it is an evidence of the same materialistic tendency to rely on
the physical rather than the mental appeal, on the investiture of the
idea rather than on the idea itself, which we noted in the extensive
method. Whatever their differences, both methods are thus at one in the
tendency to use materials as makeshifts for thought. Mahler failing
to get with eight horns the effect that Schubert got with two--plus a
great melodic idea--at the opening of his C Major Symphony, Debussy
confectioning a banal bit of tune in muted string or pastoral flute
sonorities with piquant harmonies--both are appealing, with varying
success, from our minds and hearts to our auditory nerves. The
increasing measure of success attending such appeals shows vividly the
numerical advantage that the hungry or curious auditory nerves have, in
the modern democratic audience, over the enlightened minds and hearts.
III
And indeed, how should we expect it to be otherwise? Enlightened
minds and hearts, we must remember, are the finest and rarest fruits
of civilization, to be cultivated only under conditions of decent
leisure, fair physical and mental health, and free association with
"the best that has been done and thought in the world." When they
are so rare even in the class that has all these advantages, how
shall we expect them to be common among those living either in an
industrial servitude that for monotony of toil is almost worse than
chattel slavery, or by clerical and other secondary work that through
the modern specialization and subdivision of labor condemns each
individual to a more or less mechanical repetition of a few small acts
through the larger part of his working hours, a routine the relation
of which to human life as a whole he often does not see? Writers on
sociology are beginning to realize[1] that such conditions of work
inevitably produce a morbid psychological condition in the worker,
dulling his mind by the meaningless drudgery and depressing his body
and nerves by fatigue-poisons, so that even in his few hours of leisure
his perfectly natural seeking for pleasure does not take entirely
normal paths. Too exhausted to respond to delicate shades and subtle
relationships, whether in sensuous or mental objects, his jaded nerves
cry out for violent stimuli, for sharp contrasts, for something to goad
and whip them into new activity. This craving for violent stimuli is
the essential feature of the fatigue-psychology. Now, is it not highly
suggestive that the age of industrialism is also the age of a hundred
goads for tired nerves--of the newspaper headline, the dime-novel and
"penny-thriller," the lurid moving-picture drama, ragtime and the
"revue"? And is it not possible that the sensationalism of so much
modern music is only another evidence, on a somewhat higher plane, of
the working of this same psychology of fatigue?
Again, these overworn nerves of ours have within a comparatively short
period had brought to bear upon them, through the progress of modern
invention with its cheap printing, quick transportation, and long
distance communication, a thousand distractions. No longer insulated
from the outlying world, so to speak, by time and space, as were our
more simply-living ancestors, we read, hear, and see as much in a day
as they did in a week. The inevitable result has been a diffusion of
attention fatal to concentrated thought except for the most resolute,
breeding in the average man mental indigestion and habits of disorder
and impatience, and gradually evolving the characteristic modern
type--quick, sharp, and shallow. Outward distraction has thus added its
influence to inner weariness to urge our art away from quiet thought
towards ever noisier solicitation. For thought always depends on
simplification, on inhibition: in order to think we must neglect the
given-by-sense, as we see strikingly in the case of the absent-minded,
in order to attend to the given-by-memory-and-imagination; and
over-stimulation of sense is therefore just as hostile to thought as
the depression of the higher mental faculties through fatigue. Thus it
is highly characteristic of our prevailing attitude that we strive,
not for elimination, but for accumulation, distraction, dissipation.
The formula is always mental apathy, physical and nervous excitement.
Not having the joy of the mastery which comes only through thought,
because we lack both concentration and favorable opportunity to
discipline ourselves, we seek the stimulus of constant change. We
digest nothing, taste everything; "eclecticism" is our euphemism for
spreading our attention very wide and very thin; and the nightmare that
you soon uncover under all our art is not that our minds may become
bewildered (for that they are already), but that our senses may become
jaded--which of course they do.
Still another line of influence that may be traced from general modern
conditions to the peculiar qualities of modern art concerns especially
the third of the classes described above, the capitalist class. Here
again we find a morbid condition, a distortion of wholesome human
contacts; but here instead of the impediment of meaningless drudgery,
it is the incubus of a fruitless, selfish idleness. Cut off from the
normal outlet of energy in useful work, the luxurious classes become
pampered and bored, and develop through very vacuity a perverted taste
for the unusual, the queer, the generally upside down and backside
to. Every season sees a new crop of the "isms" thus produced, the
ephemera of the world of art, which live a day and die as soon as they
lose their one interest, novelty. Of all manifestations of so-called
"art" they are the most sterile, the most completely devoid of
vital relation to any real impulse. They might be ignored did they
not complicate still further an already complicated situation, and
were they not an additional, though a largely negative, illustration
of the close causative relation between general social conditions
and artistic expression that our discussion is making more and more
evident. Fortunately they produce little enduring effect beyond their
own narrow circles; for as they spring not from any vital interest,
but only from an unguided curiosity and desire for excitement, they
take mutually opposing forms and largely cancel each other. Thus, for
instance, fads for very old or for very new music, directed as they are
toward the mere age or the mere newness, and having no concern with the
quality of the music itself, leave the actual public taste just where
it would have been had they never arisen. Nevertheless the diversion of
so much energy, which might under better conditions find an outlet in
fruitful activity, to a sterile posture-making, is uneconomical and to
be regretted.
So far, we have been looking chiefly from the point of view of the
devil's advocate, at the injurious influences on contemporary music
that can be traced with some degree of plausibility to the capitalistic
and industrial social system of the nineteenth century. Noting the
sensational bent, whether extensively or intensively expressing itself,
of the chief contemporary schools, we have asked ourselves whether
it could be attributed in some measure to the kind of demand made by
an audience dulled by overwork at monotonous tasks and depressed by
fatigue-poisons. Remarking the multiplicity of fads and "isms" by which
our art is confused, we have asked how far these might be attributed
to the cravings of a group whose normal appetites have been perverted
by luxury and self-centered isolation. All of these evils, we have
insisted, are aggravated in their effects by the distractions under
which we live. It is now time, however, taking a more positive view and
attempting a more constructive theory, to ask how these evils may be
combated, what more hopeful elements already exist in the situation,
and what others may be expected to develop in the future.
IV
First of all, it may be suggested that, so far as these evils are
fairly attributable to the social conditions of the nineteenth
century, they may fairly be expected to be mitigated somewhat by those
changes which already seem probable in those of the twentieth. The
capitalistic era seems likely to be followed by an era of coöperation
or communism; and in countless ways such a change must eventually be
deeply revivifying to all forms of art. Of course, it is only too easy
to indulge in baseless dreams of the results upon art of a millennium
brought about in this way, only too easy to forget that we are only at
the threshold of such new systems of organization, and that they may go
the wrong way instead of the right. All we can safely say is that if
they do go the right way they will rescue art, among many other human
interests, from the condition to which much of it has been prostituted
under capitalism.
Let us suppose, for instance, that something like what Mr. H. G.
Wells calls the Great State[2] eventually results from the troublous
reconstructions through which we are living. The Great State is only
one of three possibilities he sees in the further adjustment of the
leisure class and the labor class of our present order. The first
possibility (and a disagre vivid one it must seem to all thoughtful
Americans) is that "the leisure class may degenerate into a waster
class," and the labor class "may degenerate into a sweated, overworked,
violently resentful and destructive rebel class," and that a social
_débâcle_ may result. The second possibility is that the leisure
class "may become a Governing Class (with waster elements) in an
unprogressive Bureaucratic Servile State," in which the other class
appears as a "controlled, regimented, and disciplined Labour Class."
The third possibility is that the leisure class "may become the whole
community of the Great State, working under various motives and
inducements, but not constantly, nor permanently, nor unwillingly,"
while the labor class is "rendered needless by a general labour
conscription, together with a scientific organization of production,
and so re-absorbed by reendowment into the Leisure Class of the Great
State."
The first two of these possible conditions would be fatal to art,
one through anarchy and loss of standards, the other through
conventionalization. The third would bring about a renascence, after
a troubled period of conflicting standards and of readjustments such
as we find ourselves in to-day. The main elements in such a progress
would be, first, the gradual refining, deepening, and vitalizing of
the taste of the general public under the influence of increasing
leisure, health, self-respect, and education; second, the cutting
off of extravagance, luxury, and faddism in the wealthier classes
by a wholesome pressure of enforced economy; third, increasing
solidarity of feeling in the whole social fabric through such a mutual
_rapprochement_, giving the indispensable emotional basis for vital art.
There are already some encouraging evidences of such developments. Much
preparatory work towards the formation of better standards of public
taste has been unobtrusively done, at least in our larger cities, by
free lectures and cheap recitals and concerts. Two disadvantages,
however, have often attended such work, reducing its benefits. One
has come from the common fallacy that what is done for the many
must be done so as to please the many--a view often supposed to be
"democratic." Emerson was more truly democratic when he told us to
"cease this idle prating about the masses," and set about extracting
individuals from them; for real democracy never forgets that the
majority are always inferior, and its aim must be to give the superior
minority a chance to make their influence felt. In other words, to
level down to the people is to vulgarize rather than to popularize.
Theodore Thomas set a model for the conductor of popular concerts in
the best sense, for all time, when he replied to one of his orchestra
players who said that people did not like Wagner: "Then we must play
him until they do."
The second disadvantage is even harder to avoid, even for
administrators of the highest standards, because it seems to be almost
intrinsic in this kind of work. It comes from the passive nature of
the people's participation. Giving even the best concerts seems often
too much like handing the people music at the end of a stick--"Take
it or leave it"; naturally, having so little choice in its selection,
they often leave it; and even when they try their best to take it,
they cannot get so much out of it as if they were actively helping to
produce it. This is the reason that more active forms of music-making,
even if crude, like the music school settlement work and the community
choruses that have been making such strides in recent years, seem so
full of promise. The singing in the public schools, too, would have
done far more than it has, had not the standards been debased, as Mr.
T. W. Surette has ably shown,[3] to the childish tastes, not of the
children themselves, who could appreciate better things, but of their
dull and routine-enslaved elders. Yet here again we must beware of a
too easy optimism.
There is no magic about the community chorus that can suddenly change
bad taste to good. Too often we seem here, as in all other activities
for popularizing music, to oscillate helplessly between two evils.
On the one hand is the crudity of actual taste: the majority prefer
ragtime and the musical comedies to folk-songs or the simple classics.
On the other hand is the apathy that comes of prescriptions from
outsiders: musical activity that is not spontaneous is sterile.
Progress seems to come painfully and uncertainly from a constant
zigzagging between these two evils, getting gradually away from them as
the taste of the minority exercises its persuasiveness.
As for the wealthier classes, it must be confessed that there are
so far few evidences of any permanent displacement of luxury and
artificiality by saner and simpler tastes. Yet there are even here
one or two hopeful signs, of which the most conspicuous is the recent
enthusiasm for folk-songs. This is rather too good to be altogether
true. It is hard to believe in the complete sincerity of those who go
into the same rhapsodies over a perfectly simple and rather crude
peasant song that a year or two ago they reserved for the exquisite
day-dreams of Debussy or the exotic inconsequentialities of Cyril
Scott. Moreover, the appreciation of folk-song, though a normal and
indeed indispensable stage in musical education, is only the very first
phase of initiation to the deeper and subtler beauties of musical art,
and not a stage to be dwelt in with complacency. Yet so far as it goes,
and in the measure of its sincerity, the interest in folk-song is of
good augury. It means concern with melody, always and everywhere the
soul of music, rather than with externalities like orchestral color, or
harmonic "effects," or quasi-poetic associations and programs. It means
sympathy with simple and broadly human, universal emotions, such as
inspire the greatest as well as such primitive music. It may mean the
beginning of a real and eventually a developed taste for good music.
And it is a good foundation for such a _rapprochement_ of all classes
of music-lovers as may come, we may hope, with the coming of the Great
State.
If our cursory examination of the general tendencies of our day reveals
no striking preponderance of good over bad, shows us no movement of
any majority that we can acclaim without qualification, we may now
remind ourselves for our comfort that this has always been the case
in all times, and that there is indeed a curious illusion, resolvable
only by close scrutiny, that makes our own time seem worse to us, in
comparison with others, than it really is. We have to remember that the
baser elements of our own time make a much greater impression on us,
in relation to the finer ones, than those of the past. A living fool
can make as much noise as a wise man (if not far more); a dead one is
silent forever. The gold of Beethoven's day, of which he was himself
the purest nugget, comes down to us bright and untarnished, so that we
forget all the dross that has been thrown on the scrapheap of time. Our
own gold is almost hidden from us by the glitter of the tinsel.
"The world of music," says Sir Charles Stanford,[4] "is not
substantially different from what it has been. It has always exalted
those of its contemporary composers who dealt in frills and furbelows
above those who considered the body more important than its clothes.
Only a few wise heads knew of the existence of Bach. Rossini was rated
by the mass of the public far higher than Weber, Spohr than Beethoven,
Meyerbeer than Wagner. Simrock said that he made Böhm pay for Brahms."
It is always necessary to wait for the winnowing process of time before
we can see the true proportions of an age. Hence we can never see our
own age in its true proportions, and since the second- and third-rate
elements in it are ever more acclaimed by the majority than the
first-rate, we always see it worse than it is. We live, so to speak, in
the glare of noon-day, and cannot see the true coloring of our world,
which will appear only at evening. Hence in every age the tragi-comedy
is repeated of acclaiming the mediocre and the meretricious, and
ignoring worth. The Gounods always patronize the Francks. The answer of
philosophy is Emerson's:
"Ideas impregnable: numbers are nothing. Who knows what was the
population of Jerusalem? 'Tis of no importance whatever. We know that
the Saint and a handful of people held their great thoughts to the
death; and the mob resisted and killed him: and, at the hour, fancied
they were up and he was down; when, at that very moment, the fact was
the reverse. The principles triumphed and had begun to penetrate the
world. And 'tis never of any account how many or how rich people resist
a thought."
Our final question, then, resolves itself to this: Are there in the
music of our day, known or unknown to the majority, any such vital
"thoughts," based on principles that a discerning criticism may see
even now to have "triumphed and begun to penetrate the world"? Is there
music being written to-day which is modern, not through its pampering
to jaded sense or dulled intelligence, but through its intuition and
expression of the deeper emotional experience and spiritual aspiration
of our time? Is there music, in short, not only seductive to the ear
but beautiful to the mind? To answer such a question intelligently
we shall have to take account of certain truths which the foregoing
discussion has tended to establish, and which may now be made explicit.
Thought, emotion, all that we call the spiritual side of music,
expresses itself not through sonorous or harmonic effects, primarily
sensuous in appeal, but through melody and rhythm and their interplay
and elaboration in so-called thematic development. In truly great music
we remember, not such and such a bit of tone-color, not this or that
sonority, but the soaring or tender curve of the themes, their logical
yet ever new unfolding, their embodiment, in the whole composition, of
richest variety with completest final unity. The man in the street is
absolutely right in feeling that music succeeds or fails by its tunes;
his limitation arises in his conception of "tune."
Again, since the creation and manipulation of great "tunes" or themes,
unlike the hitting off of sonorous effects or the discovery of _rococo_
harmonies, comes never by luck, but only through a discipline based on
the assimilation of all that is best in music, we always find that
all really fine music is firmly founded upon tradition, and reaches
its roots into the past, while blossoming, so to speak, into the
future. The artist, despite the popular supposition to the contrary,
depends on his forerunners quite as closely as the scientist. You can
no more write a solid sonata without knowing Beethoven than you can
work efficiently in biology in ignorance of Darwin. Yet on the other
hand this assimilation of the past has to produce, not an academic and
sterile complacency with what is, but an equipped and curious advance
upon what is to be: the artist, like the scientist, brings all his
learning to the test in acts of creative imagination, leaps in the
dark. Thus artistic advance may be figured as like the shooting of
frost crystals on a window pane; never is there a crystal that is not
firmly attached by traceable lines to the main body; yet no one can
prophesy whither each fine filament may strike out in its individual
adventure. The great artist is bound to the past by love and docility,
to the future by a faith that overleaps convention.
Looked at in the light of these considerations, contemporary music
presents a scheme of light and shade somewhat different from that
ordinarily accepted. If some high lights are overshadowed, others
seem to shine more brightly. There is plenty of hopeful promise
for the future. Leaving aside the sounder elements in Strauss and
Debussy, in whom there is so much of the richness of decay, we shall
find the chief centers of truly creative activity perhaps in three
composers who in their differing ways and degrees carry on the great
tradition: Rachmaninoff in Russia, Elgar in England, and d'Indy in
France. Each of these men reaches back roots to the primal sources of
musical life--Bach and Beethoven: Rachmaninoff through Tschaikowsky,
the eclectic Elgar through Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, and others,
and d'Indy through Wagner and Franck. Each, as we see in such modern
classics as "Toteninsel," the A flat Symphony, and "Istar," can create,
in settings of modern opulence of color, nobly beautiful forms,
melodies that live and soar in a spiritual heaven. All, too, though
in varying degrees, move on as creators should toward the unknown.
Here the Frenchman has perhaps, with his characteristic lucidity and
logic, something the advantage of the more sensuous Slav and the
more convention-beset Anglo-Saxon. Rachmaninoff, for all his warmth,
does not always escape the vulgarity of Tschaikowsky, and Elgar
cannot always forget the formulæ of oratorio. But in d'Indy, with his
untrammeled experimental attitude toward all modern possibilities,
we have an influence destined steadily to grow and already clearly
suggesting an epoch combining the best of the old ways with new ones at
which we can for the present only guess.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See, for example, "The Great Society," by Graham Wallas, and "Work
and Wealth," by J. A. Hobson.
[2] "Social Forces in England and America," by H. G. Wells, New York
and London, 1914.
[3] In an article on Public-School Music, Atlantic Monthly, December,
1916.
[4] "Pages from an Unwritten Diary," C. V. Stanford.
II
RICHARD STRAUSS
[Illustration: =RICHARD STRAUSS=]
II
RICHARD STRAUSS
I