measure of his ability, a world language should ever content himself
with a Negro or Indian dialect? It would be so perhaps did we not
consider that, in order to speak the world language of cosmopolitan
music as it exists to-day, one must spend years in laborious discipline
and in obscurity, while any tyro can make a certain effect and gain a
certain prominence by stammering in an idiom strongly enough tinctured
with local color. Vanity is the immemorial enemy of art; if the itch
to be conspicuous once infect him, the artist forgets all those subtle
adaptations, those difficult reconcilements, which were formerly
his passion, and makes a crude effect that appeals much more to the
primitive minds of the masses. And this he may do quite unconsciously
and in the sincere belief that he is pursuing the highest ideals. In
the presence of the immediate good, of recognition and acclaim, it is
pitifully easy to forget the remote better, the broader, finer, subtler
beauty that is not yet understood.
But if the picturesque, the quaint, the piquant, is by nature more
quick to appeal than the beautiful, it is also more short-lived. For
this reason those writers in all ages and countries who depend largely
on local color are promptly acclaimed and soon forgotten, while those
who aim at the more universal human qualities win gradually a place
that proves permanent. Bret Harte was doubtless considered more
"American" by his own generation than Emerson. Shakespeare is far less
English than Defoe, Dante is not so notably Italian, or Goethe so
notably German, as are many lesser men. Or, to come back to music,
where are now the Russian "nationalists" who excluded Tschaikowsky the
"cosmopolite" from their magic circle? For a while we listened to their
melancholy Russian cadences with fascinated interest, in spite of their
crude harmonization, their incoherent form, their lack of instinct for
style, because we were pleased with the novelty. Now the novelty has
worn off, and for human nature's daily food we find Tschaikowsky, who
made the most of his opportunities, rose above a narrow exclusiveness,
and assimilated power wherever he found it, far preferable.
The true difficulty of the American composer's position, then, is
to be found, not in the poverty of the native folk-song, but in the
confusing variety of the foreign influences in which he is so rich. He
has suffered and is still suffering from an embarrassment of riches,
from a mental indigestion. His cosmopolitanism is indeed too often
"featureless," and his readiness to be influenced an evidence of
weakness rather than strength, a flat rather than a broad eclecticism.
His technique is miscellaneous, his style without distinction, his
art as a whole lacks individuality. This featurelessness is the
typical defect of American compositions of the present generation,
perhaps--typical in spite of some notable exceptions. The technical
deficiencies of our pioneer forefathers are more and more becoming
things of the past; free intercourse with Europe and the wholesale
importation of skilled European musicians have refined away the
crudities with surprising rapidity; there are among us to-day musical
workmen whose skill in symphony, chamber music, and opera will compare
favorably with that of Europeans. Where we still fail is in that
subtle, indefinable, and indispensable touch of personal distinction
which may be recognized in artists so diverse, both individually and
racially, as Strauss, d'Indy, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Paderewski,
Sibelius, Elgar. What is the secret of this distinction?
We may get a clue to the right answer by considering a peculiar case,
an exceptional case, among ourselves--the exception that proves the
rule--the case of MacDowell. The supreme place he undoubtedly holds
among our composers is due precisely to this quality of personal
distinction, of individuality, to the fact that his music, in spite of
the pronounced Grieg and Raff elements in it, does not sound quite like
that of any one else. Technically MacDowell has grave deficiencies;
his harmonic system is singularly limited, mannered, and monotonous;
his polyphony is weak; his "drawing," as a painter would say, is often
halting and awkward. His range of expression, moreover, is not wide,
and within it he frequently cloys by an over-sweet sentimentalism. But
MacDowell is sincere, and he is always himself. There are no unfused
elements in his style, no outstanding features, that we feel to have
been borrowed and not assimilated. His style is very narrow, but it is
his own. And the result is that, although we shall soon forget some
of our composers who are far cleverer than he, we shall not forget
MacDowell.
The enemies of eclecticism have thus expressed a half-truth, we begin
to see, when they call it flabby. Only too easily does it become so.
As dangerous as it is desirable, it will contribute to the formation
of an artist only when it is controlled by an instinctive sense of how
much one can assimilate, and the courage to reject the rest. And here
we come to one of those peculiar difficulties of the position in which
the American composer finds himself. It is hard for him, recognizing,
as his natural alertness of perception and his detached point of view
enable him to do, the merits of many different European aims and
methods, and, mainly sensitive as he must be to his own shortcomings in
respect to any of them--it is hard for him to distinguish between those
that he can possibly assimilate to his own uses and those that must
remain alien to him; and it is doubly hard to let the latter alone,
voluntarily restricting his field in order that he may be the master of
it. Yet these selections, these sacrifices, are at the very foundation
of artistic personality. It is no more possible for a human being to
be, let us say, at once as subtle as Debussy and as gorgeous as Strauss
than it is to be in two places at once. Which will you do without? But
the young American composer is at once too timid and too ambitious to
do without anything; in the attempt to be everywhere at the same time
he cuts himself up into little pieces that end by being nowhere.
The frank and courageous acceptance of limitations is, in truth,
the first step toward artistic individuality; a man can never be an
individual, as the very derivation of the word may remind him, so long
as he remains divided, spread out very wide and very thin, unwilling
to take sides, but only when he concentrates himself, is loyal to
one cause, grows out from one nucleus. What this nucleus shall be,
indeed, differs according to circumstances. For the European musician
it is to some extent decided beforehand, by the conditions of birth,
of national and racial allegiance. The American, as we said, to begin
with is freer in this respect; but we may now add that he is no less
bound to find a cause, a unifying center, if he would get beyond mere
clever imitation and become a genuine person. He must love his cause
so singly that he will cleave to it, and forsake all else. Now what
is this cause for the American composer but the utmost musical beauty
that he, as an individual man with his own qualities and defects, is
capable of understanding and striving towards? And what is the "all
else" that he must forsake, save those types of musical beauty which,
whatever may be their intrinsic worth, do not come home to him, do not
arouse a sympathetic vibration in him, leave him cold? He must take
sides. He must be, not a philosopher, but a partisan. He must have good
hearty enthusiasms, and good hearty prejudices. Only so can he be an
individual.
It matters not one jot, provided this course of personal loyalty to
a cause be steadfastly pursued, what the special characteristics of
style of the music may be to which one gives one's devotion. Let A
give his life to studying the delicate color scheme of the French
"ultra-moderns"; let B find his joy in a polyphony based on Bach's; let
C develop lovingly the cadences or rhythms of Negro and Indian tunes;
all three will be good musicians, all three good Americans--for,
after all, American music is only music. The man who is neither good
musician nor good American is the botcher, the dilettante, the clever
amateur--he who is too lazy to learn his business, too pretentious to
limit his claims, too busy talking about art to study it. Such babblers
have always been, and always will be, naturally, far more numerous
than the efficient workers; and they will doubtless continue to fill
the newspapers and magazines with their silly superficialities, and do
their utmost to confuse the public into forgetting that sincerity and
skill are the only things that can ever be justly demanded of an artist.
VI
In demanding skill and sincerity of our composers, however, we are
requiring of them, as a little analysis will suffice to show, labors
and sacrifices of which only the rarest natures are capable; and it may
well be that the unsatisfactory character of composition in America
is due far more to the rarity of men able or willing to undertake
such labors and endure such sacrifices than to the difficulties of
the æsthetic problems we have so far been considering. Let us, then,
in closing, try to suggest answers to the purely practical questions:
Is there anything about our social and economic system that lays
especial burdens on creative artists? If there is, is there any hope of
correcting it? Whether it may be corrected or not, may our composers,
through candid recognition of it, be saved from dissipation of energy
and helped to concentrate their efforts on objects most likely to be
achieved, and most worth achieving? We shall answer all these questions
affirmatively.
First we must note that the amount and intensity of mental application
involved in composition is something of which the layman has little
idea. The technique to be mastered by the composer is singularly
difficult; the tonal material he works in is subtle and intangible; its
relationships, harmonic, rhythmic, melodic, polyphonic, which he must
learn not only to understand but to manipulate, are of an indescribable
complexity; and he achieves command of all these fundamental or
grammatical means of his art only to face the far subtler distinctions
of structure and style on a wise apprehension of which depends his
artistic individuality. Moreover, if he would take advantage of the
wide and unbiased view of European music which we have seen to be a
special privilege of the intelligent American, he must do far more than
hear or read the chief works of many masters; he must know them in and
out, must learn to breathe the peculiar atmosphere of each,--must, in
short, live with them. And more than that, for after analysis comes
synthesis, after assimilation, creation; and as the one requires
laborious, minute, detailed study, the other requires a wide margin of
leisure in which the mind can forget all these details, empty itself of
all irrelevance, and prepare to receive whatever thoughts may visit it.
Here is more time needed, in great spaces. This is a full and varied
way of living, indeed, that we are sketching; and we have not yet made
out how the artist is to live at all. How is he to get money to support
himself?
Not, certainly, from his compositions. They will do well if they bring
him enough to pay for ink and paper; they will surely not pay for
their own copying. "A man," says Mr. Graham Wallas,[67] "who gives
the best strength of each day to dreaming about the nature of God or
the State, or the shape of the earth, or the relation of the sides of
a triangle to its hypotenuse, produces nothing which at the end of
the day he can easily sell. Since the actual process of inference is
unconscious, and his voluntary control over it indirect and uncertain,
he is not even sure that he will produce any result at all, whether
salable or unsalable, by months of effort. How then shall he live?" If
this is the situation of the creative thinker in science, what shall
we say of that of the creative thinker in art? As we have seen in
discussing the relations of democracy and music, the class which in the
eighteenth century bought the wares of the composer finds its analogue,
under our capitalistic industrial system, in the frivolous plutocracy,
who demand of music curiosities, novelties, and entertainment. The vast
mass of listeners emerging from below, on the other hand, of crude
and childlike taste, prefer stories (program music), day-dreaming,
and sensationalism to beauty. Confronted by these two classes, the
composer will find his sincerity likely to cost him dear. If he is
really sincere, if he is trying to write music that presents the kind
of beauty that he hears, and that no one else has heard in just that
way before, he will find himself enjoying it in a minority of one. Yet
the alternative, to prostitute himself and "give the public what it
wants," is even worse; and when the public says to him, in the words of
Mozart's publisher, "Write in a more easy, popular style, or I will not
print a note or give you a kreuzer," his answer can be no other than
Mozart's: "Then, my good sir, I have only to resign myself and die of
hunger."
Or rather, and here is the special irony of the situation, his
alternative is not a literal physical hunger, but that subtler hunger
that follows the denial of the imperious instinct to create beauty;
he has not to starve his body of bread, but his soul of music. For
while society withholds with one hand, so to speak, any payment for
the best work he can do, because it is too good, because it requires
too long to be understood, it freely offers him with the other a
bare livelihood, if not more, for work of secondary value--teaching,
performance, exposition, anything but creation. It constantly pulls,
pushes, cajoles, persuades, coaxes, browbeats him from the superior
to the inferior activity. It so fills his days with the one that even
if at long intervals an opportunity for the other presents itself he
has hardly the spirit to seize it. It deadens him with detail, drugs
him with drudgery, cages him until he forgets how to sing. Where, as
in America, there exists a very "high standard of living," as it is
quaintly called, meaning that many and costly material wants have to
be met before spiritual needs can be considered, the labor imposed by
such a struggle may be overwhelming. And it is superimposed, we must
remember, on the other labor, the creative one, described above. The
same nerves, body, and brain, in the same twenty-four hours each day,
must sustain the two labors, one to earn a livelihood, the other to
make use of it. No wonder few can endure it; no wonder most give it
up in despair or dull indifference, and content themselves with the
livelihood without taking the trouble to live.
Not only, moreover, are the broad facts of economics, under a
capitalistic-industrial system, thus flatly inimical to creative work,
but in a plutocratic civilization like ours the more subtle forces
of public opinion are perhaps even more fatal to it, because more
pervasive and intangible. In Europe the impecunious artist is accepted
with tolerance, even with a touch of respect, and suffered to live
undisturbed in his Bohemia and to pursue his dreams. To us, who still
as a people recognize no measure of achievement but income, and who
accept without a murmur the domination of mass-convention in most
matters of opinion, he is something worse than an interesting eccentric
or even a harmless crank; he is something of a sybarite and a skulker;
he is one who "doesn't play the game." Therefore he need look to us
for understanding or sympathy no more than for more material rewards.
If he wishes to be approved of, let him do something useful--that is,
something that pays.
When we realize the penalties that are thus piled upon the head of
the artist whose only offense is that he wishes to give something to
society of which it does not yet recognize the value, our wonder that
there is so little American composition of the first quality changes
to surprise that there is any. We begin to suspect--as Ruskin did at
forty, and devoted the rest of his life to demonstrating the truth
of his suspicion--that the decadence of art we witness all around us
is only a symptom of a deeper disease, and that, as William Morris
expressed it, "Slavery lies between us and art."[68] Capitalistic
industrialism, as Matthew Arnold saw, "materializes our upper class,
vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class"; and under
such conditions vital art can have no secure or assured life. It may
well be, therefore, that art can only in the long run be saved, like
society itself, by the fairer, freer, humaner system that socialism
promises. It cannot but thrill all true lovers of art to find its
claims, with those of a liberalized society, being championed to-day,
no longer merely by individual thinkers like Ruskin and Morris, but by
great representative bodies like the British Labor Party. "Society,
like the individual," says a draft report of this party[69] "does
not live by bread alone--does not exist only for perpetual wealth
production. The Labour Party will insist on greatly increased public
provision being made for scientific investigation and original
research, in every branch of knowledge, not to say also for the
promotion of music, literature, and fine art, which have been under
capitalism so greatly neglected, and upon which, so the Labour Party
holds, any real development of civilization fundamentally depends."
Finally, however, inspiring as are the hopes these words suggest, the
American composer need not await their realization before putting forth
those individual efforts without the aid of which, after all, they can
never attain it. Music, like society, has reached its present state
only through the struggles, against immense odds, of its martyrs and
its heroes: not only of Bach, of Mozart, of Beethoven, of Schubert,
of Wagner, of Brahms, but of countless others who have wrought and
suffered in obscurity and with a consecration of their more limited
powers to the great cause of beauty. And if American life lays almost
crushing burdens on artistic initiative, there is also in the best
American tradition a courage, an independence, a certain nonchalant and
plucky self-reliance that ought to carry an artist far on the solitary
path he has to travel. It ought to keep him from turning back, though
it could not guard him against wandering and getting lost. All that can
help him there is clearsightedness, a realistic and unsentimental view
of the society in which he lives and the terms on which he lives in it.
He must discharge the work he does for a livelihood as conscientiously
as he can, but meanwhile not forget to live also. He must not make
the tragic mistake, the unpardonable sin of the artist, described by
Thoreau: "To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver
ore in cartloads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known
only to ourselves, far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush
in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return
thither. Let it be the price of our freedom to make that known." He
must cut down his material requirements to the minimum and honor his
own poverty. He must learn to find his satisfaction in the work itself,
and not expect recognition, which is bound to be late (even later in
America than elsewhere), and likely to be mistaken. Above all, he
must not pity himself or grow embittered, for in the possession of a
lifelong enthusiasm, an ideal that he can always work towards and will
never reach, he has the best gift that life has to offer.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] The New Republic, October 16, 1915.
[60] "Two Views of Ragtime." The Seven Arts, July, 1917.
[61] The time is really 4-8, though marked 2-4.
[62] The Times, London, February 8, 1913, quoted in Boston Symphony
Orchestra Program Books, vol. 32, p. 1186.
[63] See, for instance, Mr. Carl van Vechten's "Interpreters and
Interpretations."
[64] Quoted by Mr. Charles L. Buchanan in an admirably sane article on
"Rag Time and American Music" in The Opera Magazine, February, 1916.
[65] For example:
"They got a fiddler there
That always slickens his hair,
An' folks he sure do pull some bow,"
from "The Memphis Blues," in which Mr. H. K. Moderwell assures us we
shall find "characteristic verse of a high order."
[66] The Nation, May 30, 1867.
[67] "The Great Society," by Graham Wallas.
[68] Quoted in "The Socialist Movement," by J. Ramsay MacDonald, p. 86.
[69] The Labor Party's Draft Report on Reconstruction: "The Aims of
Labour," by Arthur Henderson, Appendix, page 106.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. The Origins of Music.
II. The Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians, Hebrews, Arabians,
Indians, Chinese.
III. The Greeks.
IV. Rome and the Dark Ages.
V. Scales and Notes.
VI. The Less Dark Ages.
VII. Dunstable. Dufay. Des Près.
VIII. The Golden Age.
IX. The Palace of Greenwich. January 26, 1595.
X. Song and Folk-Song.
XI. The Secular Century.
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XIII. The Viennese Masters.
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Germany, Italy, and France.
XV. The Post-Beethoven Period.
XVI. Nationalism. Modern Schools.
The Chief Names of Musical History.
Index.