MUSIC.
Simplification has already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau's
aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came to
try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, and
his musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each of
them was a plea for the extrication of the simple from the cumbrousness
of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaning
devices of false art. And all tended alike in the popular direction,
towards the extension of enjoyment among the common people, and the
glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art designed for
the great.
The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a
revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the
tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through
a middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble
severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by
birth, found his first appreciation in a public that had been trained
by the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the
earliest produced in France. Grétri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a
hearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety
lived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence
between the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck.
"I have not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical
superlative," Grétri said, "but I have revealed the accent of truth,
which I have impressed deeper in men's hearts."[318] These words express
sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the
music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can
still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of
Rameau. It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in
another way revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume
as of savages grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or
subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a
negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance
of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false
art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the
pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation of _Orfeo_
and _Alceste_.
In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a
number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A
violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the
defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel
between the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament
had just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State.
The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another
channel. Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit
the printing of any work containing the damnable doctrine and position
that Italian music is good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the
Italians.[319] His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great
fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and
that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their
language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically
unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its
principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language
in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet,
sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are
precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is
sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting
of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of
the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its
pronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowels
are full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has
few or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far
more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so
onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does not
exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing
agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious
ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it
beautiful.[320]
The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes
a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the
like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained
hardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and
"other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason
justify," they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which
only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace
of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321] The last
phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the
symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism--shows that even a man
who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not
escape its influence.
Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
impossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writer
who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter
created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself
taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which
became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other
controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything
in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and
demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes
as of an axe.[322] Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely
assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to
put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a
fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that
overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.
After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the
directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
releasing him from them.[323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the
Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the
impossibility of wedding melody to French words.[324] He went as often
as he could to hear the works both of Grétri and Gluck, and _Orfeo_
delighted him, while the _Fausse magie_ of the former moved him to say
to the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought
my heart had long been closed."[325] This being so, and life being as
brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It
may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music
for the Encyclopædia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable
Musical Dictionary of his own.
His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now
accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical
instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at
once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music
to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the
arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence,
although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well
as vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at
heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most
accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom
Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the
people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons
to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come
practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the
pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the
open book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything like
facility in performance, and without some of this facility he rightly
felt that music must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was his
interest in the matter, that he was not very careful to fight for the
originality of his own scheme. Our present musical signs, he said, are
so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no wonder that several
persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder that
some of them should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signs
most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however,
depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with their
adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it was
advantageous.[326] Thus we have to bear in mind that Rousseau's scheme
was above all things a practical device, contrived for making the
teaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process.[327]
The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a
relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In
the common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is
uniformly represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second
space in the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on
the varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the
key-note of the scale to which it belongs, protested against the same
name being given to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus
Re or D, which is the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to
him, to have a different name when found as the fifth in the key of G,
and in every case the name should at once indicate the interval of a
tone from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows.
The names _ut, re_, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the
tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing
one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute quality of the
melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a number
bearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented by
one, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers from
two to seven. In the popular Tonic Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds
so closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do,
and the other symbols, _mi_, _la_, and the rest, indicate at once the
relative position of these tones in their particular key or scale. Here
the old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selected
numbers because he supposed that they best expressed the generation of
the sounds.[328]
Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic
establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed
that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would
furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,[329] but his
knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after the idea
by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental
effects of the several intervals in a key--namely, the degree of natural
affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between the
given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical value
of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the
circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are
now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks.
This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of
hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in
respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit
the tone is compelled to measure the interval between it and the
preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to
associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a
relation with this fundamental tone.
Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just as
applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements
of the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano,
who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to
a violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity,
the most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the
absolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised.
Neither of these has any time to think about the melodious relation of
the tones; it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on the
key-board or the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to
supply the clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system.
Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid before
him, and Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive,[330] though
his admission was not practically deterrent.
His device for expressing change of octave by means of points would
render the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still
more difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to
the other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible
place above or below a horizontal line. Again, his attempt to simplify
the many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modes
of double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies an
imperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting all
reference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value of
the tones in a particular movement.
FOOTNOTES:
[318] Quoted in Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 158.
[319] _Conf._, viii. 197. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, i. 27.
[320] _Lettre sur la Musique Française_, 178, etc., 187.
[321] P. 197.
[322] _Corr. Lit._, i. 92. His own piece was _Le petit prophète de
Boehmischbroda_, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent
footnote.
[323] He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm,
_Corr. Lit._, i. 113.
[324] This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard,
_Oeuv._, ii. 827):--"Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est un
excellent passe-port auprès de lui. Quant à l'impossibilité de faire
de la musique française, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne me
paraît pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence de la langue
française est d'être sans accent. Point de conversation animée sans
beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre et déterminé seulement par
l'affection de celui qui parle, sans être fixé par des conventions sur
certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots des
syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent être accentuées."
[325] Musset-Pathay, i. 289.
[326] Preface to _Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne_, pp. 32, 33.
[327] I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with
notes on a technical subject with which I have too little
acquaintance.
[328] _Dissertation_, p. 42.
[329] P. 52.
[330] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19. Also _Dissertation_, pp. 74, 75.