Let him to whom, as to me, nature has denied “an ear for music,” or
circumstance an opportunity for its education, take heart and comfort:
he has escaped a masterful temptation to commit nonsense in the first
degree. Doubtless there are music makers and music lovers who can
write and speak of the art with a decent regard to the demands of
common sense, but doubtless they don’t; their history is a record of
ignored opportunities. As to the others—the chaps who push in between
our hearing and our understanding—they possibly “play by note,” but
they write “by ear.” They say whatever sounds well to themselves, and
there they leave it. Theirs is the art of sound and they expound its
principles with due observance of its results: in speaking of it they
are satisfied to make a pleasant noise. The louder the noise of their
exposition, the more glorious the art which it expounds. As members of
mystic brotherhoods are bound by oath not to divulge the solemn secrets
which they do not possess; as the married have a tacit undertaking
to wreathe their chains with flowers, smile away their wounds, and
exhibit as becoming ornaments the handles of the daggers rusting in
their hearts; as priesthoods plate with gold their empty shrines; as
the dead swear in stone and brass that they were virtuous and great—so
the musical are in conspiracy to magnify and exalt their art. It is a
pretty art: it is rich in elements of joy, purveying to the sense a
refined and keen delight. But it is not what they say it is. It is not
what the uninitiated believe it. What is?
I am led to these reflections—provoked were the better word—by reading
one Krehbiel. “Wagner,” Mr. Krehbiel explains, “strove to express
artistic truths, not to tickle the ear, and therefore his work will
stand, while Italian opera, which is founded on sensual enjoyment, must
pass away.” A more amusing _non sequitur_ it would be difficult
for the most accomplished logician to construct. Because the city is
founded on a rock it will topple down! I think I could name several
sorts of sensual enjoyment which give promise of enduring as long as
the senses. Among them I should give a high place to whatever kind of
music the sense of hearing most enjoys. If posterity is going to be
such an infinite fool as to stop its ears to sounds which please them,
I thank Heaven that I live in antiquity.
The enjoyment of music is a purely sensual enjoyment. It “tickles the
ear,” and it does nothing else. The ear being skilfully tickled after
the fashion which the composer and the executant understand, emotion
ensues; but not thought, save by association—by memory. Music does
not touch the springs of the intellect. It never generated a process
of reasoning, nor expressed a truth, “artistic” or other, which could
be formulated in a definitive proposition. It has no intellectual
character whatever. I have heard this disputed scores of times, but
never by one who had himself much intellect. And, in truth, musicians,
if I must say it, are not commonly distinguished above their fellows by
mental capacity. The greater their gift, the less they know; and when
you find a tremendously skilful and enthusiastic executant you will
have as nearly sensual an animal as you care to catch.
To those having knowledge of the essential meaning of music, its
original place among the influences that wrought their results
upon primitive man, this will seem natural and sequent. Music was
originally vocal; before men became wise enough and deft enough to
make instruments they merely sang, as the birds do now, and certain
animals—the latter pretty badly, it must be confessed. But why did
the primitive man and woman sing? To commend themselves in the matter
of love, as the birds do, and the beasts. Abundant vestiges of this
practice survive among us. The young woman who bangs her piano and her
hair has a single motive in the double habit. She is hardly conscious
of it; she has inherited it along with the desire to brandish her eyes,
and otherwise manslay. Consider, my tuneless youth, how slender is your
chance in rivalry with the fellow who can sing. He will “knock you out”
with a bar of music better than a Chinese highbinder could with a bar
of iron. It did not occur to our good arboreal ancestor (him of the
prehensile tail, aswing upon his branch) to address his wood-notes wild
to a mixed audience for gate-money; he sought to charm a single pair
of ears, and those more hairy than critical. Later, as the race went
on humaning, there grew complexity of sentiment and varying emotional
needs, for the gratification whereof song took on a matching complexity
and variance. There were war songs, and death songs, and hunting
songs, harvest songs and songs of adoration. Wood and metal were taught
to perform acceptably.
The shells of tortoises were made to sing,
And, touched in tenderness, the captive string.
Did it ever occur to you, intelligent reader, that the simplest musical
instrument is a more astonishing invention than the talking phonograph?
But the human love-tone is the soul and base of the system; and should
men and women henceforth be born happily married the entire musical
edifice would fade and vanish like a palace of clouds.