I
In the early years of the present century a certain learned and
cultivated musician, then about eighty years of age, was heard to
say, as he came out from a concert at which works by Debussy had been
played: “Well, if this is the ‘music of the future,’ I’m very glad
I shan’t live to hear it!” Debussy has passed over to the classics
since then, but there are still plenty of music-lovers, many of them,
too, not more than middle-aged at the most, who feel apprehensive
about the future of music. Wherever they turn, there seems to be
complete chaos. The music of the present day is for them an unending
succession of hideous noises. There are some who, remembering that in
their own lifetime they have passed through periods when even Brahms
and Wagner, Richard Strauss and César Franck seemed unintelligible,
are yet resolved not to be baffled by Schönberg and Stravinsky. They
study contemporary music with perhaps little pleasure, but with
passionate interest and curiosity. Yet they are inevitably conscious
of difficulties which do not appear to have confronted them before.
They can see in the music of the early twentieth century some clear
continuance of the classical tradition; in the later music they can
find nothing that gives them even a faint hope of being able to
understand it――some day if not now. They find themselves in the
position of a man who sets out to learn a language which has no
connection with the Indo-European stock. It is bad enough to have to
master a new alphabet; one may possibly, by dint of strenuous effort,
commit to memory a vocabulary of words which bear not the remotest
resemblance to any in French or German, Latin or Greek; but when
it comes to tackling an entirely strange system of syntax for the
expression of unfamiliar ideas, the mind revolts and the student asks
whether all this jargon can really have any significance at all. And
the student of modern music is made still more sceptical by the fact
that the musicians whom he respects among the apparent initiates are
seldom in any agreement as to which of the various conflicting systems
of music is to be regarded as the expression of the true faith. Can you
tell me, he asks, often with genuine humility, of one living composer
whom you wholeheartedly accept as a great creative genius, in the way
in which you once accepted Beethoven, or Brahms, or Wagner, as the
case might be? The hardened critic hesitates, names tentatively this
or that musician――No, replies the other firmly; there seems to be no
one whom you can name without some qualification. And to scepticism
he adds fear. The new music, he begins to feel, requires not merely a
new and unaccustomed intellectual effort: it demands a new outlook on
life altogether. It may affect and disturb fundamental principles such
as most people prefer to leave untouched. It may be in truth what the
old fogeys of the past have always said of it: it may be “positively
dangerous.”
Let us consider our fundamental principles. Let us forget for a moment
all this contemporary turmoil and ask ourselves what is honestly our
attitude to the classics that we revere. Music, it has often been said,
appeals to us in three ways. It affects us first by the mere sensuous
beauty of sound; as we become more familiar with the art, it works upon
our emotions, and finally we learn to contemplate it intellectually.
_La musique est l’art de penser avec les sons._ To the musician who has
been brought up on the classics this definition of Combarieu’s sums
up his most complete experience. The three forms of appeal summarily
described above divide listeners conveniently into three categories,
but it is a very rough division, and the same person may at any one
time of his life and experience find himself in any one of the three
groups according to the particular work which he may be hearing. But it
may be safely said that the large majority of those whom we can call
music-lovers belong to the class for whom the appeal of music is mainly
or exclusively emotional. The first group, those who are affected only
by the physical quality of musical sound, may be disregarded here.
And it must be remembered that any one who is sufficiently musical to
enjoy what we colloquially call “a tune,” however simple, has at least
the germ of intellectual appreciation; he recognizes that a tune has a
definite rhythmical shape and a definite tonality, even if he is not
able to say so in technical language. But most people, when they listen
to music, do not want to be bothered with formal analysis; they want to
have their emotions aroused. The analysis of their musical experiences
is a very complicated matter and far beyond the scope of this book.
There are many people who fear that if they acquired a knowledge of
the structural principles of music they would lose all their pleasure
in it. They are confirmed in this belief by finding that persons who
are learned in the science of music undoubtedly lose pleasure in much
that satisfies the emotional requirements of the uninitiated, and may
in some cases appear to have lost pleasure in hearing any music at
all. The fear is groundless. The character and quality of the pleasure
may change, and undoubtedly does change as a result of ripening and
decaying age; but no one, even among those who detest all modern music,
however sadly he may say _si vieillesse pourrait_, would admit after
personal experience that the essential joy of music was destroyed by
knowledge.
In default of knowledge, the “emotional” group of music-lovers,
eagerly desiring to find some significance in the music which they
hear, often try to translate it into some other language with which
they are more familiar. Some listeners maintain that music gives them
positive sensations of colour. There are many who in listening to music
consciously construct pictorial images. Others will seek to interpret
it as meaning something that could be expressed in terms of literature.
Experiments have generally shown that when a number of listeners are
asked to give their impressions of the same piece of music agreement
hardly ever goes further than to such vague indications of character as
the composer himself might give in his conventional Italian directions
for performance, except in cases where the composer has deliberately
set out to evoke some literary or pictorial image or has employed
some well-worn conventional device for the awakening of familiar
associations.
The psychological process of musical creation has hitherto eluded
all scientific research. No satisfactory result can be obtained from
comparing the recorded utterances of the composers themselves as to
what induced the composition of their works or what they intended to
express in them. People who are inclined to interpret the music which
they hear in literary or pictorial terms are naturally attracted
by definitely descriptive music, and readily produce evidence in
support of the theory that all composers set out to write music with
a deliberately descriptive intent. But the history of music shows us
clearly that deliberately descriptive music rarely stands the test of
time. There are plenty of examples to be found of acknowledged great
composers such as Byrd, Purcell, Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven,
who have now and then set out to be descriptive; and in almost every
case we feel that their descriptive music is on a far lower level than
their non-descriptive music. Indeed, in many cases it is painfully
ridiculous both as pure music and as description. If it can be saved at
all, it is only by concentrating attention on its purely musical aspect.
The trained musician is content to take music as music and nothing
else. It is a logical and reasonable language, although it cannot
be translated into words. Writers on painting seem now to be pretty
generally agreed that the “story” of a picture has nothing to do
with its value as a work of art; that depends upon line and colour
alone. It is nearly half a century since Walter Pater wrote that “all
art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” It was yet a
generation earlier that Hanslick put forward his theory of musical
beauty. That theory of “abstract music” did not satisfy the age of
Wagner and Liszt; but although Hanslick failed to work out his theory
as fully as he might have done, its further implications have come to
be accepted with surprising cordiality by a generation of musicians
whose art would probably have filled Hanslick himself with the most
unspeakable horror.
Music expresses itself and nothing else. A work may be dramatic,
illustrative, or even descriptive in certain aspects; but unless it
is intelligible simply as music alone, constructed on its own purely
musical principles, apart from all external considerations, it must
fall short of perfection as a work of musical art.