Professor Weissmann has well pointed out that in the romantic days the
orchestra dominated music because it was made to represent the unseen
supernatural forces against which mere humanity struggled in vain.
And the orchestra appealed to many sides of human temperament. It was
the appropriate instrument of an age of machinery, and mechanical
invention rapidly increased its powers. It appealed to the megalomania
of certain types of genius, as well as to the philosophical worshipper
of the infinite. It appealed to the plain man by its discipline, by its
presentation of a number of nameless individuals doing the same thing
at the same moment, and in later days――now, perhaps, more than ever
before――by the sight of this huge force controlled and directed by the
apparent inspiration of the _virtuoso_ conductor.
The great singers, the few who have reached the highest summits of
fame, have always wielded an incomparable power over their hearers.
But that very element of personality which gives the supreme singer
his greatness distracts the listener on any level but the highest.
Personality is a capricious thing, and in singing, more than in
any other form of music, the listener’s judgment is liable to be
distorted by temperamental considerations which have nothing to do
with art. In the case of the instrumentalist they can be more easily
set aside. Personality is what human nature values more than anything
else in the artist. We see it at its plainest when a singer faces
an unsophisticated public; when the public is less simple-minded
and inexperienced, when the music put before it is less direct and
immediate in its expression, the judgment of personality may be
misleading, and may easily mislead artistic judgment. A vigorous
personality may delude the public into accepting bad music as good;
certain types of music, on the other hand, may falsify the judgment of
personality. These statements represent merely the obvious extremes;
what must be remembered is that this interaction may vary subtly from
moment to moment even during the course of one piece of music.
The multiform appeal of orchestral music bewilders even those who
deliberately listen to it in an analytical frame of mind. The
difficulty is complicated by the luxuriant growth, during the last
hundred years, of what is called “programme-music”――music that sets
out to describe or illustrate some idea that can be expressed, and
often better expressed, in a literary or pictorial form. To dissect
out and trace the history of all the means of emotional stimulus in
such modern orchestral music as has become generally popular――such
names as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Scriabin will
give a sufficient idea of the category――would require a whole volume
of highly technical analysis. Fortunately there are many music-lovers
who have heard enough music to grasp intuitively, if vaguely, certain
principles, conventions and technical methods which they are unable
to describe in words. They will recognize how “picturesqueness” is
achieved by the exploitation of conventional idioms: how these idioms
evoke associations not merely with things outside music, but far more
widely with the recollection of music of past generations as familiar
to them as it was to the composer who exploits it. They will recognize
conventions of sound without sense――strings of notes that perhaps
once had musical value but have now become mere formulæ, rushing winds
and roaring waves “full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.”
They would have learned also, one hopes, to mistrust the composers
who delude their audiences, perhaps delude themselves too, with a
shimmering veil of indeterminate harmonies, and to mistrust no less
those who with an aggressive air of sincerity and directness assume the
solemn pose of mystery and chivalry.