Those who live on the outskirts of the world of music may say that they
cannot get as much of it as they desire; those who are in the midst
of it are painfully aware that they cannot escape the overwhelming
flood. The commercialization of music has led to overproduction. This
is apparent enough in England, where commercialization has fostered the
spawning of a thoroughly degraded type; in Germany the over-production
has been a greater danger because the vast complexity of the musical
industry has encouraged respectable mediocrity. It is not to be
wondered that plenty of musicians would be glad to make a clean sweep
of all the music of the past and start fresh from the beginning. We
cannot; it is a hopeless delusion. Even if we could make the clean
sweep, we are still men of the twentieth century; we cannot return,
for just one aspect of our lives and that perhaps the most direct
and immediate, to primitive savagery. Civilization has forced us to
remember what we ought in the nature of things to have forgotten.
Commercialism has always been only too glad to throw dust in our eyes
with the pretence of culture. We tell people that they ought to know
and love their musical classics. Being out of copyright, they can be
reprinted cheaply. Teachers find it least troublesome to teach what
they have always taught; concert-givers play what they have always
played――it is the safest thing and requires the least rehearsal and
study. The casual listener loves the “dear familiar strain.” It is not
as if people knew their classics intimately in a scholarly way. And
the scholar is easily tempted into false judgments under the itch for
research. Old music has its interest for the musical anatomist, but
from an artistic point of view most of it is much better forgotten.
There are some who sadly deplore the popularization of the classics on
the ground that they risk being desecrated. Why not? If some unlettered
person goes into a cinema, hears a fragment of the _Unfinished
Symphony_ for the first time and receives a new thrill, surely it is
all to the good, at any rate for him. If others feel that the vulgar
associations of the cinema have destroyed the music’s beauty for them,
let them have done with it, throw it away as a worn-out thing and
turn to something else. We may reasonably say that people who are
the prey of their unwilling associations, unable to view a work of
art with detachment, do not deserve to experience artistic enjoyment;
but at the same time we should do well to admit frankly that music
which cannot survive momentary degradation (and all things connected
with music are and must be merely momentary) is not worth preserving
and reproducing. When we consider the innermost nature of music it is
surprising that any of it should survive for more than a generation.
Some has survived for less, some for far more; but that is no reason
why it should survive for ever. Occasionally some work of a remoter age
is exhumed and seems to have a new significance for us after having
been forgotten for centuries. But its significance is what our own age
puts into it. That is one of the advantages of dealing in the art of
the past; we can do what we like with it. The art of the present, if it
has any vitality, compels us to submit our minds to itself.
The present age revolts from the music of the past century because
of its insincerity and pretentiousness. Musicians of the older
generation will repudiate this charge with indignation. The criticism
is indeed a very summary one, and the man of to-day, if pressed with
cross-questioning, may probably be induced to admit a good many single
exceptions to his universal condemnation. But technical analysis will
show that there is a sounder basis for modern criticism than mere
caprice of youthful iconoclasm. The wealth of harmonic resource which
the nineteenth century built up was derived, as has been shown, to a
large extent from associations, some extra-musical, some intra-musical,
some derived from literary or pictorial ideas, some depending on
recollections of previous music. These two categories interact on
each other again and again, so that it is not easy to separate them
out clearly. Like a system of monetary wealth, the wealth of western
music has become largely a paper currency and with the realization of
this fact values have in many cases become suddenly depreciated. It
may be urged that music as an art has derived enormous benefit from
the tendency to widen the scope of its significance, from its closer
alliance with other intellectual activities and from the deepening
conviction of its ethical influence. Is it not childish, it may be
asked, for us deliberately to throw away all that we have gained and
revert to a condition of music in which it shall be at best a mere
entertainment or possibly no more than a physiological stimulus of
dangerous passions?
The lofty idealism of Beethoven and certain of those who came after
him, both composers and interpreters, is a thing which we cannot
possibly deny or ignore; but we may justly question whether the
artistic expression of it is still convincing to modern ears. That
noble and visionary idealism, in its ardent insistence on the
spiritual, tended more and more to suggest that the reality of music
lay not so much in the actual sounds perceived by the physical ear
as in the relations between them, in sounds――or rather in relations
between sounds――never actually heard at all, but induced in the
perceptive faculty by association. The works of Beethoven’s third
period often seem to lead us into a metaphysical labyrinth. But
philosophical language is apt to degenerate into a jargon, and
philosophical music, when it is the product of lesser minds than
Beethoven’s, into platitudinous rigmarole.
“Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.”
Swinburne’s parody has its musical application too. The classical
key-system of Rameau and Bach established a tradition that was academic
in the most honourable sense of the word. It won too much respect.
It had the symmetrical logic of the heroic couplet in poetry. We can
see how in literature the austere reverence for the great academic
tradition inevitably petrifies poetry into what discreet reviewers call
“scholarly verse.” Music followed an analogous course. By the irony of
fate the music of the last century, when it was designed to edify, has
become vapid and tedious; what has survived, quaintly artificial though
its freshness may be, is the music that was made only for ephemeral
entertainment. _La Belle Hélène_ has outlived _Les Béatitudes_.