It is by no means the first time that musicians have tried to “return
to nature,” but the difficulty of going back to a state of primitive
savagery presumably becomes greater as civilization becomes more
elaborate. The enthronement of idiocy may for a moment be amusing
but it soon becomes tiresome; these two favourite epithets of musical
journalism are not without their appropriateness. Nevertheless it
is only common sense frankly to face the fact that music is made up
in the first instance of physical sounds. The metaphysical attitude
towards music has given us the last quartets of Beethoven, but in the
general practice of music it has done much to lower our standards of
performance, especially in the matter of singing; indeed among singers
who have deservedly obtained a reputation for high musicianship and
intelligence those purely vocal qualities on which the emotional power
of the voice in the first instance depends are in all countries only
too often conspicuous by their absence. Instrumental music has been
affected hardly less.
It is difficult for the musician who has been trained on the classical
system to adapt himself to this new point of view. He feels inevitably
that he is being asked to lower his intellectual standards. He has
built them up by the application of a lifetime; they have brought him
his most precious experiences and he feels that to desert them is
an act of disloyalty to his most cherished ideals. It is one of the
consolations of increasing years that our intellectual appreciations
are deepened; at any rate we like to think so. But we have regretfully
to admit that increasing years are apt to bring a blunted sense of
emotional values. Our direct impressions are less vivid, our capacity
for enthusiasm shrinks. Before it is altogether too late, before we
lose all sensitive response to the stimulus of musical sound, it
may perhaps be wise to relax our austerity of principle and allow
ourselves to enjoy the primary pleasure of sound as we once did naked
and unashamed. It might yet be the beginning of a genuinely new and
delightful experience if we would risk the adventure.
All art, after all, is an adventure. In the art of the past the things
which directly move our æsthetic emotions are the moments of adventure,
the moments at which we join the artist in perceiving intuitively and
directly something which we know to be artistically true and beautiful
although it is not consistent with the conventional principles on
which the art is based. As culture ripens and art becomes a recognized
and definite part of our spiritual life, conventions are codified and
systematized. In music the classical key system provides us with an
obvious example. We acquire the habit of applying our intellectual and
reasoning faculties to it. But our æsthetic emotions are not stirred
until we are thrown into contact with the irrational. The irrational in
this case does not imply utter intellectual chaos and anarchy any more
than it does in mathematics or metaphysics. The mathematician perceives
a new truth intuitively by an act of imagination, but it is of no use
to him until he can prove it by reason; yet reason is of no use to him
unless he has creative imagination as well. This imaginative plunge
into the irrational is what produces a number of common and elementary
physical pleasures, such as the child’s first attempt to walk and such
diversions as swimming, riding a bicycle and flying, although all
these processes very soon become rational and indeed automatic. We
have analogous adventures in the world of art from the beginning. We
may say that music is to speech as swimming is to walking. The mind
very soon regularizes the new experiences, but the fascination of the
arts is that they are always offering us the chance of further ones.
We do not enjoy music as an art until we have learned to appreciate it
rationally; but at the same time it cannot give us a real æsthetic
emotion unless it confronts us forcibly with a further irrational
element.
It is this irrational reaction which causes us still to be stirred by
the music of the past. We listen to a quartet of Mozart; we recognize
a familiar convention, we are easily set back into a past cultural
period in which Mozart’s language was the language of the day. We
understand every phrase, and we may even run the risk of being bored.
Suddenly Mozart does something which the average music-maker of his
day would not have done; we are thrown off our rational balance, we
have to apprehend directly and intuitively. Our minds have to make some
unfamiliar movement just as our bodies may in certain circumstances
have to make some movement incompatible with normal equilibrium. In
the case of bodily movements practical experience and a knowledge
of mathematics may subsequently show that this unfamiliar movement
is really just as reasonable as walking. Something of the same kind
happens in our artistic experience too. Even Mozart may cease to
interest us. The once unfamiliar experience becomes automatic, the new
harmony becomes a _cliché_.
There need not really be anything so very terrifying about the
abandonment of the classical system. After all, we can always go back
to it when we feel inclined, just as we may take up Dante and return to
mediaeval astronomy. The lurking fear which besets us is perhaps that
if we abandoned ourselves to the artistic adventure of modern music we
might find, not merely that we did not particularly enjoy it, but that
somehow it had made it impossible for us to go back wholeheartedly to
the music of our youth. It is impossible. Everybody has to ask himself
the question and answer it for himself honestly――am I ready and keen
to face fresh intellectual adventures? As age increases, increasing
vanity has to be taken into account. We elderly people are easily prone
to deceive ourselves and to think that we can convince others of the
doctrine that connoisseurship is an adequate substitute for direct
enjoyment.