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* * * * *
THE ART OF MUSIC
The Art of Music
A Comprehensive Library of Information
for Music Lovers and Musicians
Editor-in-Chief
DANIEL GREGORY MASON
Columbia University
Associate Editors
EDWARD B. HILL LELAND HALL
Harvard University Past Professor, Univ. of Wisconsin
Managing Editor
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER
Modern Music Society of New York
In Fourteen Volumes
Profusely Illustrated
[Illustration: NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC]
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
1915
[Illustration: King René and his Musical Court.]
_From the Breviary of King René, a 15th century manuscript
in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal._
THE ART OF MUSIC: VOLUME ONE
A Narrative History of Music
Department Editors:
LELAND HALL
AND
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER
Introduction by
C. HUBERT H. PARRY, MUS. DOC.
Director Royal College of Music, London.
Formerly Professor of Music, University of Oxford, etc.
BOOK I
THE PRE-CLASSIC PERIODS
[Illustration: NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC]
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
Copyright, 1915, by
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC, Inc.
[All Rights Reserved]
CONTENTS OF THE SERIES
VOLUME I. NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC--BOOK I: THE
PRE-CLASSIC PERIODS.
Introduction by Sir C. Hubert H. Parry, Mus. Doc.,
Director of the Royal College of Music, London.
VOLUME II. NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC--BOOK II: CLASSICISM
AND ROMANTICISM.
Introduction by Leland Hall, Past Professor of
Musical History, University of Wisconsin.
VOLUME III. NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC--BOOK III: MODERN
MUSIC.
Introduction by Edward Burlingame Hill, Instructor
in the History of Music, Harvard University.
VOLUME IV. MUSIC IN AMERICA.
Introduction by Arthur Farwell, Associate Editor,
'Musical America.’
VOLUME V. THE VOICE AND VOCAL MUSIC.
Introduction by David Bispham, LL.D.
VOLUME VI. CHORAL AND CHURCH MUSIC.
Introduction by Sir Edward Elgar, O.M.
VOLUME VII. PIANOFORTE AND CHAMBER MUSIC.
Introduction by Claude Debussy.
VOLUME VIII. THE ORCHESTRA AND ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.
Introduction by Dr. Richard Strauss.
VOLUME IX. THE OPERA.
Introduction by Alfred Hertz, Conductor, Metropolitan
Opera House, New York.
VOLUME X. THE DANCE.
Introduction by Anna Pavlowa, of the Imperial
Russian Ballet.
VOLUME XI. DICTIONARY OF MUSICIANS AND GENERAL INDEX.
VOLUME XII. DICTIONARY OF MUSIC AND GENERAL INDEX.
VOLUME XIII. MUSICAL EXAMPLES.
VOLUME XIV. MODERN MUSICAL EXAMPLES.
THE ART OF MUSIC
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
So many and varied are the paths of musical enjoyment and profit opened
out in the following pages, so different and sometimes so conflicting
are the types of art represented there, that the timid or inexperienced
reader may well pause at the threshold, afraid of wholly losing his way
in such a labyrinth. He may hesitate to trust himself in so unfamiliar
a landscape without first seeing some sort of small-scale plan of the
ground, which, omitting the confusing details, shows in bold relief
only the larger and essential divisions--the 'lay of the land.’ Such a
plan it is the object of this introduction to furnish.
Of the two most general types of reader, the professional musician
and the amateur or lover of music, the first is least in need of such
assistance. His keen interest in his specialty will naturally determine
the order of his reading; he will look first for all he can find about
that, and later work out from that centre in various directions, and
meanwhile the plan peculiar to this work of assembling all information
on a given subject contained in any of the volumes under a name or
subject word in the index volume will make this process as systematic
and economical of time as it is fascinating to intellectual curiosity.
Thus the index volume will serve as a sort of central rotunda, so to
speak, making each room in this house of information accessible from
every other, and it will matter little at what point we enter. The
singer may go in by Volume V, the pianist by Volume VII, the organist
by Volume VI: all will eventually penetrate the entire edifice.
It is, then, the music lover unfamiliar with all musical technique,
and quite unspecialized in his interest, who most needs the help that
these preliminary suggestions may offer. The kind of help he will want
will depend, of course, on what it is he chiefly wishes to gain by his
reading. Now we shall probably not go far wrong in saying that such a
reader will desire, first, that general knowledge of the most important
schools and the greatest individuals of music history which is not
only a powerful aid to the enjoyment of music, but is nowadays coming
to be considered an essential part of a liberal education. Secondly,
he will wish to gain sufficient familiarity with music itself, and
sufficient understanding of the instruments by which it is produced and
the ways in which they influence its structure and style, to afford him
the basis for sound discrimination between good, bad, and indifferent
music, to develop, in short, his taste. In the third place, he will
justly consider that, however abstruse and involved the theory of music
may be, its fundamental principles are nevertheless accessible to the
layman, and that familiarity with such principles, especially those of
musical structure, affording as it will an insight into the way music
is put together, is an invaluable aid to that sympathetic understanding
of it which comes only to the alert and attentive listener. In a
word, the music lover will demand of his reading that it instruct him
historically, that it refine his taste by developing his sense of
style, and that it intensify his enjoyment by showing him how to listen.
Glancing now at the table of contents, we shall see that 'The Art of
Music’ naturally divides itself into three portions, each especially
suited to subserve one of these three needs of the reader. The first
four volumes, historical in character, are primarily instructive.
Volumes V to IX, inclusive, deal with the practical side of the
art--what is sometimes called 'applied music’--and in describing the
chief media by which it is produced, such as the voice, the organ, the
piano, the string quartet, the orchestra, provide general notions of
what is appropriate to each. The short essays on harmony and on form
in Volume XII, and many passages of explanation of similar matters
scattered through all the volumes, will acquaint the student with the
fundamental principles of musical theory and the standard types of
musical structure, thus affording him valuable aid to appreciative
listening. The three portions of the work, historical, practical, and
theoretical, are finally correlated and unified by Volumes XI and XII,
the Dictionary and Index, and illustrated by the musical examples in
Volumes XIII and XIV.
Let us examine a little more closely the ground covered by each
of these three general sections, one after another, not yet in
detail--that will come only with the actual reading--but with the idea
rather of getting a bird’s-eye view of the whole field in its salient
masses and divisions.
The history of music is like that of other arts in being divided
into schools or epochs. These are of course to a certain extent
arbitrary and artificial--marked off by critics for convenience of
classification--and a composer may belong to two or more schools, as
Beethoven, for example, is both 'classical’ and 'romantic,’ without
being any more aware of it than we are when our train crosses the line,
say, from New York State into Massachusetts. But they are also in
part natural and real, because any fruitful idea in art--such as the
'impressionistic’ idea of light in painting, for instance--is so much
greater than any one man’s capacity to grasp it that a whole generation
or more of artists is needed to develop its possibilities. Such a
group of artists forms what we call a 'school’ or 'period,’ beginning
usually with pioneers whose work is crude but novel, continuing with
countless workers, most of whom are after a short time completely
forgotten, and culminating with one or two greatly endowed masters
who gather up all the best achievements of the school in their own
work and stands for posterity as its figure-heads, or in some cases
engulf it entirely in their colossal shadows. Pioneers, journeymen,
geniuses--that is the list of characters in the drama we call an
artistic school.
If we try to outline in the roughest way the half dozen or so most
important schools we can find in the entire history of music we shall
get something like the following. After the long groping among the
rudiments that went on through Greek and early Christian times there
emerged during the middle ages a type of ecclesiastical music which,
after a development of several centuries, culminated in the work
of Orlando de Lasso (1520-1594), Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
(1524-1594), and others. This music is as primitive, archaic, and
severe to our ears as the early Flemish religious pictures are to
our eyes. It can be described chiefly in negatives. It did not
employ instruments, but only voices in the chorus. It had no regular
time-measure, but wandered on with as little definiteness of rhythm
as the Latin prose to which it was set. It employed no grating
harsh combinations of tones ('dissonances’) such as make our music
so stirring to the emotions, partly because they are difficult for
voices, partly because the science of harmony was in its infancy,
partly because the kind of expression it aimed at was that of religious
peace. Each group of voices had its own melody to carry, and as there
were sometimes as many as sixteen groups an extraordinarily complex
web of voices or 'parts’ was developed, to which is due the name of
polyphonic (many-voiced) applied to this school. Unsuited as it is to
the restless temper of the modern man, it often attained within its own
limits an exquisite beauty.
With the application of this general type of art, the polyphonic,
to instruments, especially the organ, new developments supervened.
Dissonances were perfectly easy, and most effective, on the organ, that
would have been impossible for voices. Definite metre and rhythm were
gradually introduced. Above all, the many melodies of the older style
to some extent gave way to the massive detached chords more suitable
to the organ (because the player could grasp them by handfuls instead
of having to make his fingers play hide and seek among the keys), and
thus was born another great type of style, the 'homophonic’ (one main
melody, accompanied by chords rather than by other melodies). At the
same time the intellectual interest was vastly increased by the use of
more and more definite and recognizable bits of melody, happily called
the 'subjects’ or 'themes’ of the composition, which could be developed
and marshalled just as a writer develops and marshals his thoughts.
The fugue is the arch type of this kind of composition, with its style
partly polyphonic and partly homophonic, its deep thoughtfulness,
its ingenuity, and its surprising variety and depth of emotional
expression. Its supreme master was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).
Despite the mixture of styles in the fugue, however, the preponderant
element was still the basket-like texture of winding melodies suitable
especially to voices--hence it was only in the suite, a type which
developed at the same time and of which also Bach was one of the
supreme masters, that the homophonic style suitable to instruments
was freely worked out. Instruments mark the rhythm much more strongly
than voices, so that all sorts of dance movements are particularly
appropriate for them. When the rhythm is so marked, comparatively
short phrases of tune stand out sharply and balance each other like the
verses in a couplet of poetry. Composers soon found out how further to
group these phrases in definite parts or sections, so contrasted that
the whole of the short piece or 'movement’ presented a perfectly clear,
sharp impression, had a definite beginning, middle, and end--a clear
scheme of form. This clearness of impression was enhanced by making
only one line of melody--the 'tune’ or 'air,’ as we say--prominent,
either subordinating all the others or doing away with them entirely
in favor of an accompaniment of detached chords such as we find in a
modern waltz or march. The suite, then, as it is found in its golden
age, the eighteenth century, is a series of short dance tunes of
strongly marked rhythm, precise in phraseology and concise in form,
in the homophonic style. Among its masters may be mentioned, besides
the German Bach, Couperin and Rameau in France, Corelli (violin) and
Scarlatti (harpsichord) in Italy, and Handel in England.
Closely allied with the suite, indeed an offshoot from it, is the
sonata, originally any piece for instruments (from _sonare_, to sound
or play) as distinguished from a cantata for voices (from _cantare_,
to sing). The old sonatas are essentially suites. But the generation
after Bach’s, of which one of his own sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel
Bach, was a guiding spirit, hit upon one of those apparently simple
but immensely fruitful ideas out of which whole schools are made. It
was this: Instead of coming to a stop as soon as you have outlined a
single musical idea or 'theme,’ and then merely repeating or slightly
elaborating it, as was done in all the movements of the typical
suite, why not embrace in the span of your thought _two contrasting
ideas_,[1] so characterized and arranged that each should serve as
the effective foil of the other? Once this notion of making a piece
of music out of two contrasting themes was tried out in practice it
proved to have endless potentialities. In the two hundred years that
have elapsed since C. P. E. Bach’s birth in 1714 its possibilities have
not been exhausted; it has shown an elasticity which has enabled it
to serve equally for the embodiment of such different ideas as those
of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Tschaikowsky, Brahms; it
has been applied to all branches of instrumental music, extending its
sway quickly from the 'sonata,’ specifically so called, for one, two
or three instruments, to the quartet, quintet, etc., for a group, to
the concerto for a soloist with orchestral accompaniment, and to the
overture and the symphony for full orchestra.
The purest examples of the application of this scheme to orchestral
music are to be found in the first movements of the symphonies of
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), of W. A. Mozart (1756-1791), and above all
of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1821), the genius in whom the classical
symphony culminated. The method adopted in such movements, of which
the opening allegro of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony may stand as an
unsurpassable model, was, first, to present two strongly individual
and contrasting musical ideas ('themes’), the first usually more
vigorous in character, the second more tender and appealing; second,
to let these thoughts germinate or develop in such a way as to bring
clearly forth what was at first latent in them; and, finally, to draw
together the threads and complete the musical action by a restatement
of the root ideas in something like their original form. The variety,
the power, the subtlety, the unfailing instinct for beauty, with which
Beethoven worked out the almost limitless possibilities of such a
scheme can hardly be realized even dimly save by a loving study of his
masterpieces, phrase by phrase, almost note by note. His symphonies
are like Greek statues of the great period in their infinite variety,
their perfect unity. It may seriously be doubted whether music can ever
a second time attain the harmony of all its elements that it found in
this supreme master--that which one of his critics has happily termed
'the perfect balance of expression and design.’
Certain it is that immediately after him, in large measure as a result
of his own example, it took a pronounced turn toward picturesqueness,
toward highly personal expression, toward all that is conveniently
summed up in the vague word Romanticism. Just what romanticism means
it is easier to suggest by examples than to define in general terms.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828), emphasizing the lyric element in orchestral
music, so that his symphonies have almost the personal expressiveness
of songs, is romantic. Robert Schumann (1810-1856), with his vivid
short piano pieces bearing such suggestive titles as 'Soaring,’
'Whims,’ 'In the Night,’ 'Why,’ and with his musical portraits of
friends, his quotations from his own works, and other ingenious devices
for stimulating our imaginations, literary and pictorial as well as
musical, is romantic. Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) is romantic with
his orchestral canvases of the Hebrides islands bathed in sunshine and
clamored over by sea-birds, and of the delicate dances of Shakespeare’s
fairies in the 'Mid-summer Night’s Dream’; and romantic is Frédéric
Chopin (1809-1849), with his nocturnes and preludes. The composers of
the romantic period, in fact, embodied in the types of design they
inherited from Beethoven (but practised, as a rule, with far less
mastery than he) a sort of poetic suggestion of all kinds of things
outside of music. Their art is essentially an art of suggestion; and,
while its purely musical beauty is often great, they wish us not to
rest content with the music for itself, but to regard it as a symbol
of something beyond.
Once composers had begun to label, so to speak, the musical
expressiveness which the classicists preferred to leave free to act
upon each hearer according to his temperament and associations,
certain especially literary minds among them, notably Hector Berlioz
(1803-1869) and Franz Liszt (1811-1886), naturally felt impelled to
carry the process a step further, to amplify and edit the label into
complete 'directions for using.’ Such 'directions for using’ are called
'programs,’ and the school which affects them is named 'programmistic,’
or, by analogy with a similar school in literature, 'realistic.’
Your typical programmist, such as Berlioz, is not satisfied with the
romanticist’s mere suggestion of a subject; he demands in advance
a complete bill of fare of his musical feast. When Beethoven, a
classicist, deals with a human emotion--love, for instance, as in the
Fifth Symphony--he aims merely to stimulate in us the most general
feeling and let each of us interpret for himself; when a romanticist
like Tschaikowsky writes almost equally beautiful love music he gives
a fillip to our imagination by naming it an overture to 'Romeo and
Juliet’; but when Berlioz conceives his _Symphonie Fantastique_ he must
have his lover killed on the guillotine--he must even hear the knife
fall. Such a theory of musical æsthetics is evidently highly dangerous,
since it tends to bind shackles on the free movement of the music, and
also to distract the hearer’s attention from the music to something far
less vital. Nevertheless in the hands of Richard Strauss in our own
day (born 1864), who seems to be the genius in which this school is to
culminate, it has led to remarkable results.
We have now reviewed in highly summary fashion some of the chief
schools, with their most representative masters, that may be noted in
a bird’s-eye view of the history of instrumental music. As for the
other great branch of the art, music associated with literature, and
especially its most important manifestation, the opera, classification
according to artistic principles is both more difficult and less
necessary, since the opera can very well be studied by countries
rather than by schools. The reader will at any rate find in his study
of opera that one or two clear conceptions of the national or racial
character of the three peoples who have done the most important work
in the operatic field, the Italians, the French, and the Germans,
will help him more than æsthetic standards difficult to apply to an
æsthetic hybrid which is neither drama nor music. Thus the Italian
sensuousness has been both the blessing and the curse of opera in
Italy: the blessing by keeping it simple and tuneful, as in so much
of Rossini (1792-1868), Bellini (1802-1835), Donizetti (1798-1848),
the early Verdi (1813-1901), and even such moderns as Mascagni and
Leoncavallo; the curse of opening the door to all sorts of absurdities
on the dramatic side, and to the abuse of the power of the singers
in meaningless virtuosity. Again, the keen dramatic sense of the
French has helped to minimize such absurdities in works produced by
their composers or at their national opera house under their national
influence, as for instance those of Gluck (1714-1787), Cherubini
(1760-1842), Meyerbeer (1791-1864), and others. Finally the warmth of
sentiment of the Germans, their unrivalled faculty for getting at the
emotional essence of a situation and expressing it in music, must be
accorded a large part in the power of the romantic operas of the German
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) and the music dramas of Richard Wagner
(1813-1883). In revenge the Teutonic deficiency of dramatic sense and
tolerance of tedium are to some extent accountable for those long
stagnations of the action in the Wagnerian dramas which the most ardent
admirers of Wagner the musician no longer deny.
In all this historical study of the earlier volumes of 'The Art of
Music’ the reader will be primarily in quest of information, his
interest will be that of the scientist in facts. Even here, however, he
will soon find himself discriminating the good from the bad, or from
the less good, setting up standards of comparison, in a word, mingling
with his purely scientific interest in facts an artistic interest
in values. In all periods he will find the great man distinguished
from the little by nobility, depth, and variety of thought, and by
purity of style. In all ages he will discover hosts of mediocrities
for one genius. He will realize that there were as many routinists in
the polyphonic school, as many dry-as-dusts in the classic, as many
sentimentalists in the romantic, as there are uninspired scene-painters
among the programmists. He will remark what may be called the double
paradox of art: first, that cheap decorativeness, empty display of
merely technical skill, 'splurge’ of all sorts, while often making
music popular in its own day, has always killed it early for posterity,
as for example in the case of the over-ornamented arias of Italian
opera or the equally over-ornamented piano pieces of Thalberg and other
early nineteenth century pianists; second, that simplicity, directness,
sincerity are always at first ignored or misunderstood, and only
gradually take the supreme place which belongs to them, as we see in
studying such otherwise dissimilar artists as Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven,
Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Franck. Such observations open up the path to
a true, independent, and unconventional estimate of artistic values, to
the development of real taste.
It is especially in amplifying, clarifying, and solidifying this taste
that the second group of volumes, dealing with the media of musical
production, will be useful to the unprofessional reader. A knowledge of
the construction of instruments and of the style appropriate to each,
as determined by its peculiarities and exemplified in its literature,
is a great aid both to the appreciation of excellence and to the
detection of shoddiness. A simple example will make this clear. Every
one who has watched a pianist play a waltz knows how appropriate and
convenient for the piano is that kind of accompaniment which has been
called the 'dum-dum-dum’--where the left hand first sounds the bass
and then strikes twice a chord completing the harmony and at the same
time marking the rhythm. This is an excellent piano device, because
it does these three needful things in the simplest possible way. What
shall we say, however, when laziness or incompetence, writing a waltz
for orchestra, borrows this piano device without change, as it does
constantly in the popular music of the day? Evidently enough, what was
well fitted to the piano is ridiculous for an orchestra: for here it
gives the bass instruments a series of detached notes without coherence
or interest, and condemns the unfortunate players who provide the
middle parts to repeat an endless 'dum-dum, dum-dum’ which outrages all
musical instinct.
Or, again, we sometimes hear piano pieces in which the harmonies
are arranged in solid chords, as in the hymn-tune familiar in the
protestant church. Why the effect should be so singularly vapid we
do not know until we think of the peculiarities of the instruments
involved. Voices, especially in large groups, as in congregational
singing, move slowly, sustain well, and show their quality best when
disposed in broad masses. Hence the appropriateness to them of these
deliberate chords. But the piano, on the contrary, sustains very
poorly, achieves fullness of volume only by means of rapid utterance,
and is in short at its very worst in the hymn-tune style. Piano tone
requires to be split up into many facets, to be carved, so to speak;
but vocal tone is like those substances, such as colored marble,
which show their texture best in the block. Recently there has been
much controversy as to the appropriateness of organ transcriptions of
orchestral works. No doubt the organ can render the notes of a symphony
quite as well as the poor overworked piano, but a rudimentary knowledge
of the mechanism of the organ will show us where lies its special
capacity--in the sustaining and rolling up of great masses of tone, and
not at all in that more intimate expressiveness through swelling and
fading and through accent in which the violin is peerless. The organ is
magnificent in a Bach fugue, unsatisfactory in a Beethoven symphony,
ridiculous in a popular dance. Thus on all sides we see that style
depends on the medium, and that a sensitive taste will no more detach a
musical figure from its appropriate setting than it will transfer the
costume of the logging-camp to the drawing-room, or _vice versa_.
What makes all study of this kind particularly necessary to the
would-be intelligent music-lover of to-day is that our generation seems
to be going through a period of unusual confusion in all matters of
taste. Whether it be that our resources have accumulated faster than
our powers of assimilation could develop, or that popular education,
while increasing the amount of musical enjoyment, has lowered
its quality, or that the ever-present commercialism has betrayed
us--whatever be the causes, it is certain that almost all our standards
have suffered from a false liberalism, that we have lost old lines and
boundaries without getting anything to put in their place, and that
much as we may boast of no longer starving our artistic instincts as
did our puritan forefathers, we do not yet discriminatingly nourish
them, but rather overeat ourselves sick. There is hardly any branch of
music where this tendency to excess may not be discovered. The modern
conception of the piano, for instance, as a rival of the orchestra in
richness, variety, and power of sound has adulterated piano style in
many respects. It has led directly to 'ungrateful’ writing for the
piano by composers, to pounding and other exaggerations by players.
There are few musicians nowadays who show the fine self-control that
made Schumann and Chopin models of how the piano should be treated.
The rare intuition of Debussy in this respect is one of the true
justifications of a vogue not perhaps altogether free from faddism.
In chamber music, notably the string quartet, where delicateness of
sonority is even more vital to the style, since it is the condition of
the clearness of the individual voices, and cannot be departed from
without an immediate coarsening of the texture, there is the same
tendency to imitate the orchestra. One hears many modern quartets in
which all four instruments keep restlessly sawing away, often on two
strings at once, as if they were taking part in a hurdle race or a
debating society, rather than in a work of art. Special effects like
harmonics and the use of the mute, appropriate enough in solos and at
long intervals, are grossly abused. In striving to be something beyond
its frame this most exquisite combination of four musical personalities
loses all its intimateness, all its charm. Even orchestral music
itself does not escape these perversions. There is a distinct cult
at the present day, especially in France, for playing at concerts
music originally written to accompany pantomimes or ballets, and even
for composing pieces intended for concert according to the processes
suitable for such illustrative music--with highly spiced sonorous
effects, schemes of structure based on dramatic action, and little
or no purely musical interest. Indeed, all thoughtful observers must
sometimes ask themselves if this universal tendency to force things out
of their natural fields, to make them do not what they can do best,
but what they are least expected to do, is not a symptom of a grave
disorder of our æsthetic sense, a preference of novelty to beauty,
a debased fondness for the queer, an invasion of art by that low
curiosity which draws a street crowd around any one who will stand on
his head, or wear his clothes wrong side before. The reader genuinely
fond of music will be glad to combat this tendency to the best of his
power, and to that end will inform himself of those peculiarities of
instruments by which appropriateness of style is so largely determined.
What the average reader can get from his study of the theoretical
portions of 'The Art of Music’ will depend largely on his instinctive
sense of the larger bearing of technical facts. Studied with pedantic
insistence of detail harmony is a dry subject; studied with an
imagination eager for the light it throws on general æsthetic questions
it proves unexpectedly illuminating. Harmony describes the material
available to the musician; it is, we might say, the dictionary from
which each composer chooses the words he needs to express his thought;
and to study it is therefore for the lover of music much what it is
for the lover of literature to study the vocabularies of his favorite
authors--the derivations of the words, their ancient associations,
the flavors which cling about them. Just as Sir Thomas Browne has his
special words, noble-sounding, many-syllabled, and his special forms of
sentence that roll grandly off the tongue, and as Keats finds in the
same English a completely different instrument, capable of romantic
utterance and full of elusive suggestion: so the harmony of Bach is not
the harmony of Schumann, although it is made out of the same notes and
even many of the same chords. Indeed, the very same chord is not the
same in effect, in style, when used in the context of two composers,
or even of one composer in two different moods; a chord is a chameleon
that takes the color of its surroundings. How full of sadness, of
infinite resignation, is the first B flat chord in the Adagio of the
Ninth Symphony! How the very same B flat chord pulsates with energy in
the Allegro of the Fourth! The study of the action and reaction of
harmony and style is a fascinating one, in spite of its difficulty--one
on which books might be written, as many have been on the choice of
words in literature.
Easier, however, and much more directly helpful to appreciation, is
the study of the chief principles of musical form or structure, as
they affect, not the composer, but the listener. As one going into a
foreign country provides himself with some guidance as to the main
things he is going to see there, so the music lover to whom symphonic
music remains to some degree a foreign region likes to find out before
he hears it what he is to listen for. That knowledge in detail will
be found in the essay on musical form in Volume XII. Here it is our
business, as before, avoiding detail, to get such a bird’s-eye view as
may be possible of the most general facts of musical form. Especially
agreeable and useful would it be if we could show that, in music as
elsewhere, form and formalism are two essentially different things,
and that while formalism is the conventionalizing and stiffening that
indicate lowered vitality or incipient death in a work of art, form is
the necessary shape it takes because it is alive. The formless is not
yet alive; the formal is dying or dead; only the _formed_ truly lives.
Therefore musical form is quite simple and natural, like the branching
of trees or the crystallizing of salts, and the study of it is based on
observation and common sense, and strives to determine how sounds have
to be ordered to become intelligible.
Essentially there are but three processes concerned in musical
construction--the announcement or exposition of the themes, their
elaboration or development, and their recapitulation. These processes
are the natural outcome of quite simple psychological facts, and are
duplicated in literature and other arts. The announcement of a theme is
the preliminary statement, made as simple and as brief as possible,
of the thought with which the composer proposes to occupy himself.
For the listener, it is the presentation of a bit of melody of a
particular rhythmic profile which he remembers by this profile, this
characteristic combination of long and short, accented and unaccented
notes, just as he remembers a person by the shape of his face. Careful
attention to the main themes of a composition is of vital importance
to appreciation, since the themes are the actors of the musical drama,
and all the action is really only the working out of their latent
characteristics.
This is what we mean by development. In no music worthy of the name
is development an artificial, intellectual process; it is simply the
germination of the theme-seeds. As it results, however, in constantly
increasing complexity, it would quickly confuse the listener were it
not judiciously combined with simple repetitions of the original ideas,
serving both to mark the completion of one cycle of development and
sometimes to initiate a new one. The recapitulations insure the unity
of the impression as a whole made by the work of art; the developments
give it the richness and variety inseparable from all life.
The many special musical forms of which the student will read are
merely so many clearly defined combinations of these three processes.
Thus in the minuet, for example, a comparatively primitive form,
there is one theme, expounded, developed, and recapitulated, and in
the second part called trio, a second theme treated exactly the same
way. In the 'Song form’ so called, used for slow movements of sonatas
and symphonies, there is usually an exposition of a theme, a slight
development, and an ornamented or otherwise varied repetition; then,
without any complete stop, a contrasting theme, treated much the same
way; finally, a return of the main theme, either treated as at first
or somewhat more briefly. Sometimes there is a short coda (concluding
section) with further slight development of one or both themes.
The sonata form, as we have already seen, is distinguished from
both these more rudimentary types by having two themes of almost
equal importance--sometimes three. These contrast with each other in
expression, rhythm, and what is called 'key.’ Their development is
extended and occupies the entire middle part of the piece. They are
regularly recapitulated much as at first, but now both in the same
'key,’ and may be followed by a coda, which with Beethoven assumes
sometimes almost the importance of a second development. In the
rondo there is a constant alternation between a main theme and other
secondary themes or sections of development.
Thus in all the special forms we find but different applications
of the three fundamental processes of exposition, development, and
recapitulation, much as all plants go through the necessary cycle
of seeding, growth, and blossoming. The more the music of the great
symphonic masters is studied the more marvellous will the reader find
the mingling of ingenuity and simplicity with which they know how to
marshal their thoughts. Such study makes listening no longer a passive
or even wearisome process, but the most fascinating reliving of a
spiritual life as many-sided, as infinitely various, as filled with
beauty, as that of Nature herself.
DANIEL GREGORY MASON.
JUNE, 1914.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] To be exact Emanuel Bach was not responsible for the idea of
contrast, which was a principle developed by the so-called Mannheim
school, whose leader was Johann Stamitz. But with Bach the two separate
sections of the 'Exposition’ first become distinct.
A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC
BOOK I
A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC
INTRODUCTION
Musical art is the idealized art of the inner man as distinguished
from the arts of painting and sculpture and their like which are the
idealized expression of what is outside him. It is the result of
the urgent impulses of certain peculiarly constituted human beings
to express things which move them in ways which are favorable to
permanence; which permanence proves attainable only through the
controlling influence of the instinct for order.
The instinct for order and the impulse to gratify it in all directions
seem to be present in all unperverted human beings; which is obviously
the consequence of the fact that it has always ministered to the
preservation of those who possessed it. The primitive savage who kept
his weapons in some kind of orderly fashion, and knew where to lay
his hands on them when wanted, easily survived the disorderly savage
who could not find them soon enough to prevent being exterminated.
The primitive savage who could dispose his means of existence in an
orderly fashion was more likely to survive the savage who had no proper
place for anything; and there were thousands of other ways in which
this instinct favored its possessor; and favored him more and more as
social and anti-social conditions progressed in complexity. Looked at
from another point of view, that of experience, the lack of the sense
of order betokens low mental power; and the possession of it in higher
and higher degrees is a token of higher and higher capacities of mind.
The sense of order is the basis of organization; and out of
organization comes permanence. The more perfect the organization
the more lasting is the thing organized. What is well built is well
organized for its purpose, and stands fast. What is ill built is badly
organized for its purpose, and tumbles down. And so it is with a work
of literature. It cannot be said that a noble thought ill-presented
will soon be forgotten; but its being ill-presented makes it obscure.
And it must be admitted that fascination is added to the utterance
of a great thought by the perfect clearness and nicety with which it
is expressed. The presentation is in that sense admirably organized
and the mind welcomes it, and returns to it frequently with delight;
whereas if it is clumsily expressed it gives the mind unnecessary
trouble to understand what it means, and then there is a feeling of
distaste and annoyance which prejudices the welcome that the great
thought merits.
So it is with a work of art. Clumsiness and incoherence of structure
beget discomfort, however great the intentions. Imperfections which
may not be noticed at first grow more and more oppressive, till they
become unbearable, and at last mankind is impelled to regard the good
intentions as little better than opportunities wasted.
It may be justly argued that such imperfections are inevitable not only
because art represents human efforts but because organization takes
centuries to effect. It is also true that certain types of imperfection
are pathetically attractive and afford a kind of interest in themselves
where they suggest the kind of human condition and effort which is
characteristic of the time and circumstances in which any individual
work of art was produced. But in such case it is necessary that the
motive shall be honorable. After ages will never be able to regard
the deficiencies in modern church and chapel architecture, stained
glass windows, modern tombstones and suburban villa residences with
anything but disgust. Putting such aberrations aside for the present,
it is pleasant to realize that one of the privileges of an instinct for
style is to be able to recognize the stage of organization which has
been reached, both in diction and structure, by the qualities of any
work of art, and to locate the type of organization and balance its
proportionate relation to what is expressed, and, more subtly still,
to discern even the intention. Men who have any artistic instinct
estimate the quality of a work of art by such an adjustment. They feel
its nobility if it has any, even though the standard of organization
is low, by estimating the quality of the thought in connection with
the inevitable limitations of the means of expression. A work of art
may inspire constant delight even though its form be obvious and its
details crude, if the methods employed are sincere efforts to express
with the best means available an inspiring idea. Limitations do not
necessarily imply false construction. There is this to be remembered:
that the progress of thought and the progress of organization
proceed together and that a thought which clearly belongs to several
generations ago will not be as complex or have to cover so much ground
as the thought of later times of equal status; and that the limitation
of the means of organization of the time to which the thought belongs
will therefore be adequate and congenial to that thought, whereas, if a
composer or artist use only the resources of diction and design of two
hundred years ago to express a modern thought, the deficiency of the
organization becomes at once apparent.
It is worth while to observe parenthetically that in primitive stages
of art men did not attempt organization in order to give permanence to
their artistic products. Their attitude was that of the unconscious
child, and they merely sought to gratify their instinct for order,
and arrived at the principle of organization in the process. So the
beginnings of art were the direct result of the inevitable processes of
the universe. Men found out the relation of organization to permanence
long afterward, when they developed the capacity to analyze and
consider what they were doing.
Mankind, like the individual, passes through three stages in his
manner of producing and doing things. The first is unconscious
and spontaneous, the second is self-critical, analytical, and
self-conscious; and the third is the synthesis which comes of the
recovery of spontaneity with all the advantages of the absorption
of right principles of action. In the products of the first stage
people delight in spite of crudity and clumsiness because they are
fervent, genuine, essentially human. The products of the second are
often ineffectual, occasionally suggestive, and for the most part
more historically than humanly interesting. It is in the last phase
that the greatest works of musical art are produced; and it is in
such works of art that the approximation to perfection may be found,
in which there is no part which has not some relation to every other
part; nothing which does not minister to the fullness with which the
inner idea of the artist is expressed; in which every curve of melody,
every progression of harmony, every modulation, every rhythmic group,
every climax and relaxation of stress, every shade of color, and every
part of the inner texture at once ministers to coherent and cogent
expression and at the same time fulfills its function in the general
scheme of design or organization. From mere elementary orderliness
art has progressed in such things to the very highest manifestations
of the subtlest and most perfect organization which the human mind is
capable of achieving. But it must be admitted that such an ideal is
only reached in very rare cases, by masters whose complete absorption
in the work of artistic creation is undisturbed by distracting
influences; who can maintain their concentration through a prolonged
and coherent effort; and who have the gift to apply their faculties
and successfully call upon their minds to provide exactly the right
methods and procedures whenever required, and at the same time to hold
everything balanced by the requirements of proportionate relation which
is indispensable to true artistic organization.
It is to such perfection that all true artists aspire, and it is only
those who are absolutely true to themselves who can even approximate to
it. In days when commercialism is rampant and the favor of such as are
totally ignorant of the most elementary artistic principles is held to
be the criterion of artistic worth, it practically becomes impossible.
There are two phases of organization. The first is the organization of
terms, signs, methods, materials, some of which must be found before
art begins, but most of which are found as it evolves. The second phase
is the organization of the individual works of art. The parallel that
springs to mind at the moment is the organization of units and supplies
of an army, on the one hand, and, on the other, the organization of the
campaign and the engagements for which the forces and their needs were
organized. Upon the former kind of organization it is not necessary to
dwell. It is an obvious necessity of art. But, though part of it, it
does not illustrate or affect the quality of the art products except
in a purely elementary and mechanical sense. Of the latter kind, which
manifests itself inevitably in varying degrees in every musical work
from the cheapest popular song to the highest instrumental symphony,
it must be admitted that it is worth while to have some little
understanding; especially of the relations to one another of the
various branches and factors in the artistic scheme which the study of
such things in detail is apt to miss.
At the outset the curious anomaly may be admitted that expression
and organization appear to be antagonistic. This is only one way
of recognizing that art, like everything else, is achieved by the
accommodation of opposites. The very idea of human feeling being
expressed in preconceived set terms sounds so preposterous as to be
almost repugnant. Yet if it is not expressed in set terms how should
it maintain its hold upon the mind? We know by experience that human
feeling upsets organization (as, for instance, in the confusion of
rhythm into which highly emotional performers and singers are driven),
and that organization stifles human feeling (as, for instance, in the
empty, inadequate words that are stuffed into poetry to make rhymes,
and the ridiculous shams that are stuffed in architecture as in music
to make a pattern complete). But, as a matter of fact, though language
also might be described as antagonistic to feeling, yet feeling cannot
definitely be conveyed to other beings without being formalized into
words, and the words arranged according to the recognized rules of
prosody. And, as a matter of experience, when language has become,
as it does, a spontaneous means of expressing feeling, it very often
intensifies the feelings that it is used to express. Many men are more
excited by their own violent language than by the motives which caused
them to give vent to it. So in art some men only begin to find out
how strong their feelings are when they try to put them into shape.
The mere fact of organizing effective climaxes according to settled
principles causes them to believe in deep-set passion which they would
not otherwise have suspected in themselves. Oratory is never in itself
a proof of greatness or even sincerity of soul.
So it cannot be maintained that the appearance of antagonism is fully
borne out by experience. But what is evident is that the human element
represents instability and the constructive element stability; and the
adjustment of the two keeps art alive. All art that has life in it must
be in unstable equilibrium, for, indeed, all thought whatever induces
instability. Stable equilibrium, if such a thing could be conceivable,
is merely abeyance of activity. As a matter of fact there is no part
of the universe which is in stable equilibrium, art as little as the
rest of it. Art is, in the widest sense, man’s highest expression of
the Spirit of the Universe; that is of the effects which are produced
in his inner man by his personal experiences in it and his cogitations
about it, and art’s life is governed by the same laws. In the universe
all things seem to tend toward stable equilibrium, and yet of necessity
when it seems to be approached some new direction of force disturbs it
and sets up new systems of motions which may last for ages. So in art
there has been a tendency to deal with the claims of feeling and the
claims of form at different times. At certain periods in art’s history
the human element predominated and the claims of organization were
either ignored or overlooked. The result was incoherence, and the need
of more circumspect procedure gave organization an excessive spell of
attention. Convention then took the place of realities and art became
the playground of ingenious dry-as-dusts, till the human element again
asserted its claims and progress swayed in the direction of instability
again; and so the great rhythm was maintained.
But it would be absurd to pretend that the alternation proceeded
regularly without yielding to external influences. The direction which
art took was often influenced by social conditions external to itself.
A chance whiff of fashion or a wave of impulse in favor of intellectual
subtleties would naturally cause a phase of art in which human feeling
would be crowded out by superfluity of organizing ingenuity. A state of
society in which a few people enjoyed the results of their ancestors
having annexed all the material advantages of the world and regarded
the rest of humanity as merely provided by Providence to minister
to their vanities, would be peculiarly favorable to the exuberance
of conventional pattern-making and elegant futilities; while the
successful overthrow of such a poisonous tradition and the general
acceptance of the widest claims of humanity to common justice naturally
brought an overwhelming impulse of human feeling into play. But the
apparent derangement of the ebb and flow was not actually destructive
of the principle, but only affected the length of the periods and the
extent of the one influence on the other.
As a rule the instinctive discernment of humanity was so far just that
it is far more easy to point to periods when human feeling predominated
than to those when the organizing instinct predominated. This was
natural because all artistic beings are, as far as the impulse is
concerned, at the outset bent upon expressing feelings of some sort.
Even those who have more aptitude for technical efficiency than mind
are not actually aiming at producing supernaturally correct grammatical
exercises. They are always much offended if such a thing is suggested.
The unsophisticated lovers of music who have no technical knowledge
to speak of are always concerned with the human side of it, they are
moved by the sound, the color, the rhythm, the character of the melody,
and, as far as they can get at it, by the idea the composer wants to
express. It lies with the unsophisticated to maintain the claims of
that side of art, as Wagner suggested when he said that he made his
works for the not-musicians.
The fully instructed are inevitably inclined to overestimate mere
workmanship. The wonder that is inspired by supremely masterly
organization impels experts to be carried away by their admiration
of it; and, moreover, it is practicable to discuss that aspect of
art fully and clearly, whereas language is not apt to discuss the
meaning and spirit of musical art, for the obvious reason that it is
the business of music to express things that are beyond the reach of
words. And it is pathetic to think how many thousands of people who
have musical insight, and are really moved and inspired by it, are,
through their very conscientious desire to understand it, misled into
supposing that organization and dexterous use of the methods of art are
the things that are of highest importance. This has been the bane of
the greater part of theoretic writing about art and is the thing which
arouses rebellion in ardent and aspiring minds against the stress that
is laid on principles of form and grammatical orthodoxies. To such
dispositions it seems preposterous to devote so much attention to the
organization and to take so little count of the thing organized; and
their antagonism is indeed very serviceable. For, however ridiculous
the results their ardor often produces, they do help to keep art
alive and to prevent its being stifled by conventions. And they do
maintain the necessary protest against the paralyzing theory that has
at times been propounded, that art is merely a special manifestation
of clever mechanical ingenuity. Coherent organization is indeed a
necessary condition of art, but the thing organized is of the foremost
importance. The idea comes first and the organization is secondary.
Yet the one is futile without the other; the idea cannot be conveyed
without the organization, but organization without something to
organize is mere superfluity. The idea without organization is mere
incoherence; mere organization without meaning is empty puzzle making.
Neither by itself has any claim to be distinguished as art.
The ways in which a work of art can be organized are practically
innumerable; but in musical art they all have the simple structural
basis of a departure from a given point to a point or many points of
contrast and back home again. The infinite number of varieties depends
on the manner in which the central point is established, and how the
departure from it is made; how the contrasting middle portion is
organized, and how the return home is established. The evolution of
principles of form consists in the elaboration of the main divisions
into subordinate contrasts, contrasts to contrasts, inner organic
procedures, devices of structure which are linked and superimposed on
one another, in which the steps that lead away from the main centre
are successively distributed in subtle gradations, all of which
are available to make the adaptation to the idea more perfect. The
story of the evolution is perspicuously clear, as the vast amount of
devoted and, latterly, intelligent labor which has been expended upon
collecting folk-songs and specimens of quasi-musical phrases of savages
has completed the story from the first appearance of the desire for
some kind of orderliness up to the portentous elaborations of European
music of the present day.
The way complication has been built upon complication may be
easily grasped by observing the successive stages of art for which
organization had to be provided. At first it had only to serve for
a single melodic line; then, in the period of ecclesiastical choral
music, for two or more combined melodic lines; then composers combined
more and more melodic lines as they found out how it could be done, and
this caused their minds to be almost monopolized by what may be called
linear organization, which is a systematized relation of melodic parts
which are quasi independent, but knit into unity by their subjection
to the rules of melodic scales, which were called modes. The highest
outcome of long and concentrated thought in this direction was the type
of organization known as the fugue, which is a linear principle of
organization vitalized by the systematic distribution of recognizable
melodic phrases. Fugue was the first form in which the musical idea
was the most prominent factor in organization, and in the hands of
genuine composers was developed to a high degree of perfection. But it
left almost unrealized the problem of organization which dawned upon
men’s minds as necessary when they began to feel the harmonies which
were the result of combined melodious parts as entities in themselves.
This problem was dealt with in the period when men devoted themselves
to the classification of harmonies in key systems, which gave every
harmony a definite function in artistic organization; and the capacity
of the human mind was developed till it could recognize one succession
of harmonies as representing one key centre and another succession
of harmonies as representing another key centre, and this made an
orderly succession of key centres the new basis of organization.
Then the human mind grew to be able to discern these principles of
order when composers dispensed with the sounding of the concrete
harmonies and only represented them by ornamental procedures; through
which the trained mind can perceive and infer the groups of harmonic
successions which are implied and recognize the respective keys to
which they belong. Complication yet further expanded the basis of
organization as composers approached what may be called the extreme of
sophistication, which became attainable by a reversion to the linear
system, in which harmony was again suffused by polyphonic methods, and
the individual notes of the ornamental formulas themselves are made to
represent centres of activity and have their own harmonization; which
harmonization subsists in spite of its apparent clashing with the
harmonization of other ornamental notes, which the mind is able to
endure because it intellectually segregates the notes which represent
different systems and allots them to their respective centres and
so keeps them apart from one another. The superimposition of device
upon device is like a perpetual budding from a germ cell, with the
additional analogy to things physical, that each generation is always
consistent in its characteristics and identifiable. The quickness of
the human mind at grasping the especial type of organization which it
has to accept, in order to follow the idea of the composer, is one of
its most extraordinary capacities; as is the development of the art
which enables the adequately equipped composer to be sure that his
most subtle sophistications are sure to meet with understanding from
the auditors who are equally well equipped. When an ignoramus looks
at a full score of any big modern work and sees there the hundreds of
notes that are to be sounded in a few seconds, and sounded also for the
fraction of a second and no more, most of which are not harmony notes
but only suggest them by the way they are grouped, and yet convey to
the qualified auditor a perfect sense of orderliness and coherence, it
will either give him the sense of the amazing development of art and of
human capacity to follow what is offered to it as art, or incredulity,
in accordance with his temperamental bias.
But it has to be remembered that, in order to find any method of
organization serviceable, the auditor must have gone through some
of the steps which enable him to follow the procedure. It is here
that certain perplexing incapacities will find their explanation. It
frequently happens that a person of considerable musical culture is
amazed to find that some passage which he regards as one of the noblest
and most moving in the whole range of art leaves the majority of
average audiences entirely blank and unmoved--and this may happen with
people who are constantly hearing music. It happens most frequently
when a person who cultivates late phases of instrumental music is
brought into contact with the finest choral music of the sixteenth
century. The meaning and purpose of the several motions have not come
under his attention and he has no clue whatever to the scheme of
organization. The contempt with which the complacent classicist of
the sonata period looked down upon the form of the fugue was owing
to musicians having broken altogether for the time with organization
of the fugal type and having become incapable of listening to and
understanding the motions of two or three independent parts at once.
For here it will be as well to observe that every step in the building
up of art by the addition of notes to a scale, of new chords which were
devised, and of methods and devices of all sorts had special functions
when they were invented, just as much as every conceivable feature in
architecture had a function. But mankind always forgot the original
meaning very soon and applied the various features to other purposes,
most of which were quite without meaning and merely served for barren
show. And it is this forgetfulness which makes so many people totally
indifferent to the finest artistic achievements. They are expressed in
a language they do not understand.
It must be obvious that there is a very close connection between
the type and complexity of organization and the standard of mental
development of those for whom it is devised. The study of folk-music
and the music of primitive savages is very enlightening in this
respect; especially in respect of the organization, which is based
in great part on musical phrases. As might be naturally supposed the
earliest sign of awakening intelligence is found in mere reiteration
of some melodic or rhythmic formula. This is essentially the primitive
savage type and is met with in extraordinary persistency under
varied conditions. It is a most remarkable fact that such undisguised
reiteration is a conspicuous feature of the music of relatively
undeveloped races in the present day, who have adopted the advanced
methods of modern music with remarkable success. It is the more
curious as the composers of the more developed races do not resort to
such naïve reiteration except as a basis for presenting a phrase or
passage in different lights by variation. And with the undeveloped
races their reversion to a primitive practice, especially at points
of great excitement, is an unconscious admission of the nearness of
their temperamental average to that of their primitive ancestry.
As a principle mere reiteration is hardly worthy of the name of
organization, it might rather be called a preliminary procedure,
or a means of keeping things going. It does not imply any mental
development, it only implies some kind of definition and capacity of
recognition. The first step toward real organization comes when a
phrase or short passage of melody is alternated with another which
serves as a contrast with it, and returns again to the first phrase
to give the sense of completeness. Yet even such a simple principle
of orderliness needed considerable progress in mental grasp before it
could be attained. It might perhaps be regarded as the significant
feature which distinguishes folk-music from savage music. Folk-music is
indeed a very considerable advance on the music of primitive savages,
and it shows the growth of power to attain to real orderliness, as
the basis of art, by the employment of simple and clear forms of
organization, which are evolved quite irrespective of any collusion
or imitation between the races that resorted to it. As folk-music is
always melodic it did not admit of great variety of elaboration in
the organization of the tunes, yet there was sufficient to illustrate
the average disposition toward intellectuality of the races which
the songs represent. Races which are notable for the quickness of
their intelligence and their delight in the exercise of it show it in
the closeness and interest of the structure of their folk-music, as
is the case with Scotch tunes, and those whom imagination, feeling,
or sentiment are specially liable to dominate are represented by
forms which are vaguer and less elaborately organized. On the side
of character, also, it is parenthetically observable that folk tunes
reflect the temperamental qualities of the races and localities to
which they belong most truthfully--such as the vivacity and love of
orderly design of the French, the pathos and pugnacity of the Irish,
the sober simplicity and deliberation of the English, the sentimental
reflectiveness of Germans, the spasmodic vehemence of Hungarians, and
the love of elaborate ornamentation of Orientals. Slavonic folk-music
is also most characteristic, but it is most difficult to define. It
has in most cases a flavor of the playful unconsciousness of youth,
simplicity of structure and a kind of pathetic gaiety. This close
connection between a race or a geographical attitude of mind and its
folk-music is really a foretaste of the connection which persisted
throughout the whole story of art’s evolution. A people’s music so
accurately represents its temperamental qualities that, if there was
any doubt about a race’s character, the music they favor would solve
it. In folk-music the element of rhythm figures very considerably;
and, as it is a subject about which a great deal of confusion of mind
seems to exist, it is advisable to give a little attention to it. It
is a defining and vitalizing influence of the highest importance; for
it is only through rhythm that the individual factors of organization
become identifiable. It is through the grouping of beats into two,
three, four, five, six, and so on that the nuclei which are the basis
of organization are grouped into coherent and distinguishable factors.
Inasmuch as a note is nothing by itself, and only becomes something
when it has relation to another note, and, as these notes must succeed
one another in time, it is necessary to have some means of defining the
respective lengths of time which are to be relatively allotted to the
respective notes; and rhythm is the process by which the progress of
sounds in time is marked off and organized. Without it there would be
mere vagueness and confusion.
This is the aspect of rhythm from the point of view of organization.
That was not its object in the beginning, but to minister to expression
of feeling. All people who have not attained to an advanced stage
of culture and intelligence delight in rhythm; and the sphere it
occupies in folk-music is enlightening; for its preponderance varies
considerably. In some folk-music it is always conspicuous, as in
Hungarian and French folk-music; in some it is only moderately apparent
and rarely aggressive, except when the words associated with it imply
vigorous action, as in English and German folk-music. There are obvious
implications which are suggested by the fact. The aggressively rhythmic
music shows a predisposition for instrumental music, and the less
rhythmic for vocal music. The former represents the music of action and
the latter the music of inner feeling. The former secular feeling and
the latter serious feeling associated with religion of some sort.
Rhythm suggests bodily activity. Its essential function is to represent
the expression of feelings by motions of the body, arms, legs, or any
part that can move freely. This is verified by the fact that rhythmic
music impels people to join in with hands and feet, and this is also
the underlying basis of dance music; for the object of dance music
is to inspire people to rhythmic activity, and its connection with
expression is verified by the fact that so much dance music, even
in the earliest times, has been mimetic. The position of rhythm in
artistic music is strange, for it is undeniable that the preponderant
impulse of serious composers is to hide it away in sophistications.
Indeed, for many centuries it was, possibly unconsciously, kept at bay.
Pure unsophisticated rhythm belongs to the primitives. It is not the
form of expression congenial to self-respecting and developed races
when they are taking anything serious in hand. This is partly because
it does, as above remarked, represent physical expression, which is not
the type to which intellectual people are prone. Developed minds want
to convince by argument; primitive people by force. Moreover, rhythm is
not progressive. In its direct forms it is probably much as it was with
the cave dwellers. Its limitations are obvious; and its simple forms
are indicative of a primitive state in those that use it.
As a matter of fact, it seems to be the ingrained impulse of composers
whose feeling for their art is highly developed to disguise it, as
though the frank use of it was commonplace and cheap. What appears to
be progress in rhythm is indeed not in rhythm itself, but in that very
sophistication. It is like the sophistication of metre in the blank
verse of Shakespeare or Milton, or even in the lyric poetry of Shelley
and Keats and later poets, which makes English lyrics so difficult for
inefficient and unliterary composers to set. The parallel in poetry
and verse is complete. For the jog-trot of those indifferent poets who
make an appeal to the undeveloped minds of the herd is poetry of a low
order, just as is the rhythmic commonplace of cheap-minded composers.
The higher type of composer deals with rhythm as with everything
else. He uses the simple basis of a definite rhythm to build upon it
something interesting. What would be commonplace and familiar is made
worthy of the name of art by its presentation in relation to other
rhythms, or in combination with an independent grouping of strong
and weak beats which gives it new significance. Such sophistication
of rhythm was very difficult in the times when music was confined to
one melodic part. But it became easy when choral music developed into
contrapuntal treatment of melodic voice parts, and it attained in
later days to the highest pitch of interest when the harmonic style
was reinfused with polyphonic methods, and full opportunities were
afforded for combining different rhythms at once, and ordinary rhythms
in one part could be made quite interesting or amusing through their
association with other parts which are purposely at variance with the
essential rhythm. By such procedure composers succeeded in avoiding
the use of common property and could enjoy the inestimable services
of rhythm as a vitalizer and a definer without condescending from
their high estate. The reticence of the higher type of composer in the
matter of rhythm, and his tendency to refrain from such undisguised
relaxation, is curiously confirmed by the history of sacred music.
It is a very singular fact that, in the long period of over five
centuries, during which church music was developed from the most
primitive conditions till it manifested such wonderful perfection of
spirit and workmanship at the end of the sixteenth century, composers,
guided by instinct rather than conscious reasoning, always endeavored
to suppress or hide the sense of rhythm. As music began to grow from
the doubling of plain-song at the intervals of fifths and fourths
and octaves (which was so convenient to the different calibres of
the voices which had to sing it), by filling in the steps between
one principal note and another with shorter notes, and so developed
primitive counterpoint, composers soon began to aim at giving the
effect of independence to human voices by making them move at different
times and in different directions; by making use of syncopations,
suspensions, dotted notes that overlapped one another, and all
such procedures as obscured the rhythmic element. And even when,
owing to special circumstances, they were driven to make parts move
simultaneously, as in later harmonic procedure, they made the chords
halt and move again, and even occasionally drop the principal accent,
to obviate the sense of rhythmic lilt--as may be observed in some of
the hymn tunes of Orlando Gibbons, which have had to be altered and
made quite commonplace in modern times to suit the mechanical habits of
modern congregations.
This curious persistence may be explained by the fact that devotional
feeling is not demonstrative. Western people in really devotional
frame of mind do not gesticulate or fling their arms and legs about
to express their feelings, but are bowed down in spiritual ecstasy.
The music was the true expression of the spirit; and, till secular
music began to react upon religious music after the beginning of the
seventeenth century, the music of the services of the church might
fairly be described as anti-rhythmic. And it still remains a fact
that whenever rhythm makes its appearance prominently in music which
purports to be devotional it is a proof of its insincerity. But there
are always many things which concur in achieving a big result, and
it must be admitted that conjoined with the instinct which avoided
rhythm in religious music was the fact that all the early religious
music was essentially vocal; and vocal music in its purest simplicity
is comparatively unrhythmic. It learnt definite and consistent rhythm
from instrumental music when that came to be cultivated with vigor
from the beginning of the seventeenth century onward. It is true that
dance music was sung, and that the _Balletti_ of such a delightful
composer as Morley have wonderful rhythmic verve; but such compositions
represent the time when musical expansion was moving strongly in
a secular direction and instruments were beginning to exert their
influence. The greater madrigals of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries still illustrate the inherent peculiarity of
pure choral music and give ample proofs of the composers’ endeavors to
disguise the rhythmic element and represent the underlying principle of
the grouping of strong and weak beats without adopting obvious rhythmic
organization. Instrumental music, on the other hand, inevitably
implies rhythm. In its most primitive phases it was probably nothing
but rhythm, and that rhythm of a perfectly frank and undisguised
description. In its early artistic, phases it was generally full of
rhythmic life without obtruding the rhythm as a special means of
appeal to the audience, as is the case in modern popular music. The
deeply ingrained habits of counterpoint which still persisted in the
eighteenth century made even suites of dance tunes so full of texture
in detail that the rhythm was rather the basis of the definition of
pulses than a factor in the effect. If the story of modern music were
followed up with special reference to rhythm it would be found that
the aim of all composers who took their art seriously has been to
avoid the commonplaces and to sophisticate rhythm in such a way as
to make it serve as an additional source of expression, instead of a
mere mechanical incitement to movement. The increase of orchestral
instruments offered ample opportunities to sophisticate rhythms in a
manner analogous to the charming effects of early choral music, in
which syncopation and cross-rhythms add a genuine interest to the
fundamental rhythm and seem to play with the hearers by making them
feel that one rhythm is superimposed on another. Even in actual modern
dance tunes of the best kind the impulse to add something independent
to the fundamental rhythm is found in such devices as tying over the
last note of a group of three in a valse to the strong beat of the
succeeding rhythmic group, while the essential rhythm is maintained by
the bass or other instruments of the accompaniment, and composers have
even successfully devised such attractive ingenuities as the effect of
three long beats being superimposed on two groups of the three lesser
beats of the established rhythm. The well-known combination in Mozart’s
_Don Giovanni_ of a minuet and a valse each in triple time and a
country dance in 4/4 time is one of the most ingenious illustrations of
such combined rhythms. The essential basis of all such devices is the
sophistication of the obvious, which is the natural impulse of every
true composer.
Such sophistication is, however, ultimately dependent on the
development of harmony into its latest polyphonic phases, which
represent the furthest progress of intellectual perception in the races
which make use of it. The use of harmonies systematized on the basis
of tonalities is the highest development in respect of expression
that has been attained in art and it has become a means of widening
the possibilities of organization which seems to be unlimited. It is
said of a famous English philosopher, whose range of intellectual
power was abnormal, that he wept because he thought that the range
of melodic variety was exhaustible. He was possibly one of the many
whose musical sense is not sufficiently developed to understand
progressions of harmony. For, if he had known that every note of
every melody is capable of being accompanied by an immense number of
different harmonies, probably several dozens apiece, and that each
different harmony is capable of altering altogether the expressive
character of the melodic note in relation to other notes of the melody,
and that the changes in expression not only apply to notes which are
contiguous but to notes that are several steps removed, he need
not have been distressed at the limitations of the musical scale as
developed by European peoples. But this does not by any means exhaust
the possibilities of expressive effect, because the same harmony will
have a different effect if it is in close order or in open order; if
it is in close order in a high part of the scale or a low part of the
scale; and the melodic significance is also variable with the rhythmic
treatment to which it is subjected. The full force of harmonies to
minister to expression was dependent on the systematization of chords
on a tonal basis. This had been in the air for a long time before
composers definitely grappled with the problem, as may be observed
in the splendid use J. S. Bach made of the expressive resources
of harmony. But it was the classical masters of the sonata period
who dealt with the matter effectually. They based their scheme of
organization on the recognition of a complete classification of the
harmonic contents of any key; which implied a recognition of the actual
degrees of importance and of the functions of each individual chord.
This scheme also required as its most essential guaranty a very strict
recognition and observance of each key that became a factor in the
form; and also the apprehension of chords as chords.
But when the true polyphonic spirit invaded the sacred precincts of
the sonata type, and means were supplied to slip from diatonic chord
to chromatic chord, and even for a composer to lead the pleasingly
bewildered hearer into some unimaginable remote key and back, it began
to dawn on people that the achievement of even such an admirable
principle of organization as the sonata form had not landed musicians
in their final haven, but that in reality the sonata period was
merely one of transition--a kind of interim, like that of the aria
form in opera, when men forebore for a time to address themselves
to expression, and projected their minds to the solution of the
essential problems of organization. The wonderful success which the
sonata composers achieved in their devoted self-denial led to the
unfortunate misconception that musical art was a thing which stood by
itself and was self-sufficient and had no reference in its highest
manifestations to anything outside itself. Two things corrected this
strange aberration. One was that a race of composers sprang up who
filled up the easily managed forms of the sonata type with correct and
orthodox passages and deluged the world with utterly barren, empty,
artificial and intolerably conventional rigmarole. This, indeed, the
world could not put up with, and it turned with not unnatural eagerness
to welcome the party who advocated program music. These aspiring people
were quite on the right tack, but the resources of art were not as yet
built up sufficiently for their purposes, and therefore a great part
of their trivial and conventional imitations of scenes and impressions
merely made them ridiculous. The necessary revolution came out of the
heart of the old régime. The greatest masters of the sonata types of
art had always been impelled to infuse their works of the sonata order
with human meaning and to suggest a condition of feeling--mournful,
cheerful, merry, mischievous, and the like; and Beethoven, the greatest
of them all by far, after showing frequent signs of breaking away even
as early as the slow movement of his Sonata in D, opus 10, No. 3,
finally in his latest sonatas, quartets and symphonies produced some of
the most wonderful human documents ever achieved by man, in which he
expressed the workings of his own innermost feelings, the portrayal of
his aspirations, his perplexities in face of the problems of life, his
deep cogitations and moods, and his hopes for the destiny of humanity.
Here, indeed, he had found the true sphere of musical expression. It
was the expression of his innermost being; and his music rose to such
unparalleled heights because he dealt with his own self, which he was
bound to know better than most people know themselves because he was so
shut off from the world by his deafness; and it may be added that the
music is so profoundly interesting also because he was personally such
an extraordinary and intensely interesting character.
Beethoven occupied the unique position of consummating the sonata type
and giving the impulse to the artistic development which reëstablished
the full vigor of human expression and feeling. He reëstablished the
right of ideas to be expressed by music and indicated the manner
in which it was to be done. His ardent nature rebelled against
conventions. He sought to eliminate all dead and inert matter, to
get rid of the formal types of accompaniment which were everybody’s
property, and to make everything subserve to the expression of the
idea. It was probably this which impelled him in his later works to
revert to the fugue--that is, to the real fugue of the type of John
Sebastian Bach, and not to the bastard form in which attempts were made
to amalgamate it with the harmonic scheme of sonata form, which caused
the introduction of the conventional passages of that form which were
totally alien to the real fugue form. In the genuine fugue form, as
illustrated by him and Bach, all the texture of the work is alive and
there are no conventional formulas of accompaniment, and Beethoven’s
point of view enabled him to go right back, as it were, beyond the
historical episode of the sonata and bring the true fugue again to
life and use it as a most concentrated means of expression. There
is a further and very striking aspect of the question which is that
Beethoven, in bringing the fugue form into the field again, anticipated
and gave impulse to the revival of the polyphonic methods which is such
a conspicuous feature of the most recent development in art: and yet
further, his use of the fugue form illustrated that gravitation of
artistic development which was to find such splendid accomplishment in
the later music dramas of Wagner, in which the polyphonic treatment and
the use of the leit-motif form a gigantic expansion of the essential
principles of the supremely elastic form of the fugue.
But even these significant facts do not exhaust the aspects in which
Beethoven anticipated later artistic developments. It is a very
strange fact that after his deafness was quite established his sense
of tone color continued to expand. Even in comparatively early works
he had shown gravitation toward romantically characteristic effects
of instrumentation, as, for instance, in the familiar and supremely
wonderful color scheme of the scherzo of the C minor symphony. But
after he had quite lost his hearing his color sense grew in richness
and depth and variety to a bewildering extent. His mind seemed to be
specially occupied with finding tone colors which intensified the
expression in quite a new way, as, for instance, in the huge slow
movement of the sonata in B flat, opus 106, in the last movement of
the sonata in C minor, opus 111, and in the slow movement of the
Choral Symphony. Prior to his time there had been a great deal of
inert matter in orchestral scoring. The functions of wind instruments
were indeed defined, in so far as they were used either as actual solo
instruments or more often to supply a pleasant continuity of tone in
agreeable colors, while the strings did most of the actual talking. But
the standard of execution of the players, as well as the technique of
orchestration, was not advanced enough to bring the wind instruments
fairly into the operation on an equality with the strings, and they
were made to play what was definitely serviceable to the scheme, but
had in itself no musical definition and purpose. The greater part of
the advance that has since taken place in orchestration consists in
making every member of the orchestra contribute to the complex of
polyphony by playing actual and apt musical passages. It implied the
growth of texture toward vitality in every part of the artistic scheme,
and a development of organization of the very subtlest description.
For it must be kept in mind that the employment of instruments of
diverse tone color in the modern manner does not imply their constant
employment, but their apt employment only; which is so contrived by
the genius of composers who can really think in orchestras that the
tone qualities affect the sensibilities of the hearers to the utmost by
their relations to one another. Even the feeblest intelligence would
be capable of discerning the fact that great effects of color are made
through juxtaposition. A very vivid piece of coloring is not vivid
because the individual colors are vivid, but because various colors
are disposed so as to give particular colors their utmost effect upon
the sensibilities. A glowing red does not glow of itself but because
the sensibilities have been so affected by other colors that they
have become highly susceptible to red. Groups of nerves are affected
in various ways by tone colors, and the secret of art is so to use
the various tone colors that each shall minister in full measure to
the effect of others. And the secret of expression in art in this
particular department is that the composer who has that very highly
organized faculty of perception of relations of colors uses just those
relations in their various degrees which intensify the susceptibility
of the human auditor to the quality of the ideas he wants to express.
In this field there is a very wide and interesting opportunity for
special study, as the average of color tendencies is a very striking
means of gauging the disposition and personality of composers. Thus
the stern, almost ascetic, colors of Brahms, varied by touching gleams
of tenderness and beauty, express his personality most exactly.
Beethoven undoubtedly changed his average of color as he developed
his personality. In his earlier works he was genial and bright, after
the manner of the sonata composers, and made use of the cheerful
coloring that suited a cultured and prosperous aristocracy. In his
middle period he became warmer and more serious; in his latest period
he was sometimes grim and fierce, sometimes deep and solemn, but often
tender with the depth of longing and the earnestness of his aspiration.
But who cannot read the character of a composer through his average
color scheme? The flighty, empty-headed trickster with his sparkling
piccolo and his gas-jet noises on violins, and the bombastic vulgarian
posing as a man of great feeling with his roars of blatant brass;
the oversensitized hedonist with his delicate subtleties, mainly in
transparent pearl-grays; and so on. We are almost inclined to forget
that it is all, or nearly all, a matter of relations; it is only not
a matter of relations when the music is false. When the composer does
try to make his effects by violence and what he supposes to be the
intrinsic power of tone-quality nobody is permanently taken in. That
the basis of color effect is relation is a thing man is learning every
day in the infinite variety of a gorgeous sunset and in the luxuriant
blaze of his own flowerbeds. Indeed, the principle of relativity in art
is nowhere likely to be more readily felt than in the matter of color.
It is more difficult to apprehend in matters of form and organization.
Yet it ought to be easy to perceive that the whole object of
organization is to put things in their right places. It is just as in
the color scheme: the effect of a work of art, as has been said before,
does not depend upon intrinsic interest of individual moments, but on
the relation of every moment to every other moment. If the relations
are false the impression is marred and the idea fails to carry
conviction.
But it follows from this that there had to be a sweeping change in the
generally accepted views of the universal applicability of the sonata
forms. They were no doubt admirable as types of abstract design; they
were examples of approximate perfection in musical organization; but,
when the time came again after the sonata period to make music express
ideas, it became evident, with the assistance of Beethoven’s insight,
that special ideas required types of organization which were specially
adapted to the ideas. Men humbly ventured on compositions which did
not represent the august dignity of the sonata order. They tried in
small ways to represent their feelings and ideas. They found the sonata
forms much too big; the prescriptive rights of so aristocratic an
organization entailing such a lot of formalities; and they had of sheer
necessity to find some forms more apt and compact. The unique genius
of Chopin led the way. Surrounded by an atmosphere of romanticism,
and entirely free, as far as we can see, from the influence of the
sonata spirit, his strange and subtle mind sought types of form which
were quite independent of tradition. Very often the form seems to
grow out of the musical ideas; at any rate it is easy to feel that
form and utterance progressed simultaneously in his processes of
inspiration. This attitude toward original methods of organization is
perceptible in a very large range of his compositions--the ballads,
the impromptus, the mazurkas, but in the finest and subtlest shape
in the best of the preludes. There, indeed, can always be felt the
underlying impulse to express some feeling or idea which is not purely
and only musical, and also the exact aptness of the form in which it
is expressed. Hardly any modern composers have excelled Chopin in this
respect; it is his greatest contribution to the evolution of musical
art. But even classical composers, composers essentially built up on
the great traditions, tacitly admitted the gravitation of art back
to its rightful position; Mendelssohn in his songs without words and
symphonies, Schumann in vast numbers of movements of all calibres
for pianoforte and even in movements of symphonies, such as the slow
movement of the Rhenish and the whole of the D major; Brahms in his
compact and well-considered piano pieces, and movements in his chamber
music; and later on the host of experimentalizing composers in every
branch of art, all bent on expressing something that stirs them, and
all bent on finding special ways of organizing what they have to say.
The most conclusive illustrations are naturally in the branch of
song as cultivated by modern composers. Here the theories of the few
faithful defenders of the old strongholds are obviously void; for it
is impossible to imagine anyone being so preposterously idiotic as to
try and write a song in sonata form. The scheme of organization must
inevitably, in such a form of art, follow absolutely the meaning of the
words and the course of the dramatic development. As a matter of fact,
the same connection with words rules the situation as far as regards
the artistic organization in all directions from anthems and church
music up to the colossal scores of music dramas. The composer has now
not only to provide diction, method, artistic texture, color, but also
new types of form. It may, indeed, be said that the highest aim of the
composer, after the discovery of something worth expressing, is to find
some new scheme--some new distribution of the architectural elements
of his musical work--which will present his ideas in forms which will
attract the attention and keep the interest of the highest class of
minds.
The situation may be said to round off the story of music’s
development so far. For the colossal accumulation of resources
and means of beautifying and vitalizing ideas serves not only for
utterance but also to widen the scope and variety of schemes of
artistic organization--and the individual composer becomes personally
responsible in that respect as well as for the feeling and the artistic
details.
But the indebtedness of latter-day composers to the devotion of
those who went before is not exhausted by these accomplishments. For
there are many features of art to which successive generations of
composers have contributed in the fashioning, and which ought not to be
overlooked, though they cannot be dealt with in detail in a summary.
One of the subtlest and most interesting is the differentiation
of various styles. The instinct which impelled composers in this
connection was always to find the most perfect adjustment of resources
to environment. In other words, to express what they had to say in the
ways which were most convenient and effective for the instruments which
had to play it, and most suitable to the audience to which it was to be
addressed in the place where it had to be performed.
At first composers’ ingenuity was exercised in one style only, that of
choral music, limited also mainly to sacred music. When that was more
or less perfected in the space of some five centuries, instrumental
secular style began to emerge; at first leaning on the methods and
devices which composers had found out in choral music, and then by
degrees, as instrumental music learned to stand alone, making it
more completely apt for performance by instruments; which process
has gone on till the present day and is still going on. Then, soon
after instrumental style began to branch off from the parent stem of
choral music, operatic style began to be laboriously devised, and is
by degrees still being perfected in the sphere of music drama; then
followed the distinct style for various solo instruments, as the style
of organ music, the style for various kinds of orchestral music, for
chamber music, for domestic music, songs, concert-platform music,
various types of modern church music--an ever-increasing variety,
each style being the most perfect adaptation to the conditions of
presentment and the qualities of instruments as time goes on.
Another development of great interest is that of thematic material.
Such things as subjects were hardly thought of at first in artistic
conditions, as choral music was not adapted to clear definition. That
quality began to manifest itself when rhythm began to play its part
in instrumental music. Then melodious passages, which were clearly
recognizable in themselves, began to make their appearance in operatic
arias, but they were for a long time defined more by the conventional
periods indicated by cadences of various degrees of finality than by
their individual character. This peculiarity of defining subjects
persisted almost till the end of the sonata period in the latter
part of Beethoven’s life, when he began to divine the possibility
of subjects being identifiable for themselves without artificial
conventions for marking their boundaries, and gave the impulse to that
practice of concentrating interest in short phrases and figures which
have intrinsic definition by reason of their characteristic intervals
and rhythms, which has become the most universal trait of all later
music, gathering force in the romantic period and being developed
further by the latest representative composers, who use color, chord
positions, even modulation, as well as melodic features, as factors
in making their thematic nuclei stand out from their context, and
serve the purpose of texts to their discourses--the said texts serving
also to suggest as clearly as possible what the composer has in his
mind, which he desires to convey to his audience in the most vivid and
permanent forms.
It is inevitable that all this huge development of artistic resources,
which has taken so many centuries of patient and devoted concentration
of faculties, should bewilder the ardent and eager latter-day composer
who is longing to express himself at once.
In many cases his invention and spontaneity seem to be paralyzed by
the amount there is to learn. On the one hand, it causes academicism
in the more conscientious, and, on the other, it causes rebellion. All
the 'isms’ of contemporary art of all kinds are the result of a kind of
indigestion which is the outcome of the superabundance of resources of
all kinds. The highest manifestations of art can only be produced by
those who have survived the long process of learning to understand the
meaning and purpose of artistic procedures and still have some vitality
left. But the public is by this time quite incapable of distinguishing
between what is built upon genuine foundations and what is pure
recklessness. They like recklessness, and the power to recognize
the mind which builds so difficult an edifice of individuality on
loyalty to his art requires too much education. So many contrive the
appearance of originality by the easy process of merely doing what they
have been advised not to do. They cry out against the soul-subduing
labor of having to learn how to do the things that are worth doing
in the best way. So artistic progress becomes mainly the process of
learning from making mistakes, which brings it into line with all
the ordinary forms of social progress. It becomes a wild hurly-burly
of impetuous adventurousness, in which the ardent explorers do not
even allow themselves time to find out whether the new country they
propose to explore is worth exploring. But without doubt there is a
residue of the real quality when the disposition of the composer is
also of fine quality. The 'new paths’ now entail the motive of the
composer being more identifiable than ever. They betray themselves in
spite of themselves. The pedant cannot escape from his pedantry, the
conventional-minded from his conventions, the sentimentalist from his
sentimentalities, the vain man from his vanities, the sensualist from
his cravings, the insolent from his insolence, or the commercial from
his advertisements. The general repudiation of standards leaves them
all without disguise, and the man who understands music can identify
the individual and his type of society and what it is worth through the
music he puts forward as representing him.
It entails a change in the position of musical art which took place
in the painting art centuries earlier, and shows what a modern thing
music is. Men no longer expect music to be the expression of noble and
exalted thoughts only, but accept it as the expression of all kinds of
moods, emotions, feelings and aspirations, whether they be little and
intimate, satyric and strange, wildly extravagant, genially humorous,
pugnacious, pacific, pastoral, even uproariously domestic. It is a
new kind of differentiation in which there is inevitably a new kind
of waste. But the ideal public, which is infinitely longer than it is
broad, will ultimately apply the judgment based on the experience of
generations, and will sift out the products of the genuinely artistic
beings from the follies of the heedless ones. The purists are in
despair, but those whose optimism is invulnerable can look forward in
the unshaken belief that art will go on expanding healthily, in spite
of the confusion of tongues, through the inextinguishable passion of
true composers to find the most perfect and complete expression of
their own personalities.
C. HUBERT H. PARRY.
October, 1914.
CONTRIBUTORS AND COLLABORATORS
FOR VOLUMES I, II AND III
FRANZ BELLINGER, PH.D. F. B.
M.-D. CALVOCORESSI M.-D. C.
W. DERMOT DARBY W. D. D.
CECIL FORSYTH C. F.
HENRY F. GILBERT H. F. G.
LELAND HALL L. H.
G. W. HARRIS G. W. H.
EDWARD BURLINGAME HILL E. B. H.
A. WALTER KRAMER A. W. K.
EDWARD KILENYI E. K.
BENJAMIN LAMBORD B. L.
FREDERICK H. MARTENS F. H. M.
EDUARDO MARZO E. M.
DANIEL GREGORY MASON D. G. M.
HIRAM KELLY MODERWELL H. K. M.
IVAN NARODNY I. N.
ERNEST NEWMAN E. N.
SIR C. HUBERT H. PARRY C. H. H. P.
FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER F. R.-W.
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER C. S.
AMELIA VON ENDE A. v. E.
WILLIAM WALLACE W. W.
LESLIE WHITTLESEY L. W.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME ONE
PAGE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION ix
INTRODUCTION TO THE NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC
BY C. HUBERT H. PARRY xxvii
PART I. PRELIMINARIES
CHAPTER
I. PRIMITIVE MUSIC 1
Music in nature--Theories of the origin of music--Intervals
and scales; contrast--The aborigines of Carribea,
Polynesia, Samoa, Africa--The rhythmic element: music and
the dance; instruments of percussion--Harmonic traces--Wind
instruments and their scales; the xylophone--Instruments
of semi-civilized peoples--The North American
Indian--Influence of modern culture on savage music.
II. EXOTIC MUSIC 42
Significance of exotic music--Classification; Aztecs and
Peruvians--The Orient: China and Hindustan, the
Mohammedans--Exotic instruments--Music as religious rite;
music and dancing--Music and customs; Orient and Occident.
III. THE MOST ANCIENT CIVILIZED NATIONS 64
Conjecture and authority--The Assyrians and Babylonians;
instruments; scales--The Hebrews--The Egyptians;
social aspects; Plato’s testimony; instruments--Egyptian
influence on Greek culture and its musical significance.
IV. THE MUSIC OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS 88
Significance of Greek music--Greek conception of music;
mythical records--Music in social life; folk-song; general
characteristics of Greek music--Systems and
scales--Pythagoras’ theories; later theorists: Aristoxenus
to Ptolemy--Periods of Greek composition; the _nomoi_;
lyricism; choral dancing and choral lyricism; the
drama--Greek instruments; notation.
PART II. BEGINNINGS
V. THE AGE OF PLAIN-SONG 128
Music in the Roman empire--Sources of early Christian
music; the hymns of St. Ambrose--Hebrew
traditions--Psalmody, responses, antiphons; the liturgy;
the Gregorian tradition; the antiphonary and the gradual;
sequences and tropes--Ecclesiastical modes; early notation.
VI. THE BEGINNINGS OF POLYPHONY 160
The third dimension in music--'Antiphony’ and Polyphony;
magadizing; organum and diaphony, parallel and
oblique--Guido d’Arezzo and his reputed inventions;
solmisation; progress of notation--Johannes Cotto and the
_Ad organum faciendum_; contrary motion and the beginning
of true polyphony--Measured music; mensural
notation--_Faux-bourdon_, _gymel_; forms of mensural
composition.
VII. SECULAR MUSIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES 186
Popular music; fusion of secular and ecclesiastical
spirit; Paganism and Christianity; the epic--Folksong;
early types in France, _complainte_, narrative song,
dance song; Germany and the North; occupational
songs--Vagrant musicians; jongleurs, minstrels; the love
song--Troubadours and Trouvères; Adam de la Halle--The
Minnesinger; the Meistersinger; influence on Reformation
and Renaissance.
PART III. THE POLYPHONIC PERIOD
VIII. THE RISE OF THE NETHERLAND SCHOOLS 226
The Netherland style; the _Ars Nova_; Maschault and the
Paris school; the papal ban on figured music--The
Gallo-Belgian school; early English polyphony; John
Dunstable; Dufay and Binchois; other
Gallo-Belgians--Okeghem and his school--Josquin des Prés;
merits of the Netherland Schools.
IX. THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 258
Spirit of the Renaissance--_Trovatori_ and _cantori a
liuto_; The Florentine _Ars Nova_; Landino; _caccia_,
_ballata_, _madrigal_--The fifteenth century; the Medici;
Netherland influence; popular song forms--Adrian Willaert
and the new madrigal--Orazio Vecchi and the dramatic
madrigal.
X. THE GOLDEN AGE OF POLYPHONY 284
Invention of music printing--The Reformation--The
immediate successors of Josquin; Adrian Willaert and
the Venetian school; Germany and England--Orlando di
Lasso--Palestrina; his life--The Palestrina style;
the culmination of vocal polyphony--Conclusion.
PART IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF HARMONY
XI. THE BEGINNINGS OF OPERA AND ORATORIO 324
The forerunners of opera--The Florentine reform of
1600; the 'expressive’ style; Peri and Caccini; the first
opera; Cavalieri and the origin of the oratorio--Claudio
Monteverdi: his life and his works.
XII. NEW FORMS: VOCAL AND INSTRUMENTAL 348
Résumé of the sixteenth century--Rhythm and form;
the development of harmony; figured bass--The organ
style; _canzona da sonar_; _ricercar_; _toccata_; _sonata
da chiesa_; great organists--The genesis of violin music;
_canzona_ and _sonata_--The _sonata da camera_; the
suite--Music for the harpsichord--The opera in the
seventeenth century; Heinrich Schütz.
XIII. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 388
The musicians of the century--Henry Purcell and music
in England--Italy: Alessandro Scarlatti; Arcangelo Corelli;
Domenico Scarlatti--The beginnings of French opera: the
_Ballet-comique de la reine_; Cambert and Perrin--Jean
Baptiste de Lully--Couperin and Rameau--Music in Germany:
Keiser, Mattheson, and the Hamburg opera; precursors of
Bach.
XIV. HANDEL AND THE ORATORIO 418
The consequences of the seventeenth century: Bach and
Handel--Handel’s early life; the opera at Hamburg; the
German oratorio--The Italian period, _Rodrigo_, _Agrippina_,
and _Resurrezione_--Music in England; Handel as opera
composer and impresario--Origins of the Handelian oratorio;
from 'Esther’ to 'The Messiah’--Handel’s instrumental music;
conclusion.
XV. JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH 448
Introduction--The life of Bach--Bach’s polyphonic skill
and the qualities of his genius--Bach’s contribution to the
art of music and the forms he employed--The revision of
keyboard technique and equal temperament--Bach’s relation
to the history of music.
INDEX. See Volume III.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. See Volume III.
ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME ONE
King René and his Musical Court (in colors) _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Orchestra of Pan’s Pipes (Aboriginal) 22
Old Japanese Print: 'Girl of the Old Kingdom playing the
Harp’ 58
Ancient Egyptian Fresco showing Instruments in Use 82
Greek Flute and Kithara Players (in colors) 96
The Contest between Apollo and Marysas 122
The Organ in the Middle Ages 156
Mediæval French Sculpture showing Trouvères and
Jongleurs with Instruments 202
The Tournament of Song in the Wartburg 218
Josquin des Près (photogravure) 252
Altar of the Virgin by Bellini (photogravure) 268
Orlando di Lasso (photogravure) 308
Perluigi da Palestrina (photogravure) 316
'The Concert’; Painting by Giorgione (in colors) 328
Claudio Monteverdi (photogravure) 338
Henry Purcell (photogravure) 388
Arcangelo Corelli (photogravure) 396
Jean-Baptiste de Lully (photogravure) 408
Jean-Philippe Rameau (photogravure) 414
Georg Friedrich Handel (photogravure) 438
Johann Sebastian Bach (photogravure) 468
CHAPTER I
PRIMITIVE MUSIC
Music in nature--Theories of the origin of music-Intervals and
scales; Contrast--The aborigines of Carribea, Polynesia, Samoa,
Africa--The rhythmic element: music and the dance; instruments of
percussion--Harmonic traces--Wind instruments and their scales; the
xylophone--Instruments of semi-civilized peoples--The North American
Indian--Influence of modern culture on savage music.
Music is coeval with the human race. In all probability it precedes
spoken language. For music is primarily the expression of emotion;
articulate language is the expression of definite thought. And in
the process of evolution emotion precedes thought. The beginnings of
music are to be found in Nature herself. The howling of the winds, the
humming of insects, the cries of animals, the songs of birds must all
be considered as elemental music, inasmuch as they contain the two
fundamental elements thereof: 'rhythm’ and 'tone.’
Rhythm is the more or less regular division of time by beats or
strokes. The heart beats in a regular rhythm; there is the rhythm
of the raindrops; man walks with a rhythmic stride; the waves beat
upon the shore in a solemn and impressive rhythm; the drumming of the
partridge; the chirping of the crickets; the tapping of the woodpecker;
the muttering of distant thunder, etc.--all these are rhythms, more or
less regular divisions of time, marked off by beats or accents.
Now 'tone’ is merely a noise which persists at a certain pitch. When we
cry out in fear we usually produce a noise, but should we be careful
to maintain a steady and equal emission of breath we should produce a
tone. In other words, a 'noise’ is produced by a rapid and irregular
change in the rate of vibration of the sounding body, whereas a 'tone’
is produced by the steady maintenance of a certain rate of vibration
for a long enough time for the ear to appreciate its definiteness. That
this time need not be very long is proved by the ease with which we
grasp as tones certain very short notes used in music; grace notes, for
instance. Many noises, in fact, upon analysis appear to be collections
of heterogeneous tonal fragments which succeed each other with such
rapidity and eccentricity as to preclude the recognition of their tonal
elements, as such.
Such animal cries as the roaring of lions, the baying of wolves, the
screeching of parrots, or the barking of dogs must be classed as mere
noises. While they are frequently of rhythmic interest, they contain
too little of the tonal element to be regarded musically. On the other
hand, the humming of certain insects, which produces a definite tone,
the whistling and singing of many birds, the musical cries of certain
monkeys as related in Darwin, and even on occasion the crying of the
wind, must all be regarded as 'natural music.’
The wind with its fitful and irregular howling usually produces mere
noise, but there are times when it blows with such a steady intensity
through the forest that a definite tone is produced. One reads with
interest and sympathy in the memoirs of a certain naturalist how he,
while listening to the ethereal singing noises produced by myriads of
small insects, imagined that he caught but the lower notes of some
elfin symphony, too refined for mortal ears to hear. The songs of the
singing birds are very notable examples of 'natural music,’ for here
the tones are in many instances quite perfect, while the rhythms of
many bird-songs are sharply defined and easily noted.
But it is savage or primitive man who claims our greatest interest.
Untouched by learning, simple of mind and direct and naïve in his
conduct, he is at the same time a part of nature and the ancestor of
civilized man--a being not only endowed with strong rhythmic sense,
but with vocal powers far superior in possible variety of inflection
to those of any of the animals. His love cries, war songs, and savage
laments are as much natural music as are the songs of birds or the
cries of animals, and contain, even though crudely, the elements from
which civilized music has subsequently been developed. It is with him
that our story really begins.
Thus we see that the fundamental elements of music are to be found in
nature herself. Man, in his upward and wonderful course from barbarism
to civilization, has but cunningly combined these elements, with
ever-increasing intellectuality, until there has come to development
the glorious art of music as we know it to-day; an art which 'hath the
power of making Heaven descend upon earth,’ as it is written in the
Chinese annals.
I
When we contemplate the life of the savage we are to all intents and
purposes observing the lives of our own primitive ancestors. As we see
them to-day they without doubt portray for us a phase through which we
ourselves passed on our way upward to civilization. No tribe of savages
has yet been discovered who have not possessed some elemental fragments
of music. No matter how barbaric the people, how rude their manners,
or how savage their dispositions, music of some sort plays a vital
and significant part in their lives. Most savage tribes have their
war cries, songs, and dances; their playful or ceremonious dances;
their love or marriage songs, their funeral songs; and lastly, their
mysterious and pantheistically religious incantations: prayer songs,
appeals to unseen powers, either diabolical or beneficent; to effect
the deliverance of some person from a dread disease, or to bring rain,
or abundance of game, etc. All these are to be regarded as primitive
music--music which has hardly as yet attained the dignity of an Art.
The collection and study of these fragments has been of great interest
to ethnologists and philosophers and has given rise to numerous
theories regarding the origin of music. Herbert Spencer gives a
physiological explanation of its origin, claiming that intense emotion
acts in a particular manner on the vocal and respiratory organs,
thereby causing the person thus affected to emit sounds; either high or
low, loud or soft, according to the kind of emotion with which he is
filled. Beginning with the proposition that 'All music is originally
vocal,’ he goes on to say: 'All vocal sounds are reproduced by the
agency of certain muscles. These muscles, in common with those of the
body at large, are excited to contraction by pleasurable and painful
feelings.’ And again: 'We have here, then, a principle underlying all
vocal phenomena, including those of vocal music, and by consequence
those of music in general. The muscles that move the chest, larynx,
and vocal cords, contracting like other muscles in proportion to
the intensity of the feelings; every different contraction of these
muscles involving, as it does, a different adjustment of the vocal
organs; every different adjustment of the vocal organs causing a change
in the sound emitted; it follows that variations of voice are the
physiological results of variations of feeling.’
Charles Darwin attempts to explain the existence of primitive music by
considering it as a secondary sexual manifestation. He asserts that
primitive song was used as a method of charming the opposite sex; that
the first songs were love songs, and that from these all others were
developed. In the 'Descent of Man’ he says: 'The male alone of the
tortoise utters a noise, and this only during the season of love. Male
alligators roar or bellow during the same season. Every one knows how
much birds use their vocal organs as a means of courtship; and some
species likewise perform what may be called instrumental music.’ And
later: 'Women are thought to possess sweeter voices than men, and so
far as this serves as any guide, we may infer that they first acquired
musical powers in order to attract the other sex.’
Spencer’s explanation is pure theory, based as it is not upon
observation of particular facts, but upon a knowledge of certain
physiological laws. Darwin’s explanation, on the contrary, is evidently
based on very careful observations of particular instances of the
manifestation of the primitive musical faculty. Nevertheless, however
interestingly Darwin writes concerning the origin of music, Spencer’s
explanation must seem to us the broader, more inclusive and satisfying
of the two, inasmuch as it bases the origin of music in a variety of
emotional experiences rather than in only one (the love emotion).
Darwin, however, says that the emotion of love may give rise to many
other emotions of a quite different character, such as rage, jealousy,
and triumph; and proceeds to indicate the possible development of
various kinds of primitive songs from primitive love songs. It is,
however, difficult for us to conceive of the development of war songs,
incantations, or howls of grief for the dead as having been developed
from primitive love songs.
According to Grosse, music arose from the play instinct. It is one
of the forms in which superabundant energy is spent. Most animals,
including man, are endowed with more than enough energy than is
absolutely necessary to supply their physical needs. This superabundant
energy is expressed in different kinds of play. The leaping and diving
of the porpoise, the gambolling of dogs, the running of races, and the
playing of games among primitive men are examples of the working of
the play instinct. Our modern sports, tennis, football, etc., are also
examples of it. According to this theory, singing and dancing first
arose as means of diversion from the monotony of existence, as a means
of whiling away the time and making life pleasant. This is a most
important theory, and while it probably is not wholly true, it contains
a large percentage of truth. It is upheld by a great number of writers
besides Grosse, and has great significance concerning the origin of all
the Arts, including music.
Another theory of the origin of music is that it arose through the
imitation by primitive man of bird-songs and other sounds in Nature.
It is true that in a collection of the music of many savage tribes
there are numerous songs which are certainly imitations of certain bird
calls and other animal cries. Particularly are these to be noted in
the music of the North American Indians. They have 'Pelican,’ 'Crane,’
'Elk,’ and 'Buffalo’ songs, and even songs imitating the wind in the
pines. Their animal songs are to a large extent but slight developments
of the cry of the animal himself. This cry was probably first used
by the primitive hunter as a decoy, and eventually through frequent
use became a recognized song. Although many primitive songs have
undoubtedly arisen in this way, the theory of imitation considered as
an explanation of the origin of music is somewhat in discredit with
ethnologists and philosophers. It is much too partial and there are too
many cases to which it certainly cannot apply.
In his study _Arbeit und Rhythmus_ Karl Bücher advances the idea that
through regular 'work’ of any kind 'song’ as an accompaniment is
naturally induced. The regularity of the 'work,’ be it walking, driving
a stake, or grinding corn in a hollowed-out stone, supplies one element
of music; i. e., rhythm. One element of a tune being present, what
more natural than an attempt on the part of the worker to supply the
other element and thus lighten the labor? Especially is this likely
to happen if the task require several workers who are obliged to work
together, somewhat in unison. Bücher says 'Song is the offspring of
labor. It is a means employed to discipline individual activities to
the accomplishment of a common task.’
Leaving out of consideration, however, all external stimuli which may
or may not have had a determinative influence in the development of
primitive music, we cannot but think of the remark of Karl Böckel,
which strikes the note of truth: 'Song has its origin in the cry of joy
or sorrow; in the need of expression inborn in all peoples in a state
of nature.’
II
From the foregoing it is easily to be seen that the first music was
vocal. Vocal music has its origin and cause in the elemental urge
of Nature, whereas musical instruments, even of the most primitive
description, are a subsequent development and spring from the inventive
faculty of man. The most elemental cries of primitive peoples consist
of a succession of sounds beginning on a high tone and descending by
means of a gliding or slurring effect, to a low tone. Such are the
cries of the Caribs, and of the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia.
Sometimes the gliding of the voice takes an upward turn, as it is said
to do among the Polynesian cannibals when gloating over a victim about
to be sacrificed. Definite musical tones cannot be recognized in these
primitive cries, hence they cannot be accurately written down in the
musical notation of civilization. In such simple and elemental cries
as these, although no definite musical intervals are to be recognized,
it is not long before they appear. In fact, it is easily to be seen
in the most primitive music that the production of definite tones,
and more or less of a definite melodic design, is the object toward
which the savage mind unconsciously gropes. It must not be supposed
that the intervals in use in civilized music are wholly the invention
of man. Many of the intervals, such as thirds, fifths, and octaves,
are found to be quite perfect in certain animal cries and particularly
in bird-song. Consider the two following bird-songs collected by the
writer in Massachusetts:
[Illustration: Music]
Civilized man has arranged these tones and intervals in diatonic
sequences called scales. The scales are his invention, but the majority
of the intervals composing them were undoubtedly in frequent use
by primitive man from prehistoric times. As Gilman truly observes,
'Definite successions of tones were in use long before they became
regular systematic scales.’[2] The following cry of grief from the
southeastern coast of Africa illustrates both the falling inflection of
the voice already alluded to as a primitive characteristic and also the
use of definite musical intervals. It was noted by Henri A. Junod:
[Illustration: Music]
Ô ma mè-re Ô ma mè-re Tu m’as quit-tée, où es-tu al-lóe
Here is another 'lament’; this one being from New Zealand. The tonal
range is somewhat more extensive but the falling inflexion of the voice
is well illustrated. The usual savage downward howl occurs at the end:
[Illustration: Music]
In the 'Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition’ by Captain
Wilkes the following song is noted. It comes from the island of
Arnheim in Polynesia:
[Illustration: Music]
The most primitive musical utterances are usually confined to a narrow
range. Seconds and thirds are the intervals most frequently used. The
songs of the Terra del Fuegians, for instance, do not usually exceed
the limits of a third. The song just quoted from Arnheim is, it will
be noted, with the exception of the ornamental quirks, confined to
the range of a second. The most limited songs in regard to range of
intervals, however, appear to be the songs of the Andamanese Islanders.
M. V. Portman in a paper on Andamanese music published in the _Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society_, says: 'The only notes in use in their
songs are the following, and in this order: The leading note 1/4 sharp,
the tonic, the tonic 1/4 sharp. The whole range of notes is therefore
not equal to a superfluous second.’[3]
The savage mind, being incapable, for the most part, of the development
of a musical idea, is satisfied by an incessant repetition of the same
phrase. Here is a song of the Caribs as noted by Théodore de Bry. While
it is comprised within the interval of a small second, it was repeated
sometimes for an hour at a time, with what monotonous effect we can
well imagine:
[Illustration: Music]
Another Carib song, comprised within the interval of a fourth, is
here given. A similar song from Polynesia is also given for purposes
of comparison. The two songs are remarkably similar; in fact, almost
identical.
The geographical separation of the Caribs and the Polynesians is so
great as to have made intercommunication almost beyond the bounds of
possibility. How, then, can the similarity be accounted for? Apparently
only by assuming that peoples who live in similar conditions, and whose
minds are in a similar state of development, may express themselves in
a similar manner:
[Illustration: CARIBS]
[Illustration: POLYNESIAN]
Germs of the principle of contrast may be found in both the above
songs. A second phrase or musical motive has been invented which
is sung alternately with the first, thereby relieving the sense of
monotony. This was certainly a great step in the development of
primitive music. The invention of a second musical phrase, and the
contrasting of it with the first, was the unconscious beginning of
musical form. For contrast is the basic principle of form in music.
The following song from Samoa shows this principle of the contrasting
of musical motives very clearly. The two motives are sung by different
groups of persons:
[Illustration: Music]
The above is a tune in which the contrasting phrases are of equal
length, and recur with great regularity, but many tunes are found in
which the contrasting motives, or melodic particles, follow each other
with whimsical irregularity, their relative position and recurrence
following no law but the feeling of the singer at the moment. Such is
this tune of the Macusi Indians of South America:
[Illustration: Music]
But in this Eskimo tune, noted by Dr. Kane, one of the earliest Arctic
explorers, while the motives follow each other with regularity and are
of equal length, each motive is given twice before the contrasting
motive occurs:
[Illustration: Music]
Two little tunes from Africa may serve as final illustrations of this
contrasting phrase principle. These tunes are also interesting inasmuch
as both contain a germ of 'ragtime.’ The sources of ragtime are to be
found in the songs of the American negro slaves, and it is significant
to find these hints also present in the songs of the parent African
race.
[Illustration: DANCE SONG]
[Illustration: HUNTING SONG]
Both the above are taken from 'Up the Niger’ by Captain A. F.
Mockler-Ferryman.
III
Music and the dance developed side by side. Music is rhythm plus tone;
the dance, rhythm plus gesture. In savage life they are well-nigh
inseparable. The dance among civilized peoples is merely a diversion;
a form of amusement. Among savages it is much more rarely so. Nearly
all ceremonies, whether of a joyful, sorrowful, or religious character,
were accompanied by appropriate dances. Many of these dances were of
a very elementary character, consisting merely of certain postures,
swaying of the body, or leaping into the air. Some dances were imitated
from the motions of certain animals, even as some of the primitive
songs were imitative of animal cries. Of such nature is the Kangaroo
dance of the aborigines of Australia. The men who indulge in the dance
imitate the postures and leaps of the kangaroo, and also imitate with
their voices the sounds made by that animal. Meanwhile the women sing
the following simple tune over and over again, and furnish a rhythmical
accompaniment by knocking two pieces of wood together:
[Illustration: Music]
Similarly, the North American Indians have eagle dances, dog dances,
etc., while the natives of Kamtschatka have a bear dance in which,
says Engel,[4] 'they cleverly imitate not only the attitude and tricks
of the bear, but also its voice.’ There were also war dances, love
dances, funeral dances, and various ceremonial dances. In a sense,
all primitive music may be considered as dance music. All primitive
songs were accompanied by gestures or dances and, naturally, there was
no dance without its accompanying music. The head-hunting Dyaks of
Borneo have a dance in which the gestures indicate the cutting off of
heads. The North American Indians have a scalp dance, celebrating the
victorious exploits of a war party. The Maoris of New Zealand have
a war dance in which all thrust out their tongues at once, a gesture
which may indicate contempt of the enemy.
One of the most curious of primitive dances is the Corroberie Dance of
the natives of Australia. It is thus described by Carl Engel: 'Twenty
or more men paint their naked dark bodies to represent skeletons, which
they accomplish by drawing white lines across the body with pipe-clay
to correspond with the ribs, and broader ones on the arms, legs, and
the head. Thus prepared they perform the Corroberie at night before a
fire. The spectators, placed at some distance from them, see only the
white skeletons, which vanish and reappear whenever the dancers turn
around. The wild and ghastly action of the skeletons is accompanied
by vocal effusions and some rhythmical noise which a number of hidden
bystanders produce by beating their shields in regular time.’ Here is
the melody of one of these Corroberie dances. This melody is from New
South Wales and has been noted with slight variations by Wilkes, Field,
and Freycinet. The version of Field is given:
[Illustration: Music]
A-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang,
gum-be-ry jah! 'jin gum re-lah’ gum-be-ry jah! 'jin gum re-lah’ a
bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang, a-bang.
But it is, perhaps, among the American Indians, of all savage peoples,
that the dance assumes its greatest importance. The very term 'dance’
often means a ceremony covering several days; the whole consisting
of many individual dances, recitations, and songs, and forming a
ritual of a quasi-religious or pantheistic character. Their ceremonies
are usually appeals to the gods for rain, abundant crops, luck in
hunting, or good fortune in war. Thus there is the Great Rain Dance
of the Junis; the Sun Dance of the Cheyennes; and the Snake Dance of
the Hopis. The Snake Dance is an elaborate ceremony of several days’
duration, during which live rattlesnakes are on occasion carried in the
hands and even held between the teeth while a dignified and 'stamping’
sort of dance goes forward. It is primarily an invocation to the gods
for rain.
Two melodies used in the Snake Dance are here given, as noted by
Benjamin Ives Gilman:
[Illustration: N.º 1.]
[Illustration: N.º 2.]
All primitive dances are accompanied by hand clapping, stamping of
the feet, the beating of stones, the knocking of two sticks of wood
together, or something of this nature to keep the time regular and to
accentuate the rhythm. Among the Andamanese Islanders thigh-slapping
alternates with hand-clapping, and among some tribes the snapping of
the fingers is used. From snapping the fingers to rattling a handful
of pebbles was an easy and natural step. This rattling of pebbles in
the hand constituted a kind of rude 'castanets.’ These pebbles were
soon put into a seashell or a gourd and thus the first rattles came
into existence. Rattles were made by putting pebbles into gourds or
other dried, hollow fruits, into tortoise shells, or seashells, and
even into human skulls, as is the case in New Guinea. In the Snake
Dance mentioned above gourd rattles are used, imitating the sound of
the rattlesnake when angry. The rattle is supposed to be the remote
ancestor of the bell. In the place of two sticks, two bones were
frequently beaten one upon the other, or struck together while being
held between the fingers of one hand. Long mussel shells were also
used as clappers. The beating of slabs or plates of stone constituted
a rude gong. Finally it was discovered that by stretching the skin
of an animal tightly over the end of a hollow log and striking it
energetically a sharper and more resonant and penetrating noise could
be produced than in any other way. Thus the first drums were made.
The rudest form of drum on record is evidently that in use among the
Andamanese Islanders. It is called the _Pukuta Yemnga_ and consists of
a 'shield-shaped piece of wood which is placed with the narrow end in
the ground and struck with the foot. The convex side of it follows the
shape of the tree from which it has been cut. When in use the convex
side of the Pukuta is uppermost’ (Portman). It is evidently a kind of
sounding board, or foot-drum.
The drum, roughly speaking, is the oldest musical instrument. It is of
great interest to us inasmuch as it still holds a place of honor in the
modern orchestra. It is the king of the group of percussion instruments
whose object it is, not to produce a tone, but an accent.
No tribe of savages has been discovered but what is possessed of a drum
of some sort. The most usual form of construction of the primitive drum
has been that of a section of tree trunk, hollowed out, and covered
with skin at each end. Certain trees, such as the bread-fruit tree or
the bamboo, render this peculiarly feasible. But drums have been found
made from gourds, cocoanuts, calabashes, and many melon-like fruits.
Primitive drums range in size from very small hand drums, which can be
held in one hand and struck with the other, up to those whose heads
are several feet in diameter and require the use of a good stout club
as a drumstick.
The ancient Mexicans possessed a drum which gave forth two distinct
tones of definite pitch. It is thus described by Carl Engel in his work
on Musical Instruments: 'They [the Mexicans] generally made it of a
single block of very hard wood, somewhat oblong square in shape, which
they hollowed, leaving at each end a solid piece about three or four
inches in thickness, and at its upper side a kind of sound-board about
a quarter of an inch in thickness. In this sound-board, if it may be
called so, they made three incisions, namely, two running parallel some
distance lengthwise of the drum, and a third running across from one
of these to the other just in the centre. By this means they obtained
two vibrating tongues of wood which, when beaten with a stick, produced
sounds as clearly defined as those of our kettledrums.’ In some of
these wooden drums the two tongues on being struck at the same time
produced a third; in others a fifth; in others a sixth, and in some
even an octave. The difference in pitch was obtained by making the
two tongues of a different thickness, and naturally the greater the
difference in thickness the larger was the interval produced.
A curious instance of drums which give forth a sound of a definite
pitch is the bamboo drums, still to be found in some of the islands of
the Pacific. These drums were first described in the account of Captain
James Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific ocean. The whole passage is
of exceeding interest, giving as it does a picture of purely primitive
musical development untouched and uninfluenced by any civilized
suggestion. The date, as far as I have been able to ascertain, was May
18, 1777, and the place Hapace (Hapai) in the Tonga Island group. The
account is as follows:
'A chorus of eighteen men seated themselves before us in the centre of
the circle composed of numerous spectators, the area of which was to
be the scene of the exhibitions. Four or five of this band had large
pieces of bamboo, from three to five or six feet long, each managed by
one man, who held it nearly in a vertical position, the upper end open,
but the other end closed by one of the joints. With this closed end the
performers kept constantly striking the ground, though slowly, thus
producing different notes according to the different lengths of the
instruments, but all of them of the hollow or bass sort; to counteract
which a person kept striking quickly, and with two sticks, a piece of
the same substance, split and laid along the ground, and by that means
furnishing a tone as acute as those produced by the others were grave.
The rest of the band, as well as those who performed upon the bamboos,
sang a slow and soft air, which so much tempered the harsher notes of
the above instruments that no bystander, however accustomed to hear
the most perfect and varied modulations of sweet sounds, could avoid
confessing the vast power and pleasing effect of this harmony.’
Captain James King, who was with Captain Cook during his last voyage,
also writes concerning these bamboo drums as follows: 'In their regular
concerts each man had a bamboo which was of a different length and
gave a different tone. These they beat against the ground, and each
performer, assisted by the note given by this instrument, repeated the
same note, accompanying it with words, by which means it was rendered
sometimes short and sometimes long. In this manner they sang in chorus,
and not only produced octaves to each other, according to their species
of voice, but fell on concords such as were not disagreeable to the
ear.’
IV
The latter part of this quotation from Captain King raises the
interesting question of the existence of harmony in primitive music.
This question has been much discussed. Travellers have certainly
brought back wonderful tales of part singing among primitive peoples.
Unfortunately most of these travellers have not possessed any very
accurate musical knowledge, hence their statements cannot for the
most part be regarded as of scientific value. Especially does this
apply to statements concerning harmony or the harmonic intervals.
The appreciation of a melody or 'tune’ is about as much as the man
of average intelligence is capable of. But the determination of the
relation of the notes of this tune to other sounds produced at the same
time requires a more special or technical knowledge.
At a first consideration of the subject one is led, somewhat hastily,
to conclude that when definite harmonic intervals occur in savage
music they are entirely the result of accident, and not of design. In
his description of a dance, native to the bushmen of Australia, Elson
says: 'The music to this odd performance is not in unison; the dancer
sings one air, the spectators another, and the drum gives a species of
“ground bass” to the whole.’ To have arranged these two 'airs’ so that
they, on being sung simultaneously, would have produced a concordant
and musical result would have required a degree of mental development
of which the bushman is not to be suspected. In this, and many similar
instances, we may safely assume that such harmonic intervals as may
have been produced were purely the result of accident. There are,
however, so many instances on record, and of undoubted authenticity,
in which it is seen that certain savages have consciously striven to
produce concords, both in their singing and in their rude instruments,
that these cannot be disregarded in an impartial consideration of the
question.
Of great interest in this connection is the following song, which was
obtained by G. Forster at the Tonga Islands about the year 1775:
[Illustration: Music]
It will be seen that this song ends with a chord of three tones; a
triad, in other words. It will also be seen that each of the tones in
the triad (with the exception of e) has been sounded more than once in
the preceding melody. In fact, with the exception of d, all the tones
of the melody are constituent tones of the triad. After singing these
tones in melodic sequence, or one _after_ the other, it was surely a
most natural procedure to sing them _at the same time_, so that they
should sound together. Thus the triad was quite naturally produced.
Drayton, who visited the Tonga Islands some seventy years after
Forster, also mentions the fact of their ending some of their songs
with a well-defined triad. But whereas the triad in the song noted by
Forster is minor, that spoken of by Drayton is a major triad. In either
case the fact is sufficiently remarkable.
In the narrative of the Wilkes exploring expedition we find a
song noted in which use is made of the harmonic intervals in the
accompaniment of a melody. The song was obtained at the Tonga Islands
about 1840. In its use of harmony it is one degree in advance of the
song collected by Forster, although not so interesting melodically:
[Illustration: Music]
At first the bass note makes a fifth with the principal melodic note.
Later the third is added, making the complete major triad. It is
also worth noting that these harmonic bass tones are in a slightly
different rhythm from the melody and preserve an independent character
as an accompaniment to the melody. Perhaps the most striking instance,
however, of the conscious use by savages of concordant musical
intervals is afforded by the following little song noted by the
traveller Forster as having been sung by the original inhabitants of
New Zealand:
[Illustration: Music]
To have sung this melody in thirds, to have ended it in unison, and
then to have gone back to the thirds again was certainly a most
remarkable feat for the savage mind to accomplish, and decidedly points
to conscious intention rather than mere accident.
While the knowledge and the development of the science of harmony
is one of the fruits of European civilization, and as a science is
well-nigh confined to Europe exclusively, we still must admit that
whereas primitive man had no knowledge of harmony he had a feeling for
it, and that this feeling led him, though somewhat blindly, to the
attainment of certain fundamental harmonic intervals. These intervals
he evidently valued and used consciously. It is certainly of interest
to note that a germ or suggestion of harmony existed in the primitive
mind; that this element, as well as the other elements of music, has a
natural basis.
V
We have seen how naturally the percussion instruments were developed;
how they sprang into being, as it were, in response to an innate
necessity for rhythmic expression, an inevitable accompaniment of the
dance and the dance-song. Almost at the same time wind instruments
of a simple and rude kind were fashioned. Whistles were made from
the bones of animals with the marrow removed. Pipes were made from
hollow reeds, while conch shells and the horns of deer-like animals
furnished the first trumpets. These primitive whistles, pipes, and
deer-horn trumpets[5] when blown were capable of giving forth but one
tone. However, it is highly probable that, as their makers grew more
familiar with the effect of the varying pressure of the lips, certain
partials of the fundamental tone were produced, such as the octave, the
fifth, and even the third. Eventually a series of holes were pierced
in them, thus making it possible by means of stopping and unstopping
these holes with the fingers to produce a rude scale of tones. But the
first whistles were evidently of the one tone variety. An interesting
relic of this description has recently been exhumed by N. Lartet in the
department of Dordogne, France. It consists of a small bone, probably
of the reindeer, about two inches in length. Through this bone near
one end a small hole has been bored, probably by a sharp piece of
hard stone, like flint. By applying the lips to this hole and blowing
strongly a shrill whistling sound is produced. This was no doubt used
in hunting, or as a call. In a cave at Lombrive in the department of
Ariège several dog-teeth with similar holes for whistling have likewise
been discovered.
To construct an instrument of the whistle variety which should produce
more than one tone was the next step. On whistles or pipes of different
lengths tones of different pitches can be produced, low tones from
long pipes, higher tones from shorter pipes. So different lengths
of whistles were rudely bound together, the longest at one end, the
shortest at the other end, and the intermediate ones arranged in a
sequence according to their relative lengths. Thus an instrument was
made from which it was possible to obtain a succession of rising tones,
a primitive scale. As with the drum among percussion instruments, so
this instrument among wind instruments occupies a place of honor.
The invention of the drum sums up for us all previously existing
rhythmic musical impulses, and this collection of whistles gives us
an instrument on which the production of a sequence of different
tones or musical scale is possible. It has been given the poetical
name of 'Pan’s Pipes.’ These 'Pan’s Pipes,’ of more or less primitive
construction, are found quite generally among the savage tribes of the
world. Specimens have been found in South America consisting of but two
flutes or pipes, a kind of double flute, as it were; while specimens
with a variable number of pipes, from six or seven up to fifteen, have
been found among the inhabitants of the various islands of Polynesia.
Stumpf, in _Die Anfänge der Musik_, reproduces a photograph taken
in southwest Africa, showing an orchestra of Pan’s Pipes. There are
eleven performers, each holding a set of pipes. The instruments are of
several sizes; the smallest being about six inches and the largest five
or six feet in length. Archæological discoveries in the ancient tombs
or burial places of barbarous or semi-civilized peoples bring many
curious specimens to light.
[Illustration: 'Orchestra’ of Pan’s Pipes.]
_From a photograph reproduced in Stumpf’s 'Anfänge der Musik’._
In the British museum there is a Pan’s pipe consisting of a double row
of reeds bound together exactly opposite each other; a sort of double
Pan’s Pipes. Each series consists of seven reed pipes, and while one
series of pipes remains open, allowing the free passage of air through
them, all the pipes of the second series have been closed at the lower
end. Now, to stop a pipe at the bottom has the effect of raising its
pitch an octave. It was evidently the intention that two of these pipes
should be blown at once and when this is done through the whole
series the following succession of tones is produced:
[Illustration: Music]
This is a five-toned or pentatonic scale, the last two tones being
merely duplicates in octave of the first two. The scale of five tones,
arranged in varying sequence, is a primitive form of scale. While not
so primitive as some (scales of three or four tones, for instance), it
is still much more so than the scales on which our modern art of music
is based.
Another specimen of ancient Peruvian 'Pan’s Pipes,’ at present in the
New York Museum of Natural History, gives the following scale:
[Illustration: Music]
This is a scale of eight tones and bears some slight relation to the
minor scale in use at the present day.
Among the Tahitians Captain Cook observed that the raising or lowering
of the pitch of a single flute or pipe was accomplished by rolling up
a leaf in tubular form, inserting this improvised tube into the bottom
of the flute and pushing it in or drawing it out until the required
pitch was obtained. Some such device as this quite probably suggested
the obtaining of different tones from the same pipe. The rolled-up leaf
itself was used as a pipe capable of giving forth a true musical tone.
One of the natives of the Sandwich Islands, on being questioned in
regard to their primitive musical instruments, stripped a leaf from the
_ti_ plant and, rolling it up somewhat in the shape of an old-fashioned
lamp-lighter, blew through it, producing a tone of pure reedlike
quality. Emerson says: 'This little rustic pipe, quickly improvised
from the leaf that every Hawaiian garden supplies, would at once
convert any skeptic to a belief in the pipes of the god Pan.’[6]
Among the inhabitants of New Guinea a flute or pipe is in use in which
the tones are varied by means of a slide which is pushed into the tube
or withdrawn in much the same manner as the rolled-up leaf mentioned by
Captain Cook, but evidently on a much more extensive scale. This is in
effect a primitive trombone.
Finally, flutes or pipes which are pierced with holes are found among
many savage tribes, who have discovered that the effect of lengthening
or shortening the tube could be obtained by boring holes in it and
stopping them or unstopping them with the fingers. Simple as this may
appear to us, it was a great discovery for the savage mind to make, and
must have been the culmination of many groping attempts to attain this
end extending through long ages.
On the most primitive instruments of this nature the finger holes were
but two or three in number, but flutes or pipes are now found among
nearly all savages capable of giving scales of from five to eight
tones. Fétis figures and describes an instrument made from the horn of
a stag, which was found in an ancient sepulchre, near Poitiers, France.
This instrument, which is a sort of trumpet or _flute-à-bec_,[7] is
pierced with three holes and gives a series of four diatonic tones.
The lowest with all the holes stopped; the next higher with one finger
raised, and so on. It is described as being made with great care and
precision, the holes having been placed with an exactitude which would
seem to indicate a considerable knowledge and appreciation of certain
facts of acoustics.
In the sepulchre where this instrument was found there were arms and
other implements made of stone. This musical instrument, therefore,
almost surely dates from the later period of the stone age, which age
preceded in point of time the age in which man discovered and made use
of the metals. It is therefore prehistoric and undoubtedly of very
great antiquity. In the New York Museum of Natural History there is a
collection of ancient bone flutes from Peru. These flutes are pierced
with finger holes and give various scales of four, five, and six tones.
The four-toned scale [Illustration: score], sounds entirely rational
and is in accordance with our modern ideas of diatonic succession;
also this five-toned scale [Illustration: score] and this six-toned
scale [Illustration: score]. But certain other scales given by these
flutes appear to be more or less freakish in character and consist of
a somewhat hit-or-miss collection of tones, indicating either a very
crude musical sense among the ancient Peruvians, or very little skill
on the part of the makers of the flutes:
[Illustration: Music]
A 'cane’ flute in the collection gives this scale:
[Illustration: Music]
Nose flutes are found at the present day among many tribes. These are
made from a section of bamboo or other cane-like wood from which the
pith has been removed. The top end is left closed by the joint and a
hole pierced on the side very near the top. Finger holes from two to
four in number are bored in the tube of the flute. In playing the flute
is pressed firmly against the lips, taking care that the little hole
near the top end is covered by one nostril. Music of an extempore
kind is now produced by breathing into the instrument and covering and
uncovering the finger holes in the usual manner; the length of the
piece of music being determined by the breath of the performer. The
following specimen of nose-flute music was collected by Miss Jennie
Eisner in Hawaii:
[Illustration: Music]
The development of these primitive wind instruments is usually
ascribed to a slightly later period than that of the development of
the first percussion instruments. The construction of wind instruments
is considered to represent a slightly higher degree of mental
development in man, and hence they are not regarded by ethnologists
as being so primitive as the percussion instruments. Nevertheless
Wallaschek insists that the first instruments to be developed were wind
instruments, alleging in proof the discovery of some Egyptian flutes
which he asserts antedate any other musical instruments of which we
have any record. It is certainly true that the physical organism of
man contains in itself the prototype of all wind instruments, i. e.,
the voice. But it is equally true that hand clapping and the stamping
of the feet are also native to him, and these are undoubtedly the
prototypes of all percussion instruments. The isolated fact of the
discovery of these flutes is not of sufficient weight, to our mind, to
justify the belief that wind instruments were developed anterior to
percussion instruments.
As the appreciation of the fact of definite musical tones being
obtainable on instruments took root and grew in the human mind, and
especially as these tones began to be arranged in definite series
or scales, another instrument of a remarkable nature was developed.
It was a percussion instrument, but one on which could be produced
not only a tone having a definite pitch, but a whole series or
scale of tones. Hence it was as capable of reproducing a melody as
some of the primitive pipes or flutes. This was the xylophone. This
instrument, having its far distant origin in the two sticks of wood
which were struck together to produce a rhythmical noise by the most
primitive savages, has been brought to its greatest perfection by
the Africans and the Guatemalans. Its principle of construction is
similar to that of the Pan’s Pipes; a series of sticks or bars of
wood arranged according to their relative lengths; the longer giving
forth the lower tones, and the tones growing higher in pitch as the
sticks grow shorter. The series of sounding sticks of wood are in
Africa usually fixed over a gourd, a series of gourds, or a drum-like
instrument which acts as a sounding-board, thus giving the pieces of
wood greater sonority. This instrument, as it is found among many
of the African tribes, has a compass of from one to two octaves and
gives approximately the tones of our usual diatonic scale. It aroused
the admiration of Junod to such an extent that he refers to it as the
'African piano,’ not an inapt name, by the way. The _marimba_ of the
Guatemalans, while not exactly a xylophone, is a percussion instrument
which is capable of giving a scale of definite tones. According to
Wallaschek 'it consists of a number of gourds (as many as sixteen)
covered with a flat piece of wood, beaten with a stick, and produces
different tones according to the size of the gourd.’ The tone is said
to resemble very much that of our modern piano.
The development of drums, such elementary wind instruments as have been
noted, the xylophone, a suggestion of harmony and the rude idea of a
scale, make up the sum of the musical accomplishment of primitive
man. It is true that the precursor of the stringed instruments is to
be found in the hunting bow, and a few cases are found where this is
used as a sort of one-stringed harp, the string being either struck
with a stick or plucked with the fingers. Mention must also be made of
the African _goura_, a sort of a primitive Æolian harp. It has but one
string, and is similar in shape to the child’s small bow for shooting
arrows. It has a quill affixed to one end in such a way that the string
may be vibrated by blowing through the quill. The fingers are then
lightly touched to the string, and a few faint harmonic-like sounds
are produced. But, generally speaking, the development of stringed
instruments is not to be looked for among savage peoples, it coincides
with the rise of man from barbarism to some degree of civilization.
VI
It is impossible to trace the progress of music in unbroken sequence
from its primitive beginnings to its development as an art by civilized
nations. The record is far too fragmentary. There are too many missing
links, too many isolated and well-nigh inexplicable facts. Thus, among
semi-civilized peoples like the Malays, the Bedouins, and the people of
Africa, we find music of a comparatively high order and sophisticated
nature. It is inconceivable that these people should have developed
this music by their own initiative. The only reasonable explanation is
that it has been acquired to a certain extent from educated travellers
and explorers. In this process it has been unconsciously modified so
that it usually reflects both elements--the barbaric and the civilized.
The following melody, which is a song in use by the 'medicine men’ of
southeastern Africa for the exorcising or expelling of an evil spirit
from a person supposed to be possessed by it, is a case in point:
[Illustration: Music]
While this melody has an undoubted barbaric character as a whole, it
shows traces of civilized influence. It is quite definitely in the key
of G, even though it contains no F-sharp, and the passages for chorus
sound anything but barbaric. From the same district comes the following
war song. While structurally, especially in regard to the use of the
musical intervals, it exhibits considerable musical sophistication, the
general effect is wild and primitive. This war song was in actual use
in 1895.
[Illustration: Music]
Among many of the semi-civilized tribes of Africa harps are found to be
in use, some having as many as sixteen strings. The oboe, an instrument
of a much higher type than the primitive pipe, is also found. It is
conjectured that the Africans derived the harp from ancient Egypt, as
many of those in use at the present day much resemble in form certain
harps which we find represented in ancient Egyptian sculptures and bas
reliefs. As for the oboe, it was almost certainly introduced by Arabian
traders.
Among several tribes, but particularly the Ashantees, is to be found
a rude sort of stringed instrument which in construction is somewhat
midway between a harp and a banjo, and has some of the characteristics
of each. It is called a _sanko_. It has eight strings, the lowest
of which is tuned to middle 'C’ and the highest an octave above. The
intermediary strings fairly represent the tones of the usual diatonic
scale. The origin of the _sanko_ is known to be Arabian, but its
construction has undoubtedly undergone some modification in the hands
of the Africans. It is capable of giving forth incipient harmony,
and its negro players make frequent use of thirds, sixths and even
chords of three tones (triads). Here are two specimens of music played
upon the _sanko_, both collected and transcribed by T. E. Bowdich in
Ashantee:
[Illustration: Music]
N.º 1.
[Illustration: Music]
N.º 2.
The first of these tunes is claimed by the natives of Ashantee to be
their oldest traditional tune. It certainly seems to possess all the
crudity of true primitive music. The second tune is far more highly and
rationally organized and shows more decidedly the effect of external
influence. Quite free from the possible modification of European
imitation, however, are the following fragments, recently taken down on
the phonograph by Sir Harry Johnston in Uganda. It is to be regretted
that the notation is not more exact.[8]
[Illustration: N.º 1. BAGANDA TRIBE.]
[Illustration: N.º 2. MASAI.]
[Illustration: N.º 3.]
Algernon Rose has described a peculiar kind of xylophone which he saw
in South Africa. It consists of a series of ten or more pieces of
bamboo of different lengths. All are fastened tightly at one end to
a board, leaving the other end free. This other end is plucked with
the thumb or fingers, after the manner of a harp string. The pieces
of bamboo being plucked in this manner, each gives forth a sound, and
as they are of different lengths it is possible to produce a series
of different sounds; a rudimentary musical scale. Rose refers to the
instrument as a 'clicker’ and finds it to be in use among the Kaffirs.
T. E. Bowdich also mentions an instrument which seems to be, from his
description, almost identical with the instrument described above. This
he found to be in use in Ashantee before 1819. He gives the following
air as having been played upon it:
[Illustration: Music]
This certainly sounds quite natural to civilized ears. Bowdich also
mentions a one-stringed instrument called the _bentwa_, which seems to
have been played much in the manner of a jew’s-harp. He says:
'The Bentwa is a stick bent in the form of a bow, and across it is
fastened a very thin piece of split cane which is held between the
lips at one end and struck with a small stick, while at the other it
is occasionally stopped, or rather buffed by a thick one; on this they
play only lively airs, and it owes its various sounds to the lips.’ He
also gives this tune as having been played upon this instrument. Its
resemblance to certain Irish jigs in 6/8 time is worthy of remark.
[Illustration: Music]
There also exists among one of the lesser known tribes (the Empoongua)
an instrument having five strings, said to be made of the filaments
of the palm tree. Bowdich describes this instrument as being made of
pieces of bamboo, which being bound together form a species of sounding
board over which the strings are stretched lengthwise and held up by
means of bridges at the ends. He gives the following tune as having
been played on this instrument:
[Illustration: Music]
While the study of some of the musical instruments of semi-civilized
peoples is of ethnological interest the music itself is questionably
so, inasmuch as it is more or less of a jumble of two elements--the
barbaric and the civilized. Hence it is not of real significance in
tracing the natural rise and evolution of the art. Much of the music of
semi-barbarous peoples does not consist of what they have themselves
developed during their rise from savagery, but consists more frequently
of diluted, distorted and malappropriated bits of melody which have by
devious routes reached them from civilization.
VII
Of especial interest to Americans is the music of the North American
Indians. It is difficult to characterize this music by a few general
remarks, as there are, or rather were, over fifty different tribes,
each of which had its own peculiar music. The whole mass of tunes
presented many interesting varieties, both in structure and rhythm.
Music among the Indians did not occupy the place of an art. Song was
not indulged in for the sake of giving pleasure, and music can hardly
be said to have been developed among them in response to a love of
melody for its own sake. There can be no doubt that among the Africans
and other semi-barbarous peoples music, however rude, gives a genuine
æsthetic pleasure, even though of a primitive sort. But among the
Indians music was too closely bound up with ritual to have much of an
independent existence as music. Song was the inevitable accompaniment
of every important act or ceremony in tribal or individual life.
Each prayer, incantation, tribal or individual ceremony had its
own appropriate song, and it was considered unlawful to sing this
particular song except in accompaniment of this particular prayer or
ceremony. Certain songs having to do with ceremonies which occurred at
certain seasons of the year could only be heard at these seasons. The
song, as a song, had no existence apart from the ceremony. It is true
that gambling songs, and songs of labor, such as corn-grinding songs,
are to be found among many of the tribes, but these are apparently
variations of the general rule, and that they were indulged in for the
sake of æsthetic pleasure is very doubtful. Between certain tribes on
the Pacific coast there were indeed singing contests, but it is learned
on investigation that these contests were largely trials of memory,
their object being to ascertain who could remember accurately the
greatest number of songs.
In general it may be said that the melodies of the northern tribes,
such as the 'Iroquois,’ 'Algonquin,’ or 'Kwakiutl,’ are much ruder and
present more rugged characteristics than those of the southern tribes,
such as the 'Zunis’ or 'Navahoes.’ These southern Indian melodies are
much more graceful. This difference is well shown by the two following
melodies. The first is from Dakota; the second from New Mexico:
[Illustration: N.º 1. DACOTAH.]
[Illustration: N.º 2. HOPI.]
A peculiarity of the Dakota melody is the downward leap of a fourth to
be seen in the second measure. The use of the interval of the fourth
as a prominent melodic interval is quite a general characteristic of
Indian music, and is noticeable in the music of many different tribes.
The following Scalp Dance from Minnesota illustrates this:
[Illustration: Music]
Again, it may be said that the larger number of Indian tunes have a
falling melodic inflection. True to the most primitive characteristic
of savage music, that of beginning on a high tone and descending
gradually to the bottom of the voice, the melodic course of the great
majority of Indian tunes is ever downward. It is not an unusual thing
for an Indian tune to end on a tone an octave and a half lower than
that on which it began. The following dance song, also from Minnesota,
illustrates this:
[Illustration: Music]
Among the Indians the drum is naturally the instrument most frequently
in use. There are but few songs or ceremonies in which it does not
play a vital part. It is almost always used to accompany a singer,
apparently to mark the time; but curiously enough the rhythm of
the drum is sometimes at variance with the rhythm of the song. The
rhythmic values of the vocal melody, on the one hand, and the different
rhythm of its drum accompaniment, on the other, are so persistently
independent that the effect is very evidently intentional. Rattles are
sometimes used instead of the drum, as is the case in the Snake Dances
of the Hopis already referred to.
The only other musical instrument deserving the name which is in
widespread use is the so-called flute. This flute, pierced with six
holes and blown through the end (not across the side) is used as a
courting or love-making instrument on which to serenade the loved one.
The fragments of melody which are played upon it are largely extempore
and are understood by the Indian maiden as a declaration of love. The
following is a sample of one of these flute love-calls:
[Illustration: Music]
With the exception of the flute and its love-calls, instrumental music
can be said not to exist among the Indians. With them music is almost
entirely song. And, as the most important element of their songs is
not primarily their strictly musical value, this paucity of their
instrumental music is only what might be expected. It is interesting to
note, however, that practically in the only case in which music occurs
divorced from ritual in Indian life, it appears as an expression of the
love emotion. This is significant when considered in connection with
Darwin’s theory of the origin of music cited above.
Even though the music of the Indians is almost entirely a by-product
of ritual it would be wrong to conclude that _as music_ it is lacking
in character. While many of their ritualistic songs are merely a sort
of recitative in which the melody is much distorted and drawn out to
accommodate the words, others are quite perfect in their form and
general melodic organization, and of a truly distinctive and forceful
character; as, for instance, the following 'Song of the Wolf,’ which
was collected by Dr. Boas among the Kwakiutl tribe in the northwest:
[Illustration: SONG OF THE WOLF.]
Nothing like a scientific study of Indian music was attempted
until 1880. In that year Theodore Baker lived a while on the Seneca
reservation, in the state of New York, and collected and studied such
Indian melodies as he could there obtain. The results of his studies
were embodied in a pamphlet and published under the title, _Über die
Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden_. This little book first drew
the attention of ethnologists and others to the hitherto unsuspected
existence of a large and important native musical culture among the
Indians. Before 1880 investigators of the Indian and his native culture
had entirely ignored his music, considering it to be mere barbaric
noise not worthy of attention. Even Schoolcraft, in his great work
published in 1854, said: 'Indian music is very simple. It consists of
about four notes.’ Since the publication of Baker’s essay, however, the
subject has not lacked investigators. The application by Prof. Fewkes,
of Harvard University, of the phonograph to the accurate recording of
Indian melody has been used with brilliant success by investigators.
Through the efforts of such workers as Alice C. Fletcher, Frederick R.
Burton, Franz Boaz, James Mooney, Natalie Curtis, Frances Densmore, and
others, thousands of Indian songs of many different kinds have been
collected, written down, and published, forming a library of American
primitive music of great completeness and inestimable value to students
of the subject.
VIII
In collecting and studying the music of primitive peoples great
difficulty is experienced in obtaining trustworthy data. Almost all
the savage and semi-barbarous peoples of the world at the present day
have been in contact more or less with civilized man for so long that
they have acquired by imitation many of his manners, customs, and
ideas. Thus the savage’s original development has been overlaid as it
were with a varnish of culture, which is foreign, not native, to him.
The first civilized men to come in contact with a savage tribe have
not as a rule been intent upon observing their manners and customs
nor upon recording their primitive music or folk-lore. These first
men have usually come as discoverers and as conquerors. They have
been followed by missionaries, who in their zeal to perpetuate the
doctrines of Christianity have been ever anxious to divert the minds
of the people from their ancient traditions, by substituting for them
stories from Bible history. Their ancient songs and barbarous-sounding
incantations, however interesting to the ethnologist, have been in most
cases tabooed by the missionaries as impious, who substituted for them
the hymns of the church. This thing has happened in Australia, New
Zealand, Polynesia, Africa, and particularly in America, the Indian
tribes having been so inoculated with musical ideas, hymns, and scraps
of folk song, that it is frequently only with great difficulty that the
character of their own primitive music can be determined.
A collection of the music of the Hopi tribe, who dwell in seven
naturally fortified hill towns in the desert of Arizona, reveals to a
large extent Spanish influence. Many of their melodies have the grace
and movement of Spanish dances. This is quite explicable, however,
when it is remembered that the Spanish held dominion over these towns
from 1580 to 1680. Spanish influence is also apparent in the music
of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, and in the
traditional music of the Mexicans and Peruvians. Brasseur de Bourbourg
has translated into French from the Quinche, the former Mayan tongue,
an ancient manuscript called 'Rabinal-Achi.’ It is an immense dramatic
ballet accompanied by music and danced and acted by hundreds of
performers. But when we come to examine this music it is only to find
that it has an unmistakably Spanish character.
From the fascinating histories of Francis Parkman it is plainly seen
with what zeal the early Jesuit missionaries strove to Christianize the
Canadian tribes of Indians. At the present day it is not an unusual
thing to find turns of melody and even whole tunes which resemble to a
large extent certain hymns of the Catholic Church. Frederick R. Burton,
who has investigated the Ojibways’ music, says that, while on one of
his trips in the vicinity of Lake Huron, he fell in with a particularly
isolated tribe of these Indians. He asked them to sing one of their
_old_ choruses. The Indians complied and--sang a garbled version of
'Old Hundred.’
The innate love of music among the African blacks has been remarked.
Their imitative powers are likewise well known. We are told by
Theophilus Hahn of an instance in which not only the music but the
words of certain Dutch hymns, the latter being entirely unintelligible
to the negroes, were remembered and repeated almost exactly, after
being heard but once by them. Noirot,[9] after calling attention to the
great resemblance existing between certain African airs and English jig
tunes, or French vaudeville songs, says: 'It is necessary, however, to
make an exception of those slow and monotonous phrases which are sung
by the young women to accompany dancing, and of the airs played on the
Bambara flute. In these we again perceive the savage aspect of this
music; the chant inspired by the patriarchal life of the blacks.’ A
specimen of one of these airs is here given:
[Illustration: Music]
The first collectors of the music of the various savage tribes
naturally were obliged to write it down in ordinary musical notation.
But savages in their primitive melodies, like certain animals in
their quasi-musical cries, continually use intervals of less than a
semi-tone. In writing down these primitive melodies in our notation it
has been necessary to disregard these small intervals and to treat them
as accidental happenings, a mere out-of-tuneness, as it were. The note
written down has always been assumed to represent the tone which the
primitive singer was trying unsuccessfully to produce. But instances
of these variations from the tones of the orthodox chromatic scale
finally became so numerous as to give rise to the belief that savages
consciously made use of quarter tones in their songs. This belief has
had many learned and eloquent defenders, among whom may be mentioned
James A. Davies[10] and Benjamin Ives Gilman.[11] The truth of this
theory is, however, very doubtful. The conscious use of the quarter
tones or intervals smaller than those in use in European music would
indicate a much more refined perception of tones and their relations,
a much more delicate musical ear, than is possessed by civilized
Europeans. And this is hardly to be reasonably expected of savages.
Moreover, during recent years the writer has examined some hundreds of
Indian songs as recorded by the phonograph. Many repetitions of single
songs have been examined by him. As a general rule the repetitions fail
to agree in length, rhythm, or accuracy of intonation. Frequently they
agree only in general contour. Any single tone is liable to vary up
or down at least a quarter of a tone, and in some cases the variation
is as much as a full tone. Now if the Indians consciously use quarter
tones in their songs, one would expect to find a regular recurrence of
these small intervals at the same place in each subsequent repetition
of the song. But as such is very far from being the case, one is led
to conclude that while these fractional intervals do really occur,
their occurrence is much more the result of accident than of conscious
intention. These conclusions in regard to North American Indian music
apply, we believe, to the music of all savages.
The characteristics of that which is primitive are undoubted strength,
directness of expression, and consequent effectiveness, but this
elemental strength is coupled with crudity, inaccuracy, and an apparent
lawlessness or impatience of restraint. No matter how charming, how
effective, or how interesting many of these strains of primitive music
may seem to us from an ethnological point of view, it is apparent that
the _mind_ of man has not yet grasped and moulded this tonal material.
Primitive music does not show the effect of thought. It is merely the
wild and wayward expression of emotion.
It was when the rudimentary successions of tones known to primitive
man were gathered up and scientifically arranged in definite and
unalterable scales that our modern art of music began. And at this
point our survey of primitive music properly ends.
H. F. G.
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF ANDAMANESE MUSIC. Noted by M. V. Portman.]
D'ót ógar lera loto cháli beo
D'ót ógar lera loto cháli beo
D'ót ógar lera loto cháli beo.
Dó ngól áka teggi leb dáka jad ála ngáka yabng-o
D'ót ógar lera, loto cháli beo
D'ót ógar lera loto cháli beo.
Pukuta Clapping etc.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Benj. Ives Gilman: Hopi Songs, 1908.
[3] A specimen of Andamanese music is to be found on page 41.
[4] Carl Engel: Introduction to the Study of National Music, Vol. I.
[5] Horns made from elephant tusks have been found in central Africa.
[6] Nath. B. Emerson: The Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, 1909.
[7] _Flute-à-bec_ = beak flute; one which is played by blowing through
the end.
[8] We have ventured to change certain notes, such as substituting
D-flat for C-sharp, for instance. While this in no way alters the tune,
the musical intervals are more readily grasped by the reader.
[9] _À travers le Fouta-Diallon et le Bambouc._
[10] See Sir George Gray: Polynesian Mythology.
[11] See 'Hopi Songs.’