ANARCHY IN MUSIC
Music is as old as human nature. We can get some idea of what it was at
first from the music of savage tribes. There were a few notes and
rudimentary melodies with blows struck in cadence as an accompaniment;
or, sometimes, the same primitive rhythms without any accompaniment--and
nothing else! Then melody was perfected and the rhythms became more
complicated. Later came Greek music, of which we know little, and the
music of the East and Far East.
Music, as we now understand the term, began with the attempts at harmony
in the Middle Ages. These attempts were labored and difficult, and the
uncertainty of their gropings, combined with the slowness of their
development, excites our wonder. Centuries were necessary before the
writing of music became exact, but, slowly, laws were elaborated.
Thanks to them the works of the Sixteenth Century came into being, in
all their admirable purity and learned polyphony. Hard and inflexible
laws engendered an art analogous to primitive painting. Melody was
almost entirely absent and was relegated to dance tunes and popular
songs. But the dance tunes of the time, on which, perhaps, erudition was
not used sufficiently, were written in the same polyphonic style and
with the same rigid correctness as the madrigals and the church music.
We know that the popular songs found their way into the church music and
that Palestrina's great reform consisted in banishing them. However, we
should get but a feeble idea of the part they played, if we imagined
that they naturally belonged there. Take a well known air, _Au Claire de
la Lune_, for example, and make each note a whole note sung by the
tenor, while the other voices dialogue back and forth in counterpoint,
and see what is left of the song for the listener. The scandal of _La
Messe de l'Homme armé_ was entirely theoretical.
We simply do not know how they played these anthems, masses, and
madrigals, in the absence of any indication of either the time or the
emphasis. We find a few directions for expression, as in the first
measures of Palestrina's _Stabat Mater_ but such directions are
extremely rare. They are simply the first signs of the dawn of the
far-off day of music with expression. Certain learned and
well-intentioned persons endeavor to compare this music with ours, and
we surprise in some of the modern editions instances of _molto
expressivo_ which seem to be good guesses. This exclusively consonant
music, in which the intervals of fourths were considered dissonant,
while the diminishing fifth was the _diabolus in musica_, ought from its
very nature to be antithetical to expression. Nothing in the _Kyrie, in
La Messe du Pape Marcel_, gives the impression of a prayer, unless
expressive accents, without any real justification, are introduced by
main strength.
Expression came into existence with the chord of the dominant seventh
from which all modern harmony developed. This invention is attributed to
Monteverde. No matter what has been said, however, it occurs in
Palestrina's _Adoremus_. Floods of ink have been poured out in
discussing this question, some affirming, while others--and not the
least, by any manner of means--denying the existence of the famous
chord. No equivocation is possible. It is a simultaneously played chord
held by four voices for a whole measure. What is certain is that
Palestrina, by putting aside the rules, made a discovery, the
significance of which he did not realize.
With the introduction of the seventh interval a new era began. It would
be a grave error to believe that the rules were overturned, for,
instead, new principles were added to old ones as new conditions
demanded. They learned how to modulate, how to transpose from one key to
the next key and finally to the keys farthest away. In his treatise on
harmony Fétis studied this evolution in a masterly manner. Unfortunately
his scholarship was not combined with deep musical feeling. For example,
he saw faults in Mozart and Beethoven where there are only beauties, and
beauties which even an ignorant listener--if he is naturally
musical--will see without trouble. He did not understand the vast
difference between the unlettered person who commits a solecism and
Pascal, the inventor of a new syntax.
However that may be, Fétis gave us a comprehensive review in broad
outlines of musical evolution down to what he justly called the
"omnitonic system," which Richard Wagner has achieved since. "Beyond
that," he said, "I can see nothing more."
He did not foresee the a-tonic system, but that is what we have come to.
There is no longer any question of adding to the old rules new
principles which are the natural expression of time and experience, but
simply of casting aside all rules and every restraint.
"Everyone ought to make his own rules. Music is free and unlimited in
its liberty of expression. There are no perfect chords, dissonant chords
or false chords. All aggregations of notes are legitimate."
That is called, and they believe it, the _development of taste_.
He whose taste is developed by this system is not like the man who by
tasting a wine can tell you its age and its vineyard, but he is rather
like the fellow who with perfect indifference gulps down good or bad
wine, brandy or whiskey, and prefers that which burns his gullet the
most. The man who gets his work hung in the Sâlon is not the one who
puts on his canvas delicate touches in harmonious tones, but he who
juxtaposes vermillion and Veronese green. The man with a "developed
taste" is not the one who knows how to get new and unexpected results by
passing from one key to another, as the great Richard did in _Die
Meistersinger_, but rather the man who abandons all keys and piles up
dissonances which he neither introduces nor concludes and who, as a
result, grunts his way through music as a pig through a flower garden.
Possibly they may go farther still. There seems to be no reason why they
should linger on the way to untrammeled freedom or restrict themselves
within a scale. The boundless empire of sound is at their disposal and
let them profit by it. That is what dogs do when they bay at the moon,
cats when they meow, and the birds when they sing. A German has written
a book to prove that the birds sing false. Of course he is wrong for
they do not sing false. If they did, their song would not sound
agreeable to us. They sing outside of scales and it is delightful, but
that is not man-made art.
Some Spanish singers give a similar impression, through singing
interminable grace notes beyond notation. Their art is intermediate
between the singing of the birds and of man. It is not a higher art.
In certain quarters they marvel at the progress made in the last thirty
years. The architects of the Fifteenth Century must have reasoned in the
same way. They did not appreciate that they were assassinating Gothic
art, and that after some centuries we would have to revert to the art of
the Greeks and Romans.