THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF SONG
The origin of song--The practical value of primitive
song--The cultural value of primitive song--Biography
of primitive song--The lyric impulse--Folk-song and
art-song--Characteristics of the art-song; style, the singer
and the song.
I
‘In this or that Sicilian hamlet,’ says the Countess
Martinengo-Cæsaresco in her ‘Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs,’ ‘there
is a man known by the name of “the Poet,” or perhaps “the Goldfinch.”
He is completely illiterate and belongs to the poorest class; he is a
blacksmith, a fisherman, or a tiller of the soil. If he has the gift of
improvisation, his fellow-villagers have the satisfaction of hearing
him applauded by the Great Public--the dwellers in all the surrounding
hamlets assembled at the fair on St. John’s Eve. Or it may be he is of
a meditative turn of mind, and makes his poetry leisurely as he lies
full length under the lemon-trees taking his noontide rest. Should you
pass by, it is unlikely he will give himself the trouble of lifting his
eyes. He could not say the alphabet to save his life; but the beautiful
earth and skies and sea which he has looked on every day since he was
born have taught him some things not learnt in school. The little poem
he has made in his head is indeed a humble sort of poetry, but it is
not unworthy of the praise it gets from the neighbors who come dropping
into his cottage door, uninvited, but sure of a friendly welcome next
Sunday after mass, their errand being to find out if the rumor is
true that “the Goldfinch” has invented a fresh _canzuna_? Such is the
peasant poet of to-day; such he was five hundred or a thousand years
ago.’
Here is the original singer. He has existed all over the world in every
age, probably, since civilization began to dawn. We are very wrong
in thinking of songs as normally written by special composers and
sung by special singers in concert halls. Such a situation is not the
usual but the unusual one. For, generally speaking, it is not special
people who are singers but ordinary people. Artists have been in the
habit of thinking that the world is divided into ordinary men and
artists. William Morris startled them by declaring that ordinary men
_are_ artists--that to be artistic is the normal condition of ordinary
men. It is only our materialistic civilization, he said, that has
made men inartistic. And historically, at least, he is quite right.
It is only in recent times, and in certain nations, that it has come
to be regarded as unusual that an ordinary man should be a singer. In
all other ages, we may safely say, and in nearly all nations, it was
regarded as unusual that an ordinary man should _not_ be a singer.
Singing has always been as natural to man as running, or whistling, or
making love. It is only in these latter times that a man who sings for
the joy of it is thought ‘queer.’
The songs that have been written down on paper are of course only
the smallest fraction of those that have been invented. It is a very
unusual adventure for a song to get written down on paper. Not one out
of a thousand experiences it. Most songs are ‘made up’ by some ordinary
person at work or at play, remembered and repeated, imitated by some
one else and changed a little and passed on. They live from mouth to
mouth and in the hearts of people. Every nation, until it became too
lettered and too self-conscious, had its songs of this kind, many of
them beautiful enough to be known by thousands of people, some the
property of only a few. In Italy investigators have recently noted down
thousands of songs that never touched paper before, but they were only
a tiny part of the songs that were passing from mouth to mouth. So it
has been in every country. Greenland and Iceland have their songs which
originated no one knows where or when. We possess folk-songs of China,
Japan, and India. The phonograph has noted down hundreds of songs of
the North American Indians. And every country in Europe has yielded
songs innumerable.
We should be on our guard, then, against assuming that what we know
as ‘song literature’--the songs written by composers in their study
and printed on paper before being sung--is any very considerable
part of the song music of the world. It is merely the music chiefly
at the disposal of highly educated people--principally because it is
_printed_. And from a certain standpoint--that of the school-trained
musician--it is perhaps the ‘greatest’ vocal music. But remember that
the standpoint of the school-trained musician is only one standpoint.
The conscious composer has chosen to look at his musical materials in
a certain way and to judge the result accordingly. But by another test
his work is inferior; in its power to move thousands of human hearts no
song by Schubert or Schumann or Brahms can begin to equal ‘Auld Lang
Syne’ or ‘The Marseillaise.’ Of necessity this book will be chiefly
concerned with consciously composed ‘art’ music. But we should always
remember that this is only because art music represents the great
majority of all the music that has been noted down--and of course in
a measure art songs at their best contain in a sublimated form the
elements of folk-song.
The less civilized and conscious people are, the more readily they do
their own singing. There is little spontaneous song among us to-day
and yet we can occasionally hear a workman humming an aimless tune
under his breath. This was probably the normal state of things when
men were less educated. Everybody was a composer, partly because it
was easier to make up your own song than to remember somebody else’s.
Among the Indians songs were regarded in some tribes as the personal
property of the person who invented them and were not to be sung by
any one else unless that second person had acquired the rights in it
by gift or inheritance. But generally, as people became somewhat more
advanced, songs were freely appropriated from one singer to another.
And each singer who borrowed generally added something of his own
to the song--something to express his sense of beauty or artistic
fitness: a more effective phrasing here, or a simpler group of notes
there. Sometimes the song was so popular that it passed from tribe to
tribe, or from nation to nation. In this case each people gave its
individuality to the song, adding perhaps a little ornamentation if
its nature was gay and volatile, or making the melody more regular and
balanced if its soul was earnest and contemplative. Everywhere the
races, the nations, and the tribes have shown their souls to us in
their songs.
We must not suppose that these songs, which were so highly treasured,
were elaborate. Sometimes they were made of no more than two or three
tones of the scale. In thousands of songs there are no more than five
tones and certain octave reduplications (as, for instance, in ‘Auld
Lang Syne’). In most cases the more primitive popular songs are too
simple to make any impression upon us at all. But often that is our
fault and not theirs. Our taste has been somewhat spoiled by highly
seasoned food. After a little sympathetic study of primitive songs we
find them full of eloquence and pathos.
II
But whether or not the early songs would please us now, they were of
incalculable importance in the lives of early peoples. We are inclined
to regard singing as an amusement only. We forget that it once had
a practical importance that is hardly to be equalled by any single
institution in modern life. Men were shut up within valleys, or tied
by their work to the fields. It was by singing and poetry that they
became citizens of the world. For, before the days of newspapers and
postal service, it was the wandering bards who took the news from city
to city, from court to court, from nation to nation. They served as
historians, recording in verse the great events of their own nation
and others, and passing the record down to succeeding generations.
They served as public libraries, conserving the legend and sentiment
of nations for the reference of others. More, they conserved the
teaching of religious seers, the great unwritten laws of the nation,
from fathers to children. In short, all that passed between nation and
nation, and between generation and generation, was transmitted in song.
We wonder, of course, why these things happened in song, rather than in
plain prose. But the answer is simple: verse is easier to remember than
prose. All the stories, all the laws, all the culture of the nation
had to be _remembered_. People’s memories served instead of libraries.
And with such a mass of matter to remember, people developed memories
which are almost unbelievable to-day. To retain the equivalent of
hundreds of pages of prose was of course impossible. But once throw
the matter into verse and the remembering of it, to a primitive man,
became comparatively simple. The whole of the Iliad and Odyssey were
transmitted in this way through at least three centuries before they
were committed to writing. For verse somehow remembers itself; the
sound remains even after the sense is gone. Prof. G. L. Kittredge, of
Harvard, tells of some literary investigators in the Orient, who came
upon a blind beggar. They asked him to recite poetry, and he started
on a long epic of which he knew thousands of lines. It was not in the
language of the time, but an old and strange tongue. They asked him
what the lines meant. He did not know. He had heard them from his
father, and had remembered them by the sound.
[Illustration: Illustration from the _Roman der Fauvel_ (15th Cent.)]
It was, then, of the highest importance that all knowledge that was to
be preserved be cast in metrical form. A wandering minstrel was able
to tell one country about the battles of another country by making a
song about them. The nature of the Gods and the religious duties of men
could be preserved for succeeding centuries because Homer made a poem
out of them. And so poetry was a thing of incalculable value.
In these practical matters, of course, the music was not of the same
importance as the words. We do not know, in fact, to what extent music
entered into the reciting of the old poems. But it has been conjectured
that even the longest poems, like the Iliad, were usually intoned
and rose into something like a set melody in the more impassioned
parts. Certainly the shorter poems always tended to find a tune for
themselves. It is even quite likely that the bards invented words
and tune at the same time. The long Robin Hood poems of England were
usually sung and not spoken and we possess some of the curious tunes
with which they were traditionally associated. Among the earlier
minstrels much of the music was improvised in the course of the
recitation, though as the poems became old and widely spread it is
likely that they were associated with precise melodies or melodic
motives. On the whole, it seems that little of the metrical literature
antedating the art of writing was without music of one sort or
another. All early references, however, tend to regard the tune and the
words as one and the same thing. It seems to some, therefore, since
melody is not mentioned by itself, that music was of slight importance.
But the truth seems rather to be that the melody was inseparable from
the words and not to be thought of apart from them. And the music
seems to have been of the highest importance in giving dignity and
seriousness to the poem.
What the music of the earliest poems was like we have no exact means
of guessing. The writing of musical notes is of comparatively late
invention and there was no way to preserve the old tunes through the
changing centuries. When the traditional poems were committed to
writing the sacred marriage of verse and music usually ended in a
divorce. We have, however, a Finnish melody of great age, sung to an
epic fragment, which might be taken as typical. It consists of few
notes (which can safely be said of nearly all primitive tunes), but the
stanza is long and the winding melodic line is highly expressive. But
in general we cannot hope to know the earliest melodies of the European
nations. We can fumble our way back about a thousand years and then we
are met by the blackness of mystery.
But we know that the songs were there and that they gave to little
lives the opportunity of being big. We find it hard to realize how
important they were, now that telegraph wires have connected all parts
of the world, when a message can be sent from San Francisco to Moscow
and back in a day, when all that has happened the world over (and much
besides) is spread out before us on paper at our breakfast tables the
next morning, when all knowledge is classified and published and can be
found in any good public library. Imagine yourself living in a village
or working on a farm without these things. It is a day’s walk to the
next village. The next country lies beyond the mountains and there are
no passes over, and besides there would be no way of living if you
left your work, unless you went as a pilgrim. Every year a few young
men wander away seeking their fortunes and never come back. Every year
a few men come seeking their fortunes and stay. One or two men have
wandered the world and come back home, telling wonderful incoherent
tales of what happens beyond the mountains. But this is all the news
you get beyond the gossip of your town and the country around--except
that once in a while comes a wandering minstrel or juggler with tricks
and songs. He will tell you the political fortunes of the next kingdom
and whether its king is likely to go to war with your king and whether
you will thus be forced to serve in the army. He will tell you the
gossip and scandal of the courts. He will tell you the customs of other
people and will give you practical hints that may save you trouble in
your work. And, best of all, he will tell you new stories to vary the
monotony of the village gossip. So you will spend a wonderful afternoon
listening to him in the village square, and when he is gone you will
have something to think and talk about for weeks to come.
Thus the wandering singers served as newspapers. And their best songs
were remembered and repeated (and improved upon) to serve as history
from that time on. But history might also be made in another way. The
skalds of the northern races accompanied their chiefs on their battles
in order to sing of them afterwards. But they were there as historians,
not merely as poets. ‘Ye shall be here that ye may see with your own
eyes what is achieved this day,’ King Olaf is recorded to have told
his skalds on the eve of the battle of Stiklastad (1030), ‘and have
no occasion, when ye shall afterward celebrate these actions in song,
to depend on the reports of others.’ The skalds were there, that
is, as true witnesses of the events, as the specialized repositories
of historical information. We cannot suppose that their reports were
altogether truthful. They were doubtless expected to ‘forget’ many
things that might seem inglorious. But their songs often passed to the
people. And, if the king or chief had made a bad record with them, be
sure the songs became changed in people’s mouths to show him in his
true character. And very often the people, or their own singers, made
the narrative songs themselves, dealing out praise or blame by their
own justice without fear or favor.
In religion song was a matter of the highest importance, as it has
always been. A prophet might reveal the will of the gods, but, unless
he were a poet or had a poet to help him, he could not make people
remember it. And so in all primitive races the priests were poets and
musicians. By the beauty and impressiveness of their songs they proved
their right to interpret the divine will. And only in poems could they
preserve their doctrine for their successors. But in time the priests
generally had to give up their prestige to those who were first of all
poets and singers. The gods of Greece were interpreted and made known
to the people by the poets. The Teutonic and Norse gods were made
known in the epics and sagas. No one else spoke to the people with the
same religious conviction as the poet. And so the poets have always,
until the most recent times, partaken of a certain religious sanctity.
Dante and Milton served as interpreters of religion to their fellow
creatures--as beings set apart ‘to justify the ways of God to men.’
III
Thus song, then, was the chief agent of civilization to primitive
man. All that is supplied in our lives by railroads, telegraph lines,
telephones, newspapers, books, and libraries was supplied to primitive
peoples by song. But this still represents only half the value of
song. If it gave to primitive men all the practical service which
specialized inventions are rendering to us, it also gave them the
romance and beauty which we have largely lost from our lives. Every
simple, primitive person, we have said, sings--either his own song or
his neighbor’s. We have in great abundance the records of what their
songs were about. The subjects cover nearly the whole range capable
of artistic treatment, but chiefly the great human experiences--love,
pity, nature, death, the supernatural.
Slowly, after much imitating and experimenting, men learned to sing
their feelings. This achievement was so important that there is hardly
another one to be compared with it. For the growth of civilization
has been simply the growth in men of consciousness--consciousness of
themselves and their surroundings. And every new song that men were
able to make for themselves marked a new step in consciousness. To
us it seems quite obvious that a deer, for instance, has four legs.
But the fact is obvious only as everything else is obvious when it is
really looked at. The great difficulty is to get people to _look_ at
things. And it was probably a real (and most important) discovery when
the primitive huntsman realized that the deer he had been hunting had
four legs, and not three or five. He simply hadn’t thought about the
matter before. He hadn’t observed clearly. Now he had added one more
fact about life to his mental treasure house. He had become one more
degree clearly conscious.
Now, art has been the chief agent of this advancing consciousness
through the centuries. Our huntsman perhaps never thought about the
number of the deer’s legs until he tried to draw the deer with a bone
knife on the wall of his cave. But when he had to _create_ the deer
in a work of art then he _had_ to come to clear consciousness about
the matter. And the same is true of every song that simple people have
made. It necessitated true observation. It forced its author to _see_.
It may seem childishly obvious to say in a song that the bluebells
are blue, but most people pay little attention to the question. It is
something to have thought the fact worth mentioning.
But it was much more. It was not only an increase in consciousness. It
was an increase in experience. By singing over his little song about
the bluebell the peasant enjoyed the bluebell a second time in his
imagination. It is nothing against the song that the blueness of the
bluebell is obvious. Most of the beautiful things in life are obvious
but nevertheless go unrecognized. The important thing about the song is
that somebody enjoyed the blueness of the bluebell so much that he had
to sing about it.
The great use of these personal songs to people was that it helped them
to feel at home in the world. ‘The first poet of human things,’ says
the Countess Martinengo-Cæsaresco, ‘was perhaps one who stood in the
presence of death. In the twilight that went before civilization the
loves of men were prosaic and intellectual unrest was remote, but there
was already Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted
because they are not.’ Death as a mystery was a horror too great to be
borne. But death made into a song could be looked at and in some degree
known. The awful sense of helplessness as people stood beside a fresh
grave was alleviated by their singing of their grief. When the mystery
had become incarnated in a work of art they could face it and know who
their enemy was.
Every man who feels emotions craves expression of them. The ability
to express is perhaps what separates man from the animals. The man
who cannot achieve the expression of what he feels sinks back into a
spiritual numbness in which joy and sorrow are of less importance. But
the man who is able to see the things that are within him and about
him--to see them clearly enough to express them in songs--is able to
take his place in life and go on to more consciousness and more power.
Something like this is the service songs have performed to men’s souls.
But, most of all, of course, songs have taught men how to love. As men
began to realize that love must be more than a mere blind craving they
had to answer the question: ‘How much do I love her? How do I love
her?’ And the question had to be answered in some kind of concrete
terms. One old French lover says in his song that if King Henry gave
to him the town of Paris on condition that he give up the love of his
sweetheart, he would reply to Henry the King: ‘Take back your town
of Paris; I love my sweetheart more, heigh-ho, I love my sweetheart
more.’ And when we read the fine straightforward old French in which
the song is sung we know that he meant it. It is evident that the whole
estate of love and marriage has risen to a vastly higher level when the
lover, instead of saying, ‘I want my sweetheart,’ can sing, ‘I want my
sweetheart more than I want the town of Paris.’ So songs gave to life
definite meanings and values.
IV
In the beginning, as we have said, it is probable that everybody made
songs for himself. Helen Vacaresco noted a long song improvised by a
Roumanian peasant woman who was going mad; the woman was suffering
under a great sorrow and was trying to express it. Being simple and
without knowledge or fear of artistic forms and laws, she was able to
express it. And each day she wandered in the fields singing the song
she had composed, changing it little by little. It was not made for
the sake of making a song, but for the sake of expressing her sorrow.
It was, of course, only half a song and a half a mechanical repetition
of her troubles. But it had its beauty of word and something like a set
melody; it was an emotion objectified, put into a work of art where it
could be looked at and known.
Here was song at its very earliest beginning. It was spontaneous, it
was personal, it was utterly sincere. And, because it sought some
objective form, it was a primitive work of art. We may imagine the
earliest songs starting in just this way. Perhaps this Roumanian
peasant woman had her counterpart thousands of years ago. Her song,
or part of it, was heard and imitated by others who felt the same
sorrow. It was changed in passing from mouth to mouth. Needless words
were dropped, weak expressions were strengthened. As men became able
to look more clearly at their trouble the essential things in the song
were emphasized or put in a more emphatic position. Everything was
dropped from it that did not express the very heart of the emotion. The
lines perhaps became more rhythmical; the verses began to balance and
contrast with each other; the metaphors became more brilliant or more
precise. Soon all members of the tribe knew it, and when the young men
wandered away to other lands they took the song with them.
At the same time a similar perfecting process was going on in the
music. The original melody was perhaps little more than a chant of two
or three notes, the tune rising when the emotional pitch was raised and
dropping when the movement became more calm. The tune was at first not
thought of as a thing in itself. But gradually people became conscious
of the two or three notes in their relation and succession. And they
began to make them more varied, to express the changes of emotion
more accurately. The melody became divided into stanzas and lines
corresponding with the words and showed in itself where the thought
came to a partial stop and where it began again. Then people began
to notice peculiar figures which they had unconsciously put into the
melody. They made use of these, balancing or contrasting them to add
beauty to the tune. And gradually the melody came to have beauty and
meaning of its own.
This series of changes perhaps occupied centuries, for the artistic
power of primitive men advances very slowly. The singers had not yet
thought of putting this song in rhythm; and it was yet many centuries
before they would feel anything like a musical scale. Rhythm had
probably developed among people as a thing in itself, not directly
connected with musical tones. Rhythmic movement is common to all
men--in walking, in running, and in the beating of the heart. Dancing
must have arisen spontaneously from an excess of emotion. Such dancing
was perhaps accompanied by the clapping of hands, the beating of
sticks, or the pounding of some primitive drum. Then with the invention
of some primitive musical instrument the tribal musician began to play
a simple dance tune in rhythm, a tune of two notes, at first an aimless
shifting from one note to another, and later an organized melody with
tonal figures and balances and contrasts.
It is probable that these two elements--rhythm and melody--were
developed separately and were at first regarded as separate arts. At
least it seems certain that singing was at first without rhythm. It
must have been a wonderful day when somebody thought of combining
the two--of singing the old song with metre and accents. But this,
too, must have developed very slowly, being at first no more than an
accenting of each alternative note. At the same time the song had
probably been divided into line divisions. The singer then probably
developed his rhythm from both ends, so to speak, building a more
complex series of accents from the single group of two notes, and at
the same time subdividing the line into sections. After several more
centuries, perhaps, the tribe possessed a song that was fairly metrical
and regular.
All this time the notion of a scale--a set succession of notes from
which the notes of the tune were to be chosen--was entirely lacking.
It came comparatively late in musical development, though it is the
first incident in musical _history_. At first each melody was its
own scale. Then, as people began to observe similarities in the tone
relations between several melodies, they began to have a conception
of the regular succession of tones which was common to all of them.
Such a succession, a mode or primitive scale, was of but three or four
notes. By arranging the semi-tones several new scales could be formed.
And by here and there adding a note above or below the scales could be
enlarged.
With the enlargement of the scales melodies became enlarged in range.
More opportunities arose for the balancing and contrasting of melodic
devices. The tune became more complex, more regular, and more beautiful.
It was now several centuries since the song had first come into
existence. Since that time it had undergone perhaps a dozen
transformations, each so unlike the other that nobody would have
suspected they had any relation. But they were different forms of one
and the same song. For songs have ancestors and descendants just as men
do. Our song may have had a numerous progeny. As it passed from one
province to another certain phrases of the melody lingered in people’s
minds and found their way into other songs. Perhaps a line or two of
its words became common property and were used as the refrain for a
new song. Certainly as people made other songs they perforce made them
somewhat in the image of the great ancestor.
Thus for centuries--ten, twenty, or thirty, likely as not--the song was
growing and changing, or at least giving birth to children before dying
by the wayside. And folk-songs are still alive, growing and changing.
It seems possible that the years of their natural life may be numbered,
for it is becoming harder every year for them to live in their new
environment. But they are still in the land of the living and may
continue for centuries to come, and if so they are bound to continue
to grow and change. Thirty centuries of growth have not taken place
that songs may stop growing right here. Perhaps the songs of to-day may
seem as crude to people five hundred years hence as the songs of five
hundred years ago seem to us now.
V
We must always remember that songs of every kind are primarily composed
in the spirit of this typical folk-song. Even the most learned composer
is spiritually a descendant of the crazy Roumanian peasant woman, and
his songs, if they are real songs at all, are of the same spontaneous
kind as hers. However much he may be occupied with conscious scholastic
principles, if his music does not somehow sing in this natural, artless
vein it is but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The impulse to
song is the soul of all true songs the world over.
What this impulse is has occupied the minds of theorists for many a
year. Their explanations are perhaps not important, since whatever
their conclusions we still posses the wonderful song literature which
is at our disposal. But their theories are at least interesting, if
only to prove that song, like love, is one of those human things that
can never be utterly explained.
Primitive people almost invariably attribute music to divine agency.
We know the story of Orpheus, who moved the beasts and even the rocks
and trees to tears by his sweet singing. We know also the story of the
competition of Apollo the harp player and Marsyas the flute player. The
Chinese say that they obtained their musical scale from a miraculous
bird. The legend is interesting as showing how people tend to invent
a supernatural explanation for the artificial laws which are felt to
need some sort of superstitious bolstering up. For it is recorded in
Chinese history that this scale has several times been changed by edict
of the emperor, who considers an orthodox scale a very important thing
to insist upon and wishes to have his word accepted as divine law.
The Japanese tradition is that the sun-goddess once retired into a
cave and the gods devised music to lure her forth once more. The story
suggests the practice of certain primitive tribes who sing and dance
during a solar eclipse, either to scare away the evil spirits or to beg
the sun-god back into their midst. The Nahua Indians of North America
say that the god Tezcatlipoca sent for music from the sun and made a
bridge of whales and turtles by which to convey it to the earth. The
Abyssinians have a tale to the effect that Yared transmitted music to
men, the holy spirit having appeared to him in the form of a pigeon.
But in the story of the Javans there seems to be a kernel of scientific
truth. They say that the earliest music was suggested to them by the
wind whistling through a bamboo tube which had been left hanging on a
tree.
The theories of the earlier musical philosophers of the nineteenth
century were not so unlike these legends as they seemed at the
time. These men had a limited historical outlook and were inclined
to discredit, when they did not ignore, the music preceding that
of Palestrina, just as the historians of painting before Ruskin’s
time tended to regard all Italian painting before Raphael as mere
experimental bungling. To these earlier philosophers music was a
thing _discovered_ rather than a thing _evolved_. In their view music
had always existed in a sort of secret treasure house instituted by
a beneficent creator for the edification of men. All melodies and
harmonies were piled in there awaiting the explorations of musicians.
The explorations were undertaken by the ‘inspired’ artists, those
who had been endowed with finer ears and more daring imaginations.
All musical history was a story of the development of music from
its imperfect state among the primitives to its perfect state with
Beethoven. This description may be exaggerated, but it is certain
that the earlier theorists considered music as a self-existent
thing, with its own laws and its own principles of beauty--laws and
principles which must be discovered by the elect among artists instead
of being evolved by the peoples. As to the impulse to song and to
artistic creation in general they laid it to that mysterious thing,
‘inspiration.’
Schopenhauer’s theory has a modern ring and is excellent poetry even
though it can hardly rank as science. He says that while the other
arts--painting, sculpture, and architecture--represent the Idea, which
is the reflection of the Will, music represents the Will itself. It is
pure energy, the nearest thing that exists among men to the essence of
reality.
With Darwin all this kind of speculation changed and the theories of
musical origins became more a matter of biology than of music. Darwin
traced the impulse to song to the love-making of animals and primitive
man. He showed how in Nature beauty is continually being made the
adjunct and servant of love--how the bird sings or the insect dances
to attract its mate. Many theorists have sought to explain the whole
of art as originating in the sexual impulse. But in this theory, as in
all, there are data on both sides of the question and the explanation
is interesting rather than valuable.
Herbert Spencer pursues the same biological line. But he traces the
impulse to song from the surplus of energy in living things. Nature,
as we know, is prodigal, producing thousands of eggs or seeds where
she expects only scores of insects or plants to grow. And so she gives
to each living thing more energy than is needed to keep it alive and
healthy--or at least more energy than is needed _all the time_. With
this surplus of energy something must be done. And that something
among men is art. When a wild rose-bush is put in rich soil it grows a
double rose and a larger one. And so, when a man has a little more than
enough for his material needs, he attempts to decorate and beautify
his surroundings. To Spencer the typical example of nascent art is the
child who dances out of pure joy of life. But others object to this,
saying that this dancing of the child (and all similarly spontaneous
art) is lacking in the very quality which makes art--namely, discipline
and control. It is selection and control, they say, which makes any
work of art more than a mere daub of color or conglomeration of sounds.
Certainly the biological theories have not satisfactorily explained the
second great element in artistic creation--the impulse to refinement.
We have seen that once our typical folk-song was invented by the
Roumanian peasant woman it could not stay as it was, but had to take
new forms, changing continually, and, as we see it, usually for the
better. What is it that makes men dissatisfied with a crude, formless
melody and desirous of making it regular and organic? Perhaps it is no
more than the impulse to play which children show when they arrange
pebbles in new and strange shapes on the sand or savages when they daub
their faces with new colors of war-paint. Again the surplus of energy?
Perhaps. Perhaps when people have become familiar with their primitive
melody they notice a peculiar turn of the phrase and take pleasure
in seeing what they can _do_ with it in the way of repeating it and
inventing contrasting phrases. At any rate, there it is, this impulse
to refinement, more mystery for the theorist and more entertainment for
the music lover.
On the whole, these theories probably err in trying to simplify the
case too much. More likely music has not one simple _cause_, but many
interacting _causes_. Like every individual man whose ancestors are a
multitude, song must be the result of many, many causes.
VI
We have been speaking chiefly of the folk-song, the fountain of all
vocal music. But the art-song, that is, the song for a solo voice with
instrumental accompaniment, which is quantitively but a small part of
vocal music, is the special study of this book. For convenience we
date the beginning of this art-song from Schubert, regarding the song
writers who preceded him as mere experimenters. Accordingly, at the
time of the writing of this book the art-song, one of the four or five
great divisions of modern music, is hardly a century old.
It is, of course, a somewhat arbitrary division that separates the
art-song from song as a whole. The arbitrary division is justified by
its convenience. Schubert may fairly be said to have infused a new
spirit into song writing and most of the songs written by established
composers since his time have been written in his spirit. So we find an
extensive and remarkably homogeneous song literature, the product of
the last hundred years, which in its form and intent separates itself
from the folk-song. The songs on the boundary line are few. The songs
before Schubert which give any evidence of this recent spirit are
hardly to be found at all. It is as though a new god had descended from
the skies and taught a new kind of art to his creatures.
What is this distinction we draw between the folk-song and the
art-song? The superficial elements of contrast are apt to be
misleading, for, while most folk-songs are simple, many art-songs are
simple, too; and, while many art-songs are irregular and peculiar,
their irregularities are rarely so great as are to be found in the
earlier folk-songs. The distinction must be sought in the spirit of the
songs. It becomes more eloquent the more we study the two sorts. It
forces us continually to seek further back for the true character of
each, so that at last it seems as though we needed two different souls
for the singing of them. The folk-song speaks for man in the mass;
the art-song speaks for man the individual. For the folk-song, let us
always remember, was composed not by an individual, but by a mass, each
member of which may have contributed one or more of its beauties. If it
had sung of a joy or sorrow which belonged exclusively to its original
singer, it would have held no interest for other people and would have
died with its composer. Those folk-songs were, of course, most popular
which spoke for the interests and emotions of the greatest number of
men. We can justly say that those folk-songs are greatest which sing of
the things that are common to all men in such a way that they can be
understood by all men. But in the composition of the art-song precisely
the opposite influences are dominant. The composer, if he is to make
his mark in the art world, must not write exactly like other composers,
but must distinguish his work in some way. He must call attention
to himself or his work by writing in a style that is not quite like
anybody else’s. Fashionable or critical audiences will pay little
attention to the man who seems merely to be repeating what a greater
man has written before him; these audiences continually crave a novelty
or a sensation. Everything forces the conscious composer in these days
to be as personal as possible. His song then expresses the feelings of
one individual in one particular style.
It has always been a nice question of taste whether one prefers to
observe the type or the individual. Would you have your love song one
that could be sung by every lover, high or low, or one that would ring
true for you alone? If you are quite honest you will probably have to
admit that you will swing from one to the other from time to time. At
times it will seem vulgar that you should be rejoicing in precisely the
same sentiments as those which are sending the Italian bootblack into a
seventh heaven; your delicacy, your sense of dignity will demand that
your love be your own, like no one else’s on earth. And, again, the
precious selfishness of cultivating your own soul with such conscious
care when it is such a tiny part of humanity--such a reaction will make
you praise heaven that you and the bootblack can sing the same love
song and feel the same love.
However you feel about it the art-song has chosen to specialize on
individuals. Not only on individual persons, but on particular feelings
of those persons. The folk-song expresses the type emotion--love,
sorrow, or patriotism; the art-song expresses some particular shade
or nuance of these emotions. The Scotch folk-tune which we sing with
Burns’s stirring words, ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ expresses magnificently the
defiance of patriotic bravery. It might be the song of anybody facing
odds in defense of his beliefs. Schubert’s song, ‘Courage,’ has exactly
the same note of defiance, but, so to speak, only a particular section
of the great general emotion. His defiance is that of a man broken down
with sorrow and misfortune, who in one superb moment vows to conquer
by pure force of will power--a vow which we know is impossible of
fulfillment. The modern French composers are especially apt at catching
a particular delicate phase of a mood or emotion and rendering it so
that it would never be mistaken for another phase, however much the two
resembled each other. Have you never caught yourself moodily looking
at the last glow from a sunset and wondered whether you have ever had
a moment just like that before--a moment which the slightest change in
the things about you would have spoiled utterly? Such a moment it is
the delight of the art-song to portray; it is almost unknown to the
folk-song.
The folk-song, again, presents an emotion in its sum total; the
art-song presents it in its component parts. With their capacity and
zest for exactitude song composers have continually, since Schubert’s
time, given more and more attention to accuracy of detail. In one of
the earliest of Schubert’s songs, ‘Gretchen at the Spinning-wheel,’ the
girl is musing of her lover while she is spinning. The whirr of the
spinning-wheel is in the accompaniment and enframes the whole song. But
when the girl sighs, ‘And, ah, his kiss!’ Schubert felt that she would
surely not continue her mechanical spinning. So he makes the whirring
stop in the accompaniment and in its place comes a lovely succession
of chords--one would say like a blush. Now a folk-song would have
paid no attention to such a detail. It would have caught and probably
caught with wonderful accuracy the spirit of the whole song. But the
variation of mood in the words would not have affected the music. It
could not, because the folk-song, unpublished and disseminated among
many untrained persons, must be easy to remember. It is accordingly
most often cast in a regular stanza form and the same melody is
repeated for each verse of the words, though the heroine change therein
from the noon of joy to the midnight of sorrow. The great majority
of art-songs, therefore, are not written in stanza form, but follow
the words with specially adapted music from beginning to end. (This
is the so-called _durchkomponiertes Lied_.) The form of the art-song
tends to be free in the extreme, while that of the folk-song is usually
strict and regular. In the art-song the tendency toward exactitude of
delineation sometimes goes to extremes. The music tries to be just to
each phrase, or even to each word, and the song as a whole is lost
in the details. But in general the good art-song shows not only the
emotion as a whole, by means of its formal or modal unity, but also
the component parts of the emotion placed side by side. We might say
that the art-song follows the impressionistic method of showing the
component colors on the canvas and letting the eye blend them into the
resultant, while the folk-song follows the older method of mixing the
components on the palette and showing only the blended result to the
eye.
The highest glory of the folk-song is to express what unites men. The
highest glory of the art-song is to express what differentiates men.
The folk-song includes; the art-song selects. The folk-song is general;
the art-song precise. The folk-song tells of life as man found it; the
art-song tells of life as man made it.
Nearly everything that is distinctive of the art-song involves
conscious planning. However spontaneous and unrestrained a _Lieder_
singer may appear on the concert platform, there is behind his or her
interpretation a whole conscious network of selection and rejection.
A good folk-song, as everyone has noticed, asks for no intellectual
comprehension--it ‘sings itself.’ But an art-song rarely ‘sings
itself.’ It must be _sung_. And this is precisely one of the beauties
of the art-song--the feeling that it has been achieved by art, that
it is the working-out of somebody’s intention, that it has been
_personally_ propelled.
VII
A good Lieder singer is like some weaver of a delicate design in silk.
Every crossing is planned and the worker must not let a single thread
slip through his fingers. Every detail of a song must be understood
before it can be interpreted. This does not mean that the singer
must have a ‘reason’--a logical argument in words--for everything
done. Usually words and arguments about a song only befuddle the
artistic sense. The song must be _understood_ in musical terms--by
comparing each phrase with similar phrases in the song, by trying
different tempos, different phrasings, different qualities of voice.
To _understand_ a song in the musical sense is to know when you sing
it that you could have sung it in ten or in fifty other specific ways,
but that you chose to sing it exactly in _this_ way. It requires a
great deal of attention to fix in your ear accurately all the little
beauties and peculiarities of the melody, the distinctions contained in
tiny variations of tempo, and so on. The facts are all obvious in the
song, but they demand attention. So the process is exactly that of the
primitive folk-singer who noticed, to his delight, that bluebells were
blue and that the deer had four legs. And, like the folk-singer, when
you have consciously noted a multitude of these obvious facts you feel
more at home in the world--you have completed a step in your education.
If the singer is obliged carefully to select and reject, he is only
doing what the composer did before him. For the song writer’s task is
one that will test the soundness of his musicianship and his art. The
song is short. It will probably be sung among a number of other short
songs. It has every chance of being forgotten. The composer can waste
no time. With little or no preluding he must strike a melodic phrase
that in smallest compass is worth hearing and worth remembering. He
has none of the opportunities of the symphonist or the opera writer.
He cannot lead up to his chief theme with a long expressive orchestral
crescendo. He cannot introduce it at the moment when his audience is
keyed up and receptive over a tense emotional story. If the melody of
the song is not worth the trouble, no amount of decoration can make
it so. If one phrase out of four in the song is good and the rest
mediocre, the song is as much a failure as though it had no single bar
of beauty. When the composer has written his song, he has committed
himself. He stands exposed to the universe without protection, without
excuse. He has chosen the test with which genius is tested--to be great
within narrow limits. If his music speaks to the heart it speaks in
words of one syllable.
If the basic materials of a song are so simple, it is evident that the
misplacing of a single note is a very serious error. The expressive
phrase might have stood in a dozen slightly different forms. It was
a delicate judgment and selection that chose exactly this one. The
phrase, if it is to express something of importance, must suggest
a great deal more than it can say. This is the problem of the
_lyric_--the personal song of the emotions--whether in words or music.
If a poet is to express the whole tenderness and fury of love in
eight, twelve, or sixteen lines he must select just the right details
that will suggest the whole epic of love that he did not write. The
structure and the language may be simple in the extreme. ‘My luv’ is
like a red, red rose,’ sings Burns in one of the most beautiful love
lyrics ever written. The poem is only a succession of the simplest
poetic figures, similes; impressive effects of rhyme and metre are
not to be found. But every one of the similes is a masterpiece,
suggesting in striking manner the variety and extravagance of the
lover’s feelings. ‘My luv’ is like a melody that’s sweetly play’d in
tune,’ continues the poet. ‘As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, so deep
in luv’ am I’--and from this point the imagery sweeps up and up with
increasing majesty and frenzy--‘And I will luv’ thee still, my dear,
till a’ the seas gang dry. Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, and the
rocks melt wi’ the sun; Oh! I will luv’ thee still, my dear, while the
sands o’ life shall run.’ We can imagine Milton building up a long and
magnificent description, in a whole blank verse canto, of the rocks
melting in the heat of the sun. But Burns dazzles our imagination by
just mentioning the gorgeous picture and then pressing on to another.
The themes of a good song are like this. They picture the heart of an
emotion that might be made the subject of an opera; they establish
instantly a mood that might dominate a movement of a symphony. They
picture one detail of the building and let it imply the whole vast
edifice.
Schumann, in the middle section of his song, _Widmung_, has such a
melody, one which leads us straight to the centre of a mood as profound
as one can find in many symphonies:
[Illustration: Music score]
Du bust die Ruh’, du bist der Frieden etc.
One can imagine Beethoven building a long, superb movement out of
this theme; the ’cellos would take it over rich bass harmony, the
counterpoint would grow deeper and more complex, a grand crescendo of
many measures would lead to a climax with the brass; the whole body
of violins would take up the theme in unison; it would be exchanged
between the wood-winds and strings; and the movement would fade away
on some magical effect with the theme in the high registers of the
violins. The theme is abundantly worth such extended and serious
treatment. Schumann uses it for two lines and then returns to his
original motive. If his purpose had been to get the greatest possible
effect out of given materials, such a procedure would have been
criminal wastefulness. But his purpose was to express the spirit of the
words. So he used the theme as the expression demanded, not begrudging
a motive which would have served him for a whole symphony movement.
And, thanks to this restraint, he made a perfect song.
And the restraint which the composer showed in using themes in naked
simplicity must be reflected in the delivery of the song by the
singer. Conscious restraint is foreign to the spirit of the folk-song,
excepting for the universal rule that every work of art must show some
reserve power. But in the art-song, artificed as it is with conscious
pains, reserve in the singer is a virtue in itself. Unless one feels
that every detail of the delivery is firmly under control one has an
uneasy sense that the singer may fly off the handle at any moment. And
this feeling robs us of any sense we might have that the singer has a
message to give.
Most concert-goers know only too well how little this principle is
regarded among Lieder singers. Is there one singer out of ten who
does not try to transcend his or her song? Is there one singer out
of ten who would not rather have his or her hearers at the end of a
piece exclaim: ‘A great singer!’ rather than ‘A great song!’ And to
force their personalities to the foreground singers will abuse their
songs from beginning to end. Often they do it intentionally, sincerely
believing that this is the only kind of singing that is effective. But
in a great number of cases, without doubt, it is done unconsciously, as
the natural and only way of singing. A special coloring on one of the
singer’s pet tones, a long pause on a high note, an exaggerated retard
in a sentimental passage--these sins against taste are being constantly
committed by singers whose only interest in songs is to advance
their personal reputations. In a way they are not to be blamed, for
competition is keen; a hundred fail where one succeeds, and that one
succeeds usually only by forcing his personality on the public; and the
public is inclined to be _blasé_, to demand picturesque personalities,
and to grumble if a singer is ‘ordinary.’ Singers need intelligent
audiences as much as audiences need intelligent singers.
But, whatever may be the lamentable state of actual conditions, a song,
if well sung, is sung with intelligent restraint. The ideal singer will
give a song as he believes it should be given, without concession to
the prejudices of the audiences, content to let the work of art speak
for itself and to allow people to forget the workman in their joy at
the work.
And as soon as the demand for restraint is met, the singer discovers a
new and kindred demand in the song, one which is quite as inherent in
the art-type. This is the demand for style. Style, as an artist uses
it, is a ticklish thing, one which cannot quite be put into words. But
every working artist feels it as a value. For, if the singer is to pick
and choose (as the composer picked and chose previously) in the singing
of a song, he must do so according to some principle. This principle,
if it be genuine and not arbitrary, will be the style of the song. It
will make the hearer feel that the interpretative details were not only
chosen carefully, but were chosen well. It is that subtle thing that
seems to make the song ‘hang together.’
Style, in short, is one more of the typical characteristics of the good
art-song. The style of a song is unique. No two songs, thoroughly well
sung, have exactly the same style. The style is developed out of the
music itself; it is implied in the notes as they rest on the printed
page; it has awaited the discerning eye of the interpretive artist. And
so when a song has been thoroughly understood and ‘lived in’ by the
singer, it will always have a personality or style of its own which
will hover above the song and embrace every note. An art-song which on
hearing does not reveal a unique style is either a bad song or a good
song badly sung.
[Illustration: Great Singers of the Past.
Top: Luigi Lablache and Giovanni Battista Rubini
Bottom: Maria Malibran and Angelica Catelani]
This type of art, the most delicate, the most personal, the most
self-contained, is laid in bewildering abundance at our feet. And some
fairly general acquaintance with modern song literature is a necessity
for the singer or the concert-goer. A singer can no more understand the
songs she sings without at the same time being familiar with others
than a student can understand the history of his own country without
knowing that of foreign lands. For such a singer to appear in public as
an interpreter is simply an insolence. If he ‘specializes’ in modern
French songs, the more necessity for him to know old German. You can
never appreciate any quality without knowing something of its opposite.
And the same rule applies to audiences. The first song one hears in
life probably goes unnoticed. The second gives the attention something
on which to base a comparison. And every new acquisition thereafter
increases the opportunity for comparison--increases the hearer’s
pleasure. How much more you have learned about Debussy when you have
heard a cycle of Moussorgsky!
And if a comparison is necessary between art-songs of one and another
lineage, how much more necessary it is of art-songs and folk-songs.
It is important for singer and audience to know various types of
art-songs. It is much more important to know art-songs and folk-songs.
When he does, all that is peculiar to the art-song becomes set off in
relief, and all that is common property becomes enhanced in value. A
knowledge of folk-songs is a knowledge of humanity in its simplest
terms. With it one can ‘walk with kings nor lose the common touch.’