Part 10

“This, then, is the revolution in the art of line and colour which has become aware of its intrinsic power, independent of any subject. In truth, even among the Venetians, as has been well said, the subject was ‘only the background upon which the painter relied to develop his harmonies,’ but the mentality of spectators clings to this background as to the libretto of an opera. At present, an end to librettos: Pure music: those who wish to comprehend it must first of all master its idiom, for ‘Colour is learned as music is.’” (Romain Rolland: “The Unbroken Chain,” Lee Simonson’s translation.)

So far, in spite of the protestations of horror made by the academicians, the pedants, and the Philistines, which would lead one to suppose a state of complete chaos, there has not been a complete abandonment of co-ordination, of selection, or of intention, in either art. In fact, it seems to me, that the qualities of intention and selection are more powerful adjuncts of the artist than they have been for many generations. In painting colour and form are cunningly contrived to give us an idea, if not a photograph, and in music natural (as well as unnatural) sounds are still arranged, perhaps to a more extreme extent than ever before.

II

I wonder if all the suggestion music gives us is associative. Sometimes I think so. Was it Berlioz who remarked that the slightest quickening of _tempo_ would transform the celebrated air in _Orphée_ from “_J’ai perdu mon Euridice_” to “_J’ai trouvé mon Euridice_”? Rossini found an overture which he had formerly used for a tragedy quite suitable for _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_, and the interchangeable values which Handel gave to secular and sacred tunes are familiar to all music students. Are minor keys really sad? Are major keys always suggestive of joy? We know that this is not true although one will be more sure of a ready response of tears from a Western audience by resorting to a minor key. In our music wedding marches are usually in the major and funeral marches usually in the minor modes. But almost all Eastern music is in a minor key, love songs and even cradle songs. Recall, or play over on your piano, the Smyrnan lullaby (made familiar by Mme. Sembrich) which occurs in the collection of Grecian and oriental melodies edited by L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray.... Even the composers who do not call their pieces by name and who scorn the use of a programme, depend for some of their most powerful effects on emotion created by association ... and a new composer, be he indefatigable enough, can rouse new associations in us.... Why if three or four composers would meet together and decide that the use of a certain group of notes stood for the town pump, in time it would be quite easy for other composers to use this phrase in that connection _with no explanation whatever_.

III

“It is a mistake of much popular criticism,” says Walter Pater, in the first two sentences of his essay on “The School of Giorgione,” “to regard poetry, music, and painting--all the various products of art--as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true æsthetic criticism.”

Strawinsky, in a sense, is quite done with programme music; at least he says that this is so. “La musique est trop bête pour exprimer autre chose que la musique” is his pregnant phrase, which I cannot quote often enough. And in an interview with Stanley Wise, which appeared in the columns of the “New York Tribune” he further says, “Programme music ... has been obviously discontinued as being distinctly an uncouth form which already has had its day; but music, nevertheless, still drags out its life in accordance with these false notions and conceptions. Without absolutely defying the programme, musicians still draw upon sources foreign to their art.... The true inwardness of music being purely acoustic, the art so expresses itself without being concerned with feelings alien to its nature.... Music in the theatre is still held in bondage to other elements. Wagner, in particular, is responsible for this servitude in which music labours to-day.”

The greater part of Igor Strawinsky’s music, up to date, is written to a programme, but these remarks of the composer should not be incomprehensible on that account. Somewhat later than the performance of the three pieces for string quartet, _The Firebird_ and _Petrouchka_ were performed in New York and were hailed by the critics, _en masse_, as most delightful works. But the music depends for its success, they said, on the stage action to explain it. I fancy this is true of many operas which were written for the stage. _Siegfried_, as a whole, would be pretty tiresome in concert form and so would _La Fille du Regiment_. And read what Henry Fothergill Chorley has to say about the works of Gluck (“Modern German Music”): “The most experienced and imaginative of readers will derive from the closest perusal of the scores of Gluck’s operas, feeble and distant impressions of their power and beauty. The delicious charm of Mozart’s melody--the expressive nobility of Handel’s ideas--may in some measure be comprehended by the student at the pianoforte and the eye may assure the reader how masterly is the symmetry of the vocal score with one,--how rich and complete is the management of the instrumental score, with the other master. But this is in no respect the case with _Alceste_, the two _Iphigénies_ and _Armide_--it may be added, with almost any opera written according to the canons of French taste. That which appears thin, bald, severe, when it is merely perused, is filled up, brightens, enchants, excites, and satisfies, when it is heard with action,--to a degree only to be believed upon experience. Out of the theatre, three-fourths of Gluck’s individual merit is lost. He wrote for the stage.” That all this is true any one who, like me, has taken the trouble to study the scores of the Gluck operas, which are infrequently performed, may have discovered for himself. I have never heard _Alceste_ and that lyric drama, as a result, has never sprung to me from the printed page as do the notes of _Orphée_, _Armide_, and _Iphigénie en Tauride_. I am convinced of the depth of expression contained in its pages; I am certain of its noble power, but only because I have had a similar experience with other Gluck music dramas, with which I have later become acquainted in the theatre.

This theory in regard to _Petrouchka_ and _The Firebird_ may be easily contradicted, however. One listener told me that she got the complete picture of the Russian fair by closing her eyes; it was all in the music. The action, as a matter of fact, she added, annoyed her. It is quite certain that the music of either of these works is delightful when played on the piano; an average roomful of people who like to listen to music will be charmed with it. _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ was hissed intolerantly when it was performed as a ballet in Paris but, later (April 5, 1914), when Pierre Monteux gave an orchestral performance of the work at a concert it was applauded as violently.

Strawinsky has, it is true, worked away from _representation_ (in the sense of copying nature or, like Wagner, relying on literary formulas for his effects) in his music, but he has written very little that does not depend on a programme, either expressed or implied. All songs of course are “explained” by their lyrics. The _Scherzo Fantastique_ and _Fireworks_ are programme music in the lighter sense, and naturally the music of his ballets and his opera depends for its meaning on the stage action. What Strawinsky means to do, I think--certainly what he has done--is to avoid going outside his subject or requiring his listener to do so. To understand the music of his opera you need never have heard a real nightingale sing, for the bird does not sing at all like a nightingale, a fact which was not understood by the critics when the work was first produced, and in _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ you will find no attempt made to ape natural sounds, although there was ample opportunity for doing so.... Another modern worker in tone, Leo Ornstein, in the accompaniment to his cradle song (it is the same _wiegenlied_ set by Richard Strauss, by the way) tries to give his hearers the mother’s overtones, her thoughts about the child’s future, etc.; the music, instead of attempting to express the exact meaning of the poem, expresses _more_ than the poem.

And Mr. Ornstein once said to me, “What I try to do in composing is to get underneath, to express the feeling underneath--not to be photographic. I do not think it is art to reproduce a steam whistle but it is art to give the feeling that the steam whistle gives us. That can never be done by exact reproduction.... I should not like a steam whistle introduced into the concert room” (I had shamelessly suggested it) “... but great, smashing chords....”

Yet Mr. Ornstein in his _Impressions of the Thames_ is as near actual representation as Whistler or Monet ... certainly a musical impressionist.

Is anything true? I hope not. At dinner the other evening a lady attempted to prove to me that there were standards by which beauty could be judged and rules by which it could be constructed. She was unsuccessful.

IV

It has occurred to me that Mr. Aldrich meant that he wanted the juxtaposition of notes explained from beginning to end. Inspiration is not always conscious ... one feels in the end whether such a collocation is inevitable or not ... I wonder if Beethoven could have explained one of his last quartets or piano sonatas. I doubt it. Of course, on the other hand, Wagner explained and explained and explained.

V

I am afraid that this quality alone, the fact that the music needs explanation, is not the rock on which Mr. Aldrich splits, so to speak. He writes somewhere else in this same article: “All he asks of his listeners is to forget all they know about string quartet music.” Now this is really too much. That is exactly what Strawinsky does, and why shouldn’t he? Has not every great composer done as much? To quote Ernest Newman again (this time from his book “Richard Strauss”), “All the music of the giants of the past expresses no more than a fragment of what music can and some day will express. With each new generation it must discover and reveal some new secret of the universe and of man’s heart; and as the thing uttered varies, the way of uttering it must vary also. There is only one rational definition of good ‘form’ in music--that which expresses most succinctly and most perfectly the state of soul in which the idea originated; and as moods and ideas change, so must forms.” “The true creator strives, in reality, after _perfection_ only,” writes Busoni, in “A New Æsthetic of Music,” “and through bringing this into harmony with _his own_ individuality, a new law arises without premeditation.” The very greatness of Beethoven is due to the fact that he made a perfect wedding of form and idea. His forms (in which he broke with tradition in several important points) were evolved out of his ideas. Now the very writers who give Beethoven the credit for having accomplished this successful revolution and who write enthusiastically of Gluck’s “reform of the opera,” object to any contemporary instances of this spirit (Maurice Ravel “corrects” with great care, I am told, the exercises of his pupils. “He who breaks rules must first know them,” he says. And I have no disposition to quarrel with this sort of reverence although I think it is sometimes carried too far. However the critic attempts to “correct” the finished pupil’s work, from the work of the past--a sad and impossible task). Why in the name of goodness should not Strawinsky, or any other modern composer, for that matter, be allowed to make us forget everything we know about string quartets, if he is able? Some of us would be grateful for the sensation. Leo Ornstein in a recent article said, “The very first step which the composer must be given the privilege of insisting upon is that his listeners should approach his work with no preconceived notions of any kind; they must learn to allow absolute and full freedom to their imaginations as it is only under such circumstances that any new work can be understood and appreciated at first. All preconceived theories must be abolished, and the new work approached through no formulas.” And in the same article Mr. Ornstein relates how, after he had played his _Wild Men’s Dance_ to Leschetizky that worthy pedagogue murmured, amazed, “How in the world did you get all those notes on paper!” That, unfortunately, concludes Mr. Ornstein, is the attitude of the average listener to modern music. A similar instance is related in the case of Strawinsky. He played some measures of his ballet, _The Firebird_, on the piano to his master, Rimsky-Korsakow, until the composer of _Scheherazade_ interposed, “Stop playing that horrid thing; otherwise I might begin to enjoy it.” And even the usually open-minded James Huneker says in his essay on Arnold Schoenberg (“Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks”), “If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I long for Death the Releaser. More shocking still would be the suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like this music, to embrace, after abhorring it.” These phrases of Huneker’s remind me of a personal incident. My father has subscribed for the “Atlantic Monthly” since the first issue and one of the earliest memories of my childhood is connected with the inevitable copy which always lay on the library table. On one occasion, contemplating it, I burst into tears; nor could I be comforted. My explanation, between sobs, was, “Some day I’ll grow up and like a magazine without pictures! I can’t bear to think of it!” Well, there is many a man who weeps because some day he may grow up to like music without melody! Music _has_ changed; of that there can be no doubt. Don’t go to a concert and expect to hear what you might have heard fifty years ago; don’t expect _anything_ and don’t hate yourself if you happen to like what you hear. Mr. George Moore’s evidence on this point of receptiveness is enlightening (Mr. George Moore who spoke to me once of the “vulgar noises made by the Russian Ballet”): “In _Petrouchka_ the orchestra all began playing in different keys and when it came out into one key I was quite dazed. I don’t know whether it is music but I rather liked it!”

Still another point is raised by Mr. Aldrich. I quote from the “New York Times” of December 8, 1915; the reference is to the second string quartet of David Stanley Smith, played by the Kneisel Quartet (the italics are mine): “Mr. Smith does not hesitate at drastic dissonance _when it results from the leading of his part writing_.” There at last we have the real nigger in the woodpile. The relation between keys is so remote, the tonalities are so inexplicable in a modern Strawinsky or Schoenberg work that the brain, prepared with a list of scales, refuses to take in the natural impression that the ear receives. This sort of criticism reminds me of a line which is quoted from some London journal by William Wallace in “The Threshold of Music,” “The whole work is singularly lacking in contrapuntal interest and depends solely for such effect as it achieves upon certain emotional impressions of harmony and colour.” And, nearer home, I culled the following from the “New York Sun” of December 12, 1915 (Mr. W. J. Henderson’s column), “This is what is the matter with the futurists or post-impressionists in music. They are tone colourists and that is all.” (Amusingly enough Mr. Henderson begins his remarks by praising Joseph Pennell for writing an article in which the post-impressionist painters were given a drubbing; this article is treated with contumely and scorn by the art critic of the “Sun” on the page opposite that on which Mr. Henderson’s article appears.) In all these cases you find men complaining because a composer has done exactly what he started out to do. F. Balilla Pratella in one of his futurist manifestos discusses this point (the translation is my own), “The fugue, a composition based on counterpoint par excellence, is full of (such) artifices even when it achieves its artistic balance in the works of the great German Sebastian Bach. Soul, intellectuality, and instinct are here fused in a given form, in a given manifestation of art, an art of its own times, historical and strictly connected with the life, faith, and culture of that particular period. Why then should we be compelled or asked to live it over again at the distance of several centuries?” And later, “We proclaim as an essential principle of our futurist revolution that counterpoint and fugue, stupidly considered as one of the most important branches of musical learning, are in our eyes only the ruins of the old science of polyphony which extends from the Flemish school to Bach. We replace them by harmonic polyphony, logical fusion of counterpoint and harmony, which allows musicians to escape the needless difficulty of dividing their efforts in two opposing cultures, one dead and the other contemporary, and entirely irreconcilable, because they are the fruits of two different sensibilities.” To quote Busoni; again: “How important, indeed, are ‘Third,’ ‘Fifth,’ and ‘Octave’! How strictly we divide ‘consonances’ from ‘dissonances’--_in a sphere where no dissonances can possibly exist_!” When Bernard Shaw published “The Perfect Wagnerite” he wrote for a public which still considered Wagner a little in advance of the contemporary in music. What did he say? “My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying _The Ring_ by their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has any power to move them they will find that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in _The Ring_--not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programmes tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons and hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner’s music is played to them, exclaim at once, ‘What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabeletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations. What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician.’ The layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn; and I leave him, unpitied, to his fate.” All Wagner asked his contemporaries to do, in fact, was to forget all they knew about opera!

VI

This piling up of Shaw on Huneker, these dips into Newman and Niecks, are beginning to be formidable, but one never knows what turn of the road may lead the traveller to his promised land and it is better to draw the map clearly even if there be a confusion of choices. And so, just here, I beg leave to make a tiny digression, to point out that the new music is not so terrible as all this explanation may have made it seem to be. Granville Bantock talks learnedly of “horizontal counterpoint” but his music is perfectly comprehensible. Schoenberg writes of “passing notes,” says there is no such thing as consonance and dissonance, and “I have not been able to discover any principles of harmony. Sincerity, self-expression, is all that the artist needs, and he should say only what he must say” but Mr. Huneker points out that he has founded an order out of his chaos, “that his madness is very methodical. For one thing he abuses the interval of the fourth and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond harmonies, in which the remotest keys lovingly hold hands do not prevent the sensation of a central tonality somewhere--in the cellar, on the roof, in the gutter, up in the sky.” Percy Grainger says he dreams of “beatless” music without rhythm--at least academically speaking--but he certainly does not write it. F. Balilla Pratella writes pages condemning dance rhythms and still more pages elaborating a new theory for marking time (which, I admit, is absolutely incomprehensible to me) and publishes them as a preface to his _Musica Futurista_ (Bologna, 1912), a composition for orchestra, which is written, in spite of the theories, and the fantastic time signatures, in the most engaging dance rhythms. Nor does his disregard for fugue go so far as to make him unfriendly to scale; the whole-tone scale prevails in this work. His dislike for polyphony seems more sincere; there is a great deal of homophonous effect. Leo Ornstein has admitted to me that his “system” would be fully understood in a decade or two. As for Strawinsky ... how the public joyfully and rapturously takes to its heart his dissonances, and even asks for more!

VII

Vincent d’Indy, reported by Marcel Duchamp, said recently that the philosophy of music is twenty years behind that of the other arts.

VIII