Part 1

TERPANDER

TERPANDER _or_ MUSIC AND THE FUTURE

BY EDWARD J. DENT

[Illustration]

New York E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue

Published, 1927 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_All ancient writers who mention the progressive state of music in Greece, are unanimous in celebrating the talents of TERPANDER. Several writers tell us that he added three strings to the lyre, which before his time had but four. Plutarch, in his “Laconic Institutions,” informs us that Terpander was fined by the Ephori for his innovations. However, in his Dialogue on Music, he likewise tells us that the same musician appeased a sedition at Sparta, among the same people, by the persuasive strains which he sung and played to them upon that occasion. There seems no other way of reconciling these two accounts, than by supposing that he had, by degrees, refined the public taste, or depraved his own to the level of his hearers._――BURNEY.

TERPANDER

I

In the early years of the present century a certain learned and cultivated musician, then about eighty years of age, was heard to say, as he came out from a concert at which works by Debussy had been played: “Well, if this is the ‘music of the future,’ I’m very glad I shan’t live to hear it!” Debussy has passed over to the classics since then, but there are still plenty of music-lovers, many of them, too, not more than middle-aged at the most, who feel apprehensive about the future of music. Wherever they turn, there seems to be complete chaos. The music of the present day is for them an unending succession of hideous noises. There are some who, remembering that in their own lifetime they have passed through periods when even Brahms and Wagner, Richard Strauss and César Franck seemed unintelligible, are yet resolved not to be baffled by Schönberg and Stravinsky. They study contemporary music with perhaps little pleasure, but with passionate interest and curiosity. Yet they are inevitably conscious of difficulties which do not appear to have confronted them before. They can see in the music of the early twentieth century some clear continuance of the classical tradition; in the later music they can find nothing that gives them even a faint hope of being able to understand it――some day if not now. They find themselves in the position of a man who sets out to learn a language which has no connection with the Indo-European stock. It is bad enough to have to master a new alphabet; one may possibly, by dint of strenuous effort, commit to memory a vocabulary of words which bear not the remotest resemblance to any in French or German, Latin or Greek; but when it comes to tackling an entirely strange system of syntax for the expression of unfamiliar ideas, the mind revolts and the student asks whether all this jargon can really have any significance at all. And the student of modern music is made still more sceptical by the fact that the musicians whom he respects among the apparent initiates are seldom in any agreement as to which of the various conflicting systems of music is to be regarded as the expression of the true faith. Can you tell me, he asks, often with genuine humility, of one living composer whom you wholeheartedly accept as a great creative genius, in the way in which you once accepted Beethoven, or Brahms, or Wagner, as the case might be? The hardened critic hesitates, names tentatively this or that musician――No, replies the other firmly; there seems to be no one whom you can name without some qualification. And to scepticism he adds fear. The new music, he begins to feel, requires not merely a new and unaccustomed intellectual effort: it demands a new outlook on life altogether. It may affect and disturb fundamental principles such as most people prefer to leave untouched. It may be in truth what the old fogeys of the past have always said of it: it may be “positively dangerous.”

Let us consider our fundamental principles. Let us forget for a moment all this contemporary turmoil and ask ourselves what is honestly our attitude to the classics that we revere. Music, it has often been said, appeals to us in three ways. It affects us first by the mere sensuous beauty of sound; as we become more familiar with the art, it works upon our emotions, and finally we learn to contemplate it intellectually. _La musique est l’art de penser avec les sons._ To the musician who has been brought up on the classics this definition of Combarieu’s sums up his most complete experience. The three forms of appeal summarily described above divide listeners conveniently into three categories, but it is a very rough division, and the same person may at any one time of his life and experience find himself in any one of the three groups according to the particular work which he may be hearing. But it may be safely said that the large majority of those whom we can call music-lovers belong to the class for whom the appeal of music is mainly or exclusively emotional. The first group, those who are affected only by the physical quality of musical sound, may be disregarded here. And it must be remembered that any one who is sufficiently musical to enjoy what we colloquially call “a tune,” however simple, has at least the germ of intellectual appreciation; he recognizes that a tune has a definite rhythmical shape and a definite tonality, even if he is not able to say so in technical language. But most people, when they listen to music, do not want to be bothered with formal analysis; they want to have their emotions aroused. The analysis of their musical experiences is a very complicated matter and far beyond the scope of this book. There are many people who fear that if they acquired a knowledge of the structural principles of music they would lose all their pleasure in it. They are confirmed in this belief by finding that persons who are learned in the science of music undoubtedly lose pleasure in much that satisfies the emotional requirements of the uninitiated, and may in some cases appear to have lost pleasure in hearing any music at all. The fear is groundless. The character and quality of the pleasure may change, and undoubtedly does change as a result of ripening and decaying age; but no one, even among those who detest all modern music, however sadly he may say _si vieillesse pourrait_, would admit after personal experience that the essential joy of music was destroyed by knowledge.

In default of knowledge, the “emotional” group of music-lovers, eagerly desiring to find some significance in the music which they hear, often try to translate it into some other language with which they are more familiar. Some listeners maintain that music gives them positive sensations of colour. There are many who in listening to music consciously construct pictorial images. Others will seek to interpret it as meaning something that could be expressed in terms of literature. Experiments have generally shown that when a number of listeners are asked to give their impressions of the same piece of music agreement hardly ever goes further than to such vague indications of character as the composer himself might give in his conventional Italian directions for performance, except in cases where the composer has deliberately set out to evoke some literary or pictorial image or has employed some well-worn conventional device for the awakening of familiar associations.

The psychological process of musical creation has hitherto eluded all scientific research. No satisfactory result can be obtained from comparing the recorded utterances of the composers themselves as to what induced the composition of their works or what they intended to express in them. People who are inclined to interpret the music which they hear in literary or pictorial terms are naturally attracted by definitely descriptive music, and readily produce evidence in support of the theory that all composers set out to write music with a deliberately descriptive intent. But the history of music shows us clearly that deliberately descriptive music rarely stands the test of time. There are plenty of examples to be found of acknowledged great composers such as Byrd, Purcell, Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven, who have now and then set out to be descriptive; and in almost every case we feel that their descriptive music is on a far lower level than their non-descriptive music. Indeed, in many cases it is painfully ridiculous both as pure music and as description. If it can be saved at all, it is only by concentrating attention on its purely musical aspect.

The trained musician is content to take music as music and nothing else. It is a logical and reasonable language, although it cannot be translated into words. Writers on painting seem now to be pretty generally agreed that the “story” of a picture has nothing to do with its value as a work of art; that depends upon line and colour alone. It is nearly half a century since Walter Pater wrote that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” It was yet a generation earlier that Hanslick put forward his theory of musical beauty. That theory of “abstract music” did not satisfy the age of Wagner and Liszt; but although Hanslick failed to work out his theory as fully as he might have done, its further implications have come to be accepted with surprising cordiality by a generation of musicians whose art would probably have filled Hanslick himself with the most unspeakable horror.

Music expresses itself and nothing else. A work may be dramatic, illustrative, or even descriptive in certain aspects; but unless it is intelligible simply as music alone, constructed on its own purely musical principles, apart from all external considerations, it must fall short of perfection as a work of musical art.

II

Those who have been brought up on the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms can readily accept this theory of musical æsthetics. It is eminently satisfactory as an interpretation of all that we commonly call classical music. There are many people who do not want to listen to any other kind of music. They have heard of great names in the days before Bach, but they are easily inclined to take the view that such composers as Purcell and the elder Scarlatti were merely the necessary forerunners who prepared the way; that Palestrina was an exceptional and unaccountable expression of a peculiarly exalted age of religious belief, and that any one belonging to an earlier date can be dismissed as a primitive interesting only to the antiquary. But at the present day the antiquaries are coming into their own. Both in England and abroad there is a vigorous revival of interest in the music of the centuries before Bach. After long years of dusty research the antiquaries have at last begun to convince a younger generation that a great deal of this so-called primitive music can be given life in performance, and performance has shown that it has a surprisingly vivid power of appealing to the emotions of modern hearers. Leaders of contemporary music indeed are clearly feeling that pre-classical and even mediaeval music has in many cases a more intimate affinity with that of our own day than the music of the last two hundred years. It has even come to exercise a definite and admitted influence on the technique of modern composition.

To dissect out the causes and effects of this tendency would be a complicated and difficult task for which there is no space here. But there is one point which is a matter of common knowledge to the trained musician, and the general musical public is probably more or less aware of it though unable to explain it in technical language. From the year 1600 to the year 1900, roughly speaking, all Western music is based on the same fundamental principle of _tonality_. All music is composed in a key. One note is adopted as a centre. The remaining notes of the octave are brought into various clearly defined relationships to it. They may further be arranged in groups, sounded simultaneously, known as chords. Each of these chords has its own fixed arrangement and its fixed relationship to the centre. What has been done for one note of the octave may be done in exactly the same way for any other, forming what we call the key of that note. The musician may shift from one key to another in the course of his work, but it is understood that he must make his main key clear and definite at the outset and must re-establish it again with equal decision at the end. In the early years of the seventeenth century the efforts of musicians were directed chiefly to establishing one key clearly and towards the training of audiences to grasp the first principles of the system. As they became more and more accustomed to the system the composers were able to extend and elaborate it. The interrelations of notes and chords became increasingly subtle and delicate from the days of Monteverdi to those of Wagner; but the fundamental key-system and the rhythmical system which is inseparable from it remained always precisely the same. The language of music developed steadily and rationally just as the English language has developed from Shakespeare to Swinburne. It is no wonder then that most musicians regarded its foundations as indestructible.

Its grammar was codified by Rameau early in the eighteenth century, and later theorists saw no reason to repudiate the main principles of Rameau’s doctrine. In the passionate stateliness of Rameau’s own music, in the gigantic dignity of Handel, in the genial _Gemütlichkeit_ of Bach, we see the same lucid and logical precision of language. It was only natural that eighteenth century criticism should regard the music of earlier centuries as crude and barbarous. The nineteenth century approached the older music with a more penetrating sense of scholarship, but could not help reading it in the same spirit. An age of antiquarian research inevitably tended to consider its discoveries as historical documents to be examined in the dry light of theory rather than as the expressions of intensely passionate humanity. The music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was interpreted according to the system of Rameau, for no other system could be conceived. If under these conditions it failed to make any emotional appeal, that did not matter: reverence for antiquity discouraged the unveiling of passion.

III

The development of all kinds of historical studies during the past half-century has caused a wide and by no means learned public to take a keen interest in the life of the past and in its artistic expression. We can no longer quietly accept the doctrine that music began with Bach, or even――as Victor Hugo suggested――with Palestrina. The architecture, sculpture and painting of the remote centuries, as well as their poetry, bring the ancient and mediaeval world vividly before our eyes and minds. We cannot help seeing that music must have been no less important in the lives of our ancestors than it is in our own; indeed, it often seems that in those far-away times the art of music exercised an even more cogent influence than it does now. How can it be, we ask, that people so strangely susceptible to the power of sound and at the same time so consummately accomplished in the other arts should have left behind them an art of music which we can only regard as crude and primitive?

If we attempt to consider this question seriously we shall soon find that we are confronted with fundamental problems of æsthetics. First of all we must rid ourselves of the habit of regarding music as something printed on paper which can be played on the pianoforte. Modern civilization easily leads us to take it for granted that whatever has been written down or printed is clearly fixed and recorded for all time. But the real music is not that which is written down: it is the sounds which are made by those who perform it. A physician cannot cure his patient merely by giving him prescriptions to read. The written notes, even those of our own day, require imaginative interpretation; they require, too, an interpretation based on tradition and experience. Complicated as it is, our contemporary notation is very inadequate, although we of to-day are thoroughly accustomed to the practice of conveying information by written signs. It is only natural that in centuries when very few people were able to read or write words at all the notation of music should have presented still greater difficulty. We can see from early documents such as the ecclesiastical manuscripts of the tenth century that if music was written down it was not in order that complete strangers should be able to read it clearly and accurately at sight, but merely to serve as a reminder to the singer of what he had already committed to memory by ear.

The records of the other arts are solid material facts, things of wood, metal or stone which are always before our eyes. The music that was contemporary with them has disappeared into silence, but that does not necessarily prove that it was not worth preserving. Yet we may well ask ourselves another question: is any art worth preserving? From the historian’s point of view everything is worth preserving as a historical document; but if we judge works of art from a purely æsthetic standpoint can we honestly say that the art of the past has any value for us?

Directors of museums and galleries may perhaps be shocked at so heretical a question. But if, as so many art-critics have suggested, music is the ideal type of art we may legitimately approach the subject from a musical point of view in preference to a pictorial one. The records of the other arts are solid material facts: temples and cathedrals, statues, panels, canvases. Compared with a symphony that may last an hour in performance, they are almost to be considered indestructible and eternal. If on hearing the symphony we find that it gives us no pleasure, it is soon over, and we need never hear it again. Once the cathedral has been put up, it is more trouble than it is worth to take it away again. A second generation may think it hideous, a third takes no notice of it, a fourth venerates its antiquity, yet another decides to find it beautiful. The statue or the picture meets with a similar fate, but as it is less bulky, it can at least be sold, bought and sold again. It may acquire value as a rarity, for every material work of art is unique, whereas a piece of music can be reproduced as many times and in as many different places as we choose. The owner of a picture by Titian possesses property which is his and his alone. He might say the same of an autograph manuscript by Beethoven; but he cannot possess the symphony itself――that belongs to the world at large. The autograph may fetch a thousand pounds at auction, but it is no more than a piece of dirty paper. You can hear the symphony played for a shilling.

The fundamental question at issue is this――is a work of art a complete and finite thing, beautiful when it left its maker’s hand, beautiful now and for ever, or is it frankly transitory, a momentary expression of a momentary experience, speaking as a rule only to those who belong to the same generation? The art dealer and the museum director naturally take the first view. If you have paid some huge sum for a picture, you may hesitate to burn it as soon as you are tired of it. You must at least go on pretending to admire it. And since material works of art are always before us, it is natural that philosophers should have started to construct their artistic theories from an architectural or pictorial point of view. It is perhaps inevitable that the criticism of music should borrow phrases from that of the plastic arts, because music is an art so entirely complete in itself that it has never yet evolved an adequate vocabulary of technical terms, let alone a vocabulary in which its nature can be described to the non-technical reader. But although there may be something to be said for Goethe’s famous comparison of architecture to “frozen music,” it is with poetry rather than with the plastic arts that music more legitimately may seek affinity. Literary critics have never yet succeeded in defining what poetry is; but we can at any rate say that what distinguishes poetry from a statement of the same idea in prose is chiefly the presence of qualities which are common both to poetry and to music. It has been clearly shown, for instance, that the lyric poetry of classical Greece employed devices of construction which are curiously similar to those of Beethoven. Habit induces us to imagine that the value of Beethoven’s music depends on our conventional scale and the harmonies derived from it; but though we are bound to admit that every artist is limited by the peculiar qualities of his materials, whether they be words, marble or musical sounds, we know that they cannot be turned to artistic account unless he has chosen them, imperfect as they are, to serve him in the expression of something conceived in his imagination――something of which he himself is definitely aware although he cannot communicate it to others without this material presentation.

That which is common to poetry and music is not a metaphysical figment. It may often elude analysis; but at present it has hardly been investigated scientifically. It ought to be possible to find out a great deal more about it, and to find out a great deal more about what constitutes the “poetical” quality――to use the epithet in a familiar if not very accurate sense――of musical interpretation, for these things are problems of actual physical sound.