Part 4
Weakness of inspiration is more evident in the tendency to play modern tricks with old forms and old styles. The sham antique suite of nineteenth-century drawing-room music is one of the products of the past which are now beneath even ridicule; the contemporary practice of taking a theme which suggests some commonplace of Bach or Haydn and treating it to a development which suggests an orchestra of amateurs reading at sight from badly copied parts may fulfil some useful function in making the idolatry of the classics ridiculous, but as contributing to the expression of contemporary thought its value is purely negative. There is enough criticism of music already without that which is written in notes. It is natural enough that young composers should wish to shock the respectable and it is very good for the respectable to be shocked. Music which is intentionally destructive may help to clear the ground and sweep away some of the romantic rubbish that still encumbers the minds of us who listen. But the composers must be careful not to forget that the listeners will be only too glad to return to the fleshpots of sentimentality if the prophets of the new generation can give them nothing but emetics with which to assuage their hunger.
A characteristic of modern music which often baffles the listener of an older generation is its abruptness. There are various causes which contribute to this. Abruptness of expression is characteristic of our time; it is the mark of our speech as well as of our music. Abruptness is often deliberately assumed by composers as a protest――perhaps superfluous――against the ceremonial formalities of the older music. It is sometimes even a new form of sentimentalism, a cult of the mysteriously fragmentary, a continuation of the example set once or twice by Schumann. And in very many cases it is due to the examples of the painters, who have little scruples about exhibiting sketches which are studies of particular technical problems. A great deal of modern music is sketchy for the simple reason that a great many new technical problems have arisen and it is both interesting and necessary to make studies of them in isolation. The publication of such studies may often help other people to understand what the artist is trying to achieve, whether in paint or in sounds. It is the museum habit and the astuteness of the picture-dealer which have combined to make the public attribute to these things an exaggerated value, for financial values easily become confused with moral ones. In the case of musical studies of this type it is perhaps more often the composer who attaches the exaggerated value and the public that is disappointed at not obtaining it.
The most frequent accusation brought against modern music is that it is devoid of melody. It is an accusation which has been made for at least a hundred years. When it is made to-day the modern musician may point out that many of the most advanced teachers of composition insist on their pupils practising the composition of real independent melodies, that is, of melodies which do not depend on an implied harmony. The ordinary lover of melody is hardly capable of realizing what this means, and the most gifted pupils generally find it an unexpectedly severe discipline. What the plain man understands by a tune is a melody in simple and obvious rhythm; and he is by now so accustomed to the classical key-system that its conventional stresses automatically suggest――even if only half consciously――the conventional harmonic relations, with the result that he is quite willing to accept as a tune a succession of notes which in reality is often meaningless when considered as a pure melody. Our popular hymn-books will provide plenty of examples. The rejection of the classical key-system makes this type of melody impossible, and one of the chief reasons why the present age has rejected the classical key-system is because it is seeking new and more supple rhythms for its melodic line.
Another favourite accusation, expressed in different ways by different people, and to most people curiously difficult of expression, may be generally formulated by saying that modern music is devoid of feeling, or even that it stimulates and appeals to feelings which are unpleasant or even morally repugnant. My attempt to put this charge into a few words is unreasonable, I admit, but I think it more or less represents the attitude of a large number of people whose conduct is guided more frequently by good feeling than by conscious reasoning. Such people feel instinctively that music, more than anything else, is or ought to be a matter of instinctive feeling. As music-lovers, they are exactly the people who are most completely under the spell of association. But as I have already attempted to show, it is just this tyranny of association against which the leaders of new movements most energetically rebel. In time they or their successors will accumulate a new store of associations; for the present they are compelled and indeed anxious to do without them altogether. If the older listeners persist in attaching unpleasant associations to the new music, it is the listeners’ own fault; it is they who by force of habit provide those associations out of their own good feeling.
XIV
It is by no means the first time that musicians have tried to “return to nature,” but the difficulty of going back to a state of primitive savagery presumably becomes greater as civilization becomes more elaborate. The enthronement of idiocy may for a moment be amusing but it soon becomes tiresome; these two favourite epithets of musical journalism are not without their appropriateness. Nevertheless it is only common sense frankly to face the fact that music is made up in the first instance of physical sounds. The metaphysical attitude towards music has given us the last quartets of Beethoven, but in the general practice of music it has done much to lower our standards of performance, especially in the matter of singing; indeed among singers who have deservedly obtained a reputation for high musicianship and intelligence those purely vocal qualities on which the emotional power of the voice in the first instance depends are in all countries only too often conspicuous by their absence. Instrumental music has been affected hardly less.
It is difficult for the musician who has been trained on the classical system to adapt himself to this new point of view. He feels inevitably that he is being asked to lower his intellectual standards. He has built them up by the application of a lifetime; they have brought him his most precious experiences and he feels that to desert them is an act of disloyalty to his most cherished ideals. It is one of the consolations of increasing years that our intellectual appreciations are deepened; at any rate we like to think so. But we have regretfully to admit that increasing years are apt to bring a blunted sense of emotional values. Our direct impressions are less vivid, our capacity for enthusiasm shrinks. Before it is altogether too late, before we lose all sensitive response to the stimulus of musical sound, it may perhaps be wise to relax our austerity of principle and allow ourselves to enjoy the primary pleasure of sound as we once did naked and unashamed. It might yet be the beginning of a genuinely new and delightful experience if we would risk the adventure.
All art, after all, is an adventure. In the art of the past the things which directly move our æsthetic emotions are the moments of adventure, the moments at which we join the artist in perceiving intuitively and directly something which we know to be artistically true and beautiful although it is not consistent with the conventional principles on which the art is based. As culture ripens and art becomes a recognized and definite part of our spiritual life, conventions are codified and systematized. In music the classical key system provides us with an obvious example. We acquire the habit of applying our intellectual and reasoning faculties to it. But our æsthetic emotions are not stirred until we are thrown into contact with the irrational. The irrational in this case does not imply utter intellectual chaos and anarchy any more than it does in mathematics or metaphysics. The mathematician perceives a new truth intuitively by an act of imagination, but it is of no use to him until he can prove it by reason; yet reason is of no use to him unless he has creative imagination as well. This imaginative plunge into the irrational is what produces a number of common and elementary physical pleasures, such as the child’s first attempt to walk and such diversions as swimming, riding a bicycle and flying, although all these processes very soon become rational and indeed automatic. We have analogous adventures in the world of art from the beginning. We may say that music is to speech as swimming is to walking. The mind very soon regularizes the new experiences, but the fascination of the arts is that they are always offering us the chance of further ones. We do not enjoy music as an art until we have learned to appreciate it rationally; but at the same time it cannot give us a real æsthetic emotion unless it confronts us forcibly with a further irrational element.
It is this irrational reaction which causes us still to be stirred by the music of the past. We listen to a quartet of Mozart; we recognize a familiar convention, we are easily set back into a past cultural period in which Mozart’s language was the language of the day. We understand every phrase, and we may even run the risk of being bored. Suddenly Mozart does something which the average music-maker of his day would not have done; we are thrown off our rational balance, we have to apprehend directly and intuitively. Our minds have to make some unfamiliar movement just as our bodies may in certain circumstances have to make some movement incompatible with normal equilibrium. In the case of bodily movements practical experience and a knowledge of mathematics may subsequently show that this unfamiliar movement is really just as reasonable as walking. Something of the same kind happens in our artistic experience too. Even Mozart may cease to interest us. The once unfamiliar experience becomes automatic, the new harmony becomes a _cliché_.
There need not really be anything so very terrifying about the abandonment of the classical system. After all, we can always go back to it when we feel inclined, just as we may take up Dante and return to mediaeval astronomy. The lurking fear which besets us is perhaps that if we abandoned ourselves to the artistic adventure of modern music we might find, not merely that we did not particularly enjoy it, but that somehow it had made it impossible for us to go back wholeheartedly to the music of our youth. It is impossible. Everybody has to ask himself the question and answer it for himself honestly――am I ready and keen to face fresh intellectual adventures? As age increases, increasing vanity has to be taken into account. We elderly people are easily prone to deceive ourselves and to think that we can convince others of the doctrine that connoisseurship is an adequate substitute for direct enjoyment.
XV
Some of the composers of the present day appear to be pursuing adventure in a definitely intellectual spirit comparable almost to that of the mediaeval Netherlanders. Their admirers often seem to be somewhat at a loss to expound their music to the uninitiated. They draw our attention to various technical ingenuities and they insist, no doubt justly, on the entire sincerity of the composers. As regards sincerity, it is a virtue with which art has no concern. As regards technical ingenuities, we have learned too many lessons from the past. There are many devices which look quite amusing on paper, but which in practical performance pass unnoticed. To this the composer may reasonably reply that the perception and enjoyment of technical ingenuities in performance is a matter of practice and experience; there is no reason why he should compose music for fools. Ingenuity is by no means a quality to be despised; there are innumerable moments in the works of Purcell, Bach and Mozart at which technical ingenuity has brought about some peculiarly poignant expression of beauty. Constructive skill――and this is what is really meant by the musician’s technical word _form_――is what makes music an art; and constructive skill has to be attained by study and experiment. It is desirable too that listeners should be trained in its appreciation, not so much by books and lectures as by the actual experience of hearing.
The composers to whom I have alluded assume in their hearers a long experience of music in general and also something of that habit of mind previously mentioned which tends to regard music less as a series of actual sounds than as a series of relations between sounds. It may be called a mathematical conception of music, and, like mathematics, it soon comes to deal with irrational quantities. It is an interesting question how far the human mind can advance in this direction. To certain temperaments music of this type is definitely repulsive; but they often feel no less repulsion towards mathematics and philosophy, studies which have been closely associated with music from very early times. We must however beware of being misled by superficial criticism into supposing that the understanding of such musical complexities requires a practical knowledge of mathematical or philosophical technicalities. In the scientific study of musical æsthetics there ultimately arise problems which bring all three branches of learning into contact; but in common practice they do not affect either the composer or the listener. There are writers on music who make use of a philosophical jargon to conceal their incapacity for clear thinking; but the truly philosophical habit of mind aims, if but with rare success, at lucidity.
The practical value of this “mathematical” system of composition lies not so much in its employment of technical devices which were practised some five hundred years ago, as in its new method of handling them. It was a great moment in the history of music when someone first discovered that two different tunes could be sung simultaneously and thereby produce harmony. The artistic result of this proceeding depended on two factors which had to be brought into relation――the interest of each tune considered by itself, that is, the driving force which made it perceptible as a continuous tune, and, secondly, the satisfaction derived from the consonance of the two voices where it happened to occur. At one period the interest of the tune predominated, at another it was sacrificed to the interest of consonance. Both interests are however subject to changes of value in the course of time. It is clear enough that such composers as Purcell, Bach and Mozart were deeply interested in the problem of exploiting these two interests, and of finding out how far the driving force of a tune could induce the listener to put up with dissonant harmony. We can see now, at this distance of time, that they positively increased the value of the harmonic interest by the way in which they deliberately tortured the ear of the sensitive listener of their own time. Our ears have become not less but more sensitive to dissonance, more able at any rate to discriminate between varieties of it. But, as I have already indicated, this preoccupation with harmony and with relations between sounds has led to an indifference towards the actual sounds themselves, and the loss of interest in the actual sounds has certainly brought with it a diminished appreciation of melody. This is clear, not from the complaints directed against the unmelodiousness of modern music, but from the common inability to appreciate the emotional force of melody as it was conceived by composers of two hundred years ago and more, composers who undoubtedly were intensely preoccupied with pure melodic expression.
Certain modern composers are devoting themselves to the same fundamental problem that interested Purcell, Bach and Mozart――how far the inherent force of melody can carry the listener over the obstacles of dissonance. It is not for me to attempt to measure the force of the actual melodies which they write. This force, too, is curiously complicated by problems involving various qualities of sound. The harshness of a dissonance may be mitigated or aggravated according to the instruments which produce it, and modern musicians are devoting much care to the minuter shades of what are sometimes called “colour-values.” The name is misleading, like all expressions which tempt the reader to apply to music the critical methods appropriate to painting. It has been suggested that music is now moving towards a phase in which “colour-values” will be the principal means of expression. The experiment may be tried, and it may well contribute something useful towards the stock of artistic material. What this movement really signifies is nothing more than a subtilization of already recognized harmonic values, for from the point of view of acoustics it is impossible to draw any clear distinction between what is perceived as a “tone-colour” and what is perceived as a “chord.”
XVI
The mechanical inventions of recent years have provided us with increased facilities for the diffusion of music. The present era may come to be regarded as similar in historical importance to those which first benefited by the invention of the stave and by the invention of music-printing. To some extent these changes represent merely the adaptation of practical conditions to the increase in population. But whereas the invention of the stave and the invention of music-printing must in all probability have increased the number of persons who could read music at sight, the modern reproductive machinery cannot do more than increase the number of those who confine themselves to listening. It remains to be seen what proportion of those who acquire the habit of listening will be stimulated to learn something of the art of performing. We hear much of the enthusiasm for music amongst “the masses.” Apparently they are now singing Bach, whereas their grandparents sang Handel; does it make much difference?
It is said that modern music has lost contact with “the people.” Had it ever any contact with them, if by “the people” is meant those whose musical education is not more than elementary? By all means let us do our utmost to raise the standard of musical education in all classes of society; but we cannot get away from the fact that at all periods of musical history the music which really made that history was in its own day the possession only of a limited circle of highly cultivated enthusiasts. This is inevitable. The moment we recognize music to be an art and not merely the instrument of magic we have to apply our intellectual faculties to the understanding of it. Architects and painters complain bitterly enough of the public’s unwillingness to meet them halfway. For the musician the case is still worse; the practical difficulty of grasping a piece of music in the transitory moment of performance is one reason, and another is the intensity with which musical sounds act upon human emotions. It is small wonder if large numbers of people still regard music as almost magical.
It is the remnant of these primitive beliefs which leads so many serious-minded and otherwise reasonable persons to take an apprehensive view of modern music, even though they may consider themselves more enlightened than those who view the music of all ages with moral apprehension. The danger, if it exists now, has always existed; people have always feared that which they do not understand.
“It is difficult,” says Dr. Burney of Plato, “to refrain from numbering this philosopher, together with Aristotle, Aristoxenus and Plutarch, though such illustrious characters, and, in other particulars, such excellent writers, among the musical Grumblers and _Croakers_ of antiquity. They all equally lament the loss of good music, without considering that every age had, probably, done the same, whether right or wrong, from the beginning of the world; always throwing musical perfection into times remote from their own, as a thing never to be known but by tradition. The Golden Age had not its name from those who lived in it.”
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Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.