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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76559 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                               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.
+
+The close connection between music and poetry would indeed be more
+immediately apparent if people of to-day had not acquired a distorted
+view of poetry by reading it in silence instead of reciting it aloud.
+Cheap printing and popular education have given readers――poets too,
+perhaps――an entirely false set of values. People talk of the beauties
+of Greek poetry; how can they have any idea of them when the most
+learned scholars admit that nobody knows how classical Greek ought
+to be pronounced? They are in the same position as a musician of the
+future might be if he studied the scores of Beethoven without any idea
+of what a tone or a semitone was. They know what the words mean, but
+they are in much the same case as the man who sees nothing in a picture
+beyond the story which it tells. This preoccupation with the “story”,
+natural and inevitable as it is, has dominated the whole conception of
+art; it has even contaminated the conception of music. It is necessary
+to draw attention to it here, because it constantly distracts the
+attention from the fact that all the arts are in a perpetual state
+of change. We see the human form represented in the plastic arts and
+are inevitably tempted to judge them according to their skill in
+representing it faithfully. We read about the common experiences of
+human life in poetry, we accept translations from other languages
+without demur, and take pleasure in the sense of human continuity. The
+stability of material works of art gives us a false idea of æsthetic
+permanence; we are easily induced to take an analogous view of poetry.
+But in actual fact language, which is the material of poetry, is in
+constant flux; we are so well aware of that fact that we have almost
+ceased to notice it. Language changes because it is, if not the most
+immediate, at least the most useful, of our means of expression. The
+most immediate means of artistic expression is music, and consequently
+music is of all the arts the most subject to change, perhaps the most
+subtle, certainly the most transitory.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+
+The art of music undergoes change, as does language, because it adapts
+itself to the expression of changing views of life. “Everything new,”
+says Frazer, “is apt to excite the awe and dread of the savage.” The
+active and exploring temperament seeks new experiences intellectual
+as well as physical; the temperament that is sedentary and passive
+shelters itself behind what is already well established. It dreads
+novelty and dreads it particularly in music――that is, if it is
+susceptible to music at all――for the very reason that music is the most
+immediate means of expressing innermost experiences such as mankind
+often fears to express in the more easily misinterpreted medium of
+words. Music has at all times been strangely associated with fear. From
+the earliest days it was the confederate of magic and religion. Even
+in classical Greece it was regarded as a thing of danger if not kept
+under the severest control. Sir Henry Hadow has pointed out that in the
+whole of classical Greek literature there is not a word of what we can
+call musical criticism, that is, criticism of music simply as an art
+in itself. But although moralists discussed it from a strictly ethical
+point of view, their very fear of it shows how powerful must have been
+its influence on those who enjoyed it. The absence of critical writings
+does not necessarily imply an absence of artistic feeling or artistic
+discrimination. It is a matter of common knowledge that the Greek word
+for “music” covered a far wider field than the word does to-day. Music
+was to the Greeks practically inseparable from poetry, so that we find
+on the one hand that their poetry absorbs much of the inventive skill
+which we now consider to be more appropriate to music, and on the other
+hand that music comes in for a good deal of the ethical censure which
+is more likely to be due to the poetry. Fortunately artists have at all
+times been reluctant to submit to the tyranny of moralists.
+
+Although practical experience may force us to admit that the perpetual
+change to which music has been subjected during the course of centuries
+makes it impossible for us to arrive even after prolonged study of
+documents at a complete understanding of the art of the remoter past,
+it is nevertheless interesting to make the attempt for the sake of
+deepening historical knowledge. If we cannot enter into the life of
+our ancestors without studying their arts as well as their politics,
+we must certainly pay as careful an attention to their music as we do
+to their architecture or their painting. The historians of music have
+only recently begun to set forth in a tentative way the evolution of
+musical forms. They have paid little or no attention to the varying
+relations of music to the other arts and to life in general. Nor have
+they considered seriously the history of musical appreciation. But if
+we are to understand the significance of music at various periods it
+is obviously of interest to discover at what date music began to be
+regarded as an independent art――independent, that is, not merely of
+poetry, but also of magic, religion or ethics. And this will further
+lead us to the closely connected question of its varying psychological
+appeal.
+
+The rough division, suggested in a previous chapter, of that appeal
+into the three aspects, physical, emotional and intellectual, will at
+least serve to provide us with an experimental basis. If we find it
+unsatisfactory we shall at least hope to make our minds clearer as
+to its real nature in the process of submitting it to a historical
+test. There is, too, another well-known classification of artistic
+experience under the adjectives “Dionysiac” and “Apollinian.” The
+latter coincides, if I understand it aright, more or less with what
+I have called the “intellectual” appreciation of music; but the
+“Dionysiac” view of music seems to require more searching analysis. It
+is clear that the Dionysiac view of music must be very much the older,
+as well as the commoner, of the two. The remoteness of Greek art of
+all kinds has caused most people to regard it in a very chilly light,
+although modern archæology has gone some way towards correcting this
+view. But it is highly probable that even to the more intellectual of
+Greek music-lovers music (using the word in our normal sense) was more
+frankly a matter of physical sensation than cultivated musicians, at
+any rate in England, would willingly admit it to be for themselves.
+It was pre-eminently vocal, and as the Greeks were a Mediterranean
+people with a very clear and concrete outlook on life, its appeal to
+them might be more reasonably compared with that of opera to South
+Italians. To people vividly conscious of all physical things singing
+naturally implies intensification of the personality――including
+the physical personality――of the singer. This will account for
+Plato’s intimate conjunction of music with bodily conditions and his
+consequent apprehension of its possible danger to morals. Evidently,
+too, the associational appeal of music was then already recognized
+and deliberately exploited by composers, though here it is difficult
+to separate clearly musical from purely rhythmical and poetical
+associations.
+
+The Romans seem to have regarded music merely as an amusement. There
+are plenty of people in all countries to-day, even in Germany itself,
+who take the Roman view of music. It does not necessarily preclude
+the view of music as an art by those who practise it for the mere
+amusement of others, although it tends to lower standards because it
+inevitably encourages commercialism. Among the early Christians we at
+once perceive a return to the fear of music as a dangerous thing. It
+could only be tolerated as the “handmaid of the Church”; but though
+that doctrine is still being preached, musicians have rebelled more
+and more resolutely against the acceptance of the ancillary position.
+St. Augustine’s famous description of the effect that music had on him
+shows how apprehensive he was lest music should become a more potent
+influence than dogma. Others, less sensitively susceptible to the voice
+of music than Augustine, speak of it as a thing purely subservient.
+The most illuminating phrase is that of St. Basil who compares the
+use of music in association with doctrine to the physician’s use of
+honey to disguise the unpleasant taste of his medicines. Yet it is
+clear that during the first thousand years of the Christian era there
+was developed in the shadow of the Church an art of music which was
+highly sophisticated and self-conscious. The ecclesiastical view of
+music had at least this to be said for it, that it caused music to be
+written down. It had for ritual reasons to be definitely fixed in an
+authoritative record, whereas the music of the profane world, composed
+for the delight of the moment, was not recorded and has therefore been
+lost for ever.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+
+The mediaeval development of musical notation has an important bearing
+on the history of music as an art. It brought music into direct contact
+with the graphic arts and must have helped to suggest that the melodies
+written in a book were no less beautiful and no less permanent than
+the pictures which illustrated the text. The monks who invented
+notation in order to preserve liturgical music intact and uncorrupted
+from the vain errors of sinful man did as a matter of fact thereby
+provide him with the means of developing his error scientifically. It
+occurred to someone that secular music could be recorded in notes as
+well as sacred. The alphabet ceased to be practically a monopoly of
+the Church. The social status of the musician rose as soon as notation
+made it clear that the composition of a piece of music could be a
+thing apart from its performance. When music can be read from notes
+its hearers inevitably begin to realize that the individual performer
+has no exclusive property in it. His voice may have lost none of its
+thrill, but the listener knows now that interpretation is not the same
+thing as spontaneous creation. If a song or a dance tune is thought
+worth the trouble of writing out, it means that it is held to be worth
+preserving. The musician who made it begins to take rank with the
+learned clerk instead of being classed with tumblers and acrobats,
+rogues and vagabonds. The cultured amateur makes his appearance in the
+ages of chivalry.
+
+Music, considered as a fine art, belongs to the privileged classes
+alone. No doubt the illiterate people had their songs and dances, but
+the ordered progress of musical development was of necessity carried
+on mainly by those who could read and write. It is in this period
+that the musical styles of East and West are sharply differentiated by
+the discovery of the principle of harmony. Harmony, the simultaneous
+sounding of two or more different notes, is so indispensable a part of
+music to-day that many people find it almost impossible to conceive
+of an art of music based on melody alone. The most unlearned are so
+accustomed to the sounds of harmonic music that although their natural
+instinct inclines them first towards pure melody it may be doubted
+whether they can recall an ordinary tune without at least some vague
+half-conscious recollection of a harmonic basis to it. This suspicion
+is confirmed by the fact that many tunes have become widely popular
+in which the melody has at moments no significance apart from the
+underlying harmonies.
+
+The early history of harmonic experiment is still a matter of
+controversy; but whether it came from the Netherlands, from England or
+from Scandinavia, it undoubtedly originated in the North of Europe,
+and for several generations the chief focus of musical development was
+centred in Flanders. This geographical factor has its significance.
+Melodic music is individualistic, harmony is co-operative. When two
+voices sing different notes simultaneously in a piece of music, they
+are obliged to show a certain consideration for one another. In the
+first place they must not try to shout each other down. Secondly, they
+must agree to accept some common system of rhythm and pace, if there
+is to be ordered principle of consonance between them. And if their
+music is to be pleasing in its general effect, they must accommodate
+their voices one to the other so that they blend agreeably. Each of
+these points involves a certain self-sacrifice and subordination of
+the individual to the community which is fundamentally irksome to
+the Mediterranean temperament. The distinction between composer and
+performer becomes sharper than ever. The history of musical composition
+from the time of _Sumer is icumen in_ (1260) to that of Josquin des
+Prés (c. 1445–1521) shows the persistent effort of musicians to
+curb the recalcitrant independence of the individual parts in the
+interests of harmony and order. The writing down of music no doubt
+helped considerably towards this. The tradition of extemporary singing,
+even in harmony, was kept up for a very long time, but it is obvious
+that awkwardnesses which might be overlooked at a single _impromptu_
+performance would be submitted to criticism and correction when they
+had been set down on paper. The Netherland school of the fifteenth
+century devoted much study to intricate technical devices, and we see
+here the most conspicuous example in early times of music in which
+emotion is completely sacrificed to mechanical ingenuity. It need
+hardly be said that this elaborate art was employed exclusively in
+the service of the Church. The extreme examples of it can hardly
+have afforded any listener the opportunity of enjoying the sensuous
+pleasure of sound, either in single voices or in the combinations of
+its harmony. Nor can we imagine that it was a type of music which
+evoked associative images. A product of the intellect it certainly was;
+but Apollo must have been as little responsible for its inspiration as
+Dionysus. It was discipline; and at any rate its poverty of melodic
+invention, its passionless indifference to sensuous beauty and its
+rigid obedience to rule may have represented the three monastic virtues.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+
+Yet some of the very composers who devoted their time to the solution,
+or construction, of such futile puzzles were themselves pioneers of
+what we can call modern, as opposed to mediaeval, music. With Josquin
+the Renaissance in music may be said to begin. His sense of harmony
+might be compared with the dawning sense of perspective in painting.
+The true history of the part played by music during the Renaissance has
+yet to be written. Here only a few salient points can be touched upon.
+The invention of printing brought music within the reach of a far wider
+circle. The cultivated amateur comes more and more into notice. The
+leaders of music in the earlier period were still the Netherlanders.
+They overran Italy and came into contact with Italian poets. The
+offspring of this union was the madrigal. The output of secular music
+from the presses of Italy was enormous, and it was soon imitated in
+other countries. Music was still to a large extent under the patronage
+of princes, but instead of being a rare luxury for the enhancement of
+courtly splendour it became a universal ornament and pleasure of all
+cultured society. This is especially observable in Elizabethan England.
+What is important to realize about the secular music of the sixteenth
+century is that music was no longer the monopoly of a close corporation
+of professional musicians in which the distinction between composer and
+performer was very indefinite; it was written very largely with full
+consciousness of the enjoyment which ordinary people could derive from
+the actual practice of it. As music becomes more and more one of the
+normal delights of cultured life, it becomes less and less of a mystery
+and more of a conscious art. Josquin and his school had laid the firm
+foundations of the classical language of music. If we take a long
+view of the history of the art from ancient times to the present day,
+concentrating our attention mainly on secular music, which obviously
+expresses the genuine musical feelings of mankind, rather than on
+church music, which in spite of the natural impulse of composers has
+always been subject to anti-artistic restrictions of style, we shall be
+convinced that the revolution associated with the name of Monteverdi
+and the beginnings of opera was a small matter compared with the
+establishment of the harmonic system a century and a half earlier.
+
+The ecclesiastical composers had undoubtedly made important
+contributions to technique. For one thing, the mere length of the
+works required gave them space in which to work out their technical
+devices completely. Secular music, with its swifter interplay of
+emotion, required a more compressed style, an art of vivid suggestion
+rather than of exhaustive discussion. From the beginning of the
+sixteenth century onwards music moves gradually faster and faster.
+Its development assumes in the listener a knowledge of what has gone
+before. Madrigals were arranged for the lute, just as nowadays operas
+are arranged for the pianoforte. A good deal had to be left out in
+the process of arrangement, but some acquaintance with the original
+might reasonably be presupposed. Music thus develops as an art of
+associative suggestion. Naturalism plays its part, probably under
+the influence of naturalistic painting. Often enough the results are
+ridiculous, but the general effect, viewed at the distance of time, was
+to enrich the musical language. The intimate association of music with
+poetry sometimes led the musician into dangerous paths. An interesting
+contrast is exhibited by Byrd and Marenzio. The Italian is vividly
+descriptive and illustrative; only his strong sense of key prevents
+his work from becoming fragmentary and disjointed as he follows every
+suggestion of his poet. Byrd is never literary; he is perhaps the
+greatest pure musician of the whole age. He represents the perfect
+Apollinian type, Marenzio the Dionysiac, and it is odd to find the
+Mediterranean romantic and the Northerner classical.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+
+The appetite for music increases in the seventeenth century and
+the development of musical drama brings the commercial aspect into
+prominence. It is the age of the theatrical and rhetorical style. It is
+an age of speed. There was little music printed, but much circulated in
+manuscript. This does not mean that the general output was less than
+before. The manuscripts are much more easily legible than the printing
+from type; only engraving, rarely practised outside England, can rival
+them. It is the century of “figured bass,” a system of notation which
+enabled a composer to write down a mere outline of his accompaniments,
+leaving them to be filled up _extempore_ by the player. It saved time
+in composition, time in writing out; copying by hand took less time
+than type-setting, and there was no need to multiply copies to any
+great extent. By the time that the copyist has made one the composer
+has produced another work, and his public want the very latest. One of
+the things that strikes us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
+is the incredible fertility of composers. Operas, cantatas, quartets
+or symphonies――it is nothing unusual to find composers reckoning them
+in hundreds. And we cannot dismiss this copious output with contempt.
+It is easy enough to say that one work sounds very much like another,
+and that even the greatest men have their moments of dullness; but even
+for people who have not specialized in antiquarian studies there is a
+vast quantity of this music which still seems to have power to stir the
+emotions. It must have been composed in a hurry, performed in a hurry
+and thrown away in a hurry; it is a marvel that at this distance of
+time we can still feel that even if we do not want to hear it often we
+are still glad to hear it once.
+
+The agitated rhetoric of the seventeenth century becomes in the
+eighteenth a convention of grandiloquence. The intellectual basis
+of the classical key-system proves to be a foundation upon which
+structures of extraordinary massiveness and dignity can be reared. The
+immense productivity of the age was only made possible by the frank
+acceptance of convention, even in the case of those rare composers
+like Domenico Scarlatti and Haydn who systematically made fun of it.
+This acceptance of convention was stabilized by the fact that there
+had been time for the long accumulation of tradition. The constant
+demand for new music was in no way inconsistent with the preservation
+of tradition; it was preserved not so much by the practical revival of
+old music as by the absorption of its style into what was contemporary.
+It is significant that the eighteenth century marked the beginning of
+the study of musical history.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+
+It is during the eighteenth century that the classical symphony
+becomes a power that could seriously threaten the supremacy of vocal
+and dramatic music. The chief centres of symphonic activity are those
+places where northern and southern musical culture met――Vienna,
+Mannheim, and in a lesser degree Paris. It was in the north that the
+preparatory work had been done long before, in the music meetings at
+Oxford and in the _Collegium musicum_ of German universities. That
+movement towards instrumental music was largely due to the amateurs.
+It must not be forgotten that the orchestra of Prince Esterhazy for
+which Haydn composed symphonies was made up mainly from the domestic
+servants of the household. The Conservatoire at Vienna was founded
+by amateurs in order to provide them with help in their own private
+performances. The symphony, along with the string quartet and the
+sonata for harpsichord or pianoforte, was the means of transferring
+the musical expression of the Italian opera to the homes of people who
+had no opportunity of entering an Italian theatre. The operatic aria
+became idealized and transfigured in the process just as a hundred
+years later the operatic melodies of Bellini were transfigured in
+Chopin’s nocturnes. The spiritual result may be looked at in two ways,
+according to our temperament and our point of view. We may say that
+this transference conveys music to a higher æsthetic plane in that it
+removes it from the direct contact with physical human personality to
+a region of suggestion, association and evocation. Or we may say that
+in losing this direct contact we are losing touch with reality, that
+we are sentimentalizing the art until we prefer pretence to truth.
+It is at this stage of musical history that the fundamental æsthetic
+problem becomes acute, although it must have existed for centuries
+beforehand. That the problem was felt to be acute at the moment is
+shown by the appearance in 1750 of Baumgarten’s _Æsthetik_, which was
+the starting-point of modern æsthetic philosophy.
+
+It has often been said that in the eighteenth century the musician had
+no other function than to accompany the clatter of dishes at princely
+dinner-tables. Even if this were strictly true one might at least reply
+that in this respect the aristocracy of the eighteenth century did more
+for the art of music than their descendants. The music of that period
+may have been conventional, courtly and designed to give pleasure;
+but if so, its freedom from emptiness, vulgarity and triviality is
+astonishing. Church and State may have deliberately encouraged the
+“light-hearted gaiety of the Viennese” in order to distract their
+thoughts from the more serious problems of politics; but music in those
+days was at any rate still an art, not a mere commercial product. At
+the same time the printing presses were active. A symphony might have
+been composed for the entertainment of a prince, but as soon as it was
+printed it became accessible to audiences outside the aristocratic
+circle. It was an age of “sensibility”; fine feelings, sighs and tears
+were all the fashion. Music begins――we can see it in Couperin, in
+Boccherini, in Mozart too――to display the quality of refinement, a
+quality which in a later generation was to have a disastrous effect on
+the vitality of the art.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+
+The outstanding characteristic of the nineteenth century is its moral
+fervour. The religious preoccupation of Victorian England is only a
+small part of this age of aspiration. In most countries of Europe
+philosophy, science, literature, art, and social life bear witness to
+the ethical passion, even in the cases of the most indignant revolt
+against it. It dominates music from the time of Beethoven onwards; and
+even now it is not entirely extinct in the musical world. The spirit
+of the French Revolution transformed the musician from a lackey to a
+prophet. Mozart was cut off just as he had recorded his vision of the
+new age in _The Magic Flute_. Beethoven proclaims it in the _Choral
+Fantasia_ and illuminates it still more intensely in _Fidelio_, in
+the _Choral Symphony_, the _Missa Solemnis_ and the last quartets.
+One cannot class Beethoven with the Romantics any more than Kant or
+Goethe. Romanticism stood not for enlightenment but for the reaction
+against it. The Romantics were like men who after an earthquake return
+to the ruins of their city to see what they can recover from them. It
+was not always their own property that they recovered. The aristocrats
+had lost their material privilege, but they were still determined to
+remain a class apart. The Catholic revival, on the Continent even
+more than in England, was the assertion of aristocracy as a moral
+principle. It affected music apart from the music that was definitely
+liturgical because it brought about a revival of interest in Palestrina
+comparable to the revival of interest in Dante. The emancipation of
+the artist from feudal servitude encouraged him to assume something of
+the privilege of the aristocracy. The typical figure of this movement
+is Paganini, from whom are descended Liszt and a multitude of minor
+musicians who made it their life-work to play the prophet in public.
+The mechanical developments of the new century contributed to the
+development of the new outlook on music. As travelling became easier
+and music-printing cheaper concerts increased in number and increasing
+newspapers gave them increasing publicity. “_Seid umschlungen,
+Millionen!_” sang Beethoven, and the millions were embraced, though
+perhaps not quite in the way in which Schiller and he had intended.
+
+The modern musician is often tempted to see nothing in the art of
+the past century but pretentiousness. It is not altogether just to
+accuse the century of megalomania. Isolated musicians, such as Liszt,
+Berlioz and Wagner, were certainly possessed with the idea of their
+own greatness. One might say the same of Beethoven himself; but in
+Beethoven’s case the consciousness of his own greatness was inseparable
+from a deep feeling of humility and an overwhelming sense of duty.
+Beethoven was no respecter of persons, but he had the philosopher’s
+intuition of his relation to humanity and of humanity’s relation to
+the universe. Undoubtedly many artists of the nineteenth century
+were stimulated by his example to attempt works on a needlessly
+colossal scale, especially in Germany, where metaphysical studies have
+always influenced a circle that extended far beyond the professed
+philosophers. An ethical view of music became more and more strongly
+marked in Germany; during the latter half of the century it made itself
+felt in England, and to a slighter extent even in France. By the end
+of the century there was a very definite tendency to regard music as a
+form of free religious worship, expressing and stimulating mystical
+experience for temperaments which could no longer be satisfied by
+dogmatic theology.
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+
+It is at all times difficult to draw a line between religious
+exaltation and rhetorical pretentiousness. A consideration of the
+technical means of expression in music may help us to clear our minds.
+Since the middle of the fifteenth century music has exhibited a
+perpetual struggle between counterpoint and harmony, between what are
+sometimes called the horizontal and vertical tendencies of the art. The
+horizontal conception of music is, as all musicians know, the primary
+musical instinct to sing and to elaborate the art by the combination
+of voices each singing its own independently expressive line and
+achieving further emotional force by the ordered clash of dissonance.
+The vertical conception cannot really be separated entirely from the
+horizontal, for it has grown out of it. It derives its emotional force
+from the assumption of periodic stresses, and the study of harmony is
+therefore inseparable from that of rhythm. It is regular rhythm which
+gives different kinds of chords their æsthetic and the quasi-logical
+values.
+
+Melody represents individuality and counterpoint the interaction and
+conflict of individualities. Harmony represents the community as a
+whole under the direction of the mind which has created the music.
+It is therefore natural that as music comes to be associated with
+communal feeling on a large scale, with such ideas, for instance, as
+the universal brotherhood of man, it should tend to become more and
+more predominantly vertical in method. The ordinary music-lover can
+realize this from his recollections of Bach and Handel. Bach’s music
+is mainly horizontal in tendency. It is music for small groups of
+performers, seldom suited to interpretation by large bodies. Handel’s
+music, in which the vertical method is far more conspicuous, gains
+rather than loses by the multiplication of voices and instruments, and
+for this reason Handel is to most Englishmen the ideal composer for
+occasions of national ceremony. The emotional effect is intensified
+by the actual increase of sound and along with this by the rhythmical
+unanimity of the chorus or orchestra. The ordinary man seems to be
+curiously susceptible to emotion at the sight of several hundred
+people doing exactly the same thing at one moment, as in military and
+gymnastic displays, even though the movements executed may be not in
+the least interesting in themselves.
+
+The communal feeling which is at the back of most of the music of
+the nineteenth century finds its technical expression in blocks of
+chords and in strongly accentuated rhythms. A typical example is
+the theme which opens the _finale_ of Beethoven’s C minor symphony.
+_Lohengrin_ and _Elijah_ are full of instances. In some cases the
+impression may be no more than momentary, a mere two or three chords,
+but the trick makes its effect. It becomes too obviously a trick in
+the hands of Liszt. As a pianist he could not help being attracted
+by it. The mechanism of the pianoforte suits full chords better than
+the complication of counterpoint, and the percussive action of itself
+exaggerates rhythmical stresses. It was the ideal instrument for
+Liszt’s grand heroic manner.
+
+The pianoforte was the amateur’s instrument as well as the _virtuoso’s_.
+The nineteenth century is the age of the amateur pianist. Music became
+the pleasure of the rising middle class, for whose domestic consumption
+an endless flood of polite and agreeable music was printed after the
+examples set by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Whatever the present age may
+think of those two composers it can safely be said that no musicians
+have ever been regarded by the general musical public with so widespread
+and so heartfelt an affection. Whoever easily recalls the lines
+
+    As for some dear familiar strain
+    Untir’d we ask, and ask again.
+    Ever, in its melodious store,
+    Finding a spell unheard before――
+
+must surely connect them in immediate memory with the _Scenes of
+Childhood_ or the _Songs without Words_.
+
+It used often to be said of Mendelssohn that “he had nothing to say,
+but said it like a gentleman.” To that I may add the observation of
+one of my own teachers: “When Mendelssohn couldn’t think of anything
+else to say, he said his prayers.” Is it surprising that the England of
+Thackeray adored him? To Mendelssohn and Schumann we owe the fashion
+of what used to be called “characteristic pieces”――quasi-pictorial
+exploitations of certain idioms which at once established themselves
+as universally recognizable conventions both of technique and of
+sentiment――all those “hunting songs,” “spinning songs,” barcarolles,
+cradle songs, wedding marches and funeral marches. At this distance of
+time they may have the charm of old-world refinement. But considered
+historically, what they brought into music was a multitude of insincere
+_clichés_. Mendelssohn and Schumann are themselves remembered for
+their very genuine merits. The style which they represented was
+absorbed into the work of followers whom it is equally impossible to
+forget as well as into that of the innumerable hundreds of purely
+commercial composers. Romantic _cliché_ reached its apotheosis in the
+symphonic monstrosities of Gustav Mahler. But between Mendelssohn
+and Mahler there came others――worthy in some ways of our deepest and
+sincerest respect――who from their own high seriousness became victims
+of the impressive platitude. Ethical fervour led them only too fatally
+into reverent pomposity.
+
+All this false sentiment was diffused universally by the pianoforte;
+not merely by the enormous multiplication of instruments and of
+performers thereon, but by the intrinsic acoustical character of the
+instrument itself. For the sound of the pianoforte cannot press onwards
+like that of the voice, the wind instrument or the violin. That is why
+“horizontal” music is in reality impossible to it; the most it can do
+is to recall the memory of something heard before. It can do this with
+extraordinary subtlety. The sudden impact of the hammer on the string
+gives it even in its most delicate moments a far clearer articulation
+than the voice or the singing instruments. Its whole art is an art of
+evasion, illusion and association. It was the ideal instrument for the
+romantic temperament. It suggested melody, it intensified harmony; it
+falsified the values of both.
+
+The pianoforte naturally attracted intelligent musicians of all grades
+because it seemed to place the whole of music within the grasp of two
+hands. Singing came to be regarded as something almost vulgar, the
+more so since nature has not always distributed voices and brains in
+equal proportions. As the ethical view of music deepened, musicians
+of serious intention turned more to the stringed instruments than to
+the human voice. The instruments could do so much more, they could run
+about faster, they had in practice a cleaner accuracy of intonation
+and a more extended compass. It was easy to forget that after all they
+were nothing more than instruments, and indeed the very fact that they
+were instruments seemed to give them a magical character that appealed
+mysteriously to the romantic mind.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+
+Professor Weissmann has well pointed out that in the romantic days the
+orchestra dominated music because it was made to represent the unseen
+supernatural forces against which mere humanity struggled in vain.
+And the orchestra appealed to many sides of human temperament. It was
+the appropriate instrument of an age of machinery, and mechanical
+invention rapidly increased its powers. It appealed to the megalomania
+of certain types of genius, as well as to the philosophical worshipper
+of the infinite. It appealed to the plain man by its discipline, by its
+presentation of a number of nameless individuals doing the same thing
+at the same moment, and in later days――now, perhaps, more than ever
+before――by the sight of this huge force controlled and directed by the
+apparent inspiration of the _virtuoso_ conductor.
+
+The great singers, the few who have reached the highest summits of
+fame, have always wielded an incomparable power over their hearers.
+But that very element of personality which gives the supreme singer
+his greatness distracts the listener on any level but the highest.
+Personality is a capricious thing, and in singing, more than in
+any other form of music, the listener’s judgment is liable to be
+distorted by temperamental considerations which have nothing to do
+with art. In the case of the instrumentalist they can be more easily
+set aside. Personality is what human nature values more than anything
+else in the artist. We see it at its plainest when a singer faces
+an unsophisticated public; when the public is less simple-minded
+and inexperienced, when the music put before it is less direct and
+immediate in its expression, the judgment of personality may be
+misleading, and may easily mislead artistic judgment. A vigorous
+personality may delude the public into accepting bad music as good;
+certain types of music, on the other hand, may falsify the judgment of
+personality. These statements represent merely the obvious extremes;
+what must be remembered is that this interaction may vary subtly from
+moment to moment even during the course of one piece of music.
+
+The multiform appeal of orchestral music bewilders even those who
+deliberately listen to it in an analytical frame of mind. The
+difficulty is complicated by the luxuriant growth, during the last
+hundred years, of what is called “programme-music”――music that sets
+out to describe or illustrate some idea that can be expressed, and
+often better expressed, in a literary or pictorial form. To dissect
+out and trace the history of all the means of emotional stimulus in
+such modern orchestral music as has become generally popular――such
+names as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Scriabin will
+give a sufficient idea of the category――would require a whole volume
+of highly technical analysis. Fortunately there are many music-lovers
+who have heard enough music to grasp intuitively, if vaguely, certain
+principles, conventions and technical methods which they are unable
+to describe in words. They will recognize how “picturesqueness” is
+achieved by the exploitation of conventional idioms: how these idioms
+evoke associations not merely with things outside music, but far more
+widely with the recollection of music of past generations as familiar
+to them as it was to the composer who exploits it. They will recognize
+conventions of sound without sense――strings of notes that perhaps
+once had musical value but have now become mere formulæ, rushing winds
+and roaring waves “full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.”
+They would have learned also, one hopes, to mistrust the composers
+who delude their audiences, perhaps delude themselves too, with a
+shimmering veil of indeterminate harmonies, and to mistrust no less
+those who with an aggressive air of sincerity and directness assume the
+solemn pose of mystery and chivalry.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XII
+
+
+Those who live on the outskirts of the world of music may say that they
+cannot get as much of it as they desire; those who are in the midst
+of it are painfully aware that they cannot escape the overwhelming
+flood. The commercialization of music has led to overproduction. This
+is apparent enough in England, where commercialization has fostered the
+spawning of a thoroughly degraded type; in Germany the over-production
+has been a greater danger because the vast complexity of the musical
+industry has encouraged respectable mediocrity. It is not to be
+wondered that plenty of musicians would be glad to make a clean sweep
+of all the music of the past and start fresh from the beginning. We
+cannot; it is a hopeless delusion. Even if we could make the clean
+sweep, we are still men of the twentieth century; we cannot return,
+for just one aspect of our lives and that perhaps the most direct
+and immediate, to primitive savagery. Civilization has forced us to
+remember what we ought in the nature of things to have forgotten.
+Commercialism has always been only too glad to throw dust in our eyes
+with the pretence of culture. We tell people that they ought to know
+and love their musical classics. Being out of copyright, they can be
+reprinted cheaply. Teachers find it least troublesome to teach what
+they have always taught; concert-givers play what they have always
+played――it is the safest thing and requires the least rehearsal and
+study. The casual listener loves the “dear familiar strain.” It is not
+as if people knew their classics intimately in a scholarly way. And
+the scholar is easily tempted into false judgments under the itch for
+research. Old music has its interest for the musical anatomist, but
+from an artistic point of view most of it is much better forgotten.
+
+There are some who sadly deplore the popularization of the classics on
+the ground that they risk being desecrated. Why not? If some unlettered
+person goes into a cinema, hears a fragment of the _Unfinished
+Symphony_ for the first time and receives a new thrill, surely it is
+all to the good, at any rate for him. If others feel that the vulgar
+associations of the cinema have destroyed the music’s beauty for them,
+let them have done with it, throw it away as a worn-out thing and
+turn to something else. We may reasonably say that people who are
+the prey of their unwilling associations, unable to view a work of
+art with detachment, do not deserve to experience artistic enjoyment;
+but at the same time we should do well to admit frankly that music
+which cannot survive momentary degradation (and all things connected
+with music are and must be merely momentary) is not worth preserving
+and reproducing. When we consider the innermost nature of music it is
+surprising that any of it should survive for more than a generation.
+Some has survived for less, some for far more; but that is no reason
+why it should survive for ever. Occasionally some work of a remoter age
+is exhumed and seems to have a new significance for us after having
+been forgotten for centuries. But its significance is what our own age
+puts into it. That is one of the advantages of dealing in the art of
+the past; we can do what we like with it. The art of the present, if it
+has any vitality, compels us to submit our minds to itself.
+
+The present age revolts from the music of the past century because
+of its insincerity and pretentiousness. Musicians of the older
+generation will repudiate this charge with indignation. The criticism
+is indeed a very summary one, and the man of to-day, if pressed with
+cross-questioning, may probably be induced to admit a good many single
+exceptions to his universal condemnation. But technical analysis will
+show that there is a sounder basis for modern criticism than mere
+caprice of youthful iconoclasm. The wealth of harmonic resource which
+the nineteenth century built up was derived, as has been shown, to a
+large extent from associations, some extra-musical, some intra-musical,
+some derived from literary or pictorial ideas, some depending on
+recollections of previous music. These two categories interact on
+each other again and again, so that it is not easy to separate them
+out clearly. Like a system of monetary wealth, the wealth of western
+music has become largely a paper currency and with the realization of
+this fact values have in many cases become suddenly depreciated. It
+may be urged that music as an art has derived enormous benefit from
+the tendency to widen the scope of its significance, from its closer
+alliance with other intellectual activities and from the deepening
+conviction of its ethical influence. Is it not childish, it may be
+asked, for us deliberately to throw away all that we have gained and
+revert to a condition of music in which it shall be at best a mere
+entertainment or possibly no more than a physiological stimulus of
+dangerous passions?
+
+The lofty idealism of Beethoven and certain of those who came after
+him, both composers and interpreters, is a thing which we cannot
+possibly deny or ignore; but we may justly question whether the
+artistic expression of it is still convincing to modern ears. That
+noble and visionary idealism, in its ardent insistence on the
+spiritual, tended more and more to suggest that the reality of music
+lay not so much in the actual sounds perceived by the physical ear
+as in the relations between them, in sounds――or rather in relations
+between sounds――never actually heard at all, but induced in the
+perceptive faculty by association. The works of Beethoven’s third
+period often seem to lead us into a metaphysical labyrinth. But
+philosophical language is apt to degenerate into a jargon, and
+philosophical music, when it is the product of lesser minds than
+Beethoven’s, into platitudinous rigmarole.
+
+    “Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.”
+
+Swinburne’s parody has its musical application too. The classical
+key-system of Rameau and Bach established a tradition that was academic
+in the most honourable sense of the word. It won too much respect.
+It had the symmetrical logic of the heroic couplet in poetry. We can
+see how in literature the austere reverence for the great academic
+tradition inevitably petrifies poetry into what discreet reviewers call
+“scholarly verse.” Music followed an analogous course. By the irony of
+fate the music of the last century, when it was designed to edify, has
+become vapid and tedious; what has survived, quaintly artificial though
+its freshness may be, is the music that was made only for ephemeral
+entertainment. _La Belle Hélène_ has outlived _Les Béatitudes_.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+
+It is quite untrue to say that the music of to-day is predominantly
+frivolous. The modern composer might well reply that even for those
+who cling to the ideals of the past there are plenty of old-world
+frivolities that have triumphed over their contemporary solemnities.
+The devotees of Haydn, Mozart and Cimarosa easily forget that all these
+three wrote music of deeply serious character and that it was chiefly
+their serious music which won the respect of their own audiences.
+There is not even anything new in the modern composer’s occasional
+habit of making a fool of his critics. But the jokes of the old
+composers, like those of Aristophanes, often require the elucidation
+of learned commentators, whereas in our own day the newspapers provide
+the needful commentary, sometimes before the musician makes his joke.
+The “verbal hæmorrhage”――as it has been appropriately called――of
+musical journalism is responsible for most of the deliberate silliness
+recently perpetrated by composers, who in these days are fully alive
+to the value of publicity. Music of this type is as ephemeral as the
+criticism which it is designed to provoke. At the same time it is
+perfectly reasonable that modern composers should occupy themselves in
+an artistic spirit with modern dance-forms. They may well take their
+place in musical history just as the waltz, the minuet, the pavan and
+the galliard have done.
+
+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.”
+
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ 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.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76559 ***