V. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF
MUSIC
“Continue to translate yourself to the heaven of art; there is no more undisturbed, unmixed, purer happiness than may thus be attained.”
—Beethoven, in Kerst, Beethoven: The Man and the Artist, p. 12.
The art of music.—Music the most difficult of the arts to define in function and meaning, because the most subtle, seeming to produce its effects as by a miracle.
The relation of music to Nature. The sounds utilized in music all found in the natural world. Compare the effect of the wind sighing in the pine-trees; bird songs; the rhythmic beat of waves upon the shore. Yet music not often directly imitating nature as do sculpture and painting. Music resolving natural forms into their elements and then recombining these independently. Thus music accomplishing in time relations more what architecture does in space relations. Compare the use in architecture of forms given by Nature, as in the tree column or cave roof. Hence deep significance in the oft-repeated comparison of music and architecture. Architecture as “frozen music”; music as liquid architecture. Illustrate in Notre Dame de Paris; in Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
The appeal of architecture.—The effect upon the beholder of the Greek temple at Pæstum. Sensuous delight in beautiful forms and colors; conception given; emotion aroused. Contrast a mediæval temple such as Notre Dame or the cathedral at Milan. What is dominant and what subordinate in each work.
The effect of music.—The appeal in a relatively slight musical composition such as Schumann’s Arabesque (Op. 18) or Chopin’s Impromptu (Op. 29). Type of sensuous pleasure as compared with the other arts. The dynamic series of forms arousing a series of emotional states. The reflections associated with these states of feeling. Thus the two-fold contrast between music and the arts dealing with space relations: (1) What is dominant in the one, associated or subordinate in the other; (2) In the one form dynamic and evanescent, in the other statical and relatively permanent.
The direct intellectual element in analyzing the composition: compare the study of motives and harmony. Relation of this to the immediate response to the appeal of art. Intellectual analysis possible in relation to all the arts; yet while this may lead to deepened appreciation, standing somewhat aside from the response to the art itself.
Fuller illustration of the line of appeal of music in the best of Chopin’s Nocturnes and the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. What is given in each of these works. The means by which the effect is attained.
The unique sphere of music.—Significance that music must be recreated every time it is enjoyed. Forms in music successive in a dynamic series, each element dying in the same moment in which it is created. Thus sublimation of form in music and the freeing of the content from sensuous association.
Possibility of expressing for the emotions what cannot be represented for the imagination. Note, possible to conceive God, an immaterial soul, a transcendent heaven; but impossible to carve or paint these. Power of music to express or awaken the emotions we associate with the conceptions of the transcendent, the supernatural and the divine. True sense in which music is the one art “capable of revealing the infinite.” Browning’s illustration of this in Abt Vogler.
Music as the most personal of the fine arts in expressing emotions no other art can adequately embody; at the same time music the most social of the fine arts in arousing the feelings that unite men, where intellectual opinions and convictions tend to separate them. Illustration in the Ouverture to Tannhäuser.
The obvious reason why it is so much more difficult to put music into intellectual terms than is true of the other arts. Various attempts to associate a definite series of intellectual conceptions with the sensuous and emotional appeal of music. Compare in naming compositions; in “program music”; in interpretations. Rigid limits to these attempts.
Composite arts.—The reasons why music lends itself so readily to combination with other arts. The song: its appeal as compared with music unassociated with words. Church music and its development.
The opera as a peculiarly characteristic composite modern art. Elements composing it; the question as to which should be central. The value of Wagner’s answer.
The cultural value of music.—Peculiar danger in music since it may arouse emotional sensibility without directing its expression. Plato’s view. The effect of merely sensuous music. The need to choose your companions wisely in hearing even great music.
Yet the danger in music merely the corollary of its peculiar strength and power. Supreme value of its refining and exalting influence. Its high significance for our time, indeed for the human spirit in all time.
ILLUSTRATIONS
“And indeed the greatness of the poet may be best measured by that concerning which he is silent, in order to let the unspeakable itself speak to us silently. It is only the musician who can bring this that is silent into clear expression; and the unerring form of his loud-resounding silence is endless melody!”
—Wagner, in “The Music of the Future,” Art Life and Theories, p. 180.
“The more definitely a composer aims at making his music an expression of emotion, the more firmly must he fashion it according to the dictates of intellect, for were he to attempt emotional expression without preserving the supremacy of the reason in his work, he would speedily fall into formlessness, and instead of enlightening would merely bewilder his hearers. In all art creative, or interpretative, the emotion must be under the dominance of the reason, or else there is no method, and art without method is inconceivable.”
—Henderson, What is Good Music, p. 98.
“What instrumental music is unable to achieve, lies also beyond the pale of music proper; for it alone is pure and self-subsistent music. No matter whether we regard vocal music as superior to, or more effective than instrumental music—an unscientific proceeding, by the way, which is generally the upshot of one-sided dilettantism—we can not help admitting that the term ‘music,’ in its true meaning, must exclude compositions in which words are set to music. In vocal or operatic music it is impossible to draw so nice a distinction between the effect of the music, and that of the words, that an exact definition of the share which each has had in the production of the whole becomes practicable. An enquiry into the subject of music must leave out even compositions with inscriptions, or so-called programme-music. Its union with poetry, though enhancing the power of music, does not widen its limits.”
—Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, pp. 44, 45.
“How, ye formal philosophers, ye men of the ‘sounding arabesque,’ unto whom the spirit shows itself not, because ye do not believe in it, or search after it in the organic structure with the gross scalpel of the anatomist—know ye not that Goethe’s ‘disengaging one’s self from a mood,’ which he found in poetry, also applies to the musician—that every truly artistic tone-work is also an ‘occasional poem’? Surely, no musical thought has ever been generated with vital power in your soul, or, if you had one, it was a greenhouse plant. Otherwise you would know, that the artist hastens with everything that delights and pains him to his beloved art, and desires of it that it should preserve each mood for him in the sacred vessel of its beautiful form for all time.”
—Ambros, The Boundaries of Music and Poetry, p. 106.
“While sound in speech is but a sign, that is, a means for the purpose of expressing something which is quite distinct from its medium; sound in music is the end, that is, the ultimate and absolute object in view. The intrinsic beauty of the musical forms in the latter case, and the exclusive dominion of thought over sound as a mere medium of expression, in the former, are so utterly distinct as to render the union of these two elements a logical impossibility.”
—Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, p. 94.
“Let us establish first of all the fact that the one true form of music is melody; that without melody music is inconceivable, and that music and melody are inseparable. That a piece of music has no melody, can therefore only mean that the musician has not attained to the real formation of an effective form, that can have a decisive influence upon the feelings; which simply shows the absence of talent in the composer.”
—Wagner, in “The Music of the Future,” Art Life and Theories, p. 175.
“In its ideal feature music keeps within its natural boundaries, so long as it does not undertake to go beyond its expressional capacity—that is, so long as the poetical thought of the composer becomes intelligible from the moods called forth by his work and the train of ideas stimulated thereby, that is, from the composition itself, and so long as nothing foreign, not organically connected with the music itself, must be dragged in, in order to assist comprehension.”
—Ambros, The Boundaries of Music and Poetry, pp. 181, 182.
“It must be in music, that language intelligible to all men, that the great equalizing power is to be found, which, converting the language of ideas into the language of the feelings, would bring the deepest secrets of the artistic conception to general comprehension, especially if this comprehension can be made distinct through the plastic expression of dramatic representation,—can be given such a distinctness as up to this time painting alone has been able to claim as its peculiar influence.”
—Wagner, in “The Music of the Future,” Art Life and Theories, p. 141.
“In opera, willy-nilly, poetry must be the obedient daughter of music. Why do Italian operas please everywhere, even in Paris, as I have been a witness, despite the wretchedness of their librettos? Because in them music rules and compels us to forget everything else. All the more must an opera please in which the plot is well carried out, and the words are written simply for the sake of the music and not here and there to please some miserable rhyme, which, God knows, adds nothing to a theatrical representation but more often harms it. Verses are the most indispensable thing in music, but rhymes, for the sake of rhymes, the most injurious. Those who go to work so pedantically will assuredly come to grief along with the music. It were best if a good composer, who understands the stage, and is himself able to suggest something, and a clever poet could be united in one, like a phœnix.”
—Mozart, in Kerst, Mozart: The Man and the Artist, p. 28.
“That which so strongly attracted our great poets towards music was the fact that it was at the same time the purest form and the most sensuous realization of that form. The abstract arithmetical number, the mathematical figure, meets us here as a creation having an irresistible influence upon the emotions—that is, it appears as melody; and this can be as unerringly established, so as to produce sensuous effect, as the poetic diction of written language, on the contrary, is abandoned to every whim in the personal character of the person reciting it. What was not practically possible for Shakespeare—to be himself the actor of each one of his rôles—is practicable for the musical composer, and this with great definiteness,—since he speaks to us directly through each one of the musicians who execute his works. In this case the transmigration of the poet’s soul into the body of the performer takes place according to the infallible laws of the most positive technique; and the composer who gives the correct measure for a technically right performance of his work, becomes completely one with the musician who performs it, to an extent that can at most only be affirmed of the constructive artist in regard to a work which he had himself produced in color or stone,—if, indeed, a transmigration of his soul into lifeless matter is a supposable case.”
—Wagner, in “The Purpose of the Opera,” Art Life and Theories, pp. 226, 227.
TOPICS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION
1. What relation has the art of music to the sounds given in the natural world?
2. Choose two musical compositions you know well and analyze in detail the effect they produce upon you and the means by which the effect is produced.
3. What element in music corresponds in any degree to color in painting?
4. Compare carefully the art of music in dealing with time relations with architecture in dealing with space relations.
5. Compare what is dominant in the appeal of music with what is dominant in the appeal of sculpture and painting.
6. What results from the fact that in music form is dynamic and evanescent, while in sculpture and painting it is statical and relatively permanent?
7. What may be said to be the intellectual element in music?
8. Compare what is given in Gounod’s music to Faust with what is given in a series of paintings dealing with the Faust story.
9. Is the effect good or bad of merely sensuously enjoying slight music?
10. Compare the cultural value of music with that of sculpture and painting.
REFERENCES
Ambros, Boundaries of Music and Poetry. Browning, Abt Vogler; With Charles Avison; Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha; Saul. Carpenter, Angels’ Wings. Davies, The Musical Consciousness. Dwight, Intellectual Influence of Music; Music as a Means of Culture. Eastman, Musical Education and Musical Art. Goddard, Reflections upon Musical Art. Gurney, The Power of Sound. Hanchett, The Art of the Musician. Hand, Æsthetics of Musical Art. Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone. Henderson, What is Good Music? Holden, Audiences. Kerst, Beethoven; Mozart. Knight, The Philosophy of the Beautiful. Kobbé, How to Appreciate Music. Krehbiel, How to Listen to Music. Kufferath, Rhythm, Melody and Harmony. Lanier, Music and Poetry. Mathews, How to Understand Music; Music: Its Ideals and Methods. Norton, The Intellectual Element in Music. Palgrave, Poetry Compared with the Other Fine Arts. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music. Plato, Republic (books II and III). Puffer, The Psychology of Beauty, chapter v. Raymond, Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music. Ritter, Music in Its Relation to Intellectual Life. Saint-Saëns, The Nature and Object of Music. Schopenhauer, On the Metaphysics of Music. Spencer, The Origin and Function of Music. Surette and Mason, The Appreciation of Music. Wagner, Art Life and Theories of; Beethoven.