Orpheus; or, The music of the future

The dullest books on literature are the books which begin with a history of the alphabet. A good history has its uses; however, this book is not a history but a phantasy or, if you like, a philosophy. For if it be a good phantasy it will be a good philosophy since all philosophy is phantasy, or the imagination of love.

Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle

We know, however, that philosophy degenerates from that love which moves the spheres into that love of moving in the tracks of the spheres which is called the love of knowledge, and philosophers are commonly men who spend their lives describing the old tracks in which they are running, and teaching how you also may keep your feet in them. So, too, musician has come to mean a man who performs music—he plays over again Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s studies;

This performance of his is a tribute to our weakness and a sign of our imperfection, and, since we are weak and imperfect, is necessary; but I cannot state too clearly and decisively at the outset that music is not the playing or the hearing of symphonies and sonatas but the imagination of love.

If music is not the imagination of love, if it is not a spiritual act, what is it? The commonsense reply will be that it is an ordered arrangement of sounds. But two words of this definition beg the question. What is meant by “ordered,” and what by “arrangement”? Order and arrangement imply meaning and significance. Can we have an order that is an end in itself, is intrinsically satisfying, or beautiful, or stimulating? But to whom? To man. But take away love from man, and what is he? What is left is meaningless, even indescribable, for in love all things exist and have their being. Music is the imagination of love in sound. It is what man imagines of his life, and his life is love. There are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds of life, and it is possible that they may not all be imaginable in sound. I say it is possible, I do not say it is probable. We do not know at present, and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct of mankind has abandoned sound as a means of expression. And that may happen. There may be no unending future of music, only a limited future. Or the world of music may be like the universe of Einstein, “finite but unbounded.” And this indeed is my belief. It is a finite, a closed world.

Can you express the life of the vegetable world in music? The imagination of a plant? The tree that rises to the sun throws its shadow upon the mind of man; you may think you cannot throw that shadow in music but you can sound forth the shadow of that shadow, turn the impalpable ghost of light into a ghost of sound, transform those tremulous visual waves into auditory waves—not in the laboratory of the physicist but in the laboratory of the mind. The musician may do this. He may do in a bar of notes what the poet does in a line of verse—make a unique sensible impression upon the mind. Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune makes this impression of a vegetable world alive in quivering hot sunshine and Debussy’s music is full of the imagination of a special order of life, the life of trees, streams and lakes, the play of light upon water and on clouds, the murmur of plants drinking and feeding in the sunlight, and all that order of motion and movement which we are in the habit of calling physical, all that order of emotion which we describe as belonging to the five senses. I do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not be expressed in music.

Music is the most concrete and physical of all the arts as it is probably the earliest and most primitive. Beasts which cannot draw or write can make expressive sounds, and the earliest men undoubtedly communicated by sound before they learned to communicate by written or painted signs. But whether at the other end of the scale there is a limit to music’s power of expression no one can say. It is only possible at this stage in the history of mankind to affirm that up till now the highest, most spiritual powers of the human mind have been able to find expression in music. There is nothing in the world’s finest literature that surpasses what we may find in the world’s best music, although, as we shall see later, music may have a virtue that is entirely its own. But it will not surprise us to find ourselves limited to the work of a very few composers when we ask for music that is as highly organized as the finest poetry.

Music in this respect has been in the past nearer to painting and to sculpture than to poetry. As with the plastic arts its swifter and stronger appeal to the senses is a source of weakness as of strength. It is a source of weakness because in every artist there is a natural tendency to slip into what comes easiest in his medium. In music it is easier to make sounds that merely gratify or stimulate the sense of hearing and the cruder emotions than to make sounds of a more complex character which will express the subtler and finer life of a more spiritual imagination. Infantile music is both easier to compose and easier to hear than mature music, so the public and the musician find themselves in a natural league in favour of the rawer kinds of music. Thus the song of obvious and commonplace sentiment and the jazz tune of blatant rhythm have universal popularity. Even an animal, one sometimes fancies might be conscious of such music. Its combinations are so simple that they may certainly be understood by every human creature. “All Nature hears thy voice,” one might almost say of the saxophone, and possibly it is the sort of music to which the mountains would skip like rams could they but hear it.

All life moves in rhythm. We know to-day that the old distinctions between spirit and matter are superficial. When I was a student at the School of Mines at the age of seventeen, learning organic and inorganic chemistry, we were taught Mendeléeff’s Law which showed that all the elements were multiples of a common denominator, the atom; and since then it has been discovered that instead of the atom being the smallest possible bit of matter, finite and irreducible, it is a solar system—its sun and planets being bits of positive and negative electricity. All that is left of the whole structure of nineteenth century materialism has crumbled away to that word “bits.” We cannot as yet imagine or think without resting somewhere on “bits.” Our minds like our feet need a solid something beneath them. It is paralysing to conceive that the floor we stand upon, the chair we sit upon, consist solely of rotating electrical forces, but when we think of “bits” welded together we feel safe again, although actually these “bits” are a pure mental fiction, and what we stand and sit upon is motion. If the motion stopped we should fall into the bottomless pit, the famous vacuum abhorred of Nature (alias Tophet in biblical language).

My chemistry teachers would have been as scandalized to think that at the bottom of their inorganic and organic chemistry there was nothing but motion, as my music teachers would have been scandalized to think that at the bottom of the major and minor scales there was nothing but love. They imagined that these were two entirely different worlds with an infinite chasm between them. They thought that inorganic chemistry was absolutely different from organic chemistry, although of course they would have got into a hopeless muddle had they tried to prove their belief—but then only fools and geniuses try to prove their beliefs. Neither my chemistry nor my music teachers could ever explain anything. One was simply asked to swallow whole and regurgitate whole what was obviously mere unintelligible rigmarole. Those of us who had this parrot-like faculty became in our turn Professors of Chemistry and of Music.

The great creative scientists of this age have disintegrated those old hard ideas, and it now appears that the Universe is a miracle of rhythm, and that “matter,” just like man, is kept going, is maintained as a co-ordinated whole by some electrical urge or spiritual impulse—at bottom it is perhaps the same thing, although “thing” is a very inappropriate word. The conception of the “will to live” has a profounder meaning for us now, and we realize that if the “will to live” dies in a man the man himself dies. A recent anthropologist, the late Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, F.R.S., in a book on the decay of Melanesia, attributes the dying off of the population in certain islands, unaffected by disease and with an abundance of food, to life having become devoid of meaning to them after contact with an alien and unassimilable civilization. They had lost faith in their old world of ideas without having the power to enter the completely new and strange white man’s world. With the decay of their ancient beliefs they took no pleasure in their ancient religious exercises. Joy and Ritual simultaneously faded. They lost the desire to live. Each one of us goes on living only so long as he desires to live, and the desire varies in degree.

We have to admit that we use these words “life” and “living” still without knowledge of what they mean, but it is not necessary, nor do I think it possible, to know what they mean. Knowledge is not important, it is life that is important, and we can feel life if we cannot know it. The only way in which we can know life is by creating it, and it will be my duty in a later chapter to discuss this.

In the meantime it is clear that the line from Dante which I began by quoting:

Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle

is no idle phantasy but a literal truth. The world about us seems to be material, but exists in rhythm. It is a living world, and it is kept alive by a spiritual force which we can best describe as love, and I end this chapter with the definition with which I began it. All art is the imagination of love, and music is the imagination of love in sound.