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.