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.