Music and Bad Manners | Project Gutenberg

The Bridge Burners

It is from the enemy that one learns. Richelieu and other great men have found it folly to listen to the advice of friends when rancour, hatred, and jealousy inspired much more helpful suggestions. And it occurred to me recently that the friends of modern music were doing nothing by way of describing it. They are content to like it. I must confess that I have been one of these. I have heard first performances of works by Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy on occasions when the programme notes gave one cause for dread. At these times I have often been pleasurably excited and I have never lacked for at least a measured form of enjoyment except when I found those gods growing a bit old. The English critics were right when they labelled The Legend of Joseph Handelian. The latest recital of Leo Ornstein’s which I heard made me realize that even the extreme modern music evidently protrudes no great perplexities into my ears. They accept it all, a good deal of it with avidity, some with the real tribute of astonishment which goes only to genius.

On the whole, I think, I should have found it impossible to write this article which, with a new light shining on my paper, is dancing from under my darting typewriter keys, if I had not stumbled by good luck into the camp of the enemy. For I find misunderstanding, lack of sympathy, and enmity towards the new music to a certain degree inspirational. These qualities, projected, have crystallized impressions in my mind, which might, under other circumstances, have remained vague and, in a sense, I think I may make bold to say, they have made it possible for me to synthesize to a greater degree than has hitherto been attempted, the various stimuli and progressive gestures of modern music. I can more clearly say now why I like it. (If I were to tell others how to like it I should be forced to resort to a single sentence: “Open your ears”.)

A good deal of this new insight has come to me through assiduous perusal of Mr. Richard Aldrich’s comment on musical doings in the columns of the “New York Times.” Mr. Aldrich, like many another, has been bewildered and annoyed by a good deal of the modern music played (Heaven knows that there is little enough modern music played in New York. Up to date [April 16, 1916] there has been nothing of Arnold Schoenberg performed this season later than his Pelléas und Mélisande and his Kammersymphonie; of Strawinsky—aside from the three slight pieces for string quartet—nothing later than Petrouchka. Such new works as John Alden Carpenter’s Adventures in a Perambulator and Enrique Granados’s Goyescas—as an opera—do not seriously overtax the critical ear) but he has done more than some others by way of expressing the causes of this bewilderment and this annoyance. Some critics neglect the subject altogether but Mr. Aldrich at least attempts to be explanatory. My first excerpt from his writings is clipped from an article in the “New York Times” of December 5, 1915, devoted to the string quartet music of Strawinsky, performed by the Flonzaleys at Æolian Hall in New York on the evening of November 30:

“So far as this particular type of ‘futurist’ music is concerned it seems to be conditioned on an accompaniment of something else to explain it from beginning to end.”

Is this a reproach? The context would seem to indicate that it is. If so it seems a late date in which to hurl anathema at programme music. One would have fancied that that battle had already been fought and won by Ernest Newman, Frederick Niecks, and Lawrence Gilman, to name a few of the gladiators for the cause. Why Mr. Aldrich, having swallowed whole, so to speak, the tendency of music during a century of its development, should suddenly balk at music which requires explanation I cannot imagine. However, this would seem to be the point he makes in face of the fact that at least two-thirds of a symphony society’s programme is made up of programme music. Berlioz said in the preface to his Symphonie Fantastique, “The plan of an instrumental drama, being without words, requires to be explained beforehand. The programme (which is indispensable to the perfect comprehension of the dramatic plan of the work) ought therefor to be considered in the light of the spoken text of an opera, serving to ... indicate the character and expression.” Ernest Newman built up an elaborate theory on these two sentences, a theory fully expounded in an article called “Programme Music” published in “Music Studies” (1905), and touched on elsewhere in his work (at some length, of course, in his “Richard Strauss.”) He brings out the facts. Representation of natural sounds, emotions, and even objects—or attempts at it—in early music were not rare. He cites the justly famous Bible Sonatas of Kuhnau, Rameau’s Sighs and Tender Plants, Dittersdorf’s twelve programme symphonies illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and John Sebastian Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of my Dearly Beloved Brother. Beethoven wrote a Pastoral Symphony in which he attempted to imitate the sound of a brook and the call of a cuckoo. There is also a storm in this symphony. The fact that Beethoven denied any intention of portraying anything but “pure emotion” in this symphony is evasion and humbug as Newman very clearly points out. From what do these emotions arise? The answer is, From the contemplation of country scenes. The auditor without a programme will not find the symphony so enjoyable as the one who knows what awakened the emotions in the composer. Beethoven wrote a “battle” symphony too, a particularly bad one, I believe (I have never seen it announced for performance). It is true, however, that most of the composers of the “great” period were content to number their symphonies and to call their piano pieces impromptus, sonatas, valses, and nocturnes. Nous avons changé tout cela. Schumann was one of the first of the composers of the nineteenth century to write music with titles. In the Carneval, for example, each piece is explained by its title. And explanations, or shadows of explanations (Cathedral, Rhenish, Spring, etc.), hover about the four symphonies. Berlioz, of course, carried the principle of programme music to a degree that was considered absurd in his own time. He wrote symphonies like the Romeo and Juliet and the Fantastique which had to be “explained from beginning to end.” Liszt invented the symphonic poem and composed pieces which are only to be listened to after one has read the poem or seen the picture which they describe. Richard Strauss rounded out the form and put the most elaborate naturalistic details into such works as Don Quixote and Till Eulenspiegel. Understanding of this music and complete enjoyment of it rely in a large measure on the “explanation.” The Symphonia Domestica and Heldenleben are extreme examples of this sort of thing. What does Wagner’s whole system depend on but “explanation”? How does one know that a certain sequence of notes represents a sword? Because the composer tells us so. How does one discover that another sequence of notes represents Alberich’s curse? Through the same channel. Bernard Shaw says in The Perfect Wagnerite: “To be able to follow the music of The Ring, all that is necessary is to become familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out of which it is built to recognize them and attach a certain definite significance to them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman recognizes and attaches a definite significance to the opening bars of God Save the Queen.” Modern music is full of this sort of thing. It leans more and more heavily on titles, on mimed drama, on “explanation.” Think of almost all the music of Debussy, for example, La Mer, l’Après-midi d’un Faune, Iberia, nearly all the piano music; Rimsky-Korsakow’s Scheherazade, Antar, and Sadko (the symphonic suite, not the opera); Vincent d’Indy’s Istar; Borodine’s Thamar; Dukas’s l’Apprenti Sorcier; Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit and Les Eolides; Saint-Saëns’s Phaëton, La Jeunesse d’Hercule, and Le Rouet d’Omphale; Busoni’s music for Turandot: the list is endless and it is futile to continue it.

But, Mr. Aldrich would object, in most of these instances the music stands by itself and it is possible to enjoy it without reference to the titles. I contend that this is just as true of Strawinsky’s three pieces for string quartet (of course one never will be sure because Daniel Gregory Mason explained these pieces before they were played). However Mr. Newman has already exploded a good many bombs about this particular point and he has shown the fallacy of the theory. Mr. Newman concedes that a work such as Tschaikowsky’s overture Romeo and Juliet, would undoubtedly “give intense pleasure to any one who listened to it as a piece of music, pure and simple. But I deny,” he continues, “that this hearer would receive as much pleasure from the work as I do. He might think the passage for muted strings, for example, extremely beautiful, but he would not get from it such delight as I, who not only feel all the musical loveliness of the melody and the harmonies and the tone colour, but see the lovers on the balcony and breathe the very atmosphere of Shakespeare’s scene. I am richer than my fellow by two or three emotions of this kind. My nature is stirred on two or three sides instead of only one. I would go further and say that not only does the auditor I have supposed get less pleasure from the work than I, but he really does not hear Tschaikowsky’s work at all. If the musician writes music to a play and invents phrases to symbolize the characters and to picture the events of the play, we are simply not listening to his work at all if we listen to it in ignorance of his poetical scheme. We may hear the music but it is not the music he meant us to hear.” And Mr. Newman goes on to berate Strauss for not providing programmes for some of his tone-poems (programmes, however, which have always been provided by somebody in authority at the eleventh hour). Niecks thinks that nearly all music has an implied programme: “My opinion is that whenever the composer ceases to write purely formal music he passes from the domain of absolute music into that of programme music.” (“Programme Music in the Last Four Centuries.”) But Niecks does not hold that explanation is always necessary, even if there is a programme.

Under the circumstances it seems a bit thick to jump on Strawinsky for writing music which has to be explained. Such pieces as Fireworks or the Scherzo Fantastique need no more extended explanation than the titles give them. His three pieces for string quartet were listed without programme at the Flonzaley concert and might have been played that way, I think, without causing the heavens to fall. But Strawinsky had told some one that their general title was Grotesques and that he had composed each of them with a programme in mind, which was divulged. When the music was played, in the circumstances, what he was driving at was as plain as A. B. C. There was no further demand made on the auditor than that he prepare himself, as Schumann asked auditors to prepare themselves to listen to the Carneval, by thinking of the titles. In Strawinsky’s opera, The Nightingale, the text of the opera serves as the programme. There are no representative themes; there is no “working-out.” You are not required to remember leit-motive in order to familiarize your emotions with the proper capers to cut at particular moments when these motive are repeated. You are asked simply to follow the course of the lyric drama with open ears, open mind, and open heart. Albert Gleizes, the post-impressionist painter, once told me that he considered the title an essential part of a picture. “It is a point de départ,” he said. “In painting a picture I always have some idea or object in mind in the beginning. In my completed picture I may have wandered far away from this. Now the title gives the spectator the advantage of starting where I started.” A title to a musical composition gives an auditor a similar advantage. No doubt Strawinsky’s Fireworks would make a nice blaze without the name but the title gives us a picture to begin with, just as Wagner gives us scenery and text and action (to say nothing of a handbook of representative themes) to explain the music of Die Walküre....

An important point has been overlooked by those who have watched painting and music develop during the past century: while painting has become less and less an attempt to represent nature, music has more and more attempted concrete representation. There has seemed, at times, to be an interchange in progress in the values of the arts. (“He [Cézanne] is the first of the great painters to treat colour deliberately as music; he tests all its harmonic resources,” Romain Rolland.) Observers of matters æsthetic have frequently told us that both of these arts were breaking with their old principles and going on to something new but, it would seem, they have failed to grasp the significance of the change. Music, as it drops its classic outline and form, the cliché of the studio and the academy, becomes more and more like nature, because natural sounds are not co-ordinated into symphonies with working-out sections and codas, first and second subjects, etc., while in painting, in some of its later manifestations, the resemblance to things seen has entirely disappeared. This fact, at least one phase of it, was realized in concrete form by the futurists in Italy who asserted that polyphony, fugue, etc., were contraptions of a bygone age when the stage-coach was in vogue. Machinery has changed the world. We are living in a dynasty of dynamics. A certain number of futurists even give concerts of noise machines in which a definite attempt is made to imitate the sounds of automobiles, aeroplanes, etc. At a concert given at the Dal Verme in Milan, for example, the pieces were called The Awakening of a Great City, A Dinner on the Kursaal Terrace (doubtless with an imitation of the guests eating soup), and A Meet of Automobiles and Aeroplanes.

Picasso and Picabia have made us acquainted with a form of art which in its vague realization of representative values becomes almost as abstract an art as music was in the time of Beethoven, while such musicians as Strauss, Debussy, and Strawinsky, have gradually widened the boundaries which have confined music, and have made it at times something very concrete. Debussy’s La Mer, for example, is a much more definite picture (in leaning over the rail of the gallery of the Salle Gaveau in Paris during a performance of this piece I actually became sea-sick!) than Marcel Duchamp’s painting of the Nu Descendant l’Escalier. So Strawinsky’s three pieces for string quartet represent certain things in nature (the first a group of peasants playing strange instruments on the steppes; the second sounds in a Cathedral heard by a drowsy worshipper, the responses of the priest, chanted out of key, the shrill antiphonal choruses; and the third a juggling Pierrot with a soul-pain) much more definitely than Picasso’s latest Nature Morte dans un Jardin.

“Now the law which has dominated painting for more than a century is a more and more comprehensive assimilation of musical idiom. Even Delacroix spoke of ‘the mysterious effects of line and colour which, alas, only a few adepts feel—like interwoven themes in music ...’ and Baudelaire, in another connection, wrote, ‘Harmony, melody, and counterpoint are to be found in colour.’ Ingres also remarked to his disciples, ‘If I could make you all musicians you would be better painters.’ Renoir, who journeyed to Sicily to paint Wagner’s portrait and to translate Tannhäuser, is a musical enthusiast and his work is music. Maurice Denis tells us that his pals at Julian’s Academy, those who were to found synthesism with him, never tired of discussing Lamoureux’s concerts, where they were enthusiastic habitués. Gaugin announced that ‘painting is a musical phase.’ He speaks continually of the music of a picture; when he wants to analyze his work he divides it into the literary element, to which he attaches less importance, and the musical element which he schemes first. Cézanne, whom Gaugin compared to César Franck, said, ‘not model, but modulate.’ Metzinger invokes the right of cubist painters to express all emotions as music does, and one of the æstheticians of the new school writes: ‘The goal of painting is perhaps a music of nature, visual music to which traditional painting would have somewhat the status that sacred or dramatic music has compared to concert music.’

“This, then, is the revolution in the art of line and colour which has become aware of its intrinsic power, independent of any subject. In truth, even among the Venetians, as has been well said, the subject was ‘only the background upon which the painter relied to develop his harmonies,’ but the mentality of spectators clings to this background as to the libretto of an opera. At present, an end to librettos: Pure music: those who wish to comprehend it must first of all master its idiom, for ‘Colour is learned as music is.’” (Romain Rolland: “The Unbroken Chain,” Lee Simonson’s translation.)

So far, in spite of the protestations of horror made by the academicians, the pedants, and the Philistines, which would lead one to suppose a state of complete chaos, there has not been a complete abandonment of co-ordination, of selection, or of intention, in either art. In fact, it seems to me, that the qualities of intention and selection are more powerful adjuncts of the artist than they have been for many generations. In painting colour and form are cunningly contrived to give us an idea, if not a photograph, and in music natural (as well as unnatural) sounds are still arranged, perhaps to a more extreme extent than ever before.

I wonder if all the suggestion music gives us is associative. Sometimes I think so. Was it Berlioz who remarked that the slightest quickening of tempo would transform the celebrated air in Orphée from “J’ai perdu mon Euridice” to “J’ai trouvé mon Euridice”? Rossini found an overture which he had formerly used for a tragedy quite suitable for Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and the interchangeable values which Handel gave to secular and sacred tunes are familiar to all music students. Are minor keys really sad? Are major keys always suggestive of joy? We know that this is not true although one will be more sure of a ready response of tears from a Western audience by resorting to a minor key. In our music wedding marches are usually in the major and funeral marches usually in the minor modes. But almost all Eastern music is in a minor key, love songs and even cradle songs. Recall, or play over on your piano, the Smyrnan lullaby (made familiar by Mme. Sembrich) which occurs in the collection of Grecian and oriental melodies edited by L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray.... Even the composers who do not call their pieces by name and who scorn the use of a programme, depend for some of their most powerful effects on emotion created by association ... and a new composer, be he indefatigable enough, can rouse new associations in us.... Why if three or four composers would meet together and decide that the use of a certain group of notes stood for the town pump, in time it would be quite easy for other composers to use this phrase in that connection with no explanation whatever.

III

“It is a mistake of much popular criticism,” says Walter Pater, in the first two sentences of his essay on “The School of Giorgione,” “to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true æsthetic criticism.”

Strawinsky, in a sense, is quite done with programme music; at least he says that this is so. “La musique est trop bête pour exprimer autre chose que la musique” is his pregnant phrase, which I cannot quote often enough. And in an interview with Stanley Wise, which appeared in the columns of the “New York Tribune” he further says, “Programme music ... has been obviously discontinued as being distinctly an uncouth form which already has had its day; but music, nevertheless, still drags out its life in accordance with these false notions and conceptions. Without absolutely defying the programme, musicians still draw upon sources foreign to their art.... The true inwardness of music being purely acoustic, the art so expresses itself without being concerned with feelings alien to its nature.... Music in the theatre is still held in bondage to other elements. Wagner, in particular, is responsible for this servitude in which music labours to-day.”

The greater part of Igor Strawinsky’s music, up to date, is written to a programme, but these remarks of the composer should not be incomprehensible on that account. Somewhat later than the performance of the three pieces for string quartet, The Firebird and Petrouchka were performed in New York and were hailed by the critics, en masse, as most delightful works. But the music depends for its success, they said, on the stage action to explain it. I fancy this is true of many operas which were written for the stage. Siegfried, as a whole, would be pretty tiresome in concert form and so would La Fille du Regiment. And read what Henry Fothergill Chorley has to say about the works of Gluck (“Modern German Music”): “The most experienced and imaginative of readers will derive from the closest perusal of the scores of Gluck’s operas, feeble and distant impressions of their power and beauty. The delicious charm of Mozart’s melody—the expressive nobility of Handel’s ideas—may in some measure be comprehended by the student at the pianoforte and the eye may assure the reader how masterly is the symmetry of the vocal score with one,—how rich and complete is the management of the instrumental score, with the other master. But this is in no respect the case with Alceste, the two Iphigénies and Armide—it may be added, with almost any opera written according to the canons of French taste. That which appears thin, bald, severe, when it is merely perused, is filled up, brightens, enchants, excites, and satisfies, when it is heard with action,—to a degree only to be believed upon experience. Out of the theatre, three-fourths of Gluck’s individual merit is lost. He wrote for the stage.” That all this is true any one who, like me, has taken the trouble to study the scores of the Gluck operas, which are infrequently performed, may have discovered for himself. I have never heard Alceste and that lyric drama, as a result, has never sprung to me from the printed page as do the notes of Orphée, Armide, and Iphigénie en Tauride. I am convinced of the depth of expression contained in its pages; I am certain of its noble power, but only because I have had a similar experience with other Gluck music dramas, with which I have later become acquainted in the theatre.

This theory in regard to Petrouchka and The Firebird may be easily contradicted, however. One listener told me that she got the complete picture of the Russian fair by closing her eyes; it was all in the music. The action, as a matter of fact, she added, annoyed her. It is quite certain that the music of either of these works is delightful when played on the piano; an average roomful of people who like to listen to music will be charmed with it. The Sacrifice to the Spring was hissed intolerantly when it was performed as a ballet in Paris but, later (April 5, 1914), when Pierre Monteux gave an orchestral performance of the work at a concert it was applauded as violently.

Strawinsky has, it is true, worked away from representation (in the sense of copying nature or, like Wagner, relying on literary formulas for his effects) in his music, but he has written very little that does not depend on a programme, either expressed or implied. All songs of course are “explained” by their lyrics. The Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks are programme music in the lighter sense, and naturally the music of his ballets and his opera depends for its meaning on the stage action. What Strawinsky means to do, I think—certainly what he has done—is to avoid going outside his subject or requiring his listener to do so. To understand the music of his opera you need never have heard a real nightingale sing, for the bird does not sing at all like a nightingale, a fact which was not understood by the critics when the work was first produced, and in The Sacrifice to the Spring you will find no attempt made to ape natural sounds, although there was ample opportunity for doing so.... Another modern worker in tone, Leo Ornstein, in the accompaniment to his cradle song (it is the same wiegenlied set by Richard Strauss, by the way) tries to give his hearers the mother’s overtones, her thoughts about the child’s future, etc.; the music, instead of attempting to express the exact meaning of the poem, expresses more than the poem.

And Mr. Ornstein once said to me, “What I try to do in composing is to get underneath, to express the feeling underneath—not to be photographic. I do not think it is art to reproduce a steam whistle but it is art to give the feeling that the steam whistle gives us. That can never be done by exact reproduction.... I should not like a steam whistle introduced into the concert room” (I had shamelessly suggested it) “... but great, smashing chords....”

Yet Mr. Ornstein in his Impressions of the Thames is as near actual representation as Whistler or Monet ... certainly a musical impressionist.

Is anything true? I hope not. At dinner the other evening a lady attempted to prove to me that there were standards by which beauty could be judged and rules by which it could be constructed. She was unsuccessful.

It has occurred to me that Mr. Aldrich meant that he wanted the juxtaposition of notes explained from beginning to end. Inspiration is not always conscious ... one feels in the end whether such a collocation is inevitable or not ... I wonder if Beethoven could have explained one of his last quartets or piano sonatas. I doubt it. Of course, on the other hand, Wagner explained and explained and explained.

I am afraid that this quality alone, the fact that the music needs explanation, is not the rock on which Mr. Aldrich splits, so to speak. He writes somewhere else in this same article: “All he asks of his listeners is to forget all they know about string quartet music.” Now this is really too much. That is exactly what Strawinsky does, and why shouldn’t he? Has not every great composer done as much? To quote Ernest Newman again (this time from his book “Richard Strauss”), “All the music of the giants of the past expresses no more than a fragment of what music can and some day will express. With each new generation it must discover and reveal some new secret of the universe and of man’s heart; and as the thing uttered varies, the way of uttering it must vary also. There is only one rational definition of good ‘form’ in music—that which expresses most succinctly and most perfectly the state of soul in which the idea originated; and as moods and ideas change, so must forms.” “The true creator strives, in reality, after perfection only,” writes Busoni, in “A New Æsthetic of Music,” “and through bringing this into harmony with his own individuality, a new law arises without premeditation.” The very greatness of Beethoven is due to the fact that he made a perfect wedding of form and idea. His forms (in which he broke with tradition in several important points) were evolved out of his ideas. Now the very writers who give Beethoven the credit for having accomplished this successful revolution and who write enthusiastically of Gluck’s “reform of the opera,” object to any contemporary instances of this spirit (Maurice Ravel “corrects” with great care, I am told, the exercises of his pupils. “He who breaks rules must first know them,” he says. And I have no disposition to quarrel with this sort of reverence although I think it is sometimes carried too far. However the critic attempts to “correct” the finished pupil’s work, from the work of the past—a sad and impossible task). Why in the name of goodness should not Strawinsky, or any other modern composer, for that matter, be allowed to make us forget everything we know about string quartets, if he is able? Some of us would be grateful for the sensation. Leo Ornstein in a recent article said, “The very first step which the composer must be given the privilege of insisting upon is that his listeners should approach his work with no preconceived notions of any kind; they must learn to allow absolute and full freedom to their imaginations as it is only under such circumstances that any new work can be understood and appreciated at first. All preconceived theories must be abolished, and the new work approached through no formulas.” And in the same article Mr. Ornstein relates how, after he had played his Wild Men’s Dance to Leschetizky that worthy pedagogue murmured, amazed, “How in the world did you get all those notes on paper!” That, unfortunately, concludes Mr. Ornstein, is the attitude of the average listener to modern music. A similar instance is related in the case of Strawinsky. He played some measures of his ballet, The Firebird, on the piano to his master, Rimsky-Korsakow, until the composer of Scheherazade interposed, “Stop playing that horrid thing; otherwise I might begin to enjoy it.” And even the usually open-minded James Huneker says in his essay on Arnold Schoenberg (“Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks”), “If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I long for Death the Releaser. More shocking still would be the suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like this music, to embrace, after abhorring it.” These phrases of Huneker’s remind me of a personal incident. My father has subscribed for the “Atlantic Monthly” since the first issue and one of the earliest memories of my childhood is connected with the inevitable copy which always lay on the library table. On one occasion, contemplating it, I burst into tears; nor could I be comforted. My explanation, between sobs, was, “Some day I’ll grow up and like a magazine without pictures! I can’t bear to think of it!” Well, there is many a man who weeps because some day he may grow up to like music without melody! Music has changed; of that there can be no doubt. Don’t go to a concert and expect to hear what you might have heard fifty years ago; don’t expect anything and don’t hate yourself if you happen to like what you hear. Mr. George Moore’s evidence on this point of receptiveness is enlightening (Mr. George Moore who spoke to me once of the “vulgar noises made by the Russian Ballet”): “In Petrouchka the orchestra all began playing in different keys and when it came out into one key I was quite dazed. I don’t know whether it is music but I rather liked it!”

Still another point is raised by Mr. Aldrich. I quote from the “New York Times” of December 8, 1915; the reference is to the second string quartet of David Stanley Smith, played by the Kneisel Quartet (the italics are mine): “Mr. Smith does not hesitate at drastic dissonance when it results from the leading of his part writing.” There at last we have the real nigger in the woodpile. The relation between keys is so remote, the tonalities are so inexplicable in a modern Strawinsky or Schoenberg work that the brain, prepared with a list of scales, refuses to take in the natural impression that the ear receives. This sort of criticism reminds me of a line which is quoted from some London journal by William Wallace in “The Threshold of Music,” “The whole work is singularly lacking in contrapuntal interest and depends solely for such effect as it achieves upon certain emotional impressions of harmony and colour.” And, nearer home, I culled the following from the “New York Sun” of December 12, 1915 (Mr. W. J. Henderson’s column), “This is what is the matter with the futurists or post-impressionists in music. They are tone colourists and that is all.” (Amusingly enough Mr. Henderson begins his remarks by praising Joseph Pennell for writing an article in which the post-impressionist painters were given a drubbing; this article is treated with contumely and scorn by the art critic of the “Sun” on the page opposite that on which Mr. Henderson’s article appears.) In all these cases you find men complaining because a composer has done exactly what he started out to do. F. Balilla Pratella in one of his futurist manifestos discusses this point (the translation is my own), “The fugue, a composition based on counterpoint par excellence, is full of (such) artifices even when it achieves its artistic balance in the works of the great German Sebastian Bach. Soul, intellectuality, and instinct are here fused in a given form, in a given manifestation of art, an art of its own times, historical and strictly connected with the life, faith, and culture of that particular period. Why then should we be compelled or asked to live it over again at the distance of several centuries?” And later, “We proclaim as an essential principle of our futurist revolution that counterpoint and fugue, stupidly considered as one of the most important branches of musical learning, are in our eyes only the ruins of the old science of polyphony which extends from the Flemish school to Bach. We replace them by harmonic polyphony, logical fusion of counterpoint and harmony, which allows musicians to escape the needless difficulty of dividing their efforts in two opposing cultures, one dead and the other contemporary, and entirely irreconcilable, because they are the fruits of two different sensibilities.” To quote Busoni; again: “How important, indeed, are ‘Third,’ ‘Fifth,’ and ‘Octave’! How strictly we divide ‘consonances’ from ‘dissonances’—in a sphere where no dissonances can possibly exist!” When Bernard Shaw published “The Perfect Wagnerite” he wrote for a public which still considered Wagner a little in advance of the contemporary in music. What did he say? “My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has any power to move them they will find that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in The Ring—not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programmes tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons and hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner’s music is played to them, exclaim at once, ‘What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabeletta to it—not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations. What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician.’ The layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn; and I leave him, unpitied, to his fate.” All Wagner asked his contemporaries to do, in fact, was to forget all they knew about opera!

This piling up of Shaw on Huneker, these dips into Newman and Niecks, are beginning to be formidable, but one never knows what turn of the road may lead the traveller to his promised land and it is better to draw the map clearly even if there be a confusion of choices. And so, just here, I beg leave to make a tiny digression, to point out that the new music is not so terrible as all this explanation may have made it seem to be. Granville Bantock talks learnedly of “horizontal counterpoint” but his music is perfectly comprehensible. Schoenberg writes of “passing notes,” says there is no such thing as consonance and dissonance, and “I have not been able to discover any principles of harmony. Sincerity, self-expression, is all that the artist needs, and he should say only what he must say” but Mr. Huneker points out that he has founded an order out of his chaos, “that his madness is very methodical. For one thing he abuses the interval of the fourth and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond harmonies, in which the remotest keys lovingly hold hands do not prevent the sensation of a central tonality somewhere—in the cellar, on the roof, in the gutter, up in the sky.” Percy Grainger says he dreams of “beatless” music without rhythm—at least academically speaking—but he certainly does not write it. F. Balilla Pratella writes pages condemning dance rhythms and still more pages elaborating a new theory for marking time (which, I admit, is absolutely incomprehensible to me) and publishes them as a preface to his Musica Futurista (Bologna, 1912), a composition for orchestra, which is written, in spite of the theories, and the fantastic time signatures, in the most engaging dance rhythms. Nor does his disregard for fugue go so far as to make him unfriendly to scale; the whole-tone scale prevails in this work. His dislike for polyphony seems more sincere; there is a great deal of homophonous effect. Leo Ornstein has admitted to me that his “system” would be fully understood in a decade or two. As for Strawinsky ... how the public joyfully and rapturously takes to its heart his dissonances, and even asks for more!

VII

Vincent d’Indy, reported by Marcel Duchamp, said recently that the philosophy of music is twenty years behind that of the other arts.

VIII

The fact that Schoenberg has written a handbook of theory, explaining, after a fashion, his method of composition has misled some people. “Schoenberg is a learned musician,” writes Mr. Aldrich (“New York Times,” December 5, 1915), “and his music is built up by processes derived from methods handed down to the present by the learned of the past, however widely the results may depart from those hitherto accepted.... There results what he chooses to consider ‘harmony,’ the outcome of a deliberate system, about which he theorizes and has written a book” (the italics again are mine). Against this train of reasoning (further on in the same article it becomes evident that Mr. Aldrich is annoyed with Strawinsky because he has not done likewise) it is pleasant to place the following paragraph from Chorley’s “Modern German Music”: “Mozart, it will be recollected, totally and (for him) seriously, declined to criticize himself and confess his habits of composition. Many men have produced great works of art who have never cultivated æsthetic conversation: nay, more, who have shrunk with a secretly entertained dislike from those indefatigable persons whose fancy it is ‘to peep and botanize’ in every corner of faëry land. It cannot be said that the analytical spirit of the circle of Weimar, when Goethe was its master-spirit did any great things for Music.” Do not misunderstand Strawinsky’s silence (which has only been relative, after all). It is sometimes as well to compose as to theorize. Some of the great composers have let us see into their workshops (not that they have all consistently followed out their own theories) and others have not. In one pregnant paragraph Strawinsky has expressed himself (he is speaking of The Nightingale): “I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called ‘impressionist’ methods” (“Mr. Strawinsky, on the other hand, is a musical impressionist from the start”: R. A. again) “a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tendency towards vagueness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists as they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic or lyric music. The one essential thing is to feel and to convey one’s feelings.”

This idea of natural expression becomes associated in any great composer’s mind with another idea, the horror of the cliché. Each new giant desires to express himself without resorting to the thousand and one formulas which have been more or less in use since the “golden age” of music (whenever that was). Natural expression implies to a certain extent the abandonment of the cliché, for, under this principle, if a rule or a habit is weighed and found wanting it is immediately discarded.

“Routine (cliché) is highly esteemed and frequently required; in musical ‘officialdom’ it is a sine qua non,” writes Busoni. “That routine in music should exist at all, and furthermore that it can be nominated as a condition in the musician’s bond, is another proof of the narrow confines of our musical art. Routine signifies the acquisition of a modicum of experience and art craft, and their application to all cases which may occur; hence, there must be an astounding number of analogous cases. Now I like to imagine a species of art-praxis wherein each case should be a new one, an exception.” Even so early a composer (using early in a loose sense) as Schumann found it unnecessary, at times, to close a piece with the tonic; and many other composers have disregarded the rule since, leaving the ear hanging in the air, so to speak. Is there any more reason why all pieces should end on the tonic than that all books should end happily or all pictures be painted in black and white? In music which Mozart wrote at the age of four there are chords of the second (and they occur in music before Mozart). In books of the period you can read of the horror with which ears at the beginning of the nineteenth century received consecutive fifths. Some of the modern French composers have disposed of the cliché of a symphony in four movements. Chausson, Franck, and Dukas have written symphonies in three parts. What composer (even the most academic) ever followed the letter of a precept if he found a better way of expressing himself? Moussorgsky avoided cliché as he would have avoided the plague. He took all the short cuts possible. There are no preambles and addendas, or other doddering concessions to scientific art in his music dramas and his songs. He gives the words their natural accent and the voice its natural inflections. Death is not always rewarded with blows on the big drum. The composer sometimes expresses the end, quite simply, in silence. In all the arts the horror of cliché asserts itself so violently indeed that we find Robert Ross (“Masks and Phases”) assailing Walter Pater for such a fall from grace as the use of the phrase, “rebellious masses of black hair.” Of course some small souls are so busy defying cliché, with no adequate reason for doing so, that they make themselves ridiculous. And as an example of this preoccupation I may tell an anecdote related to me by George Moore. “For a time,” he said, “Augusta Holmès was interested in an opera she was composing, La Montagne Noire, to the exclusion of all other subjects in conversation. She talked about it constantly and always brought one point forward: all the characters were to sing with their backs to the audience. That was her novel idea. She did not seem to realize that, in itself, the innovation would not serve to make her opera interesting.” Strawinsky’s horror of cliché is by no means abnormal. He does not break rules merely for the pleasure of shocking the pedants. In each instance he has developed, quite naturally and inevitably, the form out of his material. In Petrouchka, a ballet with a Russian country fair as its background, he has harped on the folk-dance tunes, the hurdy-gurdy manner, and, as befits this work, there is no great break with tradition, except in the orchestration. The Firebird, too, in spite of its fantasy and brilliance, is perfectly understandable in terms of the chromatic scale. In The Sacrifice to the Spring, on the other hand, unhampered by the chains which a “story-ballet” (the fable of these “pictures of pagan Russia” is entirely negligible) inevitably imply, he has awakened primitive emotions by the use of barbaric rhythm, without any special regard for melody or harmony, using the words in their academic senses. There is no attempt made to begin or end with major thirds. Strawinsky was perhaps the first composer to see that melody is of no importance in a ballet. Fireworks is impressionistic but it is no more so (although the result is arrived at by a wholly dissimilar method) than La Mer of Debussy. But it is in his opera, The Nightingale, or his very short pieces for string quartet, or his Japanese songs for voice and small orchestra that the beast shows his fangs, so to speak. It is in these pieces and in The Sacrifice to the Spring that Strawinsky has accomplished a process of elision, leaving out some of those stupidities which have bored us at every concert of academic music which we have attended. (You must realize how much your mind wanders at a symphony concert. It is impossible to concentrate one’s complete attention on the performance of a long work except at those times when some new phrase or some new turn in the working-out of a theme strikes the ear. There is so much of the music that is familiar, because it has occurred in so much music before. If you hear tum-ti-tum you may be certain it will be followed by ti-ti-ti and a good part of this sort of thing falls on deaf ears.... There are those, I am forced to admit, who can only concentrate on that which is perfectly familiar to them.) As a matter of fact he gives our ears credit (by this time!) for the ability to skip a few of the connecting links. Now this sort of elision in painting has come to be the slogan of a school. Cézanne painted a woman as he saw her; he made no attempt to explain her; that pleasure he left for the spectator of his picture. He did not draw a fashion plate. The successors of Cézanne (some of them) have gone much farther. They draw us a few bones and expect us to reconstruct the woman, body and soul, after the fashion of a professor of anatomy reconstructing an ichthyosaurus. Strawinsky and some other modern musicians have gone as far; they have left out the tum-ti-tums and twilly-wigs which connect the pregnant phrases in their music.... This does not signify that they do not think them, sometimes, but it is not necessary for any one with a receptive ear (not an expectant ear, unless it be an ear which expects to hear something pleasant!) to do so. In fact this kind of an auditor appreciates these short cuts of composers, gives thanks to God for them. Surprise is one of the keenest emotions that music has in its power to give us (even Hadyn and Weber discovered that!). It is only the pedants and the critics, who, after all, do not sit through all the long symphonies, who are annoyed by these attempts at concentration and condensation. (I say the pedants but I must include the Philistines. It is really cliché which makes certain music “popular.” The public as a whole really prefers music based on cliché, with a melody in which the end is foreordained almost from the first bar. Of course in time public taste is changed.... The transition is slow ... but the composer who follows public taste instead of leading it soon drops out of hearing. The cliché of to-day is not the cliché of day before yesterday. According to Philip Hale, Napoleon, then first consul [1800] said to Luigi Cherubini, “I am very fond of Paisiello’s music; it is gentle, peaceful. You have great talent, but your accompaniments are too loud.” Cherubini replied, “Citizen Consul, I have conformed to the taste of the French.” Napoleon persisted, “Your music is too loud; let us talk of Paisiello’s which lulls me gently.” “I understand,” answered Cherubini, “you prefer music that does not prevent you from dreaming of affairs of state.”) Strawinsky, working gradually, not with the intention to astonish but with no fear of doing so, dropping superfluities, and all cliché of the studio whatsoever, arrives at a perfectly natural form of expression in his lyric drama, The Nightingale, in which there is no working-out or development of themes; the music is intended to comment upon, to fill with a bigger meaning, the action as it proceeds, without resorting to tricks which require mental effort on the part of the auditor. The composer does not wish to burden him with any more mental effort than the mere listening to the piece requires and he strikes to the soul with the poignancy of his expression. (The foregoing may easily be misunderstood. It does not mean necessarily that there is no polyphony, that there are no parts leading hither and thither in the music of Strawinsky. It does not mean that dissonance has become an end in itself with this composer. It simply means that he has let his inspiration take the form natural to it and has not tried to cramp his inspiration into proscribed forms. There should be no more difficulty in understanding him than in understanding Beethoven once one arrives at listening with unbiased ears. The trouble is that too many of us have made up our minds not to listen to anything which does not conform with our own precious opinions.)

At the risk of being misunderstood by some and for the sake of making myself clearer to others I hazard a frivolous figure. Say that Wagner’s formula for composition be represented by some expression; I will choose the simple proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.” Humperdinck is content to change a single detail of this formula. He says, musically speaking, “Make wheat while the sun shines.” Richard Strauss makes a more complete inversion. His paraphrase would suggest something like this, “Make brass while the band brays.” Strawinsky, wearied of the whole business (as was Debussy before him; genius does not paraphrase) uses only two words of the formula ... say “make” and “sun.” Later even these are negligible, as each new composer makes his own laws and his own formulas. The infinity of it! In time the work of Strawinsky will establish a cliché to be scorned by a new generation (scorned in the sense that it will not be imitated, except by inferior men).

That his music is vibrant and beautiful we may be sure and it has happened that all of it has been appreciated by a very worth-while public. He has done what Benedetto Croce in his valuable work, “Æsthetic,” demands of the artist. He has expressed himself ... for beauty is expression. “Artists,” says this writer, “while making a verbal pretence of agreeing, or yielding a feigned obedience to them, have always disregarded (these) laws of styles. Every true work of art has violated some established class and upset the ideas of the critics who have been obliged to enlarge the number of classes, until finally even this enlargement has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works of art, which are naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings, and—new enlargements.”

“It must not be forgotten,” says Egon Wellesz (“Schoenberg and Beyond” in “The Musical Quarterly,” Otto Kinkeldey’s translation), “that in art there are no ‘eternal laws’ and rules. Each period of history has its own art, and the art of each period has its own rules. There are times of which one might say that every work which was not in accord with the rules was bad or amateurish. These are the times in which fixed forms exist, to which all artists hold fast, merely varying the content. Then there are periods when artists break through and shatter the old forms. The greatness of their thoughts can no longer be confined within the old limits. (Think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Symphonie Fantastique of Berlioz.) There arises a category of art works whose power and beauty can be felt only and not understood. For this reason an audience that knows nothing of rules will enthuse over works of this kind much sooner than the average musician who looks for the rules and their observance.”

Remember that Hanslick called Tristan und Isolde “an abomination of sense and language” and Chorley wrote “I have never been so blanked, pained, wearied, insulted even (the word is not too strong), by a work of pretension as by ... Tannhäuser....” “Fortunately,” I quote Benedetto Croce again, “no arduous remarks are necessary to convince ourself that pictures, poetry, and every work of art, produce no effects save on souls prepared to receive them.”

The clock continues to make its hands go round, so fast indeed that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of its course. For example, just before his death, John F. Runciman in “Another Ode to Discord” (“The New Music Review,” April, 1916) seemed to present an entirely new front. Here is a sample passage, “We have grown used to dissonances and our ears no longer require the momentary rest afforded by frequent concords; if a discord neither demands preparation nor resolution, and if it sounds beautiful and is expressive, there is no reason on earth why a piece of music should not consist wholly of a series of discords.... From Monteverde to Scriabine the line is unbroken, each successive generation growing bolder in attacking dissonances and still bolder in the manner of quitting them. I heard a gentleman give a recital of his own pianoforte works not long ago. They seemed to consist entirely of minor seconds—B and C struck together—and the effect to my mind was excruciatingly abominable. But that is how Bach’s music, Beethoven’s, Wagner’s, struck their contemporaries; and heaven knows what we shall get accustomed to in time. One thing is certain—that the most daring modern spirit is only following in the steps of the mightiest masters....”

We may be on the verge of a still greater revolution in art than any through which we have yet passed; new banners may be unfurled, and new strongholds captured. I admit that the idea gives me pleasure. Try to admit as much to yourself. Go hear the new music; listen to it and see if you can’t enjoy it. Perhaps you can’t. At any rate you will find in time that you won’t listen to second-rate imitations of the giant works of the past any longer. Your ears will make progress in spite of you and I shouldn’t wonder at all if five years more would make Schoenberg and Strawinsky and Ornstein a trifle old-fashioned.... The Austrian already has a little of the academy dust upon him.

New York, April 16, 1916.