CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS

BY

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

AUTHOR OF "BEETHOVEN AND HIS FORERUNNERS,"
"THE ROMANTIC COMPOSERS," "FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS," ETC.

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Copyright, 1918,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1918.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

"We live," wrote Stevenson to Will H. Low in 1884, "in a rum age of music without airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood-engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that ought to have been mezzo-tints.... So long as an artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher's needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and plaudits shower along with roses. But any plain man who tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure.... He will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts."

What would Stevenson say, I wonder, could he witness the condition to which this confusion of aims, rapidly spreading since he wrote, has now reduced all the arts, and perhaps especially music? "Painting with a flute" hardly sounds fantastic any longer, now that symphonies have given place to symphonic "poems," orchestral "sketches," and tone "pictures," and program music has taken the place of supremacy in the art of tones that magazine illustration occupies among graphic arts. Anyone who tries nowadays to write mere music—expressive of emotion through beauty—is more than ever "a commonplace person." The "persons of parts" are those who give it the quaint local color of folk-songs, like Mr. Percy Grainger; or who make of it an agreeable accessory of dance or stage picture, like Ravel and Strawinsky, or of colored lights and perfumes, like Scriabine; or who spin it into mathematical formulæ as a spider spins web, like Reger; or who use it as a vehicle for a priori intellectual theories, like Schoenberg, or as noise for a nerve stimulant, like Mr. Leo Ornstein.

The reader will look in vain for these names, in recent years on everyone's lips, in the table of contents of this book on "Contemporary Composers." In the work of most of them there is, indeed, much of charm or interest, of vividness, perhaps of permanent power. But the time when critical appraisal of them can be anything like final has not yet arrived; and meanwhile there is in their centrifugal tendencies, I believe, a real menace to the best interests of music. One and all, they look away from that inner emotion "to which alone," as Wagner said, "can music give a voice, and music only." They all represent in one way or another that trivializing of the great art, that degradation of it to sensationalism, luxury, or mere illustration, some of the historic causes of which I have tried to suggest in the introduction. No sincere lover of music can regard with anything but the gravest apprehensions such tendencies toward decadence.

Fortunately these are, however, powerfully counteracted, even now, by more constructive forces, carrying forward the evolution of music in and for itself which was the main concern of the great elder masters who regarded it as a supreme emotional language—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck. It is the representatives of this sounder tradition (despite the programmism of Strauss and the sybaritism of Debussy) that I have selected for discussion here. They have also the further advantage of having been long enough before the public to have vindicated already their claims to permanent place in musical history.

The present volume, it may be added, completes the series of studies of great creative musicians from Palestrina to the present day begun in "Beethoven and His Forerunners," "The Romantic Composers," and "From Grieg to Brahms." For permission to reprint the essays it contains, acknowledgment is made to the editors of the Musical Quarterly, the Outlook, and the New Music Review.

D. G. M.

New York,
January 26, 1918.

CONTENTS

PAGE
I.Introduction: Democracy and Music[3]
II.Richard Strauss[43]
III.Sir Edward Elgar[93]
IV.Claude Debussy[133]
V.Vincent d'Indy[153]
VI.Music in America[229]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Vincent d'Indy
 [Frontispiece]
FACING PAGE
Richard Strauss[45]
Sir Edward Elgar[95]
Claude Debussy[135]
Vincent d'Indy as a Young Man[155]

I
INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC

I
INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC

Lovers and critics of modern music who are at the same time interested students of the social changes which have preceded and accompanied its growth must often ask themselves whether there is any deep connection of cause and effect between the two sets of phenomena, or whether they merely happened to take place at the same time. Have the important social transformations of the nineteenth century reached so far in their influence as to the music of our time? Has sociology any light to throw upon musical art? The question raises a problem as difficult as it is fascinating; and the suggestions which follow are to be taken as guesses and hints, intended to provoke fertile thought, rather than as constituting in any sense a finished theory.