Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

III

One fact alone should make opponents of programme music think seriously of their position. The most significant feature of the problem is the way in which the practical musicians have dealt with it. Whereas most of the older orchestral music of any value was absolute music, most of the later orchestral music of any value is programme music; and the momentum of the latter species seems to be increasing every year. It will not do to pooh-pooh a phenomenon of this kind, nor to seek to fasten upon it the explanation that some of the new men write music depending upon literary or pictorial subjects because they cannot write music of the other kind. This is like saying that Shakespeare pusillanimously wrote dramas because he could not write epics— which is probably a true saying, but quite irrelevant. The point is, why should Shakespeare, with a gift for good drama, force himself to write bad epics? And if a man's musical ideas spring from quite another way of apprehending life than that of the absolute musician, why should he abjure his own native form of speech in order to mouth and maul unintelligently the phrases and the forms of another musician whose mental world is wholly foreign to his? In any case, while some of the critics have been paternally warning young composers against falling into the toils of programme music, and recommending them to keep to the lines of structure as they were laid down by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the musicians themselves have been flinging programme music right and left to the world. One has only to take up a catalogue of the Russian, French, German, Belgian, American, or even English music published during the last twenty years to see how enormously this form of art has grown, and how the really big men all display a marked liking for it. You may regret, if you like, that so many modern musicians should prefer programme music to absolute music; but you cannot settle the big æsthetic problem involved by shrugging your shoulders and invoking Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, nor by airily flinging out a formula or two of moribund æsthetic. And as bad æsthetic, bad argumentation, are accountable for most of the confusion upon the subject, let us try to analyse it more closely down to its foundations.

Programme music—by which we mean purely instrumental (i.e. non-vocal) music that has its raison d'être in a definite literary or pictorial scheme—is not an ideal term for this kind of art; but since all names which we can give it are open to objections of some kind, we may as well use this as any other. It must be remembered, too, that though programme or representative music is indeed differentiable from abstract or self-contained music, it is not absolutely differentiable. All programme music must indeed be representative, but it must also be, in part, self-contained; that is, a given phrase must not only be appropriate to the character of Hamlet or Dante, or suggestive of a certain external phenomenon such as the wind, or the fire, or the water, but it must also be interesting as music. [20] On the other hand, in thousands of works that have been written without a formal programme, the expression—it may be throughout the work, or only in parts of it—is so vivid, so strenuous, so suggestive of something more than an abstract delight in making a beautiful tone-pattern, that it spontaneously evokes in us images of definite scenes or characters or actions. Surely no one can listen to the C minor symphony, for example, and feel that Beethoven's only concern was with the invention and interweaving of abstract musical themes; here at any rate we feel that there is much truth in Wagner's contention, that behind the mere tones a kind of informal drama is going on. The expression comes, at times, as close to the suggestion of definite thought and definite action as any symphonic poem could do. Thus some of the qualities of programme music are found in absolute music, and vice versâ; there is no hard-and-fast line of division between the two. Even in the most mathematical music that ever pedant misconceived, a human accent will sometimes make itself heard; and even the most human music—the music that has its fount and origin and its final justification in the veracious expression of definite human feeling—must be bound together by some mathematical principle of form. But we all understand what we mean by the broad distinction of absolute and poetic music. [21] In the latter we have a definite literary or pictorial scheme controlling (a) the shape and colour of the phrases, (b) the order in which they appear, (c) the way in which they are played off against each other, (d) their relative positions at the end. This it is, roughly speaking, that distinguishes it from absolute music, where the manner in which the themes are handled depends upon no conception, external to the themes themselves, that could be phrased in words.

Now we are often told that when music takes upon itself to represent or narrate, as in programme music, it is "stepping beyond its legitimate boundaries." We are told that it is "passing out of its own sphere;" that it is abdicating the purely musical function, and trying to do what it is the function of literature or of painting to do; that a piece of music ought to be comprehensible from its music alone; that its whole message should be written plainly on the music, without the necessity of calling in the aid of a programme. If there is anything in this thesis it will dispose of programme music at once. But I shall try to show that there is nothing whatever in it—that it is not argument, but pure assertion. I shall try to show in the first place that so far from being a passing disease of the present generation, the desire to write programme music is rooted in humanity from the very beginning; and in the second place that the argument just outlined could be made to dispose not only of programme music, but also of the song and the opera.