Music and Life: A study of the relations between ourselves and music

by Thomas Whitney Surette

I. WHAT IS A SYMPHONY?

In the first chapter I discussed the nature of music itself in order that I might clear away certain popular misconceptions about it and arrive at some estimate of what it really is. In the intervening chapters I have dealt with various phases of music: I have discussed it in connection with words or action, as a sociological force, and as a matter of pedagogy, and in so doing I have had to take into consideration all sorts of non-musical factors. Now the symphony is “pure music,” so called; it exists as a separate and distinct thing whose only purpose is to be beautiful and true to life. Furthermore it has always been largely independent of its audience. The opera has been subject to the vagaries of singers, to the demands of the audience for fine costumes and scenery; the symphony, on the contrary, has grown naturally and freely, being hindered only by the slow development of instruments and of the technique of playing them. Nearly every great symphony has persisted in the face of the opposition of the public and of many of the critics; the gibes hurled at the First Symphony of Brahms were as bitter as those hurled at the Second Symphony of Beethoven. In discussing, therefore, what is undoubtedly the greatest of musical forms, I desire first to state as nearly as may be what, in its essence, it is.

A symphony is, of course, like other music in being an arrangement of rhythmic figures, of melodies (usually called “themes”) and of harmonies. But before describing it as such—before dealing with its materials, its form, its history, and its place in the art of music—I wish to treat it solely as a thing of beauty expressed in terms of sound. Many people seem to think music an art dealing with objects or with ideas. Some, never having become sensitized to it in childhood, look upon it as of no importance whatever. A large number have tried to perform it on an instrument and have failed. Others have succeeded at the price of thinking of it only in terms of technique. A certain happy few, some of whom can perform it, and some of whom cannot, are satisfied to take it as it is and be stimulated by it. These are the true musicians and we should all aspire to join their happy company.

What we call a symphony is merely a series of ordered sounds produced by means of instruments of various kinds. It is sound and nothing else. Our programme books tell us about “first themes” and “second themes,” and we make what effort we can to patch together the various brilliant textures of symphonic music into a coherent pattern, but the music we seek lies behind these outward manifestations as, in a lesser sense, the significance of a great poem lies behind the actual words. So it is with all the greatest art, whatever the medium may be. The chief difference between a symphony and any other form of artistic expression—such as a novel, a play, a painting, or a piece of sculpture—is that a symphony is not a record of something else; it is not a picture of something else; it is itself only. And it is this quality or property of being itself that gives to all pure music its remarkable power. Any intelligent person, on being shown a diagram or plan of a symphonic movement, could be made to understand how and why the material was so disposed, for that disposition is dictated to the composer by the nature of sound and by the limitations and capacities of human beings, and it conforms to certain principles which operate everywhere; but that understanding would not reveal the symphony to him.

There is in every one of us a region of sensibility in which mind and emotion are blended and from which the imagination acts, and it is to this sensibility that music appeals. Now, the imagination, which we believe to be the highest function of human beings, cannot act from the mind alone. Mathematics, for example, does not lie entirely in the domain of the mind, and the same thing may be said of any other department of science. The chief value of scientific studies in school and university lies in the stimulation of the student’s imagination rather than in the acquisition of scientific facts. Now, we cannot conceive any act of the imagination whatever that does not glow with the radiance of emotion, so that music, in appealing to the whole being, is not so completely isolated as is generally supposed. But the simultaneous appeal of music to the mind and the feelings has led to much confusion on the part of writers who have not been sensitive to all its qualities. In his essay on “Education” Herbert Spencer, for example, in discussing the union of science and poetry, says: “It is doubtless true that, as states of consciousness, cognition and emotion tend to exclude each other. And it is doubtless true also that an extreme activity of the feelings tends to deaden the reflective powers: in which sense, indeed, all orders of activity are antagonistic to each other.” Now this statement reveals at once the limitations of a philosophic mind when dealing with something that requires apprehension by the feelings also. In listening to music the reflective powers are not engaged with objects or with definite ideas, but with pure sound that requires correlation only with itself, and the condition of mutual exclusion between thought and feeling no longer exists because the music is expressing thought and feeling in the same terms.[9] Spencer speaks of science as full of poetry, which is true enough, but his statement about music reveals an incapacity to understand it. And his misconceptions about art in general may be illustrated by the following concerning the axis in sculpture as applied to a standing figure: “But sculptors unfamiliar with the theory of equilibrium not uncommonly so represent this attitude that the line of direction falls midway between the feet. Ignorance of the laws of momentum leads to analogous errors; as witness the admired Discobolus, which, as it is posed, must inevitably fall forward the moment the quoit is delivered.” This observation completely misses the quite sound reasons for the pose of that remarkable statue, and, if applied to sculpture in general, would destroy the famous “Victory of Samothrace” and many other fine examples of Greek sculpture.

But it is strange and mysterious, after all, that these ordered sounds should be so precious to us; that we should preserve their printed symbols generation after generation and continually reproduce them as sound, feeling them to be strong and stable and true; that we should even come to say, after many generations, that their creator was a wise man who had in him a profound philosophy. But it is stranger still to realize how convincing this philosophy is as compared to any philosophy of the reason, and to see how profound in it is the sense of reconciliation—a reconciliation that the mind seeks in vain. Our life consists of thought, feeling, and action, phenomena of what we are, and in actual life never quite reconcilable. But the world of music is not actual life. Music is absolved from actual phenomena, and achieves by virtue of this freedom a complete and profound philosophy—a philosophy unintelligible to the mind alone, but intelligible to the complete being. The strength of every art lies chiefly in its detachment from reality. Sculpture does not gain by being realistic, picturesque, or decorative; on the contrary, it is at its highest when it is ideal, detached, and superhuman. Painting does not gain by being categorical, but is greatest when it seeks something beyond the outward, physical view. The novel or the essay depends for its greatness on its power of relating real persons, things, and ideas to that greater and deeper reality of which they are a part. In this sense music stands supreme above the other arts because it is the most detached. The elements of thought and feeling are, in music, presented as elements; the thought is not thought even in the abstract, for it is not “about” anything; the feeling is not actual feeling, and the action is not real action. Each of these properties or states of the human being is here expressed in its essence, detached from all actual manifestation. None but the highest type of mind, none but a heart full of deep human sympathy, none but a vigorous militant spirit could have conceived and brought forth such compositions, for example, as the Third and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven, yet they are nothing but sound—neither the thought nor the feeling nor the action is real.

But we may also truly say that in Conrad’s novel it is not the person, Lord Jim, who moves us, but rather the author’s deep insight into the elements of human character expressed through the central figure. A portrait by Velasquez is a portrait of the personality that lived within the outward appearance. The figure of Pendennis is not so much the youth by that name as it is youth itself—youth, care-free, but bound by tradition and love. All great art is subjective, lying in the mind of man.

It is from this point of view, then, that I approach the symphony. I do not need now to dwell on its history, on its form, or on its means of expression, because they are merely incidental to its being a profound human document. Pure music at its highest is the will of man made manifest, and one may doubt if that will becomes fully manifest in any other of his creations. It compasses all his actions, all his thoughts, all his feelings; it translates his dreams; it satisfies his insatiable curiosities; it justifies his pride (as he himself never does); it makes him the god he would be; it is like a crystal ball, in whose mystic depths the whole of life moves in a shadow fantasy.