V
We must always remember that songs of every kind are primarily composed in the spirit of this typical folk-song. Even the most learned composer is spiritually a descendant of the crazy Roumanian peasant woman, and his songs, if they are real songs at all, are of the same spontaneous kind as hers. However much he may be occupied with conscious scholastic principles, if his music does not somehow sing in this natural, artless vein it is but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The impulse to song is the soul of all true songs the world over.
What this impulse is has occupied the minds of theorists for many a year. Their explanations are perhaps not important, since whatever their conclusions we still posses the wonderful song literature which is at our disposal. But their theories are at least interesting, if only to prove that song, like love, is one of those human things that can never be utterly explained.
Primitive people almost invariably attribute music to divine agency. We know the story of Orpheus, who moved the beasts and even the rocks and trees to tears by his sweet singing. We know also the story of the competition of Apollo the harp player and Marsyas the flute player. The Chinese say that they obtained their musical scale from a miraculous bird. The legend is interesting as showing how people tend to invent a supernatural explanation for the artificial laws which are felt to need some sort of superstitious bolstering up. For it is recorded in Chinese history that this scale has several times been changed by edict of the emperor, who considers an orthodox scale a very important thing to insist upon and wishes to have his word accepted as divine law. The Japanese tradition is that the sun-goddess once retired into a cave and the gods devised music to lure her forth once more. The story suggests the practice of certain primitive tribes who sing and dance during a solar eclipse, either to scare away the evil spirits or to beg the sun-god back into their midst. The Nahua Indians of North America say that the god Tezcatlipoca sent for music from the sun and made a bridge of whales and turtles by which to convey it to the earth. The Abyssinians have a tale to the effect that Yared transmitted music to men, the holy spirit having appeared to him in the form of a pigeon. But in the story of the Javans there seems to be a kernel of scientific truth. They say that the earliest music was suggested to them by the wind whistling through a bamboo tube which had been left hanging on a tree.
The theories of the earlier musical philosophers of the nineteenth century were not so unlike these legends as they seemed at the time. These men had a limited historical outlook and were inclined to discredit, when they did not ignore, the music preceding that of Palestrina, just as the historians of painting before Ruskin’s time tended to regard all Italian painting before Raphael as mere experimental bungling. To these earlier philosophers music was a thing discovered rather than a thing evolved. In their view music had always existed in a sort of secret treasure house instituted by a beneficent creator for the edification of men. All melodies and harmonies were piled in there awaiting the explorations of musicians. The explorations were undertaken by the ‘inspired’ artists, those who had been endowed with finer ears and more daring imaginations. All musical history was a story of the development of music from its imperfect state among the primitives to its perfect state with Beethoven. This description may be exaggerated, but it is certain that the earlier theorists considered music as a self-existent thing, with its own laws and its own principles of beauty—laws and principles which must be discovered by the elect among artists instead of being evolved by the peoples. As to the impulse to song and to artistic creation in general they laid it to that mysterious thing, ‘inspiration.’
Schopenhauer’s theory has a modern ring and is excellent poetry even though it can hardly rank as science. He says that while the other arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—represent the Idea, which is the reflection of the Will, music represents the Will itself. It is pure energy, the nearest thing that exists among men to the essence of reality.
With Darwin all this kind of speculation changed and the theories of musical origins became more a matter of biology than of music. Darwin traced the impulse to song to the love-making of animals and primitive man. He showed how in Nature beauty is continually being made the adjunct and servant of love—how the bird sings or the insect dances to attract its mate. Many theorists have sought to explain the whole of art as originating in the sexual impulse. But in this theory, as in all, there are data on both sides of the question and the explanation is interesting rather than valuable.
Herbert Spencer pursues the same biological line. But he traces the impulse to song from the surplus of energy in living things. Nature, as we know, is prodigal, producing thousands of eggs or seeds where she expects only scores of insects or plants to grow. And so she gives to each living thing more energy than is needed to keep it alive and healthy—or at least more energy than is needed all the time. With this surplus of energy something must be done. And that something among men is art. When a wild rose-bush is put in rich soil it grows a double rose and a larger one. And so, when a man has a little more than enough for his material needs, he attempts to decorate and beautify his surroundings. To Spencer the typical example of nascent art is the child who dances out of pure joy of life. But others object to this, saying that this dancing of the child (and all similarly spontaneous art) is lacking in the very quality which makes art—namely, discipline and control. It is selection and control, they say, which makes any work of art more than a mere daub of color or conglomeration of sounds.
Certainly the biological theories have not satisfactorily explained the second great element in artistic creation—the impulse to refinement. We have seen that once our typical folk-song was invented by the Roumanian peasant woman it could not stay as it was, but had to take new forms, changing continually, and, as we see it, usually for the better. What is it that makes men dissatisfied with a crude, formless melody and desirous of making it regular and organic? Perhaps it is no more than the impulse to play which children show when they arrange pebbles in new and strange shapes on the sand or savages when they daub their faces with new colors of war-paint. Again the surplus of energy? Perhaps. Perhaps when people have become familiar with their primitive melody they notice a peculiar turn of the phrase and take pleasure in seeing what they can do with it in the way of repeating it and inventing contrasting phrases. At any rate, there it is, this impulse to refinement, more mystery for the theorist and more entertainment for the music lover.
On the whole, these theories probably err in trying to simplify the case too much. More likely music has not one simple cause, but many interacting causes. Like every individual man whose ancestors are a multitude, song must be the result of many, many causes.