Why We Love Music

by Carl E. Seashore

(1) Should the schools supply musical instruments at public expense? (2) If so, what selective procedures and restrictions should be set up? (3) Is the author's conception of the characteristics of adolescence generally accepted by educators? (4) What are the evils of music contests? (5) What are some of the unfavorable musical effects of the radio? (6) What problems arise in connection with the change of voice in boys? (7) Should the high-school a cappella choir exhibit the vibrato in singing? (See the author's The Vibrato in Voice and Instrument, University of Iowa Press.)

Discuss These Situations

(1) Last fall (1939) I saw seventy-eight marching high-school bands with over 6000 instruments in a two-mile parade on the morning before a football game at the University of Oklahoma. Here was a cross-section of the youth of the state, many of them Indians; all in uniform in dancing march for musical display. Consider pro and con the implications of this phenomenal outbreak of music from (a) the musical, (b) the social, (c) the educational, and (d) the economical points of view. (2) There is a splendid tendency at present to integrate the school with social life, community services, and part-time employment. What features in such integration seem most promising for music?

Chapter V
THE MUSICAL TEMPERAMENT

What makes a musician temperamental? Tell a musician he is temperamental, and he will take offense. Yet perhaps the thing in his personality of which he is most proud is the possession of a musical temperament. This characteristic inconsistency has a basis in psychological fact; namely, that the exhibition of artistic temperament frequently leads to attitudes and actions which the rest of the world may criticize and view with amusement; but, on the other hand, the finest expressions of musicianship would perhaps be impossible without the possession of an artistic temperament.

Many persons who pass as musicians are neither temperamental nor musical. A great many of those who ply the art of music do not have musical minds in any basic sense. Their art consists in certain skills often built into a purely matter-of-fact organism. I therefore see no reason why such people in the musical world who do not show any artistic temperament have any reason to boast of the fact.

The highly temperamental musician is a species of genius in some degree. As such, he has been described by musicians, scientists, and psychiatrists in a very copious body of literature on the subject, especially that dating since the time of Lombroso, who regarded all geniuses as degenerates. The modern psychiatrist has frequently presented a picturesque view of the temperamental person in terms of the rising science and art of psychiatry, which is supposed to explain all deviations from normal behavior in terms of psychopathology. The old saying was that we are all more or less sane; the psychiatrist today says we are all more or less psychopathic. The current literature on mental hygiene is characterized by this point of view. Another point of view has proved fascinating since the coming in of Freud, in that deviations of this sort are accounted for in terms of suppressions, defense reactions, and other manifestations of the libido. Much light is thrown on the problem by the great musician's exaltation of the artistic mind in action, thus revealing essential temperamental traits on the basis of first-hand experience and artistic theory. A temperamental musician is the most merciless portrayer of his own species. Since the temperamental person is always an interesting person, all of these accounts are lively and each revealing from its own point of view, giving us much genuine insight into the nature of the temperamental person in all fields.

Descriptions of the musical temperament are, as a rule, vivacious and luminous, thrillingly interesting. If a competent analyst would follow Stokowski for one day during the season and picture in high lights, full of concrete examples, the experience and behavior of this great conductor from the whirl of emotional enthusiasms and conflicts into which he awakens in the morning to the convivial abandon during refreshments after the evening performance, we should have a spicy and animated picture of the musical temperament. If written by the smart commentator in the columns of Esquire, it might even be racy. Such pictures have often been drawn in fragments. A similar picture might be made exclusively by direct quotation from biographies, autobiographies, and letters of great musicians, such as Beethoven and Wagner, whose lives are now on record. The temperamental musician is not competent to analyze himself because he does not see himself as others see him. Literary chats about musicians are full of quirks and eccentricities giving realistic examples of a temperamental life. These might be organized into a fairly complete characterization of a distinctive musical temperament.

All such exhibits would be of the emotional type, dramatic extravaganzas, interesting and significant, and there are many such extant. The inceptive science of the psychology of music takes a different point of view, aiming to account for the highly temperamental person partly in terms of heredity and partly in terms of inherent elements in the situation in which he lives and performs. The music psychologist must content himself to deal in a cold analytical way with verifiable and orderly facts in order to contribute something toward a scientific foundation for a systematic and functional psychology of the musical mind. In attempting this approach, I realize how tame and stilted such an effort must seem to the fiery musical temperament; and even at its best the psychologist will regard the account as speculative, because it is seldom based upon experiment. I have delved into musical biography and autobiography of great musicians with an eye toward the discovery of their outstanding mental characteristics from a psychological point of view. On this basis I must make a bold venture by attempting to trace the elements in a musical situation which lead to the development of temperamental behavior and thus contribute toward the answer to the question, "What makes a musician temperamental?"

Physiological irritability. The highly-gifted musician responds physiologically to sound stimuli to a very high degree because he has inherited a genetic constitution which is anatomically and physiologically exceptionally responsive to sound. In other words, quite apart from consciousness of sound or thought of music, his physical organism responds to acoustic stimuli of all kinds which keep nerve and muscle in a state of tension. This tends to create a state of unrest and irritability. Without leading to actual hearing, it may arouse associations of a sort of dreamlike or dramatic nature which may play a very large role in the conscious life. It may create a state of well-being and happy associations, but perhaps more frequently irritation and noxious day-dreaming associations and emotional eruptions. The sounds may come from a squeaking chair, the sizzling of a kettle, the song of a bird, the cry of an infant. Most frequently sounds affecting the organism in this way are inconspicuous and commonplace in the environment; but they may often be strong; such as, the rattling of a train or the chattering in a crowd, of which the musician does not become conscious, although physiologically irritated.