The results are not heartening. The fact is that over fifty per cent. of the audiences who attend symphony concerts cannot carry a tune. Naturally they are not averse to hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played over and over and over again, but I should like to ask these same people how many times during the course of a season they would listen to a masterpiece in words—Hamlet, for instance. How much less often would they care to hear a play by Bernard Shaw?—and yet there are some overtures and symphonies which every orchestra plays every season to its patrons. Some of this music one also hears in restaurants and in the opera house. It is monstrous!
I really do not think that a modern symphony orchestra ought to be allowed to play more than one Beethoven symphony a season. This fossilization would be deadening to any art. A set concert programme is almost an occasion for despair under the brightest conditions, but with no new life in its make-up, it had better remain an unperformed programme. When an orchestra is the medium through which a new musician pours out his inspiration to the world, there is meaning in the organization. When it ambles idly through Brahms and Bach it occupies the same place in the world’s affairs that the museum does. Why should all our orchestras insist, except on rare occasions, on being museums?
We have seen that only an inert audience may be counted upon from the ranks of the music students of the country. More interest might be expected from auditors prepared to be unprepared. To be sure, every conductor is keen to put a few “novelties” on his programmes every year. This season, for instance, a symphony by Sibelius, which has been played in Europe for some time and has been performed here before, has been hauled out again to make the critics foam at the mouth. Igor Strawinsky’s early work, Fireworks, composed and published in 1908, has been vouchsafed us. Since then Strawinsky, who, to my mind, is the most brilliant of the new composers, has written three ballets, The Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Sacrifice to the Spring, and an opera, The Nightingale. Not a note, so far as I am aware, of these most interesting scores has been heard in New York, although Paris and London are thoroughly familiar with them. Schoenberg is as yet barely a ghoulish name in this country, to be whispered shudderingly until some daring soul makes the Austrian composer a conventional thing of the past. The Kneisels have at last taken him up, if that means anything, and, of course, Ornstein has played him. The Flonzaleys have played a quartet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed the five orchestral pieces. Chicago, too, has heard these. This is as far as we have gone with Schoenberg. There is really no use of referring to so bad a performance as the Russian Symphony Orchestra gave of Scriabine’s Prometheus. We hear too much Strauss now. There was a time when we did not hear enough. The academic Reger was feared like the plague for whole years. Now that his message means as little as possible, he jumps from programme to programme.
Symphony concerts, then, as they exist in America—and to a lesser degree elsewhere—are museums, where one may inspect bits of old musical armor, tunes in Sèvres, tinkling lace shawls from Brussels, or harmonious bowls of the Ming period. The audiences are shameless so-called music-lovers who dawdle through endless repetitions of the Euryanthe overture, and who whisper exquisite trifles to one another about the delights of an audition of a Mozart symphony. Really there is nothing so smug, so snobbish, to be found in the world as the audience of a symphony society, unless it be a string-quartet audience. Beside these groups you find opera-goers are simple human beings. Both the organization and its supporters, then, we discover, are simply corrupted by cob-webs. They are things of the past that persist in going on. A live orchestra, built on living principles, which played new music if it played at all, would serve not only to develop new composers, but also new ideas. One can talk intelligently and even quarrel with one’s neighbor about a new Strawinsky work. At best, if one is a critic, one can write a column about how Gustav Mahler doubled the brasses in a Beethoven symphony and thus became the most arrant of knaves, or, if one is not a critic, one may say, “I like Mr. Stransky so much when he conducts Liszt!” To be sure, the snobs and the smug would be bewildered by the novelties. Perhaps they wouldn’t even go to the concerts, although that seems unbelievable. But there would be new audiences. At a recent concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in New York, Dr. Muck dared to place three unfamiliar works on the programme. (God knows this was an unusual proceeding.) Not one of these was formidable; not one of them new, except to those comfortable ladies and gentlemen who have sat through concerts devoted to Beethoven and Bach so long that they should know the tunes by heart. Yet the protests were many and loud. I think Dr. Muck really stirred up an interest in music by this procedure.
But if our symphony societies are dead, what of our string quartets? Chamber music! Its title explains it. It is music intended to be played at home ... music intended to be played, not to be listened to, except, perhaps, by some doting members of the performers’ families. Suppose you play the violin and you can find another violinist, and a ’cellist, and a violist, you invite them all to come to your house some night and you take down Schubert’s quartets, or Tschaikowsky’s, and entertain yourselves. Father, reading his paper, listens listlessly.... Sister Mary doesn’t object to giving her ear occasionally, but there is no concerted attention devoted to you. Nor should there be. People do not, as a rule, attempt to play piano duets in public. Why they should play string quartets I do not know. Yet you will find the cult of the string quartet is almost a mystic body. There is a great deal said about this being the “highest and noblest” form of music (arbitrary art-music), and a great many people are impressed with the idea that to know the string quartets of the masters in itself constitutes a liberal education. To know how to play them does, in fact, make for a certain education, but to listen to them—well, that is a different matter. The string quartet plays in the very dustiest part of the museum in which “modern” concerts are given. Its audiences are fanatics who have gone mad over an old religion, and while they will listen on occasion to trios, sextets, and piano quintets, their idea of the limitations of the possible combinations of instruments is circumscribed.... To my mind, there seems to be no good reason why we should not have a duet between child’s voice and flute; two guitars and two mandolins make very pretty music.
I really do not know whether it is the concert-going public which makes snobs of the critics, or the critics who make snobs of the public. It is certain that the music critics are loftier in their self-created mountain strongholds than almost any body of people since the worthy mastersingers. They are the cataloguers of the museum, and as each set of performers takes out an old doll and makes its arms and legs wobble, and teases it to cry “Mama,” they express their delight or their displeasure over the results. If a new doll, by any chance, is brought in, it is quickly sent to the basement by these judges, unless it imitates not only in appearance, but in gesture as well, some old doll. Montemezzi is a doll who did not win the disapproval of the critics because they had been hearing L’Amore dei tre Re or something like it all their lives.... Zandonai, on the other hand.... New dolls are not wanted in a museum which contains the works of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. Pratella’s name does not even begin with a B. But neither does Strauss’s, nor Debussy’s. After all, however, if one writes criticisms one must have a standard, I hear you objecting. Most critics do, mercifully enough for their readers, for if one’s standard is not to accept any innovations after a diminished seventh, it at least gives his readers an opportunity to be aware of what he means when he says that a work is discordant. When a seasoned examiner of musical criticism meets this word he understands that the critic means that the music under discussion is quite different from that of Weber and Puccini. There may be, on the other hand, very good reasons to suppose that to an unprejudiced ear, one not fed up on art-music, the new music may not be any more discordant than the hum of a factory, the roar of a city, or any of the familiar rhythmical sounds to which our ears are so accustomed that we accept them. The Hottentot and the Chinaman find real pleasure in what we call discords, and, as a result, they have achieved in their music complexities of rhythm which would be beyond the grasp of the ordinary composer of our art-music.... It is alone the critic’s point of view, well-defined, which makes him comprehensible when he disdains to be more scientific in his criticism.
There would seem to be a better way, unless the critic can describe his emotions as poignantly as Pater painted his impressions of the Monna Lisa. Why not a scientific description? For years columns and pages have been pouring over to us about the “discordant” Schoenberg, but nothing which actually gives you an idea of Schoenberg has yet appeared, at least not under my eyes. (I might except a few paragraphs in Huneker’s article.) One could give an idea of what the music really was like, at least to a musician. Or one could make a confession, such as I heard Alfred Hertz make after the first performance in London of Strawinsky’s very beautiful opera, The Nightingale, in which instruments are combined with such strange effect that it is almost as if the composer had discovered a new scale of tones: “I am considered a good musician. When I am conducting an orchestra I can detect a false note in the furthest bassoon, or the nearest flute, but in the second act of The Nightingale I could not name a single note.”
January, 1915.
The Secret of the Russian Ballet
Secret of the Russian Ballet