CHAPTER IV
THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE MUSIC
Just as success in the intellectual and moral worlds results from power to shape ideas and conduct, to make syntheses which combine the most various elements in unity, so artistic success results from the power to shape into a single organism the various elements of artistic effect. Art may make a deep appeal to us by the richness of its sensuous charm, and a still deeper by the eloquence of its emotional expression; the deepest of all appeals it will not make, we have asserted, unless, by marshalling its materials into an obvious order, it adds to its sensuous and expressive charms the æsthetic charm, the greatest of all—beauty. Art, we hinted, was beautiful in the proportion of its unified variety; and we set ourselves to see what methods men gradually worked out, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by which the wonderfully various effects of their new music could be stamped with final unity.
In the fact that they attain beauty through the presentation of variety in unity, all the arts are alike; yet they differ much in the way they accomplish this end, because of their differing conditions. Those arts, notably sculpture, painting, and architecture, which adjust their materials in space, necessarily use methods quite different from those of the temporal arts of literature and music, which, existing solely in time, have no spatial relations of any sort. The spatial arts, presenting all their elements simultaneously, differentiate and at the same time interlink them by means of relative position, size, and prominence. In a well designed figure or group of figures, in sculpture, there is always a balance of masses, by which the whole work, however diverse in detail, is knit into unity. The centre of gravity is kept well in toward the centre of the entire mass; all the features at the extreme edges lead the eye back to the middle to rest; there is centralization of effect, balance, poise. In a good picture, all spots of high light, all prominent lines, all striking lineaments of every sort, are similarly contrived to equalize the tensions of the eye, to keep it in that state of attentive rest, or anchored discursiveness, which is so indescribably delightful. The same is true of all well-proportioned buildings and other architectural monuments. Activity of eye and mind are stimulated, but also governed and directed. Howsoever the eye, in looking at any good picture, statue or piece of architecture, may quest and rove, it is constantly brought, by the gentle power of good design, back to the centre of rest; the sense of interesting variety is always wedded with the sense of ultimate completeness and repose.
In the temporal arts of literature and music the same effect is gained by quite different means. Here the elements are not presented simultaneously, spread out for the attention to wander from and revert to at will. Each is presented but for a moment, after which it exists only in the memory. Nevertheless all literature and music worthy the name of art give us, in common with the spatial arts, the sense of symmetrical shape, of ordered profusion. Though we are aware of each single lineament but for an instant, after which it is supplanted by the next, yet we know that all combine into just as complete and satisfying a scheme as that of the well-designed statuary group, the well-composed picture, or the well-proportioned building. This consciousness of form or design in a series of momentary impressions, on which all the high æsthetic value of the temporal arts depends, is made possible to us by our mental powers of memory and recognition. Literature and music deal with memorable units, which are repeated. Familiarity with their methods quickly accustoms us to expect the repetitions; whereupon there arises a succession of expectations, followed by their fulfilments, by which the so fleeting impressions are arranged in our minds in a fixed and satisfying order. And so arises the sense of beauty in the contemplation of a poem or a piece of music.
In poetry two different modes of repetition are utilized, each arousing its own peculiar expectation, which combines with its fulfilment to give the sense of order. The first mode is that of metrical repetition, the establishment and reiteration of a certain scheme of accentuation of syllables practically equal in duration. In heroic verse, for example, the scheme is a succession of ten syllables, every alternate one accented, and beginning with an unaccented. When a single line of this sort is heard, it forms a pattern in the mind, and arouses an expectation of another of the same sort. The fulfilment of the expectation gives rise to the sense of form. In rhymed verse, a second kind of repetition is added to this fundamental metrical one, namely, the repetition of the terminal sound of the line. When we read “’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,” the obviously regular character of it in respect of accent leads us to expect very confidently another line of the same metrical structure; and our familiarity with rhyme disposes us to think it highly probable that the new line will moreover end with a sound similar to the final one in “offence;” so that when the line comes—“The sound must seem an echo to the sense,”—it fulfils both of our expectations, and we get a double sense of design in it. The rhythm, or reiteration of the metrical scheme, is supplemented by the rhyme, or repetition of the terminal sound. In the more complex forms of verse the two schemes of design not only become far more subtle in their single application, but are made to cooperate and reinforce each other in all sorts of ingenious ways. The couplet, the ordinary quatrain, the Omar Khayyam quatrain, terza rima, the rondeau, the rondel, the triolet, and all the stanza forms, are simply different schemes of combining rhythm and rhyme, the two fundamental formative devices of all poetry.
Like poetry, music welds its elements by means of two modes of arousing and fulfilling our expectations; but these, though they are somewhat analogous to poetic rhythm and rhyme, are so much less close to our ordinary experience that they will need a slightly more detailed explanation.
All modern music is divided up into beats, or equal time divisions, arranged into groups or measures by some regular system of accentuation. The accented beats, like the accented syllables in verse, impress the mind as goals of movement, in reference to which the light beats are felt as transitions or preparations. The regularity of the alternation of transition and goal is such that the mind quickly forms the habit of expecting each goal beforehand, and of taking a proportionate satisfaction in it when it arrives. This process of expectation and fulfillment links the successive beats together in an organism, which we may call the musical foot, after its analogy with the poetic foot.[25] So limited is the mental span that it is practically impossible for us to group more than three beats together in this way into a single organism; and all music consequently consists of combinations of either duple feet (one light beat followed by a heavy), or triple feet (two lights followed by a heavy) or complex arrangements of both sorts together. After this fundamental grouping of the time-elements is made, the mind instantly proceeds to recombine the groups into larger groups called phrases or sections. This it does by the same device of accentuation, either actual or ideal. It conceives one measure or foot as heavier or more significant than another, and so leaves one as a transition, to approach another as a goal. Thus groups of simple elements become themselves the compound elements of a larger synthesis, and the entire musical fabric gains definiteness and organization through the process of aroused and fulfilled expectation. Any metrical formula, like that of a bugle call, interrupted at any note before the last, gives us as vivid a sense of incompleteness as a statue with arms and legs broken off, or a ruined building, or a mutilated picture.
Metrical structure in music is thus, obviously enough, fairly analogous with metrical structure in verse, with its grouping of syllables into feet, of feet into verses, and of verses into couplets or stanzas. When we pass to the second sort of musical structure, however, which we may call tonal or harmonic structure, the parallel analogy with poetic rhyme is much less satisfactory. It is true that harmony and rhyme both act by presenting similar sounds at given points in the series of impressions; but harmony is a far more subtle, various, and potent organizing agent than rhyme. Harmony depends on the fact that the tones, or pitch elements, used in music, can be distinguished into unrestful and restful, or into transitional and final, just as the metrical or time-elements are. In primitive music, in which but one tone sounded at a time, the matter was almost absurdly simple: high notes were unrestful, because they involved muscular tension;[26] low notes were restful, because they meant relaxation of vocal effort. Consequently, a descent of the voice meant a transition to a goal, and songs were divided off into sections by successive falls of the voice or cadences. The word “cadence,” so important in musical terminology, preserves in itself the record of this phase of musical growth; from the Latin cado, to fall, it means primarily a sinking or lapsing, and hence, in general, a coming to rest.
As soon as two or more melodies were sounded together, however, the sense of rest following activity, the universal generator of design in a temporal series of impressions, could be produced in a far more subtle way. It could be produced by making the melodies pass through an inharmonious or dissonant chord or series of chords, to a harmonious one. As soon as dissonance came into general use, in other words, the sense of unrest, of impulsion toward something else, of progressive movement, that it imparted to music, was so potent that cadences could be made upward as well as downward; whenever dissonance resolved into consonance the effect of cadence ensued. And as dissonances are of all conceivable degrees of harshness, cadences could be made of any desired degree of finality. Moreover, as the tonal material of music grew more and more systematized, the feeling of key sprang up in men’s minds; all music was felt to be in a certain key, that is, grouped about a certain tone, the centre and goal of all the others; and then cadences came to have even greater variety in the degree of finality they seemed to assert, dependent not only on the strength of the dissonances they followed, but also on the remoteness or nearness of their final chord to the key-note of the piece. All this meant greater and greater resources for building up music into complex and yet perfectly definite organisms; and as harmonic form constantly interacted more and more subtly with metrical form the capacities of design became practically infinite.