Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

There is, in the first place, the direct sensuous effect of the sounds, their deliciousness as sensations. Musical tones gratify the ear just as light and color gratify the eye, agreeable tastes the palate, aromatic odors the nose, and soft, warm surfaces the touch. A single tone from a flute, a violin, or a horn, is as delightful as a patch of pure color, white, red, or purple. To listen to music is, at least in part, to bathe in a flood of exquisite aural sensation. This immediate value for our sense of the “concord of sweet sounds” is a fundamental, legitimate, and important one, to deny or disparage which is to confess oneself insensitive or a prude. All music depends for a part of its appeal on its primary sensuous quality.

In the second place, music has what we call expressive value. Feelings, of surprising depth and variety, it can arouse in us, by inducing, through the contagiousness of rhythm and melody, tendencies to make those bodily motions and vocal sounds which are the natural accompaniment of our emotions.[4] These tendencies, of course, remain incipient; they do not discharge in actual movements greater than the tapping of the foot in “keeping time” and a slight contraction of the vocal cords; but even this faint organic commotion suffices to arouse those vivid feelings with which we listen to expressive music. It is worth while to note further that these feelings are in themselves necessarily most general and undefined, hardly more than moods of animation, excitement, apprehensiveness, solemnity, or depression. Their particular coloring is always imparted either by words or titles, or by the associations of the individual listener. On that very fact depend both the poignancy and the variety of musical expression.

The third and highest value of music is its æsthetic value, or beauty. This value, which springs from the delight we take in perceiving, or mentally organizing our sensations and ideas, is precisely analogous to the æsthetic value of the other arts, as, for example, the beauty of sonnets and other highly articulated poetic forms, of well-composed pictures, of finely-proportioned sculpture, of symmetrical and harmonious architecture. It depends, in general, on the perception of unity in a mass of various impressions, and is but one example of a type of satisfaction we are capable of finding in all the departments of our experience. Wherever, confronted by many objects, sensations, thoughts, or feelings, we are able to gain a sense of their coherence, inter-relation, and essential oneness, we get the characteristic æsthetic value. To win it is the highest success we know. To perceive unity in the bewildering complexity of our experience, is to possess, in the realm of knowledge, truth; in the realm of practice, character; in the realm of art, beauty. Moreover, since perception is a far more active, self-directed process than either sensation or emotion, which are in large degree passively suffered, its contribution to our mental life has for us a deeper charm, a more far-reaching significance, than that of any other faculty. Beauty transfigures all elements that may coexist with it in the mind. In the intellectual sphere, for example, we understand far more deeply the phenomenon when we know its species and genus, and “science is but classified knowledge.” In practical life, all the little every-day events, the petty pleasures and pains, take on, when we view them in relation to a conceived unity in our characters and destinies, a new significance. Similarly in music, values of the first two species, sweetness of sound and emotional expressiveness, can be transfigured by formal beauty; there is no tone that is not sweeter when it embodies a lovely melody; there is no emotion that is not apotheosized by association with others in a harmonious whole, or that does not defeat itself when it stands out single, and will not merge itself in the organism. No music is wholly devoid of any one of the three values; but the greatest music uses the first two only as the materials of the third.

It is easy to see, however, that supreme as the æsthetic value of music may be, men could arrive at an appreciation of it only after a long novitiate and training. To enjoy the sensuous beauty of sweet sounds one needs only ears; to be moved by melodies and rhythms that strongly suggest those vocal utterances and bodily motions which are the natural avenues of emotion, requires but a slightly more complex appreciative mechanism, the mechanism of organic sensations and their associations in the regions of naïve feeling; but to perceive the manifold inter-relationship, and the final unity, of groups of tones combined together by relations in pitch and in time, one needs a keen ear, an awakened memory, a capacity for tracing unity under the mask of variety,—in a word, a thoroughly trained and concentrated mind. Musical art could reach a stage in which all three of its values were associated in due proportion and proper adjustment, only through a gradual progress beginning with stages in which it was but the embodiment of sensuous, or at most of sensuous and emotional, values. That it did, as a matter of fact, go through these evolutionary phases, can be demonstrated by a brief and summary account of the actual periods in its history.

In the first periods that we can make out by theory and deduction—prehistoric periods that left no records—the values sought appear to have been preponderantly sensuous and expressive. The earliest savages, like all children even to this day, who make a noise for the mere joy of it, probably used their voices and their instruments chiefly as nerve-stimulants. As in the realm of color their tastes ran to vivid reds and greens and blues, barbaric hues that assaulted the eye with a potent stimulation, so in music they were addicted to the drums and trumpets, to shoutings, and wild contortions, to whatever gave them a generous measure of sensation, whether in ears or muscles. Their motto in art was doubtless the one which some unknown humorist, perhaps a Frenchman, has attributed to the Germans, in all departments from art to gastronomy—“Plenty of it.” They did, to be sure, take a certain satisfaction in the expressiveness of their wailings and shoutings, and even in the crude formal designs into which they shaped them, generally by mere repetition of some easily recognizable formula; but their chief pleasure was to make a good, rousing noise. Of these preliminary stages in the arts of dance and song it is impossible, however, to form any certain ideas. We can only rely upon conjecture and inference, supposing that something like them preceded the stages about which we have more reliable information.

The earliest music of which historic records remain is that of the Greeks. By painstaking study of the musical inscriptions on stone that have survived the centuries, of the instruments actually in existence, or described by ancient Greek writers, and of the technical treatises on music which are preserved, scholars have been able to substantiate a very few meager facts about the musical practices of the most artistic of nations. On the whole, these facts are singularly disappointing. Forgetting that music is the youngest of the arts, one is apt to expect of the Greeks that wondrous subtlety and maturity in it which they showed in sculpture, architecture, and poetry. A people possessed of so surpassing an artistic instinct, one is apt to think, must have carried its music to a high pitch of perfection. Investigation shows, nevertheless, that the reverse was the case. Indeed, no testimony could speak more eloquently for the deliberation and continuity of the growth of music than the childishness with which it was practiced by a people so gifted as the Greeks with every fineness of nature, but at the disadvantage of living too near the time at which it emerged from savagery.

The Greeks used music chiefly as an adjunct to their poetry, and were accustomed to chant long epics in what would seem to us a monotonous sing-song, generally if not always without accompaniment. Their love for moderation and their avoidance of the passionate, harsh, or over-expressive, moreover, impelled them to exclude from their gamut both the lowest and the highest tones of the voice, so that even their tonal material was confined to a range of about two octaves. The tones included in this limited range, however, they classified and disposed with the greatest ingenuity. The intervals at which tone should follow tone were dictated by seven arbitrary schemes called modes, and each mode was supposed to have its peculiar quality of expression. Thus the Lydian mode, corresponding to our modern major scale, was considered voluptuous and enfeebling, while the Doric mode, an idea of which may be gained by playing a scale, all on white keys, beginning with E, was thought to breathe manliness, vigor, and dignity. They used no harmony, and introduced rhythm only by the metre of the verses sung. Consequently it is easy to see that they can have had from their music but little æsthetic delight, which depends on the grouping into harmonic or rhythmic forms of the tonal material; but must have valued it chiefly for its sensuous beauty, and for its power to enhance the expressiveness of their poetry.

It is nevertheless noteworthy that all three kinds of value did exist in the music of the Greeks, though the third was still in a rudimentary stage. As a result of the generally equal length of their verses or lines of poetry, the melody that accompanied them tended to be divided into equal sections remotely resembling our modern “phrases”; and these sections tended to balance each other, and so to give the sense of symmetrical form. Furthermore, it was customary to end each line with a fall of the voice analogous to the downward inflection of a speaking voice at the end of a sentence. These downward inflections, called cadences, from a Latin verb meaning “to fall,” afforded a convenient means of dividing off the musical as well as the poetic flow into definite parts like segments in a piece of bamboo or the inches on a tape-line; and in the subsequent development of musical structure these divisions, marked by cadences, became the indispensable elements in a highly complex organism. Thus the Greeks, in spite of the immaturity of their music, considered in and for itself, did actually make valuable contributions to the progress of the art. Their period was one of promise rather than of fruition; but it contained the seeds of further growth. It is often called the Monophonic or “one-voiced” period, from the fact that their chants were purely melodic, employing but one voice at a time, without harmonic support.

With the simultaneous employment of more than one voice, music passed out of its infancy. The Polyphonic period, so called from Greek words signifying “many-voiced,” extended, through all the Middle Ages, up to so recent a date as the end of the sixteenth century, there to culminate in the remarkable compositions of Palestrina. In duration it was the longest of all the periods; but this is not surprising when we consider, in the first place, the almost insuperable difficulties to be overcome before even two voices could be pleasantly and fluently conducted together; in the second place, the absence of all prototypes or models for the first experimenters to work from; and, above all, the surprising distance that separates Palestrina’s ingenious, intricate, and beautiful tone-fabrics, written sometimes in as many as sixteen parts, from the rude and protoplasmic chants of two voices, singing an interval of a “fifth” apart, from which they were developed.

That type of chant in which two voices, one a fifth higher than the other, sang the same melody, primitive as it was, and intolerable to modern ears, was to its originators a convenient and pleasant device. It was convenient because, the natural range of soprano and tenor voices being about a fifth above that of contraltos and basses, choirs could chant at this interval more naturally than at the octave. It was pleasant because, while it left each of the two melodies distinctly audible, it produced by their combination a harmonic richness that must have fallen on mediæval ears with an unwonted splendor. Organum, as this device of singing in fifths was called, must be ever memorable in the history of music as the beginning of harmony.