From Grieg to Brahms: Studies of Some Modern Composers and Their Art

by Daniel Gregory Mason

However interesting may be the study of an art through the personalities of the artists who have produced it, and such study, since art is a mode of human expression, is indeed essential, it must be supplemented by at least some general knowledge of the long continuous evolution in which the work of the most brilliant individual is but a moment, a phase. The quality of a man's work in art, and especially, as will be seen in a moment, in music, depends not alone on the depth of his character and the force of his talent, but also largely on the technical resources he owes to others, on the means for expressing himself that he finds ready to his hand. Whatever his personal powers or limitations, the value of his work will be determined not more by these than by the helps and hindrances of his artistic inheritance.

The great edifice of art, in fact, is like those Gothic cathedrals on which generations of men successively labored; thousands of common workmen hewed their foundation stones; finer minds, architects, smiths, brass founders, glass makers and sculptors, wrought and decorated the superstructures; and the work of each, whatever his personal skill and devotion, was valuable only because it built upon and added to that of all the rest. The soaring spires are firmly based on blocks of stone ploddingly adjusted; the windows, often of such a perfect beauty that they seem created rather than constructed, had nevertheless to be built up bit by bit; and all the marvelous organism of pillars, arches and buttresses is so delicately solid, so precariously stable, that had one stress been miscalculated, one joint inaccurately made, the whole would collapse. So it is with the edifice of art, and particularly with that of music, which depends for its very material on the labors of musicians. Pigments, clay, marble, the materials of the plastic arts, exist already in the world; but the whole ladder of fixed tones on which music is built is the product of man's æsthetic sense, and had to be created slowly and laboriously by many generations of men. The successions of chords which every banjo player strums in his accompaniments were the subject of long trial by the mediæval composers. The hymn tune that any boy can write is modeled on a symmetrical scheme of phrases developed by countless experimenters. It took men centuries to select and arrange the eight tones of the ordinary scale, and centuries more to learn how to combine them in chords. And the most eloquent modern works depend on this long evolution of resources just as inevitably as the Gothic spire rests on the hewn stones so carefully laid. In the art, as in the cathedral, the seen rests upon the unseen, the beautiful upon the solid, the complex upon the simple, the new upon the old. The product of a thousand artists, music is as dependent on each as the coral reef on the tiny indispensable body of each insect; and on the other hand the individual musician, whatever his ability, is great only as he uses the equipment his fellows have prepared—«the greatest is the most indebted man.»

If, then, we would justly value the half dozen composers who have done most for music in our day, we must add to our understanding of them as persons a knowledge of the general development in which they play a part; we must gain some sense of that great process of musical growth from which they inherit their resources, to which they make their various contributions, and in relation to which alone they can be fairly compared and appreciated. After examining the general course of musical history, ascertaining some fundamental principles, and applying these principles to our special judgments, we shall be able to perceive the greatest musicians of our day in their relations, and to get a perspective view of modern music in which they shall take their proper places.

I

If we wish to get an idea of primeval music, to see from what impulses it took rise, we have only to study the musical activities of children and savages, in whom we have primeval man made contemporary, the remote past brought conveniently into the present to be observed. When we make such a study we find that both children and savages express their feelings by gestures and cries, that under the sway of emotion they either dance or sing. To them quiet, silent feeling is impossible. Are they joyful, they leap and laugh; are they angry, they strike and shout; are they sad, they rock and moan. Moreover, we can discriminate the kinds of feeling that are expressed by these cries and gestures. Roughly speaking, bodily movement is the natural outlet of active vitality, of the joy of life and the lust of living, while it is the more contemplative emotions—love, grief, reverie, devotion—that find vocal utterance. The war-dances and revels of savages, accompanied by drum and tomtom, are gesticulatory; their love-songs and ululations over the dead are vocal. In the same way children in their moments of enthusiasm are wont to march about shouting and stamping in time, all their limbs galvanized with nervous force; and it is when the wave of energy has passed and they sit on the floor engrossed in blocks or dolls that they sing to themselves their curious undulating chants. Even in ourselves we can observe the same tendencies, checked though they be by counter-impulses in our more complex temperaments: when we are gay we walk briskly, clicking our heels in time and perhaps whistling a catch; in our dreamier hours we are quiet, or merely hum a tune under our breath. Thus through all human nature runs the tendency to vent feeling, active and contemplative, in those bodily movements and vocal utterances which underlie the two great generators of music, dance and song.

Such activities, however, are by no means as yet dance and song. At first they are no more than mere reflex actions, as spontaneous and unthinking as the «Ow» of the man who stubs his toe. The emotion is felt, and out comes the gesture or cry; that is all. It is the organism's way of letting off steam. It is not expression, not being prompted by a desire to communicate the feeling, but merely by the impulse to be unburdened of it. Before there can be true expression or communication, there must be two more links added to the chain of which these automatic activities are only the first. The second link is imitation. According to a theory widely exploited in recent years, we tend to imitate whatever we see another do. With children the tendency is so strong that a large part of their time and energy is devoted to elaborate impersonation and make-believe, and the entire basis of their education is acquired through this directly assimilative faculty. In adults it is less active, but every sensitive person knows how difficult it is not to imitate foreign accents, stammering, and other petty mannerisms, and few are so callous that they can withstand the infection of strong stimuli like the gestures and cries of emotion. The wailing baby in the street car, who moves all the other babies within hearing to wail also (if they be not already at it independently); the dog baying the moon until all within earshot join in the serenade; the negro at the camp-meeting clapping his hands until the whole company is in a rhythmic ecstasy—these are examples of the contagion of cries and gestures. Bearing them in mind, it is easy to see that the vocal or bodily acts which in the first place are mere reflexes of feeling, performed with no thought of expression, but only for personal easement, will generally, nevertheless, prompt similar acts in others. The performances of the individual will not end with himself; thanks to the instinct of imitation, they will be very widely copied.

But now—and this is the third link of the chain—bodily acts set up mental states, and a man cannot gesticulate or vocalize without feeling the emotions of which his actions are, as we say, expressive. «We feel sorry because we cry,» writes Professor William James in his brilliant, paradoxical way, «angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble;» and whether or not we agree with his extreme view that the mental state is entirely a reverberation of bodily disturbances, we cannot but realize that in all these cases executing the expression tends to give us the feeling. He who persistently smiles will end by being cheerful, and a moderate amount of sighing or groaning will make any one melancholy. Above all, the imitation of vocal movements, such as we all go through at least incipiently when we hear melody, and the «keeping time» that strong dance-music so irresistibly prompts—these actions very noticeably set up in us their appropriate states of feeling. We not only imitate the lip motions and throat contractions of a persuasive speaker or singer, but doing so fills us with the emotion that prompts his utterance. Tired soldiers not only step out to a potently rhythmical tune—that is, they not only imitate the beat—but they actually feel less weary, more energetic, so long as the stimulus lasts. Once a bodily activity is set up, no matter how, it arouses the mental state proper to it; in a word, expression generates emotion.

Obviously, then, if in the first place the natural outlets of emotional excitement are bodily motions and vocal sounds, if in the second place the observation of such motions and sounds arouses the impulse to imitate them, and if finally this imitation produces again in the imitator the states of mind which first set the whole process going, then these motions and sounds, these inchoate germs of dance and song, possess an enormous latent power of expression, and need only to be systematized to become a wonderfully eloquent language. Such a language, in fact, is music.

II

At this point, however, it is important not to go too fast. These crude gestures and cries by which primeval man expressed his feelings, though they were the germs out of which music grew, were as yet no more music, which is not only expressive sound, but formed, articulate sound, than an infant's cooings are speech. So far they were mere ebullitions, purposeless and formless; before they could become communicative they must become definite, they must take on some organic structure. Now gestures, bodily movements, are very easily grouped together by means of accent. Every walker knows that it is difficult not to emphasize alternate steps, grouping the unaccented with the accented into a cluster of two. Every waltzer makes a similar grouping of three steps, one accented, the other two subordinate. Some such system of grouping is instinctively adopted whenever we have a series of impressions regularly recurring in time. Let the reader, listening to the ticking of a watch, note how impossible it is to attend to each tick by itself. He will inevitably group them in twos; the accent may come on the first or on the last of the group, but he cannot hear them as exactly equal, any more than in walking he can put exactly equal stress on each step. It was this tendency of the mind to group its impressions on a basis of equal time measurements and unequal accents that led at the dawn of musical history to meter or rhythm, which is as persistent in music as it is in poetry. Metrical form was the natural means of giving definition to bodily movements, and as soon as it was developed enough to produce regular, easily imitated steps out of the chaotic gestures of naïve feeling, Dance was born.