Into this mood of meditation I was drawn the other evening after listening to Wagner’s “Procession of the Gods.” How the music takes hold of you, dips you in a sea of noise, and makes you feel alive all over. For this reason Wagner’s grand music is grand,—is greater than you. Your whole frame is plunged into an elemental excitement to which every nerve fibre thrills, and you feel conscious that latent impulses native to your being are awakened into activity; the barbaric strain in us responds, and exalts us beyond our conventional state. Noise or music? Well, technically we make a distinction. Ask a casuist what is the difference between virtue and vice, and he will tell you it all depends,—one may be as bad as the other. So of noise and music, one may be as bad as the other; aye, even worse. By all accounts much music is; but that may be prejudice. I have heard that some people decry Wagner’s music as a saturnalia of hubbub and noise. But it has one redeeming folly,—it lives: hence the censors, being human, often live to pardon.
Our scientific definitions of noise and music serve the purpose of science, but the truth is that with nature noise and music are identical in origin. There is orderly noise and disorderly noise, and music is of the orderly kind,—that is all. Discording noise, undiscording noise. Milton understood this, writing of singing
With melodious noise,
and replying
With undiscording voice.
I want to emphasize this teaching, want to impress you with the conviction that all the excitement we are seeking in our most modern style of music is but a reversion to our original instinctive desire for a dynamical excitement,—not an excitement merely æsthetical and phychical, but actually moving, forceful, elemental; a true barbaric love of stir and thrill,—and rightly so. If you think, you will find in all our modern ways a tendency to this reversion to a belief in and a culture of our original instincts. The realism of the day is the expression of a desire to understand life as it is to the individual. The hideousness of a merely conglomerate community is making itself felt upon every plane of society, and the concurrent aspiration is to be more human.
Culture will one day exhaust the conventional, and in music the tendency is apparent. The vast volume of choral sound we listen to stirs us with contagious emotion. Our pleasure in grand organs with their roll of diapasons and arresting challenge of trumpets and tubas; our willing yielding up of ourselves to be swayed hither and thither for hours in the power of the massive orchestra, that wonderful machine of nerves and muscles,—what does it mean? It is all dynamical, all barbaric. It is not only the ear that is concerned in listening, the whole being is under strain and stress. Do I hence imply that it is wrong, is reprehensible so to employ music? By no means. The moral of it is that the strong innate tendencies of our nature are best recognized, and used; nay, that they will be, will force themselves to the surface, and that under culture we may train them to our advantage. For civilization must go forward, is not content to-day with that which contented it yesterday. The appetite grows by that it feeds on; more and more we ask for intensity of excitement.
A scientific writer of an earlier generation, I think it was Leslie, defined the ear as an organ of touch, which we now under the evolutionary investigation of development understand it to be; and this is what I would have you recognise, that sound is able to touch us, able to awaken a net-work of nerve organization, to make the lip tense, to cause the eyelids to quiver and the heart to throb; the breath to come and go in accord with the aërial pulsations,—as a hand that is laid upon us to arrest or to exalt, to invigorate or to soothe. Hearing is an exalted feeling.
The Chinese, long before Englishmen existed, found delight in the dynamical influences of great sounds. Their largest and most potent sources of music were bells and chimes, gongs and drums. These supplied them with that excitement which is afforded us by the masses of sound from our large orchestras and grand organs. We say that their music is nothing more than deafening noise. They say that our music is no music; it is bad noise. So it is only matter of choice how you shall be stimulated. It’s all the same,—opium or whisky: purely a racial question.
Very early the Chinese attained great skill in the making of bells; and it may be that among these people the art of Bell Founding originated, and from the east extended over Europe. Bells are particularly associated with religious ceremonials in all countries, and have generally superstitious credentials. The Chinese frighten dragons with them; and the Christians exorcise devils with them. The Russians, who bridge the earth between Europe and China, are especially reverential to bells. The great bell at the Kremlin, Moscow—over 21ft. in height and 67ft. in circumference—is world famous, as we have known since we were boys.