And so we come to the music of our own time, which is but a logical and inevitable result of a century of growth and evolution. What, above all, is characteristic of it? First, its devotion to a "programme"—to a literary or dramatic or pictorial subject. Our modern tone-poet—as we aptly call him—having found ready to his hand an art which can convey with extraordinary vividness moods of longing and despair, ecstasy and jubilation, must make it still more specific and articulate. He writes a huge orchestral work and calls it, let us say, "Death and Transfiguration," presenting with it an elaborate poem descriptive of the agonies and hallucinations, the memories and visions, of a dying man. He then invites us to find in his music a description, which he produces by means of every harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and orchestral device at his command, of the subject which he has set before us. To achieve his end—to express all those varied emotions of anguish, terror, longing, despair, aspiration, triumph—he stops at nothing: he heaps dissonance upon dissonance, he writes in several keys at once, he assaults our ears with what would have seemed to the placid soul of Haydn the pandemonium of a mad-house. Yet, if he be a genius, we are swayed and enthralled. We even derive a double pleasure from this new kind of art-work, which is at once music and drama.
Such, in brief, is the method of the modern "tone-poet." He is, as has been said, both musician and dramatist, symphonist and poet. Nor is this all: he can be a painter as well, and can, by the aid of suggestion and the broad analogies of his tonal palette, limn for us with his instruments such an exquisite and magical picture of the dawn as Charles Martin Loeffler paints in his orchestral fantasy after Verlaine, "La Bonne Chanson"; or such a portrait as is limned by Strauss, in his "Don Quixote," of the crack-brained and lovable knight of Cervantes. Music, to-day, can annotate the art of the painter—as witness the symphonic commentary by the Swiss composer, Hans Huber, on certain paintings by Böcklin; it can be sportively delineative of personalities—as witness Sir Edward Elgar's orchestral characterization of the peculiarities of various of his friends; it can be portentously metaphysical, as in Strauss's formidable "Also Sprach Zarathustra": it has become, in brief, "a tongue of all life."
FOOTNOTES:
[2] "Programme-music" is the infelicitous term accepted, by common consent, as characterizing that class of music which, unaccompanied by words spoken or sung, aims to depict or suggest definite moods, objects, or events. This it accomplishes with the aid of a title, explanatory note, argument, or programme, which must needs be made known to the hearer in order that the purpose of the composer may be fulfilled. It is opposed, in musical terminology, to "absolute music," which is self-contained, having no other aim than, as Wagner expressed it, "the arousing of pleasure in beautiful forms."
BANTOCK
(Granville Bantock: born in London, August 7, 1868; now living in Birmingham, England)
TONE-POEM, "THE WITCH OF ATLAS" [3]
This tone-poem is noteworthy, aside from its intrinsic quality, for the completeness with which it fulfils the obligations imposed by logic and consistency upon the writer of programme-music. Here is an orchestral work inspired by certain portions of Shelley's poem—a musical illustration of various passages which in themselves contain the imaginative essence of that extraordinary fantasy. But the composer has not been content merely to tell us that his music is a tone-poem "after Shelley"; he has gone further: he has quoted as a preface to the score the precise passages in the poem which suggested his music; and opposite each passage he has placed a key-letter, which refers to a duplicate printed at the beginning of the corresponding illustrative passage in the music. That is to say, he has enabled us to follow him throughout the entire course of his musical exposition, not dubiously and by guesswork, but with certitude and intelligent comprehension. We are not put to it to decide whether, for example, the mellifluous andante passage for four horns, in the middle section of the work, is intended as an illustration of the lines in the poem descriptive of the "green and over-arching bower" inhabited by those who had received the Witch's panacea, or of the lines which celebrate the radiance of her beauty: we know precisely what it is intended to represent, and are in a position not only to feel its effect as sheer music, but to appreciate its expressive force.[4]