Music and Its Masters

by O. B. Boise

To illustrate my theory: if Beethoven were now living and composing music, it would necessarily differ as much from that which he did produce, in form and means, as our life conditions and modes differ from those of seventy-five years ago, for such a genius would be quick to feel the presence of new elements in either his material surroundings or art atmosphere.

Some of these new elements are helpful to the composer, while others tend to stifle his spontaneity or to distort the outlines and too much brighten the colors of his tone pictures. In the first class I would put the universal increase of musical intelligence; the mechanical devices, which, as applied to the organ, piano, and most of the orchestral wind instruments, greatly increase their efficiency; Berlioz's idea of color integrity, which has revolutionized orchestral writing; the decrease of conventionality in form; the greater intensity in harmonic successions; and the somewhat Bach-like import with which the writer of to-day attempts to endow the bass and middle voices.

At the head of the second class (harmful elements) I should place the immense practicality of our age, which intrudes its steam ploughs upon our rural pictures, and, with its unending procession of mechanical innovations, crowds poetic fancy into dark recesses, where she survives but does not thrive; then comes the feverish haste to become rich or famous, which so dominates our generation as to disturb the contemplative moods of the artist, imparting sometimes a suggestion of prosaic utility to his creations, and in other cases endowing them with incongruous form and colors; and last, but not least, comes the modern habit of self-introspection, which, springing from a laudable desire to reason philosophically, smothers spontaneity.

Beethoven would have rebelled against these adverse conditions, but he would nevertheless have been influenced by them. His spirit will defy time, but his models and methods have become antiquated. A modern composer, however gifted, could not follow them without sacrificing his claims to recognition.

We willingly allow Bach and Beethoven to transport us back into their times, and we draw refreshment from the natural atmosphere that pervades them, but would reject a modern product which embodied similar elements; for they would, in such case, be artificial, not the elements suggested by and characteristic of an emotional mood.

Notation, which defined musical achievements, and thus fitted each stage of development to serve as a stepping-stone to formulated art, was unaccountably long in coming.

There is no absolute certainty as to who invented our present system of writing music, but the honor is usually accredited to Huchbold, of Flanders (840-930). He was a learned Benedictine monk and an ardent worker in the field of music. Huchbold certainly employed a form of notation at least suggestive of that now in use, but, according to some historians, Huchbold's own writings mention the device as if not original with him. He left examples of part writing, which, however, mark no improvement on the implied methods of the ancient Egyptians (suggested through the mural paintings referred to in Chapter II.), for his voices progress in parallel fourths, fifths, and octaves, and consequently have no independent significance.

The earliest example of modern notation is to be seen in the Winchester Cathedral. It is the setting of a prayer, and is supposed to have been written in 1016 A.D. England also claims to have furnished the first example of contrapuntal composition,—a four-voiced canon with two free bassi, written in, or prior to, 1240. If this be authentic, it is a phenomenon, like "thunder out of a clear sky," for there was not at that time, nor for three hundred years afterwards, any manifest scientific tendency in England's musical methods. This piece may have been a direct or indirect product of the Flanders school, of which Huchbold was the progenitor.

This learned priest, who strove to materialize and co-ordinate musical means (not its spirit), may be taken as an index of the intellectual bent of his time in the Netherlands, whose people, undaunted by human foes, or by the more merciless sea, which was a perpetual menace to their very existence, devoted much attention to the development of the arts and sciences and to building up industries. Their intelligent and persistent enterprise walled out the North Sea and made it a tractable servant, and created on those reclaimed marshes a civilization which for several hundred years represented the highest attainments of man.