If music be the language of the emotions, its germs must be those sounds through which joy, grief, love, fear, rage, wonder, and longing find natural, unpremeditated, and often involuntary expression. The fact that the import of these sounds, whether produced by man, beast, or bird, is unmistakable, has led some writers to accord music the honor of having been the initial means of intercourse between members of the human family,—the original language. This is hardly consistent, for life is mostly unrhythmic monotone, punctuated only here and there by episodes fruitful in musical germs.
Scientific observation has established the fact that all of the higher species of living things have forms of vocal intercommunication. Like human beings, animals have forms of speech comporting with their degrees of intelligence and needs, but quite apart from these forms, they and man have mutually intelligible codes of emotional expression. These codes are not identical in less essential details, nor are they equally comprehensive, but they spring from a common source. They vary in character according to the qualities of instinctive feeling, refined or coarse, that dominate the creatures that employ them.
The lowest grade of animal life which possesses vocal apparatus is susceptible of but three emotions—anger, longing, and fear—in such measure as to elicit expression. The higher grades feel joy, love, sorrow, anger, fear, and longing.
Music has significance only when fraught with messages from the composer to the hearer. Therefore those sounds which most clearly voice strong emotions are the most pregnant musical germs. Isolated shouts of triumph, rage, and joy, or cries of pain, fear, and entreaty, appeal to our sensibilities, but they do not suggest music, although its line of development from these primal elements is traceable. It began with the first intellectual recognition of the adequacy of tonal expression, when those sounds which had been involuntarily produced as the result of sensations, were placed by the human mind in the category of expressive means.
At this point our germs came under the influence of deliberate purpose. Intellect took spontaneous shouts, cries, and moans in hand, and has gradually endowed them with continuity, life pulsation (rhythm), and form; has made them express sentiments surcharged with emotions, creating a definitely significant atmosphere (stimmung). This pervading atmosphere or mood, which is a vital element in successful musical effort, must be in no wise confounded with the situations incident to and arising through the descriptive (program) composer's art. The first is personal, a heart mood; the second is impersonal, a brain picture.
From this first step in musical evolution intellect has been more and more closely associated with emotion, as the composer's intentions have become more definite and his forms more extended.
Music's progress has not been uniform, for it is most sensitive, and the conditions have often been unfavorable. It has followed, to a great degree, the tidal fluctuations of refinement and fine sensibility in the masses; for although its growth is dependent upon certain conditions, these necessary conditions, if confined within narrow limits, or when found only in isolated persons, will not suffice.
It must breathe a free air, full of sympathetic feeling and impulse, and it must have a broad, deep soil in which to spread its roots, for it aspires heavenward, up through the material into the ideal.