Recent Developments in European Thought

by Unknown

But I must not allow this little preliminary apology to stray into the field of abstract aesthetics. The subject proposed to me, the correlation of the progress of specifically musical thought during the last generation with the progress of European thought in general, is so extensive that I cannot within the necessary limits attempt to deal with more than some of the most salient features, and even those I shall have to treat in very broad outlines, with a certain disregard of detail and nicely balancing qualifications. I shall only attempt to put before you what seem to me the most prominent considerations, and to throw out suggestions which I hope you may perhaps, if sufficiently interested, develop at leisure for yourselves.

In several ways the correlation of the musician with the non-musical world is now more intimate and conscious than ever before. Forty or fifty years ago—in spite of brilliant individual exceptions—musicians were, in the main, self-centred craftsmen; they were inclined to drift into a backwater, away from the chief currents of the intellectual, or often indeed of the general artistic life of their day, and they seem on the whole to have been content to have it so. In England we were somewhat behindhand, no doubt, in our participation in the gradual but steady change. But men like Parry and Stanford brought their profession into close touch with the general culture of their contemporaries, and made the universities and music understand each other; Grove, the first director of the Royal College, himself a man whose professional career (not to mention his amateur interests) had ended in music after ranging through civil engineering, business organization, biblical archaeology, and the editorship of a great literary magazine, preached with infectious enthusiasm the new doctrine of the larger outlook; and for the last thirty years, even if our practice may have occasionally seemed somewhat to lag behind, at any rate our theory has not looked back. Musicians have been granted their claim to be judged by the same intellectual and moral standards as other reasonable people; it is a modest claim, but, especially in England, it has had to be fought for.

And the entry on this wider heritage, which English musicians, apart from an exception or two such as Pierson and Bennett, won for the first time a generation ago, has had in every country a definite influence on composition, especially (as is only natural) on the composer's attitude towards the musical setting of literature. I should be far from saying that any modern is a greater song-writer than Schubert; but it is obvious that the followers of Wolf and Duparc and Moussorgsky are aiming at something different. They may not express the general mood of the poem more faithfully, but they certainly attach more importance to its lyrical structure and to flexibly expressive diction: they accept the poet as an equal colleague. The serious song-writer can hardly any longer, like Schumann in his setting of Heine's 'Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen', afford to stultify great poetry by quoting from memory and getting the adjectives deplorably wrong. Nor can he, like Beethoven in 'Adelaide' and the 'Entfernte Geliebte' cycle, let himself weave musical structures many sizes too large for the proper structure of the words, which have consequently to be repeated over and over again with very little regard for poetical or even common sense. Schumann and Beethoven, especially the former, were culturally very far from narrow-minded men; but there was not in their days any general cultural pressure sufficiently strong to influence them as composers. Now, the pressure is so strong that few can resist. Most composers have now fully learned their lesson of a fitting politeness towards their poet-colleagues—learned it in the main, so far as not intuitively, from the high examples set by Wolf and the modern French school—and have, moreover, come to recognize the duty of setting such words as may be fit not only to be sung but to be read, a duty shockingly neglected by many of the greatest geniuses in musical history.

And the cultural pressure has gone farther than this. Not only has the increasing complexity of life broadened the musician's personal outlook, professional or unprofessional: it has also modified, whether for better or for worse, the outlook of the music itself. We may conveniently divide all music into two great classes: 'absolute' music, in which the composer appeals to the listener through the direct medium of the pure sound and that alone; and 'applied' music, in which the appeal is more or less conditioned by words, either explicit or implicit by association, or by bodily movement of some kind, dramatic or not, or by any other non-musical factor that affects the nature of the composer's thought and the method of its presentation. Up to the present generation, instrumental music, unconnected with the stage, has been virtually identifiable with absolute music; there are a handful of exceptions—sporadic pieces, usually though not invariably thrown off in composers' relatively easy-going moods, and an isolated figure or two of serious revolt, like Berlioz and Liszt—but they only serve to prove the rule. Now, this identification is far from holding good. More consciously than ever before, instrumental music is straining beyond its own special domain and asking for external spurs to creative activity. And it asks in various quarters. It may ask merely the hint of particular emotional moods conditioned by special circumstances; or it may vie with the poet and the novelist in analysis of character. The psychology, again, may pass into the illustration of incident, whether partially realistic or purely imaginative, or into the illustration of philosophical tenets, as in Strauss's version of Nietzsche's doctrines in his Also sprach Zarathustra or Scriabin's of theosophy in his Prometheus. Or the composer may go directly to painting, whether actual as in Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem on Böcklin's picture of 'The island of the dead', or visionary as in Debussy's 'La cathédrale engloutie'. There is indeed no end to such instances.

All this development of instrumental music into territories more or less adjacent makes a very imposing show; and it is so markedly a product of the last generation that we easily over-estimate the novelty of its essential results. As I have said, instrumental music is more and more asking for external spurs to creative activity; but this does not mean that music as a whole is, so to speak, breaking loose from its moorings and adventurously voyaging on to uncharted seas. What it means is, simply, that, under the stress of modern culture, the barriers between vocal and instrumental, dramatic and non-dramatic, music have been to a great extent abolished.

We may consider music as normally involving three persons: the composer, the performer, and the listener. Until the present generation, the role of the listener was normally quite passive. All that he had to do was to keep his ears open to the music, and further, when required, his ears open to words and his eyes to dramatic presentation. The composer and the performers did everything for him. But now they do not. The modern composer urges that, just as vocal music demands from the listener a separate knowledge of the words, so instrumental music may demand, as a condition of full understanding, a separate knowledge of some verbally expressible signification. The parallel no doubt holds well enough even if we answer, as we certainly may, that in much vocal music the words are so unimportant that it really does not musically matter if they are unintelligible or inaudible. But this latter-day demand on the listener is considerable. The listener to Strauss's Don Quixote, for example, must, in order to appreciate in full measure any section of this long work, have a fairly close acquaintance with Cervantes' book—whether derived from an analytical programme or from personal reading: there are neither words nor acting to give a clue, nor does the printed music itself give the slightest assistance, except in so far that a couple of themes are labelled with the names of the 'Knight of the sorrowful countenance' himself and Sancho Panza. Sometimes, no doubt, a composer helps at any rate the purchaser of his music more; but to the listener he gives nothing, and leaves his thought, as embodied in the mere title, to be reached as best it may. The modern composer makes these demands on the listener continually; and he does so simply because the sphere of the music-lover's imaginativeness and general culture has become so greatly enlarged that he thinks he can fairly afford to take the risk.

But we may well ask whether the music of suggestion has not, in its restless anxiety to correlate itself with non-musical culture, reached or perhaps even overstepped the limits of musical possibility. It is no question of a composer's rights: he has a right to do anything he can, provided that he preserves a due proportion between essentials and unessentials. And judicious criticism will turn, if not a blind, at any rate a short-sighted eye towards a great composer's occasional realistic escapades, which, however irritating they may perhaps be to others, are to him only a part of the general background of his texture; after all, in their different media, Bach and most of the other giants have occasionally allowed themselves similar little flings. It is a question not of rights, but of powers. The poet and the painter and the novelist, not to mention all the non-human agents in the universe, are bound to do a good many things much better than the composer can; and even if he may personally aspire to be a kind of spectator of all time and existence, he has no means of making his listeners see eye to eye with himself. The risk he runs may be too great. Realizing as we must that all this ferment of suggestion-seeking has undoubtedly vivified and enriched musical development in not a few aspects, we may nevertheless feel, and feel profoundly, that there is a cardinal weakness inherent in it. A composer may so easily be tempted to forget that it is after all by his music, and by his music alone, that he stands or falls. If he asks too much extra-musical sympathy from the listener, he defeats his own end. The listener will inevitably concentrate on the unessentials, and will as likely as not get them quite wrong; he may indeed indulge the habit of realistic suspicion to such an extent as to make him become thoughtlessly unfair and credit the composer with sins of taste, whether babyish or pathological, of which the objurgated culprit may be altogether innocent. If a composer plays with fire, he is fairly sure to burn some one's fingers, even if he successfully avoids burning his own. And anyhow it is waste of time, and worse, for us to cudgel our brains to fits of entirely unnecessary inventiveness when the composer has left his music unlabelled. We sometimes hear of children being encouraged to give verbal or dramatic expression of their own to instrumental music; that is not education—very much the reverse. It is merely the expense of spirit in a waste of fancifulness, the wilful murder of all feeling for music as such.

The feeling for music as such, that is still the one thing needful. And by this canon, so it seems to me, we must judge all these alarums and excursions of modern composers. If we hold firmly by it, we shall not be unduly worried when we learn that the music which seems so perfectly to realize the composer's expressed meaning has been originally designed by him quite otherwise—as has happened oftener than is generally known; though this fact does not excuse wilful contradictions of a composer's definite intentions, as in the vulgar perversion of Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherezade popularized by the latest fashionable toy, the Russian Ballet, which would do more musically unexceptionable service were it to confine itself to works specially designed for it, such as the fascinating and finely-wrought scores of Stravinsky, or concert works like Balakireff's Thamar, based on programmes that can be mimetically reproduced without unfaithfulness. And anyhow, in the midst of all these appeals to the eye or the literary memory or what not, we may call to mind the simple truth that music is something to be heard with either the inward or the outward ear, and if we are too much distracted otherwise, our hearing sense suffers. We shall pay too high a price for our latter-day correlation of music with literature and the other arts if the music itself has to play the part of Cinderella. 'We do it wrong, being so majestical.'

Again, we may endeavour to correlate recent musical development with the development of the conceptions of nationality and race. With nationality in the strictly political sense music has, indeed, nothing to do: there is no inborn musical expression common to all the inhabitants of Switzerland, or the United States, or the British Empire (or indeed the British Islands). And if we abandon political nationality entirely and think of national music solely in terms of race, we still have to make very large deductions. Heredity counts, it would seem, for far less than environment in musical development—especially so in these days of free intercourse. Nevertheless, we may to some extent isolate the racial element; and within the last generation increasingly vigorous efforts have been made to do so—though they have perhaps neglected sufficiently to observe that racial ancestry is often an extremely mixed quantity.

To the musician, this insistence on race is in the main a quite modern thing. It is true that, as the successive waves of Italian influence flowed northward in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, they met in England, France, and Germany, and, at the end, in Russia, native cross-currents; and there was plenty of controversy between the opposing parties. But this controversy was mainly concerned with matters of technique; whereas the whole force of the modern movement consists in its reliance on the simple folk-music which is supposed to be characteristic of the race as a whole, and about which hardly any composers of the past consciously troubled themselves at all. Haydn and Beethoven, no doubt, used folk-tunes in their own works to some extent, but the former's adaptations from the uncultivated tunes of his own Croatian people are polished nearly out of recognition, and when the latter commandeers from Ireland or Russia or elsewhere, nothing but pure Beethovenishness remains after his masterful hand has done its will. We may say, indeed, that nationality, as such, was never in their time a conscious factor in musical composition.