A Deeper Music
Margaret C. Anderson
A piano, alone on a stage; shadowed light around and above it; ivory and ebony moving out of the shadow; and the silence that hangs there before the musician plays. There is nothing like it in the world,—nothing more wonderful....
There are “revolutions” going on in all the arts. The revolution in poetry is coming in for a lot of discussion, so that even the layman is conscious of it. His feeling about it is that some effeminate beings called Imagists are trying to emasculate the noble art of poetry. But the thing is happening right under his nose and he is careful to keep posted, in order to be able to defend his favorite theory. As for the stage, he knows that Gordon Craig and Rhinehart have been using screens instead of marble pillars painted against red velvet curtains. In painting he knows all about the cubists and futurists; he even knows that the donkey’s tail story was something of a joke. In sculpture he has heard of an unreasonable reaction from Rodin, and he has probably seen Brzeska’s head of Ezra Pound. In the ballet he has a rather clear idea of why the old classical form wouldn’t serve; perhaps because the Russians have demonstrated so clearly what it was they could do with the new form. In opera he thinks very little is happening. He is right.
But the slowest revolution of all—and the most interesting—is that which is just beginning in the art of the piano. It is the slowest because it is not the public alone that is bound to the old form. The masters themselves have not visioned toward a need that would make a new form inevitable. The need is—a deeper music. And it is the most interesting because the convention that has bound the piano,—virtuosity,—is a more worthy convention than that which has restricted any of the other arts.
There is a universe of the arts in the piano. But it is not a universe now. It is a stunt. The piano has been used for stunts for years and years and years. It will go on being used that way for years. Well, I am the last one to deprecate the art of these stunts. I think they are beautiful—some of them. I think they have their place. But they have served it too well. I love them more than I love all the opals and rubies and sapphires and emeralds and topaz and amethyst and pearl a jeweller can dip his fingers into and spread out for your dazzled senses. But I love poetry more than jewels. And I love music more than poetry. In the music of the piano you get the best illustration that music is a thing beginning and ending in itself, a thing not of story or image but of sound, a thing that must be understood quite simply in its own terms,—as Hiram Kelly Moderwell puts it, a thing that must be heard and not seen. And in the revolution that is beginning you get this first pure principle combined with another; that the music of the piano must reach to the passion of life. This is quite different from saying that music must be a dramatization of human life. It is merely saying that ballet dancing could never have produced an Isadora Duncan.
I imagine that Harold Bauer must have said something of this sort to himself. He has certainly said it on the piano. His attitude toward the piano has this sort of prophecy in it. It is a matter of the beauty of sound. The methods of approach of all the “masters” have been the same. They have imposed something upon the piano. But Bauer has approached the handling of the piano as Debussy approached composition—or Schönberg.
When Schönberg wrote that “the alleged tones believed to be foreign to harmony do not exist; they are merely tones foreign to our accepted harmonic system”, and that “tonality is not a hard and fast compulsion directing the course of music but a concept which makes it possible for us to give our ideas the requisite aspect of compactness”, he was saying practically what Bauer has suggested about the touching of the piano: that virtuosity is only a means to an end, that the springs of the art have been drying up, and that until the musician can hear better he is not worthy of the sounds the piano has to give him. You can’t play César Franck with the same hands you use for Liszt. You must change your hands into different “feelers”. The piano will give you the quality of almost every instrument. It is as though Bauer had said: “They call this an instrument of percussion. They have laid down its limitation. But I doubt very much whether it will stay within that limitation. I suspect it does not stop there but goes on into a realm where sound is of infinite development.” That is why you hear an organ when he plays César Franck; that is why you realize how the Imagists have worked when he plays Debussy; that is why you get a sense of painting in all his music. Bauer puts on the sound like paint. He knows, as Romain Rolland has said, that every art tends to become a universe in itself; that music becomes painting and poetry, that painting becomes music, etc. And Bauer is not a genius. He has merely suggested what will happen to the piano, and paved the way for an openness of mind about it. He has made a good many people gossip of how his scales won’t compare with those of the other great ones; but he has made a good many more suspect that there has been something lacking in the ultimatums of the piano athletes. He has done many simple and dynamic things to bring the piano into its own.
But the full achievement of this will go beyond what has been heard yet anywhere; and the man who does it will be scorned as the greatest fool or madman of his time before it is fully understood. It doesn’t matter. The thing will happen—I hardly know how. I hardly even know words with which to tell what it will be like. It can only be told on the piano.