Modern Musical Drift

by W. J. Henderson

It matters little from what point we view the tendency of musical art as it is disclosed to our vision through its most potent manifestations. We are driven inward upon the central and all-important question, How far can music go in the direction of depicting things which lie outside itself? Is it to convert itself into a language, or shall it sink into a kind of rapt mysticism which shall be accepted in a vague way as a species of philosophic speculation?

Walter Pater in his essay on Coleridge says: "The true illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense, understanding, individuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every moment of life brought its contribution of experimental individual knowledge; by whom no touch of the world of form, color, and passion was disregarded."

Herein lies a deep, pregnant suggestion. Pater knew little enough of the inner nature of music, but he was able to make some sensible deductions from his comprehension of art in the broader sense, and in another place in the volume just quoted ("Appreciations") he suggests the possibility that music might be the ideal of all art, "precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression."

Against such a summary of the nature of music the whole practice of composition to-day cries out. And at the same time it finds itself unsatisfied by such a standard of speculative thought as that set up by Mr. Pater. Music would perhaps profit highly by a faithful adherence to that law of continual regard to the suggestions of the "world of form, color, and passion." But the rapt vacancy of the Hindoo mystic woos and wins the favor of composers, for outwardly it has a philosophic appearance, and to philosophize in music seems now to be the highest desire of its masters.

It is useless to attempt to blind one's self to facts. The march of music from pure beauty of form and development of melodic ideas toward the representation of ideas not musical in themselves has been going on, as we have seen, from the very beginning. But at the outset there was no endeavor to translate mental processes into musical terms. As far back as the middle of the fifteenth century the story of Susanna was told in unaccompanied choral music of purely contrapuntal pattern. But there was no subtlety in such music. The text set forth the narrative; the music was a mere framework. Jannequin wrote his "Cries of Paris" in a similar style, but his musical effects consisted of a few primitive imitations of externals.

Kuhnau's descriptive sonatas contain nothing confusing. They are cheerfully frank in their endeavor to paint externals. They do not probe either heart or brain. Not till the association of music with the drama in the opera of the Italians of 1600, do we find the tone art deliberately set to work to embody the inner life of man, and then feelings alone were set forth.

The effort to embody feelings in vocal music was intelligible and natural. Song borrowed its inflections from speech, and speech took them from inarticulate cries. Peri's notion of using a smooth movement and a narrow range of intervals for unimpassioned song was taken from the instinctive practice of speech. We speak in two or three notes, and slowly and regularly when we are perfectly calm. When we become excited, our voices move through more intervals and the tempo is accelerated. In agitation the speech is in broken, spasmodic phrases; the voice rises and falls irregularly. In sadness the minor mode comes involuntarily into our tones, and in weeping we slide portamento through the chromatic scale.

When Gluck revived the method of Peri and worked it out elaborately, he struck the deathblow to classicism, but his conservation of the musical principle is to be found in his continued employment of the purely musical forms. It was not for Gluck, a sculpturesque composer, a worshipper of melodic line and curve, to enter into the new paradise of operatic tone-speech. He pruned the old tree of many useless limbs; he swept from it a mass of noisome fungi; but he sat peacefully under its shade and knew not that its trunk pointed slantwise away from the zenith.

Gluck faced the parting of the ways, but saw it not. With the young, ingenuous, unsophisticated, and absolutely musical symphony of Haydn staring him in the eyes, he failed to discover that its basic principles were not available for the construction of an art form embodying his dramatic ideals. The cyclic form of the plain song was predominant in the thought of Gluck, and it misled him from his own chosen path.