ORPHEUS
Chapter I
Definition of Music
The dullest books on literature are the books which begin with a history of the alphabet. A good history has its uses; however, this book is not a history but a phantasy or, if you like, a philosophy. For if it be a good phantasy it will be a good philosophy since all philosophy is phantasy, or the imagination of love.
Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle
We know, however, that philosophy degenerates from that love which moves the spheres into that love of moving in the tracks of the spheres which is called the love of knowledge, and philosophers are commonly men who spend their lives describing the old tracks in which they are running, and teaching how you also may keep your feet in them. So, too, musician has come to mean a man who performs music—he plays over again Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s studies;
partout il parcourit et parfournit
This performance of his is a tribute to our weakness and a sign of our imperfection, and, since we are weak and imperfect, is necessary; but I cannot state too clearly and decisively at the outset that music is not the playing or the hearing of symphonies and sonatas but the imagination of love.
If music is not the imagination of love, if it is not a spiritual act, what is it? The commonsense reply will be that it is an ordered arrangement of sounds. But two words of this definition beg the question. What is meant by “ordered,” and what by “arrangement”? Order and arrangement imply meaning and significance. Can we have an order that is an end in itself, is intrinsically satisfying, or beautiful, or stimulating? But to whom? To man. But take away love from man, and what is he? What is left is meaningless, even indescribable, for in love all things exist and have their being. Music is the imagination of love in sound. It is what man imagines of his life, and his life is love. There are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds of life, and it is possible that they may not all be imaginable in sound. I say it is possible, I do not say it is probable. We do not know at present, and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct of mankind has abandoned sound as a means of expression. And that may happen. There may be no unending future of music, only a limited future. Or the world of music may be like the universe of Einstein, “finite but unbounded.” And this indeed is my belief. It is a finite, a closed world.
Can you express the life of the vegetable world in music? The imagination of a plant? The tree that rises to the sun throws its shadow upon the mind of man; you may think you cannot throw that shadow in music but you can sound forth the shadow of that shadow, turn the impalpable ghost of light into a ghost of sound, transform those tremulous visual waves into auditory waves—not in the laboratory of the physicist but in the laboratory of the mind. The musician may do this. He may do in a bar of notes what the poet does in a line of verse—make a unique sensible impression upon the mind. Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune makes this impression of a vegetable world alive in quivering hot sunshine and Debussy’s music is full of the imagination of a special order of life, the life of trees, streams and lakes, the play of light upon water and on clouds, the murmur of plants drinking and feeding in the sunlight, and all that order of motion and movement which we are in the habit of calling physical, all that order of emotion which we describe as belonging to the five senses. I do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not be expressed in music.