What is knowledge? And what is musical knowledge? The latter question is no doubt included in the former, but we shall see. We know by experience that it is possible to learn the alphabet of a language. The alphabet as such has no longer any meaning, that is why it is possible to use it with meaning—in that form we call language. But, at the beginning, these perfectly conventionalized, perfectly meaningless symbols, A, B, C, D, etc., had each a meaning and a very definite meaning. And those series of meanings (which have now shrivelled into the scentless, savourless, unembodied twenty-six ghosts of the alphabet) precluded by their very vitality the possibility of all other meanings. Their life was death to all other life and not until they were dead could others live. This strange phenomenon is an element in the beautiful myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus must not behold the face of Eurydice when he brings her up from the underworld where she disappeared, for in the physical vision he will be forever blinded to the spirit which is returning with him, who is not the Eurydice that was but the Eurydice that is to be. And the whole life of language is in this process of continuous dying. Words die by becoming abstract, then when they are completely dead they come to life again as members of a more complicated life, the life of the sentence. Sentences die and become idioms, idioms ideas, ideas theories, theories philosophies and religions. Every page of prose is a harvest raised from corpses and under its flowering abundance dead bodies lie thickly buried. Then a time comes when these extremely complex systems break up and the words re-emerge in single units again, but with changed countenances and expressions, to begin a new series of death-and-life existence. But the letters themselves, of which all words are comprised, are finally and forever dead—which is another way of saying they are immortal; for they do not change as words change from one generation to another. The “o” in dog does not differ from the “o” in god because “o” has no longer individuality or meaning. What we call “knowledge” is that which has become fixed and immortal, that which has ceased to live and have being and is immutable. Obviously we cannot be said to know a thing which is susceptible of change, which may differ to-morrow from what it is to-day. Therefore we can only know what is unknowable, because we only know what does not exist. This is no empty paradox. It is not a play on the word “exist.” We may say we know the letters A, B, C, D, etc., because they are the same for everybody; but they are only the same for everybody because they are nothing to anybody. If I ask you what A means to you it is impossible for you to tell me, since it means no more to you than to me. A in itself is nothing, you can neither think it nor feel it, you can only state it, and so it is, as I have said, a fact. There are in all our literature only twenty-six absolute facts. And they are facts merely because there is no life in them.
In music there are also facts, so there is a part of music which we can say we know. The modern European knows a certain number of musical sounds which are the facts of music. They can be described in various ways, but as European musical facts they are twelve semi-tones repeated in series between two arbitrarily selected points which are the highest and the lowest notes comfortably audible to the human ear. Each of these semi-tones is an arbitrarily selected note or vibration number chosen out of all the masses of vibrations which we call noises by virtue of an inner unity, a mathematical symmetry which gives it form and makes it a musical sound. But even this mathematical symmetry is a fiction, a thing made by the human mind; and these sounds, like the letters of the alphabet, have no life or meaning in themselves.
But at this point a reservation must be made. For most, possibly for all, the letters of the alphabet have a varied character, a character which derives (a) from their different shapes, (b) from their different sounds. The effect of their shape belongs to the world of graphic art, the effect of their sound belongs to the world of music. We may think of these impressions as the residuary fossils left by giantlike primitive emotions which have stalked through those other worlds. A certain artistic use can be made of them, and indeed we find that every new wave of artistic expression is preluded by a breakdown of the abstract combinations of symbols in which the symbols had become most completely devitalized, and a return to a sense of a meaning, a colour, a life in the symbol itself. This results in simplification, which ultimately gives place to a new complication. What is called progress in art consists mainly of this process. Whether there is another kind of progress underlying this process must be considered in another chapter.
Now that we have become clear as to what facts are we can perceive what knowledge is. But I must prevent the danger of a mere logomachy between reader and writer by stating at once that I am giving here definitions of “knowledge” and “life” to which we must both adhere. If any reader likes to give the name of “true knowledge” to what I call life and says that what I call knowledge is not true knowledge at all, he is welcome to do so. But I am going to use my own terms, and I shall continue to use the term “life” instead of so idiotic a term as “true knowledge.”
The knowledge of music, then, is the knowledge of the facts, and the facts are, as we saw, the alphabet of music, the twelve artificial semi-tones of the tempered scale. If a musician knows these and knows those combinations of them which are called intervals—as the combinations of letters are called words—he knows what the man knows who knows the letters of the alphabet and has a vocabulary of words. He may know them by sight, by sound, or by sight and sound. If only by sight he is in the position of a man who can read and write but not speak the words of a foreign language; if only by sound he is in the position of a man who can speak the words of a foreign language and understand them when spoken but cannot read or write them. The reader can make this analogy more precise by subdivisions which I shall not bother to make here. I will merely point out that the ordinary auditor, the music-lover who is no musician, knows the facts by sound only and may so know them with greater or less precision and depth of impression. That he should not know them by sight is immaterial to his understanding what he hears, although it prevents his communicating what he hears to anyone else. He is therefore technically equipped to hear but not to compose music.
Such knowledge may extend beyond the knowledge of the vocabulary of words or chords to those more complicated combinations which have also died and become facts—sentences, idioms, ideas; or, in music, sequences, harmonies, melodies. All this knowledge represents so much dead life which can be incorporated into a page of music as it can be incorporated into a page of prose. When sentences, idioms and ideas (or sequences, harmonies and melodies) have been used over and over again so frequently as to have become immediately recognizable they cease to have meaning; because, as I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, having been used so often in so many different contexts they have shrivelled to that residuum or abstraction which fits the lot. Having shed all individuality they shed all expression, and what was once life becomes knowledge. For example, what was a feeling in Wagner becomes merely a major ninth in Vincent d’Indy. When the music of Debussy was first heard it was an emotional experience. Presently the intellect abstracted an element which it found commonly in that experience, and that element was the whole-tone scale. Then everybody by using the whole-tone scale could write music which superficially sounded like Debussy’s; but such music had no meaning or life, it was dead music, mere knowledge. And Debussy’s music itself tended to become a perceptive and not an emotional experience. There is a universal tendency to this intellectual formalizing, stereotyping process which I have called knowledge or death; and contrasted with it everywhere is a complementary process, the process of creation or life. But the one is necessary to the other and all experience is the one becoming the other. Just as life uses death—as when we eat meat and transform it into living tissue—so art uses knowledge. Music, therefore, is experience becoming knowledge and knowledge breaking up and becoming experience, and its especial nature lies not in the experience but in the medium. Music is the experience of life and death in sound.
Has sound in itself any meaning? I mean by this is there a quality, virtue, life—call it what you will—specifically in sounds and the combination of sounds which does not exist elsewhere—in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in mathematics? I think there is; but to go further into this would be to transgress the limits I have set for myself, for here we touch on perhaps the profoundest problem of philosophy. I shall be content to throw a little light upon it by analogy. Experience in sound has an individuality which separates it from experience in the other arts. This individuality in the arts is comparable to individuality in animal and vegetable life (the different and analysable virtues of an elephant, a butterfly, a lily and a violet) and to personality in human life. It is an implicit and unexplained factor in all that I shall have to say; but we have to remember that it is the combining, the making of a harmony of this character or idiosyncrasy with the composer’s imagination of love which makes music. It is then that musical form is created. What we call musical genius is related to this individuality in some mysterious and as yet unfathomable way and it would seem that there are degrees of musical genius. But it is only when great musical genius is combined with great human personality that we get what we may call the great artist as distinct from the merely great musician.
Chapter III
The General Idea of Progress
It may be objected that my persuasion in Chapter I that music is the imagination of love in sound and in Chapter II that music is also the experience of life-and-death in sound are two conclusions not only extraordinary in themselves but different. It will be seen that they are not irreconcilable. My conception of the nature of music must, if true, be such as to include all music, the music of Sullivan, Puccini, Elgar and the Jazz-Kings as well as the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner; the songs of the folk, old and new, peasant and urban, as well as the songs of Schubert and Hugo Wolf. There is no difficulty in this.
We have seen that the development of music is analogous to the development of language. That this must be so is obvious when we understand that both music and language are mental structures contemporary with the human mind, reflecting its development and having their origin in the senses of sight and hearing. No arts have been founded on the sense of touch in its forms of taste and smell. The reason for this gives us a clue to the character of progress in general. The senses of smell and taste are too intimate, too physically diffused, too direct or primitive in effect to be controlled by the mind. We may say that the body now short-circuits in these sensations and that the mind is cut out. But when, in the past, the sense of touch developed into the more complicated organs of the eye and the ear[1] which made touch at a distance possible, then what the mind sensed was more highly organized and less direct and amorphous. Smells and tastes may be compared with noises before the mind has organized them into musical sounds, or with sensations which have not yet passed through the imagination and become organized into emotions and ideas.