Orpheus; or, The music of the future

by W. J. Turner

[3] Such according to eminent critics is the work of the painter Sargent and, for my part, I have no difficulty in seeing that what they say is just.

Chapter V
Absolute Value

It may appear fantastic to assert that art is the only sphere where absolute values appear, and that the function of art in the Universe is to create absolute values, but it may be true. It is impossible to avoid the insistent demand of the human instinct for absolute values. This exists, an insatiable craving which will not rest content with the good but demands the better. And yet it is impossible to discover values that are absolute in themselves. The very notion is a meaningless abstraction. I do not even believe we can prove that Beethoven’s music is better music than Mozart’s or that Shakespeare’s poetry is better than Milton’s, or vice versa, unless we first of all limit the idea of music or poetry to something intellectually measurable. For example it would be difficult to convince all music-lovers that Bach’s counterpoint was better than Beethoven’s, or that Palestrina’s was better than Bach’s; for what is to determine “good” counterpoint? Very few musicians would accept any individual theorist’s rules—all rules being mere abstractions or generalizations from practice, and varying according to their historic date, so that even the academic theory of one age differs from that of another. Even in judging a fugue, one has ultimately to fall back upon expression, significance, or meaning, and who is to say—and on what universally acceptable principle is it to be said—that Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue is better than Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” Op. 133?

There is exactly the same difficulty in poetry. In an excellent and well-known book on the English Sonnet a definition is given of perfect sonnet form which is intellectually satisfactory. But we find that most of the greatest English sonnets are not written in this form, while thousands of mediocre sonnets observe it correctly. The same is true of Bach’s Fugues. You cannot value them according to their correctness.[4] What then becomes of our “perfect” sonnet and our “perfect” fugue? Each is apparently an unreal abstraction—like all other attempts at creating absolute value. But are these “absolute” ideas necessarily valueless in themselves? I do not think so, for they correspond to and are the formalization or death-shapes of desires ineradicably rooted in the human soul, those desires which create all values, and that profounder urge which is satisfied with none.

What is important to recognize is the diversity of these desires and to understand that it is the diversity (in itself profoundly desired) which nullifies standards. We can say that this fugue is more perfect than that fugue—having made an abstract and definable conception of the fugue form and separated it from all life. Criticism is an application of such abstract conceptions—derived by analysis from the practice of artists—from all past works of art to one present work of art and, again, backwards, from all existent works of art to one past work of art. The former is historical criticism (when a composer is judged only on what preceded him) and the latter is, or should be, the absolute æsthetic criticism. But what prevents its being so is that it leaves out the future. The work of art is judged by the present and the past but the future is unknown and the judgment is thereby vitiated and is not and cannot be an absolute judgment. But this does not mean that the future does not exist now, somewhere. To demonstrate this, however, would take me on too far-stretching a parabola. I would merely draw attention to this reservation, and say that its relevance will appear later.

My belief is that when I say, as I do emphatically say, that Beethoven is a greater composer than Bach and find my assertion difficult or impossible to prove I am judging by an instinctive but not yet intellectually formalized sense of value, or values, which will only emerge in the future to take a place among all the other principles and standards—the totality of life in its sum of death-shapes so far created. So we see there can be no such thing as a perfect fugue-in-itself but only the idea of one. The actual fugue must have a meaning, it must be an expression of life; a fugue-in-itself without relation to life, perfect and completely, is an impossibility. Nevertheless a musician like Bach finds in himself the fugue-idea as well as the fugue-emotion, the fugue-form as well as the fugue-content, and there is a constant struggle between them to coincide exactly and to materialize in one indivisible unity. Sometimes the fugue idea prevails and sometimes the fugue-emotion prevails, and the result always is an imperfect fugue. But this imperfection in all its varying degrees is the musical reality. Absolute perfection, absolute unity is annihilation, the end of all things and the attainment of Nirvana. But even the fugue-idea is not a constant unchangeable abstraction or fixed shape. It is modified by the actual fugues which are created, for it is an abstraction, a general principle from examples, an induction from particulars; and as fresh particulars arise, the induction must be modified. Again, I spoke of the content or fugue-emotion, but this fugue-emotion is not—except perhaps in the simplest and most feeble examples—single but, on the contrary, multiple. Who is to appraise or range in order of value these emotions? How is it to be done? The belief that any single judgment may do it—the mind of any one critic, expert or practitioner—is preposterous. But this does not suspend individual judgment or make it vain, since it is through the conflict or discord of all genuine individual judgments that new conceptions or attempts at concord emerge. This conflict arises from unsatisfied desire and, in the end, we think Beethoven better than Bach only because Beethoven more profoundly satisfies our desire or satisfies a deeper desire than any satisfied by Bach. Just as new conceptions emerge or are induced from discordant or unrelated conceptions so new emotions and new desires are induced from the discordance or conflict of our desires. This process of organization would seem infinite—a conception which I, personally, find intolerable and incomprehensible—were it not for a strange phenomenon, and this phenomenon is that ultimately at the core of all men there seems to be the same desire.

The world is not really divided as to who are its greatest painters, sculptors, scientists, mathematicians, musicians and poets. We may not be able to prove to our own logical satisfaction that Beethoven is greater than Bach, that Bach is greater than Haydn, that Palestrina is greater than Verdi, but we are all strangely certain that it is so. What are we to make of this? Evidently there is a unity somewhere in our diversity, and it is more than a lowest common factor—a far-away dim primitive element, never quite lost sight of but growing ever fainter, linking all men and all art. It is not that touch of nature making the whole world kin, for that—although it might enable us to have some sympathy with all things—would not enable us to range them in value. Such a minute dose of common kinship could not so vitally relate us. It is, on the contrary, by our very essence, by the most spiritual and intense of our desires that we are united. We are not unanimous about Scriabin, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, just as we are not unanimous about Aubrey Beardsley, Sargent, El Greco, or about Byron, Tennyson, and Conrad.

Apparently each of us carries within him a fundamental note which picks out all the notes struck upon us by nature and mankind and ranges them in a series. And it is this which gives to each one his values. The fundamental note which any individual carries may not be the fundamental note of mankind, or of the Universe, but it must have a more or less simple relationship with them. Thus the values of one individual are true for all others, within their limits. They are real values though not necessarily ultimate values; they can and will be related to all other values but can only be so related through a more fundamental note—hence the importance of such a note. It is my belief that the profoundest, most fundamental note in music, so far, has been struck by Beethoven. There is nothing in the music of any other composer which his does not comprehend. But his, on the other hand, has a new foundation to which no other music reaches.

But this analogy of the fundamental note must be understood merely as an analogy, suggestive rather than explanatory. Of all the simpler musical intervals I find that of the seventeenth the most satisfying to my ear. I may wonder what is the secret of the purity of its concord—so much greater than that of the perfect fifth or the perfect fourth, which at first sight seem to be more intimate relationships. Then I discover that the ratio of the vibrations of the two notes of the seventeenth is 1:5, whereas that of the perfect fifth is 2:3, of the perfect fourth 3:4. Stated thus this may not mean much to the non-mathematically minded reader but it denotes that the seventeenth is a perfect and not a syncopated interval. That is to say there is no syncopation of the vibrations of the two notes, but they beat together in a closer more united rhythm than that of a perfect fifth or perfect fourth.