Orpheus; or, The music of the future

by W. J. Turner

But the twelfth

(I use the tenor or C clef partly because it is more obscure and will annoy those who are only accustomed to the treble and bass clefs) has a ratio of 1:3 which also is not a syncopated interval but has the same kind of perfection as that of the octave (1:2) and the seventeenth (1:5). Yet the twelfth is not so pleasing an interval as the seventeenth, and the octave is inferior to them both. Nevertheless the twelfth and octave are mathematically closer relationships than the seventeenth. Evidently there is another principle to be discovered, and I will call it the principle of affinity in unlikeness and illustrate it by an analogy which may seem far-fetched but which I believe to be illuminating and significant.

Let us imagine that the unison or note A represents oneself; that the relationship of the octave (1:2) represents that of father and daughter; the relationship of the perfect fifth (2:3) that of brother and sister; the relationship of the perfect fourth (3:4) that of two brothers; the relationship of the twelfth (1:3) that of male and female cousins—in which a new element that of sexual affinity, is introduced, bringing with it a deeper reverberation although the blood relationship is more distant. And, finally, the relationship of the seventeenth, that of unrelated lovers which—although the most distant of all in blood—strikes a still profounder sympathy and beauty. It is now possible to understand more clearly why my analogy of the relation of Beethoven to the rest of music as that of a more fundamental note is not to be taken in its literal meaning. With Beethoven, a new element came into music, an element of such sublimity and beauty that its advent into the world of imagination is comparable in importance with that of sex in the physical world.

Sex as we know it did not always exist; it does not exist in the inorganic world, hardly in the vegetable world, but dimly in the animal world. It is a human discovery, and upon that new more fundamental note (fundamental not in the vertical sense but in a focal sense) rises the whole wealth of man’s intellectual and physical harmony. But even in sex we have not touched an absolute. The presage of a still profounder intimacy trembles fitfully here and there in music throughout the historical European period. In the music of Palestrina, of Byrd, of all the rarer spirits up to Bach, Mozart and Wagner there are fitful gleams of a more central desire until, finally, a love that plumbs deeper than even the love of sex rings forth unmistakeably in the music of Beethoven and immediately creates for us a new hierarchy of values. And so here we find for the time being an Absolute. The world of art, we find, resembles both the world of the atom and the world of solar space. There are greater and lesser planets and greater and lesser satellites. We can imagine that if there were inhabitants upon the Moon they might think the Earth was the primary fact of their being, since it was the focal point of their orbit, whereas the Sun would seem so eccentrically placed as to be an irregular and incomprehensible singularity; until by a process of more profound imagining they conceived the more fundamental though more distant relationship in which it stood to them.

Just as the Sun is the centre of the only system of the physical universe so far formulated—for no centre has been found to the innumerable suns of the stellar universe—so Beethoven is our temporary Absolute in the world of music. And just as the Sun is the source of all vegetable and animal life upon the earth, so I believe that in art we find the vital spirit which animates our human life. Thus it would seem to be true—as I suggested we might discover—that the function of art in the world is to create absolute values in the imagination upon which the human species can continually re-create its intellectual, moral, and physical structures. And if this is so it means that in the values of art we approach most nearly to Truth.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] See Mr. Harvey Grace’s excellent book on the organ works of J. S. Bach.

Chapter VI
Emotional Significance

A technical analysis of the art of music as practised in Europe during the past few hundred years would be interesting, but it lies outside the scope of this book. What is relevant is to consider the emotional and intellectual significance of the music composed during that period. Folksong, from which most great composers have consciously or unconsciously drawn, is the emotional substratum of all European music. At its best it is simple, sensuous and passionate—the heart-cry of men whose desires are frustrated by the accidents of life, whose joys are too short, or whose griefs are too enduring. Where it chiefly differs from similar, later, more sophisticated music is in the simple intensity of the emotion. In a society more subject to extreme vicissitudes of fortune than later and more stable social states it was easier, and natural, to believe that mere irresponsible “accident” or mischance separated men from happiness.[5] In a beautiful old Neapolitan song collected by Madame Geni Sadero the singer bewails the loss of his love carried off by Moorish pirates in a raid on the Italian coast. Such a song has an extraordinary plasticity of melody, rivalling in expressiveness the melodic invention of the greatest composers. These melodies were modelled by an intense sincerity, of a kind inconceivable to men in a more complex environment, richly provided with compensations. Any attempt at such sincerity would to-day be insincere.[6] Equally insincere would be any modern composer’s attempt to express the simple natural thrill of the Sardinian shepherd boy who greets the rising of the Sun in a wonderful song included in the Sadero collection. In our civilized society man knows that the sun will rise to-morrow as it did yesterday, and that next year or the year after he may love again. It is not Moorish pirates, or the accident of plague, or the malefic interference of an unfriendly God that will bear away his happiness. It is happiness itself that has flown away as he sits securely in the midst of his possessions and asks himself, what he used not to ask himself: “Why do I live?”