The Masters and Their Music / A series of illustrative programs with biographical, / esthetical, and critical annotations

by W. S. B. Mathews

PART I.

THE MASTERS AND THEIR MUSIC.

CHAPTER I.

MOVING FORCES IN MUSIC

The art of music shows the operation of several moving forces, or motives, which have presented themselves to the composer with sufficient force to inspire the creation of the works we have. The most important of these motives is the Musical Sense itself, since it is to this we owe the creation of the folk-song, with its pleasing symmetries, and the greater part of the vast literature of instrumental music.

Aside from the expression of the musical consciousness as such, the composer has been moved at times by the motive of Dramatic Expression. In opera, for example, a great deal of the music has for its object to intensify the feeling of the scene. Accordingly, the composer carefully selects those combinations and sequences of tones which in his opinion best correspond with the dramatic moment they are intended to accompany. And since many of these moments are of extreme intensity, even tragic in character, very strong and intense combinations of tones are sometimes employed, such as could not be justified in an instrumental composition to be played independently of any illustrative scenery or story.

There is a third motive of composition which also has had a large place in the development of instrumental music—viz., the Expression of the Individual Mood of the Composer; and the further we come down in the history of music, the more unrestricted we find the operation of this motive.

In the order of development, the purely musical is entitled to the first place; and it has also been the principal moving cause in the development of the art of music, from its universality—its power to act upon all grades of musical consciousness according to the ability of the individual musician. For example, the desire to realize in tones agreeable symmetries of rhythm and strong antitheses of melodic sequence has given rise to the folk songs, all of which operate upon what are now very elementary lines, since they never exceed very simple and obvious rhythmic proportions and the most common chords of the key.

Recent investigations of the music of barbarous and half-civilized tribes show that the attainment of symmetry in the folk-song is a somewhat late experience. In many of the songs of the American Indians, for example, the first phrase moves practically along the track of the common chord; the second phrase frequently repeats the first, and in some instances the repetition goes on indefinitely without any answer or conclusion. In other cases a second phrase follows along the track of a closely related chord, but I have never noticed a case in which a third phrase appeared, corresponding to the first, after a digression of the second phrase into another chord. Generally the rhythm runs out with a series of what might be called inarticulate drum-beats, as if an impulse existed still unsatisfied, blindly making itself felt in these insignificant pulsations; an impulse which a finer melodic sense would have satisfied by the proper antithesis in relation to the first phrase, thus leaving the melody and the rhythm to complete themselves together, as always takes place in civilized music.