What Is Music?

I

DURING the last twenty or thirty years there has been an enormous increase in the United States of what may be called ‘institutional’ music. We have built opera houses, we have formed many new orchestras, and we have established the teaching of music in nearly all our public and private schools and colleges, so that a casual person observing all this, hearing from boastful lips how many millions per annum we spend on music, and adding up the various columns into one grand total, might arrive at the conclusion that we are really a musical people.

But one who looks beneath the surface — who reflects that the thing we believe, and the thing we love, that we do — would have to do a sum in subtraction also; would have to ask what music there is in our own households. He would find that in our cities and towns only an infinitesimal percentage of the inhabitants sing together for the pleasure of doing so, and that the task of keeping choral societies together is as difficult as ever; that the music we take no part in but merely listen to, is the music that flourishes; that our operatic singers, the most highly paid in the world, come to us annually from abroad and sing to us in languages that we cannot understand; that, in short, while music flourishes, much of it is bought and little of it is home-made. The deduction is obvious. This institutional music is a sort of largess of our prosperity. We are rich enough to buy the best the world affords. We institute music in our public schools and display our interest in it once a year — at graduation time. We see that our children take ‘music lessons’ and judge the result likewise by their capacity to play us occasionally a very nice little piece. Men, in particular, — all potential singers, and very much needing to sing, — look upon it as a slightly effeminate, or scarcely natural and manly thing to do. Music is, in short, too much our diversion, and too little our salvation.

And to form a correct estimate of the value of our musical activities we should need also to consider the quality of the music we hear; and this, in relation to the sums we have been doing, might make complete havoc of our figures, because it would change their basic significance. For if it is bad music, the more we hear of it the worse off we are. If a city spends thirty thousand dollars a year on bad public-school music it is a loser to the extent of some sixty thousand dollars. If your child is painfully acquiring a mechanical dexterity (or acquiring a painful mechanical dexterity) in pianoforte playing and is learning almost nothing about music, you lose twice what you pay and your child pays twice for her suffering. What is called ‘being musical’ cannot be passed on to some one else or to something else; you cannot be musical vicariously — through another person, through so many thousand dollars, through civic pride, through any other of the many means we employ. Being musical does not necessarily lie in performing music; it is rather a state of being which every individual who can hear is entitled by nature to attain to in a greater or less degree.

Such are the musical conditions confronting us, and such are the possibilities open to us. The purpose of this article and those which will follow it is to suggest ways of improving this situation, and of realizing these possibilities; and, as a necessary basis for any such suggestions, to consider first the nature of music itself. Is it merely a titillation of the ear? Are Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert merely purveyors of sweetmeats? Does music consist in an astonishing dexterity in performance? Is it, as Whitman says, ‘What awakes in you when you are reminded by the instruments ’ ? Or has it a life of its own, self-contained, self-expressive, and complete? These questions need to be asked — and answered — before we can formulate any method of improving our musical situation.

Any discussion of the art of music, — of its significance in relation to ourselves, of its æsthetic qualities, or of methods of teaching it, — to be comprehensive, must be based on a clear recognition of the one important quality which is inherent in it, which distinguishes it from the other arts and which gives it its peculiar power. Painting and sculpture are definitive. It is not possible to create a great work in either of these mediums without a subject taken from life; for, however imaginative the work may be, it must depict something. In painting, for example, the very soul of a religious belief may shine from the canvas, — as in the ‘Sistine Madonna,’ — but that belief cannot be there presented without physical embodiment. And when the physical embodiment is reduced to its simplest terms, as in some of Manet’s paintings, there is still the necessity of portrayal; Manet’s wonderful light and opalescent color must fall on an object. Turner paints a mystical landscape, a mythological vale, such as haunts the dreams of poets, but it is impossible for him to produce the illusion by itself; the vale is a vale, human beings are there. Sculpture, which makes its effects by the perfection of its rhythms around an axis, and by its shadows, — effects of the most subtle and, at the same time, of the most elemental kind, — it, too, must portray; the emotion must take form and substance, and that form must be drawn from the outward, visible world.

In poetry the same limitations exist. It, too, must deal in human life with a certain definiteness. But the greatest poetry is continually struggling to slough off the garment of reality and free the soul from its trammels. It trembles on the verge of music, seeking to find words for what cannot be said, and attaining a great part of its meaning by a sublime euphony. The didactic is its grave.

Before I attempt to describe the peculiar quality which distinguishes music, it will be well to state quite clearly what it cannot do. This can best be understood by a comparison between it and poetry, which of all the arts is nearest to music, because it exists in the element of time, whereas painting and sculpture exist in space. Poetry is made up of words arranged in meaning and euphony. Each of these words signifies an object, idea, or feeling; the word chair, for example, has come to mean an object to sit upon. Now while notes in music are given certain alphabetical names indicating a pitch determined by sound waves, the use of these letters is arbitrary and has no connection with their original hieroglyphic and hieratic significance. The musical sound we call a, for example, means nothing as a sound, has no common or agreed-upon or archeological significance. Combine the note a with c and e in what is known as the common chord and you still have no meaning; combine a with other notes and form a melody from them, and you have perhaps beauty and coherence of form, — a pleasing sequence of sounds, — but still no meaning such as you get from the combination of letters in a word like ‘chair.’ Combine a with a great many other notes into a symphony, and this coherence and beauty may become quite wonderful in effect, but it still remains untranslatable into other terms, and without such definite significance as is attained by combining words in poems. So we say that notes have no significance in themselves; that musical phrases have no meaning as have phrases in language; that melodies are not sentences, and symphonies not poems.

If we compare music with painting or sculpture we find much the same contrast. Just as music does not mean anything in the sense that words do, so it has no ‘subject’ in the sense that Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire has, or Donatello’s David. It does not deal with objects. It cannot portray a ship or a star. It may seem to float, it may flash for a moment, but it does not describe or set forth. Furthermore, it cannot, strictly speaking, give expression to ideas. It may be so serious, so ordered, so equable — as in Bach — that we say its composer was a philosopher, but no item of his philosophy appears. Above all it is unmoral,¹ and without belief or dogma. Too much stress can hardly be laid on this negative quality in music, for it is in this very disability that its greatest virtue lies. I shall refer later to the frequent tendency among listeners to avoid facing this problem by attaching meanings of their own to the music they hear. I need only note in passing that these so-called ‘meanings’ seldom agree, and that the habit is the result either of ignorance of the true office of music, or of mental lassitude toward it. ‘ It is not enough to enjoy yourself over a work of art,’ says Joubert; ‘you must enjoy it.’

Now the one distinguishing quality of music is this: it finds its perfection in itself without relation to other objects. It is what it is in itself alone. It is non-definitive; it does not use symbols of something else; it cannot be translated into other terms. The poet seeks always a complete union of the thing said and the method of saying it. Flaubert seeks patiently and persistently for the one word which shall not only be the exact symbol of his thought, but which shall fit his euphony. The painter so draws his objects, so distributes his colors, and so arranges his composition as to make of them plastic mediums for the expression of his thought, and the greatness of his picture depends first of all and inevitably on his power of fusing his subjects with his technique. In sculpture precisely the same process takes place. Neither of these arts actually copies nature; each ‘arranges’ it for its own purpose.

In music this much-sought union of matter and manner is complete; the thing said and the method of saying it are one and indivisible. It is, as Pater says, ‘the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression.’

II

The primal element in music is vibration. Sound-waves in some ordered sequence — silent till they strike our ears — are formed by our ingenuity and sense of order into patterns of beauty. They exist in time, not in space. They are motion. And these vibrations are the very substance of all life; of stars in their courses, of the pulse-beats of the heart, of the mysterious communications from the nerves to the brain, of light, of heat, of color. The plastic arts are static. Painting has the power

Sculpture is motion caught in a moment of perfection. Music is motion always in perfection. This rhythm exists also in literature and the other arts. Poe would be nothing without it; Whitman uses it in long swelling undulations which are sometimes almost indistinguishable; the composition in a great painting is a rhythm; the Apollo Belvedere is all rhythm. But in music rhythm is a physical, moving property; rhythm in being, not rhythm caught in a poise. The possibilities of rhythmic play in music far exceed those in poetry, for in the latter the sense or meaning would be clouded by too much rhythmic complication. It would be impossible to do in poetry, for example, what Beethoven does at the beginning of a movement in one of his string quartettes,² where the cello, entirely alone, repeats one note fifteen times in two rhythmic groups; there is no melody and no harmony — merely one reiterated rhythmic sound. It is also impossible for poetry to present three or four different rhythms simultaneously, as music often does; nor can poetic rhythms carry across a complete rhythmic disruption whose whole æsthetic sense lies in its relations to a permanent rhythm which it momentarily violates, as is the case in the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In short, rhythm in music has a diversity, a flexibility, and a physical vigor quite unparalleled in any other art.

Melody in music consists in a sequence of single sounds curved to some line of beauty. Whereas rhythm is conceivable without any intellectual quality, — as a purely physical manifestation, — melody implies some sense of design, since it progresses from one point in time to another, and without design would be merely a series of incoherent sounds. In this design rhythm plays a leading part, and the themes having the most perfect balance of rhythms are the most interesting. Examples of diverse but highly coördinated melodies may be found in the slow movement of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata, opus 13, and in Brahms’s pianoforte quartette, opus 60, the synthetic quality of which is like that of a finely constructed sentence. Folk-song was the beginning of what we call ‘melody,’ and the best specimens of folk-songs are quite as perfect within their small range as are the greatest works of the masters. Their contour and rhythm are sometimes as delicately balanced as the mechanism of a fine instrument. And when we remember that these melodies were the spontaneous utterance of simple, untutored peoples who, in forming them, depended almost entirely on instinct, we realize how intimate a medium music is for the expression of feeling. People who could neither read nor write and who had little knowledge or experience of artistic objects could, nevertheless, create perfect works of beauty in the medium of sound.

We postpone, for a time, the consideration of the connections between music like this and ourselves. Our purpose here is merely to state briefly the properties and functions of the art, so that there may be a clear ground for that discussion.

Melody, being design, gives conscious evidence of the personality of its creator. Schubert, for example, is like Keats and represents the type of pure lyric utterance. Bach, on the contrary, is essentially a thinker, and his melodies are full of vigorous and diversified rhythms.

Harmony is an adjunct to the other two elements. It is in music something of what color is in painting. As contrasted with the long line of melody and the regular impulses in time of rhythm, harmony deals in masses. Melody carries the mind from one point to another; harmony strikes simultaneously and produces an immediate sensation. Its effect upon us is probably due to a subtle physical correspondence within ourselves to combinations of sounds that spring direct from nature. The whole history of music shows a gradual assimilation by human beings of new combinations of sounds, and it is probable that only the first chapters of that history have been written.

We have spoken of the synthetic quality of melody, and it is obvious that the larger the scope of music the more important this quality becomes. When a composer creates a sonata or symphony he must so dispose all his material — rhythms, melodies, and harmonies — as to give to the work perfect coherence. A work of art expressed in the element of time needs this synthesis more than one expressed in space. For although there is in music no ‘subject,’ yet beauty is being unfolded and the need of a cumulative and coördinated expression of it is quite as great as it would be were the music ‘about’ something. There are various ways of arranging musical material so as to attain this end. The chief principle of its synthesis is derived from the volatile nature of sound itself. It is this: that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or at least some reminder, of the first. The result of this is that in the early music there was an alternation of one phrase or one tune with another; and this in turn was followed by all sorts of experiments tending to bring about variety in unity. (These simple forms somewhat resemble what is known in poetry as the triolet.) The most common form in music is threefold. It is found in folksongs, marches, minuets, nocturnes, and so forth, and — expanded to huge proportions — in symphonic movements. In folk-songs this form consists in repeating a first phrase after a second contrasting one. In minuets, nocturnes, romances, and the like, each part is a complete melody in itself. In a symphonic movement the first part — save in such notable exceptions as the first, movement of the ‘Eroica’ of Beethoven — contains all the thematic material, the second contains what is called the ‘development’ of the material stated in the first, and the third part restates the first with such changes as shall give it new significance.

It is in this synthetic quality that much of the greatness of symphonic music lies. No other quality, however fine in itself, can take its place. Schumann, for example, created interesting and beautiful themes in profusion, but his compositions in the larger forms lack a complete synthesis. Bach was the greatest master in this respect. So perfect is the ordering of his material that it gives that impression of inevitability which distinguishes all great art everywhere. It is obvious enough that parallels to this form will be found in literature, for it is a part of life and nature. It is youth, manhood, and old age; it is sunrise, noon, and sunset; it is spring, summer, and winter. So it must be; for art is only life in terms of beauty, and human life is only nature expressing itself in terms of man and woman. This then is the thing we call music: rhythm, melody, and harmony arranged into forms of beauty, existing in time. It is without meaning, it is without ‘subject,’ it is without idea. It creates a world of its own, fictitious, fabulous, and irrelevant — a world of sound, evanescent yet indestructible.

III

Music deals first of all with feeling or emotion. But since emotion may be guided by the mind and transfused by the imagination, — since emotion is not a separate and isolated part of our being, — so music may be so ordered by the mind and so transfused by the imagination as to become intellectual and imaginative. It is true that the greater part of the music produced and performed deals only with emotion, but this is equally true of literature. The popular novel is nine tenths emotion, one tenth mind, and the rest imagination. So it is with music, though such illogical invention as one constantly finds in many popular novels would be intolerable in any music. Since there seems to be an incongruity between the statement that music has no definite meaning and the statement that it is intellectual, let us take a specific illustration and see if we cannot reconcile the apparent confliction.

We must first of all distinguish between the quality itself and the expression of the quality. A person may have a mind stored with wisdom and be completely what we call ‘ intellectual,5 without ever expressing himself by a spoken or written word. His wisdom exists by itself and for itself, entirely separated from its expression. If he expresses himself, and with skill, we call that expression literature, but, in any case, it remains wisdom. And what is wisdom? It is what Mr. Eliot describes a liberal education to be — ‘a state of mind5; it is the fusion of knowledge with experience, with feeling, and with imagination.

Now words are symbols which diminish in their efficacy as they try to compass feeling and imagination. If the wise man is cold, he can say, ‘I am cold ’; but if he wishes to tell you of his idea of God, he has no words adequate for the purpose, because he is dealing with something which is not in the domain of knowledge alone — which he can feel, or perhaps imagine, but cannot define. The reason alone never even touches the far-away circle of that perfection which we believe to exist, and the subtle inner relations between man and the visible and invisible world refuse to be harnessed to language. For these he finds expression in some form of beauty. ‘The beautiful,’ says Goethe, ‘is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.’

So we say that in wisdom the qualities we call insight, feeling, and imagination must find for themselves some more plastic medium of expression than language. And when that plastic medium, though non-definitive, has those qualities of coherence, continuity, and form which are essential to all intellectual expression, we are justified in calling it ‘ intellectual.’ Let us take for our specific illustration the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. It is impossible to imagine this as an expression of feeling only, untouched by thought or by imagination. The inevitable conclusion arrived at by any person who understands it is that the feeling is absolutely controlled by the mind, and that it is imagination that gives it its extraordinary effect. Compare it with the first movement of Tschaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ symphony where emotion runs riot; the difference is as great as that between Victory and The Deemster. Compare it with a symphony by Mendelssohn, and the contrast is as vivid as that between a novel by Meredith and one by Miss Braddon. Beethoven’s music contains, in the first place, themes whose import all completely receptive persons feel to be profound. (That these themes do not so impress others is due either to atrophy of the musical faculty, to mental lassitude, or to lack of experience of great music.) These themes are presented in such design as not only to make the whole movement entirely coherent, but to give it a sense of rushing onward to an inevitable conclusion. So intensive is their treatment that almost the whole five hundred or more measures grow out of the original theme or thesis, some fifteen measures long. So imaginative is it that it seems to gather to itself all related things in heaven and earth and fuse them into one. In short, we must say that this music emanates from the mind of a great man, who has subjected emotion to the control of the will and who has exercised that highest function of the mind that we call imagination.

May we not say then that this is wisdom? Shall we deny it because it cannot be spelled out word by word ? Shall we not rather say that music is a means of expressing the deepest wisdom, that which defies categorical expression? May we not accept Schopenhauer’s saying: ‘Music is an image of the will1? Are we not justified in stating that music is even an expression of the deepest relation with the visible and invisible world which the soul of man is capable of experiencing, and that these relations, inexpressible in more concrete manifestations, are expressible in music? The pathos and resignation and courage in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven are not his or yours or mine; they are the qualities themselves in this infinite being, more true, more noble, more pure than his or yours or mine. May we not, then, even go so far as to say that music tells us the deepest truths of human life; that ‘it comes,’ as Symonds says, ‘speaking the highest wisdom in a language our reason does not understand because it is older and deeper and closer than reason’?

IV

I have already stated that the other arts have for their ideal that fusing of subject and expression which in music is complete, and I have further stated that the purpose or object of music is to present emotion ordered and guided by the mind and illumined by the imagination. In this latter respect all the arts are alike. It is in the very nature of their being that they seek to find the heart of the great secret. The purpose of painting and sculpture is not to present objects as objects, but to set them forth in such harmonious perfection of line and color and rhythm as will reveal their deepest significance. The greatest examples of the plastic arts cannot be understood through sense-perception of objects. Rembrandt is a greater painter than Bougereau, not only because he has superior technique, but because he has deeper insight. This is why the ‘subject’ in painting is comparatively unimportant.

It is the same with literature. In Jane Eyre the ‘subject’ is more tangible and vivid than in Villette, but the latter is the finer book, because the technical skill is greater, the insight deeper. ‘ There are no good subjects or bad subjects,’ says Hugo; ‘there are only good poets and bad poets.’ Any subject is interesting when a mastermind presents it in full significance. A custom house is a prosaic thing, and one that has neither exports nor imports but only a few sleepy old pensioners dozing in the sun might be thought a dull subject for a writer; but Hawthorne’s imagination and subtlety of literary expression clothe it with both beauty and significance. Even the noblest and most tragic deeds find their best justification in a sublime harmony of beauty. The Greeks knew this well. Euripides, in The Trojan Women, puts on the lips of Hecuba these words: —

Deeds, monuments, cities, and civilizations fade into nothingness, but a few words, or a strain of music turned by an artist, will live on forever. Gettysburg will become merely a paragraph of history , the causes for which it was fought will be as nothing, but the words spoken by Lincoln will be preserved for all time, because they were not only wise, but wise and beautiful.

There is no escape from this condition. An occasional great writer has railed at beauty, only to prove finally that his own permanence depended on it. Carlyle, for example, was more caustic than usual when he discussed poetry. His comment on Browning’s The Ring and the Book ran thus: ‘ A wonderful book, one of the most wonderful ever written. I reread it all through — all made out of an “ Old Bailey” story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting.’ Yet the best part of Sartor Resartus is its beauty, and there are in The French Revolution many passages of quite perfect poetic imagery and characterization without which it would lose much of its value. What we call ‘Carlyle’ is no longer a man; nor is it a philosophy, or a history; it is nothing but a style, a manner of saying things — an individual, characteristic, and strange blend of hard and soft, of high and low, of rugged and tender, all struggling with a Puritanical conscience. So we say that beauty is the lodestone by which all life is tested. No game can be perfectly played unless the physical motions are timed in beauty; no machine will act save in perfect synthesis; no character is strong until it attains a harmony within itself. Beauty is the matrix in which life shall be finally moulded.

All forms of artistic expression, then, require that we shall see the object not as fact but as art. If it is fact — that is, merely an isolated object or event — it remains insignificant until some artist catches it up into the wider realm in which it belongs and sets it forth in some form of beauty. If we accept this conception of all the arts as seeking the inner sense of things, as portraying life in its essence rather than in its outward manifestations, we shall be able to understand the peculiar power of music. It becomes then, not merely a series of sounds arranged so as to be euphonious and pleasing to the ear, but a book of life which contains the ultimate expression of our instinct and of our wisdom. The Third Symphony of Beethoven, for example, gives us a more convincing presentment of heroic struggle than is to be found in the other arts or in literature, first, because it has the power to present it in the element of time, which is an essential part of any heroic deed; second, because it presents it as a quality disassociated from a particular heroism and therefore elevated into a type and made eternal; and third, because it presents it in conjunction with those other qualities without which there can be no heroism at all. (For no quality in life or element in nature exists for us save as the opposite or reverse of something else. What we call light is comprehensible only as the opposite of darkness; love is the opposite of hate, cold of heat, and so forth.)

Each of the other arts has one or two of these qualities; none has all of them. The novelist, for example, can use the first and last but not the second. Meredith’s Vittoria is an ideal presentment of the struggle for Italian unity, but the heroism which constitutes the essence of the book has to find expression through actual persons. So the greatest virtue of music lies not alone in its peculiar unification of matter and manner, its artistic perfection, but in the power which that gives it to create a world not based on the outward and the visible, but on that invisible realm of thought, feeling, and aspiration which is our real world. For if there is any one certain historical fact, it is that from the earliest times until now man has continually sought some escape from reality, some building up of a perfect world of ideal beauty which should still his eternal dissatisfaction with the imperfections and inconsistencies of his own life. It is in the very nature of his situation that he should seek some perfection somewhere. So he has tried to paint this perfection on canvas, idealizing life and nature into a satisfying form of beauty; or he has carved a physical perfection in marble to deify himself and give himself a place in nature; or he has built up for himself a world of magical words in which all his noblest dreams strive for expression. Everywhere and always he has had this dream, which has saved him when all else failed. And the noblest of his dreamers have been those whose imaginations have transcended the limitations of the actual and brought it into relation with the unknown.

Music, obeying the great laws that underlie all life and to which all the arts are subject, having for its means of expression the most plastic of all media, depending on intuitive perception of truth, not compelled to perpetuate objects, dealing with that larger part of man’s being which lies hidden beneath both his acts and his thoughts, — that which Carlyle calls ‘the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious,’ — music is the one perfect medium for this dream of humanity. In its expression of human emotions it enjoys the inestimable advantage of entire irrelevance. It does not have to develop a character or person, but only an attribute or quality. The ‘Eroica’ symphony, for example, has all the force of a mythological epic in which the heroes are pure spirit-types of humanity, of no age or time — Gods, if you will, and above human limitations. This is the quality of music that makes it precious to us. It builds for us an im-material world, not made of objects, or theories, or dogmas, or philosophies, but of pure spirit — a means of escape from the thralldom of every day.

[Mr. Surette’s next paper will discuss ‘Music and Children.’-THE EDITORS.]