Music and Life

I

FOR the ordinary listener the one great difficulty of the symphony lies in ‘making sense’ out of it as a whole. He enjoys certain themes, and is, perhaps, able to follow their devious wanderings; but he retains no comprehensive impression of the symphony as a complete thing, and he may even never conceive it at all as anything more than a series of interesting or uninteresting passages of music. Now, it is obvious that an art of pure sound, if it is to convey any significance at all, must have complete coherence within itself, and that the longer the sounds are sustained the more necessary does this coherence become. This is, of course, the problem of all music. Even opera cannot depend entirely on being held together by the text and the action. Even the song must make musical sense in addition to what sense there is — by chance — in the words. Give what glowing, romantic, even definite title you will to a piece of programme music, — call it ‘ The Hebrides,’ or ‘ Death and Transfiguration,’ or descend to such titles as ‘A Simple Confession,’ — you must still give your music coherence and form in itself. As a matter of fact the titles of such pieces do not lessen the composer’s responsibilities in the least. The title is, after all, merely a suggestion, an indication, an atmosphere. Schumann’s ‘The Happy Farmer ’ is merely jolly; it is not even bucolic, and you hunt for the farmer in vain. ‘Träumerei’ is made rhythmically vague in order to create the illusion of revcry; but it has, nevertheless, complete musical coherence. ‘Tod und Verklärung’ of Strauss contains no evidence of sacrificing its form to its so-called ‘subject.’ The Wagnerian leit-motif is suggestive and not didactic.

The development of form in the symphony is too large a subject to be covered here, but there are certain fundamental aspects of it upon which I may dwell with safety since they represent laws that apply everywhere. To make clear what I mean, let me say that an art whose fundamental quality is movement must have for its problem the disposition within a certain length of time of a group of themes or melodies. The distinction between this art and that of painting is that in music the question is, When? in painting, Where? In this sense literature is nearer to music than painting is, and I shall shortly point out some analogies between literary and musical forms.

I stated in my first article the fundamental synthetic principle of music, which is 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. There is no musical form that does not pay tribute directly or indirectly to this principle. And this, much modified by the medium of language, applies also to literature. Most novels contain near the end a ‘ looking backward over traveled roads’; a too great digression from any thesis requires a restatement of it. The first appearance of Sandra Belloni is heralded by her singing in the wood near the Pole’s country house; the epilogue to Vittoria, closes with the scene in the cathedral — ‘ Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old blind Agostino’s hands upon his head. And then once more and but for once, her voice was heard in Milan.’ The unessential characters and motives of Sandra Belloni disappear in Vittoria — Mrs. Chump, an unsuccessful portrait after Dickens, finds a deserved oblivion; so do the Nice Feelings and the Fine Shades; but the presence of Merthyr in the cathedral is as necessary to that situation as is the absence of Wilfred. War and Peace would be an inchoate mass of persons, scenes, and events, were it not for certain retrospects here and there which hold the whole mass together. The Idiot is a striking illustration of the point in question, for the early part of Mishkin’s career is not revealed until the sixth chapter, as if to tide over more successfully the vastness of the scheme, and the final chapter brings back most vividly the experiences of his boyhood. The sonnet is the most concise example of this process, and I do not need to dwell on the precision with which it illustrates it.

One great difference exists, however, between music and literature, and that is in the number of its subjects or characters. War and Peace, to take an extreme example, contains scores of characters, while a whole symphony would usually contain not more than twelve or fourteen themes. The prime reason for this is that themes have no established law of association, and so do not represent something else with which we are already familiar, as do names of persons in books. We remember the names of such characters as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, or even Dr. Portsoaken in Septimius Felton; for, although they lived a long a time ago, we have enough of word-association to contain their names, and we can understand them and can follow the devious courses of their adventures and the philosophy of life they represent. The absence of this association makes it difficult for us to remember the characters in Russian books.

When we hear a musical theme, however, we have to remember it as such. I have frequently stated the somewhat obvious fact that music obeys general æsthetic laws, and the foregoing is intended to show how those laws are modified by the peculiar properties of sound. A symphony is in this sense, then, a coherent arrangement of themes.

II

This brings me to the important question of the detachment or the unification of the several movements of a symphony. Is a symphony one thing or four? Should we listen to it as a unit or as separate contrasting pieces strung together for convenience? The conventional answer to these questions — the answer given by the textbooks — is that a few symphonies transfer themes from one movement to another, but that a symphony, generally speaking, is a collection of four separate pieces contrasted in speed and in sentiment. Now I wish to combat this theory as vigorously as possible; and I should like to rely solely on æsthetic laws, and say that no great work of art could, by any possibility, be based on such a heterogeneous plan as that. Or I might base my opinion on psychology, and say that since there are four different movements, different in general and in particular characteristics, — one containing themes which evolve as they proceed, producing the effect of struggle toward a goal; another suitable for states of sentiment; another for concise and vivid action, and so forth, — and since the mind of a great man is a microcosm of the world and contains everything, it follows, as a matter of course, that he tries to fuse his symphony into one by filling its several parts with the various elements of himself — a process that has been going on ever since there has been any music at all. The composer is not four men, nor is his mind separated into compartments. One symphony will differ from another because it represents a different stage in his development, but any one symphony — unless arbitrarily disjointed — will express the various phases of its composer’s nature at the time, and will have a corresponding internal organism.

As a matter of fact there is sufficient evidence of the soundness of this view in the great symphonies themselves. I cannot specify at length here, but any reader having access to Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, and Brahms’s symphonies, or to that of César Franck, may investigate for himself. Let me merely point out a few instances which I choose from celebrated and familiar symphonies. In the last movement of the C-major of Mozart (commonly called the Jupiter) there is a rapid figure in the basses at measure nine and ten which is derived from the beginning of the first movement. The theme of the last movement is drawn from, is another version of, the passage in measures three and four of the first movement. In Beethoven’s Eroica the first theme of the last movement is drawn directly from the first theme of the first movement. The theme of the C-major section of the Marche Funèhre is the theme of the first section in apotheosis, and each owes a debt to the first theme of the first movement. Such illustrations of this principle could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and it is not too much to say that there is in all great music this inward coherence. In other words, form in music is not only a framework, or, if you please, a law or a precedent, but the expression of an inward force. Themes having no organic relation are, of course, introduced into symphonic movements for the play of action against each other which results from their antagonism. The novel depends largely on that very contrast. If it were not for Blifil there could hardly have been a Tom Jones. Sandra Belloni must have Mr. Pericles as a foil to that finer character of hers which rises above the prima donna, and she needs Wilfred and Merthyr in order to achieve Carlo.

In short, the symphonic movement is not unlike the novel, which is based on the juxtaposition of contrasting or antagonistic characters, the struggle between the two, and, finally, their reconciliation; and sufficient analogy could be drawn between this and life itself to illustrate the principle as a cardinal one. But I believe the symphony to be a form in a flux; I see no reason why it should not continue to develop from within, and finally achieve an even greater coherence than that already attained. This wall certainly not be brought about by an extension of its outward form or by enlargement of its resources — as in the case of certain modern ¹ symphonies. In a word, the composer is an artist like any other; he is dealing with human emotions and aspirations as other artists are; he is subject to the same laws; he, too, draws a true picture of human life in true perspective, with all the adjustments of scene, of persons, of motives, carefully worked out — even though he deals only with sound. It is almost incredible that any one should suppose otherwise; the real difficulty lies in getting the ordinary person to suppose anything!

So I say that the symphony is a mirror of life, and that all the great symphonies taken together are like a book of life in which everything is faithfully set forth in due proportion and balance. All art sets forth nature and humanity, and through its power of doing so continually reveals the truth to us. I have said that the symphony contains everything and that it has room for disorder. This is its ultimate purpose, and the secret of its power. Life itself is an inexplicable thing. The great symphony compresses it all into an hour of perfection in which all its elements are explicable. Here that dream of man which he calls by such names as ‘Heaven’ or ‘happiness,’ and which he has always sought in vain, becomes, not only a reality, but the only reality possible for him. For nothing would be more terrible than endless happiness, or a located Heaven.

The history of the symphony is the history of all art. It moves in cycles, or it marks a parabola. It began as a naïve expression of feeling; it learned, little by little, how to master its own working material, and as it mastered that, it became more and more conscious in its efforts. As soon as new instruments for producing it were perfected, it immediately expanded its style to correspond to the new possibilities; as its technique permitted, it continually sought to grasp more and more of the elements of human life and human aspiration, and to express them. In Haydn we see it as naïve, folk-like, tuneful music, not highly imaginative, smacking of the soil, like Burns, but without his deep human feeling. In Mozart it reaches a stage of classic perfection which maybe compared to Raphael’s paintings; hardly a touch of the picturesque, the romantic, or the realistic mars its serene beauty. It smiles on all alike; it is not for you or for me, — as Schumann is, — but for every one. And, being purely objective, it belongs to no time and lasts forever. And how delightful are Mozart’s digressions! He is like Fielding who, when he wants to philosophize about his story, proceeds to write a whole chapter during which the action awaits the philosopher’s pleasure. Later writers never drop the argument for a moment; if there is a lull in the action it is somehow kept in complete relation to the subject-matter. Mozart often enlivens you with a story by the way, but he always manages to preserve the continuity of his material. The difference between his method and that of Brahms, for example, is like that between Fielding’s philosophic interlude chapters in Tom Jones and Meredith’s ‘One Philosopher’ who, looking down from an impersonal height upon the characters in the story, interjects his Olympian comment.

A new and terrific force entered music through Beethoven, — new to music, old as the human race, — namely, the spirit of revolt. The world is always the same. In its fundamentals, and within our historical retrospect, human life remains what it was. An art takes what it can master — and no more. Music was ready; the world was in a turmoil at just that moment, and the result was what we call ‘Beethoven.’ Mozart was his dawn, Schumann and the other Romanticists his mysterious and beautiful twilight. He himself represents at once the spirit of revolution, that inevitable curiosity which such a period always excites, and that speculative philosophy which tries to piece together the meaning of new things. The world was full of flame; battle thundered only a few miles from Vienna; the spirit of equality and fraternity was hovering in the air. Beethoven’s piercing vision compassed all this. He sounded the triumph of the soul of man, as in the great theme at the close of the Ninth Symphony; he took the simplest of common tunes and made it glorious, as at the end of the Waldstein Sonata; his imagination ranged at will over men struggling at death-grapple, over the gods looking down sardonically on the spectacle. He was the great protagonist of democracy, but he was also a great constructive mind; he never destroyed anything in music for which he did not have a better substitute to offer, and there is hardly a note in his mature compositions that is not fixed in nature.

This great force having spent itself, the art turns away and starts in another direction — as it must. The lyric symphony of Schubert appears. His was the most perfect song that ever asked for expression by the orchestra. With small intellectual power, with but scanty education of any sort, Schubert, by the very depth of his instinct, creates such pure beauty as to make intellectualism seem almost pedantic. He strings together melody after melody in ‘profuse, unmeditated art.’ He was a pendant to Beethoven, and often enough in listening to Schubert’s music we catch the echo of his great contemporary.

Then comes the so-called ‘Romantic School’ of Schumann, with its tender, personal qualities, its glamour, its roseate hues. Like all other romantic utterance, it had a certain strangeness, a certain detachment from reality, and a certain waywardness which gives it a bitter-sweet flavor of its own. Like all other romantic utterance, too, it was impatient and refused to wait the too slow turning of the clock’s hands; it is the music of youth and of hope. Its effect on the development of the symphony was slight, for it was ill at ease in the large spaces of symphonic form, its hues were too changing, its moods too shifting to answer the needs of the symphony.

No really great symphonic composer appears between Schubert and Brahms, but during that period the rich idiom of the romantic school had become assimilated as a part of the language of music. Brahms, using something of this romantic idiom, but having a broad feeling for construction, and being firmly grounded on that one stable element of style, counterpoint, produced four symphonies worthy of standing alongside the best. They are restrained in style, for Brahms has something of that impersonality which is needed in music as much as in other forms of art (and one may say in passing that the greatest of all composers, Bach, is the most impersonal).

The flexibility of the language of music increased rapidly during the nineteenth century, aided by Wagner and the Romanticists, and in Brahms the symphony becomes less didactic and more introspective. I may, perhaps, make the comparison between music like his and that later stage of the English novel wherein the author desires the action to appear solely as the result of the psychology of his characters, and wherein, also, words are made to answer new demands and serve new purposes. Brahms could not have said what he did say had he been limited to the style of Mozart; nor could Meredith had he been limited to the style of Thackeray.

Brahms’s symphonies, in consequence of the complicated nature of his style, are not easily apprehended by the casual listener. Let a confirmed lover of Longfellow, or even of Tennyson, take up for the first time ‘Love in the Valley,’ and he will have the same experience. Every word will convey its usual meaning to him, but the exquisite beauty of Meredith’s poem will elude him. He will go back to ‘My Lost Youth’ or to ‘Blow, Bugles, Blow’ for healing from his bruises. Any one of my readers who has access to Brahms’s First Symphony should examine the passage which begins twenty measures before the poco sostenuto near the end of the first movement, if he wishes to understand something of Brahms’s powers of recreating his material. Here is a melody of great beauty, which is derived from the opening phrase of the symphony, and which has a bass derived from the first theme of the first movement. As it originally appeared, it was full of stress, as though yearning for an impossible fulfillment. Here its destiny is at last attained, the law of its being fulfilled.

Contemporaneous with Brahms stands Tschaikovsky, to reveal how varied are the sources of musical expression. No two great men could be further apart than these — one an eclectic, calm, thoughtful, and impersonal, restraining his utterances in order to understate and be believed; the other pouring out the very last bitter drop of his unhappiness and dissatisfaction, entirely unmindful of a world that distrusts overstatement and has only a limited capacity for reaction from a colossal passion. Of Tschaikovsky’s sincerity there is no doubt whatever. He so believed; life was to him what we hear it to be in his symphonies. But life is not like that; if it were, we should all have been destroyed long since by our own uncontrollable inner fires. And so, aside from any technical considerations,— and he contributed nothing of importance to the development of the symphony, — Tschaikovsky represents a phase of life rather than life itself.

Dvořak’s New World symphony adds a new and interesting element to symphonic evolution. Dvořak was, like Haydn and Burns, a son of the people, and the themes he employs in this symphony are essentially folk melodies; but where Haydn merely tells his simple story, with complete unconsciousness of its possible connection with life in general, Dvorak sees all his themes in their deeper significance and thereby creates from them a work of art. The New World symphony is a Saga retold.

A new phase in the development of the symphony appears in César Franck, whose musical lineage reaches back over the whole range of symphonic development and beyond. His spirit is mediæval. In his single symphony rhythm plays a lesser part, and one feels the music to be quite withdrawn from the vivid movement of life, and to live in a realm of its own. Franck was one of those rare spirits who remain untainted by the world; his symphony is a spiritual adventure. Other symphonies are full of the actions and reactions of the real world in which their composers lived. This action and reaction always depend for their expression in music on the play and interplay of rhythmic figures. Franck’s symphony broods over the world of the spirit; his least successful themes are those based on action.

III

My object in writing all this about the forms and substance of the symphony, and in drawing comparisons between it and the novel or poetry, has not been to lead my readers to understand music through the other arts, for by themselves such comparisons are of small value. I have dwelt on these common characteristics of the arts because they exist, because they illuminate each other, and at the same time because they are too little considered. The only way to understand music is to pract ice it, or, failing that, to hear it often under such conditions as will permit a certain opportunity for reflection. We are incapable of understanding symphonic music chiefly because we have so little practice in doing so; an occasional symphony concert is not enough. How shall this difficulty be overcome? There is a natural way out, and it consists in what is called chamber-music. A piece of chamber-music is a sort of domestic symphony. A string quartet, a pianoforte or violin sonata, a trio, quartette, quintette, and the like — are all little symphonies; the form is almost identical; the same devices of rhythm, melody, harmony, counterpoint, and so forth are employed. In chambermusic paucity of idea cannot be covered up by luxury of tone-color, or by grandiloquence of style; everything is exposed, so that only the greatest composers have written fine music in this form.

Now, if in every community there were groups of people who played chamber-music together, and if these would permit their friends to attend when they practice, the symphony would soon find plenty of intelligent listeners. Such rehearsals would give an opportunity to hear difficult passages played over and over again; there would be time for discussion, and, above all, for reflection. Every town and village should have a local chamber-music organization giving occasional informal concerts. Under these circumstances a sympathetic intimacy would soon be established between the performers and listeners and the music itself. The inevitable and indiscriminate pianoforte lesson is an obstacle to this much-desired arrangement. Some of our children should be taught the violin or the violoncello in preference to the pianoforte; then the family circle could hear sonatas for violin and pianoforte by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms, and could accomplish what years of attendance at symphony concerts could not bring about.

Chamber-music has also the great advantage of being simple in detail; one can easily follow the four strands of melody in a string quartette, whereas the orchestra leaves one breathless and confused. The practice of chambermusic by amateurs would be one of the very best means of building up true musical taste. I cannot dwell too insistently on the fact that the majority of those people who do not care for such music would soon learn to care for it if they had opportunities to listen to it under such conditions as I have described. The argument proves itself, without the abundant evidence of individuals who have gone through the experience. Furthermore, by cultivating music in this way, we should gradually break down some of the social conditions which now operate against the art. If we all knew more about it and loved it for itself, we should give over our present worship of technique. We should put the performer where he belongs as an interpreter of a greater man’s ideas. By our uncritical adulations we place him on far too high a pedestal.

I have spoken of certain social conditions which affect music unfavorably. There has always been a certain outcry against music because of its supposed emotionalism. The eye of cold intelligence, seeing the music-lover enthralled by a symphony, raises its lid in icy contempt for such a creature of feeling; the sociologist, observing musical performers, wonders why music seems to effect the appearance and the conduct of some of them so unfavorably. The pedagogue who has his correct educational formula which operates like an adding machine, and automatically turns out a certain number of mechanically educated children, each with a diploma clutched in a nervous hand, tolerates music because it makes a pleasant break in diploma-giving at graduation time, and because it pleases the parents. The business man leaves music to his wife and daughter and is willing to subscribe to a symphony orchestra provided he does not have to go to hear it play.

Now, if the sociologist would put himself in the place of the singer who, endowed by nature with a fine voice, is able, on account of a public indifferently educated in music, to gain applause and an undue sum of money, even though he has never achieved education of any sort whatever — if the sociologist would but think a little about sociology, he would perhaps finally understand that he himself is very likely at fault. For it is more than likely that he knows almost nothing about this art which is one of the greatest forces at his disposal. He is, perhaps, one of the large number of persons who make musical conditions what they are. Public performers are the victims, not the criminals. We must remember of old how disastrous has been the isolation of any class of workers from their fellows.

I have referred in this and the preceding article to certain unities in symphonic music — in its several elements of rhythm, melody, and harmony, and in the whole. I have said that every object is unified in itself, and that it is a part of a greater whole. In this sense a symphony is a living thing — every member of it has its own function, and contributes a necessary part to the whole. But is not this equally true if we carry the argument into life itself and say, ‘Here is a thing of beauty created by man; it is a part of him, one of his star-gleams’? Why is it that this, so necessary to him in his thralldom, is disregarded by him, or used only as a plaything? Can his spirit hope for freedom if he depends on his mind only? Is there not something even dangerous to him in permitting these magic waves of sound to beat vainly against him? Is the satisfaction of material or intellectual achievement enough? Is there not a realm where he would breathe a purer air and be happier because he would be beyond all those unanswerable questions which forever cry a halt to his ambitions — a realm where his doubts would find the only possible answer?

Of course this brings us back to the old problem. Many men and women have allowed this beautiful thing to escape them — and are by just so much the poorer. In many cases it is impossible to regain the lost heritage; no intimate relation between life and music is possible, for the musical faculty has become atrophied. But the children! Every one of them might be and should be educated in music. Every one of them should be taught to sing beautiful songs, and should listen to music which they cannot perform. Let us stop sacrificing them to the old conventions of the ‘music lesson.’ Remembering the few who can perform music well, let us teach them to perform it and to love it; remembering the many who are capable only of loving it, and of understanding it, let us set ourselves consciously to the task of so educating them that, when they are as old as we are, they will not be in our unfortunate condition of musical obtuseness. Moral idealism is not enough for the spirit of men and women, for, humanity being what it is, morality is bound to crystallize into dogma. The Puritans were moral in their own fashion, but they were as far away from what man’s life ought to be, under the stars, and with the flowers blooming at his feet — as were the gay courtiers whom they despised.

Intellectual idealism is not sufficient, because it lacks sympathy. Idealism in buying and selling belongs to the millennium. We all need something that shall be entirely detached from life, and at the same time, wholly true to it. Our spirit needs some joyousness which objects, ideas, or possessions cannot give it. We must have a world beyond the one we know — a world not of jasper and diamonds, but of dreams and visions. It must be an illusion to our senses, a reality to our spirit. It must tell us the truth in terms we cannot understand, for it is not given to us to know in any other way.