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MUSIC AND LIFE

MUSIC AND LIFE
A STUDY OF THE RELATIONS
BETWEEN OURSELVES AND
MUSIC
BY
THOMAS WHITNEY SURETTE
AUTHOR OF
“ The Development of Symphonic Music"
AND (WITH D. G. MASON) of
“The Appreciation of Music"
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Che Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THOMAS WHITNEY SURETTE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published March 1917
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author desires to express his thanks to the
Editor of the Atlantic Monthly for permission to
use, as a part of this book, material from a series of
articles that appeared in his magazine.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS MUSIC?
I. DISTINCTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND THE OTHER
Arts . . . . . . . . . .
II. THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC . . . . . 6
III. THE SIGNIFICANCE of Music . . . . . 13
IV. “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, Truth BEAUTY” . . 18
CHAPTER II
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
I. TRAINING THE SENSE FOR BEAUTY . . . . 26
II. THE VALUE OF SINGING . . . . . .
III. CURRENT METHODS OF TEACHING'. . . .
IV. WHAT SHOULD CHILDREN SING? . . . . 45
V. THE FALLACY OF THE INEVITABLE PIANOFORTE
LESSON . . . . . . . . . 50
VI. The Real GOAL . . . . . . . 56 };
41
[ vii ]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
a I. IDeals of Public SCHOOL EDUCATION . . . 61 Y
II. THE VALUE OF MUSIC IN PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCA-
TION . . . . . . .
. . 68
III. False METHODS OF TEACHING . . . .
IV. Good or BAD MUSIC . . . . . . 83
V. ATTEMPTS AT REFORM . . . . . . 91
VI. OTHER ACTIVITIES IN SCHOOL MUSIC . :. . 97
CHAPTER IV
COMMUNITY MUSIC
I. MUSIC BY PROXY . . .
II. OUR MUSICAL ACTIVITIES .
III. WHAT WE MIGHT DO . . . .
IV. AN EXPERIMENT . . . .
V. MUSIC AS A SOCIAL FORCE .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 103
. 108
. 117
. 129
. 134
J
S
CHAPTER V
THE OPERA
.
.
.
I. WHAT IS Opera? . . . . . .
II. OPERA IN THE OLD STYLE . . .
III. WAGNER AND AFTER . . . . .
IV. WHEN MUSIC AND DRAMA ARE FITLY JOINED
V. OPERA AS A HUMAN INSTITUTION :
.
.
. 158
.
. 175
.
[ viii ]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER VI
THE SYMPHONY
I. WHAT IS A SYMPHONY ? . . .
II. HOW SHALL WE UNDERSTAND IT! .
III. THE MATERIALS OF THE SYMPHONY
IV. TONE COLOR AND DESIGN . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 179
. 187
. 196
. 210
CHAPTER VII
THE SYMPHONY (Continued)
I. THE UNITY OF THE SYMPHONY . . . . 216
II. STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT . . . . . 226
III. CHAMBER MUSIC AS AN INTRODUCTION TO SYM-
PHONIES · · · · ·
234
IV. THE PERFORMER AND THE PUBLIC . . . . 237
CHAPTER VIII
CONCLUSION .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 241
INTRODUCTION
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 es-
tablished 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 an-
num 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 inhabit-
ants sing together for the pleasure of doing
so, and that the task of keeping choral societies
[ xi ]
INTRODUCTION
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 lan-
guages that we cannot understand; that, in
short, while music flourishes, much of it is
bought and little of it is home-made. The de-
duction 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 occasion-
ally 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
.
[ xii ]
INTRODUCTION
doing, might make complete havoc of our fig-
ures, because it would change their basic sig-
nificance. 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 pain-
fully acquiring a mechanical dexterity (or ac-
quiring a painful mechanical dexterity) in piano-
forte 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 an-
other person, through so many thousand dol-
lars, 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 indi-
vidual 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.
My purpose is, therefore, to suggest ways of
improving this situation, and of realizing these
[ xiii ]
INTRODUCTION
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 perform-
ance? Is it, as Whitman says, “what awakes
in you when you are reminded by the instru-
ments”? Or has it a life of its own, self-con-
tained, self-expressive, and complete? These
questions need to be asked — and answered
before we can formulate any method of im-
proving our musical situation.
They are not asked. We blindly follow con-
ventional practices; we make little effort to
fathom the many delightful problems which
every hearing of music presents to us; we
submit to being baffled every time we hear an
orchestra play; we take no forward step on
the road to understanding. Beethoven was a
heart, a mind, a will, and an imagination ; we,
in listening, absorb his emotion and hardly
anything else. His grotesque outbursts make
us uncomfortable, as would a solecism of be-
havior. His strange, bizarre, uncouth, and ex-
traordinary themes, every one of which fits
[ xiv ]
INTRODUCTION
perfectly into his plan, leave us wondering
what he intends. His sentiment, which is al-
ways relative to his humor or his roughness,
we understand only by itself.
Our children, after years of conventional
music study, are finally taken to hear an or-
chestral concert. A great man is to speak to
them. He does not use words. What he has
to say issues forth in a myriad of sounds, now
soft, now loud, now fast, now slow. This that
the child hears is what is called music, seem-
ingly a mere succession of sounds, really a
vision of what a great man has seen of all those
inner things of life which only he can truly
see. These sounds are formed into a perfect
order. Their very soul may hide in the pe-
culiar tone of the oboe or horn; they change
their significance a dozen times in as many mo-
ments; slender filaments of them run through
and through as in a fairy web. The child gapes.
“Is this music?” it says ; “I thought music
was the black and white keys, or holding my
hand right, or scales, or the key of For G, or
sonatinas, or something." No one has ever
told her what music really is. She has only her .
delicate, tender, childlike feelings as a guide
[ xv ]
INTRODUCTION
What she has been doing may have been as
little like music as grammar is like literature.
Both the child and the adult must be brought
into contact with music; with rhythmic move-
ment in all its delightful diversity; with great
musical themes and the uses to which they
are put by composers; with musical forms by
means of which pieces of music are made co-
herent; with harmonies in their primary states,
or blended into a thousand hues. They must
learn to listen, so that, as the music unfolds,
there takes place within them an unfolding
which is the exact answer to the processes go-
ing on in the music. All this cannot be brought
about save by intention.
It is the purpose of this book, then, to lead
the reader by what capacity he possesses to
/such an understanding of the art of music as
shall make every part of it intelligible to him.
And since some readers may have little knowl-
edge of music, this book also attempts to set
forth the common grounds upon which all art
rests, and to tempt those who are interested
in the other arts to become inquisitive about
music. Curiosity is a necessary element in hu-
man intelligence.
MUSIC AND LIFE
MUSIC AND LIFE
YT
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS MUSIC?
I. DISTINCTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND THE
OTHER ARTS
Any discussion of the art of music, -- of its
significance in relation to ourselves, of its æs-
thetic 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 pe-
culiar power. Painting and sculpture are defin-
itive. 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 reli-
gious belief may shine from the canvas, — as
in the Sistine Madonna, - but that belief can-
not be there presented without physical em-
[1]
MUSIC AND LIFE
bodiment. 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 opal-
escent 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 sub-
tle and, at the same time, of the most elemen-
tal 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 defi-
niteness. But the greatest poetry is continu-
ally 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 attain-
ing a great part of its meaning by a sublime
euphony. The didactic is its grave.
[ 2 ]
WHAT IS MUSIC?
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 ele-
ment 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 in-
dicating 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 archæolog-
ical significance. Combine the note a with a
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 co-
herence of form, - a pleasing sequence of
sounds, — but still no meaning such as you
[3]
MUSIC AND Life
get from the combination of letters in a word
like “chair.” Combine a with a great many
other notes into a symphony, and this coher-
ence 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 sig-
nificance in themselves; that musical phrases
have no meaning as have phrases in language;
that melodies are not sentences, and sympho-
nies not poems.
If we compare music with painting or sculp-
ture 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 Téméraire
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 mo-
ment, 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
[ 4 ]
WHAT IS MUSIC?
is unmoral,' 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 at-
taching 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 lassi-
tude 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 mu-
sic is this: it finds its perfection in itself with-
out 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 pa-
tiently and persistently for the one word which
shall not only be the exact symbol of his
17
It may, of course, be used with words of definite mean-
ing; but we are speaking of pure music.
[5]
MUSIC AND LIFE
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 expres-
sion of his thought, and the greatness of his
picture depends first of all and inevitably on
his power of fusing his subjects with his tech-
nique. 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 indivisi-
ble. It is, as Pater says, “the ideal of all art
whatever, precisely because in music it is im-
possible to distinguish the form from the sub-
stance or matter, the subject from the expres-
sion."
II. THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC
The primal element in music is vibration.
Sound-waves in some ordered sequence --si-
lent 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
[ 6 ]
What is Music?
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
" to give
To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time
The appropriate calm of blest eternity."
Sculpture is motion caught in a moment of
perfection. Music is motion always in perfec-
tion. This rhythm exists also in literature and
the other arts. Poe would be nothing without
it; Whitman uses it in long swelling undula-
tions which are sometimes almost indistin-
guishable; 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,
The Scherzo of Opus 59, no. 1.
f
[ 7 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
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 im-
possible 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 perma-
nent rhythm which it momentarily violates,
as is the case in the first movement of Beetho-
ven's Third Symphony. In short, rhythm in
music has a diversity, a flexibility, and a phys-
ical 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
[ 8 ]
WHAT IS MUSIC?
of diverse but highly coördinated melodies
may be found in the slow movement of Bee-
thoven'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. Melody, being
design, gives conscious evidence of the per-
sonality of its creator. Schubert, for example,
C
lyric utterance. Bach, on the contrary, is es-
sentially a thinker, and his melodies are full
of vigorous and diversified rhythms.
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 knowl-
edge or experience of artistic objects could,
[9]
MUSIC AND LIFE
..
.
-
nevertheless, create perfect works of beauty
in the medium of sound.
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 combina-
tions of sounds that spring direct from nature.
The whole history of music shows a gradual
assimilation by human beings of new combi-
nations of sounds, and it is probable that only
the first chapters of that history have been
written. A
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 ma-
terial — rhythms, melodies, and harmonies —
as to give to the work perfect coherence. A
work of art expressed in the element of time
[ 10 ]
WHAT IS Music?
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 ex-
pression 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 an-
other; and this in turn was followed by all
sorts of experiments tending to bring about
variety in unity. (These simple forms some-
what resemble what is known in poetry as the
triolet.) The most common form in music is
threefold. It is found in folk-songs, marches,
minuets, nocturnes, and so forth, and ex-
panded to huge proportions --in symphonic
movements. In folk-songs this form consists
in repeating a first phrase after a second con-
[11]
MUSIC AND LIFE
trasting 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 sec-
ond 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 in-
teresting 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 order-
ing of his material that it gives that impres-
sion of inevitability which distinguishes all
great art everywhere. It is obvious enough
that parallels to this form will be found in lit-
erature, 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
[ 12 ]
WHAT IS Music?
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 mean-
ing, it is without “subject,” it is without idea.
It creates a world of its own, fictitious, fabu-
lous, and irrelevant - a world of sound, eva-
nescent yet indestructible.
....
...
- .
-
-
-
-
...
-
-
-
-
- III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC
Music deals first of all with feeling or emo- 1.
tion. 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 or-
dered by the mind and so transfused by the
imagination as to become intellectual and im-
aginative. It is true that the greater part of
the music produced and performed deals only
with emotion, but this is equally true of litera-
ture. The popular novel is nine tenths emo-
tion, one tenth mind, and the rest imagination.
So it is with music, though such illogical in-
vention as one constantly finds in many pop-
ular novels would be intolerable in any music.
[ 13 ]
Music AND LIFE
Since there seems to be an incongruity between
the statement that music has no definite mean-
ing and the statement that it is intellectual, let
us take a specific illustration and see if we can-
not 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,"
without ever expressing himself by a spoken
or written word. His wisdom exists by itself
and for itself, entirely separated from its ex-
pression. If he expresses himself, and with
skill, we call that expression literature, but, in
any case, it remains wisdom. And what is wis-
dom? It is what Mr. Eliot describes a liberal
education to be “a state of mind”; it is the
fusion of knowledge with experience, with feel-
ing, 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 ade-
quate for the purpose, because he is dealing
with something which is not in the domain of
[ 14 ]
What is Music?
knowledge alone — which he can feel, or per-
haps 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 plas-
tic medium, though non-definitive, has those
qualities of coherence, continuity, and form
which are essential to all intellectual expres-
sion, we are justified in calling it “intellee-
tual.” 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 ur-
[ 15 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
derstands it is that the feeling is absolutely
controlled by the mind, and that it is imagi-
nation that gives it its extraordinary effect.
Compare it with the first movement of Tschai-
kovsky's “Pathétique Symphony” where emo-
tion 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 Brad-
don. Beethoven's music contains, in the first
place, themes whose import all completely re-
ceptive 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 con-
clusion. So intensive is their treatment that
almost the whole five hundred or more meas-
ures 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
[ 16 ]
WHAT IS MUSIC?
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 func-
'tion 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 deep-
est wisdom, that which defies categorical ex-
pression? May we not accept Schopenhauer's
saying: “Music. is an image of the will”?
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 Bee-
thoven are not his or yours or mine; they are
the qualities themselves in their 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 Sy-
:
[ 17 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
monds says, “speaking the highest wisdom in
a language our reason does not understand
because it is older and deeper and closer than
reason?”
IV. “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY”
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 im-
agination.) 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 be-
cause he has superior technique, but because
he has deeper insight. This is why the “sub-
ject” in painting is comparatively unimportant.
[ 18 ]
What is Music?
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 sub-
jects or bad subjects,” says Hugo ; “there are
only good poets and bad poets.” Any subject
is interesting when a master-mind presents it
in full significance. A custom-house is a pro-
saic thing, and a custom-house 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. Eurip-
ides, in “The Trojan Women," puts on the
lips of Hecuba these words :-
- Had He not turned us in his hand, and thrust
Our high things low and shook our hills as dust,
We had not been this splendor, and our wrong
An everlasting music for the song
Of earth and heaven!”;
1 Gilbert Murray translation.
[ 19 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
monu
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. The battle of Gettysburg will be-
come 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, not because they were wise, but
because they were 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 re-read 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 pas-
sages of quite perfect poetic imagery and char-
acterization 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 his-
[ 20 ]
What is Music?
manner
tory; 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 tired 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, re-
quire 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 insignifi-
cant 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 manifesta-
tions, we shall be able to understand the pe-
culiar power of music. It becomes then, not
merely a series of sounds arranged so as to
[ 21 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
be euphonious and pleasing to the ear, but a
book of life which contains the ultimate ex-
pression of our instinct and of our wisdom.
The Third Symphony of Beethoven, for ex-
ample, gives us a more convincing present-
ment 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 qual-
ity disassociated from a particular heroism and
therefore elevated into a type and made eter-
nal; and third, because it presents it in con-
junction 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 some-
thing else. What we call light is comprehen-
sible 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
[ 22 ]
WHAT IS Music ?
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 unifica-
tion of matter and manner, its artistic perfec-
tion, 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 his-
torical fact, it is that from the earliest times
until now man has continually sought some
escape from reality, some building up of a per-
fect world of ideal beauty which should still
his eternal dissatisfaction with the imperfec-
tions 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, ideal-
izing 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 no-
and always he has had this dream, which has
[ 23 ]
MUSIC AND Life
saved him when all else failed. And the noblest
of his dreamers have been those whose imagi-
nations have transcended the limitations of the
actual and brought it into relation with the un-
known.
Music, obeying the great laws that under-
lie 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 perpet-
uate 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 Un-
conscious,” — 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 limita-
tions.
This is the quality of music that makes it
[ 24 ]
What is Music?
precious to us. It builds for us an immaterial
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.
vided
NT
Cal
CHAPTER II
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
I. TRAINING THE SENSE FOR BEAUTY
In what I have to say about music for children
I am not unmindful of the diversity of Ameri-
can life, and of the prevalent idea that Ameri-
cans do not pay much attention to music (or
to any other form of beauty) because they live
in a new country in which the greater part of
their energy is devoted to subduing nature and
carving their fortunes. As a nation we are said
to be too diverse to have evolved any definite
æsthetic practice, and we suppose ourselves too
busy with the practical things in: life to pay
much attention to it.
While it is doubtless true that there are
numberless prosperous American families in
which the words “art” and “literature” mean
nothing whatever, this condition is due, in
most cases, not to lack of time, but to lack of
inclination. We, like other people, do what
we like to do. No real attention is paid in
TY
[ 26 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
childhood to the cultivation of a love of the
beautiful; very little attention is paid to it
in the educational institutions where we are
trained ; so we grow up and enter upon life
with a desultory liking for music, with a dis-
tinct lack of appreciation for poetry, and with
almost no interest in painting or sculpture.
And this condition is likely to increase
rather than diminish as time goes on, until,
having finally arrived at moments of leisure and
finding that neither our money nor any other
material possession gives us any deep or per-
manent satisfaction, we turn to beauty only to
be confronted with the old warning: “Too
late, ye cannot enter now.” For we have ar-
rived at the time when, in Meredith's phrase,
“Nature stops, and says to us,''Thou art now
what thou wilt be.?” For this capacity for
understanding and loving great books and
paintings and music has to grow with our own
growth and cannot be postponed to another
season. The average American man is sup-
posed to have no time for these things. He
has time, but he refuses to turn it into leisure,
-- leisure which means contemplation and
thoughtfulness, though he very likely knows
[ 27 ]
MUSIC AND Life
that this has been accomplished over and over
again by men who have saved out of a busy
life for that purpose a little time every day.
One recalls Darwin's pathetic statement
wherein he describes his early love for poetry
and music, and the final complete loss of those
“capabilities ” through neglect. “The loss of
these tastes,” he says, “is a loss of happiness,
and may possibly be injurious to the intellect,
and more probably to the moral character by
enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
The intellect of man, in itself, is never su-
preme or sufficient. Feeling or instinct is half
of knowledge. “Whoever walks a furlong
without sympathy,” says Whitman, “walks
to his own funeral drest in his shroud.” Of
any man, American or otherwise, who lives
his life unmindful of all beauty we may justly
say, as Carlyle said of Diderot, “He dwelt all
his days in a thin rind of the Conscious; the
deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious
whereon the other rests and has its meaning
was not under any shape surmised by him.”
Must not the education of children in beauty
begin, then, with their parents ? Must they
not be aroused, at least, to an intellectual con-
[ 28 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
viction of its value, even though they have
missed its joy ? Can the matter be safely left
to the jurisdiction of the schools themselves
whose curricula are already overcrowded with
methods of escape from this very thing? Does
not the school answer the general conception
of education obtaining among the fathers and
mothers of the school children? Can it be
expected - is it possible for it- to rise far
above that conception? My object is there-
fore to suggest, first, that the perception of
beauty is, in the highest sense, education;
second, that music is especially so, because it
is the purest form of beauty; and, third, that
music is the only form of beauty by means of
which very young children can be educated,
because it is the only form accessible to them.
Need I point out that there has never been
a time in the history of mankind when human
beings have not paid tribute to beauty ? In
their attempt to escape what may be called the
traffic of life and to rise above its sordid limi-
tations, have they not always and everywhere
created for themselves some sort of detached
ideal by means of which they justified them-
selves in an otherwise unintelligible world?
nan.
[ 29 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
This ideal may have been a god of stone, but
it figured for them a perfect absolution. Sur-
rounded by brutal forces about which they
knew nothing, subject to pestilence, to war,
to starvation, to the fury of the elements, un-
able safely to shelter their bodies, they built
for their souls a safe elysium. This ideal was
always one of order and beauty; every civili-
zation has possessed it, and it was to each
civilization not only religion, but also what we
call “ art.”
I referred in the first chapter to that quality
in art which consists in its “holding a mirror
up to nature, and thus focusing our atten-
tion. Browning expresses this in “ Fra Lippo
Lippi,” where he says, --
6. For, don't you mark, we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.”
But the highest office of art is not so much to
attract our attention to beautiful objects as to
make us realize through the artist's skill what
the objects signify. It is the artist who so de-
picts life as to make it intelligible to us; it is
he who sees all those deeper relations which
underlie all things; he, and he only, can so
[ 30 ]
Music FØR CHILDREN
Il
present human aspirations and human actions
as to lift them out of the maze and give them
order and sequence. Through all the welter
of political theories, of philosophies, of dogmas
insisted on at the point of excommunication;
amid the discoveries of science and the ten-
dency to make life into a mechanically oper-
ated thing, the still small voice of the poet
rises always supreme - supreme in wisdom,
supreme in insight, the seer, the prophet, the
philosopher; when all else has passed he re-
mains, for beauty is the only permanence. To
eliminate beauty from education is to destroy
its very soul.
From the law of gravity to Shelley's “To
a Skylark,” beauty is the central element. In
physics, in mathematics, in astronomy, in chem-
istry, there is the same perfection of order and
sequence, the same correlation of forces, the
same attraction of matter which, operating in
the fine arts, brings about what we call “paint-
ing,” “sculpture,” “poetry,” and “music.”
The whole of nature is a postulate of this doc-
trine, and there is no subject taught from kin-
dergarten to college which may not be taught
as in accord with it. There is a rhythm of beauty
[ 31 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
in all things animate and inanimate ---- an end-
less variety around a central unity. The indi-
viduality in nature and in human life is as a
rhythmic diversity to a divine and central
unity. The leaves of a maple tree are all alike
mechanical arts and the fine arts is a difference
of rhythmic flexibility: one is fixed in rhythm
in accordance with physical laws, and acts in
perfect sequence and regularity; the other is
a free individualized rhythmic play around a
fixed center. The painter may not dispose the
objects on his canvas as he pleases — nature
allows him only a certain freedom ; the sculp-
tor may distribute his weights and his rhythms
around the axis with only so much freedom
from the demands of nature as his particular
purpose justifies; even the strain of music,
which seems to wander so much at will that it
is often called a “rhapsody,”-it, too, is merely
a play of rhythms and contours around a fixed
center, and conforms to a common purpose just
as a maple leaf does. A machine acts in me-
chanical synthesis, a melody acts in æsthetic
synthesis; neither is free. So we say there is no
such thing as an isolated fact, or subject, or idea.
[ 32 ]
Music FOR CHILDREN
Thus everything taught to children can be
taught as beauty, and if it is not so taught,
its very essence must dissolve and disappear.
« The mean distance from the earth to the
moon is about two hundred and forty thou-
sand miles”; “two and two make four”; “an
island is a body of land entirely surrounded
by water”;-So a child learns his lesson in
what are called facts (the most deceptive and
soulless things in the world). To him “the
moon” and “a mile” are little more than
words; 2+2 are troublesome hieroglyphics;
“an island” is, perhaps, merely a word in a
physical geography book; but to you all these
objects and quantities are, perhaps, beautiful;
for you
“The moon doth with delight
. Look around her when the heavens are bare" ;
for you numbers have come to have that sig-
nificance which makes them beautiful; an island
may have touched your imagination as it has
Conrad's, who calls it “a great ship anchored
in the open sea”; you have seen that beauty
which lies behind facts when they fall, as with
a click, into the mechanism of things. So must
children be taught to realize at the very begin-
[ 33 ]
Music AND LIFE
.
ning something of that great unity which per-
vades the world of thought and of matter.
Some comprehension must be given to them
of that marvelous sense of fitting together, of
perfect correspondence, which all nature re-
veals and which is ultimately beauty. It is this
quality, residing in every subject, which con-
stitutes the justification for our insistence on
beauty as a part of education.
With our present systems of education all
ideality is crushed, for this ideality is a per-
sonal quality, whereas all we are, we are in mass.
"You are trying to make that boy into another
you,” said Emerson, some fifty years ago ;
“one's enough.” Modern education, subject
to constant whims, has become a capacious maw
into which our children are thrown. Every-
thing for use, nothing for beauty; for use means
money, while beauty — what is beauty good
for? - (a question which Lowell, in one of
his essays, says “would be death to the rose and
be answered triumphantly by the cabbage ”).
This is indeed an old thesis, but never has it
more needed stating than now. It applies
everywhere. Literature taught as beauty is
uplifting and joyful ; taught as syntax it is dead
[ 34 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
and cheerless. All other forms of instruction
lose their force if they are detached from that
poetic harmony of which they are a part. Num-
bers, cities, machines, symphonies, the objects
on your table, you yourself, — all these are to
be seen as belonging to this harmony, without
which the world is Bedlam.
American children are musical, American
adults are not, and the chief reason lies in the
wasted opportunities of childhood. If the natu-
ral taste of our children for music were properly
developed, they would continue to practice it
and to find pleasure in doing so, and thus would
avoid the fatal error of postponing their heaven
to another time the great mistake of life and
of theology.
I desire therefore to deal here with the pos-
sibilities which music offers to children, not to
a few children in playing the pianoforte, but to
all children in love and understanding. It is ob-
viously desirable to make them all love music,
and, since few of them ever attain satisfactory
proficiency in playing instruments, our chief
problem lies in trying to develop their taste
and thereby keeping their allegiance.
[ 35 ]
Music AND LIFE
II. THE VALUE OF SINGING
In the first chapter I discussed the qualities
and properties of music as such —- music, that
is, in its pure estate, unconnected with words
as in songs, or with words, action, costume, and
scenery, as in opera. And now, in writing about
children's music, it is still necessary to keep in
mind that, even when music is allied to words, it
has the necessities of its own nature to fulfill,
and that the use of suitable or even fine words
in a child's song does not change this condition.
In beginning this discussion I propose to
ignore for the moment the effect in after life
of what we advocate for children, and I also
discard (with a certain contempt) the common
notion --- true enough in its way — that music
is for them a rest and a change after burden-
some tasksFor we must see music, in relation
to children, as it really is. I go behind the psy-
chologist" who says, “... the prime end of
musical education ... is to train the senti-
ments, to make children feel nature, religion,
country, home, duty, we, to guarantee sanity
of the heart out of which are the issues of
i G. Stanley Hall."
TES
.
.
.
.
...
...
..
.
..
..
.
:
[ 36 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
aro
life”; for I say that music, by itself, cannot
make children feel nature, religion, country,
home, or duty, and that these sentiments are
aroused by the heightened effect of words-set
to music, and not by the music itself. The..
prime end of music — and of the other arts —
is beauty. Song is not story, melodies have
nothing to do with morals, and all the theories
about music — such as those of Darwin and
Spencer — are wrong when they attribute to
it any ulterior purpose or origin whatever.
Music is an end, not a means.
: Now this beauty which the soul of man
craves, and always has craved, cannot be
brought to little children in literary form, be-
cause they cannot read or because their knowl-
edge of words is too limited; nor can it be
brought to them in the form of painting, be-
cause they are not sufficiently sensitive to color-
vibrations; nor of sculpture, for their sense of
form is not sufficiently developed. In fact,
their power of response is exceedingly limited
in most directions. They can neither draw nor
paint nor write nor read, so that this beauty
which we value so highly seems shut out from
them. This were so but for music.
[ 37 ]
MUSIG AND LIFE
By singing, and by singing only, a little
child of five may come in contact with a pure
and perfect form of beauty. Not only that,
but ithe child can reproduce this beauty en-
tirely unaided, and in the process of doing so
its whole being — body, mind, heart, and soul
- is engaged. The song, for the moment, is
the child. There is no possible realization of
the little personality comparable to this. Here,
in sounds, is that correlation of impulses in
which the stars move; here is the world of
order and beauty in miniature; here is a micro-
cosm of life; here is a talisman against the cold,
unmeaning facts which are driven into chil-
dren's brains to jostle one another in unfriendly
companionship. Through this they can feel a
beauty and order which their minds are inca-
pable of grasping. The joy which a child gets
in reproducing beautiful melodies is 'like no
other experience in life. It is absolutely a per-
sonal act, for the music lends itself to the child's
individuality as nothing else does. Music, in
this sense, preserves in children that ideality
which is one of the most precious possessions
of childhood, and which we would fain keep
in after life; which loves flowers and animals,
"... - 4.590.-
[ 38 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
which sees the truth in fairy stories, which
believes everything to be good and is alien to
everything sinister, which sees the moon and
stars, not as objects so many millions of miles
from the earth, and parts of a great solar sys-
tem, but as lanterns hung in the heavens.
The prime object, then, of musical education
for children is so to develop their musical sen-
sibilities as to make them love and understand
the best music. Does this bring up the ques-
tion, “What is the best music?” By the
“ best” music I mean exactly what I should
mean if I were to substitute the word “litera-
ture” for “music” -I mean the composi-
tions of the great masters. And if you say that
the great masters did not write music suitable
for little children, I reply that such music has
nevertheless been produced by all races in
their childhood, that it exists in profusion, that
it is commonly known as “ folk-song," that it
is the basis upon which much of the greatest
music in the world rests, and, finally, that it is
the natural and, indeed, the inevitable means
of approach to such great music.
This basis, to which I refer, is both actual
and ideal. Many great composers have used
[ 39 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
actual folk-melodies. The chorales in Bach's
« St. Matthew Passion,” for example, are
based on traditional melodies. In Haydn's in-
strumental compositions folk-songs are often
used verbatim, and the total number of them
to be found in his works is very great. Nota-
ble examples may be found in Beethoven -
as in the “Rasoumoffsky” quartettes, and the
Seventh Symphony — while Schubert, Brahms,
and Tschaikovsky used folk-melodies freely.
Dvorâk and Grieg are essentially national in
their idiom and style, and folk-music may be
said to be the basis of the music of each.
Ideally the debt of music to folk-song is greater
still. Any typical, Adagio of Beethoven (such
as that in the so-called “Pathétique Sonata")
springs from folk-song, and, in spite of the
long process of development through which
music had passed, reflects - in a more mature
form--the same sentiment one finds in the
original. How could it be otherwise? Is there
any art, or any other intellectual activity of
man, of which the same thing cannot be said ?
Were not Keats and Shelley waiting to be
born of Coleridge and Wordsworth? Is there
such a thing as a fruit without a vine; a blos-
't of midagio Orhétiqu
[ 40 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
som without a stem; an end without a begin-
ning? There have been composers, poets, and
painters who have lived detached from the
common consciousness -- like those strange
organisms in nature that float in sea or air
and draw nothing from the earth's native soil;
but all the greatest minds have been rooted
in the past and have drawn their inspiration
from common human experience. Keeping in
mind, then, that our object is to train the taste :
of children so that they will love the best
music, let us examine what is actually taking
place in the teaching of music to children.
.
III. CURRENT METHODS OF TEACHING
The most common fallacy in our teaching
consists in putting knowledge before experi-
ence, or theory before practice. Children are
taught about music before they have had suf-
ficient experience of it. They are taught, for
example, to pin pasteboard notes on a make-
belief staff; they are told that one note is the
father-note and another the mother-note (one
supposes the chromatics to be irascible old-
maid aunts); all sorts of subterfuges are re-
sorted to in an attempt to teach them what
[ 41 ]
Music and Life
they are too young to learn and what, in any
case, can have no significance whatever except
when based on a long process of actual experi-
ence. One might as well try to satisfy a hungry
child with a picture of an apple as to show a
child notes before it has dealt with sounds.
This, then, is our great fallacy. It is impos-
sible to expect children to be musical if they
begin with symbols of any kind. Furthermore,
in the teaching of songs without notation, the
whole stress can be laid on fundamental things.
What are these? First, a sense of rhythm. In
the development of music rhythm came be-
fore melody, as melody came before harmony.
Rhythmic freedom and accuracy are essential,
not only to a child's musical education, but to
his physieal well-being. Now there is one thing
certain, -namely, that freedom and accuracy
in rhythm can be brought about only by actual
bodily movement. (It is unnecessary to dwell
on the fundamental difference between actual
rhythmic movement and any symbol of it,
such as a half or quarter note.) And the be-
ginning of the musical training of children.
should consist in marching, or clapping hands
to music played by the teacher. Following this
[ 42 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
1
the actual notes of simple folk-song may be
expressed in bodily motion -- as in running or
dancing — the chief point being to engage the
whole body. The beginnings of Eurhythmics
as evolved by Dalcroze serve this purpose ex-
cellently, the meter of the song (4 or :) being
expressed with the arms, while, at the same
time, the rhythms (or actual notes) are ex-
pressed by the movement of the feet with the
body in motion. It must always be kept in
mind, however, that this training is for the
mind and the æsthetic sense, and that the bodily
motions are for the purpose of giving children
an exact sense of rhythm. Too great stress
cannot be laid on the necessity of always using
good music. Furthermore, I wish to avoid
the pitfalls that are spread at every hand in
the form of schools for self-expression in which
children and adults are taught so-called “æs-
thetic” movements to music. Æsthetic dancing
is one thing; a musical education is another.
The cry for self-expression is characteristic of
our attitude toward education. A child or an
adult is asked to listen to a piece of music and
then to express in motion or pose what it feels.
Undisciplined by experience, incapable — as
[ 43 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
we all are of fathoming the mystery of great
music, uneducated in those immutable laws
that underlie all æsthetics, what can such a
person express--save that idiosyncrasy which
he at that moment is ? So, ultimately, one
expresses a Beethoven sonata or symphony
by poses and movements — in a Greek dress,
against a curtained background and under a
calcium light! This delicate, transitory, elu-
sive, and impenetrable thing we call music is
something more than motion; yes, more even
than motion, melody, and harmony together,
for they are but its body; its spirit can neither
be fathomed nor expressed save in terms of
itself.
On every side this sort of instruction goes
on. One hears glib statements on the lips of
uninstructed persons about' child psychology,
“second” brain, and so forth. A pupil is asked
to listen to a phrase of music and then tell the
teacher what “comes through." We must re-
member that art is discipline and that there is
no real liberty except under law. We want
children to use their minds accurately and to
have control of their bodies, but this use and
this control can only come through definite
[ 44 ]
Music FOR CHILDREN
REN
and regulated effort. Gropings in the dark,
detached and illusive pursuits of the will-o'.
the-wisps of education will never accomplish
our purpose.
'IV. WHAT SHOULD CHILDREN SING?
But even these artificial and false methods
are less harmful to children than are the poor,
vapid, and false songs by means of which their
taste is slowly and surely disintegrated. Now
are unable to see why one child's song is better
than another. There is a considerable number
of people having to do with children's music
who seem quite incapable of distinguishing be-
tween a really beautiful folk-song and a trivial
copy of one. Long association with the latter
has produced the inevitable result. Only one
argument can be brought to bear on such per-
sons, an argument having nothing to do with
æsthetics — namely, that the current music
for children of one generation is inevitably dis-
placed by that of the next, whereas the same
folk-songs are continually reproduced, and are
sung by increasing generations of children the
world over. Any musician can string together
[ 45 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
in logical sequence a series of notes to fit a
verse of simple poetry -- almost every musi-
cian has; any poet can put together simple
and easily understood verses; but the hand
of time sweeps them away to oblivion. Out
of the depths of simple hearts, in joy or sor-
row or privation, as a balm to toil and labor,
as a cry from a mother's heart, in battle, in
moments of religious exaltation - wherever
and whenever the depths are stirred, song
springs forth. A composer can express only
what is in him; his limitations are as con-
fining as are those of every other artist.
Dickens could no more create a Clara Middle-
ton than could Tschaikovsky a theme like
that at the opening of the Ninth Symphony;
and to suppose that the creation of a child's
song is a simple matter of putting notes to-
gether in a correct and agreeable sequence, is
to misconceive the whole creative process.
It is our cardinal error that we think any
tune good enough which is attractive at first
hearing. In the music-books provided for kin-
dergarten and for home singing there is an
endless series of poor, vapid, over-sweet mel-
odies which children, hungry for any music,
[ 46 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
will sing readily enough for lack of better.
Some of these tunes smack unmistakably of
a Broadway musical comedy; many of them
are full of mawkish sentiment and affected
simplicity. No real progress can be made until
we reach definite conclusions on this point and
act on them. Our taste and that of our chil-
dren is never stationary, - we continually ad-
vance or go backwards, and the subtle dis-
integration of the taste of children by bad songs
results inevitably in indifference to good music
in later life. The road branches here; one leads
the way we know too well, the other leads to
a real love of fine music, to a real happiness
in it, and to a real respect for it. Let me say,
also, that children love good songs, and that,
as a part of their natural or normal endow-
ment, they possess in this respect, and to a
remarkable degree, that quality which we ig-
nobly call “ taste.” (I recall an old Egypt
manuscript in the Bodleian Library containing
a letter which ran thus: “Theon to his father,
Theon — Greeting. It was a fine thing that you
did not take me to Alexandria with you. Send
me a lyre, I implore you! If you don't, I won't
eat anything. I won't drink anything. There!")
1 Illall all vid Vogy Phall
1
eai
[ 47 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE.
The number of musical nostrums for chil-
dren is legion, and I have no desire to enu-
merate them. Their effects are in inverse re-
lation to their extensive and sometimes —
expensive paraphernalia. But I will quote a
single sentence from a popular song-book for
children as an illustration of the tendency
which they represent: “Understanding as we
do the innate fondness of children for rich
harmonies, we have given special attention to
the harmonization of the melodies; and al-
though it is occasionally necessary for children
to sing without accompaniment, yet such a
lack is to be deplored, as the accompaniment
often serves as the rhythmic expression of the
thought.” .
The foregoing specimen is almost a com-
pendium of what children's songs and the
teaching of them should not be. If children
are fond of “rich” harmonies, the fact is to
be regretted. (I do not believe that the aver-
age child is.) The best possible thing for them,
in that case, would be to hear no harmonies
at all for some time, but to sing entirely un-
accompanied (just as you would deprive them
of sweetmeats if they had been made ill by
[ 48 ]
Music FOR CHILDREN
them); special attention given to the harmo-
nization of children's songs is given in an en-
tire misconception of their character and their
uses; for the essence of a child's song lies in
its own rhythmic and melodic independence,
and if it depends on an accompaniment for its
rhythm, it is by just so much a poor song.
There is no harm in a simple accompaniment
to a folk-song, but in teaching them to children
an accompaniment does for them precisely
what we want them to do for themselves,
namely, reproduce correctly the metre and
the rhythm, the pitch and the contour of the
melody.
Such training as I have advocated, if carried
on through early childhood, brings with it a
natural desire to continue singing and makes
learning to sing from notes much easier than
it would otherwise be. The capacity to sing
music at sight is a valuable acquisition for
children, for it enables them to take part in
choral singing and provides them in after years
with a delightful means of access to some of
the finest music. The advantage to the indi-
vidual of this acquired technique is that it is
of the mind and not of the muscles; it does not
[ 49 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
desert its possessor as finger technique deserts
the player who ceases to practice. To sing
part songs with friends, or to be one of a larger
number singing a composition by Bach or some
other great composer, in which each singer is
contributing to reproduce a noble work of art
- this, in itself, is a highly desirable experi-
ence. But the process of learning to sing at
sight has sometimes led far away from true
æsthetics and has resulted in a certain debas-
ing of the taste through singing inferior music.
Vocal exercises for sight singing are necessary,
and we can accept them as such, for they do
not evoke the æsthetic sense; but bad songs
taught to illustrate some point of technique
are unnecessary, and inexcusable.
V. THE FALLACY OF THE INEVITABLE
PIANOFORTE LESSON
But the majority of the children who have
private instruction in music take lessons in
pianoforte-playing. It has become a custom ;
the pianoforte is an article of domestic furni-
ture (and a very ugly one); pianoforte-playing
is a sort of polish to a cursory education. But
the reason is chiefly found in the fact that this
[ 50 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
HIL
is the line of least resistance: there are plenty
of teachers of pianoforte-playing but few teach-
ers of music, so parents accept that which is
available.
There is here a confusion between perform-
ing music and understanding it. Learning to
perform seems (and is) a tangible asset - some-
thing definitely accomplished; while merely
learning to understand music seems to par-
ents a vague process likely to have somewhat
indefinite results. They want their children to
produce tangible results in the form of “ pieces”
well played. Here again we find the same mis-
conception. Music in this sense is half titilla-
tion of the ear, and half finger-gymnastics. 1;
Such music instruction consists in finding the
right key, black or white, holding the hand in
a correct position, - patented and exploited
as the only correct method, - putting the
thumb under, and finally, after going through
an almost endless series of evolutions cover-
ing many years and carried on at fearful cost
of patience to every one within hearing, in
dashing about over the glittering keys with an
abandonment of dexterity positively bewilder-
ing. Nine tenths of the aspirants, however,
[51]
MUSIC AND LIFE
fall by the wayside and some time later look
back grimly on a long procession of endless
hours almost wasted. One pictures to one's
self a little girl of seven or eight seated before
that ponderous and portentous mass of iron,
steel, wood, wires, and hammers which we call
a“ pianoforte” (sixty pounds of tender, deli-
cate humanity trying to express itself through
a solid ton), her legs dangling uncomfortably
in space, her little fingers trying painfully to
find the right key, and at the same time to
keep in a correct position, struggling hard the
while to relate together two strange things, a
curious black dot on a page and an ivory key
two feet below it, for neither of which she feels
much affection. And then one pictures to one's
self the same child at its mother's knee, or with
other children, singing with joy and delight a
beautiful song.
I do not advocate the abolishment of piano-
forte-teaching to children, but I do advocate
the exercise of some discrimination in regard
to it, and particularly I insist that it should
not be begun until the child has sung beauti-
ful songs for several years and has developed
thereby its musical instincts, and even then
[/52 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
only when a child possesses a certain amount
of that physical coördination which is abso-
lutely essential to playing the pianoforte. For
pianoforte-playing is by no means a sure
method of developing the musical instinct in
children. In the first place it lacks the inti-
macy of singing, and in the second place the
playing itself demands the greater part of a
child's attention, so that often it hardly hears
the music at all. Any method of teaching
music is, of course, wrong which attempts to
substitute technical dexterity for music itself.
The foregoing is not typical of the most in-
telligent instruction in pianoforte-playing, for
there are many teachers who reason these mat-
ters out, and there are some parents who see
them clearly enough to allow such teachers a
reasonable latitude. But it is true of piano-
forte-teaching in general, as doubtless almost
every one of my readers has had some evi-
dence. It is obvious that even a slight capac-
ity to play the pianoforte is useful and de-
lightful provided one plays with taste and
understanding, for one gets from it a certain
satisfaction which mere listening does not give.
I deplore only an insistence upon playing as
[ 53 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
the only means of approach to music; I ques-
tion the wisdom of forcing children to play
who are not qualified to do so; and I think
playing should, in any case, be postponed
until the musical faculties are awakened by
singing.
It is doubtless the conventional and domes-
tic character of the pianoforte that leads us to
train our children to play upon it rather than
upon the violin. The pianoforte is available
for casual music, for accompaniments to songs,
for dance music, and so forth. The violin is,
perhaps, only useful to one person. But how
much more intimate it is! Tucked under the
chin it becomes almost a part of the player —
as the sculls used to be to the Autocrat when
he went rowing. The tones of the violin are
yours and have to be evoked through your
own patient effort; the pianoforte stands glis-
tening and repellent, almost impervious to
your personality. I would have children taught
to play the violin, or violoncello in preference
to the pianoforte, and I look forward to the time
when we shall train our young people to play
other orchestral instruments as well. This is
being successfully done even now in the public
[ 54 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
schools. My own observation leads me to be-
lieve that talent for pianoforte-playing is quite
rare, and that the average child is more likely
to be able to play the violin. What more de-
lightful than a quiet evening of chamber music
in a small room, young and old playing to-
gether? Each person has his own interesting
part to play. Each expresses himself and at
the same time conforms to the ensemble. This
would be true self-expression under the best
kind of discipline."
It is perhaps too much to expect to stem
the tide of bad pianoforte music. Here, as
elsewhere, the home influence counts for
much. Is it not the duty of parents to satisfy
themselves that the teacher of music is giving
their children the best and nothing else? The
teaching of music in this country has suffered
enormously through being detached from the
highest professional standards, and, on the
other hand, the professional standard suffers
in being disconnected from the common life
and thought. In other words, anybody who
plays the pianoforte a little can set up in busi-
ness as a teacher, while, at the same time, the
highly qualified professional teacher often for-
[ 55 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
gets that he is dealing with a human being
who wants to understand music and whose
happiness in dealing with it must ultimately
depend on that understanding.
When children show an aptitude for play-
ing the pianoforte there exists still the impor-
tant question of developing their taste. Play-
ing loses much of its value if there is any lack
of musical taste and judgment on the part
of the teacher. An examination of the pro-
grammes of what are called “pupils' recitals”
will reveal how lax some teachers are in this
respect. There is no excuse whatever for giv-
ing children poor music to play, for there is
plenty of good music to be had and they can
be taught to like it - but the teacher must like
it also. Children are quick to discover a pre-
tense of liking, and it is difficult to stimulate
in them a love for something which you do
not love yourself.
VI. THE REAL GOAL
These questions now inevitably arise: “How
can children be taught. music itself?” “By
what process is it possible for them to become
musical ?” Obviously through personal expe-
[ 56 ]
MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
rience and contact with good music, and with
good music only, first, by singing beautiful
songs to train the ear and awaken the taste,
second by learning how to listen intelligently,
and third (if qualified to do so by learning to
play good music on some instrument. Intelli-
gent listening to music is obviously such lis-
tening as comprises a complete absorption of
all the elements in the music itself. It is not
enough to enjoy the “tune” alone, for melody
is only one means of expression. The listener
must be alive to metric and rhythmic forms,
to melodies combined in what is called “coun-
terpoint,” to that disposition of the various
themes, harmonies, and so forth, which consti-
tutes form in music. The groups of fives, for
example, which persist throughout the second
movement of Tschaikovsky's “ Pathétique
Symphony” constitute its salient quality ; the
steady, solemn tread in the rhythm of the slow
movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony
defines the character of that piece; the weav-
ing of the separate, individual parts in a compo-
sition by Bach is his chief means of expression,
and his music is unintelligible to many people
because they are incapable of answering to so
[ 57 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
complex an idiom; the latitude in melody
itself is, also, very great, and one needs con-
stant experience of the melodic line before one
can see the beauty in the more profound melo-
dies of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
What we are seeking to do is to make our-
selves complementary to the music. We need
to see that æsthetic pleasure is not by any
means entirely of the senses, but rather of
the imagination through training of the feel-
ings and the mind. We want our listeners to
assimilate all the elements in a piece of music
and then to re-create it in the imagination. It
is the office of art to create beauty in such
perfect form as shall make us reflect upon it.
This principle applies, of course, to the ap-
preciation of any artistic object whatsoever.
One cannot appreciate Whistler's portrait of
his mother by merely realizing that the subject
looks like a typical Victorian dame, any more
than one can appreciate Whitman's “ To
the Man-of-War-Bird” by locating Senegal.
Whistler's idea is expressed through composi-
tion, drawing, and color, and each of these
qualities has a subtlety of its own; the pose
of the figure is a thing of beauty in itself; the
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MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
edge of the picture-frame just showing on the
wall, the arrangement of curves and spots on
the curtain, the tone of the whole canvas -
all these make the picture what it is, and all
these we must comprehend and take delight
in. Whitman's poem is a thing of space and
freedom; the sky is the wild bird's cradle, man
is “a speck, a point on the world's floating
vast”; the poet's imagination ranges through
the whole created universe and flashes back
over vast reaches of time as if to incarnate again
man in the bird. So this music, which reaches
our consciousness through rhythms, melodies,
and harmonies, through form and style, through
the delicate filigree of violins, or the trium-
phant blare of horns; which says unutterable
things by means of silence; which means noth-
ing and yet means everything, — this Ariel of
the arts, - this, in all its quality, must find echo
within us.
Observation, discrimination, reflection ; cul-
tivating the memory for musical phrases and
melodies, disciplining the senses, enlarging the
scope of the imagination, nurturing the sense
of beauty these are the means and the ob-
jects of musical education for children. By
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MUSIC AND LIFE
such a process we attain in some measure to
that joy which is one of the chief objects of
art, and of which our present situation almost
completely deprives us.
So let me say finally that I wage war here
against patent nostrums, against enforced and
joyless music-teaching, against the develop-
ment of technical proficiency without taste or
understanding; and that I uphold here a pro-
cess of musical education which has for its ob-
ject“ being musical,” and which takes into its
fold every child, boy or girl, and keeps them
there as man and woman.
CHAPTER III
AT
PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
1. IDEALS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION
It is characteristic of our compliance in mat-
ters educational that of late years we have seen
subject after subject added to the curricula of
our public schools, and have cheerfully voted
money for them, without having much con-
ception of their value or of the results attained
by introducing them. Education is our shib-".
boleth, our formula. The school diploma and
the college degree constitute our new baptism
of conformity. We do not question their au-
thority or their efficacy. They absolve us. Our
public schools have become experimental sta-
tions for the testing of theories, until the de-
mand for more and more specialization has
resulted in an overcrowding of the curricula
and a consequent superficiality in the teaching.
“That any man should die ignorant who is
capable of knowledge, that I call a tragedy,"
says Carlyle. But there is a greater tragedy
still, which is that our capability for knowl-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
edge may be so overburdened by irrelevant
information that it becomes worthless to us.
We study everything and we know nothing.
Our schools become detached from the reali-
ties of life because we pursue so diligently the
semblance of those realities.
Our objective is definitely practical. We ex-
pect education to fit boys and girls to cope
successfully with the everyday affairs of life,
we frown on anything that savors of the un-
practical, and we instinctively distrust the word
“beauty.” We are like Mime who thought that
courage lay in the sword itself. We, too, have
the pieces of the broken blade, and they are as
useless to us as they were to him. Of what
avail all this information which we so slowly
and painfully acquire? Can it be put together
Mime-fashion? Or is there something that
can fuse it? Has it not all a common source,
and is not that source in nature ? “Every ob-
ject has its roots in central nature and may be
exhibited to us so as to represent the world.”
This unity in things, to which Emerson refers,
gives order and sequence to all objects, per-
sons, and ideas; they become significant and
potent, for we see them as they really are. No
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Public School Music
na
....
....my
one can be said to be educated who fails to ap-
prehend that unification of all matter, of all
thought, of all sensation -- that harmony in
things which brings into relation a speck of
dust and a star, the individual and the cosmos.
The very thing we fear most in education is
the one thing that tempers all the others -
namely, beauty. For in education, as in every-
thing else, beauty means sequence, order, and
harmony; beauty relates things to each other,
multiplies arithmetic by geography, objects by
sounds, acts by feelings. If there were a world
with one human being in it, and only one, his
sweetest, gentlest, and most inevitably perfect
act would be to leap into the mother sea and
rejoin nature. An isolated fact or an unre-
lated piece of information only differs in this
respect from the human being in that it never
was alive.
We pay lip service to beauty. We study
poetry, but we deal chiefly with poets with
their being born and their dying, with the
shell of them, whereas the poet is only valu-
able for what beauty he brings us. We even
try to extract morals from him, or to find in
him codes of conduct, philosophies, and the
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Music AND LIFE
like, forgetting Swinburne's fine saying that
“There are pulpits enough for all preachers in
prose; the business of verse writing is hardly
to express convictions; and if some poetry, not
without merit of its kind, has at times dealt
with dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and
all the weaker for that.” One of the prime ob-
jects of the study of English should be to in-
still in the student a love of English poetry.
But we are afraid of it; we distrust it, or we
think it effeminate. (It means nothing that we
are now praising “free verse,” for we are only
interested in the first half of the term, and that
is not applicable to poetry, since no verse
worth having ever has been or can be free.
We nibble.)
But poetry does, at least, express itself in
words, and words can be punctuated, and
spelled, and parsed and scanned, and, above
all, words provide material for examinations.
You cannot do any of these things with mu-
sic, for it consists in mere sounds meaning
nothing that any one can find out. We do allow
music to enter a corner of our educational
sanctuary, and then we slam the door on her
and leave her there until June when we expect
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
her to come forth garlanded for the graduation
exercises. The taxpayer attends these exercises
and listens to the singing of the children in
that complacent mood which he commonly as-
sumes when he thinks he is getting his money's
worth, although he very likely knows that his
own public school education in music did noth-
ing whatever for him.
What are the claims of music as a means
of educating the young? To some educa-
tional administrators it seems to have almost
no justification. " What can be accomplished
by it?” they ask. “Singing is not necessary as
a factor in life.” “ Music is of little importance
in a work-a-day world.” So argue the school
men who want "results" as they call them.
\'But the real object of education should be first
to make human beings capable of hearing
and seeing intelligently, and of using their
hands skillfully, and then to train the mind
so that it can receive and assimilate knowledge
and turn it into wisdom. There are a few school
authorities who see music as an important part
of such education, but most of them- being
in themselves unconscious of its power and
of its value — only accept it because other
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Music AND LIFE
people similarly placed have done so, or as a
relief from other studies, or as a means of en-
livening public school exhibitions. That there
is something in our natures which music ful-
fills and satisfies; that great men have given
expression to their ideas through it; that the
understanding and appreciation of their utter-
ances depends on the training of the ear and
of the imagination, and that, when this train-
ing has been completed, a man or woman has
access to a whole world of beauty — all this
the average school man does not see. Nor can
he be expected to see it, for he has never ex-
perienced it in himself. But he should be con-
vinced by the phenomena ; by the large num-
ber of people who derive enjoyment and
stimulation from great music; by the per-
sistence of the love for it; even, perhaps, by
the colossal sums spent on it. But he cannot
dispel his distrust of a study whose results are
illusive; he often sees it badly administered,
and is unable to remedy the condition, so he
leaves it to its fate. The one medium of hu-
man expression that is universal, that tran-
scends language, that knows no distinctions
save such as it seeks out itself in our own
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
souls; that speaks to the tiniest child and to
his grandfather in common terms; that does
not deal in beliefs, or in dogma, or in events,
or things, or persons, or localities - this he
suspects! Put all this on his educational scales;
a few lessons in arithmetic will outweigh it.
The passion for categorical facts, arranged in
methodical sequence term by term, year by
year, and culminating in a sky-rocket burst,
every fact blazing up separately for an instant
as though it really were alive, and then going
out while the charred embers fall far apart on
a patient earth — this is called Education !
But this passion is almost ineradicable-is,
indeed, one of the most common of human
failings. It is what is called in these days
“efficiency”: that is, a sort of nose-on-the-
grindstone persistency in detail entirely obliv-
ious of those larger aspects of any case which
really decide its destiny. Systems, categories,
precedents; these are safe. Why wander from
beaten paths? Individual aspiration, a desire
for beauty — these are dangerous. We have
ceased memorizing the names of rivers, or
the capitals of Patagonia and Bolivia, but we
still cling tightly to “useful” subjects, and
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MUSIC AND LIFE .
we still test our education by weighing it in
June.
I propose, then, first, to examine the claims
of music as a subject to be taught in our pub-
lic schools; second, to examine into prevail-
ing methods of teaching it; -third, to investi-
gate the results now obtained; and finally, to
suggest ways of bettering our situation.
.: II. THE VALUE OF MUSIC IN PUBLIC SCHOOL
EDUCATION
In the last chapter I referred to the qualities
in music which make it especially valuable for
children, and what I said there applies with equal
or even greater force here. Any one who has
compared town or city life in this country and
in Europe, and has seen what a pleasure, and
what a civilizing influence music may become
when it is properly taught in childhood, must
realize how great a loss our people sustain by
the neglect of singing. We are only now begin-
ning to realize how long it takes to weld a diverse
people into one by means of an intellectual
conception of nationality. The thin bond of
self-interest, the advantage of “getting on” in
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
the world - these keep us together in ordi-
nary times, but in a great crisis these bonds
break. The leaven of sentiment is needed. We
all some means of expression for that sympa-
thy: . There have been of late numerous great
meetings at which the feelings of men and
women have expended themselves in shouts,
in cheers, in the clapping of hands, and in
other inarticulate methods of expressing emo-
tions. What would not a song have done for
these thousands — a song they all knew
and loved? Are we forever to be dumb?
Our hope is in the children, to whom music
is of inestimable value. In the first place (as I
have already pointed out) music supplies the
only means of bringing young children into
actual and intimate contact with beauty. In
the kindergarten or in the early grades of our
public schools children are capable of singing,
and love to sing, simple songs which, within
their limited scope, are quite perfect, whereas
their capacity for drawing, or for appreciating
forms and colors is comparatively slight. In
music children find a natural means of expres-
sion for that inherent quality of idealism which
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MUSIC AND LIFE
is a part of their nature. When children sing
together their natures are disciplined while
each child at the same time expresses its own
individuality. Activity of ear, eye, and mind
together tends to cultivate quickness of de-
cision and accuracy of thinking. In the matter
of rhythmic coördination alone music justifies
itself. Rhythmic movements to music have
long since come to be recognized as a means
of mental and physical development. All sorts
of interesting and stimulating exercises can be
used in connection with the teaching of songs
to little children, and any one who has ever
watched a child's development through intel-
ligent instruction in singing and in rhythmic
exercises must have realized how keen its per-
ception becomes and how valuable to its gen-
eral intelligence the training is. So impor-
tant is training in rhythmic movement that
it should be a part, not only of all musical
education, but of all primary education every-
where.
Singing beautiful songs prepares children by
the best possible means for an intelligent un-
derstanding of the compositions of the great
masters which, for lack of this preparation,
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PUBLIC School Music
many adults never comprehend. The educa-
tional administrator who denies a great com-
poser the distinction he gives to a great writer
is going against the testimony of generations
of cultivated and educated people all over the
world, and, moreover, is tacitly acknowledging
that he believes greatness to be a matter of mere
outward expression. The element in Shake-
speare's writings, for example, which reveals his
greatness is the same element that reveals Bee-
thoven's — namely, an imaginative, beautiful
and true concept or idea of human life. Bee-
thoven is as true as Shakespeare. The same
fancy, the same daring, the same grandeur, the
same extravagance of imagination, and the same
fidelity to life are found in each. That one uses
words and the other mere sounds affects the
case not at all, or if at all, in favor of music,
since these elements or qualities of life are
expressed more directly and more intensely in
music than in words. ..
Yes, there is every reason for giving music
a real place in the curriculum save one, and
that is this: you cannot give an examination
in it. Fatal defect! No A + or A – for the
child to take home proudly to its parents ;
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MUSIC AND LIFE
on a certain day at a certain hour you cannot
find out by a set test what, of the beautiful
thing we call music, a child has in its heart and
soul. The result you hope to gain consists
chiefly in a love of good music, and a joy in
singing it - a result that is likely to affect the
happiness of the child all its life long; the
whole tendency of singing in schools has been
to civilize the child, to make it happy, and to
help its physical and mental coördination ; yet
you deny the value of such training, you re-
fuse to give it a real place in your curriculum,
you call it a fad or a frill. What an extraor-
dinary attitude for an educational administra-
tion to assume! The world is, then, merely a
place of eating and drinking, of mechanical
routine, of facts. There are to be no dreams;
the flowers and brooks and mountains, the
sky, birds' songs and the whole fantasy of
life — these are nothing. Beautiful objects in
which the eye delights, beautiful sounds that
fill the soul with happiness and create for us
a perfect world of our own, these are useless
because they won't submit to an examina-
tion in June and can't be made to figure in a
diploma. How many young people, I wonder,
ne
a
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
1
graduate from our institutions of learning with
nothing but a diploma? Would it not be of
great value to the children if they were taught
to see and to hear vividly and intelligently, to
be alive to all beautiful objects, to love a few
beautiful poems, to have the beginnings of
a taste for literature, to be able to sing fine
songs, to take part in choral singing, and to
know well a few pieces by Mozart or Schu-
bert? Do not all great things establish rela-
tionship and do not all little things accentuate
differences? What education is better than
that which unifies the individual with the uni-
versal? Is not this whole world of fine litera-
ture, painting, sculpture, and music in the very
highest sense, then, an education to the indi-
vidual ?
We march in endless file along a hard-paved
way out of the sun, our goal a place where use
holds sway. We reach the goal and begin our
labors under the lash, catching a glimpse only
now and then of stars, of flowers, of brooks,
of green fields — only a glimpse, for use holds
us fast. After a time we forget them altogether
as use fastens its grip upon us more securely.
We plod onward, machine-like, until all sense
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MUSIC AND LIFE
of beauty is dead, and the world is a tread-
mill of money-getting and of trivial pleasures.
Then our blindness reacts on our children.
We have forgotten the impulse of our child
hood. The love for beautiful things has left
us, and we have no longer a sense of their
value. Must our children continue to suffer
for this? Must they, too, become the slaves
of use?
III. FALSE METHODS OF TEACHING
That compliance of ours to which I have
referred is nowhere more evident than in the
large sums we spend on the teaching of music,
and in our ignorance of the results. School
boards and school superintendents usually pos-
sess little knowledge of the subject and have
no means of knowing the quality and the effect
of music teaching save by such evidences as
are supplied by the singing of the children at
the end of the school year. No one asks what
the one thousand or the fifty thousand dollars
spent by the school board earns. The money
is appropriated and expended on salaries, mu-
sic books, .etc., and there the matter is left
hanging, as it were, in the air, and not to be
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Public School Music
heard from again until the end of the school
year. No committee supervises the selection
of the books or the methods of teaching. The
supervisor is in autocratic control. The system
is like an inverted pyramid propped up by an
occasional show of singing, by the fallacious
excuse that singing is a relaxation after bur-
densome tasks (fallacious because such relaxa-
tion by singing could be carried on without
the expensive paraphernalia of a school music
system), but most of all supported and fostered
by the equally fallacious belief that reading
music "at sight," so called, is an end in itself.
So completely divorced is it from such con-
trol as is exercised over other subjects that it
has become the prey of theorists who have
accumulated around it a mass of pedagogical
paraphernalia quite unknown in any other
form of music teaching, and essentially arti-
ficial and encumbering.
I have attended conventions of teachers
where all the interest centered in pedagogical
methods, and in the discussions of artificial
terms and theories. I have met teachers who
say they discourage the children from singing
because it ruins their voices! and who con-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
fine their instruction to the theory of music.
The fetish of sight-singing has cast its blight
over the teaching of little children so that in-
stead of letting them sing by ear simple and
beautiful songs, - which nearly every child
loves to do, - they are taught at the age of
five or six years the mysteries of intervals,
etc. And since the time divisions of music
present difficulties too great for their young
minds, the vertical measure lines are discarded,
thus obliterating the accents and taking away
from music one of its most fundamental ele-
ments. This makes necessary the substitution
of purely empirical terms to describe the time
values of quarter notes, eighth notes, and
so forth, such as "type one," "type two”; or
artificial syllabic terms are piled up one upon
another until such a monstrosity as tafate-fetifi
results.
It is obvious that a long experience of music
through singing should precede any instruc-
tion as to the time values of notes, and that if
a child has sung many times by ear the sounds
represented by these artificial terms, and has
continued to sing by ear for two years or more,
and has stored up a series of musical impres-
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
sions that have developed its musical taste and
instinct, and has mastered the rudiments of
numbers, the teaching of the notes becomes a
much simpler and more natural process, in-
volving no other terms than those ordinarily
in use in music. You can then call a note by
its generally accepted name— "half,” “quar-
ter,” “eighth,” etc.
How did this all come about? Primarily
through the indifference of the public, and
through the incapability of the school authori-
ties to control the teaching. Never having been
so educated in music as to realize that it con-
tains the highest kind of educational possi-
bilities, parents take little interest in the music
their children learn in school. The connection
between music and life is lost. The supervisor
may, or may not be a good musician; he may
be entirely indifferent to the higher possibil-
ities of music as a factor in education; his taste
may never have been properly, formed. He is
likely to be helpless even though he feels the
need of reform because he needs music books,
and has to take what he can buy. The making
of music books for schools has become too
much a matter of commercial competition, and
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MUSIC AND LIFE
particularly of commercial propaganda, and
this latter condition is fostered by the summer
schools for supervisors controlled and operated
by the publishers of school music books. The
result of all this is that a cumbersome peda-
gogical system has become firmly entrenched
in many American towns and cities.
One of the greatest difficulties connected
with public school music teaching is the ina-
bility of some of the grade teachers to teach
music. The daily lesson is given by her. The
music teacher visits each room once in two,
three, or even four weeks. It is not necessa-
rily the grade teacher's fault if she cannot teach
music well, because the training given her in
the grade schools and normal school may have
been quite inadequate. But teach music she
must—as a part of her regular duties. My
own observation leads me to believe that a
good many grade teachers are capable of doing
this work well, that few do it as well as they
might do if they were given more training, and
that some teach so badly that it results in more
harm than good. In any case I am opposed
to any transference of the daily lesson from the
grade teachers to an expert, not because I think
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Public School Music
the expert would not do it in some ways better,
but because it would mean a very large in-
crease in the expense of our schools and be-
cause I believe that only a few grade teachers
are incapable under proper training of giving
a satisfactory music lesson. Furthermore, I
believe in keeping the music lesson as a bond
of sympathy between the grade teacher and
the children. Singing is an entirely natural art
for any human being who begins it in child-
hood and pursues it through youth. I look
forward to the day when we shall all sing. I
object to the displacement of the grade teacher
in the one function of school life which is
intimate, free, and beautiful, in which facts,
members, places, events, names are forgotten,
and in which the spirit of each child issues
forth under the discipline of beauty. (I place
these words in italics because I am constantly
being told that the great thing in the educa-
tion of children is to give them self-expression;
to which I reply that self-expression except
under discipline - using the word in its larger
sense --- has never helped either the individua
or the race.) We must look to the normal
schools for this improvement in the ability
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MUSIC AND LIFE
of our teachers to teach music, and the normal
schools, in turn, must expect our high schools
to send forth their graduates, properly taught
in music, so that normal schools will not have
to spend time (as they often do now) sup-
plementing the imperfections of the earlier
training.
Many of our normal schools still preserve
something of that artificial pedagogy to which
I have referred, and still send out teachers who
are, humanly speaking, ill-fitted to lead the chil-
dren in music. (I refer to the human element
in the matter because it is impossible to teach
music properly if you have not had experience
with the best of it, and if you do not love the
best more than any other. So long as our nor-
mal schools lay too great stress on the tech-
nique of teaching music at the expense of the
greater thing, just so long will our schools
suffer. And it is easily possible for the normal
school authorities to be deceived as to what is
the best music, as well as by a brave showing
of musical performance. The real failure in
the administration of music is due to a false
ideal. And it is in this mistaken ideal or pur-
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FUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
pose that the crux of the whole matter lies.
Nearly the whole stress of teaching is laid on
expert sight-reading of music. Gointo a school-
room with a supervisor to hear his class sing
and he will almost invariably exhibit to you
with pride the capacity of the children to sing
at sight. He will ask you to put something
impromptu on the blackboard as a test of
their proficiency. He will exhibit to you classes
of very young children who have already learned
to read notes and who can sing all sorts of
simple exercises from the staff.
What is meant by the term “sight-singing"?
It means, if it means anything, that a person
shall be able to sing correctly at the first trial
his part in any piece of vocal music which he
has never seen or heard before. And this,
which we spend our money for, is an entirely
artificial attainment, since in real life we are al-
most never required to do it. “Sight-singing"
has become a shibboleth. What we want is a
reasonable capacity for reading music, for that
is all we are called upon to do in actual life.
In choral societies and choirs all over this coun-
try the number of singers who can read music
at sight is negligible, and there is probably not
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MUSIC AND LIFE
one of them who could master at once the in-
tricacies of modern choral writing. Let us then
teach children to read music by giving them
as many trials as is necessary, and let them
gradually acquire such a familiarity with inter-
vals and with rhythmic figures as will make it
possible for them to sing with other people,
and enjoy doing so. We shall then get rid of
an artificial ideal and have just so much more
time in which to cultivate music for its own
sake. It goes without saying that the vast ma-
jority of the children in our public schools never
attain to that expertness which is the present
objective of the teaching. So we have a double
failure-in ideal and in practice. (This is not
the place for a discussion of the various meth-
ods of teaching sight-singing. The method
commonly used in this country is derived from
English practice and we have ignored the much
more accurate and scientific systems of France
and Germany.)
The supervisor, who takes so much pride
in the capacity of his pupils to sing at sight,
ought to be chiefly interested in something
much more important-namely, their ability
to sing a beautiful piece of music and particu-
-
-
-
-
-
-
·
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
larly their joy in doing so, for that is the only
real justification for his presence there. Many
supervisors seem to have almost forgotten that
music is a thing of beauty and that the only
way to keep it alive in a child's heart is to
teach the child to sing beautiful songs. Con-
stant contact with inferior songs for children
may, indeed, have so affected the supervisor's
taste that he himself can no longer detect the
difference between good and bad.
N-
IV. GOOD OR BAD MUSIC ?
For eight years, then, in our public schools
children are taught -- as far as may be — to
sing at sight. 14 there a fine song which pre-
sents a certain difficulty, it is placed in the
book at the point where that difficulty arises,
and is treated as a sight-reading test. It is
subjected to analysis as to its melodic progres-
sions, each of which is taken up as a technical
problem. This is precisely the method so
often and so fatally used in connection with
poetry. The Skylark's wings are clipped ;
the Grecian Urn becomes an archæological
specimen; the Eve of Saint Agnes a date in
the almanac.
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MUSIC AND LIFE
This brings me to the most important part
of the whole matter. If expert sight-singing is
not only a false ideal, but one impossible of
general attainment in public schools under the
conditions at present existing, what does jus-
tify our expenditure of such large sums of
money? The sole justification for it is to bring
children to love the best music, and so to train
their taste for it as to make them capable of
discriminating between good and bad. Now a
thorough test of the children in the kinder-
garten or the lower primary grades of any pub-
lic school anywhere will surely reveal that such
children start life with the makings of good
taste in music. Nature is prodigal here -
prodigal and faithful. In the most remote vil-
lages in this country, in purely industrial com-
munities, among the poor and among the rich
(both having forgotten), children love good
songs. It is their natural inheritance. No ex-
cess of materialism in the generations affects it
in the least. This is the primitive endowment;
deep down in human character there lies a har-
mony of adjustment with nature. Overlay it as
you may with custom or habit; sully it with
luxury; it still persists, for without it human
II
.
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Public School Music
life cannot be. This idealistic basis of human
life, which is never destroyed, appears fresh
and unstained in children, and in their song it
bubbles up as from a pure spring."
It has been a matter of frequent comment
that there has been no such increase in choral
singing either in town or city as our public
school music teaching should lead us to ex-
pect. In fact the countless young people who
graduate from our schools seem to make almost
no impression on choral singing. It still re-
mains the least of our musical activities. It is
as difficult as ever to secure people who care
enough for the practice of singing to come to
rehearsals. Voluntary choir singing, for the
pleasure to be derived from it, is rare. Are not
our public schools partly responsible for this
condition? Is not that natural taste and love
for good music, to which I have just referred,
allowed to lapse and finally almost to disap-
IA certain small proportion of children are backward in
music, but the possibility of teaching them to sing has long
since been satisfactorily demonstrated. They need special at-
tention which it is difficult to give in public schools. They
should, I think, never be taken from their seats in the room
and placed at one side, but should be asked to listen to the
other children, and occasionally to sing with them, the teacher
standing near for help and encouragement.
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MUSIC AND LIFE
pear? And is not this largely the result of too
much technical instruction, and too little good
music? I know that there are many more dis-
tractions for children than formerly; I know
that the home influence in music is slight, and
that parents assume less responsibility for their
children than they used to do. But, grant-
ing all this, the musical instruction in public
schools does not fulfill its proper function, nor
can it hope to do so until it changes its
ideals.
There is no doubt whatever that, speaking
generally, the best music with which to train
the taste of young children is that known as
“ folk-song.” The supposition that any mu-
sician is capable of composing a fine enduring
song suitable for children is false in its very
essence. The constant appearance of new songs
for children and their inevitable disappear-
ance in the next generation is evidence enough
that this is so, apart from the unmistakable
evidence in the songs themselves. In reality
the good tune is right, the poor tune wrong;
the good tune conforms to, is a part of na-
ture; the poor tune is false in quantity and
in sentiment, and not a part of nature. The
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Public School Music
-
---
-
---
fine tune is straightforward, honest, and genu-
ine in sentiment; the inferior tune professes
to be so, but it is not. Fine simple tunes of
the kind suitable for children to sing have
been composed, -“Way Down upon the Su-
wanee River” is an example, — but they are
very few in number. The only safeguard is to
keep chiefly to the old melodies whose qual-
ity has been proved. And since the number
of fine folk-tunes is more than sufficient for
our purpose, and since most of them are
not copyrighted, there would seem to be no
reason whatever why they should not con-
stitute the larger part of the music we give
our children to sing in their early years of
school life.
I have said that children like real tunes in
preference to false ones. We have therefore a
perfectly sound basis upon which to build.
But it must not be forgotten that singing is in
itself an agreeable pastime to children and that
their taste can be lowered as well as raised.
With their fundamental good taste to build
on, we can be reasonably sure of accomplish-
ing our purpose if we provide them all through
their school life with the best music and no
1
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MUSIC AND LIFE
.
other. This is not done and the failure of our
school music to justify itself can be attributed
chiefly to this.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the
very place where it will do the most harm -
namely, in the kindergarten. And this is true
of kindergartens generally. In the process of
providing very young children with suitable
words for their songs --- which in the kinder-
garten are considered of first importance -
the effect of inferior music seems to have
been entirely ignored. In other words, the
one sense through which young children re-
ceive their most vivid impressions has been
systematically and persistently violated. I have
examined a great many song books used in
American kindergartens and I have never
found one that was really suitable for the pur-
pose of training the musical taste of young
children. Our craving for a complete peda-
gogical system is characteristic; it is our refuge,
our bulwark. Instead of facing actual problems
as they are, we take some ready-made system
- which some other perplexed person has
made for a shelter -- and proceed to adopt it
in toto. I mean by this that the custom of
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
kindergarten authorities is to buy a book in
the open market - a book whose sole guaran-
tee is that it is for sale. It probably contains
inferior music, but the purchaser asks no ques-
tions. Now an enterprising and well-equipped
teacher could gather together during a sum-
mer holiday twenty-five simple folk-songs,
could have suitable words written for them,
and could have them mimeographed (if more
copies were needed), and put into use in her
school. I say nothing of the benefit to her of
doing this.
It is obvious, then, that our public school
music labors under great difficulties. The
children in a room, - the music lesson period
is too short; the music teacher visits each room
at too great intervals; the grade teacher is
perhaps not properly qualified to teach mu-
sic and the head master's interest in it may be
perfunctory. The study itself is, therefore,
irregular, as must be the case when such con-
ditions as these exist. Yet we are trying to
produce expert results. Why not say to our-
selves that since our population as a whole is
not yet actively interested in the best music,
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MUSIC AND LIFE
and since the children are unlikely to hear
much of it outside the school, and since by
nature and habit and association there is really
nothing in our musical life to justify spending
our money on teaching expert sight-singing
to children -- the undertaking being in a sense
anomalous and detached; why not say to our-
selves: “We must first of all teach our chil-
dren to love the best music, and then we
must train them to read it, not necessarily ‘at
sight,' but to read it well enough to satisfy all
the demands likely to be made in that direc-
tion in after life.” I would sweep away half the
pedagogical paraphernalia of our public school
music teaching. I believe much more valuable
results could be secured by constant contact
with the best music, and continued observa-
tion of it, with a minimum of technical exercises.
I believe the processes of music to have no
significance whatever except as they appear in
I do not mean by the foregoing that I consider a fair de-
gree of expertness in reading music "at sight" an impossible
attainment for children. What I have said has been entirely in
reference to our public schools as they are at present consti-
tuted, and to the arrangements now made for the teaching of
music. The teaching of sight-singing requires the services of
an expert, more time than our schools now give, and a more
scientific method than that now employed.
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Public School Music
great compositions, and that constant contact
with and observation of fine music is more
valuable than the study of the rules by which
it is made, or the technique by which it is pro-
duced. In music as in poetry we deduce the
rules and laws from the artistic objects them-
selves. The composer and the poet are to us
what nature is to them.
V. ATTEMPTS AT REFORM
I have drawn the foregoing conclusions from
an extended observation and experience of pub-
lic school music, and Tought to addlest the
record seem too despairing--that in a con-
siderable number of places intelligent and open-
minded men and women have been doing their
best to stem the tide of inferior music and of
artificial methods of teaching. During the last
two years I have been serving on an unpaid
advisory committee appointed by the School
Committee of the City of Boston to improve
the teaching of music in the public schools.
The School Committee of Boston consists of
five people elected by the people. They be-
came aware of the inefficiency of the teaching
through an independent investigation carried
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MUSIC AND LIFE
on by Dr. A. T. Davison, of Harvard Uni-
versity (who is chairman of our committee),
and they asked him to form a committee to
help them. Boston was spending some forty
thousand dollars for public school music.
During one school year the members of our
committee visited schools, taking note of what
they heard and saw, and finally each member
submitted a written report to the chairman.
These were made the basis for a general re-
port to the School Committee by whom it was
accepted.
The Boston teaching was especially weak in
dealing with rhythm, and for a perfectly sim-
ple reason. Rhythm was taught, not as action,
which it is, but as symbol, which it is not. The
various rhythmic figures were taught, in other
words, through the mind instead of through
the body. These rhythmic figures were given
arbitrary names (to which I have already re-
ferred), and the children, looking at the sym-
bols, were told the strange name given to them,
and, sitting quite still, produced the required
sounds. The teachers did not even beat the
time. The usual answer we got when asking
about rhythm was, “Oh, they feel the rhythm."
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
This may have been true, but, if it were, the
children were extreme individualists! This sort
of rhythmic teaching is common in the United
States and the defect is a grave one. The arith-
metical complications of rhythm in musicshould
never be taught to little children at all. Just
as they should sing the melody by imitating the
teacher, so they should be taught the rhythm
notes. A child who has sung a simple folk-
song many times, and has danced, or marched,
or clapped his hands in exact time and rhythm
with the notes, can be taught later the pitch
names and the time names of those notes with-
out the slightest difficulty and without any
subterfuge whatever. In a schoolroom contain-
ing some forty children, and with the space
largely occupied by desks and seats, it is, of
course, impossible to carry on any extended
exercises in rhythm. But every effort should
be made to teach musical rhythms as action be-
fore they are taught as sounds. Whenever pos-
sible classes should be taken to the assembly
room, where there is a sufficiently large open
floor space for such exercises.
But the most distressing condition in the
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MUSIC AND LIFE
Boston schools — and this would be more or
less true everywhere in our country -- was that
all the children in the kindergarten and pri-
mary grades were learning such songs as would
eventually destroy their natural taste for fine
music. This is the one great indictment against
public school music in the United States —
that it has been made to order for schoolbooks,
and to fit technical problems, and that it conse-
quently fails to keep the allegiance of children.
Nothing but the best will ever do that, and
until we supply the best our school music is
bound to fail. Our committee, as a prelimi-
nary step toward reform, recommended that all
instruction in reading music should be post-
poned until the last half of the third grade.
This allowed us to institute singing by ear and
at the same time to teach rhythm by beating
time, clapping hands, marching, etc. A book
of folk-songs was compiled by Dr. Davison
and myself and was adopted and published"
by the School Committee. The greatest diffi-
culty here has been to get suitable verses for
the simpler songs. We have spent much time
Now published by the Boston Music Company, 26 West
Street, Boston, Massachusetts.
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
over this one matter and have not, even then,
always been successful. Good verses for very
young children are difficult to secure, and
to instance how painstaking the process of mak-
ing a book of such songs is -- we have some-
times received half a dozen sets of verses för
a simple melody without finding one that we
thought suitable.
It is perhaps too soon to draw very definite
conclusions from the results of these reforms
in the Boston schools. One thing is certain :
a very large number of children five, six, and
seven years of age are now singing really beau-
tiful songs without seeing any music at all and
without being told anything whatever about
the notes, rests, intervals, etc., which occur in
them. Upon the experience of these two and
one half years of singing by ear we shall build
up skill in singing by note and this skill will
be acquired with much greater ease than would
be otherwise possible. It is also worth noting
that the expense of music books in these grades
(and the same will be true of later grades) is
more than cut in half. In the kindergarten and
the first primary grades the children sing with-
out a book; in the second and third grades
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MUSIC AND LIFE
W
they use a simple and inexpensive book of
words, while the teachers in these grades use
the small collection of folk-songs already re-
ferred to.
In the Boston schools ninety minutes a
week is given to drawing, and sixty minutes
a week to music. It is obvious that a daily
lesson in music twelve minutes long is entirely
inadequate for proper instruction. An increase
to twenty minutes a day, or to three half-hours
a week is highly desirable. In many schools
entirely too much time is devoted to prepar-
ing music for the graduation exercises. Fail-
ing an examination, what is there left but an
exhibition?
It is a task of real difficulty to reform any
strongly entrenched system or method of edu-
cation. What is conclusively demonstrated as
a more sensible method runs against self-in-
terest, tradition, intellectual immovability to
use a moderate term !), and other even more
violent opposition. The reforms we are insti-
tuting in Boston need the combined force of
all the persons in authority, of all the teaching
staff, and of public opinion. No one of these
forces is being fully exerted owing to circum-
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PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
stances over which we have no control. But
we have accomplished something, for we have
reduced the expense and we have simplified
the teaching; and each of these improvements
was sadly needed.
VI. OTHER ACTIVITIES IN SCHOOL MUSIC
One of the encouraging signs of our ad-
vancement is in orchestral playing. School
orchestras have become important features of
school life, and the excellence of some of the
orchestral playing is remarkable. It often out-
shines the singing, and it is frequently self-
contained, being under the direction, not of
the music teachers, but of the head master or
one of his assistants. In this department of
music teaching, as in the singing lessons, much
depends on the attitude of the head master.
In our Boston schools there are notable exam-
ples of fine music fostered and sustained by
enthusiastic head masters who lay great stress
on that as contrasted with mere technical ex-
pertness. Credit toward the high-school di-
ploma is now given in Boston for study of the
pianoforte or an orchestral instrument outside
school hours and with independent teachers...
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MUSIC AND Life
Lists are issued to indicate the standard of
music and of performance for each grade, and
certificates of hours of practice are required of
parents. This system of credits depends for its
success on securing competent examiners not
otherwise connected with the schools, for by
this nieans poor teachers are gradually elimi-
nated. Many schoolrooms are provided with
phonographs which may be a powerful factor
in building up or in breaking down the taste
of children. An approved list of records for
the Boston schools is in course of preparation
in order to eliminate undesirable music and to
increase the usefulness of the instruments.
Singing by ear spontaneously and without
technical instruction, but rather for the joy of
doing it, and for the formation of the taste on
good models, is the proper beginning of all
musical education. Such experience, coupled
with proper rhythmic exercises, constitutes a
real basis, not only for sight-singing, but for
performance on any instrument. No child
should be admitted for possible credit in piano-
forte playing or be allowed to enter violin
classes until so prepared in singing and in
rhythm. The pianoforte neither reveals nor
1
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PUBLIC SCHOOL Music
corrects the defective ear; the violin, on the
other hand, does reveal it, though it does not
necessarily correct it. Defective rhythm can
be properly corrected only through actual
rhythmic motions of the body.
Many high schools now offer courses in
what is called “The Appreciation of Music.”
The success of such courses depends to a con-
siderable extent on the quality of music used
in the primary and grammar grades. If the
children have been singing inferior music for
eight years, the difficulties of teaching them
to appreciate the best is correspondingly in-
creased. If, on the contrary, their taste has
been carefully formed on good models, the
introduction to great music has already been
made. In studying symphonies, for example,
one would begin with Haydn whose sym-
phonies and chamber music are largely based
on folk-melodies. In short, courses in appre-
ciation should be the culmination of the mu-
sical education of our young people. Such
courses should have for their object, first and
foremost, the cultivation of the musical mem-
ory, for this is an absolute essential to anybody
who hopes to listen to music intelligently.
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Music AND LIFE
After this has been accomplished, the student
should listen to simple instrumental pieces
whose style and form should be explained,
and the explanation should be as untechnical
as possible. Each of the properties or quali-
ties of music is susceptible of treatment on
the broad grounds of æsthetics, and one's suc-
cess in teaching young people to understand
it depends considerably on the ability so to
present it. The instructor and an assistant
should play on a pianoforte all the music stud-
ied, or, failing that, a mechanical piano-player
should be used.
And now let me say that the most impor-
tant and beneficial step any community could
take toward improving its school music would
be to secure a supervisor who is untainted by
current American pedagogical theories of sight-
singing, who will not attempt to teach little
: children something they cannot possibly un-
derstand, and who will use nothing but the
best music from the kindergarten to the high
i Counterpoint, for example, is, strictly, note against note,
two melodies parallel to each other ; æsthetically, counterpoint
consists in illuminating, illustrating, or developing, a phrase
or theme by parts of itself — what in architecture would be
described as making the ornament grow out of the structure.
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Public SCHOOL MUSIC
school. No community is really helpless if it
will bestir itself. If our public school music
teaching were well devised and properly ad-
ministered and if our children were taught to
sing nothing but the best music, we might
look forward to a time, not far distant, when a
generation of music-lovers would take the
place of the present generation of music-tast-
ers. Our young people would gravitate natu-
rally into choirs and singing societies. Groups
of people would gather together to sing; fam-
ilies would sing together; there would be
chamber music parties; we should pass many
a quiet domestic evening at home listening to
Mozart and Beethoven instead of playing
bridge or going to a moving-picture theater.
The whole body of American music would be
affected by the influx of those young people
who would want the best. In course of time,
perhaps, — although one must not expect the
millennium, — the vapid drawing-room song
would disappear along with the tinkling piano-
forte show-piece. Cellists would play some-
thing better than pieces by Popper; the thir-
teenth concerto by Viotti and the thirtieth
Hungarian rhapsodie would be relegated to
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Music AND LIFE
that limbo where now repose (we hope in
death) the “ Battle of Prague” and “Mon-
astery Bells.” This cannot be brought about
casually. We must set about it; and the place
to begin is in our public schools.
CHAPTER IV
COMMUNITY MUSIC
1. MUSIC BY PROXY
In the preceding chapters I have dealt with
special musical subjects, and have constantly
referred to music as a distinct and independent
art having its own reasons for existence. I have
dealt, also, with some of its special functions
as well as with its relation to the education of
children. In the present chapter it is my pur-
pose to discuss music in its relation to com-
munities large and small, and this necessitates
treating it on the broadest possible grounds.
By community music I mean, first, music
in which all the people of a community take
part; second, music which is produced by cer-
tain members of the community for the benefit
and pleasure of the others; and third, music
which, while actually performed by paid art-
ists, is nevertheless somehow expressive of the
will of the community as a whole. I shall take
no refuge behind generalities or theories of
æsthetics. I want to reach everybody, include
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MUSIC AND LIFE
ing the person who says, “I don't know any-
thing about music but I know what I like,"
and that other extraordinary person who says,
“I know only two tunes, one of which is ‘Yan-
kee Doodle'”— each of these statements being
quite incomprehensible, since it is a poor per-
son indeed who does n't know what he likes,
and anybody who knows “Yankee Doodle"
has no excuse whatever for not knowing what
the other tune is, or, so far as that goes, what
any other tune is. I am, in short, appealing
on common grounds about a common thing.
My only question is this: If there is a means
of interesting, delighting, and elevating a large
number of people at very small expense, by
something which they can all do together and
which brings them all into sympathy with one
another, and if the result of this coöperation is
to produce something beautiful, is it not worth
doing? I intend to make as full an answer to
this question as space permits.
It is in the “doing” and the “doing to-
gether” that the crux of the matter lies, for a
purely external connection with music never
brings about a complete understanding of it.
It is no exaggeration to say that our connection
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
with nearly all artistic things is largely external.
We do not draw; we do not train the eye to
see or the hand to feel and touch, and artistic
objects remain in a measure strange and unin-
telligible to us. The whole tendency of mod-
ern life and of modern education is to delegate
those functions which have to do with our inner
being. We delegate our religion to a preacher
or to a dogma; we delegate our education to a
curriculum smoothed out to a common level;
some of us even delegate the forming of an
opinion on passing events to a leader who pre-
sents them to us in a “current events” class.
The religion, the knowledge, the opinion of
many a person belongs to someone else. Many
a man prefers an inferior novel because the
author not only writes it, but reads it for him,
whereas to the wise man the author might almost
be called an amanuensis. In any case, a writer
of genuine power never does more than his
share. He depends on us to complete him.
And in like case, if we expect to understand
and love music we must use it; the composer
depends on us as much as the author does.
This external connection with music and this
lack of intimacy with the thing itself naturally
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MUSIC AND LIFE
jeads us to lay stress on the performance of it.
We revel in technique and we exalt the per-
sonalities of players and singers. In our opera
houses we are satisfied only when we have an
“all star” cast by whom we expect to be as-
tonished rather than delighted and elevated.
Now, fine singing, as such, is of little impor-
tance save as a means of reproducing fine music.
If fine singing means a sacrifice of the musical
effect; if it destroys the ensemble; if it limits
the repertoire - then it is not worth the sacri-
fice. Why should it ever do so ? Simply be-
cause opera-goers suffer it, and for no other
reason in the world. One merely needs to
mention a reasonable plan of opera --- such as
has been carried out for generations in French,
Italian, and German cities to be laughed.
at by those devotees who have sat for years at
the feet of magnificence warming themselves
in the effulgence of gilt and jewels. So it is
with solo recitals and orchestral concerts. One
continually hears people discussing the tech-
nique of pianists and violinists, or the compara-
tive merits of our various orchestras. Local
pride — the last thing in the world to connect
with artistic judgment - asserts itself in favor
[.106 ]
COMMUNITY MMUNIT
Or
Music
of one orchestra or another, until it would ale
inost seem that the only purpose of having an
orchestra was to excel all the others. How
often, on the contrary, do we hear the music
itself intelligently discussed? In short, we are
trying to be musical vicariously by means of
an occasional performance by other people of
music the greater part of which is unfamiliar
and, therefore, unintelligible to us. This is like
trying to be religious through going to church
once a week and, sitting passively, being
preached and sung at! The most musical com-
munities are not those where all the music of the
year is crowded into a festival of three or four
days, but those where there is the most real
music made at home. If a musical festival were
the culmination of a whole year of healthy mus-
ical activity during which the people who attend-
ed the festival had themselves been taking part
in music, then the occasion would be amply just-
ified. We should depend not on an annual and
perfunctory performance of “The Messiah,"nor
on the presence on the platform of famous solo-
ists, but should go to hear fine music for its own
sake. Is it not true that all the higher functions
of the soul of a man or a woman or of a com-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
munity can be preserved only by being exer-
cised?
In what follows I shall try to show how we
may escape from the conditions in which we now
too complacently rest. The material for the
change is abundant, for there is in every com-
munity much more love of music than ever
appears; the means are simple and inexpensive,
for only a few dollars worth of good music are
needed, with a room in which to practice, a
piano and a leader. Let us make a start to-
ward a sincere and intimate understanding of
music through making it ourselves. Let us
construct. Then shall we learn to see music as
it is and to value it accordingly.
II. OUR MUSICAL ACTIVITIES
As a preliminary to this discussion it will be
well to look at the present status of music
among us, and to see how near we come to this
necessary intimacy with the art.
In any small American community-the-first
impression one gets about music is that it is
useful to fill up gaps. At the theater, before
public meetings, at social affairs of one sort or
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
another, music is performed to a ceaseless hum
of conversation or while people are entering
and leaving. The art becomes, in consequence,
like the cracking of the whip before the team
starts, or like the perfunctory speeches and
gestures of social amenities; it is nothing in it-
self, and falls in our estimation accordingly.
It is true that, at such times, only trivial mu-
sic is usually played, but this only makes the
situation worse, because, after all, it passes as
music. A bad piece of music at the theater or
while one is dining in a restaurant is merely an
annoyance; a good piece beats its head against
a flood of conversation, tinkling glasses and
other disturbances, and is lost; one feels as
though its composer had been insulted. All
this incidental music must be partly due to the
decline in conversation. We are relieved of all
responsibility save an occasional “yes” or “no”
shouted above the din.
Real musical activity in the average small
community is limited to a very small number
of its inhabitants. Only a few people sing; a
much smaller number play some musical in-
strument. There are, here and there, choirs
made up of volunteer singers, but the spirit
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MUSIC AND Life
that animated the old choirs -- the spirit which
Hardy has celebrated so lovingly in “Under
the Greenwood Tree” - has disappeared.
Hymn-singing in church is often distressingly
bad, and with good reason, since the composers
of modern hymn tunes seldom take into con-
sideration the needs and wishes of congrega-
tions. Church music has been delegated by us
to paid singers, and our church music becomes
a thinly disguised concert, or, when the really
abominable vocal quartette supplies the music,
a concert outright.
What days those were when old William
Dewey and Dicky, and Reuben and Michael
Mail played in the Mellstock church! What
a fine personal character such music had! How
they loved to play -- these simple rustics, and
how intimate was the relation between their
music and the people and the place! Read the
early chapters of “Under the Greenwood
Tree" and listen to the ardent discussions be-
tween the players before they go out on their
Christmas rounds. “They should have stuck
to strings as we did, and keep out clar'nets,
and done away with serpents. If you'd thrive
in musical religion, stick to strings, says I.' .i.
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
S
“Yet there's worse things than serpents,' said
Mr. Penny. Old things pass away, 't is true;
but a serpent was a good old note; a deep
rich note was the serpent.' ... 'Robert Penny,
you was in the right!' broke in the eldest
Dewey. “They should ha' stuck to strings.'
‘Your brass-man is a rafting dog -- well and
good; your reed-man is a dab at stirring ye-
well and good; your drum-man is a rare bowel-
shaker ---good again. But I don't care who
hears me say it, nothing will spak to your heart
wi' the sweetness o' the man of strings.""
In the preface to his book Hardy speaks of
the advantage to the village churches of that
time of having these volunteer players and
singers, and how their displacement by the
harmonium with its one player " has tended
to stultify the professed aims of the clergy,
its direct result being to curtail and extinguish
the interest of parishioners in church doings."
This holds good in our own village churches
to-day, for we consider music more a means
of entertaining the church-goer than of enlist-
ing his interest in the services.
Women's clubs provide a certain sort of
musical life to small communities. They fos-
ir Own
[1 ]
Music AND LIFE
mu
basse.
ter the performance by members of rather vari-
egated programmes of pianoforte pieces and
songs, with an occasional concert by a paid
performer from abroad, and they sometimes
make a study of a composer or a period of
music. Many of them lose sight of the only
possible means of vitally influencing the mu-
sical life of their own members and of the com-
munity at large.
In some of the communities of which I am
writing there are choral societies. In very few
is there any well-sustained and continuous
choral organization giving concerts year after
year supported by the general public. The
record of choral singing in America shows a
constant endeavor to attain grandiose results
rather than to foster the love of choral singing
for itself. Singing societies are continually
wrecked by the expense of highly paid solo-
ists, and are continually striving for something
beyond their reach.
This statement would not be complete were
we to omit the instruments which play them-
selves. The educational possibilities of these
instruments have not been realized, for they
are used chiefly for amusement. In spite of
P
1
are
usem
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
the extraordinary selections of music which
one finds in people's houses, and in spite of
the seemingly incorrigible propensity to heal
singing, as opposed to hearing music, - Į
mean the exaggerated and grotesque singing
of certain famous people who care chiefly for
sensation, - the graphophone, which has the
practical advantage of being portable and in-
expensive, — it has transformed many a lonely
farmhouse, and the mechanical piano-play-
ers have become so popular that one can but
conclude that there are multitudes of people
whose desire for music has never before been
satisfied. Would that this desire could be
turned into proper channels; that these in-
struments could be used systematically to
build up taste and develop understanding of
great music. The larger number of people
using them have no means of knowing what
to buy. If they could hear the best music their
allegiance would probably be secured. How
many parents ever think of the responsibility
laid upon them of preserving or improving
the musical taste of their children by a careful
supervision of the records or rolls used with
these instruments ?
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MUSIC AND LIFE
11
This completes the list of our own personal
activities in music. And we have to admit
that the most discouraging item of all comes
at the end. For we make little music of our
own, by our own firesides where all good
things should begin, and where we should find
the community in embryo. What a delightful
element in family life is the gathering together
of young and old to join in singing! How few
families cultivate this custom ! How few par-
ents, whether they themselves care for it or
not, realize that their children would enjoy it
and be helped by it! Why should not such
parents begin at once and be encouraged, or
even taught by their children until all can sing
together heartily and well? Is it not worth
while preserving the musical sense of children,
so that when they reach your age they will not
be helpless as you are ? Are you satisfied to
have your child's music merely bought and
paid for outside the home? How can you ex-
pect it to flourish under such conditions ? Let
the children teach you, if need be. Copy them,
learn their songs by ear, and find out what
music really is !
This somewhat meager showing of musical
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
activity does not completely represent our con-
nection with the art, however, for nearly all
but the smallest communities spend consider-
able sums for concerts by paid performers from
abroad. But it is doubtless true that the ma-:
jority of the people in any small community
hear very little real music at all save at occa-
sional concerts, and if a fine composition is
performed they seldom hear it again, so that
it is clearly impossible for them to understand
it. In towns of from five to twenty thousand
people all over the country there is very little
consciousness of what music really is. Highly
paid performers occasionally appear, and local
pride asserts itself to provide them with the
adulation to which they are accustomed, but
real musical activity or musical feeling is con-
fined to a few.
In large communities these conditions are
duplicated and even exaggerated. There nearly
all the music is bought-and-paid-for, and...very
little is.home-made. Nearly all choirs are com-
posed of paid singers. In cities, as in the coun-
try, choral societies are struggling to find men
who care enough about singing to attend re-
hearsals. There, too, children go their rounds
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MUSIC AND LIFE
of "music" lessons. The only possible way to
estimate the state of music in our cities is to
look at the population as a whole. By counting
up the number of fine concerts in fashionable
halls one arrives at no significant conclusions.
Do we sing at home, or when we are gathered
together in friendly converse ? Are there small
centers in cities where good music can be heard?
Is there any good music within reach of people
of small means? The millionaire regales his
friends with the playing of his private organist
(in imitation of the old patron days of art, but
generally without the love and understanding
of music which was the sole justification for the
proceeding), but does the dweller in the mod-
est flat ever have a chance to hear good music?
These are questions we need to ask if we want
to estimate the state of music in our great cities.
Is not all this grand music, as I have said, merely
a largess of our prosperity?
The most grandiose and disconnected form
of our musical activity is the opera. And when
we consider the love of drama which finds ex-
pression in nearly every small community in a
most complete detachment of opera from our
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
natural thoughts, feelings, and instincts. Of
this detachment there is no doubt whatever;
the whole plan of American operatie-produc-
tions is exotic, aristocratic, and exclusive.
It is quite true that we are continually im-
proving our musical status. The effect of all
our fine music may indeed be observed, but
our progress is undeniably slow, particularly
when we remember with what a liberal endow-
ment we start. That endowment is very little
less than other peoples possess. Our children
are musical, and there is no reason why we
should not be. Moreover, the strain of ideality
which runs through American life, however
naïve it may be, would seem to make us es-
pecially qualified to love and understand music.
'
T
T
III. WHAT WE MIGHT DO
I have indicated in a former chapter some-
thing of our needs as regards the musical edu-
cation of children. The problem before me
now is how to persuade American men and
women into active coöperation in making mu-
sic. It is obvious that there is only one way
of doing this, and that is by singing. Only an
infinitesimal number of people can play musi-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
cal instruments, but nearly everybody can sing.
To play requires constant practice. Singing in
groups does not. In their right estate every
man and every woman should sing.
Now my urgent appeal for singing does not
mean that every village, town, or city should
turn itself bodily into a huge singing society.
Some people will sing better than others and
will enjoy it more, or have more time for it.
But there are constant opportunities for large
groups of people to sing - in church, on Me-
morial Day, at Christmas time, at patriotic
gatherings, or at dedications. Nothing is more
striking on such occasions than the total lack
of any means of spontaneously expressing that
which lies in the consciousness of all, and which
cannot be delegated. What a splendid expres-
sion of devotion, of commemoration, of dedi-
cation, of sacred love for those who died in our
Civil War would a thousand voices be, raised
up as one in a great, eternal, memorial hymn!
What do we do? We hire a brass band to be
patriotic, devout, and commemorative for us.
This inevitably tends to dull our patriotism and
our devotion. To live they must spring forth in
some sort of personal expression. In a village
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COMMUNITY Music
I know well, this custom mars an otherwise
deeply impressive observance of Memorial
Day. The “taps” at the soldiers' graves in
their silent resting places, the sounds of minute
guns booming, the long procession of towns-
people, the calling of the roll of the small com-
pany of soldiers who marched away from that
village green half a century ago, with only an
occasional feeble “Here" from the handful
of survivors, the lowering of the flag on the
green with all heads uncovered, all eyes strain-
ing upward — these make the ceremony fine
and memorable. It needs to complete it only
some active expression on the part of every
one such as singing would provide.
“I know not at what point of their course,
or for how long, but it was from the column
nearest him, which is to be the first line, that
the King heard, borne on the winds amid their
field music, as they marched there, the sound
of Psalms ---many-voiced melody of a church
hymn, well known to him; which had broken
out, band accompanying, among those other-
wise silent men.” So relates Carlyle, in “Fred-
erick the Great," of the march of Frederick and
his army before the battle of Leuthen. “With
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MUSIC AND LIFE
men like these, don't you think I shall have
victory this day?” says Frederick. Is not such
singing a wonderful thing? Those soldiers, with
a common dedication to duty, and a common
disdain of death, send up to some dimly sensed
Heaven, from the very depths of their being,
a song. How otherwise could they express the
thoughts and feelings that must have been clam-
oring for utterance in their sturdy breasts? Their
bodies were marching to battle. What of their
souls? Shall the very spirit of them slumber
on their way to death?
And we? We watch from afar; weare dumb;
we look on this profoundly moving ceremony,
this simple pageant, and utter nothing of what
we feel and what we are. Why do we not sing?
Is it not partly because of that self-conscious-
ness which hangs about us like a pall, and
partly because we were never made to like sing-
ing well enough to pursue it? The former
difficulty we could overcome easily enough if
the right opportunity continually offered itself.
The latter, too, would disappear as occasion
arose when we could sing something worth
singing. “The Star-Spangled Banner" is a
candle-snuffer on the flame of patriotic feeling;
.
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
never was there an air more unsuited to its
purpose. Since we have almost no indigenous
national melodies, why should we not sing the
old songs, chorals, and hymns that have sur-
vived all sorts of national changes and belong
to every people? The tune for “ America” is
not an American tune, neither is it English.
It originated in Saxony. There is no national-
ism to stand in the way of such music, because
it speaks elementally and universally. There
are scores of fine melodies which we could
well use.
The one place where singing might be fos-
tered is in church. But where the worshipers
are asked to sing a hymn pitched too high for
them, or one that moves too quickly, or is full
of unfamiliar and difficult progressions in both
melody and harmony, what other result can
be expected than poor singing and the gradual
abandonment of all music to a paid choir?
The real purpose of the hymn tune has been
lost. It was intended to serve the needs of all
the people, and to do this it must be simple
in both melody and harmony, and within the
range of every man, woman, and child in the
congregation. The sturdy old hymns and cho-
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MUSIC AND ND
LIFE
rals of our forefathers were so. Nothing is finer
in church music than good unison singing in
which every one takes part. No skilled choir
singing can ever take its place.
Even the manner of singing hymns has
changed. Many of them are raced through at
a pace which leaves one half the congregation
behind, and totally eclipses the other half! In
many of the old hymn tunes there is a pause
at the end of each line, during which the mem-
bers of the congregation had a reasonable
chance to take breath. Even these pauses
have often been eliminated, thus destroying
the sense of the music and giving a colder
shoulder still to the musical and devotional
aspirations of the congregation. (If space per-
mitted I should like to dwell here on the gene-
sis of some of these old tunes. They were
deeply embedded in the common life of our
remote forefathers, and had no taint of self-
consciousness in them. Springing from the
soil, they survived all changes of dogma and
custom. And they will survive. We shall
come back to them when we have survived
our present attack of prettiness.)
The decline in hymn-singing is evident
W
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COMMUNITY Music
enough. Save in churches where the liturgy
restrains the ambitions of the choir, almost
anything is possible; and even under that re-
straint there is a constant tendency toward dis-
play. What is the office of church music? Is
it to astonish or delight the congregation? Is
it to supply them with a sacred concert or fine
singing ? To take their minds off the situation
in which they find themselves ? To ease the
effect of a dull sermon, or obliterate the effect
of a good one? To serve as a bait to catch
the unwary non-church-goer, or as a means of
retaining the waverer within the fold? Or is
it to induce devotion and religious feeling, to
keep the moment sacred and without intru-
sion? If the choir is to sing alone, why should
we accept from it display pieces, or arrange-
ments from secular music, or silly “sacred”
songs overburdened with lush sentiment, or
anthems of a certain fluent type composed by
anybody who can put a lot of notes together
in agreeable sequence? Why should we toler-
ate the solo in operatic style, or contemptible
solo quartette music, suitable (and hardly that)
for the end of a commercial “banquet”? Is
there, then, no reality behind church music?
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MUSIC AND LIFE
Is it merely any music set to sacred words?
He who has ever studied any art knows that
this cannot be true. The finest church music
- of which Palestrina and Bach are the great-
est exponents — is based on something more
than a casual association with sacred words.
In the Protestant churches of our cities the
music is very largely derived from modern
English sources, and I count this an obsta-
cle to our progress. Beginning with the last
half of the nineteenth century, English church
music has been dominated by a school of
composers whose music is charming, or pretty,
or melodious, or what-you-will, but is not
either profound or devout. Nearly all our or-
ganists are, musically, of English descent, but
they treat their forefathers with but scant re-
spect. There is no difficulty whatever in pro-
curing good music for choirs. There is a sup-
ply suitable for solo singing or chorus, for
small choir or large, to be purchased at any
music shop. There are a dozen fine compos-
ers whose music is never heard in most Amer-
ican churches; composers such as Palestrina,
Vittoria, and others of the great period of
church music; or Bach, or Gibbons, Bryd,
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COMMUNITY Music
and Purcell, whose music is in the true idiom,
an idiom now almost entirely lost; or John
Goss, Samuel Wesley, and Thomas Attwood
in the early part of the nineteenth century,
before the decadence had fairly begun. The
earliest of this music is written for voices un-
accompanied, and is therefore too difficult for
any but a highly trained choir; but there are
plenty of simple anthems with organ accom-
paniment by the early: English composers
named above, and there are a certain number
of Bach's motets suitable for choirs of mod-
erate ability.
Let me mention“ O Thou, the central orb,"
by Gibbons, as an example of a fine anthem in
the old style, and“ Oh, Saviour of the World,"
by Goss, as an example of the simpler and later
type. These are beautiful, simple, and dignified
anthems suitable for city or country choir. Il
the city choirmaster will give over for a time
trying to provide the congregation with bril-
liant music which is chiefly notable for its ex-
travagance of technique and its striking effects,
his listeners will, perhaps, be able to revert to
that state of quiet devotion which the rest of
the service has induced. Many choir directors
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MUSIC AND LIFE ,
would doubtless like to use simpler and more
devotional music, but are hindered from doing
so because they feel upon them the weight of
the opinion and taste of the congregation, and
perhaps of the preacher. Every body, regard-
less of his qualifications for doing so, feels at
liberty to criticize the music he hears in church.
Social and musical clubs for women exist in
great numbers all over the United States.
They are often useful in practical ways, but
their contact with artistic matters is, on the
contrary, often ineffectual. They offer their
members continual sips at different springs,
but no deep draught at one. The average
member of a women's club, if she is to be helped
in anything, must be helped from the position
in which she then is; and this is particularly
true of music. But she is torn out of her nat-
ural environment and asked to listen to a re-
cital of, say, modern French music, not one
note of which answers to her intelligence or
her feelings. The passion for the last thing in
music without any knowledge of the first is
fatal to any one. And when one considers the
enormous membership in clubs for women in
this country, one can but wish that more effort
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
were made to help the individual to progress
simply and naturally step by step. It is not to
be expected that the average woman, whose
time is very likely occupied with domestic
cares, should make an extended study of mu-
sic; but it is possible to give her a chance to
hear a few simple, good compositions, and to
hear them several times during a season, so
that she may learn to understand them. The
more experienced and more advanced mem-
bers of women's clubs are apt to dominate in
these matters and to forget the needs of the
others, and there is certain to be a few rare
souls who dwell entirely in the rarefied atmos-
phere of the very latest music, and who look
down on the common ignorance of the mass.
Some women's clubs purvey only the perform-
ance of great players or singers, and pride them-
selves on their lists of celebrities, all too for-
getful of those delicately adjusted scales which
demand equal weight in kind. If a women's
club in a small town (or in a large one, for that
matter) should abjure for the moment piano-
forte and vocal recitals of the latest music, and
should proceed to devote a little time to sing-
ing, in unison, some fine old songs in which
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Music AND LIFE
every one could take part, a fair start would
be made. I am not attempting to belittle the
musical capabilities of these clubs, nor am I
decrying expert performances; I am merely
speaking for the average woman who has had
little opportunity for musical education or
musical experience, and who is usually left far
behind as club programmes run, yet who is ca-
pable of understanding music if it be brought
to her in the proper manner. Ask her to sing
with you and she is brought into the fold in-
stead of straying blindly outside. Every meet-
ing of a women's club (why qualify? -- of any
club, save, perhaps, a burglar's, where silence
would be desirable) should begin with a hearty
song. Step by step - not a violent leap to a
dizzy height; we cannot become musical by the
force of our aspiration even though it be quite
sincere; nature unrelentingly exacts of us that
same slow growth which she herself makes.
If all the people in a community expressed
themselves at appropriate times and seasons by
singing, it would naturally follow that a goodly
number of them would form themselves into a
singing society. This society would satisfy the
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COMMUNITY Music
desire of the community to hear such music
as can be performed only after considerable
practice. I cannot emphasize too strongly the
connection between the community and the
singing society. The latter should be the an-
swer to the community's desire, and not be a
spectacle - if I may mix my metaphors to that
extent.
ne
IV. AN EXPERIMENT
I live in a town of some six thousand in-
habitants which about answers to the descrip-
tion given near the beginning of this article.
There was a singing society in the place about
thirty years ago, but since then there has been
little choral singing. Two years ago I asked
some thirty people to come together to prac-
tice choral singing. I then stated that I should
like to train them if they would agree to two
conditions: first, that we should sing none but
the very best music, and second, that our con-
certs should be free to the townspeople. These
conditions were at once agreed to and we started
rehearsing. We found it possible to get the
use of the largest church containing a good
organ, and we found four people who played
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Music AND LIFE
the violin and two the violoncello. Our little
orchestra finally grew until we had some eight
or ten string players. We borrowed kettle-
drums and one of our enthusiasts learned to
play them.
We have given three concerts, at each of
which the church was more than filled — it
seats about six hundred people. Our pro-
grammes have contained Brahms's “Schick-
salslied” (Song of Fate) and parts of his “Re-
quiem," Bach's motet, “I Wrestle and Pray,"
arias from the “St. Matthew Passion, and
similar compositions. Our soloists have been
members of our chorus, with little previous
experience of such music as we have been
singing, but with a profound sensibility to it
brought about by continued practice of it. The
townspeople who have come to hear our music
have given certain evidence of a fact which I
have for many years known to be true, namely,
that when people have a chance to know thor-
oughly a great composition it invariably se-
cures their complete allegiance. We have there-
fore repeated our performance of these various
works, sometimes singing one piece twice in
the same concert. We have given, for example,
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the “Schicksalslied” three times in two years,
and both singers and audience are completely
won over to it.
Our singing society is supported by the
payment of fifty cents each by any individual
who cares to subscribe. We give two open con-
certs a year, at which six hundred people hear
the finest choral music at a total annual expense
of about seventy-five dollars. Every one con-
nected with the project gives his or her serv-
ices free. Our concerts take place on Sunday
afternoons. At the last one I tried an interest-
ing experiment. Bach's motet, “I Wrestle and
Pray,” is based, as is common in his choral
pieces, on a chorale which is sung by the so-
pranos in unison, with florid counterpoints in
the other parts. At the end the chorale is given
in its original form, so that the congregation
may join in the singing of it. It was a simple
matter for us to get six hundred copies of this
chorale reproduced by mimeograph, and these
were distributed in the pews. The result was
almost electrifying to one who had heard the
feeble church singing of feebler hymns in our
churches. The second time the motet was sung
— we performed it at the beginning and at the
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end of this concert-nearly every one joined
in and the echoes rolled as they had never
roiled before in that church. Why? These
very same people send up feeble, timid, dis-
Sunday morning in their various churches. Has
a miracle happened that they are lustily sing-
ing together? Not at all. They have merely
been offered an opportunity to do what they
are all quite capable of doing, namely, singing
a hymn suited to them. This chorale has a
range of but five tones from f to c; it is
largely diatonic, proceeding step by step of the
scale, and it is noble and inspiring. How often
nad such an opportunity been presented to
them before? Why not?
The members of our chorus are such people
as one would find in most American towns of
the same size. Perhaps we are more than usually
fortunate in our solo singers and our orches-
tra. I believe the chief reason why a project
like this might be difficult in many places is
because it might not be possible to find a leader
who cared more for Bach and Brahms than for
lesser composers. The technical problem is not
extreme, but the leader must have unbounded
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
belief in the best music and tolerate nothing
less. The moment this latter condition lapses,
choral singing will lapse — as it would deserve
to do.
There are many small communities where
choral concerts on a large scale are occasionally
given. Great effort and great expense are not
spared. Several hundred voices, a hired orches-
tra, and hired soloists make the event notable.
But the music performed is of such a charac-
ter that no one wants to hear it again; neither
the singers who practice it nor the audience
who listen to it are moved or uplifted. There
have even been systematic efforts in some
middle western states to establish community
singing. The effect of such efforts depends
there, as here, on the kind of music which
people are asked to sing, for this is the heart
of the whole matter. No advance in music, or
in anything else, can be expected without con-
stant striving for the very best. And it is quite
within bounds to say that most of these efforts
are nullified by lack of a really high standard.
Finally, let me say that a concert of good mu-
sic by a local choral society is, to the people
of any community, immensely more valuable
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MUSIC AND LIFE
than a paid musical demonstration by perform-
ers from abroad which costs five times as much
money.
V. MUSIC AS A SOCIAL FORCE
Leaving this actual experience and its effects
on the community, let us ask ourselves what
this singing means to the individuals who do
it. In the first place, it makes articulate some-
thing within them which never finds expres-
sion in words or acts. In the second place, it
permits them to create beauty instead of stand-
ing outside it. Or, to speak still more definitely,
it not only gives them an intimate familiarity
with some great compositions, but it accustoms
them to the technique by means of which mu-
sic expresses itself. They learn to make melodic
lines, to add a tone which changes the whole
character of a chord; they learn how themes
are disposed in relation to one another; they
come into intimate contact with the actual ma-
terials of the art by handling them. This, we
do not need to say, is the key to the knowledge
and understanding of anything. You cannot
understand life, or love, or hate, or objects, or
ideas, until you have dealt in them yourself.
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Music
Singing has the profound psychological ad-
vantage of giving active issue to that love of
beauty which is usually entirely passive.
The artist has two functions: he draws, or
paints, or models; he uses language or sounds.
This comprises his technique. But he also
possesses imaginative perception. Now, noth-
ing is more certain than that our understand-
ing of what he does must be in kind. We learn
to understand his technique by actual experi-
ence of it. So, also, we learn to enter into the
higher qualities of his art by the exercise of
the same faculties which he uses. Our feelings,
our minds, and our imaginations must take a
reflection from him as in a mirror. If the glass
is blurred or the angle of reflection distorted
we cannot see the image in its perfection. The
light comes from we know not where.
Let any reader of these words ask himself
if the statement they contain of the qualities
with equal force be applied to his own business
or occupation. Is not his understanding of
that business or occupation based on these two
essentials: first, familiarity with its methods
and materials, and, second, some conception
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MUSIC AND LIFE
of the real meaning, significance, and possibil-
ity that lie behind its outward appearance and
manifestation ?
I have not laid sufficient stress on the ad-
vantage to men of singing. Not only does it
enable them to become self-expressive, but it
gives them the most wholesome of diversions,
it equalizes them, it creates a sort of brother-
hood, it takes their minds off per cents, and
gives them a new and different insight. This
is, of course, not accomplished by the kind of
music men now sing, which is chiefly associ-
ated with sports and conviviality. So long as
music is only outside us, so long as we edu-
cate our children without bringing them into
actual contact with its materials, giving them
little real training in the development of the
senses, just so long will it remain a mystery,
just so long will its office be misunderstood.
What a perplexity it is now to many of us!
How it does thrust us away! We have got be-
yond being ashamed to love it, but we love it
from afar.
From a sociological point of view this dis-
cussion has thus far been somewhat limited.
Now, the possibilities in music to weld to-
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COMMUNITY MUN
MUSIC
gether socially disorganized communities have
never been fully realized in America. Were
we to set about using it directly to that end,
we should find out how valuable it is in break-
ing down artificial barriers. By choral singing,
people in any one locality can be brought into
a certain sympathy with each other. Groups
who attend the same church, the fathers and
mothers of children whom the settlements
reach - wherever there is a “neighborhood”
there is a chance for singing. It needs only a
person who believes in it, and who will rigidly
select only the best music. And where neigh-
borhood groups have been singing the same
fine music, any great gathering of people would
find everybody ready to take part in choral
singing. This would make community music
a reality, and would doubtless so foster the love
of the art as eventually to affect the whole
musical situation. Any one who has ever had
personal experience of bringing fine music to
those who cannot afford to attend concerts
knows that such people are as keen for the
best as are those who can afford it. There is
no one so quick to appreciate the best as
the person who lives apart from all those
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MUSIC AND LIFE
social usages of ours which constitute our silk-
spun cocoons. There we lie snugly ensconced,
protected from sharp winds, completely en-
shrouded, while these other folk are battling
with life itself. We may be satisfied with a
gleam or two through the mesh; they are not.
They meet reality on every hand and know
it when they see it. No make-believe can de-
ceive them.
And when I say this I mean that the experi-
ment has been tried over and over again. In
what are called “the slums” of the greatest
American and English cities I have seen hun-
dreds and even thousands of poor people lis-
tening to the music of Beethoven, and to a
few simple words about it in rapt and tense
silence, and have heard them break out into
such unrestrained applause as comes only from
those who are really hungry for good music.
Put a good orchestra into any one of these
places and you will find the best kind of an
audience. Such people have no taint of hyper-
criticism, no desire to talk wisely about the
latest composer. They have not constructed
for themselves a nice little æsthetic formula
which will fit everything a sort of pro-
H
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
are
tective coloring; their minds are not “made
up.”
Let us not misunderstand this situation. I
am not writing about painting or sculpture, for
I know that these arts involve certain percep-
tive and selective qualities of the mind which
require long training. I am writing about mu-
sic, which appeals to a sense differentiated and
trained long before the sense for color-vibran
tion or for beauty of form was developed, a
sense which we possess in a highly developed
state in very childhood.
Imagine a small opera house in the lower
East Side of New York or in the North End or
South End of Boston, which the people there
might frequent at sums within their means;
imagine a small Western city with such an
opera house; and compare the probable results
with those now attained by our gorgeous and
needlessly expensive operatic performances
which, whether at home or abroad, leave little
behind them but a financial vacuum, and a dim
idea that somehow opera means famous“ stars”
singing in a highly exaggerated manner in a
strange language, in stranger dramas, where
motives and purposes are stranger still. Con-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
certs and operatic performances such as I have
advocated would supplement and complete our
own musical activities. These paid artists would
be playing and singing to us in a language we
ourselves had learned by using it. Music would
be domestic; we should understand it better
and love it more.
I am familiar with the old argument that
concerts and operas so conducted would not
pay. To this I reply that it is probably true.
Does settlement work pay? Does a library pay?
Does any altruistic endeavor anywhere pay?
No; nothing of this sort ever shows a money
balance on the right side of the ledger. But
we do not keep that column in figures. It foots
up in joy, not in dollars. The best kind of
social “uplift” would be something that made
people happier. The real uplift is of the soul,
not of the body. Let a rift of beauty pierce
the dull scene. Let us have a taste of heaven
now; and let it be not yours or mine, but
theirs. In music every body makes his own
heaven at the time.
But it is not money that is lacking. Hun-
dreds of thousands are annually spent to make
up the deficits of our symphony orchestras.
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
Millions are spent for the physical well-being
of our poorer people. Beauty for the well-to-
do, who are, like as not, too well-to-do to care
much for it; materialistic benefits for the poor
and unfortunate, who are fairly starving for
something bright and joyous. What would it
not mean to these latter were they able to go
once a week to a hall in their own part of the
city, to hear a fine concert at a fee well within
their means, and to know that there would be
no chairman there to tell them “what a great
privilege,” etc., but that they would be let
alone to enjoy themselves in their own way.
These, after all, make up the great body of
our city populations; from these humble homes
come the future American citizens; in some
ways they are superior to us, for they survive
a much harder battle, and preserve their self-
respect in face of enormous difficulties. Why
should we dole out to them what we think
they need? Why not offer them something
that puts us all on the same level ?
The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from
an investigation of our musical situation is that
we need only opportunities of expressing our-
selves. Every village contains a potential sing-
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MUSIC AND LIFE.
ing society, every church contains a potential
choir, every family in which there are children
might sing simple songs together. There is a
singing club hidden away in every neighbor-
hood. Every city might have, on occasion,
thousands of people singing fine songs and
hymns. What is the present need? Leaders :
educated musicians who have learned the tech-
nique of their art and have, at the same time,
learned to understand and appreciate the great-
est music, and who prefer it to any other.
Our institutions for training musicians are
sending out a continual stream of graduates,
many of whom begin their labors in small
towns and cities. Nearly every community
has at least one man who has sufficient tech-
nical knowledge of music to direct groups of
singers, large and small. What kind of music
does he, in his heart, prefer? The answer is to
be read in programmes here and there, in the
record of unsuccessful singing societies, in the
public performances of “show pieces.” Should
not our institutions pay more attention to
forming the taste of their students ? Is it really
necessary to teach them technique through
bad examples of the art of music? Can ther
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COMMUNITY MUSIC
safely spend several years dealing with dis-
tinctly inferior music for the sake of a facile
technique? Is rhetoric or oratory superior to
literature? There is no such thing as teaching
violin or piano-playing and teaching music.
If the violin or piano teaching deals with poor
music which the pupil practices several hours
a day, no lessons in musical history, theory,
form, or æsthetics can counteract the effect of
that constant association. We cannot advance
without leaders. We look to the training
schools for them. And these schools cannot
expect to supply them to us unless they so
conduct their teaching as to develop in stu-
dents a love and understanding of the best.
Finally, then, let me express my conviction
that the average American man or woman is
potentially musical. I believe the world of
music to be a true democracy. I am convinced
that our chief need is to make music ourselves.
I believe that under right conditions we should
enjoy doing so; I think all art is closely re-
lated to the sum of human consciousness.
And just as I see great music based on what we
are and what we feel, so I see the expert per-
formance of music as being merely our own
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Music AND LIFE
performance magnified and beautified by ex-
treme skill. I see, in short, a necessary and nat-
ural connection between ourselves and both
composer and performer. I believe that all the
great pictures and sculpture and music lay first
in the general consciousness and then became
articulate in one man. I believe no statesman,
no philosopher, no, not even a Christ, to be
conceivable save as he lies first in men's hearts.
What they are in posse he is in esse. That we
all are more musical than we are thought to
be; that we are more musical than we get the
chance to be of this there is no doubt what-
ever.
CHAPTER V
THE OPERA
I. WHAT IS OPERA?
The form of drama with music which we
loosely call “opera” is such a curious mixture
of many elements -- some of them closely re-
lated, others nearly irreconcilable — that it is
almost impossible to arrive at any definite idea
of its artistic value. A great picture or piece
of sculpture, a great book or a great sym-
phony represents a perfectly clear evolution
of a well-defined art. You do not question the
artistic validity of “ Pendennis” or of a por-
trait by Romney ; they have their roots in the
earlier works of great writers and painters and
they tend toward those which follow. The arts
they represent grew by a slow process of
evolution, absorbing everything that was use-
ful to them and rejecting everything useless,
until they finally became consistent and self-
contained. The development of opera, on the
other hand, has been a continual compromise
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MUSIC AND LIFE
– with the whims of princes, with the even
more wayward whims of singers, and with so-
cial conventions.
Its increasing costliness (due sometimes to
the composer's grandiloquence and sometimes
to the demands of the public) has necessitated
producing it in huge opera houses entirely un-
suited to it; and, being a mixed art, it has
been subject to two different influences which
have not by any means always been in agree-
ment. Its life-line has been crossed over and
over again by daring innovators who, forget-
ting the past, have sought to force it away
from nature and to make it an expression of
excessive individualism. Methods which would
find oblivion quickly enough in any pure form
of art have been carried out in opera, and
have been supported by an uncritical public
pleased by a gorgeous spectacle or entertained
by fine singing. All the other art-forms pro-
gress step by step; opera leaps first forward,
then backward; it becomes too reasonable,
only to become immediately afterward entirely
unreasonable; it passes from objectivity to
subjectivity and back again, or employs both
at the same time; it turns a man into a woman,
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THE OPERA
or a woman into a man; it thinks nothing of
being presented in two languages at once; it
turns colloquial Bret Harte into Italian with-
out the slightest realization of having become,
in the process, essentially comic: in short,
there seems no limit to the havoc it can play
with geography, science, language, costume,
drama, music, and human nature itself.
Any attempt, therefore, to deal here with
the development of opera as a whole would
be an impossible undertaking. We should be-
come at once involved in a glossary of singers
(now only names, then in effect constituting
the opera itself), an unsnarling of impossible
plots, an excursion into religion, into the bal-
let, into mythology, demonology, pseudo-
philosophy, mysticism, and Heaven knows
what else. We should see our first flock of
canary birds, — released simply to make us
gape, - and we should hear a forest bird tell
the hero (through the medium of a singer off
the stage) the way to a sleeping beauty; we
should hear the hero and the villain sing a
delightful duet and then see them turn away
in different directions to seek and murder each
other; we should find the Pyramids and the
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MUSIC AND LIFE
.
Latin Quarter expressible in the same terms;
our heroines would include the mysterious and
demoniac scoffer, Kundry, the woman who
doubts and questions, the woman who should
have but did not, and the woman who goes
mad and turns the flute-player in the orchestra
to madness with her; we should see men and
women, attired in inappropriate and even un-
intelligible costumes, drink out of empty cups,
and a hero mortally wound a papier-mâché
dragon; we should have to shut our eyes in
order to hear, or stop our ears in order to see;
if we cared for music, we should have to wait
ten minutes for a domestic quarrel in recitative
to finish; if we cared for drama, we should
have to wait the same length of time while
a prima donna tossed off birdling trills and
chirpings. We should, in short, find ourselves
dealing with a mixed art of quite extraordinary
latitude in style, form, dramatic purpose, and
musical texture.
It will be sufficient for our purposes, there-
fore, to state that both sacred and secular
plays with music have existed from the earli-
est times, and that their development has
tended toward the form as we now know it.
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The OPERA
The introduction of songs into plays was, in
itself, so agreeable and interesting that their
use continually increased until some vague
operatic form was reached in which music pre-
dominated.
But there are two great revolutionary epochs,
to which proper attention must be paid if we
are to understand opera at all. The first of
these is the so-called “ Florentine Revolu-
tion” in the years 1595 to 1600, and the sec-
ond is the Wagnerian reform in the middle
of the last century.
II. OPERA IN THE OLD STYLE
The “ Florentine Revolution” was an at-
tempt to create an entirely new type of opera
in which all tradition was thrown to the winds.
To “Eurydice," the best known of these
Florentine operas, its composer, Peri, wrote
a preface, from which we quote the follow-
ing : “ Therefore, abandoning every style of
vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself
up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation
(of speech) demanded by this poem.” (Is
this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck,
or Wagner, or Debussy ?) In any case, the
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MUSIC AND LIFE
abandonment, in any form of human expres-
sion, of every style known hitherto is a fatal
ature can throw away its past and live. The
Florentine Revolution was not revolution,
but riot, for it undertook to tear down what
generations had been slowly building up, and
to substitute in its place something not only
untried but (at that time) impossible. It was
an attempt to found a new art entirely de-
tached from an old one. Beethoven without
Haydn and Mozart, Meredith without Field-
ing, the Gothic without the Classical, a Re-
naissance without a birth, daylight without
sunrise. It was an entirely illogical proceeding
from first to last, but opera came forth from
it because opera can subsist — it has, and
does — without logic or even reasonableness,
There had been composed before the year
1600 the most beautiful sacred music the
world possesses — that which culminated in
the works of Palestrina. A style or method of
expression had been perfected, and this style
or method was gradually and naturally being
applied to secular and even to dramatic forms.
There were at that time, also, songs of the
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THE OPERA
people which had been often used in plays
with music, and which might have supplied a
basis for opera. But the creators of the new
opera would have none of these. They had a
theory (fatal possession for any artist): they
wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they
believed that, in opera, music should be sub-
servient to the text. It was Peri and his asso-
ciates who first saw this will-o'-the-wisp, which
has since become completely embodied into a
fully equipped and valiant bugaboo to frighten
and subdue those who love music for music's
sake. All that one needs to say on this point
is that there is no great opera in existence,
save alone “ Pelléas et Mélisande” by De-
bussy, in which the music is not supreme over
the text (and Debussy's opera is unique in its
treatment and leads nowhere — or, if any-
where, away from opera). Peri's reforms were
artistically unreasonable, but the composers
who followed him gradually evolved what is
called the aria or operatic song and did even-
tually make a more or less coherent operatic
form, although a long time passed before opera
unified in itself the various elements necessary
to artistic completeness.
Ore
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MUSIC AND LIFE
It was only a short time, however, before
opera attained the widest favor all over Eu-
rope, a favor which it has enjoyed from that
day to this. The reasons for this never-waning
popularity are found first in the natural pref-
erence on the part of the public for the hu-
man voice over any instrument. For whatever
facility of technique or felicity of expression
musical instruments may have, they lack the
intimate human quality of the singing voice.
The voice comes to the listener in terms of
himself, whereas an instrument may be strange
and unsympathetic and awaken no response.
So complete is this sympathy between the
singer and listener that almost any singer with
a fine voice (she is, very likely, called a “hu-
man nightingale") is sure to attract an audi-
ence, no matter what she sings or how little
musical intelligence she shows. (It is this sym-
pathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawing-
room song, the last word in utter vacuity.)
Coupled with this is the delight the public
takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility.
The singer vies with a flute in the orchestra,
or sings two or three notes higher than any
other singer has ever sung, and the public
1
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THE OPERA
crowds to hear her. But it is useless to dwell
on this : the disease is incurable; there will
always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready
for any vocal gymnast who sings higher or
faster than anybody else, or who can toss off
trills and runs with a smiling face and a pretty
costume, and in entirely unintelligible words.
And, second, when this singing, which the
public dearly loves, is coupled with the per-
ennial fascination of the drama, the appeal is
irresistible.
I do not need to dwell here on the quality
in the drama which has made it popular from
the remotest time until now. One can say this,
however : that to people who are incapable of
re-creating a world of beauty in their own
minds — although nature surrounds them with
it, and imaginative literature is in every library
- the stage is a perpetual delight. There they
behold impossible romances, incredible virtues
and vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted
but inevitably triumphant, impossible scenes
in improbable countries, everything left out
that is tiresome and habitual and necessitous,
no blare of daylight but only golden sunrise
and flaming sunset: the impossible realized
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MUSIC AND AND
LIFE
at last. These qualities are in all drama to a
greater or less extent, for they embody the
essence of what the drama is. Æschylus and
Shakespeare divest life of its pruse as com-
pletely as does a raging melodrama, for a play
must move from one dramatic and salient point
to another; and while those great dramatists
imply the whole of life,-- whereas the ordi-
nary play implies nothing, — they do not and
cannot present it in its actual and complete
continuity.
Now the drama is subject more or less to
public opinion and to public taste, because in
the drama we understand what we are hearing.
On the other hand the opera, considered as
drama, is almost free from any such responsi-
bility, because it is sung in a foreign language;
or if, by chance, in our own tongue, the size
of the opera house and the disinclination of
singers to pay any attention to their diction
renders the text unintelligible. So the libretto
of the opera escapes scrutiny. “What is too
silly to be said is-sung,” says Voltaire.
Let us note also that when an art becomes
detached from its own past, when it is not
based on natural human life, and does not
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The OPERA
obey those general laws to which all art is sub-
ject, it is sure to evolve conventions of one
sort or another and to become artificial. This
is to be observed in what is called the “rococo”
style of architecture, as well as in the terrible
objects perpetrated by the “futurists” and
“cubists” (anything that is of the future must
also be of the past, no matter whether it is a
picture, or a tree, or an idea). Opera was soon
in the grip of these conventions from which,
with a few notable exceptions, it has never
escaped. Even the common conventions of
the drama, which we accept readily enough,
are in opera stretched to the breaking point.
For many generations operas were planned
according to a set, inflexible scheme of acts; a
woman took a man's part (as in Gounod's
“Faust”); characters were stereotyped; the
position of the chief aria (solo) for the prima
donna was exactly determined so as to give to
her entrance all possible impressiveness; the
set musical pieces (solos, duets, choruses, and
so forth) were arranged artificially and not to
satisfy any dramatic necessity. There is some
justness in Wagner's saying that the old con-
ventional opera was “a concert in costume.”
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MUSIC AND LIFE
An example of this conventionality and lack
of dramatic unity may be found in the famous
quartette scene in Verdi's “Rigoletto,” an
opera which is typical of the Italian style (in
which, in Meredith's phrase, “there is much
dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet an-
guish”). In this scene there are two persons
in hiding to watch two others. The conceal-
ment is the hinge upon which, for the mo-
ment, the story swings. But the exigencies of
the music are such that, before the piece has pro-
gressed very far, all four are singing at the top
of their lungs and with no pretext of conceal-
ment—in a charming piece of music, indeed,
but quite divested of dramatic truth and unity.
And then, naturally enough, the thin veneer
of drama having been pierced, they answer
your applause by joining hands and bowing,
after which the two conceal themselves again,
the music strikes up as before, and the whole
scene is repeated.
But one of the most artificial elements in
the old operas was the ballet. Its part in the
opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and
great sums were lavishly spent to make it as
gorgeous as possible. It had usually nothing
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THE OPERA
whatever to do with the story, but was useful
in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who
did not take opera seriously. Once upon a
time, in London, by an extraordinary unlucky
stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to
hear an opera containing a ballet; whereupon
he fulminated as follows: “The very ballet
girls, with their muslin saucers round them,
were perhaps little short of miraculous; whirl-
ing and spinning there in strange mad vor-
texes, and then suddenly fixing themselves
motionless, each upon her left or right great
toe, with the other leg stretched out at an
angle of ninety degrees — as if you had sud-
denly pricked into the floor, by one of their
points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous co-
hort, of mad restlessly jumping and clipping
scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open
blades, and stand still in the Devil's name!”
One remembers, also, “War and Peace,”
with its scene at the opera — and Tolstoï's
reference to the chief male dancer as getting
“sixty thousand francs a year for cutting ca-
pers.” So, looking over the older operas which
still hold their place in the repertoire, we think
of them as rather absurd, and comfort our-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
selves with the reflection that to-day opera has
outgrown its youthful follies and has become
a work of art.
III. WAGNER AND AFTER
Then came the second great operatic re-
form, --- that of Wagner, -- which was sup-
posed to free us from the old absurdities and
make of opera a reasonable and congruous
thing. This, Wagner's operas, at the outset,
bade fair to be. In “ Der Fliegende Hol-
länder," « Tannhäuser,” and “Lohengrin”
there is a reasonable correspondence between
the action and the music; we can listen and
look without too great disruption of our fac-
ulties. Wagner's librettos are, with one excep-
tion, based on mythological stories or ideas.
His personages are eternal types — Lohengrin
of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by
fiat, Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic
and noble womanhood. He adopted the old
device by means of which certain salient qual-
ities in his characters — such as Siegfried's
youth and fearlessness, Wotan's majesty, and
so forth — were defined by short phrases of
music called leit-motifs; he made his orchestra
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THE OPERA
eloquent of the movement of his drama, in-
stead of employing it as a “huge guitar”; he
eliminated the set musical piece, which was
bound to delay the action; he kept his music
always moving onward by avoiding the so-
called “authentic cadence,” which in all the
older music perpetually cries a halt.
But by all these means Wagner imposed on
his listener a constant strain of attention: leit-
motifs recurring, developing, and disintegrat-
ing, every note significant, a huge and eloquent
orchestra, a voice singing phrases which are
not parts of a complete melody then and there
being evolved, - as in an opera by Verdi,
but which are related to something first heard
perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act
(or a week before in another drama): we have
all this to strain every possibility of our appre-
ciative faculty, and at the same time he asks us
to watch an actual combat between a hero and
a dragon, or to observe another between two
heroes half in the clouds with a God resplend-
ent stretching out a holy spear to end the duel
as he wills it, while a Valkyrie hovers above
on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under
water, with Undines swimming about and a
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MUSIC AND LIFE
gnome clambering the slippery rocks to filch
a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even
this, and more; for he asks us to witness the
end of the world the waters rising, the very
heavens aflame when our heart is so torn
by the stupendous inner tragedy of Brunhilde's
immolation that the end of the world seems
utterly and completely irrevelant and imper-
tinent.
After all, we are human. We cannot be men
and women and, at the same time, children.
We should like to crouch down in our seat in
the opera house and forget everything save
the noble, splendid, and beautiful music, see-
ing only just so much action as would accord
with our state of inner exaltation. An opera
must be objective or subjective; it cannot be
both at the same time. The perfection of“Don
Giovanni” is due to the exact equality be-
tween the amount and intensity of the action
and of the musical expression-or, in other
words, to the complete union of matter and
manner, of form and style. The “Ring” cycle
is objective and subjective; it is the extreme
of stage mechanism (and more), and, at the
same time, everything that is imaginatively
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THE OPERA
profound and moving. It is impossible to
avoid the conclusion that Wagner in those
great music-dramas lost sight of the balance
between means and ends, and the proportion
between action and thought. His own theories,
and the magnitude of his subject, led him to
forget the natural limitations which are im-
posed upon a work of art by the very nature
of those beings for whom it was created. The
“Ring” dramas should be both acted and wit-
nessed by gods and goddesses for whom time
and space do not exist, and who are not limited
by a precarious nervous system. No one can
be insensitive to the great beauty of certain
portions of these gigantic music-dramas, ---
every one recognizes Wagner's genius as it
shows itself, for example, in either of the great
scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde, -- but
the intricate and well-nigh impossible stage
mechanism and the excursions into the written
drama constitute serious defects. (For the
scene between Wotan and Fricka in “ Das
Rheingold” and similar passages in the suc-
ceeding dramas are essentially scenes to be
read rather than acted.)
One would suppose that Wagner had made
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MUSIC AND LIFE
impossible any repetition of the old operatic
incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case.
One of the latest Italian operas is, if anything,
more absurd than any of its predecessors.
What could be more grotesque than an opera
whose scene is in a mining camp in the West,
whose characters include a gambler, a sheriff,
a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose
language is perforce very much in the ver-
nacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards,
-an “Outcast-of-Poker-Flat” opera, --- and
this translated, for the benefit of the com-
poser, into Italian and produced in that lan-
guage? “I'm dead gone on you, Minnie,”
says Rance; “ Ti voglio bene, Minnie,” sings
his Italian counterpart.
“Rigoletto” does entrance us by the beauty
and the sincerity of its melodies; it is what
it pretends to be; it deals with emotions
which we can share because they derive ulti-
mately from great human issues. The Count,
Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types;
we know them well in literature - in poetry,
novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept
the strained convention of the scene as being
inevitable at that point in the development of
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THE OPERA
the opera. But after Wagner's reforms, and the
influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the
greatest of the Italians, it would seem incredi-
ble that any composer could lapse into a“ Girl
of the Golden West.”
Nearly all Puccini's operas are a reversion
to type. The old-fashioned lurid melodrama
appears again, blood-red as usual; as in “ La
Tosca,” which leaves almost nothing to the
imagination-one specially wishes that it did
in certain scenes. “Local color,” so-called, ap-
pears again in all its arid deception -- as in the
Japanese effects in the music of “Madame
Butterfly”; again we hear the specious melody
pretending to be real, with its octaves in the
orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It is the
old operatic world all over again. When we
compare any tragic scene in Puccini's operas
with the last act of Verdi's “ Otello,” we real-
ize the vast difference between the two. It is
true that Puccini gives us beautiful lyric mo-
ments — as when Mimi, in “ La Bohème,”
tells Rudolph who she is; it is true, also, that
we ought not to cavil because Puccini is not
as great a composer as Verdi. Our compari-
son is not for the purpose of decrying one at
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MUSIC AND LIFE
the expense of the other, but to point out that
the greater opera is not called for by the pub-
lic and the lesser is; that we get“ La Bohème,”
“Madame Butterfly,” and “La Tosca”twenty
times to “Otello's” once, and that we thereby
lose all sense of operatic values.
The most trumpeted operatic composer of
to-day is the worst of operatic sinners. Noth-
ing could be more debasing to music and to
drama than the method Strauss employs in
“Electra.” In its original form “Electra” is
a play of profound significance, whose art, phi-
losophy, and ethics are a natural expression of
Greek life and thought. It contains ideas and
it presents actions which, while totally alien to
us, we accept as belonging to that life and
thought. In the original, or in any good trans-
lation, its simplicity and its elemental gran-
deur are calculated to move us deeply, for we
achieve a historical perspective and see the
meaning and significance of the catastrophe
which it presents. This great story our mod-
ern composer proceeds to treat pathologically.
Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every
passion, every fearful deed with a personal and
immediate significance which entirely destroys
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The OPERA
its artistic and its historical sense. The real
“ Electra” is an impersonal, typical, national,
and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and
Strauss have made it into a seething caldron
of riotous, unbridled passion.
The lead given by Strauss in “ Salome,”
“ Electra,” and, in different form or type, in
- Der Rosenkavallier" has been quickly fol-
lowed. “The Jewels of the Madonna" is an
“Electra” of the boulevard, in which the worst
sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege
are flaunted openly in the name of drama. It
belongs in the “Grand Guignol.” Let any
reasonable person read the librettos of current
operas and form an opinion, not of their mor-
als,- for there is only one opinion about that,
-- but of their claims on the attention of any
serious-minded person.
I refer to the moral status of these stories
only because many of them stress the abnor-
mal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks
the truth wherever it be, but the truth is the
whole truth and not a segment of it. A novel
may represent almost any phase of life, but it
must keep a sense of proportion. Dostoievsky
pushes the abnormal to the extreme limit, but
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MUSIC AND LIFE
on the other hand he is “a brother to his vil-
lains” and he gives us plenty of redeeming
types. The hero in “ The Idiot" is a pre-
dominating and overbalancing character. The
object of all great literature is to present the
truth in terms of beauty. “Tess of the D'Urb-
ervilles” is as moral as “Emma.” But the
further one gets from a deliberate form of art-
istic expression like the novel, the less latitude
one has in this respect. An episode in a novel
of Dostoïevsky would be an impossible sub-
ject for a picture. So opera, which focuses it-
self for us in the stage frame and within a
limited time, must somehow preserve for itself
this truthfulness and fidelity to life as it is.
“ The Jewels of the Madonna" might serve
as an episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky, or of
Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity.
T
.
IV. WHEN MUSIC AND DRAMA ARE FITLY
JOINED
I have referred to these various inconsist-
encies and absurdities of opera, not with the
idea of making out a case against it; on the
contrary, I want to make out a case for it.
This obviously can be done only by means
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THE OPERA
YT
of operas which are guiltless of absurdities and
of melodramatic exaggeration, which answer
the requirements of artistic reasonableness, and
are, at the same time, beautiful. This cannot
be said of “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic
Chivalry -Heaven save the mark!), “La Bo-
hème,” “La Tosca," « The Girl of the Golden
West,” “Thaïs ” (poison, infidelity, suicide,
sorcery, and religion mixed up in an intoler-
able mélange), “ Contes d'Hoffman” (a Don
Juan telling his adventures in detail) -- these
are bad art, not because they are immoral, but
because they are untrue, distorted, without
sense of the value of the material they employ.
Operas which are both beautiful and rea-
sonable do exist, and one or two of them are
actually in our present-day repertoire. The
questions we have to ask are these: Can a
highly imaginative and significant drama, in
which action and reflection hold a proper bal-
ance, in which some great and moving passion
or some elemental human motives find true
dramatic expression - can such a drama exist
as opera? Is it possible to preserve the body
and the spirit of drama and at the same time
to preserve the body and spirit of music?
on
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MUSIC AND LIFE
Does not one of these have to give way to the
other? We want opera to be one thing, and
not several. We want the same unity which
exists in other artistic forms. We want to sep-
arate classic, romantic, and realistic. If opera
changes from blank verse to rhymed verse, so.
to speak, we want the change to be dictated
by an artistic necessity as it is in “As You Like
It.” We want, above all, such a reasonable
correspondence between seeing and hearing as
shall make it possible for us to preserve each
sense unimpaired by the other. A few such
operas have been composed. A considerable
number approach this ideal. From Gluck's
"Orfeo” (produced in 1762) to Wagner's
“ Tristan”(1865) the pure conception of opera
has always been kept alive. Gluck, Mozart,
Weber, Wagner, and Verdi are the great names
that stand out above the general level.
Gluck's “ Orfeo” is even more interesting
since the dark shadow of Strauss's “ Electra”
has appeared to throw it into relief. Once in
a decade or two “Orfeo" is revived to reveal
anew how nobly Gluck interpreted the old
Greek story. And it must be remembered that
Gluck lived in the latter part of the eighteenth
THE OPERA
century, when music was quite inflexible in
the matter of those dissonances which are
considered by modern composers absolutely
necessary to the expression of dramatic passion.
After Gluck came Mozart with his “Don
Giovanni,” preserving the same balance be-
tween action and emotion, with an even greater
unity of style and the same sincerity of utter-
ance. Mozart possessed a supreme mastery
over all his material, and a unique gift for cre-
ating pure and lucid melody. In his operas
there is no admixture : his tragedy and his
comedy are alike purely objective — and it is
chiefly this quality which prevents our under-
standing them. We, in our day and age, can-
not project ourselves into Mozart's milieu ;
the tragedy at the close of “Don Giovanni”
moves us no whit because it is devoid of
shrieking dissonances and thunders of orches-
tral sound. Our nervous systems are adjusted
to instrumental cataclysms. (We are conscious
only of a falling star; the serene and placid
Heavens look down on us in vain.) Could we
hear “ Don Giovanni” in a small opera house
sung in pure classic style, we should realize
how beautiful it is; we should no longer crave
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MUSIC AND LIFE
the over-excitement and unrestrained passion
of “ La Tosca”; we should understand that
the deepest passion is expressible without tear-
ing itself to tatters, and that music may be
unutterably tragic in simple major and minor
mode. Don Giovanni is a type of operatic
hero, - he may be found in some modified
form in half the operas ever written, - but
Mozart lifts him far above his petty intrigues
and makes him a great figure standing for cer-
tain elements in human nature. (It is the fail-
ure of Gounod to accomplish this which puts
“Faust” on the lower plane it occupies.) The
stage setting of “Don Giovanni," -- the con-
ventional rooms with gilt chairs, and the like,
-- the costumes, the acting, the music (orches-
tral and vocal), are all unified in one style.
And this, coupled with the supreme mastery
and the melodic gift of its composer, makes it
one of the most perfect, if not the most per-
fect, of operas.
Beethoven's “Fidelio” (produced in 1805)
celebrates the devotion and self-sacrifice of a
woman — and that devotion and self-sacrifice
actually have for their object ber husband! It
is a noble opera, but Beethoven's mind and
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THE OPERA
temperament were not suited to the operatic
problem, and “ Fidelio” is not by any means
a perfect work of art. The Beethoven we hear
there is the Beethoven of the slow movements
of the sonatas and symphonies; but we could
well hear “Fidelio” often, for it stands alone
in its utter sincerity and grandeur.
The romantic operas of Weber tend toward
that characterization which is the essential
equality of his great successor, Wagner, for
“ Der Freischütz” and “Euryanthe" are full
of characteristic music. Weber begins and ends
romantic opera. (Romantic subjects are com-
mon enough, but romantic treatment is exceed-
ingly uncommon. Scott's “Bride of Lammer-
moor," for example, in passing through the
hands of librettist and composer becomes -
in Donizetti's “Lucia di Lammermoor"-
considerably tinged with melodrama.) There
is evidence enough in “Der Freischütz" and
“ Euryanthe" of Weber's sincerity and desire
to make his operas artistic units. Each of them
conveys a definite impression of beauty and
avoids those specious appeals so common in
opera.
Meanwhile, in the early part of the nine-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
WC
or
teenth century, opera comique was flourishing
in France. Auber, Hérold, Boieldieu, and
other composers were producing works in
which the impossible happenings of grand
opera were made possible by humor and light-
ness of touch. The words of these composers
are full of delightful melody and are more rea-
sonable and true than are many better-known
grand operas.
Then comes the Wagnerian period, with
its preponderance-of-drama over music. In
“ Tristan und Isolde” Wagner, by his own
confession, turned away from preconceived
theories and composed as his inner spirit
moved him. “ Tristan” is, therefore, the work
of an artist rather than of a theorist, and al-
though it is based on the leit-motif and on cer-
tain other important structural ideas which be-
long to the Wagnerian scheme, it rises far
above their limitations and glows with the real
light of genius. In “Tristan” the action is
suited to the psychology. It is a great work
of art and the most beautiful of all recanta-
tions. In it we realize how finely means may
be adjusted to ends, how clearly music and
text may be united, how reasonable is the use
1
[ 172 ]
THE OPERA
of the leit-motif when it characterizes beings
aflame with passion; how the song, under the
influence of great dramatic situations, can be
expanded; how vividly the orchestra can in-
terpret and even further the actions; how even
the chorus can be fitted into the dramatic
scheme – everywhere in “ Tristan” there is
unity. This is not true of most of Wagner's
other operas. “Die Meistersinger.” comes
nearest to “Tristan” in this respect. May we
not say that of all the music-dramas of Wag-
ner, “Tristan” and “ Die Meistersinger” lay
completely in his consciousness unmixed with
philosophical ideas and theories? In them the
leit-motif deals chiefly with emotions or with
characteristics of persons rather than with in-
animate objects, or ideas; in them is no gran-
diose scenic display; no perversity of theory, but
only beautiful music wedded to a fitting text.
Wagner's reforms were bound to bring about
a reaction, which came in due season and re-
sulted in shorter and more direct works, such as
those of the modern Italians. No operas since
Wagner, save Verdi's “Otello” and “Fal-
staff,” approach the greatness of his music-
dramas, and the tendency of many of these
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Music AND LIFE
ev
later works has been too much toward what
we mildly call “ decadence.” But there is a
great difference between the truthfulness and
artistic validity of “Carmen” and that of “La
Bohème” and “La Tosca.” The former is
packed full of genuine passion, however prim-
itive, brutal, and devastating it may be; and
its technical skill is undoubted.
The most interesting phrase of modern op-
era is found in the works of the Russians. It
was inevitable that they should overturn our
delicately adjusted artistic mechanism. Dos-
toïevsky's “The Brothers Karamazov" is as
though there never had been a Meredith or a
Henry James, and Moussorgsky's “Boris Go-
dounov” is as though there had never been a
Mozart or a Wagner. It has something of that
amorphous quality which seems to be a part
of Russian life, but, on the other hand, it has
immense vitality. How refreshing to see a
crowd of peasants look like peasants, and to
hear them sing their own peasant songs; and
what stability they give to the whole work!
Boris Godounov” gravitates, as it were,
around these folk-songs, which give to it a
certain reality and truthfulness.
[ 174 )
THE OPERA
V. OPERA AS A HUMAN INSTITUTION
These various works have long since been
accepted by the musical world as the great
masterpieces in operatic form. Many of them
are practically out of the present repertoire of
our opera houses. Were we to assert our-
selves — were the general public given an op-
portunity to choose between good and bad -
we should hear them often. And who shall
say what results might not come from a
small and properly managed opera house,
with performances of fine works at reasonable
prices ?
: Opera is controlled by a few rich men who
think it a part of the life of a great city that
there should be an opera house with a fine
orchestra, fine scenery, and the greatest sing-
ers obtainable. It does not exist for the good
of the whole city, but rather for those of ple-
thoric purses. It does not make any attempt
to become a sociological force; it does not
even dimly see what possibilities it possesses
in that direction. Opera houses and opera
companies are sedulously protected against
any sociological scrutiny. They are persist-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
ently reported to be hot-beds of intrigue; they
trade on society and on the love of highly
paid singing; they surround themselves with
an exotic atmosphere in which the normal
person finds difficulty in breathing, and which
often turns the opera singer into a strange
specimen of the genus man or woman; they go
to ruin about once in so often, and are extri-
cated by the unnecessarily rich; they are too
little related to the community that supports
them save in the mediums of money and so-
cial convention.
These artificial and false conditions are
bound to bring evils in their train, but these
conditions and these evils are chiefly the re-
sult of our own complacency. Were opera in
any sense domestic; were opera singers to
some extent, at least, human beings like our-
selves, moving in a reasonable world; did we
go to hear opera -as we go to a symphony
concert, or to an art museum, - to satisfy our
love of beauty, and quicken our imagination
by contact with beautiful objects; were the
conditions of performance, such as to enable us
to hear the words, then would opera..become
a fine human institution, then would it take
.
-
L
.
THE OPERA
..
.*..
its place among the noble dreams of hu-
manity.
"In my endeavor to make some distinctions
between good and bad opera I have drawn a
somewhat arbitrary line. I do not wish to give
the impression that I think all opera on one
side of the line is bad and on the other good.
I have tried to strike a just balance by ap-
plying certain admitted principles of artistic
construction and expression. From these prin-
ciples, which lie at the basis of life and, there-
fore, of art, opera has unjustly claimed im-
munity.
And finally we come to that point in our
argument where reasoning must stop alto-
gether. For opera is to many people a sort of
fascination entirely outside reason. They re-
fuse to admit it as a subject of discussion;
they enjoy the spectacle on the stage and the
spectacle of which they are a part; the sight
of three thousand people well dressed like
themselves comforts them; the fine singing,
costumes, and stage-setting, the gorgeous or-
chestra throbbing with passion entirely un-
bridled — all these they enjoy in that mental
lassitude which is dear to them. They are,
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MUSIC AND LIFE
perhaps, slightly uncomfortable at a symphony
concert; here there are no obligations. Opera
is, in short, to such people a slightly illicit
æsthetic adventure.
CHAPTER VI
THE SYMPHONY
1. WHAT IS A SYMPHONY ?
In the first chapter I discussed the nature of
music itself in order that I might clear away
certain popular misconceptions about it and
arrive at some estimate of what it really is. In
the intervening chapters I have dealt with va-
rious phases of music : I have discussed it in
connection with words or action, as a socio-
logical force, and as a matter of pedagogy, and
in so doing I have had to take into considera-
tion all sorts of non-musical factors. Now the
symphony is.“pure music," so called; it exists
as a separate and distinct thing whose only
purpose is to be beautiful and true to life.
Furthermore it has always been largely_inde-
pendent of-its-audience. The opera has been
subject to the vagaries of singers, to the de-
mands of the audience for fine costumes and
scenery; the symphony, on the contrary, has
grown naturally and freely, being hindered
only by the slow development of instruments
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MUSIC AND LIFE
and of the technique of playing them. Nearly
every great symphony has persisted in the
face of the opposition of the public and of
many of the critics; the gibes hurled at the
First Symphony of Brahms were as bitter
as those hurled at the Second Symphony of
Beethoven. In discussing, therefore, what is
undoubtedly the greatest of musical forms, I
desire first to state as nearly as may be what,
in its essence, it is.
A symphony is, of course, like other music
in being an arrangement of rhythmic figures,
of melodies (usually called “themes") and of
harmonies. But before describing it as such
- before dealing with its materials, its form,
its history, and its place in the art of music -
I wish to treat it solely as a thing of beauty
expressed in terms of sound. Many people
seem to think music an art dealing with ob-
jects or with ideas. Some, never having be-
come sensitized to it in childhood, look upon
it as of no importance whatever. A large num-
ber have tried to perform it on an instrument
and have failed. Others have succeeded at the
price of thinking of it only in terms of tech-
nique. A certain happy few, some of whom
...
13
[ 180 ]
THE SYMPHONY
can perform it, and some of whom cannot,
are satisfied to take it as it is and be stimu-
lated by it. These are the true musicians and we
should all aspire to join their happy company.
What we call a symphony is merely a series
of ordered-sounds..produced by means of in-
struments-of various kinds. It is sound and
nothing else. Our programme books tell us
about “first themes” and “second themes,"
and we make what effort we can to patch to-
gether the various brilliant textures of sym-
phonic music into a coherent pattern, but the
music we seek lies behind these outward man-
ifestations as, in a lesser sense, the significance
of a great poem lies behind the actual words.
So it is with all the greatest art, whatever the
medium may be. The chief difference between
a symphony and any other form of artistic
expression -- such as a novel, a play, a paint-
ing, or a piece of sculpture — is that a sym-
phony-is-not-a-record of something else; it is
not a picture of something else; it is itself
only.. And it is this quality or property of
being itself that gives to all pure music its
remarkable power. Any intelligent person, on
being shown a diagram or plan of a sym-
.
[ 181 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
phonic movement, could be made to under-
stand how and why the material was so dis-
posed, for that disposition is dictated to the
composer by the nature of sound and by the
limitations and capacities of human beings, and
it conforms to certain principles which operate
everywhere; but that understanding would not
reveal the symphony to him.
There is in every one of us a region of sensi-
bility in which mind and emotion are blended
and from which the imagination acts, and it is
to this sensibility that music appeals. Now,
the imagination, which we believe to be the
highest function of human beings, cannot act
from the mind alone. Mathematics, for ex-
ample, does not lie entirely in the domain of
the mind, and the same thing may be said of
any other department of science. The chief
value of scientific studies in school and uni-
versity lies in the stimulation of the student's
imagination rather than in the acquisition of
scientific facts. Now, we cannot conceive any
act of the imagination whatever that does not
glow with the radiance of emotion, so that
music, in appealing to the whole being, is not
so completely isolated as is generally supposed.
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THE SYMPHONY
TYT
But the simultaneous appeal of music to the
mind and the feelings has led to much con-
fusion on the part of writers who have not
been sensitive to all its qualities. In his essay
on “Education” Herbert Spencer, for exam-
ple, in discussing the union of science and
poetry, says: “It is doubtless true that, as states
of consciousness, cognition and emotion tend
to exclude each other. And it is doubtless
true also that an extreme activity of the feelings
tends to deaden the reflective powers : in which
sense, indeed, all orders of activity are antag-
onistic to each other." Now this statement
reveals at once the limitations of a philosophic
mind when dealing with something that re-
quires apprehension by the feelings also. In
listening to music the reflective powers are not
engaged with objects or with definite ideas, but
with pure sound that requires correlation only
with itself, and the condition of mutual exclu-
sion between thought and feeling no longer
exists because the music is expressing thought
and feeling in the same terms." Spencer speaks
cen
1 I stated in the first chapter what justification there is for
using the word intellectual" in regard to music, and I speak
here of thought in that sense.
[183]
Music AND
and Life
of science as full of poetry, which is true
enough, but his statement about music reveals
an incapacity to understand it. And his mis-
conceptions about art in general may be illus-
trated by the following concerning the axis in
sculpture as applied to a standing figure: “But
sculptors unfamiliar with the theory of equi-
librium not uncommonly so represent this at-
titude that the line of direction falls midway
between the feet. Ignorance of the laws of
momentum leads to analogous errors; as wit-
ness the admired Discobolus, which, as it is
posed, must inevitably fall forward the mo-
ment the quoit is delivered.” This observa-
tion completely misses the quite sound reasons
for the pose of that remarkable statue, and, if
applied to sculpture in general, would destroy
the famous “Victory of Samothrace" and
many other fine examples of Greek sculpture.
But it is strange and mysterious, after all,
that these ordered sounds should be so precious
to us; that we should preserve their printed
symbols generation after generation and con-
tinually reproduce them as sound, feeling them
to be strong and stable and true; that we should
even come to say, after many generations, that
[ 184 ]
THE SYMPHONY
their creator was a wise man who had in him
a profound philosophy. But it is stranger still
to realize how convincing this philosophy is
as compared to any philosophy of the reason,
and to see how profound in it is the sense of
reconciliation --a reconciliation that the mind
seeks in vain. Our life consists of thought,
feeling, and action, phenomena of what we are,
and in actual life never quite reconcilable. But
the world of music is not actual life. Music is
absolved from actual phenomena, and achieves
by virtue of this freedom a complete and pro-
found philosophy — a philosophy unintelli-
gible to the mind alone, but intelligible to the
complete being. The strength of every art lies
chiefly in its detachment from reality. Sculp-
ture does not gain by being realistic, pictur-
esque, or decorative; on the contrary, it is at
its highest when it is ideal, detached, and super-
human. Painting does not gain by being cate-
gorical, but is greatest when it seeks something
beyond the outward, physical view. The novel
or the essay depends for its greatness on its
power of relating real persons, things, and ideas
to that greater and deeper reality of which they
are a part. In this sense music stands supreme
[ 185 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
I
above the other arts because it is the most de-
tached. The elements of thought and feeling
are, in music, presented as elements; the thought
is not thought even in the abstract, for it is
not “about” anything; the feeling is not ac-
tual feeling, and the action is not real action.
Each of these properties or states of the hu-
man being is here expressed in its essence, de-
tached from all actual manifestation. None but
the highest type of mind, none but a heart full
of deep human sympathy, none but a vigor-
ous militant spirit could have conceived and
brought forth such compositions, for example,
as the Third and Ninth Symphonies of Bee-
thoven, yet they are nothing but sound
neither the thought nor the feeling nor the ac-
tion is real.
But we may also truly say that in Conrad's
novel it is not the person, Lord Jim, who
moves us, but rather the author's deep insight
into the elements of human character expressed
through the central figure. A portrait by Velas-
quez is a portrait of the personality that lived
within the outward appearance. The figure of
Pendennis is not so much the youth by that
name as it is youth itself - youth, care-free,
[ 186 ]
THE SYMPHONY
but bound by tradition and love. All great art
is subjective, lying in the mind of man.
It is from this point of view, then, that I
approach the symphony. I do not need now
to dwell on its history, on its form, or on its
means of expression, because they are merely
incidental to its being a profound human docu-
ment. Pure_music.at its highest is the will of
man made-manifest, and one may doubt if that
will becomes fully manifest in any other of
his creations. It compasses all his actions, all
his thoughts, all his feelings; it translates his
dreams; it satisfies his insatiable curiosities; it
justifies his pride (as he himself never does);
it makes him the god he would be; it is like a
crystal ball, in whose mystic depths the whole
of life moves in a shadow fantasy.
II. HOW SHALL WE UNDERSTAND IT?
It is obvious, then, that the only possibleway
to understand a symphony-is-to-accept-it as it
is and not try to make it-into-something else.
Music is not a language; it does not exist in
other terms, but is untranslatable. When a
trumpet blares and you make any of the con-
ventional associations with the trumpet, such
[ 187 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
as a battle, a hunt, a proclamation, a signal,
off goes your mind on a stream of alien ideas
that may carry you anywhere and that will
certainly carry you farther and farther away
from the music itself. Each of the orchestral
instruments has its own individual association
-the oboe reminds you of a shepherd's pipe,
the flute of a bird's song, the French horn of
struments in the orchestra as you listen to it
is forming lines, and adding colors, as it were,
in a great design. And this design, always com-
plete at any one point, goes on unceasingly
forming itself ever and ever anew. It is always
complete and always incomplete, always mov-
ing onward, always delicately poised for inevi-
table flight. As you listen you have lived a
thousand lives; dream after dream has dis-
solved itself in your consciousness; each mo-
ment has been a perfect and complete exist-
ence in itself. When it is finished you awake
to what you call happiness or unhappiness,
peace or struggle, satisfaction or chagrin; the
unreal spectacle of the world imposes itself
upon you again; you are once more a human
being. Why ask that glorious world in which
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THE SYMPHONY
your nature has been freed and your soul has
been disencumbered of your body to assume
all the imperfections of this one? The gods,
of necessity, dwell in the heavens. No, you
cannot understand music by translating it into
other terms, or by preserving your associations
with the world in which you live. Mind and
feeling, sublimated by the magic of these
sounds, must detach themselves and rise to a
world of pure imagination where there is no
locality.
Reconciliation! A philosophy without a cate-
gory; a religion without a dogma; an inde-
structible shadow world which offers no expla-
nations, promulgates no opinions, and has no
mission - which exists completely in itself.
What more shall we ask for? Why cry to the
heavens for a manifestation? Why take refuge
in a so-called “system” of philosophy? Why
shuffle off the whole problem on a dogma?
What comfort to a squirrel in a cage to know
the number of its bars? Is our slow and inevi-
table progress from the unknown to the un-
known any more significant because we have
learned to tell our beads, intellectual, religious,
or æsthetic, to mumble our little formulæ, and
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MUSIC AND LIFE
to pick our way, eyes downward, amongst the
stones and thorns, never once glancing clear-
eyed upward to the sun? We have always
sought a fourth dimension, and have always
had it. We want what we have not; we wish
to be what we are not; and all the time they
have been within our grasp. We make a far-
away heaven to answer this universal cry, when
nation falters most when we apply it to things
nearest us. Where can heaven be if not here?
Is it an omnibus in which you may secure a
comfortable seat by paying your fare? Or is it
a state of yourself toward which you continu-
ally struggle and to which you occasionally
attain?
This, then, is my thesis. A symphony_is
(not merely an arrangement of rhythms, mel-
bdies, and harmonies; it is not a record of the
thoughts, feelings, and deeds of men; it is not
a picture of man or of nature. Rather does it
launch itself from these into the unknown. It
is pure imagination freed from the actual.
The foregoing does not, in any sense, pre-
clude that idea of a symphony which is ex-
pressible in terms of rhythm, melody, and har-
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THE SYMPHONY
TS
mony. What I have said has been said for the
purpose of preventing a conception of it in
these terms only (and, of course, in still lower
terms). Our physical hearing is a transit to the
imagination and we want the physical hearing
to serve that purpose. Nothing retards it more
than an attempt at the time to intellectualize
the process. In other words, listening to a sym-
phony should consist in giving yourself freely
to it; in making of yourself a passive medium.
Your study of the arrangement of themes, and
so forth, should precede or follow the actual
experience. And if you have no leisure or op-
portunity for such study and depend entirely
on an occasional concert, you should neverthe-
less continue to pursue the same inactivity,
allowing the music itself to increase your sus-
ceptibility little by little. If the mind is em-
ployed in an attempt to extricate order from
confusion, it usurps for the moment the other
functions of listening. And I would go so far
as to say that the proper goal of a musical
education should be to arrive at such a state
of impressionability to pure music as would
leave the mind, the feelings, and the imagina-
tion free to act subconsciously without active
a
n
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MUSIC AND LIFE
direction, and without struggle. The matter
is so obvious. There is the music; here is the
person. It awaits him. It was created of him
and for him. It is inconceivable without him.
It is his spirit coming back to him purified. It
is the only thing he cannot sully, and which
cannot sully him, for in the very nature of it,
it cannot be turned to base uses. What man
would be, here he is. In making this beautiful
spectacle of life, as Conrad says, he has found
its only explanation. So we should avoid mar-
ring the actual experience by conscious intent
on the technical details.
What I have said thus far may seem of but
slight assistance to the average person who at-
tends symphony concerts. I have stated what
I thought symphonic music to be, and have
urged my readers not to listen to it analyti-
cally. But my purpose here is not to attempt
to blaze an easy path for the music-lover; in
fact, I am unqualifiedly opposed to that too
common practice of æsthetic writing. There
is no easy path, and an attempt to find one is
disastrous to any progress whatever. Every
person who has attained to a real understand-
ing of æsthetic objects knows that the growth
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THE SYMPHONY
i
of that understanding has been slow. The
characteristic weakness of our artistic status is
self-deception. We are not frank with our-
selves; we are unwilling to admit ourselves in
ignorance; we advance opinions which are not
our own. The only possible basis for advance-
ment in anything is intellectual honesty. In-
formation about a symphony is useless unless
there is a real appeal in the music itself. So I
do not attempt to provide here a panacea;
just the opposite is my purpose. All I want
to do is to show that the symphony is worth
struggling for, and to brush away such mis-
conceptions about it as might retard the prog-
ress of those who have the will and the per-
severance to struggle. And when there is no
will to struggle, nothing can be accomplished.
What is called “mental lassitude” is almost a
contradiction in terms.
' It is obvious that a proper musical educa-
tion would have solved our problems in a
natural manner. If, as children, we had been
taught to sing only beautiful songs; if we had
been trained to listen to music; if our mem-
ory for musical phrases, rhythms, etc., had
been cultivated, we should be quick in appre
i
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MUSIC AND LIFE
| ev
hending all the qualities of a symphony, for
all our analytical reasoning would have been
done beforehand. And nothing can ever take
the place of such an education, because the
natural taste for music, which is so strong in
childhood, has in us been allowed to lapse.
So that our first duty is to our children. We
want them to avoid our mistakes. In every
household, in every school, public or private,
this ideal of music-study should be upheld -
namely, that the children should enter life so
prepared by their early training as to be able
to enjoy the greatest music.
I take a form of pure music as a type of
our highest attainment, because when music is
allied to words or to action it gives certain
hostages. Furthermore, the symphony evolved
slowly under the law of its own being, and it
represents the application to music of those
general laws of proportion and balance, of
unity and variety, which govern all artistic
expression. It has never been subjected to
alien influences ; popularity has not been its
to it. If you understand the symphony you
can apply that understanding to any other
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THE SYMPHONY
form of music. If one compares it with the
opera this distinction is at once evident. In
the opera that antagonism of which Spencer
speaks between states of feeling and of cogni-
tion does exist, because the mind is there ap-
pealed to through objects rather than through
pure sound. The symphony speaks in its own
terms; opera speaks in terms of characters in
action, of costume and of scenery, as well as
of music. Even the greatest operas cause you
to reflect on something outside themselves ---
on human motives as they find expression in
human action. In either “Don Giovanni” or
“Tristan," although the music reaches great
heights of beauty and is profoundly moving,
there is the inevitable struggle between seeing
and hearing, the inevitable difficulty between
a simultaneous state of cognition and of feel-
ing. The symphony entirely escapes this di-
lemma. No doubt great motives lie beneath
it; no doubt it, too, is a drama of human life,
for otherwise it could not be great as a work
of art; but the play of motives in a symphony
is hidden behind the impenetrable veil of
sound. The Third, Fifth, and Ninth Sym-
phonies of Beethoven are truly dramatic, but
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MUSIC AND Life
only in this sense. They range from the ten-
der to the terrible; they have their own emo-
tional climaxes; they philosophize, they brood,
they grin like a comic mask; action and re-
action follow each other as in life itself; noth-
ing is lacking but that one inconsequential
e
1
fading to nothingness as the sun sets.
III. THE MATERIALS OF THE SYMPHONY
I have said that the symphony evolved
slowly under the laws of its own being, and I
wish to state briefly and (as far as possible) in
simple terms how that evolution came about.
If I should go back to the very beginning I
should have to point out that the primal dif-
ference between music and noise consists in
the intensity of vibration and in the grouping
of the sounds into regular series by means of
accents. A series of unaccented tones does not
make music. If a clock, in striking twelve,
should, by accenting certain strokes, throw the
whole number into regular groups, it would
supply the basis for music. In any great piece
of martial music these accents and these im-
pulses in groups constitute the element that
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The SYMPHONY
moves us to comply with it ourselves; we beat
time with hand or foot; we are infused with
the momentum. And the force of the impetus
may be observed at the close of nearly every
piece of music where conventional chords ease
off its stress. The last forty measures of the
Fifth Symphony of Beethoven constitute a sort
of brake on the huge moving mass. Chopin's
Polonaise, opus 26, number I, on the contrary,
does not end; it stops. In Fielding's “Tom
Jones” the impetus of the action is carried on
so far that the climax is postponed to a point
dangerously near the end of the book, which
leaves us with a sense of breathlessness or even
of aggravation. In music, when this impetus
is of extreme vigor, any temporary displace-
ment of it produces almost the effect of a cata-
clysm -as in the first movement of Beetho-
ven's Third Symphony, where great chords in
twos clash across already established metrical
groups of threes. Within the metrical groups
all sorts of subdivisions may exist, and these
constitute what is called “rhythm” in music.
Rhythm, in brief, is the variety which any
melody imposes on the regular beats that con-
stitute its time basis.
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MUSIC AND LIFE
It is from this rhythmic movement that the
symphony gets its quality of action, and the
precursors of the symphony in this respect
were the old folk-songs and dance-tunes the
melodies of which are full of rhythmic diver-
sity. The line from these early naïve compo-
sitions down to symphonic music was never
broken, and there is hardly a symphony in
existence that does not pay direct tribute to
them.
I dwell on this point at some length because
here lies a large part of the energy of music.
The rhythmic figures to which I have already
referred contain within themselves a primal
force. They are capable of throwing off parts
of themselves, and these, caught in the pri-
mary orbit, live as separate identities, until
the too powerful attraction of the greater mass
absorbs them again. As rhythm, then, a sym-
phonic movement is like sublimated physical
energy. As the first oscillations of its impulse
strike our consciousness we are caught up into
a world of movement which has the inevita-
bility of star courses. We ourselves are all
rhythm-rhythm imprisoned and awaiting re-
lease. In music we become one with all that
1
[ 1981
THE SYMPHONY
SW
ceaseless movement or vibration without which
there would be no physical or spiritual world
at all. I say, then, that rhythm is the very
heart of music; that while we are all suscep-
tible to it (though comparatively few people
can move their hands or feet or bodies in per-
fect rhythm— they would be much better off
if they could !) we do not altogether see what
significance it has as an æsthetic property of
music. When the heart of music stops beating
(as in one of Beethoven's scherzi) we are sur-
prised, or perhaps disturbed, not answering to
the marvelous silence; when two or even three
rhythms are acting simultaneously we are con-
fused and helpless before the most fascinating
of æsthetic phenomena.
Let me next dwell briefly on that element
in the evolution of symphonic music which
consists in the use of several themes simul-
taneously. Should we trace this back to its
original we should find ourselves in the ninth
century. Now, while I know that this is not
the place for a dissertation on any abstruse
musical terms, I shall venture this much, not
only because this method of writing is used
in nearly all really fine music, but because a
SO
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Music AND LIFE
large part of the pleasure to be derived from
listening to a symphony depends on our ca-
pacity to follow the varied strands of melody
that constitute it. Is it not so, also, with the
novel? The chief theme of Meredith's “The
Egoist” has numberless counter-themes run-
ning through and around it. It is not by any
means to be found in Sir Willoughby alone,
for you understand it through Vernon's good
sense, through Clara's dart-like intuitions,
through Mr. Middleton's patient surprise at
having such a daughter, through Letitia, and
Crossjay, and Horace De Cray—all these are
continually explaining and illuminating the
theme for you. It is true that music asks you
to listen to several melodies at once, but what
does the episode of Crossjay's unwitting lis-
tening to Sir Willoughby's belated declaration
to Letitia ask you to do? Is it enough merely
to record the scene as it is unfolded to you?
Or do you remember Crossjay's father stump-
ing up the avenue in his ill-fitting clothes?
Clara's intercessions for Crossjay? Vernon's
attempts to adjust himself to Sir Willoughby's
overbearing grandiloquence? And do you not
have to remember, especially, that Crossjay
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THE SYMPHONY
loughby and had sought the ottoman as a
refuge? These are all strands of the chief
melody in that remarkable composition. (Not
all the strands are there, for satire never tells
the whole truth. “Tony” in Ethel Sidgwick's
“Promise” and “Succession” is also an ego-
ist.) A novel, then, in this sense, is not suc-
cessive, but simultaneous. All that has been
and all that is to be exist in every moment of
life, for that is all what we call “the present”
means. The chief difference between such play
of character around an idea and the movement
of many musical themes around a central one
lies in the detached and spiritualized quality
of sound.
It is obvious that music, written for an or-
chestra containing some twenty or more differ-
ent kinds of instruments and scores of perform-
ers, must have great variety of expression. Each
instrument has its own tone color, its own range,
and its own technique, and each must be given
its own thing to say. In this sense symphonic
music is an intricate mesh of melodies, each
intent on its own purpose, each a part of the
whole. In no other of its varied means of ex-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
pression is the symphony more strictly and
more fully an evolution than in this one of
complex melodic textures. There has been no
hiatus. From its first great moment of per-
fection in the time of Palestrina, through the
madrigal and fugue, through dance-tunes
pieces, oratorios, and the like, this method of
writing has persisted. Wagner bases his whole
musical structure on the play and interplay
of melodic lines in his leit-motifs. Bach is all
melodic texture. Music written in this manner
is called “ polyphonic,” and the method of
writing it is called “counterpoint.”
In direct contrast to this is “monodic”
music which employs only one melody against
an accompaniment of chords. A large part of
the music we hear is monodic; an aria by Puc-
cini, a popular song, most church music -
these have one melody only. So has Poe's
“For Annie.” Polyphonic music has the
great advantage of being intensive in its ex-
pression; it evolves out of itself. When I say
that almost the whole of the first movement
of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is evolved
out of a few measures near the beginning, I
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The SYMPHONY
mean that the melodic fragments of the theme
take on a life of their own and by so doing
illustrate and expound the significance of the
original thesis from which they sprang. This
quality, or property in music, upon which I
have laid some stress, is, then, not so much a
matter of technique as of æsthetics. The thing
done and the manner of doing it is each the
result of general laws, and I venture to dwell
on them here, not for expert, technical rea-
sons, but because I wish to offer the listener
to symphonies one of his most delightful op-
portunities. Note should finally be made of
the important fact that only those symphonic
themes which have a varied and vibrant rhythm
serve well the purpose of counterpoint, for
the essence of instrumental counterpoint lies
in setting against each other two or more
melodic phrases in contrasting rhythms.
I do not mean to imply by the foregoing that
symphonic music persistently employs coun-
terpoint as against simple melody. There are
whole passages in the symphonies of Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven where one tune is
given out against an accompaniment of chords,
and a lyric composer like Schubert employs
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MUSIC AND LIFE
counterpoint somewhat rarely. But in the
greatest symphonies the predominating method
of expression is through polyphony.
In writing about counterpoint I have dwelt
on the rhythmic quality in melody, and have
stated that a well-defined and varied rhythm
is essential to contrapuntal treatment. I might
almost have said that all good melody depends
on rhythm. I do say — expecting many a si-
lent protest from certain of my readers — that
all the greatest melodies have a finely adjusted
rhythm, and I apply this statement to all mel-
ody from the folk-song to the present time.
I might enumerate beautiful melodies whose
effect depends on other properties than rhythm,
-- as the second melody in Chopin's Noc-
turne in G major, opus 37, number 2, - but
I should add that, as melody, existing by it-
self, it is not fine and the reason is that its
rhythm is monotonous.' And when I say it is
not fine, I mean that it is not highly imagina-
tive, and that it depends too much on its har-
monization. And when, in turn, I say that, I
* As examples of melodies with finely adjusted rhythms I
may cite the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven's
pianoforte sonata, opus 13, and that of the slow movement of
Brahms's pianoforte quartette, opus 60.
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THE SYMPHONY
mean, perforce, that it is too emotional. The
difference between such a theme and one with
a really fine rhythm is the difference between
Poe's “The Raven” and Keats's “ Ode to a
Grecian Urn.” In the former the mind is be-
ing continually lulled by the soft undulation
of the rhythms and rhymes; in the latter the
mind is being continually stimulated by their
complexities. Yet Keats’s ode is as unified as
Poe's lyric. There are melodies for songs for
the pianoforte, for the violin, and for the or-
chestra; there are sonata melodies and there
are symphonic melodies just as there is a shape
for a hatchet and a shape for a pair of scissors
-- which is only stating once again the old
law that the style must suit the medium of
expression, or that the shape must suit the
uses to which a thing is put. Symphonic
themes, in contradistinction to themes for
songs or short pianoforte pieces, or dances,
should be inconclusive; they are valuable for
what they presage rather than for what they
state, and they should indicate their own des-
tiny. The four notes with which the Fifth
Symphony of Beethoven begins are so, - in
fact the whole theme is valueless by itself, -
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Music and Life
but they contain enough pent-up energy to
vitalize not only the first movement, but the
three which follow it. If it were possible for
each reader of these words to hear — as an
interlude to his reading -- a series of great
symphonic melodies, and if he would listen to
them carefully, he would find almost every
one to contain a finely adjusted rhythm.
Symphonic themes present certain difficul-
ties to the listener whose understanding of
melody is limited to a square-cut strophic tune.
He is accustomed to a certain musical punc-
tuation -- a comma (so to speak) after the
first and third lines of the music, a semicolon
after the second, and a period at the end.
And when he gets an extra period thrown in
(as he does after the third line of the tune
“ America ") he is all the happier. When he
hears the opening theme of the “ Eroica”
Symphony break in two in the middle and fall
apart, he gets discouraged, for his musical im-
agination has not been sufficiently developed
to see that that very breaking apart presages
the tragic turmoil of the whole movement.
When Brahms gives out, in the opening meas-
ures of his Third Symphony, two themes at
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THE SYMPHONY
once, he does not fathom the element of strife
which is involved, and so cannot follow its
progress to the final triumph of one of them.
But the symphony contains everything, and
there is a place in it for lyric melody, provided
the flight be long and sweeping. The “slow
movement” of a symphony contains such
themes, but they are not content to be merely
fine melodies. They, too, must contain some
potentiality which is afterwards realized. The
best and most familiar example will be found
in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, where the
first rhythmic unit (contained in the first three
notes) of the beautiful romantic theme de-
taches itself and pursues an almost scandalous
existence full of delicate pranks and grimaces,
and comic quips and turns, now gentle, now
ironic, now pretending to be sentimental, un-
til it finally rejoins the theme again. This
piece is a romance touched with comedy - a
romance great enough to suffer all the by-play
without the least dilution of its quality.
Any attempt in a book like this to explain
the intricacies of harmonic development as it
is seen in the symphony must be inconclusive.
Harmony is, in itself, less tangible than either
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MUSIC AND LIFE
rhythm or melody, for it lacks to a consider-
able extent the element of continuity. I mean
by this that groups of harmonies do not pos-
sess coherence in relation to each other. They
do not stay in the memory as a line of melody
does; the impression we get from them is
fleeting. It may touch with light or shade one
brief moment in a piece of music (as it fre-
quently does in Schubert's compositions); it
may produce a bewildering riot of color (as in
ultra-modern music); or it may cover the
whole piece with a subdued shadow (as in the
slow movement of Franck's quintette). But
the real office of harmony is to serve melody.
I mean by this that when two or more melo-
dies sound together they make harmony at
every point of contact, and this harmony, in-
cidental to the movement of melodic parts,
has a reality which chords by themselves can-
not acquire. And the whole justification for
many of the sounds in ultra-modern music
lies in this one perfectly correct theory. Not
that the laws must not be obeyed - as they
frequently are not; not that a composer may
violate nature, and do what he likes. He
must, as of old, justify in reason all the disso-
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THE SYMPHONY
nances arising from his melodic adventures.
He should remember Bach, whose melodies
clash in never-to-be-forgotten stridence, strik-
ing forth such flashes of strange beauty as can
only come from a war of themes.
The symphony is, then,-an-arrangement of
rhythms, melodies, and harmonies. Each of
these three elements has a life of its own, -
the rhythms, taken altogether, have their own
coherence, the melodies theirs, and the har-
monies theirs,— but each belongs to the whole.
The rhythm of Poe's “For Annie” would be
an impossible rhythm with which to carry for-
ward the purposes of any part of “The Ring
and the Book.” Equally useless would be the
rhythms of Schubert's “Unfinished” Sym-
phony to carry forward the purposes of Bee-
thoven's Ninth. The whole structure of Poe's
poem would disintegrate if one single word
fell out of place; so would the fabric of a
Schubert melody were a note destroyed.
In every direction, wherever we look, this
cohesion of all objects in themselves, this blend-
ing of all objects into a greater body, reveals
itself. This is the basis of all religious belief,
of a novel, of the composition of a picture, or
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MUSIC AND LIFE
of life itself. To say that a symphony is made
up of separate elements, that each of these ele-
ments has a life of its own, and that they all
unite in a common purpose, is to state a tru-
ism. And to suppose that a symphony can be
understood without an understanding of all its
elements is to suppose an absurdity.
IV. TONE COLOR AND DESIGN
Such has been the development of the ele-
ments of symphonic music. The processes I
have described are the natural processes of an
art which is continually striving for wider and
deeper expression. And, speaking humanly,
it is not too much to say that within ourselves
there should take place a complete analogue to
that development and to those processes. The
connection between ourselves and the sounds
may graduate all the way from complete un-
consciousness of their significance (even though
we hear all the sounds clearly) to that state
wherein they strike fire in our souls, and there
passes between the imagination of the com-
poser and our own that spark of undying fire
which illumines our whole being. For in the
last analysis it is not so much the music that
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THE SYMPHONY
communicates itself as it is the soul of the
composer reaching us over whatever stretch
of time. He who creates beauty is im-
mortal.
Is not this what we seek? Is not this the
object of all beauty everywhere? Is it not al-
ways trying us to see if we are in tune? - as,
indeed, everything else is : labor, love, ob-
jects, knowledge, religion — all these await
our answer.
But I should not leave this part of my sub-
ject without setting forth the relation between
these elements of symphonic music and the
orchestral instruments by means of which they
find expression. I do not wish to attempt here
any account of orchestration, as such, but
rather to point out that in symphonic music
it is by the quality of tone that the essence of
an idea is conveyed. The tone of the instru-
ment is like the inflection of the voice in
speaking, wherein the truth is conveyed al-
though you speak an untruth. An oath might
be a prayer but for the inflection.
The pianoforte or the violin, or any other
single instrument, has but little variety of
tone; the orchestra, on the other hand, has
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MUSIC AND LIFE
not only four distinct groups of instruments,
each group having its own tone quality, but
within two of these groups' there are consid-
erable differences in what is called “tone color.”
It is of no great importance to know that the
solo near the beginning of the slow move-
ment of the César Franck symphony is played
on an English horn, but it is important to feel
the quality of the tone, and to realize how
largely the effect of the theme depends on it.
For some obscure reason many people remain
insensitive to qualities of tone color. (Perhaps
they have received their musical education at
the pianoforte which, under unskillful hands,
differs only in loud and soft.) One so seldom
observes a listener even amused by the antics
of Beethoven's double-basses, and yet, in at
least four of his symphonies, their behavior
is at times extremely ludicrous. He whose
humor ranges all the way from the most deli-
cate, ironic smile to a terrible, tragic laughter,
wherein joy and sorrow meet, -as meet they
must when either presses far, - he achieves
In the "wood-wind” group, so called, there are flutes,
oboe, clarinets, bassoons, English horn, etc.; in the brass,
there are trumpets, French horns, tronbones, tubas, etc.
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THE SYMPHONY
these remarkable effects largely by means of
the tone quality of the instruments. In his
Fifth Symphony he creates the most thrilling
effect by means of some score or more of reit-
erated notes in the soft, muffled tones of the
kettle-drum. In the finale to the First Sym-
phony of Brahms it is the tone of the French
horn, and again of the flute, that creates for
us such profound illusions of beauty as pierce
to our very soul. From the depths of the
orchestra the horn chants its ennobled song;
then follows the dulcet blow-pipe of the flute
singing the same magic theme. These varied
tones succeeding one another, or melting one
into the other -- these are the colors that ani-
mate and beautify the forms into which the
thoughts fall. What delicate nonsense filigree
the violins draw in the slow movement of
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; how sepulchral
the bassoon with its mock sadness; what a
vibrant quality do the violoncellos and the
contra-basses give to the great melody in the
finale to the Ninth; with what poignancy does
the clarinet give voice to the sentiment of
the second theme in the slow movement of
Brahms's Third Symphony. How luxurious
18
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MUSIC AND LIFE
and vivid is the application of all these varied
hues to the design.
A fine singing voice has, perhaps, the most
beautiful of all tone colors, but the sensibility
of many people seems to be limited to that
alone. In fact the love of singing is, in many
cases, merely a sentimental thrill unconnected
with any intellectual process and entirely de-
void of imagination. In the orchestra the tone
of the instrument is to the theme itself what
the color is to the rose. It is much more than
that, of course, because it is at any time both
retrospective and prospective; this tone color
is a darker or lighter shade of that, or, per-
chance, another hue entirely. The colors shift
from moment to moment always as a part of
the design rather than as mere color.
Taking it all together — rhythm, meter,
melody, harmony, and tone color -- this sub-
stance of a symphony is a wonderful thing.
Nothing quite so delicately organized has ever
been created by the mind and the imagination
of man. With an interplay of parts almost
equal to that of a finely adjusted machine, it
seems to go where it wills to go regardless of
anything but a whim. How marvelously does
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THE SYMPHONY
11
it express both the actions and the dreams of
human beings; how true is it to their deeper
consciousness — a consciousness that dimly
fathoms both life and death; that knows it-
self to have come from across the ages, and feels
itself to be a part of the ages to come. It is
just as likely that life is a brief, shadowed
moment in an endless light, as that it is “a
rapid, blinking stumble across a flick of sun-
shine."
CHAPTER VII
THE SYMPHONY (continued)
1. THE UNITY OF THE SYMPHONY
For the ordinary listener to a symphony the
one great difficulty-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 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
have any significance at all, must have com-
plete coherence within itself, and that the longer
the sounds go on the more necessary does this
coherence become. This is, of course, the prob-
lem of all music. Even opera must have a cer-
tain musical coherence, for it cannot depend
entirely on being held together by the text
and action; even the song must make musical
sense in addition to what sense (by chance)
there is in the words. Give what glowing, what
THE SYMPHONY
romantic, even what definite title you will to
a piece of programme music, — call it “The
Hebrides,” or “ Death and Transfiguration,”
or descend to such a title as “A Simple Con-
fession," - you must still give your music
coherence in itself. As a matter of fact, the
titles of pieces of programme music do not
lessen the composer's responsibilities in the
least, and there is no fine piece of such music
in existence that does not obey the general
laws of form as applied to music. The title is,
after all, merely a suggestion, an indication,
an atmosphere. Schumann's “The Happy
Farmer" is merely jolly ; it is not even bu-
colic, and you hunt for the farmer in vain ;
“ Träumerei” is made rhythmically vague in
order to create the illusion of reverie, but has,
nevertheless, complete musical coherence;
“Töd und Verklarung” of Strauss contains
no evidence of sacrificing its form to its so-
called “subject,” and 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 obey
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MUSIC AND LIFE
laws which apply everywhere. To make clear
what I mean let me say that an art whose fun-
damental quality is movement must have for
its problem the disposition within a certain
length of time of a certain group of themes
or melodies. The distinction between this art
and that of painting is that in music the ques-
tion is “ When?” in painting “Where?” In
this sense literature is nearer music than is
painting, and I shall shortly point out some
analogies between literary and musical forms.
I stated in the first chapter 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 certain restatement of it. The first
appearance of Sandra Belloni is heralded by
her singing in the wood near the Poles' coun-
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THE SYMPHONY
try house. The epilogue to “Vittoria” closes
with the scene in the cathedral: “Carlo Mer-
thyr 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 unessen-
tial characters and motives of Sandra Belloni
disappear in “Vittoria” – Mrs. Chump, an
unsuccessful essay in 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 situa-
tion as is the absence of Wilfred. “ War and
Peace” would be an inchoate mass of persons,
scenes, and events, were it not for certain ret-
rospects here and there which hold the whole
mass together. “The Idiot" is a striking il-
lustration, for the early part of Mishkin's
career only appears in 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, be-
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MUSIC AND LIFE
tween music and literature, and that is in the
number of its subjects or characters. “War
and Peace,” to take an extreme example, con-
tains scores of characters, while a whole sym-
phony 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 some-
thing else with which we are already familiar
as do names of persons in books. We remem-
ber the names of such characters as Joseph
Andrews or Tom Jones, or even Dr. Port-
soaken, for, although they lived a long time
ago, we have enough word association to con-
tain their names and we can understand them
and can follow the devious courses of their ad-
ventures and the philosophy of life they rep-
resent. (The absence of this association makes
it difficult for us to remember the characters
in Russian novels.) When we hear a musical
theme, however, we have to remember it as
such.
I have frequently stated the somewhat ob-
vious fact that music obeys general æsthetic
laws, and the foregoing is intended to show
how these laws are modified by the peculiar
[ 220 ]
The SYMPHONY
properties of sound. A symphony in this
sense, then, is a coherent arrangement of
themes. 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 move-
ment to another, but that, speaking generally,
a symphony is a collection of four separate
pieces contrasted in speed and in sentiment,
etc. Now I wish to combat this theory as vig-
orously as possible, and I should like to rely
solely on general 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 partic-
* ular characteristics,-one containing themes
which evolve as they proceed, producing the
effect of struggle toward a goal, another suited
to states of sentiment, another for concise and
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MUSIC AND LIFE
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 com-
partments. One symphony will differ from
another because it will represent a different
stage in his development, but any one sym-
phony - unless arbitrarily disjointed - will
express the various phases of its composer's
sponding internal organism. This 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 sym-
phonies or that of César Franck may investi-
gate for himself. Let me merely point out a
few instances which I choose from celebrated
and familiar symphonies. In the last move-
ment of the C major of Mozart (commonly
called the “Jupiter”) there is a rapid figure
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THE SYMPHONY
in the basses at measures nine and ten which is
derived from the beginning of the first move-
ment. The theme of the last movement is
drawn from is another version of the pas-
sage 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 Funèbre” is the theme of the first
section in apotheosis, and each owes a debt to
the first theme of the first movement. Illus-
trations 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 merely a sort of framework, or, if you
please, a law or precedent, but the expression
of an inward force.
Themes having no organic relation are, of
course, introduced in symphonic movements
for the play of action against each other which
results from their antagonism. The novel de-
pends largely on the same element. If it were
not for Blifil there could hardly have been a
Tom Jones. Sandra Belloni must have Mr.
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MUSIC AND LIFE
Pericles as a foil to that finer character of hers
which rises above the prima donna, and she
needs Wilfred and Merthyrin order to achieve
Carlo. In short, the symphonic movement is
not unlike the novel which is based on the
juxtaposition of contrasted or antagonistic
characters or elements, 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 still in flux. I see no reason why it should
not continue to develop from within and finally
to achieve an even greater inward coherence
than that already attained. This will almost
certainly not be brought about by an exten-
sion of its outward form or by an enlargement
of its resources — as is the case with many
modern symphonies. In brief, the composer
is an artist like any other; he is dealing with
human emotions and aspirations as other art-
ists are; he is subject to the same laws; he,
too, draws a true picture of human life in true
The reason for this is one to which I referred in the chap-
ter on “ The Opera" - namely, that a work of art must not
overstrain the capacities of those human beings for whom it
was intended.
1
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THE SYMPHONY
--*
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 sup-
pose otherwise; the real difficulty is 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 to-
gether are like a book of life in which every..
thing is faithfully set forth in due proportion
and balance.
I have said that the symphony contains
everything and that it has room for disorder.
This is its ultimate purpose. The secret of
its power lies in this. Life itself is an inexpli-
cable thing. The great symphony compresses
it into an hour of perfection in which all of
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 end-
less happiness or a located heaven.
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MUSIC AND LIFE
II. STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT
The history of the symphony is the history
of all art. It moves in cycles; it marks a parab-
ola. 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 ex-
press them. In Haydn we see it as naïve, folk-
like, tuneful music, not highly imaginative,
smacking of the soil — like Burns, but with-
out his deep human feeling. In Mozart it
reaches a stage of classic perfection which may
be compared to Raphael's paintings. Hardly
a touch of the picturesque, the romantic, or
the fealistic 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 di-
[ 226 ]
THE SYMPHONY
gressions. 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 philo-
sophic interlude chapters in “Tom Jones”
and Meredith’s “Our Philosopher," who,
looking down from an impersonal height upon
the characters in the story, interjects his Olym-
pian 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 funda- ·
mentals, human life, within our historical ret-
rospect, 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
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MUSIC AND LIFE
“ Beethoven.” Mozart was his dawn, Schu-
mann and the other Romanticists his mys-
terious 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 pierce 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. Beetho-
ven'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 in death-grapple,
over the gods looking down sardonically on
the spectacle. He was the great protagonist
of democracy, but he was also a great con-
structive mind. He never destroyed anything
in music for which he did not have a better
substitute, and there is hardly a note in his
mature compositions that is not fixed in
nature.
This great force having spent itself, the art
[ 228 ]
THE SYMPHONY
ONY
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 pedan-
tic. He strings together melody after melody
in “profuse, unmeditated art." He was a pen-
dant to Beethoven, and often enough in listen-
ing 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 detach-
ment from reality, and a certain waywardness
which give 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 de-
velopment of the symphony was slight. It was
ill at ease in the large spaces of symphonic
form, for its hues were too changing, its moods
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MUSIC AND LIFE
too shifting, to answer the needs of the sym-
phony. No really great symphonic composer
appears between Schubert and Brahms, but
during that period the rich idiom of the Ro-
mantic 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 con-
struction, and firmly grounded on that one
stable element of style, counterpoint, produced
four symphonies worthy to stand 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 lan-
guage 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 Eng-
lish novel wherein the author desires the ac-
tion to appear solely as the result of the psy-
chology of the characters, and wherein, also,
[ 230 ]
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 con-
firmed lover of Longfellow, or even of Tenny-
son, 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 the 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 meas-
ures before the poco sostenuto near the end of the
first movement if he wished to understand some-
thing of Brahms's powers of re-creating 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
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MUSIC AND LIFE
as though yearning for an impossible fulfill-
ment. Here its destiny is at last attained, and
the law of its being fulfilled. Music progresses
from one point of time to another.
Contemporaneous with Brahms stands
Tschaikovsky to reveal how varied are the
sources of musical expression. No two great
men could be farther apart than these -- one
an eclectic, calm, thoughtful, and impersonal,
restraining his utterances in order to under-
state 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.
So, aside from any technical considerations,
and he contributed nothing of importance to
the development of the symphony, - Tschai-
kovsky represents a phase of life rather than
life itself. Dvorak's “ New World” Sym-
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THE SYMPHONY
phony adds a new and interesting element to
symphonic evolution. Dvorak 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 unconscious-
ness of its possible connection with life in gen-
eral, Dvorak sees all his themes in their deeper
significance. 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 one 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 sym-
phony is a spiritual adventure ; other sympho-
nies are full of the actions and reactions of the
real world in which their composers lived.
This action and reaction always depends for
its expression in music on the play and in-
ter-play of rhythmic figures. Franck's sym,
[ 233 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
phony broods over the world of the spirit;
his least successful themes are those based on
action.
III, CHAMBER MUSIC AS AN INTRODUCTION
TO SYMPHONIES
My object in writing all this about the form
and substance of the symphony, and in draw-
ing 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 charac-
teristics 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 prac-
tice it, or, failing that, to hear it under such
conditions as will permit a certain opportunity
for reflection. We are incapable of understand-
ing 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 natu-
ral way out, and it consists in what is called
“chamber music.” A piece of chamber music
".
.
.
.
-.
wit.
..we.b
in
[ 234 ]
is a sort of domestic symphony. A string quar-
tette, a pianoforte or violin sonata, a trio, quar-
tette, quintette, etc.; — these are all little
symphonies; the form is almost identical, the
same devices of rhythm, melody, harmony,
counterpoint, and so forth, are employed. In
chamber music paucity of idea cannot be cov-
ered up by luxury of tone color; 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 peo-
ple who played chamber music together, and
if these would permit their friends to attend
when they practice, the symphony would soon
find plenty of 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 reflec-
tion. Every town and village should have a
local chamber-music organization giving occa-
sional informal concerts. Under these circum-
stances a sympathetic intimacy would soon be
established between the performers and listen-
ers and the music itself. The inevitable and
indiscriminate pianoforte lesson is an obstacle
to this much-desired arrangement. Some of
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MUSIC AND LIFE
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, Bee-
thoven, or Brahms, and would accomplish what
years of attendance at symphony concerts
could not bring about. Chamber music has
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 prac-
tice of chamber music by amateurs would be
one of the very best means of building up
true musical taste. I cannot dwell too insist-
ently 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 opportu-
nities to listen to it under such conditions as
I have described. The argument proves itself,
without the evidence — plentiful enough - of
individuals who have gone through the expe
rience. Furthermore, by cultivating music in
this way, we should gradually break down
some of the social conditions which now.oper-
ate against the art. If we all knew more about
it and loved it for itself, we should give over
[ 236 ]
THE SYMPHONY
our present adulation of technique. We should
put the performer where he belongs as an in-
terpreter of a greater man's ideas. By our un-
critical adulations we place him on far too high
a pedestal.
IV. THE PERFORMER AND THE PUBLIC
I have spoken of certain social conditions
which affect music unfavorably. There has
been always 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, won-
ders why music seems to affect the appearance
and the conduct of some of them so unfavor-
ably. The pedagogue, who has his correct edu-
cational formula which operates like an add-
ing-machine, and automatically turns out a
certain number of mechanically educated chil-
dren, each with a diploma clutched in a nervous
hand - he 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
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MUSIC AND LIFE
daughters and is willing to subscribe to a sym-
phony 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 edu-
cated in music, to gain applause and an undue
source 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
very likely that he knows almost nothing of 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 condi-
tions what they arej Public performers are the
victims, not the criminals. We must remem-
ber of old how disastrous has been the isola-
tion of any class of workers from their fellows.
I have referred in this and in the preceding
chapters 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
.
.
[ 238 ]
THE SYMPHONY
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 cre-
ated by man; it is a part of him - one of his
star-gleams; can he be complete if he loses it
altogether? Can his spirit hope for freedom
if he depends on his mind alone? Is the satis-
faction of intellectual or material achievement
enough? Would he not find in music a realm
where he would breathe a purer air and be
happier because he would leave behind him
cry a halt to his intelligence? 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 Puri-
tans 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 enough, because it lacks sympathy. We
all need something that shall be entirely de-
tached from life and, at the same time, be
[ 239 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
wholly true to it. Our spirit needs somit joy-
ousness 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 the truth in terms we can-
not understand, for it is not given to us to
know in any other way.
CHAPTER VIII
CONCLUSION
ONE of the most unfortunate conditions sur-
rounding our musical life is the small part men
take in it. This is not altogether their fault.
Their business is engrossing, and concert-go-
ing is made difficult for them. There should
be some music for the business man between
the time when he leaves his office and the
hour of his dinner, and it should be so ar-
ranged as to cause him the minimum of trouble
and give him the maximum of enjoyment.
This means a half-hour or forty minutes of
good music available, say, at five o'clock, and
not too far away. It means, also, that he shall
be provided with a repetition of every long
or complicated composition so that he may
have a chance to understand it. The average
listener hears a Brahms symphony once in,
say, two or three years, and there is little
chance of his finding it intelligible. No doubt,
in course of time this will come about. No
doubt, too, workers in shops and offices will
[ 241 )
MUSIC AND LIFE.
by and by be able to hear a little really fine
music at lunch time. The influx of men into
concert rooms would be of great benefit to the
cause of music, as well as to the men them-
selves. We should, after a time, get rid of that
nate, and should begin to value it. for what..it
really is. Whenever I think of this mistaken
notion the figure of Michael Angelo rises be-
fore me. There was as heroic a'man as even
the world of war ever produced; capable alike
of the Herculean task of the Sistine frescoes,
- the actual physical labors of which would
kill an ordinary man (and Michael Angelo
was then over sixty years old), --- of the heroic
Moses, and again of that most tender and
beautiful of all sculpture, the Piętà; a stern
and noble nature capable of fighting for his
principles no matter what the risk. Or I think
of Beethoven, ill, lonely, deaf, and poor, but
nevertheless creating virile music of the kind
we know. Or of Bach, sturdy as an oak tree,
without recognition from the world, bringing
up a large family on almost nothing a year,
i I do not mean a phonographic record of the tenor solo in
“L'Elisire d'Amore," or anything of that sort. I mean some-
thing which will be more than a casual moment's entertainment.
[ 242 ]
CONCLUSION
wholesome, profound, and true-- the equal in
all that goes to make a man of any “captain
of industry,” any soldier, or any statesman.
These are the ones I should match men with.
I would have men listen to the strains of these
composers, look at the works of that colossal
genius of Italy and ask themselves : Is art
effeminate or am I blind and deaf?
But men, having comparatively little leisure,
cannot be expected to waste it on sentimental
music or on mere virtuosity. A violinist who
plays sweet little pieces, or who astonishes you
by his technical skill, should expect no re-
sponse from human beings who are at work
day by day and hour by hour facing the hard
facts of life. Men, dealing with exact laws or
under the necessities of trade and barter, are
forced to distinguish between true and false,
between reality and unreality, for their very
existence depends on so doing. I do not mean
by this that these common experiences of men
fit them to understand great music, but I think
men possess thereby a certain sense of values
and a certain discrimination between what is
real and what is false, and that a great piece
of real music will find an answer in them. I
[ 243 ]
Music AND LIFE
believe that the opera has much to do with the
average man's attitude toward music. To spend
from three to four hours in an overheated and
badly ventilated opera house after a day of
business, and to listen to the sort of hectic
emotionalism which is common in opera is
enough to disgust the average business man
with all music. How patient he is! But Bee-
thoven, who loved and hated, and suffered
and triumphed, we can all understand. When
we come to listen to the opening of his violin
concerto, for example, we must all say: Here
is a man. And when we have compassed the
whole of that great composition we shall learn
to say: Here is reality turned true at last. We
shall then have learned one of the great lessons
that art teaches — namely, that there is noth-
ing in the world so heroic, so noble, or so pro-
found but that its qualities may be increased
by the imagination and the skill of the great
artist. For however profound a human emo-
tion may be or however noble a deed, it be-
comes more profound or more noble when it
is seen in relation to the whole of life and over
a stretch of time. The artist gives it true per-
spective, and enables us really so to see it.
[ 244 ]
CONCLUSION
Dante the poet is greater than Dante the
lover.
But my plea that music should be made
easy of access for men is based chiefly on the
fact that they need it. It is so easy for human
beings — men or women -- to become com-
pletely submerged in the details of life; and
the round of daily acts and daily associations
does, in course of time, completely engulf
many people, so that they only catch glimpses
of something beyond - glimpses of a prom-
ised land into which they never enter. I can
esting in itself; the “game” of life has its own
rewards; and there is no trade, no profession,
no business that does not offer some play to
the imagination. But every weight needs a
counterbalance, and every human being whose
daily occupation is full of practical detail must
save himself or herself by some equal force in
the opposite direction. The law is as old as
life itself. The best preparation for an educa-
tion in engineering is a course in the classics,
and the man who grinds all things in the mill
of business eventually goes into the hopper
himself.
UU
[ 245 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
na
But love of beauty is a secret and inviolate
thing. Our tendency to-day is to seek our sal-
vation — of whatever kind - in the crowd.
We form literary and musical clubs, and drama
leagues, and art circles to accomplish what
each person should do alone. This is an old
human fallacy. To attempt to be literary or
artistic or socialistic or religious by means of
an organization is to waive the whole question.
There is only one way of being literary and
that is to love good literature and to read it in
privacy ; there is only one way to understand
the drama and that is to read by yourself the
great plays from Æschylus onward, and to
see as many good plays as possible. I know
that it is impossible to hear the symphonies
of Beethoven except with some thousands of
other people; nevertheless, you are yourself
alone, and, by yourself, you must solve the
mystery. Never can there be a more complete
isolation of the individual than when, sitting
with the crowd, a piece of fine music begins.
Never is your own individuality so precious
to you as then. Straight to your soul come
these sounds, automatically separating all the
diviner part of you from the lower, singling
[ 246 ]
CONCLUSION
out what is commonly inarticulate and incho-
ate, and fanning into life again that smothered
spark which never wholly dies. How impos-
sible it is to look at pictures with other people.
The mind and the imagination demand free-
dom to wander at will, to ponder, to specu-
late. What passes from the picture to you,
and from you to the picture, is a sort of trem-
bling recognition, too delicate to be shared,
too intimate to be uttered. So it is with books.
You need silence and retirement so as to feel
the perspective of knowledge, so that your
mind may wander through whatever courses
open to it.
It has often been remarked that, in Amer-
ica, women have now both leisure and inde-
pendence to pursue the arts and to satisfy
their desire for what is called “culture," and
that in this respect they have taken the place
formerly occupied by men. The most charac-
teristic element in this situation is, however,
that in the pursuit of intellectual or artistic
advancement, woman joins a club! These clubs
are of very great use to the individuals who
belong to them and to the communities in
which they flourish when they undertake-as
[ 247 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
they frequently do the betterment of social
conditions. Any one familiar with what they
have accomplished in this respect must pay
them a real tribute. But in their pursuit of
“culture” they have been less successful, and
for the reasons already outlined here. They
pursue too many subjects, and they dissipate
their energies. But above all, they seem uncon-
scious of the fundamental principle of educa-
tion which is that one really educates one's self.
For education, after all, consists in the gradual
enlargement of one's own perceptions through
coming in contact with greater minds, and its
processes are secret and intensely personal. As
you read “ The Idiot,” for example, you con-
nect Mishkin with Lohengrin, Parsifal, the
Arthurian legends, or even with Christ. The
extraordinary account of his thoughts as he
falls in the epileptic fit, and his use of the
words, “And there was no more time," bring
up a whole fascinating sequence of psycholog-
ical speculations. The character of Nastasya
calls to your memory scores of other charac-
ters from Kundry down to Sonia, and, as you
read, the whole warp and woof of life, shot
through and through with its drab and scarlet,
[ 248 ]
CONCLUSION
flashes before you. Now, these contacts are
as nothing if some one else makes them. The
spark must strike in your own imagination.
You yourself must feel the current of this
magnetism which reaches from the earth to
the stars and makes all things akin. A good
book should be a provocation to the reader.
A club for “culture” is a collection of human
beings each hoping for vicarious salvation
through the other.
Women's clubs not only waste energy in
their pursuit of knowledge, but they debilitate
woman. Nothing could be worse for the mind
than the peaceful acceptance of the point of
view of another without resistance and with-
out the test of your own thoughts and your
own personality. Smatterings of knowledge
are almost useless. Nothing is yours until you
make it so.
The relation between music and life is, then,
an intimate and vital relation. Any person,
young or old, who does not sing and to whom
music has no meaning, is by just so much a
poorer person in all that goes to make life
[ 249 ]
MUSIC AND LIFE
happy, joyous, and significant. Any commu-
nity which employs no form of musical ex
pression is by just so much inarticulate and
disorganized as a community. Any church
that buys its music and never produces any
of its own loses just so much in spiritual
power.
We all need music because it is a fluent,
deeper impulses of ours which are denied ex-
pression by words. Our speech is too highly
specialized; we discriminate with words instead
of with inflections and gestures; we smother
our natural expressiveness; we hold words
to be synonyms of thought, whereas thought
is half feeling and instinct and imagination,
no one of which can really find issue in exact
terms. All great literature is inexact. :
Music frees us. Not only does it let each
of us say for himself what he cannot say in
words, but, at its best, it reveals to us a higher
reach of life, detached, yet a part of the inmost
being of us all. When we truly respond to it,
there is set up in us a certain harmonious
vibration which tunes us to one another, to
the mother earth, the everlasting sea, and to
[ 250 ]
CONCLUSION
that larger world of suns, stars, and planets
of which they are a part.
Nothing ever dies. What we call death is
only a transformation from one form of life to
another. All the music that ever was still
sounds; all the music that is to be still slum-
bers. Life and death are one, and, in the truest
sense, the whole universe is a song.
THE END

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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