Part 2

Probably every one who has listened to the whistling of factories in a large city at noon has had the curious experience of suddenly hearing amid the meaningless din a pair of tones that mysteriously mate and merge. The other tones seem entirely accidental; they have no relation to each other, and give one merely a sense of vague annoyance. But these two form an intelligible group; we are able to grasp them together, and we take an indescribable pleasure in thus feeling them as parts of one whole. Here is an instance of another sort of musical form than the metrical, a sort that we may call harmonic. Here the grouping takes place on a platform not of time, but of pitch; the two elements of the group have no metrical relations, but in pitch they are somehow related. Now this sort of pitch relationship has played a vital part in music, a part hardly secondary to that of time relationship; so that an understanding of it is important enough to delay us here a moment with some rather dry technical facts on which it depends.

Ordinary musical tones, the notes of the voice, the violin, and the piano, for example, simple as they sound, are, like ordinary white light, rather complex compounds of many simple elements. There are in them seven or eight constituent or «partial» tones, quite distinctly audible to the trained ear or to the untrained ear armed with suitable instruments; and these partial tones, produced by vibrations in the sound-emitting body whose rates are regularly related, bear a certain fixed relation to each other, like the spectrum-colors that compose white light. Not only this, but each partial tone arouses its own proper sensation in the ear by stimulating there one of the minute filaments called the cords of Corti, each of which vibrates sympathetically to a tone of given pitch and to no other. Now we are to imagine that when an ordinary musical tone is sounded, seven or eight of these little cords immediately start a-tremble, and send to the brain their messages, which combine there into the composite impression we name «a tone.» If now another tone is sounded, one which starts into motion another set of filaments, and if furthermore there is one filament now set in motion that was also excited by the first compound tone--if, in other words, the two tones happen to have a partial tone in common, which in both instances excites the same filament in the ear, then we shall have a sense of close relationship between them; they will make together a harmonic group or form. This, as a matter of fact, is what happens with any two tones that form what is called a consonant interval with each other, an «octave,» a «fifth,» or a «fourth.» If tones X and Y, for instance, are an octave apart, the second partial tone of X will be identical with the first of Y; if they are a fifth apart, the third partial tone of X will be identical with the second of Y; if they are a fourth apart, the fourth partial tone of X will correspond with the third of Y. It is obvious, then, that all these intervals will give us the sense of harmonic form; for they provide all the necessary conditions of a form, having enough in common to be associated by our minds, and enough not in common (their dissimilar partial tones) to be distinguished. When the partial tone in common is so high, and therefore so weak, that it impresses us but slightly, we shall have little or no sense of their being related; such is the case in the so-called imperfect consonances and the dissonances. When, on the other hand, all the most prominent partial tones of one exist in the other, they will fuse into one impression in our minds, losing the characteristic of form entirely, as is the case to some extent with the octave and entirely with the unison. But when, as in the case of fifths and fourths, there are both a distinctly audible partial tone in common and others not in common, then we shall have true harmonic forms.

So much technical detail will be forgiven by the reader who can at all realize how profoundly the entire history of music has been affected by these acoustic and physiological facts. We have already seen how folk-music slowly wrought out the complex metrical forms based upon time grouping. In the same way, ecclesiastical music wrought out, slowly and laboriously, the harmonic and melodic forms that were based upon pitch-grouping. For a long time vocal utterance was defined only by certain simple intervals like the fall of the fourth, which formed the cadences of Greek dramatic recitation and of mediæval Christian intoning. Gradually ornamental notes were introduced as approaches to the final note; these were varied in pitch, and new ones added, until finally there resulted the ancient modes, precursors of our scale. Then, when two melodies began to be sung at once, the intervals of the octave, fifth, and fourth were again called into requisition, and made the bases of primitive harmony. In the old Organum of the Middle Ages, two voices, a fifth apart, gave the same melody, just as with the Greeks, in the process called «magadising,» two voices sang the same tune, an octave apart. So, step by step, pitch relations were perceived and utilized. In all stages of the long progress, whether the interval chosen was the octave or the fifth or the fourth, and whether the tones were sounded in succession as a melodic step or simultaneously as a chord, the guiding principle was the same; tones were grouped together which had pitch-form, which had partial tones in common and others not in common. A harmonic form, like a metrical form, was always a cluster of tones that could be both associated and distinguished.

It was a long time before these two means of organizing sound were used in combination. Until the seventeenth century metrical form was chiefly used, quite naturally, to define the gesticulatory part of musical material, the product of active emotion, while harmonic form gave coherence to the vocal part, the product of contemplative or religious emotion. Primitive dance either neglected pitch relationship entirely, as in that kind of savage music which uses only drums, tomtoms, clappers and such percussive instruments, or used only the simplest intervals like the fall of the fourth or the rise of the fifth. And in ecclesiastical Song, all through the Middle Ages, metrical regularity was not only not sought for--it was avoided. Even in the highly artistic song of the great choral epoch which culminated in Palestrina there was no rhythm. Phraseology depended entirely on the words. Composers avoided anything like an appearance of even sections, in sharp demarcation, balancing each other, such as we now demand. They liked rather to have their melodies cross and interlace like the strands in a basket, making a texture solid but inorganic. To them coherence was a matter merely of the individual voices; music held together like a rope rather than like a crystal. Indeed, any deeper harmonic unity was not feasible until they had gained more experience in tone relationship. But eventually the secular composers of the last half of the seventeenth century, among whom Arcangelo Corelli is a typical figure, learned to utilize both kinds of form, making them supplement and reinforce each other in all sorts of interesting and unexpected ways. With Corelli, pure music emerges as an independent art, beautiful as sculpture and promising new powers of expression. By his successors this new promise was realized with surprising rapidity. Constantly growing more independent of extraneous aids, developing, thanks to the fruitful interaction of metrical and harmonic grouping, an unprecedented richness and variety, music became in the hands of Bach and Beethoven a strong, flexible and efficient fabric, adapted to all phases of expression and capable of forming the most complex and self-sufficient structures. Evolved from the crude gestures and cries of naïve feeling by a never-ceasing, ever-widening exertion of man's intelligence, absolute music has become in some respects the most eloquent and penetrative of the arts.

III

Form in music, however, notwithstanding its origin as a means of defining those emotional expressions which without it would have remained vague, unimitable, and immemorable, is much more than a means of definition. At first practiced as a means to an end, it soon became an end in itself. For the perception of relations, the mental activity which groups impressions, is not merely useful; it is profoundly, indescribably delightful. Calling the mind into activity just as sensation calls the senses, it is a far deeper source of pleasure than sensation can ever be, because the mind far exceeds the senses in the subtlety, variety and independence of its action. When, therefore, the primitive musicians first made their syntheses of gestures and cries they discovered a novel pleasure, altogether more delicious than the crude joys of sensation and expression. Before they made such syntheses they had merely enjoyed the sweetness of tones, and taken satisfaction in expressing their feelings; but when once they learned to group their expressive tones together, to feel the subtle bonds which bound them into clear and salient unity, then they felt a joy altogether new and on a higher plane, they felt true æsthetic delight. Here was not merely a passive, or at most an automatic process; here was a truly creative activity, a conscious and free manipulation of materials. Mere hearing, however delicious, mere expression, however grateful, could not give this sense of mastery, of comprehension, of insight. Beauty alone, beauty depending on consciously made comparisons and contrasts, can give the highest æsthetic delight, the delight in form. And so, like painters who, using form at first to define their material, come quickly to a realization of its inherent value, and finally, if they be true artists, value its pure beauties of line and balance and composition more highly than any mere richness of color or of expression, musicians, in the degree of their true musicianship, came to prize the intrinsic beauty of music above all its other qualities.

Sometimes, doubtless, they carried their devotion too far. In certain periods and individuals the love of formal beauty has entirely eclipsed pleasure in expression. Unable to attend at once to expression and to beauty, many composers, and in some periods all, have devoted their entire energy to the quest for formal perfection. Thus in the work of the Netherland masters of early counterpoint, in some of Bach's ingenious weavings, and in much of the music of Haydn and his contemporaries, the search for purely plastic qualities goes on with little thought of the original emotional burden of the material that is being formulated. To such men form was much more than a means of defining expression; it was an end in itself, and an end worth a lifetime of painstaking, devoted effort.

And yet, justifiable as their feeling was, indispensable as their labors were to that development without which the expressive power of music would itself have remained rudimentary, it is not to their view, but to a more universal one, that we must look to find a rounded theory of expression and form. If it be a mistake to neglect the latter for the former, as they well saw, it is equally a mistake to prize form with too exclusive an enthusiasm. For beauty is itself one of the most potent means of expression. Our minds are not made up of hermetic compartments, but are so permeable, so conductive, that an eloquent thing is made more eloquent by being also beautiful. The impression of beauty reverberates endlessly, intensifying all that is associated with it. The general atmosphere transfigures every feature. If the whole is fair, no detail will be entirely without its appeal to our kindled imaginations, but if the whole is formless, no single phrase, however impassioned, can affect us very deeply. The truth is, then, that form and expression in music are as essential to each other as objects and light in the world of vision. No radiance of illumination will satisfy the eye if there is nothing to see, and, on the other hand, the loveliest things will give little pleasure in the dark. To be beautiful they must be suffused in light. Similarly the phrases of music, to be truly moving, must be suffused in beauty. The greatest masters clearly realized this. Bach in his masterpieces, Beethoven nearly always, and Brahms in his inspired hours, acted on the principle that the two elements must exist side by side, subtly and potently reacting upon each other. Their practice, indeed, unanimously confirms the theory of musical effect which has now been briefly sketched, and which may be more briefly summarized before we pass on to deduce from it some general canons of appreciation and criticism.

Music, we have seen, originates in the spontaneous gestures and cries made by primitive man under the sway of emotion, imitated by observers, and arousing in them the same feelings. As intelligence dawns, men see that this triple process of spontaneous action, imitation and reduplicated feeling affords a basis for a language of emotion, a language that needs, however, to be somehow defined and articulated. Articulation gradually follows by means of the grouping in time which develops the gestures of active feeling into Dance, and the grouping in pitch which develops the utterances of contemplative feeling into Song. Eventually the two modes of grouping are combined, and music becomes an independent art. Meanwhile, the forms at first adopted for the sake of mere definition become the basis of a new and deeper delight, æsthetic beauty, which is sought for both as ancillary to expression and for itself alone. Finally, beauty of form reacts potently on eloquence of expression, and the most universal composers, recognizing the interdependence of the two elements, produce the highest type of pure music, music in which beauty is based upon expression and expression transfigured by beauty.

IV

The principles we now have before us, interesting as they are in themselves, must finally vindicate their worth by helping us to form sound opinions of musical tendencies and of individual composers; they must provide a corrective for the whims and freaks of prejudice, and a basis for that intelligent and systematic criticism which takes account both of a man's qualities and of his defects before assigning him his place in the general artistic movement. With them in mind, we should be able to avoid the current one-sided and partial views, and also to attain that positive insight into the nature of music which alone can give our opinions sanity, liberality and perspective.

In the first place, then, it will be well to turn their light on certain dangerous half-truths, which, constantly cropping up in musical opinions, are hardly less misleading than complete fallacies. The two most persistent and mischievous of such half-truths are those which neglect one aspect of the dual nature of music, which ignore expression or repudiate form. Of the first, the half-truth so frequently formulated in the phrase, «Music is a kind of audible mathematics,» it is not necessary to say much. Those dryly ingenious persons who rejoice in a fugue of Bach much as they enjoy an intricate problem in calculus, failing to perceive the warm human heart that animates the skeleton, form a minority which gets little attention from the mass of music-lovers. The half-truth which neglects expression will not, in the nature of things, ever gain a large following. Far more dangerous is the opposite fallacy, which, repudiating form, asserts that expression is all, that «music is the language of the emotions.» This phrase, without any qualifications, is the creed of the sentimentalists. Their ranks assemble all varieties of rhapsodical, ill-balanced temperaments, from the young girl who «dotes on Wagner» to the old lady with curls who thinks that «music leads us up to the higher life.» The sentimentalists sin, perhaps, not so much by commission as by omission. So far as they are able they appreciate music, for they feel it emotionally, and, as we have seen, half its reason for being is its appeal to the emotions. But they fail to realize that it must be beautiful as well as moving, that all its lineaments of expression must be held in orderly relation with a larger integral beauty of form. They fancy that form, which in reality enhances expression, is somehow at odds with it, that the mind and the feelings are natural enemies. Satisfied with thrills and tremors, they do not ask, in their music, for meaning and order. They fancy that to listen heedfully, attentively, analytically, is somehow to pull out the petals of art and strew them in the dust. Analysis is a desecrating process. You should not focus your ears, make the image clear; you should swoon in a delicious haze of sensation and suggestion. But one can analyze without dissecting; one can recognize that a flower has petals without pulling them out; and indeed it is hard to imagine any one appreciating the true loveliness of a flower, its formed, articulated beauty, without such recognition. So in music, the true lover of melody will be in no danger of confusing Beethoven's Hymn of Joy with Schumann's _Warum_ because of the trance of nebulous feeling into which they throw him. He will pay them the tribute of listening to them attentively, of noting the various charms of their phraseology and expression as he would note the difference of meter and effect between a sonnet of Shakespeare and a song of Burns. Music is not poorer, but richer, for its marvelous intricacies of structure, and the sentimentality which hates clear definition is not high sentiment, but misconception or insensibility.

It is a suggestive fact, however, that the sentimental attitude is found among us, not only in music, but everywhere. It is the tendency of the day to confuse acquiring with assimilating, to fancy that wealth of experience is better than self-mastery and intelligent possession. Heedlessness is our besetting sin. We skim books, «do» picture galleries, talk at the opera, interrupt in conversation, and gobble our food. Metaphorically, as well as actually, we swallow more than we can digest, imagining that if we only subject ourselves to enough impressions we shall become connoisseurs. We value quantity rather than quality, in everything from bric-à-brac to education; and it is quite to be expected that we should reckon the value of music by the number of shivers it can give us. But we are nevertheless capable of a wiser attitude. We have it in us to learn that feelings are of no use until they are related to the central personality, that impressibility is not yet dignity, that to be informed is not necessarily to be educated--that, in a word, possession of any sort is not an external fact, but an inward control. We may take a facile interest in the sentimentalists and the enthusiasts--the people with «temperament»--but at heart we know that those passions are deepest which are most firmly dominated by will, that he is freest who obeys the highest law, and that «temperament» is after all less vital than character. We really prefer organization to coruscation. And so in music we are capable of learning, and knowledge of the principles of musical effect can help us to learn, that the balance and proportion and symmetry of the whole is far more essential than any poignancy, however great, in the parts. He best appreciates music who brings to it all of his human powers, who understands it intellectually as well as feels it emotionally.

In these and other ways the principles of musical effect afford touchstones for the detection of prevalent but erroneous views--views which contain their element of truth, but are still fallacious because partial. But the same principles are also capable of yielding more positive and detailed insight into the nature of musical appreciation. They illuminate, for example, that perplexing problem of expression--why it is that from the same piece of music one person gets so much more than another. The fact is familiar to every one. Every one knows that of two persons equally sensitive to music on the sensuous and formal side, of good «ear,» and familiar with the effects of harmony, melody and rhythm, one will get far deeper meanings, will be far more elated and inspired, than the other. How can this be? Our theory of expression gives the clew. We have seen that bodily states set up by imitation are the basis of musical emotions. Hearing is always a sort of ideal performing. In listening to a melody we always feebly contract our throat muscles as if to sing, and the perception of rhythm is always accompanied by an incipient «keeping time.» These bodily acts, however faintly realized, set up their appropriate feelings, the feelings we associate with their actual performance. But now it should be noted that the richness, quality, and significance of these feelings will depend in the case of each man on his particular associations--that is to say, on his entire personal character. Evoked by similar bodily states, the mental emotions will be always as dissimilar as the men who feel them. «We cannot conceive,» says Thoreau, «of a greater difference than that between the life of one man and that of another.» He might truly have added that we cannot conceive of a greater difference than that between the feelings of one man and those of another in hearing the same piece of music, which excites in both the same tremors and thrills, but vistas of thought how utterly unlike! Musical appreciation is thus subject to the same variations which make the ordinary experiences of men so diverse. The prophet on fire with righteous indignation and the common scold undergo in anger the same suffusion of blood, the same boiling up of the organs; yet how different in dignity and value are their sentiments! And music, by setting up a certain sympathetic turmoil in the organs, will plunge one man into a selfish opium-dream and will fill another with the rarest, most magnanimous aspirations. It follows as a practical corollary that he who would get from music the best it has to offer must cultivate the best in himself. No fine sensibility in him, no large heroism, no generosity or dignity or profundity of character will be without its quiet, far-reaching effect on his appreciation of music.