VII
Vincent d’Indy, reported by Marcel Duchamp, said recently that the philosophy of music is twenty years behind that of the other arts.
VIII
The fact that Schoenberg has written a handbook of theory, explaining, after a fashion, his method of composition has misled some people. “Schoenberg is a learned musician,” writes Mr. Aldrich (“New York Times,” December 5, 1915), “and his music is built up by processes derived from methods handed down to the present by the learned of the past, however widely the results may depart from those hitherto accepted.... There results what he chooses to consider ‘harmony,’ the outcome of a deliberate system, about which he theorizes and has written a book” (the italics again are mine). Against this train of reasoning (further on in the same article it becomes evident that Mr. Aldrich is annoyed with Strawinsky because he has not done likewise) it is pleasant to place the following paragraph from Chorley’s “Modern German Music”: “Mozart, it will be recollected, totally and (for him) seriously, declined to criticize himself and confess his habits of composition. Many men have produced great works of art who have never cultivated æsthetic conversation: nay, more, who have shrunk with a secretly entertained dislike from those indefatigable persons whose fancy it is ‘to peep and botanize’ in every corner of faëry land. It cannot be said that the analytical spirit of the circle of Weimar, when Goethe was its master-spirit did any great things for Music.” Do not misunderstand Strawinsky’s silence (which has only been relative, after all). It is sometimes as well to compose as to theorize. Some of the great composers have let us see into their workshops (not that they have all consistently followed out their own theories) and others have not. In one pregnant paragraph Strawinsky has expressed himself (he is speaking of The Nightingale): “I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called ’impressionist’ methods” (“Mr. Strawinsky, on the other hand, is a musical impressionist from the start”: R. A. again) “a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tendency towards vagueness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists as they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ’working-out’ in dramatic or lyric music. The one essential thing is to feel and to convey one’s feelings.”
This idea of natural expression becomes associated in any great composer’s mind with another idea, the horror of the cliché. Each new giant desires to express himself without resorting to the thousand and one formulas which have been more or less in use since the “golden age” of music (whenever that was). Natural expression implies to a certain extent the abandonment of the cliché, for, under this principle, if a rule or a habit is weighed and found wanting it is immediately discarded.
“Routine (cliché) is highly esteemed and frequently required; in musical ‘officialdom’ it is a sine qua non,” writes Busoni. “That routine in music should exist at all, and furthermore that it can be nominated as a condition in the musician’s bond, is another proof of the narrow confines of our musical art. Routine signifies the acquisition of a modicum of experience and art craft, and their application to all cases which may occur; hence, there must be an astounding number of analogous cases. Now I like to imagine a species of art-praxis wherein each case should be a new one, an exception.” Even so early a composer (using early in a loose sense) as Schumann found it unnecessary, at times, to close a piece with the tonic; and many other composers have disregarded the rule since, leaving the ear hanging in the air, so to speak. Is there any more reason why all pieces should end on the tonic than that all books should end happily or all pictures be painted in black and white? In music which Mozart wrote at the age of four there are chords of the second (and they occur in music before Mozart). In books of the period you can read of the horror with which ears at the beginning of the nineteenth century received consecutive fifths. Some of the modern French composers have disposed of the cliché of a symphony in four movements. Chausson, Franck, and Dukas have written symphonies in three parts. What composer (even the most academic) ever followed the letter of a precept if he found a better way of expressing himself? Moussorgsky avoided cliché as he would have avoided the plague. He took all the short cuts possible. There are no preambles and addendas, or other doddering concessions to scientific art in his music dramas and his songs. He gives the words their natural accent and the voice its natural inflections. Death is not always rewarded with blows on the big drum. The composer sometimes expresses the end, quite simply, in silence. In all the arts the horror of cliché asserts itself so violently indeed that we find Robert Ross (“Masks and Phases”) assailing Walter Pater for such a fall from grace as the use of the phrase, “rebellious masses of black hair.” Of course some small souls are so busy defying cliché, with no adequate reason for doing so, that they make themselves ridiculous. And as an example of this preoccupation I may tell an anecdote related to me by George Moore. “For a time,” he said, “Augusta Holmès was interested in an opera she was composing, La Montagne Noire, to the exclusion of all other subjects in conversation. She talked about it constantly and always brought one point forward: all the characters were to sing with their backs to the audience. That was her novel idea. She did not seem to realize that, in itself, the innovation would not serve to make her opera interesting.” Strawinsky’s horror of cliché is by no means abnormal. He does not break rules merely for the pleasure of shocking the pedants. In each instance he has developed, quite naturally and inevitably, the form out of his material. In Petrouchka, a ballet with a Russian country fair as its background, he has harped on the folk-dance tunes, the hurdy-gurdy manner, and, as befits this work, there is no great break with tradition, except in the orchestration. The Firebird, too, in spite of its fantasy and brilliance, is perfectly understandable in terms of the chromatic scale. In The Sacrifice to the Spring, on the other hand, unhampered by the chains which a “story-ballet” (the fable of these “pictures of pagan Russia” is entirely negligible) inevitably imply, he has awakened primitive emotions by the use of barbaric rhythm, without any special regard for melody or harmony, using the words in their academic senses. There is no attempt made to begin or end with major thirds. Strawinsky was perhaps the first composer to see that melody is of no importance in a ballet. Fireworks is impressionistic but it is no more so (although the result is arrived at by a wholly dissimilar method) than La Mer of Debussy. But it is in his opera, The Nightingale, or his very short pieces for string quartet, or his Japanese songs for voice and small orchestra that the beast shows his fangs, so to speak. It is in these pieces and in The Sacrifice to the Spring that Strawinsky has accomplished a process of elision, leaving out some of those stupidities which have bored us at every concert of academic music which we have attended. (You must realize how much your mind wanders at a symphony concert. It is impossible to concentrate one’s complete attention on the performance of a long work except at those times when some new phrase or some new turn in the working-out of a theme strikes the ear. There is so much of the music that is familiar, because it has occurred in so much music before. If you hear tum-ti-tum you may be certain it will be followed by ti-ti-ti and a good part of this sort of thing falls on deaf ears.... There are those, I am forced to admit, who can only concentrate on that which is perfectly familiar to them.) As a matter of fact he gives our ears credit (by this time!) for the ability to skip a few of the connecting links. Now this sort of elision in painting has come to be the slogan of a school. Cézanne painted a woman as he saw her; he made no attempt to explain her; that pleasure he left for the spectator of his picture. He did not draw a fashion plate. The successors of Cézanne (some of them) have gone much farther. They draw us a few bones and expect us to reconstruct the woman, body and soul, after the fashion of a professor of anatomy reconstructing an ichthyosaurus. Strawinsky and some other modern musicians have gone as far; they have left out the tum-ti-tums and twilly-wigs which connect the pregnant phrases in their music.... This does not signify that they do not think them, sometimes, but it is not necessary for any one with a receptive ear (not an expectant ear, unless it be an ear which expects to hear something pleasant!) to do so. In fact this kind of an auditor appreciates these short cuts of composers, gives thanks to God for them. Surprise is one of the keenest emotions that music has in its power to give us (even Hadyn and Weber discovered that!). It is only the pedants and the critics, who, after all, do not sit through all the long symphonies, who are annoyed by these attempts at concentration and condensation. (I say the pedants but I must include the Philistines. It is really cliché which makes certain music “popular.” The public as a whole really prefers music based on cliché, with a melody in which the end is foreordained almost from the first bar. Of course in time public taste is changed.... The transition is slow... but the composer who follows public taste instead of leading it soon drops out of hearing. The cliché of to-day is not the cliché of day before yesterday. According to Philip Hale, Napoleon, then first consul [1800] said to Luigi Cherubini, “I am very fond of Paisiello’s music; it is gentle, peaceful. You have great talent, but your accompaniments are too loud.” Cherubini replied, “Citizen Consul, I have conformed to the taste of the French.” Napoleon persisted, “Your music is too loud; let us talk of Paisiello’s which lulls me gently.” “I understand,” answered Cherubini, “you prefer music that does not prevent you from dreaming of affairs of state.”) Strawinsky, working gradually, not with the intention to astonish but with no fear of doing so, dropping superfluities, and all cliché of the studio whatsoever, arrives at a perfectly natural form of expression in his lyric drama, The Nightingale, in which there is no working-out or development of themes; the music is intended to comment upon, to fill with a bigger meaning, the action as it proceeds, without resorting to tricks which require mental effort on the part of the auditor. The composer does not wish to burden him with any more mental effort than the mere listening to the piece requires and he strikes to the soul with the poignancy of his expression. (The foregoing may easily be misunderstood. It does not mean necessarily that there is no polyphony, that there are no parts leading hither and thither in the music of Strawinsky. It does not mean that dissonance has become an end in itself with this composer. It simply means that he has let his inspiration take the form natural to it and has not tried to cramp his inspiration into proscribed forms. There should be no more difficulty in understanding him than in understanding Beethoven once one arrives at listening with unbiased ears. The trouble is that too many of us have made up our minds not to listen to anything which does not conform with our own precious opinions.)
At the risk of being misunderstood by some and for the sake of making myself clearer to others I hazard a frivolous figure. Say that Wagner’s formula for composition be represented by some expression; I will choose the simple proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.” Humperdinck is content to change a single detail of this formula. He says, musically speaking, “Make wheat while the sun shines.” Richard Strauss makes a more complete inversion. His paraphrase would suggest something like this, “Make brass while the band brays.” Strawinsky, wearied of the whole business (as was Debussy before him; genius does not paraphrase) uses only two words of the formula... say “make” and “sun.” Later even these are negligible, as each new composer makes his own laws and his own formulas. The infinity of it! In time the work of Strawinsky will establish a cliché to be scorned by a new generation (scorned in the sense that it will not be imitated, except by inferior men).
That his music is vibrant and beautiful we may be sure and it has happened that all of it has been appreciated by a very worth-while public. He has done what Benedetto Croce in his valuable work, “Æsthetic,” demands of the artist. He has expressed himself... for beauty is expression. “Artists,” says this writer, “while making a verbal pretence of agreeing, or yielding a feigned obedience to them, have always disregarded (these) laws of styles. Every true work of art has violated some established class and upset the ideas of the critics who have been obliged to enlarge the number of classes, until finally even this enlargement has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works of art, which are naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings, and—new enlargements.”
“It must not be forgotten,” says Egon Wellesz (“Schoenberg and Beyond” in “The Musical Quarterly,” Otto Kinkeldey’s translation), “that in art there are no ‘eternal laws’ and rules. Each period of history has its own art, and the art of each period has its own rules. There are times of which one might say that every work which was not in accord with the rules was bad or amateurish. These are the times in which fixed forms exist, to which all artists hold fast, merely varying the content. Then there are periods when artists break through and shatter the old forms. The greatness of their thoughts can no longer be confined within the old limits. (Think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Symphonie Fantastique of Berlioz.) There arises a category of art works whose power and beauty can be felt only and not understood. For this reason an audience that knows nothing of rules will enthuse over works of this kind much sooner than the average musician who looks for the rules and their observance.”
Remember that Hanslick called Tristan und Isolde “an abomination of sense and language” and Chorley wrote “I have never been so blanked, pained, wearied, insulted even (the word is not too strong), by a work of pretension as by... Tannhäuser....” “Fortunately,” I quote Benedetto Croce again, “no arduous remarks are necessary to convince ourself that pictures, poetry, and every work of art, produce no effects save on souls prepared to receive them.”
The clock continues to make its hands go round, so fast indeed that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of its course. For example, just before his death, John F. Runciman in “Another Ode to Discord” (“The New Music Review,” April, 1916) seemed to present an entirely new front. Here is a sample passage, “We have grown used to dissonances and our ears no longer require the momentary rest afforded by frequent concords; if a discord neither demands preparation nor resolution, and if it sounds beautiful and is expressive, there is no reason on earth why a piece of music should not consist wholly of a series of discords.... From Monteverde to Scriabine the line is unbroken, each successive generation growing bolder in attacking dissonances and still bolder in the manner of quitting them. I heard a gentleman give a recital of his own pianoforte works not long ago. They seemed to consist entirely of minor seconds—B and C struck together—and the effect to my mind was excruciatingly abominable. But that is how Bach’s music, Beethoven’s, Wagner’s, struck their contemporaries; and heaven knows what we shall get accustomed to in time. One thing is certain—that the most daring modern spirit is only following in the steps of the mightiest masters....”
We may be on the verge of a still greater revolution in art than any through which we have yet passed; new banners may be unfurled, and new strongholds captured. I admit that the idea gives me pleasure. Try to admit as much to yourself. Go hear the new music; listen to it and see if you can’t enjoy it. Perhaps you can’t. At any rate you will find in time that you won’t listen to second-rate imitations of the giant works of the past any longer. Your ears will make progress in spite of you and I shouldn’t wonder at all if five years more would make Schoenberg and Strawinsky and Ornstein a trifle old-fashioned.... The Austrian already has a little of the academy dust upon him.
New York, April 16, 1916.