■■■lii 
 
 IJ 111' K, IM, 1 1,1't), I III ,1 ' I'-t, 
 
ni37 
 
 Pfip 
 
 Q^atnell Htniaetaitg SItbratg 
 
 3tl|a(a, Nem ^orb 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
 MSIC 
 
... »_ ..£•"■"«" University Ubrary 
 ML 60.M39A6 
 
 3 1924 022 170 405 
 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 IWIAR2 
 
 1978 F 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 FEB 2 
 
 smR 
 
 AIICl 2 9 
 
 loor 
 
 ^te 9. ' 
 
 \mm 
 
 rlUU *• V 
 
 Krfy 
 
 mn 
 
 1999 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 OAYLORD 
 
 
 
 PKINTCO INU.S.A. 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022170405 
 
EDWARD J. DE COPPET 
 
THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC SERIES 
 VOLUME IV 
 
 MUSIC AS A HUMANITY 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 DANIEL GREGORY MASON 
 
 NEV^^ YORK 
 
 THE H. W. GRAY COMPANY 
 
 SOLE AGKNTS FOR 
 
 MOVELLO AMD COMPANY, Ltd. 
 1921 
 
Copyright, 192 i 
 
 BY 
 
 THE H. W. GRAY CO. 
 
 3i^a-fe /Ter/ -tG^v Q/, 
 
 '/) 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These essays, published in various magazines during recent years, 
 are here reprinted with but slight changes. In some cases, as in the 
 accounts of the first three festivals of chamber music at Pittsfield, it 
 seemed desirable to preserve first impressions just as they were received 
 and expressed at the time, since whatever value the papers may have 
 will be largely historical. The same thing is true of "A Society for 
 Publication," "A Practical Suggestion, " and "Music Patronage as an 
 Art." The essays in the third division, "Of .^Esthetics and Psy- 
 chology," have been suggested, all but two, by books or articles which 
 date them with some exactitude. Thus that on Vernon Lee has been 
 reprinted substantially as it appeared in 1906. The idea of "A Note 
 on Tonal Chiaroscuro" is due to a conversation with Mr. Leopold 
 Stokowski, whose conducting is so beautiful in its adjustment of 
 values. "An International Language," written for the American 
 Association for International Conciliation before the war (June, 1913), 
 retains now, it is hoped, any value it may have had then. The need 
 for international sympathy is greater than ever, and it is now clearer 
 than it was in 191 3 that the way to political cooperation must be 
 slowly and patiently opened up by art, literature, and other super- 
 national interests, among which music has an important place. 
 
 Acknowledgment of courteous permission to reprint is hereby 
 made to the American- Association for International Conciliation, 
 Arts and Decoration, the Atlantic Monthly, the Columbia University 
 Quarterly, the Harvard Musical Review, the Musical Quarterly (Schir- 
 mer), the New Music Review, the New Republic, and the Outlook. 
 
 D. G. M. 
 
 Norfolk, Connecticut, 
 September 21, igso. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 OF UNIVERSITIES AND THE PUBLIC TASTE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Music as a Humanity . .• 5 
 
 The College Man and Music . . • . . 13 
 
 Harvard the Pioneer . . . . . .18 
 
 The Quantitative Standard ..... 22 
 
 Domesticating Music . . .... 28 
 
 An International Language ...... 33 
 
 OF FESTIVALS AND PATRONS 
 
 The Berkshire Festivals, 1918-1920 
 
 Music Patronage as an Art 
 
 An Ideal Patron 
 
 A Practical Suggestion 
 
 A Society for Publication 
 
 41 
 59 
 63 
 71 
 76 
 
 OF ESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 Vernon Lee on Musical .^Esthetics . 
 Bertrand Russell on Music and Mathematics 
 Vincent d'Indy on Composition . 
 A Note on Tonal Chiaroscuro . 
 Psychoanalysis and the American Composer 
 Dissonance and Evil 
 
 81 
 
 91 
 
 95 
 
 102 
 
 108 
 
 "5 
 
MUSIC AS A HUMANITY 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
OF UNIVERSITIES AND THE PUBLIC TASTE 
 
MUSIC AS A HUMANITY 
 
 o. r had now learned by; experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be 
 cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched 
 as well as guided.- , . . The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now 
 seemed to me of primaiy importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one 
 of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. — ^John Stuart Mill, 
 Autolsiography. 
 
 I am heartily in favor of an education which will enable the great majority to 
 have a better understanding and control of their own environment. But so long as 
 our world remains so far from our heart's desire, any philosophy or education which 
 does not also enable one to build a haven whence he can for a time escape from the 
 suffocating cruelties of every-day life, is needlessly cruel. — Morris R. Cohen, in The 
 New Republic. 
 
 Pbr thousaipds of generations war has been the normal state of man's existence, 
 yet alongside war has flourished art, reflectiflg 'man's myriad aspirations and longings, 
 . . . ever unifying human life, through the common factor of impersonal emotion 
 passing from heart to heart. '. . . Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth 
 of heart is that inward freetiom which has the power to understand, feel with, and, 
 if need be, to help others.— J6hn Galsworthy, A Sheaf. 
 
 When John Stuart Mill, in his early manhood, had that first 
 realization of the insufficiency of narrow utilitarianism which he 
 has recorded in a memorable passage of liis Autobiography, modern 
 industrialism was just beginning. With every year that has elapsed 
 since he wrote, the need for such a "cultivation of the feelings" as he 
 championed, the difficulty of maintaining such a "due balance among 
 the faculties, ' ' has increased pari passu with the spread of the industrial 
 system. Specialization has become ever narrower, ever more inten- 
 sive. All appetites, impulses, and faculties not directly subservient 
 to the wage-earning work of the individual have tended to be starved 
 or crowded out. Life, for millions whose waking hours consist chiefly 
 of the endless mechanical repetition of insignificant acts, has becoifie 
 intolerably monotonous. Only in scanty leisure can they get any of 
 that general human experience, that miscellaneous free activity, on 
 which mental and moral health depend; and usually even then they 
 are too exhausted to make their diversions truly "re-creative," 
 and seek either sensational excitement (feverish fiction, melodrama, 
 
 5 
 
6 Music as a Humanity 
 
 ragtime music) or dissipating day-dreaming (sentimental novels 
 and the "movies") rather than those arts which enlarge sympathy 
 and restore balance. Psychology has recently formulated in sci- 
 entific terms the disastrous effects, long ago foreseen by men of genius 
 like, Ruskin and Morris, of such an aborting of human nature ; such 
 formulations have gained wide currency at the very time that the great 
 war has given an example unparalleled for vividness and horror of what 
 human instincts will do when denied wholesome expression ; and it is to 
 be hoped that we are entering on an era when science will be applied 
 to men as well as to things, and the evils of blind industrialism arrested. 
 But it will take a long while before, even with the best fortune for such 
 reforms, the world can become a truly humane place to live in; and 
 meanwhile, as in the past, one of the greatest reconcilers, appealing to 
 some temperaments even more immediately than philosophy and 
 religion, will be art, with its vicarious satisfaction of instincts that 
 the world denies, its realization of perfection here and now, its rainbow 
 of utter beauty leaping from the blackest skies. 
 
 Regarded from this standpoint music has a potency for solace, 
 for at once arousing and harmonizing emotion, that is hardly paralleled 
 by that of the other arts, and that gives it a place in our emotional and 
 spiritual life, and hence in education, literally unique. Poetry shares 
 with it the power to initiate through sympathy strong, though vicari- 
 ous, emotional experiences ; but poetry necessarily reaches the emotional 
 life indirectly, through the path of intellectual concepts formulated in 
 words. Music, on the contrary, strikes directly a level far deeper than 
 that of the intellect, the level of fundamental emotional attitudes, more 
 rather than less vivid in that they cannot be expressed in words. 
 Poetry may disengage the feeling of sorrow or joy as a reaction to what 
 it tells; but music tells nothing — it is joy or sorrow, or a thousand 
 other things with less definite names. Thus it releases and assuages 
 impulses that can find no outlet in more intellectualized expression or 
 in action, and so purges and refreshes the soul. 
 
 It is the uniqueness of this process that makes music at once 
 so precious to those who react to it and so impossible to describe intelli- 
 gibly to others. More nonsense has been written about it than about 
 any other art — and that is saying a good deal. Fortunately minute 
 psychological analysis of the ways in which it affects us is neither 
 indispensable nor even particularly useful to a treatment aimed simply 
 at making accessible to those not yet very familiar with it its greatest 
 gift, spiritual refreshment. By listeners of the intelligence of college 
 
Music as a Humanity 7 
 
 students what seems most needed, aside from certain warnings against 
 popular misconceptions, is plentiful presentation of fine examples, well 
 performed and sympathetically analyzed, detailed study of the styles of 
 various composers and schools, and stimulus to discriminate between 
 the best and what is in any way inferior, and to build up gradually 
 from such discriminations the habit we call good taste. 
 
 Of popular misconceptions that need to be taken some account 
 of from the start, the most persistent seems to be that which attrib- 
 utes to every musical composition a "program." The difficulty 
 above touched upon, of explaining the true nature of the musical appeal, 
 so much deeper than the evocation of a fanciful series of events or 
 images; the actual frequency of programs in modern works of the 
 realistic school of Berlioz, Liszt, and Strauss (though not in neo-classic 
 and romantic works); the numerical preponderance in audiences of 
 those who can enjoy following a story or indulging a mood over those 
 who can perceive the specific beauty and feel the specific appeal of 
 music — all these conditions encourage the fallacy that music is neces- 
 sarily programmistic — deals, that is, with series of impressions that can 
 be programmed in words. The truth is, of course, quite the contrary, 
 that at its greatest, as in most of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, for 
 instance, it strikes through to an emotional stratum deeper than that of 
 words, and that to try to translate it into verbal terms is like trying 
 to gild the sun. Yet conscientious students will ask you what they 
 "ought to think about " while they hear it ! 
 
 Another fallacy that tends to interfere with right listening is the 
 notion that the display of technical skill or the exploitation of person- 
 ality, rather than the achievement of impersonal expression and 
 beauty, is the aim of musical art — a notion to which credibility is too 
 often given by the vanity of "artists." From an undue emphasis of 
 the display idea we get exaggeration of the importance of virtuosity, 
 and the silly idolizing of soloists which vulgarizes so many recitals. 
 From the tendency to exploit personality we get the anti-artistic 
 prominence of the singers in opera and of the soloists in orchestral 
 concerts, connived at by both performers and public, and as injurious 
 to musical as the star system is to dramatic art. Students often need 
 to be reminded that solo performance and opera are both inferior as 
 art forms to symphonic and chamber music, in which ensemble is 
 more important than personality. 
 
 Experience seems to show, however, that such warnings as these, 
 after all essentially negative, should not be too much harped upon at 
 
8 Music as a Humanity 
 
 the beginning, before students have become capable of the positive 
 reactions to great music in reference to which only they have a mean- 
 ing. To men undergraduates particularly, with their keen sense of the 
 ridiculous and their easily aroused suspicion of cant, they may give an 
 impression of snobbish preciosity. Sympathy may thus be alienated 
 at the start. Moreover if professors will only learn as well as teach, 
 they must confess that there is a wholesome corrective to academic 
 condescension in this undergraduate attitude, that intellectual like 
 social exclusiveness too often excludes only oneself from vital contacts, 
 and that while one ought not to sacrifice standards to popularity, one 
 ought also to be on guard against "highbrowism," and should recog- 
 nize cheerfully that ragtime as well as Beethoven has its place. The 
 relative value of the two may be made clear to candid youth by com- 
 parison with that of detective stories and the character novels of 
 Meredith or Hardy. Ragtime, like the detective story, is more 
 immediately exciting, requires less effort of attention; a Beethoven 
 symphony, like a fine novel, makes greater demands upon us, but 
 rewards us with a richer and more lasting joy. 
 
 Thus the chief aim must be the sympathetic presentation of the 
 best. At Columbia and Barnard Colleges the courses are arranged to 
 cover two years, with two lectures a week in each, the first dealing 
 with the classic period up to the death of Beethoven in 1 827, the second 
 with the romantic and modern periods. In the classic course Bach, 
 Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and others are studied during the first half- 
 year; the second half is consecrated entirely to Beethoven. Most of 
 his symphonies are played in piano arrangement, with comment upon 
 the beauty and emotional power of the themes and their development, 
 and utilization of every device that may contribute to intelligent listen- 
 ing. Thus the rhythmic outlines of the main themes are graphically 
 represented on the blackboard, or embodied in syllables as an aid to 
 •memory. The methods by which the motives or rhythmic profiles are 
 developed, such as "imitation," "transposition," "inversion," "aug- 
 mentation," "stretto," and the like, are explained; and students are 
 asked to state which of them are being employed in specific cases. The 
 schemes of order in which the themes follow each other ("forms") 
 are described in so far as an understanding of them aids clear appre- 
 hension of the content of the music. Those students who can read 
 music notation are encouraged to follow the orchestral scores, while 
 for the majority there is more general description of the appearance, 
 sound, and use of orchestral instruments. Characteristic methods and 
 
Music as a Humanity 9 
 
 styles of various composers are exemplified and discussed. In short, 
 in every way possible students are helped to substitute for that 
 "drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills" in which Mr. Santayana 
 says most people listen to music, an attitude of alert, discriminating 
 perception. 
 
 The collateral reading^ and reports required deal to some extent 
 with the biographies of composers, but far more with the evolution 
 of musical style and methods in general, a matter which has been 
 made intelligible to laymen in such admirable books as Parry's "The 
 Evolution of the Art of Music," and Grove's "Beethoven and His 
 Nine Symphonies." Actual views of a great master in his workroom 
 are given by examples from Beethoven's sketchbooks, in which his 
 immortal melodies were laboriously perfected, and the common notion 
 that music knows no laws and acknowledges no standards is thus 
 shown up in all its fatuity. Thoughtful students are deeply impressed 
 when they first realize that nothing in art goes by luck, but that genius 
 works there by bold imagination and patient experiment, quite as it 
 does in science. And even on the more intimately human side, where 
 the danger of sentimentalization and of trivialization by program is 
 great, much can be done if too literal an interpretation is avoided. 
 The virility, the magnificent spiritual vitality of Beethoven make their 
 spontaneous appeal to all manly students; his incomparable expression 
 of the struggle between fate and the human will in his Fifth Symphony 
 may be illuminated by reference to such literary parallels as Steven- 
 son's "Pulvis et Umbra," Emerson's "Self-Reliance," Bertrand 
 Russell's "The Free Man's Worship"; even the striking contempora- 
 neity of his timeless spirit may be divined in the democratic ardor of 
 his " Eroica " and in the hope of human brotherhood and international 
 peace sung once for all in the Ninth Symphony. 
 
 The danger of a too passive attitude on the part of students, 
 common to all lecture courses, hut especially menacing in subjects 
 with which, like music, they feel themselves unfamiliar and likely 
 to "make breaks," may perhaps best be met, in all discussion in which 
 they participate, by stressing the human side of musical expression 
 as suggested above, and especially by bringing out analogies with 
 other subjects. The parallelism between the romantic period begin- 
 
 ' For the classic course the textbooks used are Dickinson's "Study of the History 
 of Music," and Siirette and Mason's "The Appreciation of Music"; for the modern 
 course, Mason's "Great Modem Composers," "The Romantic Composers," and 
 "From Grieg to Brahms." 
 
10 Music as a Humanity 
 
 ning with Beethoven and the poetic period of Wordsworth, Shelley, 
 and Keats has often been noted; and other literary analogies may be 
 drawn. Even better are sociological sidelights. The similarity of 
 spirit between Catholic mysticism and the music, of Palestrina, or that 
 between the Protestant Reformation and the sturdy independence and 
 rugged strength of Bach ; the reflection of the feudalism of the patron- 
 age system in the courtly grace of Haydn and Mozart; the vastly 
 deepened emotion of the individualistic Beethoven; the coincidence of 
 the rise of sensationalism in nineteenth-century program music and in 
 Wagner with the jading of the nerves through industrialism : — all these 
 are phenomena capable of profoundly stirring the imaginations of 
 intelligent young men and women, and tempting them to truly personal 
 adventure in the subjects studied. 
 
 The past should also be vivified by comparison with the present, 
 as the present may be illuminated by comparison with the past. If 
 students can be shown how perennial are the typical reactions to art, 
 how mediocrity and superficiality are always acclaimed by the mob 
 and excellence always ignored, ^distrusted, or misunderstood; how it 
 nevertheless slowly makes its way through the appreciation of the 
 intelligent minority and the acquiescence of the rest and how medioc- 
 rity quickly passes from popularity to oblivion — if they can be shown 
 these things, they will not only be put in the way of personal culti- 
 vation, but, what is far more important, they will be rendered forces 
 for good in the contemporary musical life. Let them see that as 
 Spohr was preferred to Beethoven in Vienna in 1815, and Gounod to 
 
 Franck in Paris in 1885, so X is applauded and Y ignored in 
 
 New York in 1920. Let them compare Bach's poverty with Handel's 
 wealth, and learn to distrust our press estimates of our composers on 
 the basis of their royalty returns. Let them read Schumann's impas- 
 sioned denunciations of the Philistine of his day, and ask themselves 
 if there are no Philistines left to be denounced in ours. Above all, give 
 them material for generous enthusiasm in the glorious story of loyalty 
 to the best, in face of hardship, neglect, misunderstanding, and obloquy 
 that stretches from the earliest days right down to our own. Let them 
 thrill at the thought of Mozart, telling his publisher that he would die 
 of starvation rather than write "in a more popular vein"; of Beetho- 
 ven's grim remark as the doctors, operatiSig for dropsy, drew out the 
 water: "Better from my belly than from my pen," ; of Theodore 
 Thomas's answer when told that the people did not like Wagner: 
 "Then we must play him until they do " ; of MacDowell's withdrawal 
 
Music as a Humanity II 
 
 of one of his pieces from an "All- American" program, because he was 
 unwilling to let his art lean upon the crutch of patriotism. There is too 
 much acquiescence in lax standards in our day, too much good-natured 
 toleration of mercenary aims, commercial methods, and half-baked 
 workmanship. Only as individuals, standing off from the mass, 
 inspired by great examples, insist on something better, shall we have a 
 future for music worthy of its past. 
 
 It is thus in the last analysis only by the individual reaction of 
 each student to the music he hears, his ability to recognize the finest, 
 his detection of triviality or mediocrity in composition and of per- 
 functoriness or sensationalism in performance, that the utility of this 
 kind of music study is disclosed. Hence, however necessary examina- 
 tions may be as a part of the academic machinery, they afford in this 
 subject an even less adequate reflection than usual of the success 
 or failure of the teaching. They may, however, especially in a city 
 like New York, where many concerts and recitals are to be heard, and 
 among them a few good ones, be supplemented by reports and dis- 
 cussions of notable concerts, in which the student is obliged to depend 
 on his own impressions and to set them forth in his own language. 
 During the spring of 191 8 the students in the music courses at Colum- 
 bia were thus required to criticize an unusually fine series of three 
 orchestral concerts given by Mr. Ossip Gabrilowitsch. These con- 
 certs were chosen both on account of Mr. Gabrilowitsch's extraordinary 
 power, magnetism, and subtlety as a conductor, and because his 
 interpretations of Beethoven and other classics are quite free from 
 the perfunctoriness and careless preparation of our resident orchestras, 
 which save their best efforts for modern works and novelties. 
 
 The choice was justified by the enthusiastic response of the stu- 
 dents, expressed, as is characteristic of them, with the utmost uncon- 
 ventional freshness of imagery and comparison, with a refreshing free- 
 domfrom the servility of the too consciously "cultivated," and with all 
 degrees of experience from an unexpected competence to the crassest 
 and frankest ignorance. It may be worth while to make room for a 
 few samples, in order to enable the reader to judge for himself whether 
 the study of music as a humanity is capable of contributing something 
 to the life-interest of the students themselves, and to the quality of the 
 future musical pubhc. 
 
 "The Rimsky-Korsakoff 'Scheherezade' falls down in the impor- 
 tant art of development of ideas; there is too much reliance upon 
 
12 Music as a Humanity 
 
 obtaining colorful combinations. The result is a frequent repeat of 
 original ideas unchanged, except for being played by another instru- 
 ment. It is like starting a few balls rolling among the instruments." 
 
 "I guess I was prejudiced against ['Scheherezade'] before I went 
 to the concert. I '11 admit that the piece was full of orchestral color and 
 that each motive when repeated was as differently clothed as it could 
 be, but yet I deny that a piece of that sort where each motive is re- 
 peated continuously throughout holds one's interest ; it is bound to get 
 monotonous. ... I have come to the conclusion that when a piece 
 of music, art, or literature is narrowly nationalized it is bound to lose 
 out in the end. I think the real worth-while piece is the one that is 
 universal in its appeal and is not so full of local color as to be foreign 
 and not easily comprehensible as soon as it leaves its native land." 
 
 " It is not often that one can take a scoffer at the poetry of music to 
 a concert where it can really be felt, but the young fellow who was with 
 me made several interesting comments. On the symphony (he had 
 only heard of Beethoven in a general way) he made the criticism that 
 ' it made one feel sleepy.' His main idea of fine music was originally 
 bounded, before last night, by Sigmund Romberg and Jerome Kern. 
 But the playing of Mr. Gabrilowitsch held him spellbound. He sat 
 silent and motionless. 'That's classic? ' he whispered at the end. I 
 nodded. ' Beats ragtime all out,' was his only comment." 
 
THE COLLEGE MAN AND MUSIC 
 
 In facing that relentlessly recurring question, "What courses shall I 
 take next year?" nine undergraduates out of ten doubtless eliminate 
 music almost at the start — even supposing they consider it at all. 
 Three or four of the nine are probably expecting to enter business 
 after graduation; of the rest, one or two contemplate engineering or 
 surveying or some such industrial profession, one or two, law or medi- 
 cine or teaching, and the others have not got so far as contemplating 
 anything in particular. Naturally, those who have more or less 
 definite plans, realizing the keenness of competition, wish to take 
 courses which, bearing directly on their future work, will be a tangible 
 aid toward the successful performance of it. Music strikes them as a 
 "frill," and, even if they are musically inclined in moments of relaxa- 
 tion, they prefer to study something else, something, as perhaps they 
 say, "more practical" — unless, to be sure, it appeals to them as a pos- 
 sible means of accumulating points without excessive outlay of energy. 
 
 Now, for this view every man of common sense must have a good 
 deal of sympathy. It is true that competition in all branches of our 
 American life is keen ; it is true that specialization is nowadays carried 
 to such a point that the limitations of human strength and time compel 
 us to begin it early; it is true that in a country still so new as ours the 
 greatest need is for men who can do things, who can build railways 
 and bridges, open up mines and other sources of natural wealth, and 
 organize industries and manufactures. Opportunities for wealth, 
 power, and social usefulness smile everywhere upon the man of action. 
 
 But this man of action, this typical American, as we see him em- 
 bodied in the successful financiers, manufacturers, engineers, inventors, 
 lawyers, statesmen, of the day, is he, with all his admirable energy and 
 efficiency, an ideal human being? Is he even altogether a happy and 
 contented one? Too often, we must confess, he is somewhat narrow 
 and hard in the very heyday of his power, and in the later years, the 
 years of waning energy, he is apt to become a pathetic figure of luxuri- 
 ous boredom,, chasing health in a motor car and scouring the earth for 
 
 13 
 
14 Music as a Humanity 
 
 the interests that he has specialized himself away from. Through all 
 his youth he has left the imaginative and emotional side of his nature 
 unawakened, undisciplined; and when he so sorely needs it, both for 
 personal enjoyment and for that sympathy with the pursuits of others 
 which is the peculiar grace of ripe years, it has become atrophied 
 through disuse. 
 
 This spectacle of the Nemesis which overtakes so often the merely 
 "practical" man, the "hustler," laid at last unwillingly on the shelf 
 to fret and fume there, suggests that there is a usefulness in those 
 studies which round a man out, which develop his sympathy, under- 
 standing, and taste, quite as real as that of the chosen specialty, if less 
 obvious. Such studies may be described in the most general terms 
 as those which open up to the individual the thought and feeling of 
 the race as a whole, and which thus enable him to widen his interests 
 vicariously, to get out of his every-day "practical" self and range 
 freely through all that mental world which humanity has cultivated, 
 as a laborer at some monotonous task spends his Sunday in the coun- 
 try. The old-fashioned name of "the humanities" described them 
 as well as any, for their function is to save a man from becoming a 
 machine, useful as a machine may be — to keep him a human being. 
 They help him, not to make a living, but to live. 
 
 These humanizing or liberalizing studies divide themselves into 
 several groups, distinguished one from another both by what may be 
 called their accessibility and by their particular kind of appeal. First 
 of all comes literature, that great standard reservoir of all that has 
 been done, thought, felt, and dreamed by men, whether in classic 
 Greece and Rome, in modern Continental Europe, or in England and 
 America. I,t reaches us through a medium closer to us than that of 
 any other art — the medium of speech, the daily use of which for practi- 
 cal purposes makes it so familiar that the masterpieces of literature, 
 in the original or in translations, are of all artistic masterpieces the 
 most accessible. Its appeal, too, is as wide and many-sided as hiunan- 
 ity itself; for every temperament, condition, and interest it has its 
 message, rich beyond analysis, and definite as only words can be. In 
 its three great divisions of poetry, prose, and the drama, with its coEa- 
 teral'subjects of history and philosophy, it must ever make the first 
 claim on the college man who would widen his horizon. 
 
 But if every normal young man who appreciates his college oppor- 
 tunities thus turns first of all to reading and to the liberal studies 
 pursued through reading, he soon finds in himself also other capacities 
 
The College Man and Music 1 5 
 
 which need a different development and which yield a different satis- 
 faction. He may be, for instance, observant of the appearance of 
 things, sensitive to the beauty of a fine building, a picturesque land- 
 scape, or the well-set-up t)ody of an athlete. Or his special suscepti- 
 bility may be for music; he may, without quite knowing why, take 
 keenest delight in good tunes, exciting rhythms, rich harmonies. In 
 such cases natural curiosity points unmistakably to study of the fine 
 arts — architecttire, painting, sculpture, music; but at the same time 
 the bearing of these things on ordinary life is so much less clear than 
 that of literature, and there is so strong a tendency among us to con- 
 sider them "precious," "faddish," "effeminate," that one is much 
 less apt to let such curiosity take its course. This is a pity. When- 
 ever a man stifles a natural taste because others who do not share it are 
 inclined to scoff at it, or because he cannot see at first quite how it bears 
 on his other interests, he is accepting a narrower life than he might 
 achieve. Each art that we can in any measure learn to appreciate 
 adds, as it were, a new room to the mental house in which we live. 
 We cannot afford to cut off a single one of these rooms ; the more we 
 have the more spacious, airy, and varied becomes our habitation. 
 
 The peculiar use, for instance, of the music-room in this mental 
 dwelling place we all build in our college years is that it is a retiring 
 spot, a place of refreshment, where we rest not only our hands but our 
 minds, where we do not have to think in definite concrete terms as 
 we do in the library, but in general terms of feeling. In other words 
 music expresses our great fundamental emotions, our hopes, joys, and 
 griefs, without the intellectual detail of literature: and to some moods 
 this simplification is a relief. Moreover, it presents these feelings, so 
 confused and tangled in our everyday lives, with that clear harmony 
 and orderliness we call beauty, and so refreshes and reinvigorates us 
 as only beauty can do. It takes us down to a deeper level of our lives 
 than that on which books speak to us, a level where there are no longer 
 choppy little waves and cross-currents of detail, unrelated facts, 
 unharmonized ideas. 
 
 Music differs from literature also in its accessibility, in the special 
 faculty it addresses. That unique gift we call a "musical ear" may 
 be lacking in a man of books ; it may be present in one for whom books 
 have little charm. Here is another reason, then, why an appreciative 
 study of music may be an obligation of self -development. One may 
 be of those for whom music is the great unlocker of the door of self, 
 the means of communication with the thought and feeling of the world ; 
 
1 6 Music as a Humanity 
 
 one may be cold and impervious to words, yet sensitively responsive 
 to the vaguer but not less rich or many-sided revelation of tones. For 
 such a person music is the most liberalizing of all studies. ' 
 
 It is important at this point to distinguish between a musical ear 
 and a trained musical taste. The former does not in the least imply 
 the latter. You may never have heard a grand opera nor a symphony 
 concert; you may prefer the mandolin to the church organ, and 
 "Dixie" to Walther's Prize Song, and yet have an excellent ear. A 
 good ear is, in fact, nothing but an arable soil; whether you grow upon 
 it thistles, corn, or orchids depends on your methods of cultivation. 
 If you like a good rhythm, such as a swinging march or a swaying 
 waltz, if you can remember and recognize a tune, you have the neces- 
 sary equipment for the study of music. All you need to do is to hear 
 goodmusic attentively and repeatedly, to listen discriminatingly to the 
 kinds of effect it makes, to follow the growth of the musical ideas in it, 
 and to acquaint yourself by study with its historic development and 
 with the individual peculiarities of its great masters. Gradually but 
 inevitably as you do this you will find your taste growing keener, more 
 exacting; your pleasure in empty, tinkling tunes, in over-obvious 
 rhythms, in cloying, sugary harmonies, will diminish in the exact ratio 
 in which you come to appreciate more lasting beauties; above all, your 
 taste, being founded upon a real perception, will gain in refinement 
 without sacrificing sincerity. 
 
 Up to this point we have been speaking of the personal advantage 
 that a college man may gain from the study, in general, of those sub- 
 jects which widen his relation with life and keep him from becoming a 
 mere specialized cog in the machine, and, in particular, of music. But 
 if we are convinced that what has been said of the peculiar power of 
 music over our minds and feelings is true, we shall not content our- 
 selves with the personal, passive enjoyment of it. We shall wish to do 
 what we can to extend its influence to others, to share its benefits. We 
 shall ask ourselves not only, "What has music for me?" but also, 
 "What have I for music? " Up to a certain point the answer is fairly 
 obvious. The college graduate frequently has it in his power to sup- 
 port the best music in the most tangible way — that is, financially. 
 Colonel Henry Lee Higginson, of Boston, to whose generosity we owe 
 the incalculable benefits of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is a 
 brilliant example, and many others might be cited. 
 
 But it is not only this tangible influence of money that we can 
 give. Scarcely less important, if less evident, is the influence of sound. 
 
The College Man and Music 1 7 
 
 impartial, disciplined opinion, and this we are at present too little, 
 inclined to exert. We are too inclined to maintain a skeptical or in- 
 different attitude on everything outside of business and politics; to 
 leave to our sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters the formation of 
 artistic standards and the determination of artistic values. Un- 
 doubtedly women have done and are doing in these matters admirable 
 work, for which we cannot be too grateful; but it is neither fair nor 
 wise to leave them to bear the entire brunt of such responsibilities. 
 There is in the feminine mind a natural conventionality and an in- 
 stinctive shrinking from strictly impersonal criticism that has intro- 
 duced a regrettable tolerance of unprogressiveness and mediocrity 
 into our national standards of taste. We accept too tamely imported 
 music, often totally unsuited to our own mental life. We are inclined 
 to estimate native compositions too uncritically, swayed often by 
 considerations more personal than artistic. Now the college man is 
 certainly in no danger of this over-complaisance, this tendency to wel- 
 come uncritically what is presented for his approval. On the contrary, 
 he is quite detached and irreverent. He asks, not who vouches for a 
 thing, but whether it is any good. He offers it an open field where 
 the fittest survives and "the devil takes the hindmost." Such a 
 wholesome struggle for survival on merit alone, before impartial 
 judges not too lenient to condemn an individual who fails to measure 
 up to abstract standards, is what our present musical arena most 
 sadly needs. The college man, if he will only take the trouble to 
 interest himself and to educate his perceptions, can do more than any 
 one else for American musical taste. 
 
HARVARD THE PIONEER 
 
 It must always be a source of pride to all Harvard men who care 
 for the best things — for what Matthew Arnold called sweetness and 
 light — that Harvard was the first American college to introduce into 
 the curriculum the study of music. And from those early days right 
 down to the present Harvard has in many ways remained the pace- 
 maker in the matter of how music should be taught as a college sub- 
 ject, and the other colleges have more or less followed her lead. One 
 reason for this leadership, as it has manifested itself in recent years, is 
 the admirably level-headed way in which Professor Walter Spalding 
 and his colleagues have kept the humanistic ideal in college music 
 study before them, resisting all temptation to make their department 
 into a mere conservatory strayed into academic fields. There are at 
 Harvard, to be sure, as everyone knows, excellent technical courses in 
 harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and the like, and there are plenty 
 of students of talent to take advantage of them. But what may be 
 even more valuable to the musical life of America, though in a less 
 direct and obvious way, is the instruction in what has come to be 
 known as the "appreciation of music," provided for the student with- 
 out special talent, but with normal intellectual curiosity as to the fine 
 things that he has come to college to learn about. Your youth of 
 talent might be provided for elsewhere, but your youth of friendly 
 curiosity about "anumberof things, "as Stevenson has it, can nowhere 
 so conveniently as at college be given a sort of general passport or 
 letter of introduction to the arts — the freedom of the city, as it were, of 
 humane expression. 
 
 We have all known what it is to be presented to a complete stranger 
 at an afternoon tea, and, without any hints as to his identity, left to 
 our fate. Embarrassing in something the same way is it for the 
 average man to be left alon^ with a Beethoven sonata. Especially 
 terrifying may the sonata become to him, under these circumstances, 
 if he has chanced to read any of the preposterous stuff that has been 
 written, by certain types of sentimentalists, in "interpretation" of 
 
 i8 
 
Harvard the Pioneer 19 
 
 these sonatas. He may become so preoccupied in a vain effort to con- 
 jure up moonlight, waterfalls, or babbling brooks, before his balking 
 imagination, that he cannot hear the music at all. Therefore, he 
 needs first of all to be led to see what a complete and self-contained 
 world music is, how independently of anything outside themselves its 
 thoughts take rise', unfold, evolve, ramify, and propagate their kind. 
 To this end he must learn to notice the contour of each essential mo- 
 tive and theme, above all their rhythmic individuality, since, as von 
 Bulow said, " In the beginning was rhythm," and to become gradually 
 as deft in following them through the maze, in recognizing them under 
 their disguises, and in anticipating what they will do next, and how 
 they will eventually triumph over all their enemies, as he is in accom- 
 panying the great Sherlock Holmes through one of Dr. Conan Doyle's 
 stories. The themes, indeed, as d'Indy vividly puts it in his " Cours 
 de composition musicale," are the characters of the musical drama, 
 quite as the tonalities are the scenes where their action takes place; 
 and to follow them through their many fierce battles and hair-breadth 
 escapes (development-portion) until in the end (recapitulation) they 
 marry and live happily forever after, is a mental adventure of the most 
 thrilling sort. 
 
 Once the student discovers this kind of interest, which fails some- 
 what, of course, in composers of second rank, but is almost continuous 
 in such work as Bach's, Beethoven's, Richard Strauss's, or Vincent 
 d'lndy's, he is not likely to revert to the old mooning attitude, the 
 attitude which regards music as an agreeable background for thoughts 
 about something else. He will not worry any more about what music 
 "means." There is a story of Professor Leo Lewis, of Tufts College, 
 which sums up the whole matter. One of his students asked him 
 what he thought Beethoven ' ' meant "by the first phrase of the ' ' Eroica 
 Symphony," and played the first four measures on the piano. Pro- 
 fessor Lewis, after a pause for consideration, replied that he thought 
 on the whole what Beethoven meant was — and played the first four 
 measures over again. 
 
 Besides presenting good music frequently enough to make it 
 familiar, and elucidating its nature as a unique type of human thought, 
 the instructor may be of much use to his students by calling to their 
 attention the value of musical standards of excellence, and the modes 
 by which they may be formed. The power to discriminate between 
 what is excellent and what is less than excellent is surely one of the 
 most important of intellectual faculties; in artistic matters we call. it 
 
20 Music as a Humanity 
 
 taste ; and it is apt to be somewhat unevenly developed in Americans, 
 partly because they are more interested in ' ' practical ' ' than in aesthetic 
 things, partly because they are in a hurry, and partly because they are 
 too good-natured and complaisant. Standards, therefore, need to be 
 constantly insisted on, not only in the music itself, but in its mode of 
 production. The toleration of our public for third and fourth-rate 
 "artists" is astonishing — ^for people who not only have no experience 
 and routine, but not even rudimentary understanding of what they 
 try to play or sing, and how to play or sing it so as to make it intelligible 
 to the hearer. They read a piece of music as a schoolboy recites 
 ' ' The boy stood on the burning deck, ' ' with no conception of phrasing, 
 of bringing out the essential melodic contours; and people listen to 
 them and decide that because they don't enjoy it they don't "care for 
 music." 
 
 The mechanical instruments have a good deal to answer for as 
 well. They cannot possibly mold a musical phrase with the infinite 
 gradations of saliency and subordination that the human hand is 
 capable of; and useful as they are for giving reproductions of music 
 that may be roughly compared to photographic reproductions of 
 paintings (though the pictures are truer in the capital matter of light 
 and shade, comparable to phrasing). Heaven help the man who should 
 form his idea of music on machine-made renditions! The student 
 may accordingly be advised to use mechanical instruments as much 
 as he pleases as a device for study, provided, and only provided, he 
 familiarizes himself with the real thing as it may be heard from the 
 great recitalists, and in a measure from much less famous performers 
 who have musical intuition and enough technical control to make 
 it effective. 
 
 The charge of superficiality has often been brought against such 
 cotorses as those in the appreciation of music, by critics both inside 
 and outside the academic walls; they have been called "snap" courses; 
 and their frequent popularity has been attributed to the fine youthful 
 capacity for indolence. There is undoubtedly a half-truth in such 
 charges: it is probably easier to slip through, without learning any- 
 thing, courses aimed like these at what Charles Eliot Norton used to 
 call true "education," than courses" planned only to give what he 
 called "information." Thus his own lectures in fine arts at Harvard 
 in the nineties, the perfect model of what such lectures should be, 
 were attended by many who could relieve the boredom they endured 
 only by placing match-heads on the floor and setting them off with 
 
Harvard the Pioneer 21 
 
 their feet. In the spring days, when the sun began to be warm, it was 
 harder than ever for these lovers of adventure not intellectual to im- 
 mure themselves in "Upper Massachusetts," and the fire-escape used 
 often to be black as an ant-hill with them. And later, when examina- 
 tion time came round, doubtless many of the cleverer ones were able 
 to secure pass-marks by the help of a little tutoring and a few adroit 
 references to "sophrosyne." 
 
 Yet all this does not in the least diminish the value of such courses, 
 as those students who were permanently influenced by Norton will 
 hasten to insist. Let us admit that examinations work more satis- 
 factorily in "informative" courses, where facts and facts alone are 
 imparted, where they are grasped by effort of memory only, without 
 necessity of choice, judgment, or any other originative faculty, than 
 in "educative" courses where less easily mensurable faculties like 
 comparison, discrimination, and selection are called into play. Let 
 us admit that examination in such creative faculties is a make-shift 
 and more or less of an absurdity ; that the student is really examined 
 by his later life rather than in the classroom, and that his success is 
 the enrichment, perhaps in high degree gradual and cumulative, of 
 his imagination and power of vicarious emotional experience, per- 
 fected many years after he leaves college. These considerations, far 
 from impugning the value of such study, show that it is more than 
 ever necessary in our modern America, where specialization becomes 
 ever narrower and more relentless, standardization increasingly im- 
 poverishes individual initiative, and the prevailing quantitative 
 standards make it daily more difficult, unpopular, and even dangerous 
 to judge things by their qualities. Yet now as always the finest 
 values remain unmeasurable, and from a purely utilitarian viewpoint 
 useless. True education will never forget them. In such education 
 Harvard — the Harvard of Norton, of James, of Santayana — is still 
 the pioneer. 
 
THE QUANTITATIVE STANDARD 
 
 SiGNOR GuGLiELMO Ferrero, in his interesting book, "Fra i due 
 mondi'" ("Between Two Worlds"), discards as superficial the old 
 charge that Americans worship the almighty dollar. He makes. one 
 of his characters point out that, on the contrary, ' ' not a day passes but 
 they try to create some new religion or charitable institution," and 
 that "there is not a model of art, of elegance, or of culture, ancient or 
 modern, European or Asiatic, that they do not compel themselves to 
 understand, to imitate, and to appropriate." One feels the gentle 
 irony here, and over the page one finds the indictment against us 
 definitely formulated : ' ' What is it that America is searching for in the 
 mystical ideas, in the philosophic doctrines, in the institutions, the 
 customs, the arts and elegances of the universe, and. Heaven forgive it, 
 even in Christian Science? — ^A standard of measurement."^ "Quan- 
 tity alone does not suffice, because it quickly results in satiety ; because 
 a civilization is only a system of standards of measurement ; because 
 these immense riches [of America] produced with such rapidity, have 
 to be translated into quality, that is to say into beauty, into virtue, 
 into wisdom, into glory, into grandeur, without which it is useless to 
 produce them." 
 
 Against this modern ideal of quantity, of material riches, of luxuries 
 and conveniences ever multiplied and without limits, which he finds not 
 only in America but also spreading over Europe, Signer Ferrero sets 
 off the ancient ideal of quality, inseparable, according to him, from 
 voluntary limitations, and depicts in a splendid paragraph the spirit 
 of the ancient civilization — ' ' that austere discipline of human thought 
 which willed to limit itself, in order to produce, in the finite, with power 
 precise and sure, after clear and definite models, innumerable forms of 
 the beautiful, of the good and of the true." "Limitation, concen- 
 
 " This article was written before the English translation of Signor Ferrero 's book 
 appeared, and the quotations given are based upon the French edition, "Entre les 
 deuxmondes." 
 
 = Entre les deux mondes, page 364. 
 
The Quantitative Standard 23 
 
 tration, and discipline," he sums up, "is it not these which have sup- 
 plied the inner force of those wonderful ancient civilizations of which 
 the relics fill us still with astonishment, us, the distant nephews of 
 those who created them, in spite of the pride with which our riches 
 have filled us?'" "The secret and cruel torment of the modern 
 world" — so he sums up his argument — "or rather of the two worlds 
 between which we are sailing, and of all the world of machines, is the 
 impossibility of distinguishing between extravagance and legitimate 
 consumption — it is the continual and never decided struggle between 
 quantity and quality."^ 
 
 It may be worth while to try to apply this distinction which Signor 
 Ferrero draws so eloquently to an art of which he has little to say, 
 though every one of his points might be amply proved from it. How 
 far is music subject to the struggle he depicts? To what extent is the 
 standard of quantity encroaching on that of quality in our musical 
 life? How often do we, in judging composers, performers, and public 
 taste alike, have recourse to methods of estimate more applicable to 
 iron-ore or wheat than to art, and neglect in proportion the finer dis- 
 criminations which must be expressed in the positive rather than in 
 the comparative or the superlative — which recognize a thing neither 
 as greater than something else nor as "the greatest in the world," but 
 as its simple but unique self ? 
 
 In that strange region of which most people think first of all when 
 one speaks of things musical, yet which is only half musical, and 
 scarcely that — the region of opera — the prevalence of quantitative 
 standards is so obvious that all we need do here is mention it in passing. 
 Artistic worth counts for little in opera, popularity for much. The 
 whole system of stars is of course based on popularity, or the appeal to 
 numbers. And the successful composers are those who appeal, not 
 to a cultivated musical taste, but to the love of the crowd for over- 
 charged sentiment, melodramatic effect and spectacular display. 
 Opera is the chosen land of the quantitative standard. 
 
 In the form of musical entertainment next to the opera in popular- 
 ity, the recital by a solo performer — singer, violinist, or pianist — the 
 influence of the lower order of standard is less obvious but still not 
 far to seek. The pianist who gives, as most present-day pianists do, 
 recitals in halls absurdly disproportionate in size to the capacity of his 
 instrument, is either consciously or unconsciously submitting to such 
 an influence. There are happily few who choose an auditorium like 
 ' "Entre les deux mondes," pages 353-4. " "Entreles deux mondes," p. 363. 
 
24 Music as a Humanity 
 
 Carnegie Hall rather than, say, Aeolian Hall, purely and simply 
 because if it is filled the box-office receipts will be larger. But the 
 vanity which selects the larger hall because of the supposed distinction 
 of collecting such an audience is only a step removed from this frank 
 commercialism. Whatever his motive, the player is sacrificing quality 
 to quantity, for such a place is as a matter of simple acoustics too large 
 to be filled by a piano without forcing and a loss of the more delicate 
 nuances of tone. Yet a pianist much before the public was frank 
 enough to admit that though artistic considerations urged him to give a 
 recital of intimate music in Aeolian.Hall for the small public that even 
 in a city like New York appreciates such things, he did not dare: — 
 
 "For," said he, "people will say 'X cannot fill Carnegie Hall any 
 
 more. He is losing in popularity. ' " 
 
 As for chamber music and orchestral concerts, there the conditions 
 are somewhat different, and the tendency toward the quantitative 
 standard therefore shows itself in a different way, though hardly less 
 strikingly. The temptation is here not so much to play in too large a 
 place as to play too often. Financial returns and notoriety depend of 
 course as much on the number as on the size of audiences, so that 
 when the audiences are as large as possible, commercialism and vanity 
 still have the counsel left — "Get as many as you can." To this the 
 truly artistic director has to answer that too many concerts will 
 inevitably deteriorate the quality of his work, because, first, he must 
 have time for rehearsal, and second he must have time for rest and 
 diversion — in short, he must keep at the top of his condition. 
 
 Now the subtlety of the quantitative standard is nowhere more 
 noticeable than in its bearing on this question of rehearsal. If one 
 rehearsal, says Mediocrity, will enable my men to give a respectable 
 performance, without overt accidents, which nine-tenths of the audi- 
 ence cannot tell from an excellent one, why should I waste time, 
 strength, temper, and money in having three, or five, or ten? The 
 result is that most of our chamber music and orchestral concerts in 
 New York are under-rehearsed. Not only the business personnel but 
 the conductors, who ought to be guided by a principle of "Noblesse 
 oblige," consent to a constant commercial speeding up that inevitably 
 degrades quality. One of the two best known orchestras in New York 
 actually advertised itself as giving "more concerts in a season than 
 any other organization" — apparently naively unaware that this was a 
 statement that cut two ways. The other responded a little later by 
 announcing that its pairs of concerts, or "rehearsal and concert" as 
 
The Quantitative Standard 25 
 
 they were called in the old days, would no longer consist of the same 
 program, but of completely different ones. "More symphonies than 
 the other fellow" is the motto, whether rehearsed or not. 
 
 Yet it is just those later rehearsals, superfluous from the quanti- 
 tative point of view, that attain the ease, the elasticity, the accuracy 
 of detail with perfect freedom of declamation, the thorough familiarity 
 with not merely the notes but the spirit of the music, which make a 
 really fine performance, capable not merely of satisfying the mob but 
 of delighting the connoisseur. And if we are insisting on quality we 
 must not stop at rehearsals, but we must claim even leisure and rest for 
 the over- driven musician, if not for the rank and file at least for the 
 leaders and for those who are responsible for the conception as well as 
 for the execution of the music. " Pay a man to rest ! " exclaims with 
 horror the practical American manager. Yes, pay a man to rest, 
 because an artist is not a brick-layer, but works with the most deli- 
 cate part of his mind, easily jarred, dulled, or paralyzed by too much 
 drudgery; if you want to get your money's worth from him you pay 
 him for resting as well as working. 
 
 That these are no imaginary evils in our musical life might be 
 proved by many references to existing institutions among us. Two 
 will suffice. 
 
 The leader of one of our most distinguighed chamber music organi- 
 zations was urgtd by his manager to give more frequent concerts, not 
 only for the money but for the reputation. He replied that if he under- 
 took more concerts he could not rehearse sufficiently, and he insisted 
 on giving a few good concerts rather than many bad ones. Or rather, 
 many less good ones. With players like this it was not a question of bad ; 
 had it been, probably the manager himself would have recognized the 
 inadvisability of increasing the number of performances. I'he choice 
 was between excellent and less than excellent, as will usually be found 
 to be the case when the qualitative standard is hardest to apply, and 
 most worth the effort of applying. The other instance is of a soloist, a 
 piano virtuoso, of excellent European reputation, who gave a very 
 inferior recital in New York. After the concert he told those who 
 gathered about him of his chagrin at playing so badly, and of the 
 reason of it — his engagements had been so multiplied by his manager 
 that he had had to take a cab to the hall directly from the railway 
 station at which he had arrived after a long journey, and was so tired 
 that he could hardly strike the right notes. 
 
 Of all types of musicians with us in America the composer is, perhaps, 
 
26 Music as a Humanity 
 
 least directly affected by these prevalent quantitative standards. Yet 
 that he too is affected is suggested by our dearth of really first-rate 
 composers, a dearth which persists in spite of. our many impassioned 
 denials of it. Much effort by co'mposers of ability that might under 
 happier conditions go into work of high quality is no doubt frittered 
 away in the production of pot-boilers to please the multitude — but 
 that is not peculiar to America. Really sincere and self-respecting 
 work in composition is not apt to be remunerative in any country. 
 The mischievous working of quantitative standards is more subtle 
 than that. 
 
 The formation of an individual style, essential to every artist 
 worthy of the name and always difficult, is especially difficult to the 
 American composer for two reasons. First, it comes only through 
 endless practice of his art and as the final flowering so to speak of a 
 luxuriant technique — it is not a matter of thinking but of doing. 
 Therefore the American composer is at a disadvantage in comparison 
 with his European brothers because his time for composing is more 
 limited than theirs — limited by the confusion and countless distrac- 
 tions of our life, by the pull away from the arts exerted by our social 
 standards, and above all by the high cost of living. 
 
 Secondly, the formation of an artistic style is difficult in direct ratio 
 to the variety and complexity of the models by which one is influenced. 
 Now, our American spirit, as Signor Ferrero remarks in the passage 
 quoted, is excessively eclectic, and our tendency to "bolt " this varied 
 mental food which we gather dispassionately from the four quarters of ■ 
 the globe often leads to a mental indigestion — witness, as our author 
 again suggests, the prevalence of Christian Science among us — as 
 disastrous, if not as universally recognized, as the correlative bodily 
 ailment for which we are famous. Our hospitality puts an almost 
 killing strain upon our power of assimilation. For the French or 
 German student of composition the models at hand are fairly simple in 
 their limitation; he follows the school of Franck and d'Indy, or of 
 Debussy and the independents, or of Strauss, or of Reger, and ignores 
 what is beyond the frontier. But for the American youth there are no 
 kindly protecting frontiers. He grows up in a babel of conflicting 
 languages, his ears are battered from infancy by Debussyan whole-tone 
 scales, Straussian orchestral sonorities, Regerian vagaries of harmony, 
 to say nothing of Indian and Negro folksong, ragtime, and the classics. 
 What a diet ! Yet who will be the doctor to cut him down to some 
 musical bread-and-water that shall be nourishing but tame? Is it in 
 
The Quantitative Standard 27 
 
 our American genius to accept those limitations which Signor Ferrero 
 so convincingly demonstrates as underlying all that is greatest in the 
 older civilizations? Is there a man to-day who, like MacDowell, is 
 willing to risk being called a reactionary, an old-fashioned, and to cut 
 himself off from many seductive and valid musical styles, in order to 
 attain at last individuality? 
 
DOMESTICATING MUSIC 
 
 "It doesn't matter what the opera is," said the painter's wife, an 
 attractive and intelligent woman, if a trifle conventional, "I always 
 love to hear Caruso. ' ' The remark, casual as it was, seemed somehow, 
 in spite of its platitude, or perhaps because of it, to be symptomatic of 
 a view of music as mischievously influential as it is widespread. It 
 was like one of those fossil bones from which those who know can 
 reconstruct whole prehistoric monsters. And the point of view sug- 
 gested is indeed, both in itself and in its devastating effect on our musi- 
 cal life, rather monstrous, though not, alas, at all prehistoric. 
 
 In trying to reconstruct such a point of view one is at first puzzled 
 by the tone of complacency, almost smartness, in which the remark was 
 • uttered. Not only was there no trace of shame at the lack of dis- 
 crimination as to the opera sung, but there was positive pride in the 
 assertion of fastidiousness as to the soloist singing it. Then it gradu- 
 ally comes back to one that to this peculiar point of view the work of 
 art is nothing, its interpreters everything; aesthetic values are entirely 
 submerged and excluded by personal ones ; balance, proportion, moder- 
 ation, perfection of ensemble pale before the prima donna parading 
 in the spot-light; and the opera is no longer anything in itself, anything 
 with a meaning, but merely, in the expressive phrase, a "vehicle" for 
 the singers. One sees, therefore, that the first half of the sentence 
 amounts simply to a categorical denial of independent meaning to a 
 work of musical art in itself — a denial intensely characteristic of the 
 point of view in question. 
 
 In the second place, however, as a thing without meaning can 
 have only sensuous values, it becomes a point of pride to be sensitive 
 to such values, and to insist upon the best. If you are a wine-fancier 
 you become fastidious about bouquets; if you are a devotee of the 
 human voice (not as expressing something, but as pure aural sen- 
 sation) you grow exacting about larynxes, and can soon talk learnedly 
 about ' ' head-tones, " " portamento, ' ' and ' ' tessitiurae. ' ' In other words, 
 while for him to whom music has a meaning of its own, interpretation 
 
 28 
 
Domesticating Music 29 
 
 is a secondary matter, and the spirit of beauty can transfigure the 
 humblest incarnation, he for whom it is devoid of intrinsic meaning 
 sets supreme store by its sensuous embodiment. Hence the odd para- 
 dox, so frequently observable, that the most musical people are the 
 most tolerant of physical shortcomings in performance, if the spirit be 
 right, while the least musical are precisely those who make the most 
 exacting material demands. A test question, to determine in which 
 class any listener belonged, would be : "Should you rather hear Kreisler 
 play anything he chose, or a third-rate nonentity play, with loving 
 intelligence, the Beethoven concerto?" Wine that is a symbol, as in 
 the eucharist, may be of inferior quality, and no harm done. Wine 
 that is to be merely a luxury must be of the rarest vintage. If the 
 opera means nothing, we must hear Caruso. 
 
 But, in the third place, we may not all of us have ears keen enough 
 to select for oiu-selves the best which our ideal of artistic luxury makes 
 us thus insatiably demand. It is, therefore, highly convenient that 
 there should be a vogue for those performers (whether singers, players, 
 or conductors) whom connoisseurs consider the best, and that we should 
 be able to feel safe in vicariously following the preferences of those who 
 know. Furthermore, as the distant and unfamiliar always excites our 
 curiosity and stirs our imagination more than the familiar and hum- 
 drum, this vogue will naturally select foreigners rather than natives, 
 or at least those with foreign names, for its favorites. Thus we arrive 
 at the snobbery in preferring European above native musicians in all 
 lines, which is the polar opposite of chauvinism — and quite as dis- 
 astrous to our art. And so we complete our reconstruction of a point 
 of view immensely prevalent — the old man of the sea that rides down 
 all our efforts and all our hopes, and find it to be made up of a frivolity 
 which demands from music entertainment rather than expression, a 
 materialism which exacts above all luxury in its embodiment, and a 
 snobbery which cannot endure unpretentiousness in its practitioners. 
 
 It is because this entertainment-luxury-snobbism point of view 
 is so widespread that an experiment carried on for several years in a 
 
 small New England city by Mr. X , a local musician with few 
 
 resources beyond good musicianship and boundless love of music, 
 promises more for the future of musical taste among us than many 
 more ambitious, expensive, and advertised undertakings. Similar 
 experiments should be tried as widely as possible, under divers condi- 
 tions and by experimenters variously endowed. This gentleman's 
 original idea was simple, as are most good ideas. In response to 
 
30 Music as a Humanity 
 
 requests from his friends he gave a series of piano recitals in his home. 
 Gradually the attendance so increased that he had to borrow the 
 use of a friend's studio. At last he organized a chamber music club. 
 His idea was to gather together the local instrumentalists — from 
 theater, restaurant, hotel — into a small group, coach them in pieces of 
 good chamber music, and play these for the pubUc at moderate prices. 
 There are few cities, even small ones, where you cannot find a few string 
 players — violinists and 'cellists (viola players are rarer) — men who are 
 usually more or less unaware of each other's existence, and who have 
 seldom dreamed of banding together to use their music as something 
 more than a means of livelihood. But with only a violinist and a 
 'cellist you have, if you yotu-self play the piano, a fine musical liter- 
 ature of trios and sonatas open to you, and when there are also clari- 
 netists and cometists to be had, the possibilities become exciting. 
 
 But this good idea was like others not only in being simple in 
 conception, but also in involving for the execution much devoted labor 
 and the solution of many puzzling problems. First of all, it is natural 
 that the average theater or restaurant player knows as little of music 
 as a newspaper man does of literature. Singular patience, tact, and 
 contagious enthusiasm are needed to overcome this initial difficulty. 
 How this New England enthusiast overcame it may be divined from 
 the following interesting chapter of his experiences. 
 
 He found working in one of the factories a young man who spent 
 all his spare time playing the cornet for his own amusement. He had a 
 good ear and a natural love for music, but next to no acquaintance with 
 musical literature, and naturally little sense of relative values or 
 
 instinct for style. Finding him anxious to learn the horn, Mr. X 
 
 bought or hired for him an instrtiment. There followed much coach- 
 ing, playing, discussion, study. In the course of a few years this young 
 horn player was living in the house of the older man, in a pleasant half- 
 filial, half-comradely relation, and participating in pieces like Dukas's 
 Villanelle for Horn and Brahms's Horn Trio. Later he gained ad- 
 mittance to a New York symphonic orchestra, and is doubtless, thanks 
 
 to the efforts of Mr. X , a musician for life. Somewhat similar 
 
 was the story of a clarinet player in one of the city theaters, who after 
 a year or two of this inspiring association was taking part in Mozart's 
 Clarinet Quintet and in Brahnis's Clarinet Sonatas. Even Saint- 
 Saens's Trumpet Septet was tried with the help of a comet player 
 sufficiently coached. 
 
 Thus Mr. X rendered one kind of service in stirring professional 
 
Domesticating Music 3 1 
 
 musicians accustomed to a routine of the dance and the theater into 
 the creative activity of real interpretation. But even more far-reach- 
 ing was his service to the pubHc. Here again, of course, there were 
 difficulties and problems. It was found, for instance, that many 
 people, even after considerable hearing of the best ensemble pieces, 
 frankly preferred piaao solos, and would say effusively, thinking to 
 
 please the founder: "A delightful concert, Mr. X , but why don't 
 
 you give us more solos ? We want to hear you play alone. ' ' To which 
 
 Mr. X would always long-sufferingly reply that there were certain 
 
 things string instruments could do that a piano could not, and that it 
 was these larger effects and this new literature that he had wished to 
 make available to them. Of course this was, from one point of view, 
 encouraging, as showing the need of just such training; so long as a 
 public is more interested in an individual soloist, through his person- 
 ality, than it is in a cooperating group through its artistic results, it 
 is fundamentally uneducated. 
 
 Again it was found that in some neighboring towns where it was 
 proposed to introduce the concerts (which in their home town had 
 swelled into a regular series of ten each winter, at a subscription price of 
 five dollars for the series) the public inability to recognize good music 
 for itself expressed itself, as it often does, in the snobbish wish for^a 
 
 label.. " We can get ten concerts from Mr. X 's Club for so much," 
 
 ran this familiar argument, "but, as we can only get one or two from 
 
 the celebrated Quartet of New York for the same money, the 
 
 Quartet must be very much better, and therefore we shall have it come 
 for one concert rather than have a series from an organization less 
 famous." 
 
 The fallacy here is not quite so easily recognizable as that of the 
 preference for a soloist to a group, but is at last traceable to the same 
 indifference to art in and for itself. For if a public has really learned 
 to love music for itself, it will prefer a number of concerts by local 
 musicians, sufficiently well trained to present it intelligibly, to concerts 
 so infrequent as hardly to keep the musical body and soul together by 
 an organization of much greater reputation, yes, and even by one of 
 measurably greater skill and authority. For the music is the thing, 
 not the people that play it. That is a truth which the American 
 public must be persuaded to understand. 
 
 Yet in spite of these difficulties the undertaking was a success. 
 The concerts not only gained a body of staunch supporters from year to 
 year, but tempted in, from time to time, a number of adventurers who 
 
32 Music as a Humanity 
 
 would often stop the founder in the street to tell him how much they 
 had enjoyed his music. Every fall he was asked with genuine interest 
 about his plans for the coming season. Best of all, it was found that 
 certain easily comprehensible classic works, such as the Schumann 
 Piano Quintet or the Schubert Forellen Quintet (for the versatile 
 clarinetist was also by good luck an excellent double-bass-player), 
 wisely repeated from year to year, became loved and anticipated 
 favorites. It is encouraging that such complex masterpieces as 
 Franck's great Quintet can be given at all, but it is even more encour- 
 aging that pieces like the Schumann and Schubert should be given 
 often, and often welcomed. For it means that they were not regarded 
 as mere entertainment, nor made the occasion for luxury, nor appraised 
 in a spirit of snobbism. Their recurrent performance and welcome 
 meant that music was being domesticated in America. 
 
AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE 
 
 There is a Russian edition of Rimsky-Korsakoff 's " Scheherazade " 
 Suite for orchestra founded on the Arabian Nights Entertainments, 
 which flaunts as title-page a most gorgeously oriental design of bright 
 blues, reds, and greens, on a background of gold. It is strikingly 
 handsome and quite barbaric, reminding one more than anything else 
 of the wall decorations of Byzantine architecture. The last touch of 
 outlandishness is given by the text in those strange Russian letters 
 which look, according to a whimsical admirer of Rimsky and his 
 music, "as English does when have belladonna in your eyes." To 
 see discerningly such a title-page, feeling the remoteness of the point of 
 view that produced it from that of the Anglo-Saxon mind, and then to 
 turn over the leaf and read, with a thrill of appreciation, the stirring 
 melody with which the piece begins, is to gain a vivid sense of the 
 universality of music, its power to bridge even such a chasm as that 
 which separates East and West. A Russian and an American who 
 stopped at the title-page might well feel a strangeness in each other, a 
 saase of fundamental differences in racial memories, traditions, tastes, 
 which would need only an occasion to manifest itself in active enmity; 
 yet if they once heard the music^ witnessing each other's delight in it, 
 they would feel underneath all this a bond of common human feeling 
 uniting them already in potential friendship. However little sym- 
 pathy they might have in other respects, the music at least would 
 speak to both, by virtue of its unique power as the only language that 
 requires no translation. 
 
 This curious power of music to reconcile extremes by means of its 
 universal comprehensibility seems to constitute a strong claim on the 
 attention of those interested in international friendship and the cessa- 
 tion of wars which it alone can bring. If it be true that music is, in 
 sober fact, the only international language, the only emotional and 
 spiritual coinage that is honored all over the world, then it must surely 
 be an invaluable influence toward peace. For after all, the acts of 
 governments are ultimately dependent on the temper of the people 
 3 33 
 
34 Music as a Humanity 
 
 behind them. If the mass of the people in a country are selfish, 
 provincial, and narrow, inclined to look upon all the world beyond their 
 borders as " outlandish " and "queer," as made up of those infra-htmian 
 beings called "foreigners," then that country is never really safe from 
 war. And it is only when the mass of people are educated beyond 
 such crude sophomoric views and learn to substitute for the concep- 
 tion of "foreigner" that of "interestingly different fellow being," that 
 there is any real basis, in mutual regard, for a lasting peace. 
 
 In developing such a mutual understanding and regard between 
 nations, the arts have important but varying functions to perform. 
 The plastic arts, by nature more objective than the arts of literature 
 and music, may be of great service in familiarizing us with the external 
 aspects of distant countries, and thus making us feel at home there. 
 In the wholly strange we notice only trifling details, as one unac- 
 quainted with Brittany and Normandy, for example, might, on first 
 seeing a picture by Millet, pay more attention to the wooden shoes and 
 the smocks of the peasants than to the physical and mental character- 
 istics which he delineates so powerfully, or to the purely aesthetic 
 beauty of line and form by which he transfigures them. By familiar- 
 izing us with French peasant life such a painter as Millet does much to 
 supersede such childish preoccupations in us by more helpful divina- 
 tions as to the human nature living its serious life beneath these clothes. 
 
 Literature and music, however, by virtue of their more intimate, 
 subjective way of working, exercise an even more important influence, 
 perhaps, toward international goodfellowship. They are not obliged 
 to go indirectly at the spirit through the body, but are privileged to 
 express directly and poignantly the most intimate facts of mental and 
 emotional life. A Russian painter may give us pictures under the 
 surface of which we can discern much of what makes the Russian 
 character individual; but Turgenev and Tolstoi in their novels, 
 Tschaikowsky in his symphonies, and Borodine and Moussorgsky in 
 their operas, show us the Russian as he is in his soul — that strange 
 mixture of fatalism and impulsiveness. Constable shows us the Eng- 
 lish countryside, and Gainsborough and Hogarth, in their differing 
 ways, it must be admitted, show us much of the English character; 
 but not quite in the simple transparency wherewith it is revealed in a 
 poem like "Robin Hood" or a folksong like "Polly Oliver." 
 
 Literature, of course, whether in the poem, the novel, or the play, 
 is one of the great revealers, the influence of which toward a good 
 understanding between nations it would be hard to overestimate. Yet 
 
An International Language 35 
 
 even over literature music has one advantage, which dates back to the 
 confusion of tongues. The work of art in words must be translated if 
 it is to make its appeal beyond its limited audience; the work of art in 
 tones appeals to every human being in the measure of his capacity to 
 hear, and to understand intelligently what he hears. Moreover, the 
 habit of reading is confined to certain classes; some people who never 
 open a book listen with ardor and a certain degree of intelligence to 
 music; it is quite conceivable, for example, that one who had never 
 heard of Tiu-genev, might nevertheless feel powerfully the spell of 
 Russia in such a work as Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic Symphony," or 
 that one wholly unacquainted with the history of serfdom might have 
 a ray of sympathy for the monotonous weariness of the serf's existence 
 shot into his heart by hearing the "Song of the Volga Boatmen." 
 Probably for every ten Americans who have gained a sense of sym- 
 pathy with Germany through Goethe's or Heine's poetry there are 
 a dozen who love Beethoven's music. Few except special students 
 could give an intelligent account of a great literary masterpiece of an 
 out-of-the-way country like Ibsen's "Peer Gynt"; how many have 
 delighted in the melodious orchestral suite founded upon it by Grieg ! 
 
 It would of course be absurd to claim that music can give us any- 
 thing like the detailed information that literature can, or that its mes- 
 sage is at all comparable to that of literature in concreteness and 
 definiteness. In any such comparison music must suffer. So far as 
 interr.ational peace depends upon the communication of facts and 
 concrete thoughts from nation to nation, literature is doubtless its 
 chief servant. But the present point is that it depends not only on 
 these, but also, and perhaps even more intimately, on profound tem- 
 peramental affinities and sympathies that can best be nurtured by 
 such an art as music, with its wonderful power of illuminating the 
 depths of our emotional life. It cannot show us the other man's in- 
 tellectual ideas; but if, by way of compensation for this shortcoming of 
 vagueness, it has an incomparable power to reveal what is even deeper, 
 his loves and hates, his hopes and fears, in a word the temperamental 
 soil out of which all his ideas must grow, is not that an even more vital 
 revelation? Music thus seems to bring us into contact at a deeper 
 level than that of the spoken word. 
 
 If music as a whole is thus distinguished from other modes of ex- 
 pression by the depth of the emotional level to which it penetrates, it 
 is also noteworthy that within music itself there are different levels 
 of expression, some kinds of music delving much more profoundly into 
 
36 Music as a Humanity 
 
 human nature, others remaining comparatively superficial. To this 
 latter class some critics not wholly carried out of their senses by the 
 folksong craze would be inclined to attribute much narrowly national 
 music of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Many composers 
 of this period discovered in the provincial music of various countries 
 a charm which was due to its quaintness, its novelty, its unfamiliarity 
 to the cosmopolitan ear. It was a charm akin to that which the 
 American traveler finds in Dutch windmills or Egyptian camels — the 
 charm of the picturesque, of "local color." The peculiarities enjoyed 
 were in every case more or less external, superficial; yet the enjoyment 
 of them, so far as it went, tended to increase the interest in other na- 
 tions, and perhaps even the sense of brotherhood with them. 
 
 Examples of this interest in provincial peculiarities, in what may be 
 called dialects of the musical language, meet us on every hand in nine- 
 teenth century composition. Recent research proves that even 
 Haydn, at the end of the previous century, based his work largely on 
 Croatian folksongs. Beethoven used one or two Turkish themes, in 
 somewhat jesting mood, but it is not until Liszt borrowed sb copiously 
 from his native Hungarian melodies that we find the practice well 
 established. Chopin used the Polish folk-music to a limited extent. 
 Grieg, the first thorough-going "nationalist,." owes much of his charm 
 to the plaintive Norwegian idiom; Dvorak and Smetana exploited 
 Bohemia with equal success; Russia had its Glinka, Balakirev, Cui, and 
 others, Poland its Paderewski, Finland its Sibelius; our own country- 
 man MacDowell has used in his Indian Suite the tunes of the red 
 aborigines of America, and Dvofdk, Chadwick, Gilbert, and others 
 have idealized the really beautiful plantation airs of the negroes. 
 
 In all national music of this kind, strictly so called, we find,a«trong 
 local interest. Over and above the general -appeal of the music as 
 music, which is sometimes considerable, there is the special interest of 
 the reflection of a particular racial or national temper, often inextric- 
 ably intertwined with the interest of technical peculiarities of a highly 
 local kind. Emotionally such music interests us not so much through 
 its expression of widespread or universal human feelings as through 
 its emphasis on subtle shades or unusual accentuation, such as the 
 touch of southern languor in Italian love-songs, or the riotous wealth 
 of imagination revealed by the ornamental cadenzas of the Hungarian 
 gypsy. Technically it is notable not so much for high organization or 
 beauty of design — ^universal qualities — as for the quaintness of some 
 peculiarity, either rhythmic, as in the "Scotch snap," familiar to us in 
 
An International Language 37 
 
 our own "ragtime," or melodic, as in the tendency of the Norwegian 
 tunes to fall back from the seventh step of the scale to the fifth instead 
 of proceeding to the eighth, and the like. In a word, it is the excessive 
 rather than the normal that appeals to us in all these cases. 
 
 This distinction is made not invidiously but for clearness of classi- 
 fication and discussion. Provincially national music amply justifies 
 itself, from many points of view. Especially interesting to us here is 
 the service it does to international goodfellowship by presenting to us 
 the peculiarities of distant nations in piquant and attractive guise. 
 We hear, for instance, the Slavonic Dances of Dvofdk with their im- 
 petuous rhythms, their gracefully twining and climbing melodies, 
 their intoxication of joy in dancing, and we understand something of 
 the passionate delight in rhythmic movement that is said sometimes 
 to keep the Bohemian peasants dancing all night. Or we divine in 
 the "spirituals" of the negroes, at once palpitantly sensuous and 
 charged with awe-struck, childlike piety, something of the paradox of 
 their strangely mixed emotional nature. And it is worth noting that 
 folk-music, emanating as it does from man's subconscious life, cannot 
 misrepresent him as his conscious expressions sometimes do. We are 
 frequently told that the French are frivolous, or worse; but we cannot 
 hear such a tune as their "Nous n' irons plus au bois" without doing 
 homage to their chivalrous gaiety of spirit. The German devotion 
 to the Fatherland becomes sometimes, in its verbal utterance, the least 
 bit wearying; the solidity of character, the stout unquestioning loyalty 
 of heart which underlies it, finds a far more ingratiating expression 
 in those massively plain old German chorales which did so much to 
 inspire the "father of musicians," J. S. Bach. 
 
 Music does much, then, to interpret nations to each other by seiz- 
 ing upon and presenting persuasively the salient, individualizing traits 
 of each. But perhaps it does even more by giving noble and univer- 
 sally intelligible expression to the human qualities common to ay. 
 Was not Tschaikowsky right when, instead of joining the nationalists, 
 Balakirev, Cui, and the rest, who were exploiting the Russian folk- 
 music to the exclusion of all else, he set himself to study the best 
 music of the world, and to acquire an eclectic and cosmopolitan style ? 
 Is there not something inspiring in the breadth of view suggested by 
 his answer to a lady who asked him what was his ideal? — " My ideal," 
 he replied, " is to write beautiful music." Beauty in music, he doubt- 
 less realized, was something far wider than this or that piquant cadence 
 or turn of melody ; it was the result of a divination that plumbed deeper 
 
38 Music as a Humanity 
 
 than the national pecuHarities; it was not Russian, but human. Had 
 he not thus felt what we may call the international sense of music to 
 be even more precious than its national interpretation he could hardly 
 have stirred, as he has done, music-lovers all over the world. 
 
 It has often been pointed out that the greatest poets speak to the 
 widest audience, that Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante are understood in 
 some measure by all men, and that what they say is so universal that 
 we are apt to forget which is English, which German, and which 
 Italian. Surely the same thing is true of composers. Many of them, 
 to be sure, happen to be German; but that seems rather accidental 
 than essential to their quality. And in our day, when intercommuni- 
 cation has so reduced the insulating power of space, it is surely a world- 
 language that is spoken (with varying accents, of course) by such men 
 as Strauss in Germany, d'Indy in France, Elgar in England, Rach- 
 maninoff in Russia, and that is understood by intelligent music-lovers 
 the world over. 
 
 Such a cosmopolitanism in so highly ideal and disinterested a pur- 
 suit as music would seem to be as advantageous to the interests of 
 peace as it is to those of art. Since international jealousies are likely to 
 keep a certain degree of bitterness so long as they center on material 
 objects which cannot be divided, it is most fortunate that they can 
 sometimes be transformed into freer, more generous rivalries, taking 
 place in those mental and spiritual arenas where possessions are in- 
 creased by being shared. We may admire, but we are apt to envy, a 
 person or a nation that outstrips us in the race for physical wealth, 
 but in these more ethereal realms the work is undertaken in common, 
 and the success of one is the success of all. If it be true that competi- 
 tion is the law only so long as values are conceived as personal, then it 
 is nowhere more likely to be superseded by a more magnanimous 
 cooperation and community of effort than in those fields where the 
 good sought is so universal in its nature, like artistic insight, that 
 it cannot be conceived as anything but impersonal and free to all. 
 
OF FESTIVALS AND PATRONS 
 
 39 
 
THE BERKSHIRE FESTIVALS, 1918-1920 
 
 The First Festival, 191 8 
 
 Clouds of mist rolling along the broad cheek of South Mountain, 
 alternating with sharp showers which at times wiped out all distant 
 objects, and with their pattering on the roof of the Music Temple 
 filled oddly some of the pauses in the music, failed to dampen the 
 enthusiasm of those who gathered at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Sep- 
 tember 16-18, 1918, to hear the first chamber music festival ever given 
 in America. " Kneisel weather," or as it should perhaps now be called 
 "Kortschak weather," though persisting for the entire three days, 
 only emphasized by contrast the good cheer of the music provided 
 indoors, and made the brightly lighted auditorium seem symbolic of 
 the preservation of art and the other precious things of civilization' 
 from the storms which now threaten them all over the world. That 
 all present were aware of this deeper significance of the festival, of 
 the seriousness, far removed from any mood of mere entertainment, 
 given it by the power of art to minister to sorrow, to inspire hope, 
 to strengthen all high spiritual devotions, was evident throughout. 
 It was felt in the intent, almost breathless stillness with which the 
 more nobly beautiful of the compositions were listened to, such as the 
 two Quartets of Beethoven and the Sextet of Brahms. It was voiced 
 in the spontaneous applause to those portions of Mr. Rubin Gold- 
 mark's speech after the last concert expressing the gratitude of all to 
 Mrs. F. S. Coolidge, the donor of the festival, in which he touched 
 upon this refreshing and solacing power of great music. It was 
 admirably summed up by Mrs. Coolidge herself in her response, when 
 she said that in thus keeping art alive we were doing what we could do 
 best "to serve America." And it was nowhere more touchingly shown 
 than by some of those in the audience, dressed in mourning, evidently 
 recent, as they spoke afterwards of what they had been hearing. One 
 felt then the immortality of music such as Beethoven's. And one 
 felt that the patriotic aspect of such an institution as this was almost 
 
 41 
 
42 Music as a Humanity 
 
 as striking as the artistic, or perhaps rather that to a deep enough 
 view the two aspects Were, after all, one. 
 
 The Music Temple has been built on South Mountain, a mile or two 
 outside of Pittsfield, entirely of wood, some of it long seasoned, taken 
 from an old barn in Hinsdale. The seats are pews from an old church 
 in Nashua, New Hampshire. This wood construction, and perhaps 
 also the shape of the semicircular wall behind the players, gives an 
 admirable acoustics such as is seldom heard in buildings of the usual 
 modem steel and concrete construction. At the opening chords of 
 the "Maestoso" of the Beethoven Quartet, opus 127, played by the 
 Berkshire Quartet on the first afternoon, one fairly held one's breath 
 with delight at the fullness and warmth of the sonority. Of the 
 Adagio, one of the supreme things in music, the Quartet gave a 
 carefully wrought and in some ways an eloquent performance. It 
 may be said in general that their ensemble is now excellent, as was 
 shown notably, for example, in the skill with which the difficult end- 
 ing of the Scherzando vivace was done, and that their intonation is 
 seldom at fault, though Mr. Kortschak has a tendency to play Sharp 
 in high positions on the E string; but in expression there is still room 
 for improvement. This is due chiefly to two causes. First, they do 
 not yet avail themselves of the full gamut of dynamic light and shade 
 on which chamber music so peculiarly depends for its effect. Not 
 only are the fortes too steadily maintained (as in the Andante of the 
 Brahms Sextet, where crescendos could not be obtained because the 
 full power was too constantly in use) but the true vanishing pianissimo, 
 almost inaudible, is seldom achieved. At this ultra-violet end of the 
 musical spectrum, where the Flonzaleys are so inimitable, the Berk- 
 shires are still not quite at home (though they attained some lovely 
 sonorities in the Adagio of the Mozart Quintet). The second de- 
 ficiency in expression is due to a certain inflexibility of tempo. For 
 instance, the Allegro of the same Quintet was just the least grain too 
 fast for the tender wistfulness of Mozart in what may be called his 
 G-minor mood, and in the last movement the second subject needed a 
 little more sostenuto than it got; while on the other hand the Andante 
 of the Brahms was not quite broad enough. But the playing of the 
 Quartet is already so competent that it is to be hoped that with in- 
 creasing experience and especially with growing artistic maturity its 
 interpretations will become thoroughly satisfjdng. 
 
 The second number on the program of the opening afternoon was 
 the Quartet of Alois Reiser which won the second prize in the com- 
 
The Berkshire Festivals, IQ18-IQ20 43 
 
 petition of eighty-two new quartets. Of this more in a moment. 
 The closing piece was Thuille's Quintet for Piano and Strings, opus 
 20, in which Mrs. Coolidge showed herself an excellent ensemble player. 
 As a composition this is a pompous, obvious, and tiresome work, full 
 of "bromidioms," underlining all its points, leaving nothing to the 
 listener's imagination, and wearying the ear with its incessant over- 
 emphasis as much as the mind with its prolixity and inability to sub- 
 ordinate anything to anything else. Some composers, as a well-known 
 musician remarked, occasionally spare you a side theme, a transition, 
 or a codetta ; but Thuille spares you nothing. You have to eat through 
 the menu from hors d'osuvre to sweet, whether you are hungry or not. 
 
 The second day of the festival opened with a concert by the newly- 
 formed Elshuco Trio, Samuel Gardner, violin, WiHielm Willeke, cello, 
 and Richard Epstein, piano, presenting three trios: Brahms's in C 
 minor, Ravel's in A minor, and Schubert's in B flat major. The new 
 organization gave great satisfaction by its unusually perfect ensemble. 
 Mr. Epstein loves his neighbor as himself more than most pianists, 
 and evidently cares even more for music than for piano-playing. He 
 never covered the strings in fortes, and only once or twice in pianos. 
 The playing of the lovely Presto non assai in the Brahms was delicious, 
 the rhythmic justice of the piano part merging perfectly with the 
 bubbling pizzicato passages done as by one instrument. It is in 
 poetry and beauty of phrasing that Mr. Epstein is deficient. He was 
 prosaic in the Andante grazioso of Brahms and too matter-of-fact in 
 the accompaniment of the trio of the scherzo in the Schubert. The 
 Trio of Ravel is rather diffuse and monotonous. There are charming 
 passages of the same kind of plaintiveness as of- lost Maeterlinckian 
 children that he has made peculiarly his own in "Ma M^re I'Oye"; 
 but the admirable conciseness of that work is lacking, and there are 
 long stretches where idiom ceases to be a means and becomes an end. 
 The third movement, a Passacaille, is more genuinely imaginative 
 than the others. 
 
 In the afternoon the Longy Club of Boston gave a concert of wood- 
 wind music that in view of their leader's well-known artistry was 
 keenly disappointing. It was hard to believe that some numbers had 
 been rehearsed at all. D'Indy's lovely Chanson et Danses, for in- 
 stance, was played with such flaccid tempos, such ragged attack, and 
 such false intonation in the bassoons that it became unintelligible. A 
 sonata of Loeillet (i 653-1 728) for flute, oboe, and piano, a delightful 
 work, was delightfully played, and exhibited Mr. Longy's lovely tone 
 
44 Music as a Humanity 
 
 and phrasing at their best. Piern^'s Pastorale Vari^e gave much 
 pleasure with its musical charm and broad humor. Andr6 Caplet's 
 Sviite Persane is local color — "snake-charmer music" — such as any 
 clever composer can confection if it seems to him worth while. 
 
 The high point of the festival was undoubtedly the concert Wed- 
 nesday morning by the Letz Quartet: Hans Letz, Sandor Harmati, 
 Edward Kreiner, Gerald Maas. This Quartet, beginning modestly 
 last season without any "booming" by the press, has already, by fine 
 artistic feeling, individual and collective, and by hard work conscien- 
 tiously done, commanded a place high among organizations of its kind. 
 Its performance of Mozart's Quartet in G (K. No. 387) was a model of 
 what chamber music should be, in balance, in due subordination of 
 parts, in dynamic light and shade, while its playing of Beethoven's 
 Opus 74 was an artistic experience not to be forgotten. Its pianissimo 
 in the pizzicato passage just before the recapitulation in the first move- 
 ment, and again towards the end of the Presto, seemed hardly sound 
 at all, rather a presence hovering in the air, divined rather than heard. 
 Its feeling for rhythm, too, is admirable, as in the restraint, the de- 
 liberation of the close of the Adagio. There is perhaps some lack of 
 warmth in the tone of the quartet as a whole, but intellectually and 
 emotionally its playing is singularly satisfying. It will doubtless 
 play an important part in the development of American chamber 
 music. Its program closed with the B flat Quartet of Tanei6fl, a 
 skillfully made work of the Russian school, not free of the salon music 
 suavity of so many Russian composers, but full of ideas, and admirably 
 in quartet style. 
 
 The festival closed with a concert by the Berkshire Quartet on 
 Wednesday afternoon, presenting with the assistance of members of 
 the Letz Quartet the G minor Quintet of Mozart and the B flat Sextet 
 of Brahms, and between them the curiously awaited first-prize-win- 
 ning composition, a quartet by Tadeusz larecki, a Pole now serving 
 in the Polish Legion in France. 
 
 The prize-work proved a sore disappointment. It is a fresh in- 
 stance of the often remarked fallibility of juries, disheartening when 
 we consider how its effect is to encourage inferiority, that the quartet 
 awarded the second prize was a better work, as most of the listeners 
 agreed, than that awarded the first. The comparison is instructive. 
 In that projection of characteristic rhythmic outlines, wherein true 
 musical invention is shown, the larecki work is singularly deficient. Its 
 first movement is indeed surprisingly primitive rhythmically, consist- 
 
The Berkshire Festivals, igiS-igzo 45 
 
 ing largely in the endless repetition of a banal two-measure figure, 
 becoming intolerably wearisome. The slow movement brings forward 
 the only memorable idea there is ; and that is repeated without change 
 until its charm becomes rather threadbare, and is moreover borrowed, 
 it is said, from one of its composer's piano pieces (though of course 
 there is no harm in that, except as a possible indication of poverty of 
 invention.) The Scherzo and the Finale both strive after novelty 
 through rhythmic dislocations and harmonic idioms arbitrarily as- 
 sumed rather than achieve it through ideas ; indeed the latter is piti- 
 fully empty of an original thought. 
 
 The Reiser Quartet is in comparison much more original. Though 
 the ideas are not always strongly characterized, and are sometimes, as 
 in the main theme of the Finale, a bit commonplace, and though they 
 are little developed — a fault from which the Scherzo especially suffers 
 — they are at least there. The theme of the Scherzo is individual and 
 even fascinating in outline. The moods of the first two movements 
 are also saliently contrasted. In short, the work is more the result of 
 a personal impulse than the larecki, which despite fine moments like 
 the close of the first movement, is in the main highly conventional. 
 In the far less important matter of harmonic idiom, too, the Reiser 
 Quartet has the advantage. While its slow movement has the De- 
 bussyish flavor apparently unavoidable in modern quartets, there 
 are whiffs of more stimulating airs, as of Smetana and Dvofik (Mr. ■ 
 Reiser is a native of Prague, a cellist and assistant conductor at the 
 Strand Theater in New York). Mr. larecki's style, with its Wagner- 
 ian seventh and ninth chords and suspensions and its whole-tone 
 scale passages laid down by formula, is far less personal, is indeed 
 stereotyped, according to the model we call "ultra-modern." 
 
 But perhaps the most significant thing about both quartets is the 
 attention they pay to sonority, and the kind of sonorities they affect. 
 Here again both are of the "ultra-modern" convention in that they 
 value "effects" above ideas, emphasize always the sensuous at the 
 expense of the intellectual and the emotional, and write illustrative 
 music suited to accompany ballet or spectacle rather than self-suffi- 
 cient music evoking its own sequence of feelings. They try to make 
 up for the absence of melody, rhythmic vitality, and organic beauty 
 of form by revamping the sadly worn properties of Debussy and 
 Ravel — "effects" withmutes, pizzicato, tremolo, high registers. They 
 cruelly overuse the homophonic style with all the instruments moving 
 together in chord-masses, giving little relief by more thinly scored 
 
46 Music as a Humanity 
 
 passages. In Mr. larecki's first movement everyone plays so con- 
 stantly that the cellist's only chance to turn over is with his left hand 
 as he sounds an open string. Such monotony is the negation of art. 
 And effect for effect, Mr. Reiser's are preferable. His pedal point, 
 high on the first violin, in the first movement, is original and striking, 
 and a persistent figure,-also for high violin, in the second movement is 
 agreeable both to ear and mind; while Mr. larecki, sending his viola 
 up to Arctic regions where all vegetation ceases, achieves oddity per- 
 haps, but does not give pleasure. 
 
 Why, then, with such serious shortcomings, did this quartet take 
 first prize away from eighty-one competitors? Why did the judges 
 prefer it to a work so much more virile as the Reiser Quartet, to say 
 nothing of others, such as Mr. Lorenz Smith's, that rumor makes one 
 wish one could hear? Why did the audience, despite the wandering 
 attention that always betrays a struggle with boredom, politely give 
 it their applause? Let us, Irish fashion, answer the questions with 
 others. Why do many women wear furs on hot summer days, trans- 
 parent stockings in winter, hats that prevent them from seeing, and 
 shoes that prevent them from walking? Because fashion so decrees. 
 Fashion never consults reason, instinct, or natural human preference. 
 It hands down its dictates to its slaves, who hasten unthirikiiig to obey 
 the oracle. Now we of the musical public have thus become slaves 
 to a fashion; and, snobs and "highbrows" that we are, we never ven- 
 ture to disobey it, though it kill us with sheer boredom. It calls itself 
 "ultra-modernism"; it taboos emotional vitality in any of its mani- 
 festations and insists on a stereotype style, a certain kind of harmony, 
 stock "effects." It is as conventional as any convention which has 
 ever existed, and more fatal to the spontaneity indispensable to artistic 
 life than most, because so much narrower — it excludes far more than 
 it includes. Our art is visibly languishing under it; through its 
 tyranny we are losing the tradition of broader, freer styles ; and most 
 musical people, if they were candid, would confess they dread hearing 
 new works, not because they are difficult to understand (they are only 
 too easy !) but because of their sheer yawn-compelling emptiness and 
 all-alike-ness. 
 
 Is it not time for those to whom music is something more than ear- 
 tickling, who need its refreshment, its solace, its immense emotional 
 impetus, to protest against its domination by a coterie ? Should not 
 the judges in a competition of this sort have a serious enough sense 
 of their responsibility to our general musical life to lead the most en- 
 
The Berkshire Festivals, IQ18-1920 47 
 
 lightened and vital public taste forward instead of following the most 
 artificial and snobbish element of public taste backward ? Should not 
 the public itself rouse itself to the realization that effect-music is a mere 
 toy which it cannot play with forever without reverting to infantility, 
 and that if it wishes to grow up musically it must cultivate a type of 
 art which has something of import to say to our minds and hearts, and 
 is master of the varied technique necessary to say it? One thing is 
 certain. In these grim times when we are perforce paring our lives 
 down to the basic essentials, no interest that wishes to survive can 
 afford to flirt with futility. Effect-music is a toy of the pampered 
 classes that may as well go. 
 
 The music that the human spirit of the coming democracy will 
 need will be a music not to tickle or surprise the senses nor to minister 
 to the consciousness of snobbish superiority and exclusiveness, but to 
 regale, enlighten, and develop the mind, to arouse and satisfy the 
 heart. It exists already, and will be added to by composers still 
 unborn. It is neither old nor new. It is certainly not "ultra- 
 modem." It is eternal with the eternity of beauty. 
 
THE SECOND FESTIVAL, 1919 
 
 The second annual Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music, which 
 took place in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, September 25th, 26th, and 27th, 
 191 9, was in all respects a satisfactory continuation of the work for the 
 nobler forms of music begun last year. The dates set this year were 
 later in the season, and the change was for the good : instead of the 
 equinoctial rains and mists of last summer, we had bright autumnal 
 sunshine, with a clear blue sky and light clouds — and something of 
 Indian-summer warmth and sweetness in the air. The performances, 
 too, were as interestingly varied as last year, and more uniformly well- 
 prepared, while the programs were on the whole well-balanced between 
 standard works to delight the sense of beauty and novelties to gratify 
 curiosity. But perhaps the most auspicious sign of all, this year, was 
 the attitude of the audience : its devotion, its evident sense of participa- 
 tion in a memorable artistic experience, its discriminating attention. 
 It was clear that the listeners felt themselves not mere passive recipi- 
 ents of the generosity of the donor of the festivals, Mrs. F. S. Coolidge, 
 but active cooperators with her in the creation of an atmosphere in 
 which music is intelligently loved. Indeed, so sincere and spontaneous 
 seemed this love of the best in music that one had the rare sense that 
 there was no need to pamper curiosity, and that the percentage of 
 novelties might well have been less than it was; howsoever Bloch, 
 Ravel, Stravinsky might startle, beguile, or amuse, it was Beethoven 
 and Brahms that brought the sigh of relief and delight, and again and 
 again saved the day for pure musical joy. 
 
 The program for the first afternoon, September 25th, played by the 
 Berkshire String Quartet, with Louis Bailly taking the place of Clar- 
 ence Evans as viola, comprised the Beethoven quartet, op. 132, the 
 quartet recently written by Sir Edward Elgar among other works as a 
 first venture in chamber music of a past master of the orchestra, and 
 the sonata for viola and piano by Miss Rebecca Clarke, another Eng- 
 lish composer, which was the second composition chosen this year from 
 the seventy-two submitted in competition for the one-thousand-dollar 
 
 48 
 
The Second Festival, 1919 aq 
 
 prize offered by Mrs. Coolidge. Elgar's quartet is a little disappoint- 
 ing. Admirably written for the strings, as one should expect from him, 
 it contains some themes that verge dangerously upon the common- 
 place, and it is not free from those singsong over-regular rhythmic 
 designs which are one of the pitfalls of his style. Nevertheless it con- 
 tains much musicianly and expressive music, makes no attempt to 
 prostitute the string quartet into a mere medium of color, and was well 
 worth a hearing. 
 
 Miss Clarke's sonata aroused great interest, not only because its 
 composer was a woman, but because, hitherto almost unknown, she 
 had come within an ace of taking first prize away from a composer of the 
 reputation of Mr. Ernest Bloch. Her sonata made a decidedly favor- 
 able impression. A violist herself, she has written with a keen sense 
 of the special genius of the instrument, the things it can do best, and 
 the sardonic macabre quality of its expressiveness. In this respect she 
 seems to have excelled Mr. Bloch; his sonata is not very specifically 
 "viola " in quality, indeed its plangent, metallic, coruscating hardness 
 seems rather to call for the more brilliant violin. But Miss Clarke her- 
 self would probably not regard her work as possessing the extraordinary 
 musical force, logic, and passion of the Bloch work. Beside it her 
 piece seems a little nerveless and diffuse; and although there are fine 
 moments, especially the opening and the close of the first movement, 
 there is also some wandering and fumbling and a tendency to seek 
 "efEects" by the wayside and forget the main road. The first and 
 third movements are more than tinged with Debussy, but the first has 
 genuinely individual quality as well. 
 
 On Friday morning there was a concert of chamber music with 
 wind instnmients: a pastorale by Daniel Gregory Mason for clarinet, 
 violin, and piano, played by Messrs. Langenus and Kortschak and the 
 composer; a trio by Leo Sowerby for flute, viola, and piano, played by 
 Messrs. Maquarre and Bailly and the composer; and the Brahms horn 
 trio, splendidly played by Jacques Gordon, violin, Leopold de Mar6 
 horn (of the Chicago Orchestra), and Harold Bauer. Mr. Sowerby is 
 a Chicagoan of great talent and almost greater youth, whose music 
 irritates scarcely less than it interests. Without pity on his audience, 
 seduced by the fascinations of viola and flute with piano, the composer 
 indulges an undiscriminating facility, a glib diffuseness, which ends 
 by turning all his streams of thought (often sparkling fresh at their 
 source) into stagnant fens wherein all landmarks disappear. " If you 
 would be dull, tell all. " Mr. Sowerby makes everything so important 
 
go Music as a Humanity 
 
 that nothing is important. Like so many young composers he has not 
 realized that clear form is the first condition of dramatic effectiveness, 
 and that a musical like a verbal idiom becomes flaccid when there are too 
 many adjectives and adverbs for the nouns and verbs. Yet few of 
 our younger men have such genuine ideas, so definite a flavor of 
 individuality as that disclosed here, not to be obscured by many 
 Debussyisms. The main theme of the third movement for instance, 
 a broad and justly projected melody for viola, seemed to have great 
 expressive possibilities, if only it could be disentangled from its sur- 
 rounding surplusage. This movement is far the finest. The second is 
 amusing, as of a sort of reformed and repented jazz band, and the first 
 contains some charming effects, if a little reminiscent of "L'Apr^s- 
 midi d'un Faune." The finale again leans too heavily on Debussy, 
 and perhaps Faur^, and contains a deal of the note-spinning that its 
 author can do with such fatal ease. Mr. Sowerby is one of the most 
 promising figures in our American music; but he is at present like a 
 young and vigorous fruit tree that has run wild and is all gone to wood 
 and leaves. Will he have the courage for a heroic pruning process ? 
 
 The Friday afternoon concert marked the middle, and certainly for 
 pure musical joy the high point, of the festival. It was given by the 
 Flonzaley Quartet, with Mr. Ugo Ara back in his place as viola, and 
 consisted of a Mozart quartet of delicious clarity and freshness, the 
 richly romantic Quartet of Dvorak in E-fiat major, and Beethoven's 
 incomparable "Muss es sein " Quartet. All these varying works were 
 played with an appropriate variety of style, with matchless accuracy 
 of ensemble, and with the care in planning and the skill in executing a 
 thousand shades of force and color with which admirers of the Flon- 
 zaley Quartet have long been gratefully familiar. 
 
 Saturday morning's concert proved a pleasant innovation in its 
 extending of the ordinary acceptation of " chamber music " to include 
 small groups of voices as well as of instruments. The program had 
 been planned, and its numbers presenting difficulties of ensemble were 
 conducted, by Mr. Frederick Stock, of the Chicago Orchestra; the 
 well-known soloists Florence Hinkle, Eva Gauthier, Merle Alcock, 
 Lambert Murphy, and Reinald Werrenrath had been engaged; and 
 the instrumental accompaniment included wind instruments as well 
 as strings and piano. The fine acoustic qualities of the Music Temple 
 were realized afresh as one listened to the rich and noble sonority of 
 the string quartet with bass in a Purcell air sung by Mr. Werrenrath 
 and even more with the contralto of Miss Alcock in a beautiful Salve 
 
The Second Festival, iQig 51 
 
 Regina of Pergolesc; Mr. Lambert Murphy offered a novelty (to 
 most American listeners, though it is often sung in England) well 
 worth hearing, in Vaughan Williams's " OnWenlock Edge," settings of 
 texts by A. E. Housman. These poems are almost too perfect as 
 literature to be set to music ; it seems a pity to underscore, sometimes to 
 dislocate, their exquisitely just metrical and rhythmical emphasis by 
 musical elaboration — a weakening by exaggeration; and there is too 
 much thought in them too, since texts for music should be as nearly 
 purely ejaculatory as possible. But Mr. Williams has certainly used 
 them as the basis of a striking and highly individual musical work. 
 There are most imaginative color effects, as in the strange harmonies 
 of muted strings with chimes in the piano suggested by the lines : 
 
 " In summer time on Bredon 
 The bells they sound so clear " ; 
 
 there are finely realized dramatic contrasts, as in the song where the 
 dead plowman asks (in successive stanzas pianissimo), "Is my team 
 plowing?" "Is my girl happy?" " Is my friend hearty ? " — t^ be 
 answered each time with the brusque indifference of the living; there 
 is often a deep expressiveness, though seldom is it clinched by an in- 
 evitable or satisfying beauty of melodic line. 
 
 Three tiresomely inconsequential songs by Ravel were sung by Miss 
 Eva Gauthier, on symbolistic texts by Mallarm^. One of those 
 stories that always pass from mouth to mouth at gatherings like these 
 festivals gives a good definition of symbolism, at least from the point 
 of view of the plain man. Miss Gauthier, so it runs, was heard telling 
 an inquirer as to the meaning of these words that they did not mean 
 anything in particular — they were simply a peg to hang the music on. 
 A little later she was heard assuring another seeker after knowledge 
 that "the music was wonderful, it suited the words so exactly." It 
 does. 
 
 ."Trois Poesies de la Lyrique Japonaise," by Stravinsky, also sung 
 by Miss Gauthier, were not only cleverer but far more amusing than 
 the Ravel pieces. They are in Stravinsky's now well-known style, 
 without attempt at specifically musical quality, but astonishingly 
 realistic in pictorial suggestion. The second, especially, with its 
 glassy, icy sonorities, fairly made one shiver; and the audience, de- 
 lighted, redemanded it. 
 
 It was hard to see why "The Day of Beauty," a lyric suite by 
 
52 Music as a Humanity 
 
 Clough Leighter, commonplace and sentimental to vulgarity, was in- 
 cluded in the program, sung by Miss Hinkle with an indistinctness of 
 enunciation that made the words unintelligible — though that was no 
 great loss. The concert closed with an excellent performance of 
 Brahms's beautiful "Liebeslieder." 
 
 The final concert was built around the prize-composition Sonata for 
 Viola and Piano, by Ernest Bloch, played splendidly by Louis Bailly 
 and Harold Bauer, placed between a new quartet by the indefatigable 
 Saint-Saens and the Beethoven Septet. The " Dean of French com- 
 posers" has added little to his work by this latest composition. Though 
 excellently played by the Berkshire Quartet, it was so trite, so pseudo- 
 classic in method and style, so devoid of emotional vitality and pre- 
 occupied.with childish tricks like the plucking of the open strings in 
 succession, that one sighed at the decline of a great man who, what- 
 ever his limitations, has done good service to music and loved it well. 
 
 About the Bloch sonata one hesitates to express an opinion. It 
 came at the end of three days of music, when one's receptivity was 
 jaded; it is uncompromisingly unconventional in its harmonic scheme; 
 and it is terribly long. One saw at once that it was the work of a 
 master musician, who had his meaning as well as his technical means 
 thoroughly in hand and wrought with the economy and directness of 
 ripe experience. One was particularly struck by the boldness of the 
 rhythmic outlines, the far-flung profiles of the thematic motives. But 
 as Mr. Richard Aldrich has whimsically remarked: "This music does 
 not aim to please"; and to some it was acutely painful. The frag- 
 mentary and fugitive character of the themes, the apparently willful 
 succession of moods, the ceaselessly dissonant harmonic schemes, 
 making the ear callous at last and obliterating that sense of contrast 
 on which dissonance depends for its true effect : above all the forbid- 
 ding, acrid, and apparently bitterly ironical character of the emotion 
 embodied in this strangely monotonous music — all these qualities 
 made one wonder whether art too is destined to become as disagreeable 
 as most other things in the modern world. It seems an irony of fate 
 that at the very time when actual life is becoming so confused, noisy, 
 and distracted that one longs more than ever for the refuge of art, art 
 too should become so confused, noisy, and distracted that life seems 
 almost quiet in comparison. Perhaps modern music is a subtly dis- 
 guised intervention of Providence to protect our overtired nerves by 
 bringing to our consciousness the tranquility that may exist, by con- 
 trast, in the most unlikely places, say in a subway. Of course it is 
 
The Second Festival, igig 53 
 
 impossible to resent such suffering without being told that we are 
 hopelessly old-fashioned, that Beethoven hurt many sensibilities in 
 his day, and that our grandchildren will probably take this music 
 as if it were so much milk. One is tempted to reply that our grand- 
 children are welcome to any music they like, provided that we for our 
 part may only be left in peace in our subways, where the noises make 
 no pretense of going together. 
 
THE THIRD FESTIVAL, 1920 
 
 There seems to have been considerable difference of opinion among 
 those attending the third annual festival of chamber music given by- 
 Mrs. F. S. Coolidge at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, September 23-25, 
 1920, as to the felicity of introducing music for two pianos. After the 
 playing of Beethoven's Quartet in C Sharp Minor by the Berkshire 
 Quartet, the rest of the program of the first afternoon was made up 
 of music for two pianos by Brahms, Debussy, Casella, and Ropartz, 
 played by Messrs. Guy Maier and Lee Pattison. Some thought the 
 players admirably deft ; others found them lacking in light and shade. 
 A lady, an amateur, was thrilled by the thought that they had played 
 together in the trenches; a man, a professional critic, recalled Mr. 
 Philip Hale's comment on a similar team, that while neither player 
 was particularly expressive by himself, together they were like the 
 two halves of a Seidlitz powder. In general it may be held that two 
 pianos form the least agreeable of all chamber-music combinations, 
 degenerate most easily of all to the mechanical. If the many possible 
 permutations of strings and piano do not supply sufficient variety, it 
 would seem better to resort to voices or woodwind instruments, as 
 was done last year. . 
 
 On Friday morning, September 24th, Mr. Efrem Zimbalist and 
 Mr. John Powell gave a recital of violin and piano sonatas. Brahms's 
 pensive yet gracious Sonata in D Minor they made a little heavy, a 
 little bloomless, taking both the Adagio and the Poco presto rather 
 slowly, and playing as if they did not feel quite at home in this work 
 which so peculiarly demands complete repose and an elastic rhythm. 
 The Beethoven G Major Sonata went better. 
 
 Mr. Powell's own Sonata in A fiat in one movement renewed and 
 confirmed the deep impression it made when the same players gave 
 it a year or so ago in New York. Its fundamental qualities are of 
 the rarest : a freshness and beauty of melodic thought that can dispense 
 with the sensationalism, the constant search for eccentricity, that mars 
 so much of our music nowadays — that can afford to be simple and 
 
 54 
 
The Third Festival, IQ20 55 
 
 sincere ; an idiom that though certainly it derives from Schumann and 
 Brahms is nevertheless genuinely personal; a power of construction 
 that uses skillfully an ingenious scheme for welding all the four move- 
 ments of the usual sonata into one, and stands the music solidly upon 
 its feet. Along with these rare virtues go, however, certain faults. 
 There is diffuseness, inability to eliminate the inessential or that 
 which cancels more important points, surrender at times to purely 
 conventional, even claptrap effects, like rising chromatic sequences 
 and frenetic climaxes k la Tschaikowsky. There are many pebbles 
 and much sand which the composer has not taken the trouble to wash 
 away from his nuggets of the pure metal, the main themes. 
 
 Unfortunately, too, the condensation of four movements into one, 
 greatly as it enhances unity of impression and sustainment of mood, 
 puts upon the hearer's attention so severe a tax that all impediments 
 to the current of the music become doubly, trebly disastrous. The 
 scheme is admirable: Sonata exposition and development; scherzo; 
 slow movement as trio; return of scherzo; second development 
 (fugato); recapitulation; and coda. The treatment of some of the 
 transitions is as felicitous, too, as the general scheme, and shows 
 Mr. Powell to have an instinct for musical architectonics as fine as 
 it is rare — for instance, the premonitions of the scherzo theme before 
 it enters, and the dovetailing by which the fugato is made to start 
 before the brilliant run which precedes it has ended. Nevertheless 
 one cannot but feel that in the charm of his themes, and perhaps in 
 the interest of an unavowed program, the composer has forgotten that 
 a flagging of the auditor's attention is as disastrous as a failure of his 
 own thought, and that the span of human attention is pitifully brief. 
 If he would shorten the exposition a little, and the recapitulation a 
 good deal, ruthlessly reducing it indeed to the three main themes, he 
 would immensely enhance the effect of the whole sonata. It is worth 
 the trouble. Its main themes have a depth of feeling, a simplicity of 
 style, a beauty and variety of melodic and rhythmic curve, rare in our 
 music, or indeed in any music. It is a work of genuine nobility. 
 
 The concert of Friday afternoon was given by the London String 
 Quartet, Messrs. James Levey, Thomas W. Petre, H. Waldo Warner, 
 and C. Warwick Evans, heard in America for the first time. These 
 visitors from England were subjected to a trying ordeal, sweltering 
 in the sultriest kind of September afternoon, in formal dress, on a 
 platform only a few feet raised above a curious audience of strangers, 
 playing in succession three taxing works, with two of which most of 
 
56 Music as a Humanity 
 
 their auditors were wholly unfamiliar. From the moment they fin- 
 ished the somber yet noble and genuinely English first movement of 
 the Frank Bridge Quartet in E Minor there was no doubt of the en- 
 thusiastic response which they continued to elicit all the afternoon. 
 Their playing, like the Bridge music, has that dignity and virile 
 strength, that fine contempt for exaggeration and sentimentality, that 
 singularly stirring reticence, giving as it does the exciting sense of 
 unplumbed reserves in the background, which is the true note of 
 Anglo-Saxon music. One felt it thrillingly in the beautiful yet so quiet 
 Adagio molto of Bridge. One felt it in the cool nonchalance of the 
 scherzo, with its quality of English country dance. The finale of this 
 Bridge quartet is a little less distinctive than the other movements, 
 perhaps, although the return at the end to the theme of the first 
 movement and the dying away of the whole on a single pianissimo 
 note of the cello is very finely conceived. 
 
 Mr. H. Waldo Warner's Folk-Song Phantasy on "Dance to Your 
 Daddy," which gained first prize in one of the Cobbett Competitions, 
 is like most prize works gratefully written for the strings, and effective 
 (in a somewhat Griegish way), but rather diluted music. The concert 
 closed with a masterly performance of Beethoven's great E Minor 
 Rasoumofifsky Quartet, arousing eager anticipations of the cycle of 
 all Beethoven's quartets which these players are to give in New York 
 this season. 
 
 The concert of Saturday morning was rather an interlude in the 
 regular business of the festival. Seven golden harps, six of them 
 played by young women, form doubtless an agreeable picture for the 
 eye, but can hardly be taken seriously by those able to distinguish the 
 essentially beautiful from the meretriciously attractive. 
 
 The prize-winning work of the year opened the afternoon concert — 
 Francesco Malipiero's "Rispetti e Strambotti," named after ancient 
 Italian verse-forms, roughly translatable as "Madrigals and Gro- 
 tesques." When the gentlemen of the Berkshire Quartet, Messrs. 
 Kortschak, Gordon, Evans, and Stoeber, came upon the stage to make 
 this their last contribution to the music of the festivals with which 
 they have been so closely connected, and for which Mr. Kortschak 
 especially has done so much work, they were greeted by an audience 
 rising to applaud, a reception which profoundly moved them. They 
 responded by playing with more than their ordinary authority and 
 dramatic expressiveness. The prize work proved rather disappointing. 
 It is strongly folk in character, as suggested by the title, consisting of 
 
The Third Festival, ig20 57 
 
 a great many rather brief sections in contrasting moods, either exu- 
 berantly bustling or of. long-drawn melancholy or pensiveness, with 
 no striking or beautiful melodic features, no development, and hence 
 little cumulativeness or dramatic power. A passage of sawing the 
 open strings, as if tuning up for a rustic dance, with which it opens, 
 is striking at first, but is repeated ad nauseam (perhaps in a vain 
 attempt to unify the form), and is after all more suited to operetta 
 than to chamber music. Indeed the work reveals little feeling for 
 chamber-music style, little fastidiousness or distinction. Though in a 
 sense it is effectively written for strings, evidently amusing to play, 
 containing many obstinate rhythms, and making notable use of such 
 devices, for instance, as the pizzicato, it is not genuine string quartet 
 music, lacking moderation, balance, and the sense for delicate and 
 significant polyphonic weaving. Even its folkishness is somehow not 
 quite the real thing. It is not simple enough. Its simplicity is the 
 sophisticated simplicity of the over-civilized man who takes thought 
 and goes forth to lead "the simple life," or, in musical terms, of the 
 overbred ultra-modernist who reacts from artificiality not to sincerity, 
 but to an exaggerated and self-conscious barbarism. 
 
 How full of life, how spontaneously, unquenchably musical, 
 seemed the Octet by Enesco, played in conclusion of the festival by 
 the Berkshire and London Quartos! Here is a flight as of young 
 eagles disporting themselves, a music that has no theories to propound, 
 no program to illustrate, only its own abundant life to realize. It is, 
 to be sure, too long, especially when its four movements are not 
 separated by pauses, and suggests again, like Mr. Powell's Sonata, the 
 question whether the traditional division into movements is not after 
 all psychologically sounder than these modern efforts at forced feed- 
 ing, almost inevitably inducing hunger strikes in the sensitive. But 
 though both of these works were too long, each contained an abundance 
 of real music. Would either, one cannot help wondering, have taken 
 the prize away from Malipiero, had it been in the same competition? 
 One doubts it. For both Enesco and Mr. Powell are quite simple, 
 sincere, forthright music-makers, with something to say and without 
 a thought of being striking, queer, "effective," or "ultra-modern" in 
 their way of saying it. And judges, unhappy men, are weighed down 
 by their sense of obligation to find not the beautiful but the novel, 
 not the sincere but the sensational, not what will sound clear to-day 
 and fresh in twenty years but what will sound queer to-day, even if 
 threadbare in a decade. Short cuts in the discovery of excellence 
 
58 Music as a Humanity 
 
 seem to be impracticable; it seems to be impossible to tamper with 
 nature's process of trial and error, of elimination of the unfit and sur- 
 vival of the fit, wasteful and slow though it be. Tampering achieves 
 apparently only the survival of the freaks. The way of the stupid, 
 stolid public works out better in the long run. At its tender mercy 
 the mediocre gradually dies of inattention, and the excellent slowly 
 comes into its own. 
 
MUSIC PATRONAGE AS AN ART 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose, as the histories of music often seem to 
 do, that the patronage system died out in the late eighteenth or eariy 
 nineteenth century, within a generation or two after Mozart had been 
 kicked downstairs by Archbishop Hieronymus' underiing, and that 
 Beethoven was the last of the great composers whose way was 
 smoothed by men like Archduke Rudolph and Prince Lobkowitz. It 
 is true that there are few individual patrons in the nineteenth century 
 as conspicuous as Haydn's Prince Esterhazy in the eighteenth; but 
 Schubert, as everyone knows, was kept alive (though not for long) by 
 his friends ; Wagner let himself be financed largely by Liszt ; and in 
 our own days Frau von Meek, in her relations to Tschaikowsky, 
 has given the world a model of delicate serviceableness. To-day in 
 America music needs intelligent, unselfish patronage as much as ever, 
 perhaps more. What would happen if it were left entirely to the 
 tender mercies of the people? The phonograph, the mechanical 
 player, ragtime, and the Broadway "musical" comedy give the 
 answer. 
 
 But patronage is as difficult as it is necessary; to be a good patron 
 one must have not only money and an interest in music, but what is 
 rarer, tact, imaginative perception of other points of view, complete 
 freedom from the wish to be personally conspicuous, and a greater 
 love for art than for artists. What Emerson said of charity is even 
 truer of patronage, that it is not enough to "abandon your money" 
 to people, that your heart must go with it — that is, your sympathetic 
 understanding of their artistic aims. Otherwise, however you may 
 try to gloss the matter, you are a dispenser of benefits, a king with a 
 court, a patronizer rather than a patron. You are substituting a 
 feudal relation of lord and vassal for the democratic one of the coopera- 
 tion of equals variously endowed, for the realization of ends desired 
 by all. 
 
 And of course, viewed from the other side, such a feudal relation is 
 intolerable to any self-respecting artist. In spite of the highly per- 
 
 59 
 
.6o Music as a Humanity 
 
 sonal and intimate nature of artistic expression, especially of musical 
 expression, every true artist, interpretative or creative, makes a dis- 
 tinction between his art and himself. One is public, the other private. 
 If you are interested in my art, he says, you are at liberty to help it, 
 and I am indeed glad to have you do so, for I too am interested in it. 
 But I can hardly allow you to help me as a private individual. Every- 
 one understands and respects MacDowell's refusal of an annuity 
 offered to allow him to compose an opera. He was not sure the opera 
 would be good enough. On the other hand, had he written an opera 
 which someone found so good as to be worth a handsome fee which 
 would give him the leisure to write another, the sensible view would 
 seem to be that he ought as a lover of art to accept it, gladly, freely, 
 and with no false shame or inverted pride. 
 
 Friends of American music cite an example of generous and, on the 
 whole, successful patronage in the maintenanqe each June, by Mr. and 
 Mrs. Carl Stoeckel of Norfolk, Connecticut, of a three-day festival of 
 choral music by the Litchfield County Choral Union, and of orchestral 
 and solo pieces by professional artists brought to Norfolk for the oc- 
 casion. These festivals constitute a unique feature in our musical 
 life. All winter long the choruses which are to participate in them 
 are being rehearsed, in divers Connecticut towns, on different evenings 
 of the week, by their devoted conductor, Dr. Arthur Mees. Then, 
 early each June, they collect from far and wide in the music shed 
 erected for this purpose by Mr. and Mrs. Stoeckel on their Norfolk 
 estate, and for three evenings participate in choral music, and, with 
 such of their friends as have been fortunate enough to secure invita- 
 tions (each member of the Choral Union is allowed a certain number 
 of seats) listen to the solo and orchestral numbers. The Union, to 
 quote the official program, "was founded in 1899 to honor the memory 
 of Robbins Battell [the father of Mrs. Stoeckel], and with the object of 
 presenting to the people of Litchfield County choral and orchestral 
 music in the highest forms. No tickets are sold to the annual con- 
 certs, admission being by invitations which are in the hands of the 
 members of the chorus. No advertising of any nature is permitted in 
 connection with the concerts, the sole object being to honor the com- 
 poser and his work, under the most elevated conditions." Here is a 
 careftdly thought-out scheme, carried out each year at a rumored cost oi 
 something like fifty thousand dollars for the three-day festival . Natur- 
 ally it propounds to the music-lover with unusual insistence the peren- 
 nial question of what constitutes a wise economy in artistic patronage. 
 
Music Patronage as an Art 6 1 
 
 Assuming that musical progress depends on two mutually reacting 
 forces, collective public taste and the individual efforts of composers, 
 does so large a sum of money do all it can be made to do, first for the 
 education of listeners, second for the development of composers ? 
 
 The answer we shall give to such a question will probably depend 
 in part on the extent to which we consider a democratic organization 
 feasible and desirable in matters musical. A critic who considered it 
 unattainable in the present state of public taste, and who was there- 
 fore what we may call a feudalist in his conception of the relation of 
 patron and public, would point out that the members of the Union 
 and their friends are enabled by the festival to hear in three days an 
 amount of good music Which many probably do not equal in the other 
 three hundred and sixty- two of the year; that those who not only 
 listen but sing in some one of the incorporated choruses profit by the 
 active participation which in art is almost immeasurably more stimu- 
 lating than the passive; and that all, in addition to their conscious 
 reactions, are doubtless swayed by the unconscious influence of see- 
 ing music taken thus seriously by large masses of people, as something 
 more than an amusement or a profession. 
 
 To this the democrat d outrance might retort that so large an 
 amount of music, fed to people in a famishing condition, with little 
 time allowed for swallowing and hardly any for digesting it, might 
 easily result in indigestion, and that a more ideal regime would seem 
 to be small amounts of nourishment frequently administered, rather 
 than an orgy once a year, on a background of famine rations. He 
 might add that the singers seemed to have little choice in what they 
 should sing or listen to, and that they would cooperate more actively 
 if they were required to pay for their seats. To this and similar 
 glimpses, glances, or stares into the mouth of the gifthorse the feudal- 
 ist would perhaps reply by pointing out that, whatever might be ideal, 
 it is not practical to give choral and orchestral music to sparsely 
 settled country districts at frequent intervals, and that if the audi- 
 ence was made to "pay its money" it would also wish to "take its 
 choice," which might be artistically disastrous in the case of a group of 
 people who obviously prefer a trill between a popular soprano and a 
 flute to the slow movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Per- 
 haps, after all, he would suggest, it is a choice between paternalism 
 and the musical-comedy-phonograph-victrola stage of taste. 
 
 If the question of the public were thus left somewhat in the air, 
 however, the question of the composer, of capital importance as the 
 
62 Music as a Humanity 
 
 prime mover who starts the endless give-and-take between his own 
 activity and public receptiveness out of which all musical culture 
 grows, would seem less open to debate. Here the feudalist would 
 seem to have distinctly the best of it. Each composer, states the 
 program of the festival, "receives a handsome honorarium for his 
 work, which remains his property for such disposition as he may elect, 
 after the first performance at Norfolk." This is exactly as it should 
 be. The composer has to suffer no invasion of his privacy, but simply 
 to sell a work that deserves to be public property. As he receives his 
 money not before but after he completes his work, there is no element 
 of charity in the transaction, and no harassing undefined obligation 
 to torture his conscience. There is none of the subtle demoralization 
 incident to charity, either; for inasmiich as he knows that he has to 
 give a quid pro quo for his money, he cannot forget that efi&ciency is 
 demanded of him quite as of anyone else who proposes to be paid for a 
 service rendered. On the other hand, he has a chance to hear his work 
 adequately performed, with sufficient rehearsal — an immense benefit 
 to his future workmanship ; he gets the stimulus and encouragement 
 of a public hearing; and he earns a fee that will enable him to devote 
 time to new compositions. 
 
 The only comment left for our hypothetical democrat would seem to 
 be that the young and unknown composer who specially needs such 
 help might be crowded out by older, more established men. He 
 might. That depends of course on the way the matter is administered. 
 To find obscure merit is no easy task; it requires patience, independ- 
 ence, complete superiority to snobbery and conventional standards, 
 and a catholic yet discriminating personal taste. Obviously few 
 patrons will combine all these qualities in their own persons, and few 
 will be sufficiently free from vanity to call in expert assistance. Thus 
 we return to our original point — that music patronage is a delicate 
 and exacting pursuit, and that the ideal patron must be quite as fine 
 an artist in his way as the other artists it is his art to assist. 
 
AN IDEAL PATRON 
 (Edastard J. DE Coppet) 
 
 Emerson somewhere says that in a great man there is a spirit 
 greater than any of his works, a quality that permeates them all, and 
 yet is fully expressed in none. How true this was of Edward J. de 
 Coppet, how really great he was in the sense it suggests, is probably 
 realized only by a few of the many who knew and admired him as the 
 founder of the Flonzaley Quartet. His modesty made it only too 
 easy to underrate the rare nature of which it was itself the finest flower. 
 Even those who had got beyond the vulgar view that he was merely 
 an eccentric rich man who maintained a quartet as others maintained 
 steam yachts or other more or less selfish luxuries, who had noted his 
 complete superiority to personal indulgences, and the warm affections 
 which made him the most spontaneous of altruists — even these appre- 
 ciated but gradually the spirit of art that he put into everything he did, 
 and especially into his work with the Quartet : his tireless pursuit of 
 excellence for its own sake; his patient, sympathetic study of all prob- 
 lems that had to be solved in its interest; his tender regard far the 
 feelings and convictions of those with whorh he worked; his quiet in- 
 difference, touched with quizzical humor, to all efforts made by out- 
 siders to put commercial gain or the satisfaction of personal vanity in 
 the place of the large impersonal ends he sought. Once we recognize 
 the rarity of such pursuit of excellence for its own sake, especially in 
 America, where the curse of music is a facile mediocrity, we realize 
 that de Coppet's life work had a value that is incalculable, that cannot 
 be measured even in such deeds as the founding of the Quartet he so 
 loved. There was in him a spirit that was greater than anything he 
 did, a spirit that expressed itself throughout his life in his quiet cham- 
 pionship of whatever was fine, and that will long survive hini in its 
 inspiration to all who care for quality. 
 
 The deliberation, patience, and devotion with which he built, up 
 the Flonzaley Quartet, in striking contrast to the careless facility 
 
 63 
 
64 Music as a Humanity 
 
 with which so many musical undertakings are conceived, neglected, 
 and abandoned, were in the best sense of the word artistic. The pride 
 with which he always spoke of "our artists" was justified most of all 
 Jby the fact that he, too, was an artist : the Flonzaley Quartet was his 
 work of art. He never supposed, as do those who aspire to be patrons 
 of art less for the sake of the art than for that of the patronage, that 
 he could create what he was after by the simple process of signing 
 cheques. His method was that of all genuine art : indefatigable ex- 
 periment, proceeding by trial and error, requiring endless loving 
 thought, and extending through a long series of years. The books in 
 which are entered in his own hand, and with the painstaking precision 
 he did not spare even when physically ill, the programs, participants, 
 and guests of all his musical gatherings, cover thirty years, from 
 October 21, 1886, to April 21, 1916, and record one thousand and 
 fifty-four meetings. 
 
 The list of works performed, classified also by de Coppet, in an- 
 other book, according to composers, is fairly equivalent to a complete 
 catalogue of string-quartet literature, classical and modern, with a 
 large representation, thanks to Mrs. de Coppet's assistance as pianist, 
 of trios and piano quartets and quintets. There are also, of course, 
 string trios, duos, and solos. Outside of the staple material — Bee- 
 thoven, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, 
 Tschaikowsky, Dvofdk, Franck — there is a bewildering variety of 
 lesser matter, of which the following roll, by no means complete, will 
 give some notion: d' Albert, Borodine, Chausson, Debussy, Dohnanyi, 
 Gernsheim, Glazounow, Gli^re, Grasse, d'Indy, Kaun, Klose, Kodaly, 
 Lekeu, Magnard, Moor, Novak, Novagek, Ravel, Reger, Samazheuil, 
 Sammartini, Sandby, Schoenberg, Sgambati, Sibelius, Smetana, 
 Stahlberg, Stojowski, Strawinsky, Suk, Suter, Taneiew, Thirion, 
 Tomasini, Wolf, Zemlinski. It is interesting to note the change of 
 musical "fashion" from 1886 to 19 16 reflected in the programs. At 
 the beginning we note such names, now seldom heard, as Bargiel, 
 Goldmark, Onslow, Reinecke, Rheinberger, Rubinstein; at the end 
 we find Debussy and Ravel, Reger and Schoenberg and Strawinsky; 
 below such surface changes flows of course the steady stream of Bee- 
 thoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Schumann. 
 
 At the first meeting, Thursday, October 21, 1886, only Mr. and 
 Mrs. de Coppet, Mrs. de Coppet's brother Mr. Charles Bouis (violin), 
 and Mr. Edwin T. Rice (violoncello), himself an ardent patron of. 
 chamber music these many years, were present. The program con- 
 
An Ideal Patron 65 
 
 sisted of one Beethoven and two Schumann Trios and Vieuxtemps' 
 Fantasia appassionata, played by Mr. Bouis. Passing rapidly over 
 the early years, we come to musicale number 626, November 5, 1896, 
 memorable as the first given at the house in West 85th Street, New 
 York, which will ever be associated, by many of the guests, with some 
 of the happiest hours of their lives. Number 808, October i, 1902, is 
 notable as the first appearance of one of the present players, Mr. 
 Alfred Pochon. On this occasion he took the first violin part ; and in 
 later years de Coppet never tired of insisting that to the making of a 
 quartet must go a second violin of first violin caliber, that in a sense 
 the second violin was the corner stone of the whole structure. It was 
 a characteristic view. The combination of skill and devotion, the 
 subordination of personal to artistic ends required by a post exacting 
 a musicianship both competent and unobtrusive, appealed to him. 
 
 The first musicale at which the present personnel' of the Quartet 
 played together was number 836 of the series, and took place in Vienna, 
 January 3, 1904. Here is the program: 
 
 Haydn. Quartet No. 33, opus 64, B-flat, 
 
 Messrs. Pochon, Betti, Ara, d'Archambeau. 
 
 Bach. Piano and Violin Sonata in E. 
 
 Mrs. de Coppet and Mr. Betti. 
 
 Pogajeff. Theme and Variations, opus 3, A major. 
 Messrs. Betti, Pochon, Ara, d'Archambeau. 
 
 It is well known that for some years Messrs. Betti and Pochon alter- 
 nated as first violin — an arrangement as creditable to their loyalty as 
 to the founder's rare perception of the relative importance of artist and 
 art. From the fall of 1906 on, Mr. Betti took the leadership, to which 
 his rare analytic and synthetic grasp of a quartet as a musical whole 
 pecvdiarly fitted him; but he would be the first to insist, as every care- 
 ful listener can recognize for himself, that he is but primus inter pares. 
 The one-thousandth musicale was celebrated on March 24, 1913, 
 with a large gathering of friends, and the " thousand-and-first Arabian 
 Night, " as it was called by Mr. Ara, the speaker of the Quartet, in a 
 happy address to the founder, the following evening in a more intimate 
 group. One year later came an even more impressive occasion, when 
 
 ' This article was written before Mr. Louis Bailly had taken Mr. Ugo Ara's place 
 as viola. The other players were Adolfo Betti, first violin; Alfred Pochon, second 
 violin, and Iwan d'Archambeau, violoncello. 
 
66 Music as a Humanity 
 
 over two hundred friends met at a supper at Sherry's, March 9, 1914, 
 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the de 
 Coppet musicales, and the tenth of the founding of the Flonzaley 
 Quartet. So public a tribute had its terrors as well as its gratification 
 for de Coppet, retiring by nature and now, alas, seriously afflicted with 
 a deafness that had been growing for years. ' ' A testimonial supper, ' ' 
 he writes in a letter, "is to be offered the Quartet and myself, after 
 their last concert. I am very glad for them, but don't fancy the idea 
 for myself, as I shall not be able to hear what is going on." 
 
 When the evening came, however, he first referred whimsically, 
 (in an address read for him by a friend) to his dread of such a formal 
 occasion : — ' ' Imagine me rising before a considerable number of people 
 and boldly stating that two and two make four ! I could not even do 
 that. How much less could I attempt to express any finer sentiment ' ' 
 — and then proceeded as follows : " But suddenly there was a change in 
 my mental attitude ; something like a ray of sunlight broke through my 
 clouds. It came from the great sun of human kindness and sympathy, 
 and I felt its benevolent heat warming my heart. I said to myself: 
 ' These friends, who are bidding us join them in this festivity, are not 
 going through a pure form. They have something in their hearts 
 which they wish to express.' And then I saw it all. We personally 
 were to be of no importance in the matter. Even our friends 'the 
 Flonzaleys' and their fine ten years' efforts were to count for little. The 
 purpose was to be for us all to assemble as an expression of undying 
 love and devotion for the great art. Ah ! that is another thing. Let 
 me in,' if you please. And the first thing I knew I was fighting my 
 way to obtain a front seat." 
 
 To a friend abroad he wrote in a similar spirit: "What you say of 
 my work in connection with the Quartet is very gratifying to me; yet 
 it is impossible for me to feel anything in the nature of pride about the 
 matter. It all Occurred so unconsciously that it seems as if I had 
 nothing, or almost nothing, to do with the final result. (Yet I know I 
 have.) That is why it was difficult for me to understand the desire 
 that people had to do us homage. However, I was much moved at 
 the time by their evident warmth and sincerity of feeling. It "has done 
 me good and given me fresh courage. I think, also, it has had a very 
 good effect on my son, who, I hope, will eventually devote his efforts 
 to altruistic work. That is the great source of happiness in this life, 
 and my experience 'has, I think, opened his eyes to the truth about 
 this matter." 
 
An Ideal Patron 67 
 
 As one turns the leaves of these program books one finds reminders 
 of countless happy occasions that can only be summarily mentioned 
 here. There were for instance the ' ' reading evenings, ' ' usually in the 
 spring, when the Quartet's season was over and de Coppet engaged 
 them for some weeks, to play for his friends, to read new works before 
 a few intimates, and even to rest — ^f or such was his magnanimous idea 
 of what a good patron should expect of a good artist. ' ' They are tired 
 after their year's work," he would say. " If they are to do their best 
 they must have time to relax, to think, to absorb new impressions." 
 There were again the jovial St. Cecilia Festivals, held from year to year 
 with much good fellowship and good music, ending up after dinner 
 with an octet by Raff, Bargiel, Gade, or Mendelssohn, played by all 
 the available "talent." There were other times, too, when some or 
 all of "the Flonzaleys" listened instead of playing: notably when 
 their friendly rivals "the Kneisels" supplied the music. 
 
 Turning reluctantly all these leaves, we come to the last musicale 
 in the f amilar handwriting, now tremulous with the nervous weakness 
 which had for some time been bravely borne. It was number 1054, 
 April2i, 1916, ameetingof "the professionals," and the program con- 
 sisted of the Schubert A minor Quartet and the Minuet and Fugue 
 from the Beethoven C major. With this the record ends. But there 
 was, happily, one more meeting, on Sunday afternoon, April 30th, the 
 very day of his death. Though his health had been failing for a year 
 or two, and he had known that the end might come at any time, and 
 though — which was even harder for one of his active habit of mind — 
 he had suffered much from drowsiness and difficulty in concentrating 
 his thoughts, he was in cheerful and even jesting mood that afternoon, 
 took tea with a characteristic naughty-boyish gusto (for his diet had 
 been much restricted), and talked with animation of future musical 
 plans, especially of the playing of the later quartets of Beethoven, 
 the high point of chamber music. It was in a similar happy frame of 
 mind that he listened, a little later, with his family, to one of the 
 noblest of these quartets, that in Eb, opus 127; and hardly had it 
 died away when a sudden seizure resulted quickly in unconsciousness, 
 and a few hours later in death. "Soutenu," writes his friend Mr. 
 Ara, "par les sublimes id^es de Beethoven, dont une heure avant 
 de mourir il analysait lucidement les beaut^s, il s'est 6teint presque 
 subitement et sans peine, sous la caresse bienfaisante et le sourire 
 angelique de sa douce compagne; et cette mort, si simple et ser- 
 eine, semblait fitre I'indvitable Epilogue d'une vie comme la sienne. 
 
68 Music as a Humanity 
 
 entiSrement depens6e dans la poursuite du Bien et dans I'amour du 
 Beau." 
 
 Fond as de Coppet was of insisting on the close connection there is 
 between moral and intellectual qualities, he perhaps did not realize, 
 what a testimony, more eloquent than the most earnest words, he 
 gave to the truth of this theory in the example of his life. His power 
 lay in the combination of an intelligence both keen and broad with a 
 moral quality, a sweetness, loyalty, modesty, that is even rarer; and 
 each enriched the other : intelligence directed character, and character 
 deepened intelligence. His modesty, for instance, was that of discern- 
 ment, which saw the limitation of the individual as a corollary of the 
 greatness of the world. "What is so stupid," he would exclaim, " as 
 conceit! What a fool a man is, who is satisfied with himself!" When 
 he was praised for his manifold generosities, which sometimes became 
 known to his friends despite his habitual reticence about them, he 
 would first say that they gave him pleasure and were his form of self- 
 ishness. (Would there were more egotists of his stripe!) If hard- 
 pressed, he would point out that men of wealth owed much, which 
 they ought to be glad to repay, to modern civilization, because of its 
 efficient protection of their wealth. " In the middle ages," he would 
 say, "I should have had to spend half my fortune to defend the rest. 
 Nowadays I pay a very small percentage of it for its protection. I can 
 therefore afford to use a part of what remains for the general good." 
 
 It is important to observe, however, that this characteristic good- 
 will resulted not at all from blindness to the evil in the world, as in 
 weakly amiable natures, but from a stoic or fatalistic endurance of it in 
 so far as it was inevitable. He was tolerant, not gullible. Thus he 
 writes a friend: "I feel sorry for you, being knocked about from the 
 French f addism and snobbishness in musical matters to the American 
 crudities. The only cure I know for that is to read my friend Du 
 Bois, and you will become less severe with other people's weaknesses 
 and stupidities. " But that such love of the sinner never inhibited, in 
 his keenly critical mind, a wholesome hatred of the sin, is shown by 
 the lifelong fight he waged against the most unpardonable of artistic 
 sins, that of contented mediocrity, whether displayed in the laxness 
 of performers or in the dullness of audiences. He comments in a letter 
 on "the tendency of the day to palm off insufficiently prepared 
 concerts as thoroughly prepared ones"; he declined his aid to under- 
 takings, whatever their renown among the thoughtless, which he 
 considered inefficiently managed; and nothing distressed him more 
 
An Ideal Patron 69 
 
 than the measuring of artistic results by quantity, rather than by 
 quality, so common among us. Above all, his habit of judging things 
 for himself saved him from any taint of that servility to the herd so 
 often supposed to be "democratic," but in reality fatal to all higher 
 vMues. " Of course," he writes of the Schoenberg Quartet, "the ma- 
 jority dislike it, but there is quite a fair-sized minority that seem to 
 realize that there are elements of real greatness in it." He liked to 
 quote a remark of Mr. Pochon's, that even where he had nothing to do 
 but hold a single note, he could do it "for a cent, or for a dollar — and 
 ninety per cent of the audience would not know the difference. You 
 have to do it for the other ten per cent and for your own satisfaction. " 
 
 He carried this independent attitude consistently into all his think- 
 ing. He was an agnostic in religion, a sceptic in metaphysics; and his 
 cautious and economical mind instinctively disliked glittering gener- 
 alities and gratuitous assumptions. "Listen to d'Indy's advice," 
 he wrote me, "as much as you like on musical matters, but be careful 
 he does not convert you to Roman Catholicism." Works seemed to 
 him of vastly greater importance than faith; and his interest in con- 
 structive social effort, expressing itself in the support of many under- 
 takings, notably a bureau for political study and education, was 
 thoroughly modern. A much cherished plan of his last years was to 
 establish an endowment for ethical research. The great laws of moral- 
 ity, he felt, were vital to human welfare, and should now be disen- 
 tangled from the religious superstitions with which they have come 
 down to us. He fully realized the difficulty of such an undertaking. 
 " I feel encouraged," he writes, "for we have surely advanced at least 
 one inch, and we only have ten thousand more miles to go." 
 
 But keen as was his critical insight, the saving sense of humor 
 shown here, and even more his warm affections, served to keep him 
 unembittered. His intelligence alone would have made him a re- 
 markable and no doubt in a worldly sense a successful man ; it was the 
 sweetness that went with it that made him a rare spirit, and successful 
 in a higher than the worldly sense. This shone from him in the most 
 casual contact, in the kindliness with which he seated a guest, the 
 deprecation with which he offered a musical opinion, as happily as it 
 directed his largely conceived benefactions. The Flonzaley Quartet 
 is the public monument of it ; but de Coppet was not a public man, but 
 one who felt most at ease with his family and friends, listening to the 
 music he loved. And therefore the memory that seems to contain 
 most of the essence of his unique nature is that of him as he would sit. 
 
70 Music as a Humanity 
 
 in the darkened music room, among his friends, listening to a quartet 
 of Beethoven. To watch him at such a moment, armed with his 
 enormous apparatus for hearing and yet obliged to sit but a few feet 
 from the players — to see the deaf lover of music thus listening to the 
 deathless thoughts of the deaf musician, was to realize how the tragic 
 limitations of human nature may yet be met by its unconquerable 
 spirituality. 
 
A PRACTICAL SUGGESTION 
 
 A RECENT announcement that the interest on the large sum of 
 money bequeathed by the late A. D. Juilliard to the art of music 
 would soon be available for use will doubtless bring out a new crop of 
 suggestions as to how this princely gift should be spent. Everyone 
 will have a word of sage advice for the trustees, and there will be a 
 goodly pile of axes stacked up for the grinding. Whatever hesitation 
 one may feel in adding another to the pile, one cannot bear to see 
 composition, perhaps the most vital of all our musical activities, neg- 
 lected or patronized in conventional and dubiously valuable ways for 
 want of a little plain speaking from those who, in Thoreau's phrase, 
 have been "in at the life." 
 
 The sincere lover of music is inclined to resent all discussion of the 
 art in economic terms, all suggestion that the higher functions of it, 
 such as composition, can be facilitated or retarded by financial condi- 
 tions, all treatment of it as a business as well as a vocation. And this 
 suspicion of the economic approach to music is indeed well-founded 
 and salutary^ so long as our point of view is that of the composer. 
 History shows that all the greatest workers of all periods, the Mozarts, 
 the Bachs, the Beethovens, the Francks, have been men in lo-^e with 
 the process of composing, indifferent to the rewards that might fol- 
 low it; only the hucksters — the Rossinis and the Meyerbeers — have 
 thought much about payment, either in money or in reputation; and 
 it would be a sad and rather absurd fiasco if in our endeavor to aid 
 composition we succeeded only in pauperizing and debauching the 
 composers from whom it springs. But from the point of view of 
 society, or the consumer, the matter looks rather different. As con- 
 sumers we are interested to see that the condition of the market be 
 such as to maintain a supply of the commodities we need; if it be not, 
 we are interested to correct it as may be necessary. As music lovers, 
 then, we are interested that the financial return of composition should 
 be, not indeed luxurious, since Stevenson is right in saying that the 
 artist's reward is not in his livelihood but in his life, but sufficient to 
 
 71 
 
72 Music as a Humanity 
 
 make the act of composition economically feasible. And if we find 
 that it is not economically feasible, or only with such hardship as 
 seriously and needlessly to diminish the supply of compositions, then 
 we are not debauching or prostituting anybody if we set about devis- 
 ing machinery by which the hardships and handicaps may be a little 
 lightened, and the economic feasibility a little increased — always 
 providing, however, that this machinery is of a kind that will work 
 impersonally and that will not introduce any artificial principle of 
 selection among the compositions it is to conserve. We shall see 
 presently that this proviso is more far-reaching and difficult to satisfy 
 than it appears, as many elements not at first apparent must be 
 considered. 
 
 Now one need have no hesitation in saying that the "economic 
 feasibility" of composition approaches, under ordinary present-day 
 conditions, zero — if, indeed, it be not a minus quantity. In our so- 
 ciety the painter who paints well enough can support himself by paint- 
 ing; the essayist who writes well enough can support himself by 
 writing; as for the writer of fiction, though the big plums go to the 
 crude work, it is probable that work of real merit usually receives a 
 financial return not ludicrously disproportionate; but a composer 
 who dreamed of supporting himself by composition would be mad. A 
 man among us must have either independent means or abilities in 
 other more money-making directions in order to gain time for the 
 luxury of composition. The more he composes the poorer he will be. 
 
 Even in the most profitable of all departments of music, opera, it 
 is only one composer in a hundred that makes a living. The usual 
 fate is to be read between the lines of some interesting figures given by 
 Mr. Krehbiel of the expenditures in one year of the Metropolitan 
 Opera House, under Heinrich Conried: To "artists" {i.e, singers), and 
 staff, $544,153.11 ; to composers "and others" (presumably publishers 
 and copyists), $3,499.67. The symphonic composer, of course, makes 
 less money than the operatic. It is only in the case of exceptionally 
 successful works that he gets, in the form of rental of score and parts, 
 any return at all. If we put the cost of copying score and parts at 
 from $50 to $300 dollars, according to the length of the manuscript, and 
 the average rental fee at $25 to $50 a performance, it can easily be 
 computed how long it will take to get back actual money spent, to say 
 nothing of the far more material element of time. As- for chamber 
 music, it is an indulgence, like a steam yacht, or at the least a Ford. 
 In the time that it will take you to write a sonata for violin and piano 
 
A Practical Suggestion 73 
 
 for which you may get, in the course of ten years, from ten to a 
 hundred dollars, you could earn five hundred by teaching, writing, 
 lecturing, playing, or accompanying. 
 
 Thus composition is always achieved under certain heavy economic 
 handicaps; and it is to the removal or lightening of these handicaps, 
 so far as they are without benefit to the work achieved and merely 
 vexatious and burdensome, rather than to the awarding of prizes, 
 that a fund for composition could most hopefully be directed. 
 There is something tragic in the needless friction and loss of energy 
 of a career like that of the late Charles T. Griffes, prematurely cut 
 short, which a few hundred dollars in the right times and places might 
 have tided over into unforetold fruitfulness. For years Mr. Griffes 
 supported himself by the drudgery of hack teaching in a boys' school, 
 detestable to a man of his imagination. Spending his leisure in com- 
 position, he produced some admirably skillful music, and though at 
 first much influenced by the modern French style, was in his later 
 work rapidly discovering his own' individuality. But this double 
 work was done at too great a cost of health. In the end, it is said 
 partly by copying at night the orchestral parts of his " Kubla Khan " 
 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he taxed his strength too far. He 
 died just as his work was beginning to be known, at thirty-five. . . . 
 And all the while the musical papers were bursting with ' ' propaganda ' ' 
 for '"the American composer" that benefited only self-advertising 
 mediocrities, and public-spirited philanthropists were offering prizes 
 which were frequently being taken by facile, shallow writers with 
 pieces quite up to the last word of the latest musical mode. It would 
 seem as if we owed it to Griffes's memory to devise something a little 
 more effective. 
 
 But we premised, a moment ago, that any such machinery must 
 be impersonal, and must not introduce any artificial principle of selec- 
 tion. Perhaps we have here a clue to the usual failure of prize com- 
 petitions. A prize differs from a payment in that it is disproportionate 
 and uncertain — in short, highly speculative. If you get it, you make 
 perhaps much more than your work is worth; if you don't get it, you 
 have nothing. In other words, a prize is a gamble, to which a com- 
 poser, being human, may very possibly be corrupted, but by which, in 
 so far as he is a conscientious workman, he cannot be sustained. In 
 the second place, while it offers him with one hand this bait, it takes 
 away with the other the natural conditions under which he might 
 profitably strive for it, and substitutes artificial and paralyzing ones. 
 
74 Music as a Humanity 
 
 Free selectiveness is the inmost essence of art, unhurried contempla- 
 tion its necessary method; and the competition prescribes the type of 
 piece and names the date. Finally, prizes are awarded by judges ; and 
 judges are not the great, indifferent, stupid, keen, tolerant, gullible, 
 but in the long run indeceptible public, asking only to be stirred, de- 
 manding nothing but power, life, originality. Judges are professional 
 persons, highly respectable and conservative, with narrow professional 
 standards, precise notions of technical fitness, and an incorrigible dis- 
 trust of originality. If judges had had anything to say about it, we 
 should never have had Beethoven's symphonies, nor Bach's fugues, 
 nor Wagner's music-dramas, nor anything but music most timidly 
 d la mode. If we want to discover any potent new personalities in the 
 future, we had better put on their scent, not the judges, instinctively 
 playing the "safe and sane," but the public, so wholesomely indiffer- 
 ent to correctness, so eagerly sensitive to power. 
 
 While no system can be safeguarded against all errors and mis- 
 carriages a plan has recently been suggested which might meet the 
 needs of the situation, and would certainly avoid the more glaring 
 evils of the prize competition. 
 
 Composers should be invited to send their works to certain central 
 ofifices, which could easily be maintained in connection with public 
 libraries or with musical bureaus in important musical centers, say, to 
 begin with. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, 
 Detroit, and San Francisco. Directors of orchestra and chamber- 
 music organizations should be asked to refer to these collections for 
 novelties. Whenever a director found a work which, with his experi- 
 ence of the public taste, he considered worth producing, he should 
 notify the trustees of the fund, who would, upon the performance of 
 his work, pay to the composer a lump sum, say five hundred dollars 
 for a symphony and two hundred and fifty dollars for a symphonic 
 poem or for a string quartet or other large chamber-music work. 
 Due precaution should of course be taken that only performing organ- 
 izations of recognized standing should be allowed to nominate 
 composers. 
 
 Simple as this plan is, it has a number of far-reaching advantages 
 tha,t will appear the more as one meditates its probable working out in 
 practice. First of all, it gets as near the source of lastingly correct 
 judgment of merit — the general public — as it seems in any way pos- 
 sible to get, by calling on the practical, experienced, and non-academic 
 judgment of performing directors, eliciting their cooperation by 
 
A Practical Suggestion 75 
 
 ministering to their natural desire to find novelties of worth. Simi- 
 larly their experience guarantees, as far as possible, the prompt elimi- 
 nation of all that mass of botch-work which always forms such a 
 preliminary impediment in all plans for aiding composition. Thus 
 the chance of finding the really original and vigorous works, of dis- 
 entangling them from the half-baked stuff on the one hand and from 
 the merely clever reflections of prevailing modes on the other, seems 
 better here than in plans less closely correlated to the play of supply 
 and demand. 
 
 The conditions under which the composer would work would be 
 similarly favorable to the production of his best. His freedom would 
 be complete. He could write anything that it occurred to him to 
 write, finish it without hurry, and revise it at leisure. There would be 
 nothing speculative in the transaction, no demoralizing suggestion of 
 big plums being held in reserve to reward big effects. On the con- 
 trary, the whole affair would be quite simple and businesslike. John 
 Smith would know that if he wrote a quartet for strings that the 
 Flonzaley Quartet, let us say, considered good enough to play, he 
 would receive enough for it to pay for copying score and parts and 
 give him a little return for his time — not very much, but possibly 
 enough to justify him in spending time on another quartet by and 
 by. In fact, the money return would be sufficient to help the man with 
 a real vocation for composing to gratify it, to his own happiness and 
 the great benefit of society, and not enough to tempt the bounders 
 and the gamblers to waste their time perpetrating "prize-winners." 
 Isn't that about the effect we want to have on composition, so far as 
 financial matters have any effect at all on artistic production? If 
 Griffes had received a small payment for some of his earlier works, 
 played by the BarrSre Ensemble, the Flonzaley Quartet, and other 
 well-known groups, might he not have driven himself a little less in 
 copying the parts of ' ' Kubla Khan " ? At any rate it would be inter- 
 esting to see such a plan given a fair trial. It would probably do less 
 harm, and might do far more good, than the prize competitions. 
 
A SOCIETY FOR PUBLICATION 
 
 "If I knew that a man was coming to my house, "says Thoreauin 
 "Walden," "with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run 
 for my life." That is the way the American composer is inclined to 
 feel nowadaiys. There is something terrifying about being made the 
 object of a movement, or, as it is now called, a "drive"; and one 
 blinks at being suddenly dragged into glaring daylight after a long 
 period of complete and in some ways wholesome obscurity. One may 
 remember Emerson's word, truer now even than when he wrote it: 
 " Forewarned that the vice of the times and the country is an excessive 
 pretension, let us seek the shade, and find wisdom in neglect"; and 
 this friendly shade, this independence-giving neglect may seem to be 
 of the kind of blessings that brighten as they take their flight. The 
 absurdity, too, of subjecting art, the value of which resides entirely 
 in its quality, to quantitative influences such as "propaganda," votes, 
 prizes, may amuse for a while, but disgusts when it begins to blur 
 distinctions and confound standards. Better to be ignored than to be 
 boomed! "Bach did not happen," points out Mr. Arthur Whiting, 
 in his pitiless way, "because the Ladies' Monday Musical of Eisen- 
 ach joined with the Chromatic Club of Weimar and the G Clefs of 
 Cothen in passing resolutions, first, that compositions of native com- 
 posers should be heard with more interest; and second, that these 
 societies hereby pledge themselves to prefer the domestic output to 
 the imported Italian product; and third, that they hereby censure 
 that snobbishness which believes in the superiority of foreign music." 
 We have, perhaps, had too much "intervention" and too little 
 "watchful waiting." 
 
 We may well be on our guard then against all schemes to secure 
 audiences for the American composer by legislative enactment, or to 
 make listening to American composition a sort of tax on the privilege 
 of being American. This side of the matter can hardly be too often 
 or too strongly stated, in view of the harm likely to be done by well- 
 meant but inept attempts to "railroad through" American music. 
 
 76 
 
A Society for Publication 77 
 
 Yet there is another side that also deserves consideration. While a 
 composer, if he be wise, will leave his obscurity not without regret, 
 he will never, if he be in earnest, hesitate to leave it; for art is com- 
 munication and his art will always be incomplete until it has been 
 received and understood, not by his friends and relatives but by an 
 impersonal public. And as for the public, it too will desire such a 
 relation; for while" chauvinism is folly, interest in our native art just 
 because it is ours is natural and entirely legitimate, and worth cultiva- 
 ting even at the expense of considerable boredom at times. In short, 
 it is desirable that a considerable volume of American-made music 
 should be produced and heard. Most of it will be ephemeral; some of 
 it may survive; but unless it is written, played, and listened to there 
 will be little chance for something better gradually to emerge. An 
 American traveling in Europe is likely to be especially struck with 
 the amount of this free experimentation that goes on there. In Paris, 
 for instance, you can go all winter to the concerts of the Soci6t6 Na- 
 tionale and the Soci6t6 Musicale Ind^pendante, and hear new works 
 of French and other composers being tried out. Most of them, of 
 course, are indescribably dull ; it gives one a new admiration for French 
 intellectual curiosity and esprit de corps that it can survive such or- 
 deals; but once in a long time there emerges a masterpiece. 
 
 Here at home we have little of this insatiable Gallic curiosity. 
 These passionate likes and dislikes about so impersonal a thing as art 
 that drive a Frenchman to violent gesticulation, shouting, hissing, 
 profanity, and sometimes duels, inspire in the average Anglo-Saxon a 
 sense of superiority that is perhaps oftener than he suspects an un- 
 conscious effort to compensate himself for losing so much fun. We 
 incline rather to the " safe and sane." Let a symphony, symphonic 
 poem, or string quartet only be imported through the usual 
 channels, endorsed as correct by the European public, and we will 
 listen to it patiently, and with a sense of done duty and freedom from 
 sin, but hardly presuming to ask ourselves whether we like it or not, 
 still less why. But expect us to listen to the lucubrations of Tom, 
 Dick, and Harry, our own brothers and cousins, and we feel our 
 dignity as concert-goers is impugned. Would you have us behave 
 as if a concert were a game of baseball ? One is sometimes tempted 
 to retort that if audiences would only behave a little more that way 
 our native music might begin to show something of the vitality of 
 the national game. 
 
 Perhaps one reason for their indifference is that the music of our 
 
78 Music as a Humanity 
 
 composers, at least in the serious forms, has hitherto been with diffi- 
 culty accessible. Piano music and songs are almost too easily pub- 
 lished, but he is a brave publisher who can look a string quartet in the 
 eye. Yet good string quartets have been written by Americans and 
 circulated in manuscript until the paper or the composer's patience 
 wore out. We may hail, therefore, as a step towards a better status 
 for our chamber music, the recent foundation of a Society for the 
 Publication of American Music of which Mr. John Alden Carpenter is 
 president, which states in its prospectus that it is its object, not "to 
 coddle the American composer nor to make access to the public easy 
 for music that is technically crude, barren of inspiration, or forgetful of 
 artistic ideals," but "to widen and deepen interest in the larger forms 
 of good concert music by American composers." That this aim will 
 really be maintained we are encouraged to hope by the high standing 
 of the members of the jury who will decide what shall be published: 
 George Barr^re, Harold Bauer, Adolfo Betti, George W. Chadwick, 
 Rubin Goldmark, Hugo Kortschak, Frederick A. Stock, and Deems 
 Taylor. 
 
 May we hope that the Society for the Publication of American 
 Music will do for chamber music in this country what the Soci6t^ 
 Nationale did for it in France and what Belaiefi did for it in Russia? 
 Time alone can show. 
 
OF /ESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 79 
 
VERNON LEE ON MUSICAL ESTHETICS 
 
 It is now more than a quarter of a century' since Edmund Gurney, 
 in his remarkable book, "The Power of Sound," demonstrated how 
 the gulf that had long separated the psychological theorist from the 
 practicing musician might be bridged, how the fallacies born of de- 
 ductive reasoning might be exposed by a fearless observation and 
 study of facts, and how on the ground thus cleared a valid musical 
 aesthetics might gradually be built. If Gurney 's own work was largely 
 negative, if his keen insight discovered less new truth than old error, 
 he at least saw where the essential problem of music lay, and by dis- 
 encumbering it of all the a priori theories, question-begging explana- 
 tions, and tangles of side issues that had obscured it, gave an immense 
 impetus to the more fruitful investigations of later students. That 
 these investigations have since 1880 proceeded apace, that they have 
 been helpfully guided by the principles of general esthetics ascertained 
 during the same period, and that they have already reaped a consider- 
 able harvest of positive truth becomes at once evident to the reader 
 of an article by Vernon Lee,^ in the Quarterly Review for January, 
 1906, entitled "The Riddle of Music." This article takes 
 the form of a review of some standard and some recent books, 
 with important supplementary discussion. A starting-point is 
 found in those portions of Hanslick's "Vom Musikalisch-Schonen" 
 and of Gurney 's "The Power of Sound," which still remain valid; 
 to this is added what seems fruitful in M. Lionel Dauriac's "Essai sur 
 I'Esprit Musical" (Paris, 1904); the general psychological theories of 
 Ribot, Lipps, James, and others are skillfully made to throw their light 
 on the special topic in hand; and the whole argument is drawn to a 
 
 ' This essay appeared in the New Music Review for May and June, 1906, 
 and is here reprinted without material change, since its main contentions remain as 
 true as ever, and apparently as little recognized by music critics and the general 
 public. 
 
 ' Pseudonym of Violet Paget, well-known as a writer on artistic and aesthetic 
 topics since the appearance of her "Belcaro "in 1881. 
 6 81 
 
82 Music as a Humanity 
 
 focus in the original thought of the reviewer, who is as independent in 
 treatment as she is lucid and thorough in exposition. The result is 
 one of the most comprehensive, sound, and suggestive of recent con- 
 tributions to music psychology, one which everyone interested in the 
 how and why of musical effect will wish to read in its entirety. As it 
 may not be available to all, howeyer, a brief, and necessarily incom- 
 plete, summary of its main features may prove of service. 
 
 It begins with a discrimination between the two fundamental 
 characters or aspects of music now distinguished by almost all writers : 
 expression and form. "Music represents two sets of psychological 
 phenomena. It can suggest and stimulate feelings akin to those pro- 
 duced by the vicissitudes of real life; and it can interest, fascinate, 
 delight, or weary and displease, by what we can only call the purely 
 musical quality of its sound patterns. Music thus awakens two 
 different kinds of emotion — a dramatic one referred to its expressive- 
 ness, and an assthetic one connected with the presence or absence of 
 what is known as beauty " (pp. 208-209). After pointing out the con- 
 fusion which has been introduced into musical criticism by the close- 
 ness of interplay of these two sets of phenomena, and by the relative 
 richness and definiteness of the vocabulary of human feeling, as com- 
 pared with the poverty and vagueness of the nomenclature of aesthetic 
 form, the writer proceeds to examine the best available explanations 
 of these two modes of effect, treating first expression and then form. 
 
 The main factors of the expressive power of music are found, in 
 accordance with Hanslick and Gurney, to be first, the nerve stimulus 
 of mere sound, and second, the emotional impressiveness of sound 
 measured in time (pace and rhythm). Sound in itself, and particu- 
 larly musical sound, is on account of its intermittent character, a 
 potent stimulant to the general nervous tone. Auditory impressions 
 are more exciting than visual in the ratio of their comparative infre- 
 quency; and musical, i. e., artificial, sounds are of course even more 
 infrequent, and hence more affecting, than natural noises. Further- 
 more, it seems likely that the nerves of hearing are enmeshed with the 
 nerves controlling the movements of the larger viscera : and if this be 
 indeed the case, "Sound impressions may provoke massive and un- 
 localizable conditions such as invariably accompany emotion" (p. 
 211). As for the effect of pace and rhythm, ' ' we need for our musical 
 aesthetics nothing beyond the universally recognized fact that degrees 
 of quickness and slowness, like degrees of recurrence of stress and of 
 relief, are .ultimately connected with all the modes of being of the in- 
 
Vernon Lee on Musical Esthetics 83 
 
 dividual body and soul," as for example, bodily movements, the func- 
 tions of the heart and lungs, and even the mental processes of attention 
 and effort, all in their various ways rhythmical. The theories of 
 Ribot and James are then adduced to prove that abstract emotions, 
 physiologically connected with general visceral conditions and sensa- 
 tions, are not only memorable apart from their concrete circumstances, 
 but arerevivable by the fresh establishment of the appropriate visceral 
 conditions. Finally, "By an inevitable association of functions, the 
 emotional memory thus evoked and reinforced by music brings up 
 with it the ideas, the images, the situations which in each individual 
 soul have accompanied in real life similar emotional conditions. Thus 
 it comes about that music, which has no meaning of its own, save the 
 vaguest indications of varieties of movement, yet speaks to many of 
 us the secrets of our very heart and life, secrets only the more precious 
 that they are our own, and told to us in the terms of our own desires 
 and needs, with the imagery of our own joys and sufferings " (p. 216). 
 
 With this we have before us what seems a satisfying account of the 
 essential elements in the purely emotional effect of music, viz. :. the 
 primal nervous stimulus of the mere sound; the compelling power of 
 pace and rhythm, establishing in the listener their various kinds of 
 movement; the arousal, thus, directly and without intellectual media- 
 tion, of general or abstract emotional states ; and finally, the indirect 
 arousal, through association, of those particular images and ideas 
 which, in each individual's experience, have once formed the settings 
 of such emotional states. We catch glimpses at this point of many 
 inviting side paths which it would vastly interest us to explore; but 
 our author, bent on the main line of the argument, hurries us on to 
 the consideration of the second, and even more vital, problem of 
 musical effect, the problem of form. "Since the expressive function 
 of music," she remarks, "is most akin to daily life, most easily 
 described, and therefore thought of, in the vocabulary of general 
 experience, it is the one which occupies most space in all that has 
 been said and written and thought about music, masking, with its 
 famihar facts of human vicissitudes, the other great function of music; 
 so that emotional suggestion usurps the credit and explains the mir- 
 acles of musical form with all its beauty, grandeur, and splendor" 
 (p. 216). The older aesthetics, we are told, habitually confused, in 
 music, the audible pattern (form) with the suggested emotion (ex- 
 pression), and, in plastic art, visible pattern with the object repre- 
 sented. But so far, in truth, are the audible pattern and the suggested 
 
84 Music as a Humanity 
 
 emotion from being one, that their relative prominence in any given 
 piece of music is apt to be in an inverse ratio. "For not only can the 
 same degree of emotional suggestiveness be attained by compositions 
 of wholly difiEerent musical merit . . . but, what is more significant, 
 the emotional appeal of music is usually greater with half-attentive 
 and self-engrossed listeners than with real musicians following atten- 
 tively each complex and coordinated beauty of a great composition" 
 (p. 216). Hence it is of capital importance to insist on the distinction 
 between expression and form, and on the peculiar significance of the 
 latter. "Beauty of form, in and out of art, is an independent phe- 
 nomenon, requiring special study" (p. 218). "Why, apart from every 
 coincident influence, there are qualities of form which attract and 
 satisfy, and others which dissatisfy and repel," this is "the essential 
 and distinctive problem of all sesthetics, to which psychology will 
 have to return over and over again" (p. 219). 
 
 Of the author's own hypothesis as to the modus operandi of aes- 
 thetic form, which occupies the next eight pages of her essay, and 
 which is in part founded on the theories of Gurney, Dauriac, and Lipps, 
 a detailed account cannot be given here. It is almost as abstruse as 
 it is ingenious, and involves many psychological technicalities.' 
 Moreover, by her own admission, "We cannot hope at present for 
 anything beyond speculation on this subject." 
 
 Passing over this more technical section of the essay, then, without 
 further comment than that it is an admirable opening wedge for future 
 discussion, we come to what, for the general reader, is undoubtedly 
 the most illuminating portion of the entire paper. This is the recapit- 
 ulation of the main points near the end, and the concluding hint as 
 to the bearing of these points upon musical taste and education, and 
 upon the social and moral values of music. Here we may let the author 
 speak for herself. 
 
 "The first kind of emotion [that resulting from 'expression'] is 
 essentially personal, the second [that resulting from Eesthetic beauty], 
 essentially impersonal ; the first leads away from the music to the ex- 
 
 ' Suffice it to say that Vernon Lee takes as a basis Theodor Lipps's theory that the 
 perception of visual form depends on "Einfiihlung," or the attribution to a given 
 form of the qualities associated with the sensations aroused in the observer by a 
 sympathetic following out of this form's suggestions of bodily movement. The 
 beauty of the form, Lipps believes, depends on the favorability of these movements 
 to the welfare of the organism. ' Dauriac's interesting but unconvincing conception 
 of an "'audible space" is then utilized to extend this explanation to musical forms. 
 
Vernon Lee on Musical /Esthetics 85 
 
 perience and interests of the hearer, while the second adheres to the 
 music with an exclusiveness proportionate to the purely aesthetic 
 delight; the first is as various as the emotional experience and condi- 
 tion of the individual hearer, while the second is as unchanging as 
 the form-quality of the composition. Finally, while the first is favored 
 by nervous excitability, weakness of attention, and the presence of 
 vague feelings of self, in fact, by inferiority, momentary or permanent, 
 in psychic power and organization; the second, on the contrary, de- 
 mands a braced heightening of nervous tone, a resistance to random 
 stimulation, a spontaneity and steadiness of attention, a forgetfulness 
 of self and interest in the not-self, in fact a vigor and organization of 
 soul approaching to the magnificent wealth and unwavering self-for- 
 getfulness of all spiritual creation." (pp. 225-226). 
 
 "This main difference will explain why, as observation seems to 
 prove, the two powers of music are exercised most often in inverse 
 proportion. For, whereas the absorption in musical form, in the com- 
 poser's thought, removes the attention from our own past and present 
 experience, a state of emotional day-dreaming is, on the contrary, 
 fostered by imperfect listening to music; our memories, our vague 
 self-fueling, fill up the empty spaces whenever musical attention 
 lapses, stimulated as they are by the power of mere sound and rhythm, 
 and unchecked by the practical concerns of everyday life" (p. 226). 
 
 "Such is the dualism and contradiction inherent in music. But, 
 in the vastly greater number of cases, the contradiction is resolved; 
 and the dualism appears as a complete fusion of the two elements. 
 " (pp. 226-227). 
 
 "In this fusion . . . lies, perhaps, the moral and social function 
 of the art. For, whether a composition affect us as a beautiful and 
 noble aesthetic experience, faintly tinged, vividly tipped, with some 
 human emotion; or whether it affect us as an emotional experience 
 kept within the bonds of aesthetic order, shaped in esthetic beauty, 
 by the presence of musical form — whichever of the two possibilities 
 we consider, there remains an action of the aesthetic element upon the 
 emotional; and the emotional is probably purified by the aesthetic, 
 as the aesthetic is unquestionably brought deeper into our life by the 
 emotional. Music, in a manner more obvious and efficacious than 
 the other arts, disposes of modes of movement and being; and it is 
 gain to the individual soul, and to the aggregate soul of societies and 
 races, if, freed every now and then from the hurry and confusion, the 
 tentative and abortive effort, of practical life, and saved at the same 
 
86 Music as a Humanity 
 
 time from the pursuit and the suspense of intellectual existence, our 
 emotions, our moods, our habits of feeling, are absorbed into the ways 
 of lucidity and order, of braced and balanced intensity, of disinter- 
 ested satisfaction, of contemplative happiness, which are the ways of 
 assthetic form, the ways of beauty" (p. 227), 
 
 It seems desirable, in view of the fact that those whose ideas of 
 the modes and limits of musical effect most need correction by a 
 rational aesthetics are precisely the people least likely to read Vernon 
 Lee's admirable paper, to add here a few remarks, such as may eluci- 
 date the bearing of her theory upon certain very familiar paradoxes 
 of observation, and perhaps slightly diminish the sway of some time- 
 honored fallacies which are hardly less pernicious than they are plausi- 
 ble. For example, we hear it constantly asserted that music is as 
 definite an expression of specific truth as literature; that the emotion 
 it conveys from composer to hearer is its prime reason for being; that 
 the greatest composers are merely the men of deepest and most 
 impassioned feeling; and that that composer is greatest who puts the 
 greatest variety and intensity of feeling into his tonal communica- 
 tions: — all this in spite of the facts, obvious enough to any observer 
 not blinded by a theory or a prepossession, that various hearers get 
 the most various kinds and degrees of gratification from a piece of 
 music; that the most musical listeners are those who care least for the 
 merely emotional burden of the piece (because they are absorbed in 
 its beauty) ; that some of the greatest composers have been in other 
 respects commonplace men; and that the greatest of them, in their 
 highest moments, have been least conscious of a "message."' It is 
 evident that theories have wandered far from facts; we have so long 
 tolerated cant and absurdity in talk about music that we have almost 
 forgotten the taste of truth ; and musical aesthetics has thus become 
 an Augean stable which it will take many virile thinkers to cleanse. 
 
 Vernon Lee's analysis demolishes a good many of these ancient 
 fallacies of popular theory. "What a flood of light she throws on that 
 obscure question of "expression" when, to the current doctrine that 
 the composer puts a definite "thought" in his music, which the listener 
 in due time receives in as compact and palpable a form as a letter from 
 the post, she says : Not at all ; the composer merely adjusts the tones 
 in such a way that they will best arouse those visceral and nervous 
 processes with which general states of emotion are physiologically 
 
 ' The true view is crystallized in the saying that ' 'great music is not the expression 
 of great emotion, but the great expression of emotion." 
 
Vernon Lee on Musical Esthetics 87 
 
 connected: the specific images, feelings, and ideas are then supplied 
 by the listeners from their own past experience, in accord with the 
 well-known principle of association. Here vanishes the old bugaboo 
 of the divinely inspired musician, rapt in thought, putting emotions 
 into a piece of music as he might put berries into a pie, and his com- 
 panion figure, the passive ecstatic listener, receiving emotional food 
 like a vast open mouth or stomach. In their place comes a picture 
 more like what any unprejudiced student can see for himself in the 
 real world : the composer a cool and collected artist, skillfully disposing 
 objective means to produce an objective effect; the listeners as various 
 in endowment, sensibility and experience as the race itself, getting 
 from the music not what the composer has put into it, but what they 
 can take out of it ; some much, some little, some the divinest intima- 
 tions, others mere nervous thrills, some "a thing of beauty and a joy 
 forever," others hardly more than a quickening of the pulses and the 
 breath. 
 
 The evidence of musical history and of every-day observation join 
 in support of this theory. For it, Mozart does not have to be a great 
 universal character, a hero of large heart and exhaustive intelligence, 
 a prophet who, had tones not been at hand, would have entrusted 
 his ideas with equal confidence and success to words or to pigments. 
 He does not have to be all that he most unquestionably was not, but 
 simply what, as a matter of fact, he was, a specialist with a genius for 
 the manipulation of tones. Wagner need not be a combination in one 
 organism of Schopenhauer, Rubens, Goethe, and heaven knows how 
 many other great men. Give him what he undoubtedly had, melody, 
 harmony, the keenest instinct for tone color, and the rest of the tech- 
 nical endowments, and he has enough. On the other hand, the theory 
 explains why A, B, and C, confronted with the same piece of music, 
 will get from it totally different impressions. A, being of the literary 
 type of mind, may be led to imagine princes, saints, heroes, and demi- 
 gods moving through some vast drama; B, of plastic imagination, will 
 see forests, cataracts, mountains, deserts; C, the most musical of the 
 three, may rest content with the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms 
 actually heard, and with the beauty of the impalpable organism they 
 build up. Something like this, we may be certain, is what happens in 
 every concert-hall where as many as three people of differing type are 
 assembled; and it is amusing to think that it is perhaps precisely this 
 divergence of mental type that makes A prefer opera, B program music, 
 and C the symphony and the string quartet. 
 
88 Music as a Humanity 
 
 The emotional element in music, then, is neither constant nor fun- 
 damental. It changes from listener to listener, even from mood to mood 
 of the same listener; and a potent assault on the nerves does not con- 
 stitute a great composition any more than the story of a murder or a con- 
 flagration makes great literature. What makes a piece of music great 
 is in truth its form-quality, its aesthetic character, just as what makes 
 a picture great is not its subject but the lines, masses, and colors in 
 which the subject is embodied by a master of plastic beauty. "Why, 
 apart from every coincident influence, there are qualities of form 
 which attract and satisfy, and others which dissatisfy and repel" — 
 that, says our author, is the "essential and distinctive problem of 
 aesthetics." On this point all the greatest composers have been at one. 
 How much did Bach, in writing a fugue, think about God, or man, or 
 ecclesiastical polity, or indeed anything else in heaven or on earth 
 save the themes and counterthemes which he was weaving into that 
 lovely fabric? Is it likely that Mozart contemplated the idea of the 
 Greek deity when he wrote his Jupiter Symphony? Even Tschai- 
 kowsky, self-conscious modern romantic that he was, answered a lady, 
 who asked him what was his object in composing, with the memorable 
 words: "To make beautiful music." 
 
 The practical benefit of such an analysis as Vernon Lee has at- 
 tempted is therefore great. When she tells us that the emotion result- 
 ing from "expression" is essentially personal, while that resulting from 
 aesthetic beauty is essentially impersonal, that "the first leads away 
 from the music to the experience and interests of the hearer, while 
 the second adheres to the music with an exclusiveness proportionate 
 to the purely aesthetic delight," she conveys by implication a whole 
 philosophy of listening and teaching. Listener and teacher alike 
 would do well to take this lesson to heart. To the listener it says: 
 Be no longer content to abandon yourself to these thrills and shivers, 
 to wallow in sentiment and bask in sensation. Do yourself the justice 
 to believe that you have higher powers; powers of attentive sympathy 
 and intelligent comprehension, of perceptive appreciation of beauty 
 in melody, harmony, and structure. Discover a power of Compre- 
 hension in yourself that matches and supplements, at however great 
 an interval, the skill and loving ingenuity of the composer. Believe 
 that there are intelligent lineaments, definite features, in this artistic 
 physiognomy, and not merely a vast shapeless smile or frown. So 
 believing, you will gradually come to see that a symphony is quite as 
 definite, quite as organic, quite as living and beautiful a thing as a 
 
Vernon Lee on Musical Msthetics 89 
 
 cathedral, statue, picture, poem, or essay; and you will at last commune 
 with the masters on a footing of equality, of intelligent mutual under- 
 standing, instead of bowing before them like a superstitious savage 
 before a tyrannical deity. 
 
 For the teacher, too, whether of performance, theory, or apprecia- 
 tion, this discussion will have its enlightenment. It ought in some 
 measure at least to discourage that false emphasis, that constant side- 
 tracking of attention from the music itself to the man who wrote it, 
 or the story it tells, or the program it illustrates, or something or any- 
 thing else extraneous to it, which is at present the bane of musical 
 instruction. The formal analysis of music, the dissection of it into 
 themes and sections, is often contemned as dry and academic; and 
 indeed, a merely scientific zeal for articulating skeletons is arid 
 enough when applied to art. But at least science is better than super- 
 stition; to analyse is better than to swallow at a gulp, and heedlessly; 
 and if dissection for its own sake leads to the familiarity that breeds 
 contempt, dissection for the sake of understanding, of focussing atten- 
 tion, of defining perceptions, may lead to a quite different familiarity, 
 to that which attends the minute and orderly understanding of a fine 
 thing. There is, to be sure, a time to analyse and a time to enjoy; 
 but in dealing with a work of art of any complexity, the second can 
 only ensue upon the first. 
 
 Some readers of Vernon Lee will doubtless be repelled by the 
 "impersonality" on which she insists as characteristic of aesthetic en- 
 joyment. To them a closing word may be addressed. Is acute con- 
 sciousness of self after all a highly desirable element in every artistic 
 experience ? Is that novel most' enthralling which reminds me of the 
 actual events of my own life ? that poemmost inspiring which suggests to 
 me only those aspirations I have myself cherished? And is that music, 
 or that mode of hearing any music, most satisfying, which stirs only the 
 emotions that are immemorially associated with what has happened to 
 me, and to me alone? Is it not better, after all, to be carried clean out 
 of myself by the largeness of a novel beauty, by the universality of a 
 more inclusive point of view? Certain it is, the music which lasts 
 longest and wears best is that which carries us into realms of wide 
 horizon and clear white light, which acquaints us with a beauty so 
 grand in scope, so beyond and above our every-day experience, that 
 in its presence our identity becomes a matter of sUght import, and all 
 that we remember is that we exist, and partake of this subUmity. 
 Religion solaces our private ills chiefly by making us oblivious of them; 
 
go Music as a Humanity 
 
 and art can do us the same service. A Chopin nocturne, a Schumann 
 song, a movement of Tschaikowsky — these, to be sure, can make us 
 contemplate ourselves with pleasure. But a Bach fugue or a Beetho- 
 ven symphony can do even more: they can make us forget that we 
 are ourselves, and remember only that they are beautiful. 
 
BERTRAND RUSSELL ON MUSIC AND MATHEMATICS 
 
 The analogy between music and mathematics has been so often 
 asserted that there is no longer anything novel abo"ut it — it has be- 
 come almost a truism. Yet, like many truisms, it has frequently been 
 ill understood. Seldom is justice done to the logical quality of good 
 music, largely because this logic is less intellectual than emotional, 
 and many people resent the idea of a logic of feeling; even less is the 
 creative, beauty-seeking activity of mathematics realized, the hum- 
 drum associations of school closing our minds to all that is most 
 essential in it. Naturally enough, the relation of the two activities, 
 each so misunderstood, is seldom clearly grasped. All the more 
 refreshing is it to find, in Mr. Bertrand Russell's deUghtful es^ay on 
 "The Study of Mathematics," the following sentences, which, read 
 with the simple substitutions suggested in brackets, will be seen to 
 throw a flood of light on the sister art : 
 
 "The characteristic excellence of mathematics [music] is only to 
 be found where the reasoning [development] is strictly logical ; the rules 
 of logic are to mathematics [music] what those of structure are to 
 architecture. In the most beautiful work, a chain of argument is 
 presented in which every link is important on its own account, in which 
 there is an air of ease and lucidity throughout, and the premises achieve 
 more than would have been thought possible, by means which appear 
 natural and inevitable. Literature embodies what is general in par- 
 ticular circumstances whose universal significance shines through their 
 individual dress; but mathematics [music] endeavors to present what- 
 ever is most general in its purity, without any irrelevant trappings." 
 
 The second sentence here in particular, through the emphasis it 
 justly lays upon economy, coherence, and richness of result with 
 simplicity of means, may be used as a touchstone for finding the best 
 in the music of all periods. It applies perfectly to a fugue of Bach or 
 a symphony of Beethoven, and with some qualifications to the best 
 modern work, to a symphony of Brahms or a symphonic poem of 
 Strauss.. It instantly exposes diffuseness such as Schubert's, or non- 
 91 
 
92 Music as a Humanity 
 
 sequaciousness such as Tschaikowsky's, the turgidities of Mahler, the 
 irrelevancies of Reger. It accounts in large measure for the slackness 
 and transiency of interest of so much contemporary music, thrown off 
 hastily, without that long distilling and redistilling of the thought 
 that alone can free it from all inert matter, and concentrate what is 
 vital in it to its essence. The indefatigability of Beethoven's work- 
 manship, as evidenced by the sketch books, has often been remarked, 
 and its contribution to the vitality of his music correctly pointed out ; 
 yet it may be questioned whether sufficient emphasis has been laid on 
 the fact that what the sketch books so strikingly reveal is far less 
 frequently elaboration than condensation. We are reminded of 
 Stevenson's " If I only knew what to omit, I could make a classic out 
 of a daily paper." On page after page we see Beethoven struggling 
 to compress into eight measures what has occurred to him in sixteen, 
 to reduce the eight to five or three, in some cases to delete the matter 
 altogether, since it proves unnecessary. His aim is always to get the 
 desired effect with the fewest possible notes, realizing as he does, and 
 as all the greatest artists do, that an extra note is not merely a super- 
 fluity, but a distraction. Hear his own description of the process: 
 "From the glow of enthusiasm I let the melody escape. I pursue it. 
 Breathless, I catch up with it. It flies again, it disappears, it plunges 
 into a chaos of diverse emotions. I catch it up again, I seize it, I 
 embrace it with delight. Nothing can separate me from it any more. 
 I multiply it then by modulations, and at last I triumph in the first 
 theme. There is the whole symphony." 
 
 The sketch books show that by far the most laborious part of com- 
 position for Beethoven was this determination of the chief ideas, the 
 "^exposition." Yet he exaggerates when he says that "there is the 
 whole symphony," for we find him grudging effort to no detail, however 
 minute, that makes its contribution to the elegance and force of the 
 whole. In the sketch book of 1803, for example, we can retrace his 
 exact steps in dealing with the recurrence of the principal theme in 
 the Waldstein Sonata. First he noticed that the original key of C 
 major would have a monotonous effect at this point unless relieved 
 against some strongly contrasting key. He therefore introduced a 
 digression occupying in the sketch seventeen measures. Most com- 
 posers, even had they noted at all the necessity of a digression, would 
 have been amply satisfied with the passage thus sketched; Beethoven 
 reduces it, in the finished sonata, to seven measures. How much of 
 its force does his work owe to this splendid conciseness ! That excel- 
 
Bertrand Russell on Music and Mathematics 
 
 93 
 
 lence and mediocrity differ in a somewhat similar way in mathematics 
 is indicated by a comment •©£ Mr. Russell's : 
 
 "In the great majority of mathematical textbooks there is a total 
 lack of unity in method and of systematic develbpnient of a central 
 theme. . . . Much space is devoted to mere curiosities which in no 
 way contribute to the main argument. But in the greatest works, 
 unity and inevitability are felt as in the unfolding of a drama; in the 
 premises a subject is proposed for consideration, and in every subse- 
 quent step some definite advance is made toward mastery of its 
 nature." 
 
 Why is it that excellence of this kind is so seldom found in modem 
 work? It will not do to answer, as some conservatives may, that the 
 free modem forms, like the symphonic poem, are intrinsically inferior 
 to the classic sonata type. We see more and more clearly that the 
 sonata had grave dangers of its own, that its literal repetitions en- 
 couraged laziness in the composer and inattention in the audience, and 
 that as practiced by all but the greatest it carried along in its musical 
 stream a good deal of sand. Schubert's recapitulations of his themes 
 are of a length not "heavenly"; Schumann's, Tschaikowsky's, 
 Dvorak's development sections are often perfunctory; even Brahms,; 
 as Mr. Ernest Newman points out in his "Richard Strauss," does not 
 always avoid the effect of watering the wine to fill the bottle. On the 
 other hand, Strauss himself has shown again and again how the 
 symphonic poem can be given a conciseness, logic, and force in no 
 way inferior to those of the symphony. "Till Eulenspiegel," for 
 example, admirably fullfils the demands suggested by the Russell 
 passage, in the brevity of its premises (the two Till motives) in the 
 closeness of its texture, in the avoidance of irrelevancies, and in the 
 richness of the results finally attained by an always logical musical 
 imagination. 
 
 The particular scheme of structure used, then, is unimportant in 
 comparison with the degree of intellectual and emotional concentration 
 brought to bear upon it by the composer. Whether, indeed, the type 
 of expression favored by modern music is helpful to this concentration 
 may still be asked. Does the subordination of emotion to picture and 
 realistic suggestion, as we find it in program music, help or hinder a 
 logic that is characteristically a logic of emotion? The last sentence 
 of the passage from Mr. Russell's essay with which we began will 
 suggest, what is the conviction of many of us, that music cannot 
 well hamper itsielf with the "irrelevant trappings" of particular cir- 
 
94 Music as a Humanity 
 
 cumstances, without jeopardizing the general emotional expressiveness 
 which is its truest power. 
 
 There is, however, plenty to account for the shortcomings of the 
 music of our period in the general conditions of the life of that period. 
 The thousand distractions among which we live, the economic temp- 
 tations proceeding from a large and thoughtless public, the overf acility 
 of production which, especially in Europe, stimulates the composer's 
 pen to outdistance his imagination — all this militates against that 
 "intending of the mind" which is as indispensable to artistic creation 
 as to scientific discovery. "No more solitude," says M. Romain 
 RoUand in his diagnosis of modern German music, "no more long 
 silent times, years lived with the work. The first idea that comes is 
 accepted by the composer. . . . Mahler's themes have the slightly 
 commonplace air of certain ideas of Beethoven in the first sketches. 
 But Mahler rests contented with that." 
 
 And so solid work is rare; the patience for it is lacking. "Let me 
 suggest a theme for you," writes Thoreau to a friend, "to state to 
 yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains 
 amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until 
 you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. 
 Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you 
 try, but at 'em again. . . . Not that the story need be long, but 
 that it will take a long time to' make it short. " It will take a long time 
 to make it short! — is not that the familiar conviction of all true artists ? 
 And is it not too evident that most modern composers work on the 
 exactly opposite principle, that it will take only a short time to make 
 it long ? 
 
VINCENT D'INDY ON COMPOSITION 
 (1910) 
 
 Every earnest student of composition must often deplore the 
 scarcity of books treating its fundamental phenomena with anything 
 approaching illumination. Of course, there is no lack of textbooks 
 by routine writers, with their lists of rules more or less arbitrary, and 
 their perfunctory analyses of masterpieces; but such are apt to deaden 
 rather than to vitalize the imagination. On the other hand, in the 
 occasional treatises one meets in which a philosophic method has 
 been attempted, the philosophy is apt to be far too a priori and ab- 
 stract, even to the point of distorting the most familiar facts of musical 
 experience. What young students most need is a presentation of the 
 essential facts of music psychology, stated broadly and without con- 
 fusing insistence on unimportant technical details, and yet avoiding 
 by sound musical sense the pitfall of plausible but fallacious analogies 
 and ingenious abstractions. 
 
 Such a presentation of some of the most important modern musical 
 forms one finds in the recently published second book (first part) of 
 M. Vincent d'Indy's monumental "Cours de composition musicale" 
 (A. Durand et fils, Paris) . 
 
 M. d'Indy's fondness for intellectual neatness, for antitheses that 
 mathematically balance and analogies that exactly match is, to be 
 sure, apt to lead him at times into the pitfall just mentioned — a ten- 
 dency that was obvious enough in the first book of the present work, 
 appearing in 1902, and that led him there to certain fallacies that reap- 
 pear in this volume. The most flagrant of these fallacies is that the 
 minor chord is generated from its highest note (fifth) downward by 
 means of "r&onnance inf^rieure." The theory, advocated by Von 
 Oettingen and Riemann (see Chapter IX of Book I), despite its seduc- 
 tive air of completeness and precision, is in opposition to the fundamen- 
 tal facts of musical experience; one might as well begin to build a house 
 from the garret as a chord from its fifth. It leads inevitably, too, like 
 all fundamejital fallacies, to a host of corollary errors: as, for instance, 
 
 95 
 
96 Music as a Humanity 
 
 that the true minor scale has a flat leading note, and that the chord 
 "vulgarly" called the dominant in minor is in reality the subdominant, 
 and vice versa. 
 
 But along with these and other perversities one found in Book I 
 a clear statement of certain fundamental principles so simple in es- 
 sence that they are always obscured by the pedantic lover of detail, 
 and important in the exact degree of their simplicity. As these prin- 
 ciples remain basic throughout the complete work, they must be 
 briefly enumerated here. 
 
 : Tonality is the sunj of musical phenomena which the human 
 understanding can apprehend by direct comparison with one 
 constant phenomenon — the tonic — taken as invariable term of 
 comparison. ' 
 
 The tonal function of a chord is the special character it takes in 
 our minds according as it presents itself to us 
 
 1. As point of departure [Tonic] ; 
 
 2. As determinative of an oscillation toward the fifth above 
 [Dominant] ; 
 
 3. As determinative of an. oscillation toward the fifth below 
 [Sub-dominant] . ' 
 
 There is but one chord, the triad, alone consonant because, alone, 
 it gives the sense of repose or equilibrium. The chord manifests itself 
 under two different aspects, major and minor. It assumes 
 
 three different tonal functions, according as it is Tonic, Dominant, 
 or Sub-Dominant. "All the rest is only artifice. What is usually 
 called dissonance is only the passing modification of the chord, either 
 by the addition of melodic tones having only a remote relation with 
 those of the chord, or, what comes to the same thing, by the alteration 
 of one or more of the melodic notes of the chord itself. All dissonance 
 or alteration can be heard or explained only melodically, because, 
 destroying the sense of repose given by the chord, it suggests a suc- 
 cession, a melodic movement. Combinations requiring, in order to 
 be examined, an artificial arrest in the melodies which constitute 
 them, have no proper existence, since in abstracting from the move- 
 ment which engenders them, one suppresses their sole reason for 
 being." ^. 
 
 [See, apropos of this striking passage, the explanation given on 
 page 117 of the opening phrase of "Tristan and Isolde." ] 
 
 Modulation consists in modification of the Tonality of the various 
 
 ■ Book I, page 108. ' Book I, page 109. s Book I, page 1 16. 
 
Vindent d'Indy on Composition 07 
 
 periods or phrases' constituting the musical discourse; it operates by 
 means of a displacement of the tonic, of its oscillation towards the 
 fifths above or the fifths below. Modulation has for effect the translation 
 of relative impressions of brightness or darkness ["de clartd et d'ob- 
 scurit^"]. This sentence seems worthy of italics because it states so 
 simply and so strikingly a principle which, despite its importance, has 
 never been so clearly formulated. 
 
 Such are the chief definitions, often, as will be seen, highly illumi- 
 nating, of the first Book. It is, however, in the application of these 
 principles to modern musical forms, and above all to the sonata, to 
 which Book II is devoted, that our present interest chiefly attaches. 
 The volume divides itself into six chapters, each containing a technical 
 and a historical section, as follows: I, the Fugue; II, the Suite; III, the 
 Sonata before Beethoven; IV, the Sonata of Beethoven; V, the Cyclic 
 Sonata; VI, the Variation. There is also an Introduction giving a 
 bird's-eye view of the classification, and an appendix indicating prac- 
 tical work for the student-composer. 
 
 The early chapters, based on a classification of the fugue as "mono- 
 thematic and unitonic," the suite as "binary and modulating," 
 and the sonata as "ternary and modulating," packed full of interesting 
 discussion, analysis, and criticism though they be, must not detain us 
 here. It is with Chapter IV that the interest becomes absorbing. 
 "Under the spur of Beethoven's genius" — so it opens — "the theme 
 began to grow to such proportions, it took on so much of nobility 
 and power, that its enunciation imposed it definitely on the under- 
 standing and the memory : it acquired thus the value and the preroga- 
 tives of an idea, radiant sovereign of vast symphonic domains where, 
 without ceasing to be itself, it was able to present itself progressively 
 under the most diverse aspects. This idea, a veritable entity musically 
 organized according to the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic principles 
 we are to study, comported itself in the work like every idea, every 
 being, every force: it acted [elle agit]. And this special action took 
 the form of a new process, anticipated already by Beethoven's pre- 
 cursors, the process of development, subject to the unalterable laws of 
 tonal relations and of modulation." ^ 
 
 Proceeding to a minute examination of the constitution of the 
 
 'M. d'Indy uses these common terms in an unusual way. By "period "he means 
 what we ordinarily call "phrase"; by "phrase" he means what we should name a 
 group of phrases or section. 
 
 ' Book II, Part I, p. 232. 
 
98 Music as a Humanity 
 
 musical idea, the author shows that it originates in a motif or "cellule" 
 (p. 234), which gives rise progressively to a principal period' or "th^me 
 gfenlrateur," and to secondary periods combining with the first to form 
 the complete phrase^ or "id6e musicale" (p. 235). The function of 
 the principal period is in short to engender the phrase or phrases 
 which express the idea, and "this second operation is never the effect 
 of chance, of mere instinct, or of what is called 'inspiration.' A labor 
 more or less long, an effort more or less arduous, are always necessary. 
 Severe and noble task, which consists in completing this thematic 
 embryo, in endowing it with all essential organs, in holding it jealously 
 in the place where it has been born, resisting temptations to modulate, 
 which would submit it prematurely to the conflicts of the 'translations 
 tonales' before it is sufficiently established" (p. 239). All of this sec- 
 tion, dealing with the genesis of the musical idea, deserves a verbatim 
 transcription, which, unfortunately, lack of space forbids. Suffice it, 
 then, to quote the striking words with which it concludes: "What- 
 ever be the destination of the idea, its essential quality during its 
 exposition is tonal immobility. Veritable living person, it presents 
 itself to us in a definite place; and this place is its proper tonality. 
 It is thus necessary that it be expounded in full, before starting to 
 accomplish its mission, which consists in developing the life of the 
 whole, composition, in modulating, in acting — following certain un- 
 changeable laws to which Beethoven himself has not been afraid to 
 submit" (p. 241). 
 
 This masterly description of the musical idea, which deserves to 
 be read, reread, and pondered by all young composers, is followed by 
 an even more elaborate study of its development, defined at the outset 
 as "the logical and ordered expression of the movements and of the 
 successive states through which pass the various elements of the 
 musical idea — the action of the themes and of the ideas, and conse- 
 quently their raison d'etre, since an idea is of value only through the 
 action it is capable of exercising" (p. 241). 
 
 Development is classified as (i) Organic and (2) Tonal. Organic 
 development, whether rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic, may proceed 
 by "amplification," "elimination," or "superposition" (imitation); 
 the discussion of this phase, interesting as it is, brings out little, 
 however, that has not already been well described in standard text- 
 books. It is in the treatment of Tonal Development that M. d'Indy's 
 
 ' "Period": that is, in the usual tenninology, "phrase." 
 " "Phrase": that is, "section." 
 
Vincent d'Indy on Composition gg 
 
 breadth of view and firm grasp of basic principles make him most 
 illuminating. Here follow the main points : 
 
 "Tonality should be considered as the place where the thematic 
 actions occur; this place may remain the same, or it may change. 
 From the tonal point of view, then, the development partakes of one 
 or the other of two tonal states : immobility or transition. 
 
 " I. In the state of immobility or repose the development takes 
 on momentarily the principal qualities of an exposition: it has for 
 point of departure a cadence which determines the key whence comes 
 this arrest, this halting-place [Stape] destined to interrupt the modu- 
 latory progress. 
 
 "These tonal halting-places, being the successive goals proposed 
 and attained by the development, exercise on the sound composition 
 of the work an influence at least as great as do the choice and the 
 elaboration of the idea. It is thus urgent that the Stapes be determined 
 in advance, and the greatest symphonists have never ignored this. 
 
 "2. In the state of transition or marche the development truly 
 acts: it tends toward an end, it expresses something, and it employs 
 one or another of three expressive processes : 
 
 "An 'agogic' (rhythmical) development acts by increasing or de- 
 creasing the frequency of the movements in the rhythmic figures. 
 
 "A dynamic development acts by increasing or decreasing the 
 intensity of the melodic accents. 
 
 "A modulating development acts by increasing or decreasing the 
 degree of light [clarti] in the harmonic progressions" (pp. 243-4). 
 
 There follows hereupon a thorough study of the effects of modu- 
 lation already characterized briefly in what has been quoted above 
 from the First Book. After pointing out that modulation is never 
 an end, but always a means to the service of the musical idea, and that 
 all modulation not thus subordinate to the idea is "inopportune, use- 
 less, and often disastrous to the equilibrium of the composition," the 
 author proceeds to classify modulations according to their duration, 
 their intensity, and their distance. Much that is said under the first 
 two headings, as, for instance, the distinctions made between modu- 
 lations "accidentelle," "passagfere," and "definitive" (pp. 246-249) is 
 most suggestive; but we must confine ourselves here to a summary of ' 
 the most original and novel part of the analysis^-that which deals 
 with the distance of the modulatory movement. 
 
 When one proceeds in either direction from a given tonic — that is, 
 toward the "sharp keys" or toward the "flat keys," along the circle 
 
100 Music as a Humanity 
 
 of fifths, the relative phenomena of brightening or darkening [" d'6clair- 
 issement ou d'assombrissement"] are symmetrical, and offer, ac- 
 cording to the distance of the progress, the following particular 
 effects : 
 
 1. The modulation to the- first fifth, above or below {e. g., to G 
 or to F, from C), is very frequent, but its brightening or. darkening 
 power is somewhat feeble. 
 
 2. The modiilation to the second fifth (D or B-flat from G) is 
 necessarily transient, "accidentelle," or passing,, "passag^re,", since the 
 tonalities have no close relationship. Its brightening or darkening 
 power is, however, marked. A striking example from the "Eroica" 
 Symphony is cited on page 25a. 
 
 3. The modulation to the third fifth is rare in its direct form be- 
 tween tonalities of similar mode (e. g., G to A, or G to E-flat), but 
 extremely frequent and potently brightening or darkening when it 
 operates as a change of mode on an identical tonic {e. g. , A-minor to 
 A-major, or G-major to G-minor). It is, however, the movement 
 through three fifths, and not the change of mode in itself, that effects 
 the brightening or darkening (p. 255). 
 
 4. The modulation to the fourth fifth (so-called "mediant-modu- 
 lation") is. so easy and natural, and at the same time so potently 
 expressive, that Beethoven has in several sonatas employed it for the 
 second theme. 
 
 5. The modulation to the fifth fifth (e. g., C to B, or G to D-flat) 
 is of dubious effect, since we are apt to confuse it with that to the 
 seventh fifth in the other direction (e. g., G to G-flat, or G to G-sharp). 
 The same equivocal effect pertains to all the other modulations be- 
 yond this one, so that practically that of the fourth fifth is the limit 
 of usefulness. 
 
 This section closes with the following resume: 
 
 "A structure is able to sustain itself, live, and endure only by 
 reason of the stability of its tonal foundations. And these will resist 
 only if they are powerfully knit. Thus all stable compositions are 
 founded upon related keys, whose tonic chords are fastened together 
 by the indestructible cement of common tones; the more distant 
 modulations, true flying buttresses, appear among the various devel- 
 opments as if raised on these firm columns which support them. 
 
 "And these developments themselves show two essential 
 characteristics : 
 
 "i. Organically, they are related to the musical .ideas by their 
 
Vincent d'Indy on Composition lOi 
 
 thematic elements: they are always dependent on these ideas, and can 
 contain nothing which is alien or contrary to their nature. 
 
 "2. Tonally, they are unified by relationships between the keys, 
 arid by the alternation of periods of transition and of repose; they 
 orient themselves logically toward the light or toward the shadow, 
 this orientation being always conscious and preestablished. " 
 
 The four general types of movement in the SQnata,— mouvement 
 initial (sonata form), mouvement lent, mouvement modSrS (minuet or 
 scherzo), and mouvement rapide, are next discussed in order, with typi- 
 cal examples from Beethoven; and this chapter of 143 closely printed 
 pages ends with a historical section containing analyses of Beethoven's 
 piano sonatas, and remarks on his sonatas for violin and violoncello. 
 
 It is impossible here to give even a summary of the chapters on 
 the cyclic sonata (sonata with generating themes reappearing in dif- 
 ferent movements) and on the variation. Not the least interesting 
 portion of the former is the critical comment on such modern com- 
 posers as Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Franck, and Grieg. But it 
 will be sufficiently evident from what has been said that M. d'Indy's 
 treatment of Beethoven alone is enough to make his book indispensable 
 to all serious students of composition. 
 
A NOTE ON TONAL CHIAROSCURO 
 
 Analogies between the arts are proverbially dangerous, apt to 
 mislead; but they also fascinate by their frequent illumination of 
 dark places from unexpected angles. Why, for example, is the even 
 division of a space, as in a landscape where the horizon line comes 
 exactly midway between the top and bottom of a picture, inferior to 
 the uneven division obtained by putting it either higher or lower? 
 Why, in a melody like "Yankee Doodle," is the precisely even sub- 
 division of the time into equal notes felt to be so flat and stale in com- 
 parison with an uneven division into long and short notes, as in 
 "Dixie"? Have the two phenomena, apparently so disparate, any 
 hidden psychological connection ? It is at least worthy of note that 
 in both cases we find a difficulty in holding together the precisely 
 equal elements : the picture tends to break into two pictures, the tune 
 falls apart into notes. On the other hand, the unequal elements more 
 easily cohere. The unevenness of the spaces in the picture helps the 
 mind to pick out one as the more important (not necessarily the larger 
 — apparently it is always the lower portion that is so chosen) and to 
 treat the other as pendant to it, so to speak. And in melodies the 
 ancillary character of the short notes is quite clear; they are like 
 trains of servants to those important personages, the long notes. 
 Both in vision and audition, then, divided attention is unpleasant and 
 wasteful'; we naturally deal most easily with what we can handle as 
 principal and secondary, nucleus and fringe; subordination facilitates 
 synthesis. 
 
 This is indeed so obvious, and the supreme importance of synthe- 
 sis in all art, as the only way of dealing economically with rich material, 
 is so evident, that it would hardly be worth while to call attention to 
 the whole matter, were not the terminology of subordination in music 
 strangely and seriously defective. While the necessity for subordi- 
 nation is quite as imperative in music as in painting, for example, 
 our means'of describing it are, in comparison, laughably meager, loose, 
 and empirical. A painter has his "chiaroscuro," his "perspective," 
 
A Note on Tonal Chiaroscuro 103 
 
 his "values," "nuances," and "tones"; he has definite terms for at 
 least three planes in his picture, background, middle distance, and 
 foreground. A composer, on the contrary, can only write " cantabile, ' ' 
 "cantando, ' ' or "espressivo' ' over a melody he wishes to have come out, 
 or "sotto voce" over one he wishes to have go back — both highly vague 
 expressions; the French have, in addition, the useful phrase "en de- 
 hors," and Mr. Percy Grainger writes "clarinet come out." M. Vincent 
 d'Indy uses the terms "fond" ("foundation" or "background") and 
 " personnages" respectively for the accompaniment and solo parts in 
 a piece of orchestration, obviously by an analogy with painting. 
 
 But how meager and inexact, when all is said, are all of these terms 
 together; how inadequate to describe relationships of the utmost 
 subtlety, subordinations as meticulous as those of Chinese caste, such 
 as we actually use in our music every day ! How sadly the vocabulary 
 needs enrichment ! For though indeed no nomenclature can make the 
 dull perceptive, it can at least focus their flickering perceptions; a 
 name is the first step toward dealing with a thing; and what we ig- 
 nore conceptually we are apt to bungle even in our purely instinctive 
 uses, or at least to fall short of using as we might. Perhaps if we could 
 talk about subordination we should less ignore it; our notion of "tech- 
 nique" might become less crudely physical, more subtly mental; "in- 
 terpretation" might less frequently turn out obfuscation; we might 
 have more composers, fewer juxtaposers. 
 
 Take, for example, the matter of dynamic gradation, mere loud 
 and soft, the most fundamental and universally recognized scale of 
 values music uses. Here, at least, we might think, accurate directions 
 would be available. Yet what do we find? The spartan " forte" and 
 "piano" with which Bach and Handel contented themselves have, it 
 is true, been split and multiplied into "fortissimo," "pianissimo," 
 "mezzo forte," "mezzo piano," and the like; but these, having no clear 
 relativity of meaning, make confusion only worse confounded. Pre- 
 cisely what does Tschaikowsky mean by the four P's in a row at the 
 end of the Symphonic Path6tique ? How much more salient would a 
 part bearing only three of them be? How much more subordinated 
 one bearing five? For, we must never forget, the significant matter 
 is always the relative, not the absolute values, the salience and sub- 
 ordination of the elements. And no number of P's, were they enough 
 to fill a pod or a basket, will tell me the precise relation between this 
 voice and another, this note and that, which is alone what I want to 
 know. 
 
104 Music as a Humanity 
 
 Iti Chopin's later years, when long illness had sapped his strength, 
 he was physically unable to produce a fortissimo. Yet, we read, so 
 perfect was his control of the shades within his power, so subtle his 
 command of gradation, that he was able, reducing the whole scale of 
 his dynamics, still to produce the effect of a fortissimo with what was 
 actually, shall we say, a mezzo forte or a forte. Very well, then, the 
 effect of a fortissimo is a fortissimo, artistically speaking. The actual 
 loudness is a matter of indifference to us. What interests us, what we 
 wish our terminology to describe, is the relation of the values, the 
 hierarchy of relative salience and subordination. Music, like paint- 
 ing, is a series of planes or values, a background, a middle distance, 
 and a foreground. If we could number these planes we should have 
 a rough but perhaps rather serviceable description of what is essential. 
 Chopin's twenty-first Prelude lias an unusual distinctiveness of planes : 
 the foreground is the melody of the right hand; the background is the 
 bass; the middle distance, blurred, mysterious, and gray as a Corot, 
 is the accompanying scraps of subordinate melody of the left hand. 
 Confuse any two of these planes, equalize the values of any two, and 
 you ruin the chiaroscuro of the piece. 
 
 The adjustment of rhythmic values is almost more subtle than that 
 of dynamic light and shade, and perhaps even more vital, too, since 
 rhythm gives music its most essential profile. Such rhythmic adjust- 
 ments are achieved in part, of course, through dynamics, in so far, 
 that is, as they depend on accent ; but the subtler aspect of them is 
 that of the allotment of time. The more important notes of a phrase 
 receive more time, at the expense of the less important ones,- just as 
 in speech we dwell upon the important words. This immensely im- 
 portant adjustment of values, however, perhaps the most important, 
 for the purposes of expression, with which the interpretative artist 
 has to deal, is so entirely left to musical instinct that we can hardly 
 talk about it, for lack of terms. Such terms and signs as we have to 
 indicate dwelling on a note, the fermata and the tenuto line, for instance, 
 are for massive detached effects, which have no more relation to the 
 constant but infinitely slight modification of values that make rhythms 
 significant than shouts or ejaculations have to eloquent speech. 
 
 Indeed, so totally traditional and instinctive are these adjustments, 
 so unreflected in the written lore of the art, that most audiences will 
 swallow whole, from a cellist, stupidly distorted, unintelligible phrases 
 the like of which in a recitation would reduce them to laughter, and 
 one may even hear a skillful pianist, well-trained on at least the me- 
 
A Note on Tonal Chiaroscuro 
 
 105 
 
 chanical side of his art, gravely advance the theory that because the 
 "rain-drops" in Chopin's Prelude are all eighth notes they must all be 
 of precisely the same duration. ... As if one were to say because 
 words are all printed in letters of the same height, the "of's" and the 
 "the's" were to receive as much of our attention as the nouns and 
 verbs. There is democratic equality for you with a vengeance. 
 
 But the aristocratic distinction and beauty which are the highest 
 qualities of piano playing come from just the opposite process — from 
 a subordination as rigorous as that of feudal society, though more 
 intelligent, a subordination that assigns each note its true place and 
 prominence in the society of the phrase. To hear Mr. Gabrilowitsch 
 play the first ten notes of the slow movement of the Mozart D minor 
 Concerto is enough to prove to anyone with ears for gradations the 
 supreme importance of such subordination. Not that the pianist is 
 necessarily conscious of it; indeed, such molding of the phrase is one 
 of the most deeply instinctive of all musical acts; and our plea for a 
 more adequate terminology is not based on the notion that it would 
 automatically turn the lubbers into artists, but only on the hope 
 that it would direct their attention to quarters where their instincts 
 needed cultivation. None the less is it true that science in its 
 laborious, intellectual way, might arrive at a formulation of what 
 Mr. Gabrilowitsch does (not of how he does it) when he plays this 
 meltingly beautiful phrase. Science would measure the dynamic force 
 and the deviation from standard time value of each of those ten notes, 
 and plot down for us their scheme of subordination. And without 
 danger of being too drily scientific, we may venture the specific sug- 
 gestion that the difference between Mr. Gabrilowitsch's exquisite 
 delivery, and on the one hand the perfunctory matter-of-factness of 
 the average performance, and on the other the sentimentality of what 
 we may call an over-ripe one, will depend quite perceptibly on the 
 length of the sixth note. If it is a grain too short we have matter-of- 
 factness, if an iota too long, sentimentality. 
 
 Let us also not fail to note the curious fact that there is a distinct 
 type of pianist — there is indeed one notable example of it now promi- 
 nently before the public — explicable as a sort of miscarriage of the 
 instinctive process of subordination through a meddling of the con- 
 scious will. "Let me see," says a pianist of this type, "expression is a 
 dwelling on certain notes. Well, which notes shall I dwell on?" Such 
 a man is sure to go wrong, either in the dwelling or even in the notes 
 chosen. Sometimes he even adds : "The sixth note is the one usually 
 
I06 Music as a Humanity 
 
 considered the most important. It will therefore be more original to 
 dwell on the fifth or the seventh." Hence arises a school of playing 
 which we may contrast with the instinctively right, and which we 
 may call the conscientiously wrong. 
 
 Applying finally our principle of subordination, or the hierarchy 
 of values, to composition, we shall find that it works out there much 
 as it does in painting. The deepest and most far-reaching problems 
 of the two artists are surprisingly similar, and concern what the 
 painter calls "composition" and the musician "form." Merely to 
 state the analogy in this way is to show that "form" is a far more 
 vital matter than that mechanical sub-division or arrangement which 
 certain ' ' temperamental ' ' critics are fond of supposing it to be. Form 
 is indeed a highly inclusive term, indicating all that has to do with 
 the coordination of the work, the organization of moods, of climaxes, 
 abatements, and contrasts, the subordination of the relatively unim- 
 portant, the emphasis on the essential. And just as the composition 
 of a picture so hangs together that the change in value of a square 
 inch of canvas anywhere affects all the other areas throughout, so a 
 movement of a symphony is a highly sensitive organism in unstable 
 equilibrium: if you lengthen this theme, shorten that transition, or 
 change the key of that episode, you may throw out the whole delicate 
 balance. 
 
 As an illustration, take the repetition of the second theme, the 
 more lyrical melody, that comes toward the end of a movement in 
 sonata form. The layman, and even the inexperienced composer, 
 may suppose that this will be a literal repetition. A little experience 
 will teach one that the music has acqtiired greater momentum at the 
 second appearance than it had at the first; it is, as a conductor ex- 
 pressively phrased it, "warmer"; and consequently the theme must 
 this time be expressed more vividly and less deliberately. In fact, 
 the themes of the composer, his keys, timbres, and all his other means 
 of effect, are just as truly hierarchies of relation, just as insistently 
 demand adjustment in salience and subordination, as the tones of 
 the pianist. 
 
 A common fault of young composers, a fault, indeed, that it takes a 
 curiously long time to outgrow, is that of packing a piece too full of 
 interest. It is so natural, but so naive, to imagine that the more 
 sustained the tension the greater will be the effect. One gradually 
 learns that this is not the case; human attention ebbs and flows, and 
 the interest of a well-composed work will ebb and flow correspondingly. 
 
A Note on Tonal Chiaroscuro 
 
 107 
 
 No one has understood this better than Beethoven, and the over- 
 whelmingly dramatic effect of his music often owes much to his grasp 
 of it. How skillful he is in alternating the passages where the interest 
 pulses thick and fast, where there is a rapid change of harmony and 
 tonality, intricately interwoven polyphony, with others of almost 
 completely suspended animation, audible pauses, where a" single chord 
 is sounded in featureless rhythm, and the music merely vegetates. 
 There are two such passages in the Andante of his Fifth Symphony, 
 which may be commended to all students who wish to see how far 
 subordination may profitably be carried. 
 
 A composer and a conductor were once discussing, after a rehearsal, 
 details of a symphony. "Do you think," said the composer, "that 
 at this point I have held this chord of A major too long? You notice 
 there are eight measures of it, in slow time, nothing but the chord of 
 A major, in an inverted form that keeps the hearer in suspense, with 
 wood-wind instruments holding, harp sweeping chords, and strings 
 embroidering, and finally a touch of quiet trombones at the end. I 
 don't quite know why I put it there, and I fear it may be too long." 
 "Not a bit of it, "replied the conductor. " Look what is coming. You 
 are getting ready for that oboe solo, creating an atmosphere for it. 
 You know how the effect of a picture is enhanced by the blank margin 
 which carries the eye up to it. Well, that chord of A major is your 
 blank margin." 
 
 Planes, values, margins : — how shall we translate such visual terms 
 into their audible equivalents, and thus learn to find our way better 
 than at present through the mysterious auditory spaces our music 
 inhabits? 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE AMERICAN COMPOSER 
 
 The application of the new science of psychoanalysis to the criti- 
 cism of the arts promises to yield novel and fascinating results, perhaps 
 nowhere more fascinating than in music, which seems to be almost 
 more than the other arts, if that be possible, a welling up from the 
 subconscious, only slightly and indirectly affected by conscious pro- 
 cesses. A beginning of such application, none the less suggestive for 
 being unsystematic, fragmentary, and tentative, was made by Mr. 
 Paul Rosenf eld in his brilliant first volume, ' ' Musical Portraits. ' ' Take 
 for example the case of Rimsky-Korsakoff, in one aspect one of the 
 most picturesque and colorfully Russian of composers, whose "Sche- 
 herezade" is a musical counterpart of the barbarically opulent "Thou- 
 sand and One Nights" on which it is based, and in another aspect a dry- 
 as-dust professor, who, as,Tschaikowsky said, "worshipped technique" 
 and was "full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of a sterile pedan- 
 try." How could one and the same man write music superficially as 
 richly oriental as that of any Russian, but fundamentally empty, dry, 
 -and hard, devoid of deep expressiveness ? Mr. Rosenf eld has ready 
 the psychoanalytical answer. "He was, after all, temperamentally 
 chilly. ' The people-are the creators,' Glinka told the young national- 
 ist composers, 'you are but the arrangers.' It was precisely the vital 
 and direct contact with the source of all creative work that Rimsky- 
 Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men like him, who 
 feel their race and their environment only through the conscious' mind. 
 . It was not that Rimsky was pedantic from choice, out of a 
 willful perversity. His obsession was, after all, the result of a fear of 
 opening the dark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life." 
 
 In dealing with Richard Strauss Mr. Rosenfeld is even more in- 
 genious and searching. Others before him have described the strange 
 decadence that sets in at about the time of the ' ' Symphonia Domestica, ' ' 
 making such a work as the "Alpine Symphony" seem almost a parody 
 of earlier masterpieces like "Till Eulenspiegel" or the "Hero's Life," 
 and have suggested a cause for it in the composer's prostitution of his 
 
 io8 
 
Psychoanalysis and the American Composer 109 
 
 art for money and immediate notoriety. ' Mr. Rosenf eld goes deeper. 
 " In the end," he says, "it is as the victim of a psychic deterioration 
 that one is forced to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one 
 sees happening to so many people about one, the extinction of a flarhe, 
 the withering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensi- 
 bilities, the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to 
 him, too. . . . No doubt the love of money plays an inordinate 
 r61e in the man's life, and keeps on playing a greater and a greater. 
 But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of 
 perversion, a mania that has got control over him because his energies 
 are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course, and creating 
 works of art.^ . . . He has rationalized his unwillingness to go 
 through the labor-pains of creation by pretending a constant and 
 great need of money." 
 
 Not the least inspiring result of such analyses as these is that they 
 serve to bring sharply home to us, as will always be the case when the 
 deeper purpose and method of psychoanalysis are grasped, the super- 
 ficiality of all explanations of artistic failure in terms of environment, 
 however specious, and to trace it relentlessly to attitudes of the indivi- 
 dual conscience and intelligence. Mr. Rosenf eld is admirably loyal to the 
 search, through and past all the easy false explanations, to the difficult 
 but true one. "There is, no doubt," he says in his cruel but just paper 
 on Mahler, "a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four 
 chief German musicians of the recent period there should be manifest 
 in some degree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of the 
 craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the gro- 
 tesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of 
 Schoenberg has always been tainted, ... the banality of Mahler, 
 dovetail suspiciously." But he refuses to stop at this coincidence, 
 gratifying as its contemplation might be to a narrow nationalism. 
 "And yet," he continues, "it is probable that the cause lies elsewhere, 
 and that the conjunction of these four men is accidental. There have 
 been, after all, few environments really friendly to the artist; most of 
 the masters have had to recover from a 'something rotten in the state 
 of Denmark,' and many of them have surmounted conditions worse 
 than those of' modern Bismarckian Germany. The cause of the un- 
 
 ' See, for example, the essay on Strauss in the writer's "Contemporary Com- 
 posers,"'and Mr. Ernest Newman's "Richard Strauss." 
 
 ' Cf. Bertrand Russell, in "Why Men Fight," on the relation of the possessive 
 and the creative instincts. 
 
no Musir as a Humanity 
 
 satisf actoriness of much of the music of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger 
 and Mahler, is doubtless to be found in the innate weakness of the 
 men themselves rather more than in the unhealthiness of the atmos- 
 phere in which they passed their lives." 
 
 There then follows a discussion of just what this weakness was in 
 the case of Mahler, in the course of which the principles of psycho- 
 analysis are applied not only to the personal but to the racial mind, 
 and there emerges the most sig'nificant general truth of the book: — 
 that just as the highest achievement in art is attained through a 
 "sublimation" that is racial as well as personal, so the deepest defeat, 
 the most complete sterility, is that which avenges a suppression, not 
 only of personal but of racial instincts. Mahler, the argument runs, 
 born in the Austria of the i86o's, "a society that made Judaism, 
 Jewish descent, and Jewish traits a curse to those that inherited them," 
 was like many of his fellow Jews, the victim of "an unconscious 
 desire to escape the consequences of the thing that stamped them in 
 the eyes of the general as individuals of an inferior sort; to inhibit 
 any spiritual gesture that might arouse hostility; and to ward off 
 any subjective sense of personal inferiority by convincing themselves 
 and their fellows that they possessed the traits generally esteemed." 
 
 By this unconscious desire a conflict was set up within him. "In 
 the place of the united self, there came to exist in him two men. 
 For while one part of him demanded the free, complete expression 
 necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in the 
 free flow the hated racial traits would appear." Thus torn between 
 "the desire of self-expression and the fear of self -revelation," he de- 
 veloped an eclectic, featureless style, devoid of true individuality and 
 real power. He is thus the type of Jew described in Wagner's famous 
 pamphlet, "Das Judenthum in der Musik," the Jew who "through 
 the superficial assimilation of the traits of the people among whom he 
 is condemned to live, and through the suppression of his own nature, 
 becomes sterile." This sketch of one of the most tragic and pitiful 
 of modern artistic failures should be compared with the study of 
 Ernest Bloch, who, thinks Mr. Rosenfeld, has the "intelligence, sense 
 of reality, real overwhelming spiritual strength" that Mahler lacked, 
 and in whose music he finds "a large, a poignant, an authentic expres- 
 sion of what is racial in the Jew. There is music of his that is authentic 
 by virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial than the synagogi- 
 cal modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic pomp and color that 
 inform it." 
 
Psychoanalysis and the American Composer m 
 
 Thus does Mr. Rosenfeld psychoanalytically explain the artistic 
 sterility that overtakes a composer who sacrifices his own temperament 
 to an alien environment. A featureless eclecticism, so runs the theory, 
 results whenever a composer suppresses his own peculiar ways of 
 regarding life in order to satisfy the demands of a public which sees 
 it differently. However he may please for the moment, he eventually 
 stultifies himself. For the artist, the unpardonable sin is failure in 
 that self-reliance for which Emerson so sublimely pleaded. Do we 
 find any such featureless eclecticism here in America? Do our com- 
 posers too lack the courage of their convictions ? Has psychoanalysis 
 any light to throw on the music about us? 
 
 To some extent, we must remember, a young country is necessarily 
 dependent on others for its ways of doing things, and imitativeness is 
 one of the vital instincts of immaturity. As Sir Hubert Parry put it, 
 you can no more build a symphony than a ship without technical 
 command of ways and means; and in borrowing these ways and means 
 from those who had most highly developed them, particularly the 
 Germans, the American composer of the last generation naturally 
 borrowed also a point of view, an attitude towards life, a spiritual 
 atmosphere, so to speak, not quite his own. Our musical fathers, 
 uncles, and elder brothers were for the most part educated in Germany ; 
 a whole group of our best men now in later middle age sat at the 
 feet of Rheinberger, for instance, while some went to Raff or others. 
 What wonder that with the stoutly wrought if slightly academic 
 counterpoint of Rheinberger they absorbed something of the peculiar 
 Teutonic romanticism we associate more especially with Raff, the 
 Raff of the "Im Walde Symphony," a romanticism rather more effgte 
 and flaccid- than that of the masters Schubert and Schumann, the 
 stream of it beginning to lose freshness and head, and to stagnate in 
 the morasses of sentimentalism? Even our own MacDowell lived 
 largely in this essentially Teutonic world of his suite, "In a Haunted 
 Forest." He is a sort of American Raff, in whom American energy 
 has not roused itself from this medieval dream world, American 
 himior has not yet pierced the absurdities of these romantic knights 
 with their simpering maidens waiting to "redeem" them. 
 
 The German domination, serviceable as it was in giving us a 
 technical equipment without which we should have remained forever 
 dumb, was bound to come to an end as soon as our native humor began 
 to play upon the absurd assumptions and omissions of romanticism, 
 its ostrich-like habit of hiding its head from the real world. In the 
 
112 Music as a Humanity 
 
 phrase, "German as Kraut," coined years ago by a Rheinberger pupil 
 in comment on the compositions of a friend, sounds already for the 
 discerning the knell of its decease. But the end was brought suddenly 
 at last by the war. To-day we are in the midst of a reaction ; we are 
 superstitiously afraid of admiring anything Teutonic; we have turned 
 away not only from Rafifian romanticism, which we can very well do 
 without, but from Beethovenian solidity and nobleness. We have 
 forgotten that we eyer had a German nurse, to whom we owe the 
 gift of speech, and have fled in panic to the arms of our new French 
 governess. 
 
 Will the new allegiance help us to find our individuality any better 
 than the old ? It may be doubted. Debussy and Ravel may prove 
 momentarily a wholesome counterinfluence to the grossness, stodgi- 
 ness and megalomania of modem Germany, but their over-refinement, 
 their preoccupation with "effects" to the. exclusion of ideas, in Mere- 
 dith's phrase their "fiddling of harmonicson the harp-strings of sen- 
 suality," will certainly in the long run prove; as alien to American 
 energy, simplicity, and directness as the German romanticism is unten- 
 able to American humor. Our constructivenessj our (delight in activity 
 for its own sake (a vice as it shows itself in our "hugtliog," our desire 
 to be "on the move," whether or no aware of any goal, but surely 
 also the root of many virtues) can never be content in/the idle savor- 
 ing of sensation of the French impressionists. We prefer the highroad, 
 with all its dust, to dalliance on the primrose path. Already Mr. Car- 
 penter, so French in his "Adventuresof a Perambulator," is sounding a 
 sturdier note, almost Russian in its primitiveness, in his " The Birthday 
 of the Infanta"; and in Mr. Edward Burlingame Hill's "The Trojan 
 Women" one hears, besides the clear orchestral sonorities of jnodem 
 France, a strength of melodic texture and a symmetry of form: which 
 are more German, horrified as he would be at such a suggestion. Had 
 Charles T. Grifles lived, the evidence of some of his late wor^, es- 
 pecially a piece for flute and orchestra, seems to indicate that he would 
 have emerged from his early impressionistic mist into a sharper, more 
 American air. 
 
 Meanwhile the oriental, especially the Jewish, infection m our 
 music, seemingly less widespread than the German was, or the French 
 is, may prove even more virulent. Those not temperamentally im- 
 mune to it catch it severely, like Mr. Leo Ornstein; and if they ever 
 throw it off, as he has given some signs of doing, seem to be left devoid 
 of energy, and as it were permanently anaemic. The insidiousness of 
 
Psychoanalysis and the American Composer 113 
 
 the Jewish menace to our artistic integrity is due partly to the spe- 
 ciousness, the superficial charm and persuasiveness of Hebrew art, 
 its brilliance, its violently juxtaposed extremes of passion, its poignant 
 eroticism and pessimism, and partly to the fact that the strain in us 
 which might make head against it, the deepest, most fundamental 
 strain perhaps in our mixed nature, is diluted and confused by a hun- 
 dred other tendencies. The Anglo-Saxon group of qualities, the 
 Anglo-Saxon point of view, even though they are so thoroughly dis- 
 guised, in a people descended from every race, that we may easily 
 forget them, and it is not safe to predicate them of any individual 
 American, are nevertheless the vital nucleus of the American temper. 
 And the Jewish domination of our music, even more than the Teu- 
 tonic and the Gallic, threatens to outrage and stultify them at every 
 point. 
 
 For how shall a public accustomed by prevailing fashion to the 
 exaggeration, the constant running to extremes, of eastern expression, 
 diyine the poignant beauty of Anglo-Saxon sobriety and restraint? 
 How shall it f)ierce the Anglo-Saxon reticence, the fine reserve so polar 
 to the garrulous self-confession, the almost indecent stripping of the 
 soul, it witnesses in every concert hall and opera house? How, stimu- 
 lated as it is to an abnormal appetite for the purely sensuous luxury 
 of the ear by the oriental gift for lavish ornamentation, shall it be 
 able instantly to pitch its demands, so to speak, in another key when 
 it listens to the plain texture, the austere spareness, of Anglo-Saxon 
 musical speech? And how, finally, shall it value as it deserves, the 
 moderation, the balance, the sense of proportion which is the finest 
 of Anglo-Saxon qualities, and which, like the sense of humor to which 
 it is akin (since both depend upon the sense of congruity or incongruity) 
 nothing is more alien than the oriental abandonment to excess ? Our 
 public taste, in short, is in danger of being permanently debauched, 
 made lastingly insensitive to qualities most subtly and quintessen- 
 tially our own, by the intoxication of what is after all an alien art. 
 Just as the confirmed alcoholic finds spring water vapid, our jaded 
 musical palates find simplicity and sincerity tame, and consider 
 moderation and proportion, the immortal qualities of all art, negative. 
 But they are not negative, they are in the highest degree positive, 
 as every artist of Anglo-Saxon temperament at heart knows. " Mod- 
 eration," as Chesterton has it, "is not a compromise; moderation is a 
 passion, the passion of great judges"; and if we would come into our 
 own artistically, we must have the courage to assert this moderation. 
 
114 Music as a Humanity 
 
 We await the composer, or group of composers, who shall rest serenely 
 on that insight, 
 
 "Turning to scorn, with lips divine. 
 The falsehood of extremes." 
 
 Meanwhile most of our young men are imitating Ravel and De- 
 bussy, or Rimsky-Korsakofi and Stravinsky, or Bloch and Ornstein, 
 more or less cleverly. Few are trying to grope towards their own light, 
 to find their own speech, to accept with courage the limitations of 
 their own temperaments. Especially is the Anglo-Saxon group sub- 
 merged because its sobriety is at the pole from the over-emphasis 
 and sensuous luxury that are d la mode. But unless, in spite of all 
 unpopularity, of all delay and doubt and disappointment, they can 
 learn Emerson's lesson of self-reliance, they will remain sterile, they 
 will be our Mahlers rather than our Blochs. And after all it does not 
 take psychoanalysis to teach us that. Years before Freud, Robert 
 Schumann, then a youth of twenty -nine, wrote to his future wife: "I 
 want to be ten times less than other people, and only be worth some- 
 thing to myself." Some such sentiment accompanies all real artistic 
 power. 
 
DISSONANCE AND EVIL 
 
 Every one who cares for art, who likes to read discussions of art, 
 must often have felt how fascinating, and yet how generally misleading, 
 are the analogies which writers love to make between art arid other 
 human interests. Such analogies give us at first a delicious mental 
 fillip, a sense of novel discovery and possession. We feel that we 
 understand two things better by seeing wherein they are one. We 
 thought we knew them before, but merely to contemplate them to- 
 gether gives to each a new color and charm. Unfortunately, however, 
 further contemplation, as a rule, leads to doubt. The analogy limps, 
 or halts altogether, and we are left with a sense of having been hoaxed. 
 We find only superficial and entertaining the similarity we had fancied 
 fundamental and enlightening; we are disappointed, or, worse still, in 
 our enthusiasm we twist and misinterpret the facts, and are deceived. 
 
 Such analogies, as seductive as they are treacherous, have especially 
 infested the literature of music. So different is music from anything 
 else we deal with that critics have been sorely tempted, in treating it, 
 to resort to mutilating simplifications, distorting comparisons, and ex- 
 planations that do not explain. Sentimental essayists, whose vapor- 
 ous effusions have delighted and betrayed thousands of readers, and 
 metaphysical theorists, whose zeal for philosophy has been the measure 
 of their violence to art, have devised the prettiest comparisons between 
 music and something else — one might almost say anything else — the 
 only drawback of which is that they are false. It is an awkward fact 
 about music — awkward, that is, for the critics of it — that it is unique 
 in human experience. 
 
 But to say that music is in the last analysis unlike anything else 
 we know is not to say that our reactions upon it, which in their turn 
 affect its own nature, are not in many respects like our reactions on 
 our other experiences. Unique as the experience of music is in our 
 world (for nowhere else do we encounter tones related to one another 
 in time and pitch), yet the perception of this material, being a process 
 of our minds, must share the nature of our other perceptions. As 
 
 "5 
 
Il6 Music as a Humanity 
 
 the human mind is everywhere one, all the matters it perceives have 
 in common certain peculiarities produced by its mode of perceiving. 
 Analogies, consequently, may be quite valid so long as they restrict 
 themselves to these peculiarities; and by calling our attention to the 
 subjective or self -supplied element in all our experience they may 
 furthermore have for us a legitimate and deep interest. They can 
 never take the place of observation, study, and experiment, but they 
 can assuredly sharpen our wits and provoke our imaginations. Innu- 
 tritious as mental foods, they may be valuable stimulants. Knowledge 
 comes not only from the investigation of the unknown, but also from 
 the analysis and ordering of the known; and to behold our minds 
 performing one function in two different situations is to be both 
 entertained and enlightened. 
 
 To trace the effect of the perceiving function of our minds in two 
 such dissimilar realms as music and ethics, to see how our way of 
 approaching them binds together even these, remote as they are, 
 with fragilebut tangible threads of analogy, will then, one may 
 hope, be an interesting and not too dangerous task. Dangerous it 
 certainly would be to hang too heavy a theory on threads' so slender; 
 but, after all, it is the threads and not the theory that now interest us. 
 Our present purpose is merely to point out how, in music, dissonance, 
 and in life, evil, alike depend in large part for their peculiar meaning 
 and value on an identical element in our modes of viewing them, on 
 an intrinsic and persistent peculiarity in our perceptive faculty. 
 
 It is not necessary to go very deeply into psychology, or to make 
 any very technical definitions, in order to get before our minds, clearly 
 enough for our present purpose, this peculiarity of perception. Per- 
 ception, as we vaguely realize even without analysis, is a much more 
 far-reaching and significant mental process than sensation. When we 
 perceive we not only find certain impressions of the world coming to 
 us from without, as is the case with sensation, but we also, by an in- 
 ward and more or less self-determined activity, arrange these impres- 
 sions in order, relate them intelligibly to one another, and thereby, 
 as we say, possess them. Sensation, so to speak, happens to us; per- 
 ception we win. Sensation is accidental, perception has purpose and 
 value. It is a sort of intellectual reclaiming process by which we make 
 the weeds of useless sense-impressions give place to crops of sustaining, 
 vitalizing ideas. When, for example, hearing twelve strokes of a bell, 
 we consider them not as isolated sounds but as the striking of a clock, 
 we elevate a series of sensations into a perception. Or when, seeing 
 
Dissonance and Evil 
 
 117 
 
 an at first haphazard mass of dots on a sheet of paper, we suddenly 
 discover that these dots make letters, and the letters a word, then we 
 substitute a valuable and informing perception for our first chaotic 
 bundle of sensations. Whenever, in short, we discern in a number of 
 sensations any kind of relationship which unites them in a group, 
 grafts upon them intelligible value, and domesticates them, so to say, 
 in our service, we perceive. Perception is a process which by appre-^ 
 bending relations makes many things one, transforms chaos into oi;der, 
 and outlines on the shifting surface of chance a profile of meaning. 
 
 In no branch of our interest has the perceiving faculty achieved 
 more remarkable results than in music, where it has produced a con- 
 tinuous evolution of technique covering centuries of time, and con- 
 stantly opening up the most unforeseeable and surprising vistas of 
 new progress. None of its results are more interesting than one which 
 is defined by implication in a distinction of terms which we may now 
 examine — the distinction between the terms "dissonance" and "dis- 
 cord." It is unfortunately a common error, especially with English 
 musical writers, to use these terms as synonyms. To do so, however, 
 is greatly to impoverish both language and thought; for there is be- 
 tween them one of those far-reaching distinctions of meaning of which 
 a full analysis would constitute a philosophical theory. Stated as 
 concisely as possible, the distinction is this: a discord is merely a 
 harsh and disagreeable combination of sounds; a dissonance is a com- 
 bination of sounds, which, though harsh in itself, is justified, and even 
 necessitated, bj'' certain musical laws. A nyone can make a dis^rd . 
 by merely sitting oh the piano keys; only a trained mu sician can write 
 "a" dissonance. In brief , discord is fortuitous; it is that which happens 
 to be unpleasant. Dissonance, on the other hand, is intended; it is 
 that which must be unpleasant. Furthermore, if we have borne in 
 mind the nature of perception, we shall have no hesitation in adding 
 that this accidental character of discord, 5nd this purposeful charac- 
 ter of dissonance, must ultimately depend on our being able to com- 
 prehend the latter, and not the former. Dissonance must be justified, 
 if at all, by our perception in it of relations that we cannot perceive 
 in discord. What, then, are these relations ? 
 
 Music, as everyone knows, consists of several melodic parts, or 
 "voices," going on at once and combining in a satisfactory mass of 
 sound. These voices, each singing its own tune, are like so many 
 strands in a basket, so many threads in a fabric, so many members 
 in a society. All must cooperate to produce one harmonious general 
 
Il8 Music as a Humanity 
 
 result, yet each also has its measure of independence, goes its own way, 
 and fulfills its own purpose. Like a human being, it is at once a citizen 
 and an individual. Musicians, recognizing this twofold function of 
 the voices, consider them from two points of view, and as subject to 
 two realms of law. In the first place they must, as a whole, make an 
 agreeable combination of sound often enough to give us the feeling 
 that they are working together, that they are not entirely unrelated 
 and at cross purposes. The chords they form in the successive mo^ 
 ments of their progress must be prevailingly "consonant"; that is, 
 must be physically pleasant in the sense that they do not arouse in 
 the ear distressing sensations that attend certain combinations of tones, 
 and must be mentally grateful in the sense that they are easily recog- 
 nized and perceived. On the other hand, when for a moment they 
 make combinations which are painful to the ear or diSicult to unravel, 
 they must be so conducted as to make us feel their momentary 
 harshness inevitable and right. Such laws, which concern the simul- 
 taneous combination of many voices in successive moments of time, 
 are called harmonic laws. In the second place, each single voice is 
 subject to certain other and equally important laws, which concern 
 themselves not with its relation to the other voices, but with its indi- 
 vidual coherence, significance, and interest. Of these, which may be 
 called the melodic laws, the most important is that the single voice 
 must make not a mere random series of tones, but an intelli^ble 
 melody or tune. It must be built out of definite, recognizable figures 
 or motifs, groups of tones having certain fixed relations in time and 
 pitch; and these motif s must be so repeated and expanded and devel- 
 oped as to give it, as a whole, thematic meaning and point. Moreover, 
 it must not stagnate in the moment, however interesting that may 
 be, but must progress urgently toward a goal ; it must give the sense 
 of life and motion that is essential to any utterance, and particularly 
 to musical utterance. Thte urgency of melody, this constant striving 
 and pressing toward the goal, is perhaps the most characteristic feattire 
 of music. 
 
 It is on our clear perception of these harmonic and melodic rela- 
 tions of tones that our use of dissonance depends. Obviously enough, 
 any given voice, at any givep moment in the progress of a piece of 
 music, may be obliged, in order to fill out a tonal figure or to carry 
 out a melodic design, to take a tone that will not combine agreeably 
 with those which the other voices, under similar obligations, must 
 sound. For the moment, harmonic purity must be sacrificed to me- 
 
Dissonance and Evil 
 
 119 
 
 Iodic interest. The result is a dissonance. It is now quite clear how 
 such a dissonance differs from a discord. The discord is a mere acci- 
 dental combination of disagreeable sounds; but the dissonance, 
 embodying a momentary harshness as the unavoidable result of melo- 
 dic tendencies being purposefully carried out, is in no sense accidental ; 
 its physical painfulness, even if extreme, is justified by a necessity 
 perceived in it. We endure, we even welconie it, because we grasp' 
 its relations. 
 
 If dissonance is thus primarily a by-product of melodic motion, 
 however, it ends by being much more than that. Every musician will 
 feel the erroneousness of defining dissonance as a mere result. The fact 
 is that dissonance, reacting potently on the very melodic motion that 
 produced it, becomes immediately one of the most vitalizing elements 
 in musical effect. Even if we overlook, as we must do here, its merely 
 sensuous value as an offset to the over-sweetness of too many conso- 
 nant chords, we must be careful to estimate justly its service to melodic 
 vitality. The unpleasantness of dissonance arouses in us a peculiar 
 restlessness; it makes us impatient for the melodies to press on, to 
 continue their motion until they reach a pleasanter place; and thus 
 it deeply intensifies that sense of urgency, of progress, of motion, 
 which is the life of melody. Like those rocks in a mountain brook 
 which so pile up the water that, when they are once past, it hurls itself 
 forward with new impetus, dissonances immensely reenforce the mo- 
 mentum of the melodies they momentarily encumber. They give the 
 tension of palpitating life to an organism which without them would 
 be flabby, stagnant, inert. In order to realize this, it is only necessary 
 to play over, carefully noting the impulse given by the frequent dis- 
 sonances to the melodic progress of the parts, a fugue of Bach, a sonata 
 of Beethoven, or a novelette of Schumann. 
 
 This reenforcement of melodic vitality by dissonance, however, will 
 occur only so long as we, the listeners, firmly grasp the melodic strands 
 that lead us. They are the threads that penetrate the labyrinth; so 
 long as we hold them we shall advance with excitement and interest, 
 but if we once lose them our interest will turn to confusion. Our per- 
 ceptions,' then, by which we seize the relations of the tones in the 
 melodies and of the chords in the harmonic sequence, must be keen 
 and well trained. We must be aware, at the moment of the dissonance, 
 that all those jarring tones are part of a scheme that is being purpose- 
 fully and intelligently carried out by the composer. If we fail even 
 for an instant to hear each tone, we cannot be sensible of the added 
 
I20 Music as a Humanity 
 
 momentum it gets from the dissonance, or expectant of the tone it is 
 progressing to, which will resolve the chaos into order. The melodies 
 will lose for us their unity, and become meaningless fragments; the 
 dissonance will degenerate into a discord. The effect of dissonance 
 accordingly depends on the intelligence of the hearer, on his having 
 trained perceptions. If these be lacking, one of the most potent for- 
 mative agents of musical effect will mean to him mere ugliness and 
 fatigue. 
 
 So much, then, for a brief sketch of one aspect of the psychology 
 of dissonance. It has shown us, in the first place, how dissonant 
 effects are reclaimed from the realm of mere meaningless discord by 
 our faculty of perception; how, in the second place, they originate as 
 by-products in the process of carrying out certain melodic tendencies ; 
 and how, finally, they end by giving an immense stimulus to these 
 very melodic tendencies, the urgency of which is the fundamental 
 vitalizing principle in music. 
 
 It requires, fortunately, no great learning or penetration, but only 
 a natural interest in human life, and a habit of observing it, to discern 
 in our attitude toward evil a striking analogy with our attitude toward 
 dissonance. To discern this analogy is merely to point out how, in 
 the two realms, widely sundered as they are, of music and of ethical 
 life, our perceptive faculty is alike active, and leads to similar results. 
 As a matter of fact, the phenomena of evil are determined by our ethi- 
 cal perceptions much as the phenomena of discord and dissonance are 
 determined by our musical perceptions. And what is more, the average 
 man is inclined to be as naive in his ethical as in his musical attitude. 
 
 Most people, it is curious to note, lump together as "evil" every- 
 thing that is disagreeable. Evil is whatever hurts them, interferes 
 with their comfort, upsets their plans. In this sense death, poverty, 
 disappointment in love, toothache, accidents, taxes, are examples of 
 evil things. This view, crude and superficial as it is, is very widely 
 held. It is the spontaneous view of the natural man. Its most striking 
 peculiarity is that it takes no account of human reactions upon events, 
 but accepts the events themselves as the ultimate and essential facts. 
 The immediately pleasant it labels ' 'good, ' ' the immediately unpleasant 
 "bad." It even employs the terms of philosophy, such as "optimism" 
 or "pessimism," which properly define only general mental attitudes, 
 to describe the facts of mere experience: men say that they are "opti- 
 mistic this morning," because they have breakfasted well; or that 
 they are "pessimistic," there being a fall in stocks. It crops out in 
 
Dissonance and Evil I2i 
 
 theology, in such arguments as that God cannot be omnipotent, since 
 he permits earthquakes and volcanoes, floods, droughts, and tempests. 
 It unhappily dominates the thought even of many sincere reformers 
 and pioneers, who believe that the salvation of humanity means the 
 elimination of discomforts from life. They fancy that because" evil 
 makes us uncomfortable, good is to be pursued through steam heat, 
 electricity, and furniture. Good and evil are for them external facts, 
 not inward conditions. 
 
 The reason that this conception of evil as something external and 
 fatal is so crude and unsatisfactory is that it entirely fails to take 
 account of a vital element in our experience of bad things — namely, 
 of our mental attitude toward them, our spiritual reaction upon them. 
 We instinctively feel that no evil worthy of the name is defined simply 
 by stating an event, a fact, an outward condition. To that external 
 factor in it we must add the internal factor of our behavior toward it. 
 There is no such thing as an abstract evil, floating in a vacuum like 
 some lost meteorite in the interplanetary spaces. Any evil is evil 
 only in relation to some consciousness. And if it be thus related to 
 some consciousness, then it will be in turn reacted upon by that con- 
 sciousness. Nothing, in short, has any effect upon us, or is in any sense 
 real to us, until, as we may say, it is assimilated; and the form in which 
 we assimilate it is determined not more by it than by ourselves. It 
 is a fact of the most momentous importance that we contribute to our 
 own lives, moment by moment and with inevitable constancy, an 
 ingredient which is always the same, and which enters into instant 
 chemical combination with everything that befalls us. This ingredient 
 is the peculiar quality of our character or genius. As it is in the nature 
 of man to transform certain kinds of vibrations of ether, from whatever 
 source they reach him, into light, and certain kinds of air-vibrations 
 into sound, so it is in his nature to turn all his experience to the uses 
 of character. Or again, as nitric acid, brought into contact with iron, 
 copper, zinc, or lead, makes in turn nitrate of iron, nitrate of copper, 
 nitrate of zinc, or nitrate of lead — but always a nitrate — so the char- 
 acter of a man, brought into contact with events, treats them all as 
 spiritual opportunities. If, then, we would gain more than a superficial 
 conception of evil, we must insist on perceiving evils in their relation 
 to the ideal purposes our characters create. These purposes, con- 
 stantly held, never in the finite world fulfilled, run through our lives 
 as melodies run through music. Changeless, perennial, they pierce 
 and penetrate the kaleidoscopic flux of events as melodies pierce and 
 
122 Music as a Humanity 
 
 penetrate the fabric of harmonies in which they are embodied. They 
 alone persist, they alone stamp life, teeming and inchoate as it is, 
 with one dominant character, one unchanging value and significance. 
 Nothing can befall a man that he cannot in some degree relate to 
 his ideals. The direst temptation is a means of holiness; the ut- 
 most frailty is a condition of strength; loss, loneliness, and bereave- 
 ment are the schools of loyalty; and failures are the stages in 
 success. 
 
 Nor need we fear that this analysis of the relation of ideals to 
 events, by which we have been led from the conception of external 
 evil to that of ethical evil, just as by analyzing the relations of melody 
 and harmony we were led from the conception of discord to that of 
 dissonance, is a mere intellectual feat, a device of ingenuity, without 
 real value as a revelation of truth. To convince ourselves of its va- 
 lidity we need only note that it is actually our ideal purposes themselves 
 which introduce into our world most of the evils we experience. So 
 close and causal is the relation. By merely surrendering the ideals, 
 we could usually evade the evils. Temptation (to take the examples 
 just used) exists for us only so long as we desire virtue; we should be 
 unaware of our weakness did we not long for strength; only the lover 
 can experience loneliness; and we can fail only so long as we try to 
 succeed. The animals, as Walt Whitman keenly says, are neither 
 respectable nor unhappy; for having no ideals, they cannot fall short. 
 "The conscious ills which beset our fortune," writes Professor Royce, 
 "are in a large measure due to the very magnitude and ideality of our 
 undertakings themselves, to the very loftiness of our purposes, and 
 even to the very presence of our active control over our deeds. For 
 all these more ideal aspects of our consciousness mean that we set 
 our standard high, and strive beyond the present more ardently. 
 And in such cases our ideals actually imply our present dissatisfaction, 
 and so contribute to our consciousness of temporal ill." It is true, 
 then, in a very real sense, that our ideal aims not only react to modify 
 the nature of evils, but actually produce some of the most significant 
 evils we experience. Even so, we have seen, the melodies in a piece of 
 music not only influence' our attitude toward the dissonances they 
 encounter in their progress, but actually create these dissonances by 
 following out their chosen paths. They must, as melodies, be signi- 
 ficant, interesting, thematic; and that involves many momentary 
 complexities of harmony. Our ideals, in their turn, make high de- 
 mands upon us — demands which often bring us into painful conflict 
 
Dissonance and Evil 
 
 I2J 
 
 with our environment. Ideals, then, create and justify the sort 
 of evil we have called ethical, just as melodies create and justify 
 dissonance. 
 
 Finally, the ethical evil thus created and justified by ideal aims 
 reacts to give these aims an immensely increased vitality. And here 
 we touch at last upon a peculiarity of ethical as opposed to external 
 evil, which has, more strikingly than any other, suggested the analogy 
 with musical dissonance. Dissonance, we saw, was a harshness or 
 complexity, resulting from the carrying out of melodic purposes, which 
 in turn actually stimulated and vitalized those purposes. Similarly, 
 are not ethical evils those birth pangs of the spirit which, primarily 
 caused by the conflict between our ideal aims and our circumstances, 
 end by impelling us all the more irresistibly along our path, filling us 
 with a new and immeasurable vitality ? Do not the very obstacles to 
 our progress develop in us a strength by which we not only overleap 
 them, but are prompted to seek worthier goals? Is not our very 
 ignorance of the final issues of life, pathetic as it is from one point of 
 view, the condition of a courage which could n^ot be so noble if it fought 
 with no fears ? Does not the dignity of our faith depend on the limita- 
 tion of our knowledge? The more we study the facts of our inner 
 life, the more convinced we must become that our misfortunes and 
 our sufferings, be they only clearly understood and firmly handled, 
 are the sources of new moral momentum in us; that they initiate and 
 foster our ideal aims, unfolding before us like a panorama new con- 
 summations and fulfillments. 
 
 Are there then, nevertheless, no such things as blind and fatal 
 evils, unamenable to character, wholly stubborn to ideal uses? Not 
 absolutely, perhaps ; but relatively there surely are, as we know to our 
 sorrow. We constantly do encounter evils we cannot comprehend, 
 evils which for us are opaque, diabolic, and disastrous. To trace 
 the relation of such evils to spiritual life would mean to delve deeply 
 in the researches of metaphysics, to define types of consciousness 
 both higher and lower than the human, and to see whether what is 
 for us fatal and terrible may not be for these other minds necessary 
 and right. But this we cannot attempt. We can here only suggest 
 that, harsh as much of our experience irremediably is, we are ever, 
 with surprised delight, discovering in it, now here and now there, 
 supposed discords that on further acquaintance turn out to be dis- 
 sonances. Who can tell where the process will end? So long as our 
 evil remains external it is, alas, an accident, a chaos, a prank of des- 
 
124 Music as a Humanity 
 
 tiny; but once let it be perceived as in a relation to our inner purposes, 
 even if only in the relation of an enemy that may be conquered, and 
 it is won over, reclaimed, domesticated. Our one skill, then, in life 
 as in art, is the skill to perceive; and the great business of our lives is 
 the training of perception. The one irremediable misfortune is to be 
 blind; the one ever serviceable technique is insight. 
 
 If, therefore, our conceptions of dissonance and of evil depend in 
 so large a measure on our intelligence, on our power to penetrate 
 their tissue and hold clearly in rtiind the aims which justify them, 
 should we not expect these conceptions to change from age to age 
 and from individual to individual, reflecting accurately various stages 
 of training and faculty ? The answer is definite enough on the niusical 
 side, if somewhat problematic on the ethical. Nothing in niusical 
 history is more surprising than the constant unfolding of the power 
 to discriminate dissonance from discord. When men first combined 
 tones together they could tolerate hardly any interval harsher than 
 the octave, the fifth, and the fourth. Gradually the thirds and sixths 
 were introduced, but with many strict regulations and conditions. 
 Even in Mozart's time the third was often omitted from the final 
 chord of a composition, as too opposed to the sense of restfulness 
 desired; and Bach generally ends his fugues written in minor keys, 
 not with the minor third, but with the less dissonant major interval. 
 Beethove^j horrified his contemporaries by the harsh combinations he 
 delighted in, and Schumann and Wagner have accustomed our ears 
 to sounds that wouldhave seemed quite intolerable to Palestrina, if 
 not even to Haydn. All this means that as the musical perceptions of 
 men gradually became sharpened they learned to hold clearly in mind 
 combinations of tone constantly more complex, and to perceive their 
 relations and functions so clearly that they could tolerate greater and 
 greater momentary harshness, so long as it was felt necessary to melo- 
 dic progress, and useful to melodic vitality. In our own day the 
 development is more rapid than ever, and no man can say where it 
 will stop. 
 
 When we turn to the history of ethics the analogous process is 
 harder to trace. Certainly, however, the lesson taught by the greatest 
 moralists, from Marcus Aurelius down to Bertrand Russell, is that 
 happiness springs not from pleasure or the avoidance of discomfort, 
 but from self-mastery and the unfolding of the inner powers. There 
 are still, and probably always will be, those who can conceive human 
 progress only as a gain in material welfare; but, on the whole, the con- 
 
Dissonance and Evil 1 25 
 
 sensus of feeling seems to be more and more moving toward a moral 
 or idealistic interpretation of life, and men are slowly learning that 
 evil is to be controlled and spiritualized rather than abolished, and 
 that it is possible to be happy without being comfortable. 
 
^:il 
 
 IrHiji^^H