The Intellectual Influence of Music

WHATEVER doubt exists concerning the intellectual influence of music is chiefly due either to its alleged vagueness in comparison with speech, or to its emotional and sensuous qualities so seemingly opposed to the calm temper and “ pale hue ” of thought.

What does it mean ? (Sonate, que veux-tu ?) is asked after a fine sonata, symphony, or song without words, commonly by some one who has not enjoyed it, and who is not musical. It would be hard to tell him, and the interpretations of a dozen really sincere enthusiasts, stirred by it to the bottom of their hearts and fed as with heavenly manna, would be widely apart. The truth is, the meaning of music lies hidden in those deep, mysterious springs of every-day experience, which it were as vain to ignore as it is impossible to render into words. Music is finer than speech, and makes its appeal to a deeper somewhat in us underlying all thoughts of the understanding. Music expresses that part of our best and inmost consciousness, which needs such sympathetic, fluid, one might almost say electric, language as its tones alone afford. For it begins where speech leaves off ; through it the inmost spirit — all that is inexpressible and yet of most account in us — can give sign of itself. Hence the loftiest poetry, the most inspired and subtile charm of conversation, in short, that magical something which distinguishes the utterances of genius in its high hour, in whatsoever form, is analogous to music and sets the fine chords vibrating in somewhat the same way. The higher ranges of Coleridge’s conversation are described by his nephew, in the Preface to the “Table-Talk,” in terms which one might use who had been sitting under the spell of Mendelssohn or Chopin : “I have seen him at times when you could not incarnate him, — when he shook aside your petty questions or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common conversation. Then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to him, and there he would float at ease. Like enough, what Coleridge then said his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a newspaper ; but upon such a listener there would steal an influence, and an impression, and a sympathy; there would be a gradual attempering of his body and spirit, till his total being vibrated with one pulse alone, and thought became merged in contemplation : —

Did you never step within the portal of a vast and crowded church in the hour of prayer ? In vain you sought to catch the syllables of the far-off, pale, spiritual-looking man. What if you could not hear them ? You heard him ; his tones, his spirit, took possession of your spirit, till, losing thought of self, it went up with the rest. Of that sort is the eloquence, the influence of music. Nothing does more for culture than the personal presence, the magnetic sphere as it were which one in whom the spirit and result of higher culture are embodied bears about with him. The presence of good music is the presence of a good spirit. The presence of deep and earnest music is essentially the presence of the deep and earnest spirit who composed it,— a presence felt more surely than his words or looks could be. There is frivolous, idle music, and there is pedantic music. There is also music, more than one mind may compass, which is altogether the outpouring of the hopes, the prayers, the faith, the very lives of men like Handel, Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. It is good to have them with us ; and in no way could we have them so near as in their undying harmonies, not so evanescent but that generation after generation can recall them, all alive and new as if they never had been heard before. Music is an expression of character, of the moods, the spirit, the meaning of the man that makes it. His words can only tell the meaning of his thoughts ; his actions, the meaning of his present purpose ; his music tells the meaning of him. Through one symphony you get a clearer insight into a being like Beethoven than through any life of him that could be written. Not much acquaintance can you have with Bach or Mozart, through biographies, unless you know their music and can read that, all the while, between the lines.

Music has an atmospheric influence. In earliest childhood such influence is felt. The very infant is affected by it ; we care not that he understand or even seem to heed or listen. And each composer’s music is a peculiar atmosphere, as much so as the atmosphere of pine woods or fresh fields. The sensibilities, the character, the tone of feeling, the aspirations, the habitual consciousness of the child, will be affected by it, and all his after-life be redolent of it. Beethoven or Mozart may be introduced as an invisible presiding genius over his earliest education, before other teachers can begin to reach him, or any thoughts shall have begun to shape themselves in his unconscious mind.

All very well, you say, in theory ; but look at facts and persons. Were your musical classmates, are your musical friends and neighbors, are the musicians of your town, distinguished as a class for intellectuality ? How many of your great tone-masters, even, seem to be persons of no culture ! How little they can talk on intellectual, moral, social topics ! How innocent of all book knowledge, and how helpless in high conversation ! And so on.

Yet we could give instances where, could you know the persons nearly and what spirit they are of, you might be forced to own that mere music may serve as a virtual equivalent for other culture, — holding in itself much other culture in solution as it were. For there we seem to have the essence of it all. You will note sometimes in the simplest remark of one of these thoroughly musical natures, one of these so steeped in harmonies, but ignorant of books, and so unused to cultivated circles, — nay, in a mere smile or lighting of the eye or least expression of the face, — how right to the heart and centre of a thought their quick instinct, intuition, strikes, how they see the gist of the matter in anticipation of the hint. For, somehow, in fine music they have been baptized into the spirit of the highest thought, without the tedious intervention of the letter and the syllogism. The musical soul is gifted with a rare divining power. If the best of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin has passed into one, and there become assimilated with his inmost life and individuality, what culture can he lack that would seem rich enough to covet in exchange for this ! And all the more by virtue of this one unspeakable possession (whether he possess or is possessed), will he be sensitively open, heart and mind, to every hint of truth and beauty in nature, in poetry and art, in history, philosophy, or science. Preoccupied with one, as every earnest person must be in his way with something, does he renounce his birthright to the rest ?

But let us not admit too much, since other culture is not hard to find in men who live for the most part in music.

During these last years, if not before, the reading world has had occasion to become acquainted with a goodly number of musicians who also were good writers and good talkers. Not a few of them have written books, and successful ones, though some of them may never have intended it. Mendelssohn’s letters, sought in all the circulating libraries, though written to familiar friends, without the slightest literary purpose, show a literary faculty, a cleverness of thought and observation, a quick and fine appreciation of what passes, quite as remarkable perhaps as the Note-Books of Hawthorne. Schumann wrote only about music, but wrote like a man of culture and a thinker,fresh, original, and rich in illustration. The letters of some earlier great composers,— Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, — which have been dragged to light of late to gratify the craving for whatever smallest personal relic can be found of men so perfectly revealed in their creations, though not to be judged at all as literature, do certainly afford glimpses here and there into most interesting character and intellectual traits of brightness not outmatched in other spheres. The Ritter Gluck knew how to explain the æsthetic principles which lay at the foundation of his classic operas with such clear logic and such fortunate expression as the case required ; and Richard Wagner, who would fain push those principles too far, finds even now far readier audience as controversial pamphleteer and critic than he does for “ Lohengrin,” the “ Meistersinger,” or the “ Nibelungen ” trilogy. Weber, even if he had not composed “ Der Freyschütz,” “ Oberon,” and “ Euryanthe,” would have won a name by his æstheticoromantic and fantastic writings, mostly of the kind called fugitive. More lately, Ferdinand Hiller, Hector Berlioz, and Liszt have written frequently and well, each with a fascinating individuality, all in a genial vein, full of enthusiasm and of bonhomie, and with fine discrimination, showing abundant evidence of minds well stored with general knowledge, on every page betraying genuine sympathy as well as personal acquaintance with poets, artists, men of thought and genius in all spheres. A more beautiful, poetic, chivalrous, appreciative tribute to the genius and the country of a brother artist than Liszt’s noble monograph on Chopin were hard to find in any literature. Even the gay, mercurial, convivial Rossini, if he wrote no books, was quoted universally for his fine wit and observation ; nor did he, as Hiller reports him daily for a season, lack higher powers of thoughtful conversation. Some of the recent German musicians, who have written on the principles and method of their art, have shown themselves well versed in modern metaphysical ideas and systems ; for instance, Marx and Hauptmann. Joachim, the great violinist, asked all manner of questions, with most eager interest, about our Emerson, and showed an intimate acquaintance with his works ; it was the genuine response of one free, large, fearless, truthful mind to another.

And so we might go on with instances, if there were need of more to prove that the musical passion, musical genius, “inspiration,” is not a kind of preternatural secretion of all the mental faculties into one unduly developed organ at the expense of all the rest, and that a man, however much absorbed in music, need not be a moral weakling or a fool, or a poor “Blind Tom ” in kind, if not degree. It were a pretty problem for the idle hours of any of these doubters, — who talk so pityingly of intellectual and moral weakness as the price of musical indulgence,—to contemplate the difference between Blind Tom and, say, Sebastian Bach! Bach and Handel both, in their way, too, were totally absorbed in music, — mere musicians so far as we can know, their whole gigantic force of heart and mind and will spending itself in that direction, — only to some purpose ! Greater musicians, greater men, than these who, in this more self-conscious age, write books as well as symphonies, they have left no other sign but their great music. No one will doubt the greatness or the soundness of such intellects. Beethoven and Mozart must be joined with them, giant intelligences likewise, whose whole vitality was spent in music, and without conscious literary gift, though much be found so interesting in the letters which they would have burned could they have known the curiosity and love of publication of the age to come after them. (Let us be thankful that they did not know it.) There have been giants in our own days, — Mendelssohn at least, and Schumann ; but the giants of those days were greater, and they wrote not books ; they were all music. Does this prove against us ? On the contrary, it proves that music of itself is sphere enough for the completest exercise of such sublime intelligences, nay, such grand types of character, as only find their peers in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Raphael, MichelAngelo, or Milton. There is idle lotuseating, sickly sentimental vanity, shallow dilettanteism enough in music as in other arts and literature ; no less, no more ; and it is even found in much which tries to fancy itself religion, spirituality, life hidden in a better world. Dilettante is precisely the name that has been given to the idle, selfish, weak indulger in all or any of these spheres ; but to be an artist, or even an amateur (or faithful lover), that implies some earnestness, some bending of the faculties, with strength of will, to worthy purpose.

Music a self-indulgent, pleasurable weakness, do you say ? Makes a man a listless, shiftless dreamer, unfit for life’s stern business, and to be counted a mere cipher by the world’s self-elected governing committees ? Enough to point for answer to the lives and labors of the great composers ; to their sufferings too, their willing martyrdom to the ideal of their art ; their wholesouled loyalty to duty such as in the sure and strong bent of their genius God gave them to do. For this they could dispense with what the mass of men deem indispensable. Think what Bach actually did, and Handel ; how Bach, in tranquil, cheerful, unambitious daily round of service, like a true priest who keeps the altar fire forever burning, tasked all his strength and mighty genius to the utmost, composing for each Sabbath in that Leipsic Thomas-Kirche, and for all the festivals besides, through six long years, a new cantata, comprising orchestral symphony, chorals, which he alone has harmonized so perfectly, elaborate choruses, and recitatives and airs for single voices, each upon a scale of magnitude equal to that of a mass, or one of the two or three parts of an oratorio, and all in the noblest and most learned style of composition, — works to live forever, yet sung then only once and laid away to be explored and published for the first time now, a century since he lived ! There they lie, the manuscript scores of some three hundred of them, in the Royal Library at Berlin, any one of them a task beyond the power of any master of our own day. Think of the seemingly endless series of huge volumes of his works in all forms which the “ Bach Gesellschaft,” year by year, for sixteen years now, have been bringing out, while the heap of manuscripts unedited seems scarcely yet to be diminished. And in all this not a page which a true criticism would leave out as being either trivial or commonplace ; the whole of it sincere and wholesome music, the heartfelt expression of the deepest piety, and moulded in the clear, though complex and subtile forms peculiar to a loyal master mind that had attained to know and reverence the divine law and secret of all form.

Think of Handel creating all those oratorios after thirty years of intense toil in composing, rehearsing, and bringing out Italian operas at the rate of two or three each year ! — Handel, a people’s man, compared with Bach, who loved the light, while Bach lived in the shade, and who was much more in his element while facing the great world. Think of the brave old giant, after he grew blind, conducting the performance of his “ Israel or “ Messiah ” at the organ, improvising such organ accompaniment as it is scarcely within the skill of modern musicianship to replace, his huge wig vibrating, they say, with satisfaction when the whole went to his mind ! Or think how Mozart consumed himself in musical creation, and died so young, apparently, only because the tree had borne all the wondrous fruit required of it, because he had fairly done the work, achieved the mission, of the longest life in five-and-thirty years ! And Beethoven ! What shall we say of him, writing his greatest works after he had entirely lost the sense of hearing? Was not that intellectual labor, and of the greatest kind, whether we judge it by the spiritual and mental chemistry which organized the works without the aid of sense, in him, or by their influence on the world ? Schubert, Bellini, Weber, Mendelssohn, great workers all, died young ; for real life and work of the purely intellectual, inspired kind are not to be measured by length of years. And the same is true in a great degree of the Dii minores, minor characters, in music ; this constancy of mental application, this earnest concentration of the higher faculties, is found in them ; nor in composers only, but in humblest teachers, village organists, amateur enthusiasts.

Music may run into frivolity, may be coupled with immodesty, and with sheer atheism, that makes a jest of honesty, believing in no good, as in the opéra bouffe of Offenbach ; but music in itself has no such tendency. It can be gay, light-hearted, droll, and set the soul free from its mortal clogs awhile by exquisite and graceful fancies, such as sparkle in Rossini’s comic operas, but never did it wear filthy channels for itself. Hold not the art guilty of the base uses trade and luxury would put it to. Music for music’s sake is one thing, is divine ; “ sensational ” music another and of other origin ; its spring is mercenary, not sincerely musical.

There is another prejudice against musicians on the score of “ eccentricities,” “ exceptional behavior,” “ disappointing ” personal appearance, etc. Such hopeless “ impracticables ” ! Beethoven’s “ moroseness,” his absentmindedness (forgetting to order his dinner while he sat in the restaurant for hours); Handel’s “ huge appetite,” for truly the giant had two attributes of Homer’s heroes in a high degree, capacity for anger and for eating (as it were, whole hecatombs)! absence of mind in Schumann too, and in Franz Schubert, alternating in the latter with a wild Bohemian conviviality, the great work going on within him somehow all the while ; Chopin’s morbid and unreasonable sensitiveness ; and many more such contradictions might be named ; yet really not more, we fancy, than among famous painters, sculptors, poets, psychologists, and men of science, men of business, and even some whom the pious world has sainted. But music presupposes a harmonic, truer sort of life than society has realized as yet; and so for answer we may say : These great musicians lived too early ; they were prophets in their way ; in actual outward life but ill at home in a world not ready for them, — a world so selfish and antagonistic. Their souls were strung up to heaven’s concert pitch ; it was the age, the world around them, that was false and gave out an uncertain and bewildering sound.

Schubert, they say, haunted the wineshop ; sought seclusion, sought escape from bores (whom, chiefly of all mortal ills, he dreaded), in what seemed dull and sensual leisure. There he would find free play of thought and room for shaping fancy. There, as we said, the work went on within, the new song sang itself, the symphony was growing into form. He was convivial and fond of friends, recklessly generous, “ felt himself a Crœsus when he had sold a song or two.” And when the generous liquor loosed his tongue, with what fearless frankness, what subtile, withering satire, he would tell pretenders to the name of artist what he thought of them ! Then again he could sit dumb and vacant to appearance, quiescent, passive as an oyster. But was there not a pearl in that oyster ? What if that pearl should chance to be the glorious great Symphony in C, that of the “ heavenly length,” as Schumann said of it, which here in our own city has held thousands of listeners in rapt, exalted mood so often in the Music Hall! What if it were full of pearls ! How many, as it now appears, of purest lustre, did he, careless of fame or publishers, leave hid away in corners, now first brought to light! Which is the real Schubert, the oyster or the pearl ?

Perhaps, considering all that these men have done, and what they are to us and will be to mankind for ages, the all-sufficient, simple excuse for the contradiction is, it proves them human, and makes them doubly ours.

We have been speaking of composers, real composers, great ones. If the brain-work they did was so vast in quantity, so intense in energy, so sublime in quality, so far-reaching in influence, so historic, precious to the heart of ages, it surely proves the intellectuality of the tone-art itself, the element in which they wrought, and in which we too feel free, clear, high, and happy, nearer heaven, while we listen to and love their inexhaustible creations. It it was great to do these things, is it not great to have and use and love them when done, as long as they will last ? — and that would seem to be forever. What it was good to give, is it not good also to receive, and yield us to its charm, and woo its influence ? And if this imply a certain passiveness of mind, abandonment of will on our part, are we less passive, are we more intellectual under the spell of poems or whatever kind of high discourse ?

Now here we have to meet perhaps the most respectable of all the phases of the scepticism with regard to music. It has its spring in certain sensitive consciences, persons intelligently, sincerely musical, but with a proneness to self-accusation when they find themselves enjoying. These, while they own their hearts are moved, as the flushed face and glistening eyes testify, while they admit the claim of music to be called the language of the heart, with power to melt, transport, instead of reasoning and convincing, appear to fancy that they but disparage it by such admission. They say it is a sentimental rather than an intellectual mood to which it ministers ; that it is a matter of mere feeling and emotion ; below the intellectual, the voluntary, moral principle, inferior to poetry, philosophy, or doctrine, since in it we simply yield ourselves to passive rapture. Strange if one could always enjoy tasting fruit, and never planting!

It is common to define music as the natural language of feeling, while words are the expression of ideas, of thoughts. And so, indeed, it is ; but not in a mere sentimental sense ; for do we not distinguish between music which awakens feelings wholesome, high, impersonal, and more allied to intellect than sense, enamored not with pleasure solely, but with truth, and beauty as a type and symbol of the highest truth, and music which is shallow, maudlin, commonplace in its expression, attractive to the selfish, sentimental, vulgar mind ? The truest feeling, such as true art, true music breathes and makes appeal to, is of a more intellectual temper. Heart quickens brain ; then thought reacts on feeling, and carries it up to a sense of perfect order, to a holy love and yearning after unity.

It by no means covers the whole significance of music to call it the language of feeling ; though, rightly understood, there might not be a higher definition. The poet truly sings,

But then he means the feeling which is “deep,” and which relates us to the highest universal ends of being. Now musical art, to be sure, does not describe objects, nor narrate histories, nor unfold cosmogonies and systems of philosophy and ethics, as some imaginative expounders of “ Ninth Symphonies ” would have us think. It does not express ideas, except of the kind technically known as musical ideas, pregnant little germs of melody, capable of logical development in a way analogous to the development of thoughts. And here, by way of caution, lest we be misunderstood in claiming that music is intellectual and has meaning, we would take occasion once for all to wash our hands of all responsibility for that kind of musical interpretation which seeks to trace a story, a mythology, a thread of doctrine, throughout such or such a symphony, sonata, or “ tone-poem ” ; and to express our conviction that music stoops from its proper, higher mission when it undertakes to describe scenes or imitate sounds in nature ; and that it is never less intellectual, or more regardless of its own chaste integrity, than when it takes the form of “programme music,” not trusting its own proper element, but borrowing chances of effect ab extra, and dividing the attention as if to cover its own insufficiency. Music must be sufficient in itself. The highest kind of music is pure music, that which lives and moves in purely musical ideas. Yet nothing is more natural than to try to describe the effect upon you of a piece of music by calling up such images, associations, trains of thought, analogous effects in other spheres, as it may have awakened in your mind. You clutch at all these feeble helps in your enthusiastic, vain endeavors to describe the witching thing. This you may do legitimately, so long as you profess no more, and do not try to reverse the order, and make it appear that the music was written to describe your thought. For here we find the true relation between thought and feeling in the sphere of music. Music in one sense describes, by awakening the feelings with which objects, thoughts, experiences, are inevitably associated ; every such feeling may of course awaken many images and many memories in many minds ; but there will be, at least, some vague analogy, affinity between them ; so that music, even of the most pure and abstract sort (such as a stringed quartette by Mozart) is always heard to best advantage on the fit occasion. If it be wedded to words, as in a song, an opera, an oratorio, these in a measure must determine its expression, though it bring out new meanings such as the words alone could hardly have conveyed. Yet take the words away, the music could not be translated into them, would not enable you to find them, though it would put you in a state of mind and feeling in which those or kindred thoughts and words might other themselves most aptly.

This brings us to the heart of the matter. Leaving objections, we come back to positive statement. The highest definition of music, its full significance and worth, is to be sought mainly in the highest kind of music ; that is to say, pure music, dealing in purely musical ideas, conscious of no outward purpose, content in its own world, preoccupied with its own peculiar mission, which is too divine to need the justification of any end to serve. This, indeed, is the first principle of truth in art of any kind.

In this we find the intellectuality of music. For music, in this view, is the most abstract, pure embodiment and type of universal law and movement. It is a key to the divine method throughout all the ordered distribution of the worlds of matter and of spirit. It is the most fluid, free expression of form, in the becoming (what the Germans call das Werden); form developing according to intrinsic and divine necessity. There is nothing arbitrary in music ; no acquiring any power in it except by patient, reverent study and mastering of divine proportions and the eternal laws of fitness. Goethe says : “ The worth of art appears most eminent in music, since it requires no material, no subject-matter, whose effect must be deducted ; it is wholly form and power, and it raises and ennobles whatever it expresses.”

Hence the study of the laws of fugue and counterpoint, the subtile art of what is called the polyphonic interweaving of the parts in harmony, the learning to develop out of a little melodic phrase of theme or motive, as from a seed thought, all the wealth of meaning and of beauty there concealed and waiting for the touch of fairy wand of genius, is at least as good a kind of higher intellectual gymnastics as the transcendental mathematics, or the categorical chains of logic, or the perpetually shifting, vanishing cloud-forms of metaphysics. Good music has a logic of its own ; none more severe, more subtile, and surely none so fascinating, for it leads, it charms into the Infinite.

Even to contemplate the elementary phenomena in nature, upon which all the wonders of the musical art are founded, is to find ourselves in presence of enchanting facts, of laws so intellectual, so inexhaustible in their suggestion, such startling revelations of an infinitely beautiful organic, allpervading, living order, that the soul is filled with awe as if the very air were tremulous with Deity. For what is music ? Its substance, common air. Its form, vibration. All beauty, in whatever art, is the result, the impressed form of motion, — free, unimpeded, even motion ; and motion, movement, is the universal sign and undeniable assertion of force, of power, of inspiration, in a word, of life ; and, finally, all free, undisturbed motion is vibratory, undulating, measured, proportionate, rhythmical. Physically, then, music is motion, and it is nothing else. And nothing moves that does not impress upon the air a vibration, or (which is the same thing) a sound, a tone. If I sing to you, a vibration of my soul, my feeling, imparts itself to the atmospheric medium, travelling on until it becomes a vibration in your soul, your feeling. The spiritual fact of music answers to this physical fact. Its business is directly with the motive principle in human life, and not with thoughts, perceptions, memories ; for these are passive, prompted by some motive force behind them.

Vibrations beget vibrations ; a vibrating chord or column of air divides into vibrating portions of itself, whose tones a fine ear will detect, mysteriously, faintly blending, harmonizing with the parent tone as it dies out. Thus one tone generates a whole series of tones, and we have virtually all tones in one. The first begotten and the most distinctly audible are those two, which, on being reduced within the compass of one octave, form with the principal its third and fifth,— and then we have that never-fading miracle, the trichord, which is the soul and substance of all harmony. Hauptmann (quoting Goethe, “ Jedes natürliches ist ein frisch ausgesprochenes Wort Gottes ”) says the trichord is “a word of God ” ; and who that heard the clear, fresh voices of ten thousand children in the “ Coliseum,” when they, after holding out a long, pure tone in unison, suddenly struck the blended tones of the trichord, —purity itself, like the white beam of “ holy light” divided by the prism, — will not heartily agree with him ? Three trichords, based respectively on the principal or keynote, its first “ over-tone ” or fifth, and the tone of which it is itself the fifth, give all the tones of the diatonic musical scale ; in other words, the operative melodic scale is really a mingling of three harmonic scales or series of tones generated by the first vibration ; and this trine origin, this “ trinity ” of the scale, carries in it the germ of all the possibilities of harmony, indeed, the whole beautiful secret of all musical development. Rhythm, too, lay coyly hidden in these same vibrations of the primal tone, and knew by instinct how to regulate the time career, the onflow of the tune, the composition as a whole, by measured intermittent stress or accent, so that it all should run in waves as uniformly as the “ tone-waves ” of the air which waft the message of each single tone upon the ear. Given the diatonic scale, which tempts continually to modulation, change, excursion among tones ; given beforehand, with it, that earlier, original harmonic scale of tones first generated by the vibrations of a groundtone (“ over-tones ”) to hold this free propensity still back to unity, as well as furnish samples of most pleasing and harmonic intervals (thirds, sixths, etc.) ; add to these rhythm, and lo ! Melody is born. And harmony is not far off: for can the stream forget its source ? Here too “the child is father of the man.” And now is music fully armed, to leap forth like Minerva from the brain of Jove. Now out of the harmonious strife of melody and harmony we presently shall see spring up all sorts of kaleidoscopic hints of imitation (themes, motives, bits of motives, echoed or reflected from one part to another of the harmony); sharp-flavored passing discords, piquing expectation, pressing to solution ; all the arts of polyphonic interweaving of the parts, each part pursuing its own independent, individual, melodic way, yet all enforcing, celebrating the one common theme, co-operating to one end ; in short, the whole development — as beautiful and wonderful as growth of plant or crystal — of counterpoint and fugue and all the inner structural and outer architectural varieties of form which music has from time to time assumed, and some of which she cherishes forever ; till, donning finally her rainbow robe of many colors, she thrones herself upon the orchestra and shines forth in her crowning glory in the consummate form of forms, the Symphony.

Thus logically, as tree from germ, out of the first tone (“ word of God ”) that ever rang, may we deduce the art of music in its infinite varieties, all singing, pleading for and prophesying UNITY, as the grand hope of human mind and heart, the highest word of science and religion. Here is no room, of course, for the history, any more than for the theory of music. Yet this exceedingly brief hint of its origin, at least, was quite essential to our argument. Such origin and such development who can fairly contemplate, and for a moment longer doubt the intellectuality of music ?

As there is nothing arbitrary in music of itself, in music as a science, so too there is nothing arbitrary, or merely accidental, in its true forms of art. And here, before concluding, we would dwell a moment upon two of the more important forms, which are too commonly imagined to be arbitrary experiments, inventions of one man, indolently aped by others, fashions of too long a day, doomed to be swept away with other traditional rubbish of the past; but which we believe to have grown out of the very nature of things, — types moulded into shape by a necessity intrinsic and enduring.

The first is the FUGUE FORM. The fugue is the vital principle of musical form ; it is the prime secret of all form, the very soul of it. Whatever music does not more or less imply the fugue principle, though it need not be strict fugue, is likely to be poor and shallow music. For fugue is but the logical development of what is latent in a germ or theme. It is in music what the spiral law of growth is in the plant. It has its prototypes in nature : in the surf billows rolling up the beach; in the waves that run along a field of grain before the wind ; in the widening vortex of the whirlpool and the waterspout ; in the tongues of flame losing themselves and reappearing as the fire soars and seeks the sky. It has its correspondences in other arts ; in nothing, perhaps, so strikingly as in those wonderful creations of religious architecture, which are the furthest removed from mere mechanics and geometry, which speak so to the soul and the imagination, and almost seem alive and growing, as it were yearning, reaching, soaring upward while we look at them, — the old Gothic churches. There we see the fugue in solid form ; that is what Madame De Staël meant when she called architecture “ frozen music ” ; there we find the same precision of minute detail, the same endless echoing and imitation of motives and parts of motives, phrases, with quaint particulars ; a thousand pointed arches, clustered columns, cunning tracery, and, peeping out of unexpected corners, exquisite or grotesque shapes of plants, of men, of animals, and monsters, as if to include all the images that ever filled the waking thoughts or dreams of man in history, — all aspiring, growing to a climax, yet to the mind still hinting further growth, still seeming in the process of becoming, never absolutely done ; utmost finish in detail mechanically, actually, but ideally suggesting still the Infinite, the unattainable in time. This suggestion of the Infinite is what we would call the expression of the fugue. (Only, to be expressive, it must be a fugue of genius.)

Yes, in music, the fugue is the perfect type of unity in variety. It is nature’s own law ; the true instinct of genius felt it out, obeyed it unconsciously by the inmost necessity of art and of its own soul. True to nature, genius could not do otherwise ; it was simply letting germs, seed - thoughts (motives technically) grow. To be bound always strictly to the fugue form is pedantry ; but not to know it, not to feel it, not to imply it even in free composition, is to forsake the real fount of inspiration. All the great composers, the real creators whose works live forever, — Beethoven, for instance, who did not very often write fugues as such, — working by a true instinct with nature and the divine laws of essential form, or unity, still imply the fugue in whatever form they write ; they have its secret in them, its law is in their hearts, the soul of all their method ; indeed, so familiar are they with it, that they need not literally present it. It lay at the basis of their culture. No one is fairly master of the free forms, until he is master of the fugue. That is, wherever there is harmony, wherever there is more than one part, true art dictates that the parts move individually, that there be some contrapuntal texture. Where Counterpoint sits down to work, Fugue looks over its shoulders.

And now we see why one never exhausts the interest of a good fugue. There have been plenty of mechanical, dry fugues, results of plodding calculation, ingenious, learned, but without much expression. But there are also live ones ; a live one never gets hackneyed, never dogs and persecutes the mind like tunes in fashion, which the street-organs keep forever murdering, but will not bury. Mere melody has in it a principle of decay ; it stales by repetition ; and therefore the music that proclaims the Infinite, the great religious music from of old, has worn the undecaying form of fugue and counterpoint. For fugue treats its theme, develops, “ works ” it up in such a noble way that it becomes a perpetual renovation and new illustration of itself, and so invests it with perennial youth and freshness : it can no more bore you now than can the themes, the motives, multiplied, repeated, echoed, imitated, or contrasted throughout the whole upward floating, spirit-like, scarcely material mass of a Strasbourg or Cologne cathedral. All its possibilities of repetition are provided for, anticipated in this structural development, this contrapuntal transfiguration, lifting it into a purer atmosphere beyond reach of the curse of commonplace, so that it cannot spoil. Right healthy music are the fugues of Bach, and hearty too ; no sickly sentimentality there ; no poor ambition for effect ; but sincere expression always of deep, genuine, religious feeling. To him the fugue form had become a native, pliant, and obedient language, in which he could express himself most readily ; and between one fugue and another of his there is a wide range of expression, from airy, fairy fancy to deepest tenderness, to holy meditation, to noonday brightness of sublimest joy. Expression you will find too, as well as learning, in many more of the old fuguists. A century before Bach, the fugues of Frescobaldi, chapel-master at St. Peter’s, in Rome, breathe a delicate and tender sentiment. So do some by Bach’s pupil, Kirnberger. Handel, too, was grand in fugue, but far less various than Bach. Nor was his nature quite at home in so interior and mystical an element. Mozart, consummate master in all music, could not write without expression. A deep, musing sort of feeling goes with subtile art in the fugues of the older Scarlatti. Then there were the sons of Bach ; nor even in such types of learned and severe musicianship as Albrechtsberger and the Padre Martini is the fugue always dry and unsuggestive.

The fugue form pertains more to internal and organic structure in one homogeneous musical piece or movement. Our other example of form shall be one of what we may term architectural massing of several movements in a great symmetrical musical whole. Look at the SYMPHONY, or what is technically called the SONATA form, common to sonatas, symphonies, trios, stringed quartettes, classical concertos, etc.

This form, too, we say, is not mere accident or imitation of one man’s success beyond its reasonable term of life. The reason of it is to be sought in the nature of the human soul and in the corresponding nature of music.

How is it with us when a matter interests us and excites us to that pitch of feeling in which music steps in as the natural language? Our whole nature is engaged in it. The head, or thinking principle; the heart, or feeling, loving principle ; the will, or active principle ; and more or less (amid these earnest powers) the lively, recreative play of faney, — all take part in it, all in turn are principally addressed by it. Reason, passion, frolic humor, will : these seek each its type and representative in the forms of an art so perfectly human and so pliant to the motions of the human soul as music. If a matter taxes our reasoning, truth - seeking faculties for one spell, it is a law of our nature that we then quit thinking and only feel about it for another spell. We modulate out of the dialectic into the religious and accepting mood. It was an argument, an emulous labor of the brain; it has become a lyric of the heart, a prayer, a hymn, a softly rising incense and aroma of the faith and love and longing in us. And then, the more we have been in earnest, the more naturally comes the reaction of frolic fantasy and humor, the more lively the suggestions and “heat-lightnings” of a quick, surcharged, midsummer fancy, — the scherzo humors that so often flash from characters of deepest pathos. But the circle of moods is not yet complete. Thought, feeling, fancy, are but phases of the living stream that yet must ultimate itself in action, must rush into deed, and so pour its life into the great ocean whence all proceed and to which all tend. That is the finale. Now for the musical correspondence.

The first, or allegro movement of a symphony, takes up a theme, or themes, and proceeds to their discussion and elaboration. It begins with a principal theme or subject ; presently, with the natural modulation into the dominant or relative key, comes in a counter theme ; these two are developed and contrasted a little way, when the whole passage is literally repeated to fix them firmly in the mind. Then begins a sort of analytic canvassing of all that they contain ; fragments, phrases of the one are blended with or off-set against the other ; the two propositions (often waking up a number of accessory subjects by the way) are subjected to a sort of exhaustive musical logic, till what is in them is brought fully out and verified. By a sort of refining, differentiating, intellectual argumentation these themes are held up in various lights, are developed singly and in contrast, and are worked through various keys, abridgments, augmentations, episodes, digressions, into a most various and complex whole, in which the same original threads or themes continually reappear, yet with perpetual sense of novelty. The intellectual principle delights in analysis, in the detection of differences and distinctions. So the symphonic allegro betrays a tendency to continual divergence and escape from the first starting-point. Here is an art type of discussion, whose whole aim and tendency is unity and truth. What a type of catholicity in thought ! Discussion, no denial ; music is incapable of that ; Mephistopheles in music must make sad work, or forget his nature.

Then comes the adagio, larghetto, andante, — some slow movement, which has more of calm, still feeling and unquestioning religion in it. This is the central sanctuary in this musical abridgment of man’s life, which every good symphony appears to be. This the heart ; that the head.

The serious andante passes, — sometimes directly, sometimes through the frolic scherzo, and the minuet and trio, — into the rondo finale, which is rapid and full of the spirit and preparation for action, full of resolve and fire. The sentiment which has passed through the crucible of the judgment in the allegro, and sought its divine repose at the religious altar of feeling in the adagio, having traversed its intellectual and its effective phases, now puts on its armor and moves on with alacrity for action. (Though, in many lighter symphonies, it is more like a school-boy pulling on his hat and rushing out of doors in pure animal spirits.) It seems to act itself out with buoyant confidence ; sometimes with sublime triumph, as in the march concluding the C Minor Symphony.

Such is the model or typical form of a symphony, or a sonata. We do not say, all symphonies must closely conform to it ; no two things in nature are precisely alike, no two leaves upon a tree, no two human forms or faces ; but every one, with more or less divergence, illustrates its own proper type. And, be it remembered, we are citing only one of many admirable great forms of music, — greater and truer in that they are not arbitrary, but determined by intrinsic reason and necessity, and therefore enduring. Search into the secret, then, of musical form, and you will learn other secrets, learn much of yourself, of the divine organic method in the material and moral universe. Said we not rightly that music is as good a school for intellectual discipline as mathematics, logic, or philosophy ?

But the superior potency of these studies in musical form appears in this : that they are æsthetical as well as abstract ; they are imaginative and free in absolute obedience to law ; they seek beauty as an end, and pour forth glowing feeling from the heart, while they so finely illustrate the method of the universe, the principle of one in all. And so (even without the theoretic study as such), by mere familiar intimacy with such forms, such music in the concrete, by frequent listening to the beautiful sonatas, overtures, and symphonies, till we become possessed with them, informed with their own spirit, our instincts get attuned into a sympathy with universal law and unity. Here is an intellectual culture, where intellect as it were rises into sentiment, and the two are henceforth one ; where scientific, dry analysis blooms out and fructifies into poetic, loving synthesis. Indeed, may not this be, perhaps, the highest kind of intellectual culture : this cultivation not so much of reasoning or perceptive powers, as of the harmonic mood and temper ; this disposing and attuning of the whole mind to law, to the perpetual embrace of truth in beauty ?

At once emotional and intellectual in so pure a sense, music with good right has been called a universal language, and, above all, the native language (so to speak) of the religious sentiment. This aspect of the subject claims consideration, but not now.

John S. Dwight.