Modernism in Music

I

Quo musa tendis ? The question rises to the lips whenever we contemplate the development of modern music. If we are young and radical, we welcome enthusiastically the innovations of Strauss and Debussy. If, however, the confidence of youth is ours no longer, if the blood in our veins begins to chill, we are apt to shrink from the musical manifestations of modernism as from something uncanny and repellant.

Is the modern movement in musical art what theologians would call a true development; or is it the luxuriant growth of corruption? If it is a true development, the principles which underlie all great art will be manifestly operative in it. If the inward grace of order is lacking, it must be a corruption.

Fortunately for truth, the issue is one which we can put to the test. If modern music is æsthetically sound, its distinctive notes will ring clear and true.

What are those notes?

The first concerns the material of which music is made, the sounds through which the art manifests itself, as poetry manifests itself in words and architecture in stone. Musicians are beginning to feel that the tonal equipment which has served the craft since Bach and Rameau, — the major, minor and chromatic scales, — if not actually outworn, stands in need of the stimulus of novelty. They resent the tyranny of the piano, with its one key to do service for both a sharp and a flat (D sharp and E flat, for example), though the violin recognizes them as different, and its ability to play in all the keys — none of them in tune.

Musical research among the Arabs and other Oriental peoples reminds us of a fact which the world is apt to overlook: that there are available for music many sounds not used in Western art. The old idea that the Arabs use a scale of quarter-tones has been exploded by Julien Tiersot; but the same careful investigator shows that the Eastern scales of tones and halftones are not the same as ours. Slight but unmistakable variations of pitch give the Oriental gamut a personality and an expressiveness with which we would fain enrich our own. Even as matters stand, Orientalism is a factor of the first importance in modern music.

The smallest interval that Western music calls on us to distinguish is the semitone. But the trained ear can distinguish the sixteenth part, of a tone, and organs exceptionally constituted can appreciate shades of sound still more delicate. We have thus available for the purposes of composition some hundred or more notes, a prismatic series as delicately graded as the hues of the spectrum. With this gamut musicians should be able to rival the achievements of the impressionists in painting or the symbolists in verse. From time to time we hear of the invention of instruments which can be played in this microtonal scale. Science can readily produce such instruments, and, with their assistance, musicians will be able to give utterance to conceits which the contemporary orchestra would be powerless to realize. The scale of tones and half-tones will always continue to be the norm, however; for, in various forms and with delicate inflections, it is the basis of the musical speech of humanity. But the finely shaded scales of science will endow musicians with sonorities as exquisite as the hues of mother-ofpearl.

The development of art naturally follows the line of least resistance, and modern innovations in tonality largely consist in a return to scales which had fallen into disuse, such as the modes of ancient Greece and the Christian Church. Occasionally, however, the need of new means of expression drives composers to the invention of scales undreamed of before. When Strauss wants to convey the idea of the weakness and depravity of Herod, he does so partly by halting, vacillating rhythms, partly by the use of a theme based on a scale of whole tones. If you play seven successive whole tones — C, D, E, F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, C, you have the scale used by the composer of Salome when he wants to portray degeneracy. It jars on the ear, but not more so than the character of Herod on the mind. Strauss is giving expression to the thought which was in the mind of Milton, when he sang how

Strauss boldly realizes in music the ineuphoniousness of sin. He deems it illogical to portray a moral pervert in an agreeable succession of sounds. He chooses ugliness as a means of musical conviction. To those who regard beauty as the one and only excuse for music’s existence this seems the unpardonable sin, and they would willingly put Strauss under sentence of excommunication. To be logical, however, they could not stop at so doing. They must erase Caliban and Thersites from Shakespeare; eliminate the allegory of Sin and Death from Paradise Lost; expunge whole cantos of the Inferno; repaint crucifixions and martyrdoms innumerable; and send Rodin’s Belle qui fat Heaulmiere to be broken up.

Through the use of effects ungrateful to the ear, Strauss deepens.the moral significance of music. Here is no seductive portrayal of vice, as in Verdi’s La Traviata, but a representation of things as they are. The music of John the Baptist is gravely diatonic; that of Salome is chromatic; Herod is portrayed in music as abnormal as his nature.

Debussy also makes use of abnormal aspects of tonality. Like his teachers, the singers of noels and chansons spirituels, he turns lovingly to the ancient modes of the church, scales of a strange beauty, though long despised by Philistines as barbarous. His predilection for a scale of whole tones manifests itself continually; but with so delicate a garb of harmony does he cloak the strange mode, that the Debussian melody leaves on the mind images of wondrous beauty. Yet he too, when he wishes to suggest the unusual, does not shrink from effects which many musicians condemn as ugly. The most significant episode in Pelleas et Mélisande is where Mélisande, leaning out of the window of her tower, suffers her hair to fall in a cascade about the head and shoulders of Pelleas. The occurrence is symbolic. It pictures the envelopment of Pelleas in the personality of Mélisande. The tragedy of the event is darkly hinted at in the music.

With the purpose of gloomy suggestion in mind, Debussy makes use of the succession of four whole tones (B, A, G, F) so detested by mediæval composers and known to them as “ the devil in music.” Beautiful it may not pretend to be, but impressive it surely is; and the composer, to heighten its impressiveness, multiplies the device in six-fold harmony, each voice singing four successive whole tones. It is impossible to drive home an idea more significantly.

Debussy’s harmonies are as remarkable as his melody, and the narrowly orthodox, according to the law and the text-books, regard him as the high priest of decadence. His followers, on the other hand, say that, like Bach and Wagner before him, Debussy is a generation ahead of the schools.

When he was a soldier, in garrison at Evreux, Debussy loved to listen to the bells of the parish church and analyze their strange harmonies. For no musical voice is so complex as that of a bell. Yet the simplest note of the purest instrument contains within its little world of vibrations all the notes of the gamut and many others besides. Strike C in the bass of the piano and keep the key held down. You will hear, not only the fundamental note, but, aft - er a moment, C an octave above, and, if your ear is sharp, the G above that. The note is disintegrating, and the whispered overtones establish the relation of the primary sound with the whole universe of tone. Just as all mankind are related to one another, so are all sounds.

In bells these overtones, or harmonics, are very rich. Sometimes they are more prominent than the basic note itself. That is the case of Big Ben of Oxford. Big Ben’s loudest note is B flat in the middle of the piano. But his lowest note is A, an octave lower, sounded much more softly, however. C sharp and E, above the B flat, are also heard gently murmuring, the five sounds uniting to form the harmony of the dominant ninth. Some bells give discords much more violent; yet so exquisitely proportioned are the constituent elements of tone that the resultant voice is beautiful. Debussy delighted to dwell on these tonal affinities, and it is his ideal to enrich the great normal harmonies by associations, remote, bizarre, and provocative of attention.

Much of the music of both Strauss and Debussy is in no determinate key. Tonality, in the old sense of the word, has ceased to be their object. Their conceit floats hither and thither on the sea of tone. In Salome the singers rarely conclude a passage in the key in which it begins. The signature in Strauss’s music has humorously been said to be mainly useful as an indication of the key which the composition is not in. Debussy leaps from key to key with a boldness justified only by the felicity of the result.

For extraordinary effects Strauss sometimes writes in two keys at once. He does so in Also sprach Zarathustra, which concludes with an equivocal chord, suggestive at one and the same time of the alien keys of C and B. The chord on C typifies the hope of life after death; the chord on B is pessimistic. Together they give the effect of doubt. In Salome, when Herod cries out at what seems to him the terrible idea of the raising of the dead, he sings in one key, while the orchestra plays in another. Strauss wished to create the feeling of consternation, of terrified amazement. Could he have gone to work in a more convincing way?

Bach and Wagner saw in vision the realm of tonal freedom; Strauss and Debussy are leading the chosen people into the promised land.

II

The awakening of the race-spirit has greatly furthered the emancipation of tonality. It came as a reaction against the spurious classicism which followed the flowering of German art in Mozart and Beethoven. Instead of being true to their racial idiom, men slavishly copied the Teutonic vernacular, as though it were the one authentic speech of classic art. Even to this day we see men sacrificing their God-given originality, to imitate an idiom which can be creative only when it is the musician’s native speech. Taxed with their fault, these misguided persons say that, classicism has no nationality. Yet what is Homer if not Greek, Shakespeare if not English, Goethe if not German, Dante if not the voice of mediæval Italy? The classics of music are, in like manner, national monuments. Beethoven is most truly classical when he is singing with the voice of the German people. The slow movement of the C minor Symphony, the Allegretto of the Seventh, the Scherzo of the Eroica, the rustic merriment of the Pastoral, the choral crown of the Ninth, are impregnated with the spirit of the Volkslied.

But this saving truth was lost sight of in unregulated hero-worship, and whole libraries of ineffectual imitation had to be written before it was rediscovered. It was Schubert who helped to lead people back to artistic sanity. He recognized the beauty of Magyar song, and made use of it in his compositions. Liszt followed where Schubert led, and, in his Rhapsodies, gave glowing expression to the Hungarian spirit. This was the revival of nationalism. To-day the race-spirit is recognized as one of the great feeders of art. It manifests itself simply and unmistakably. The case of Hungary is typical. The Hungarian genius is mirrored in tonality and rhythm. The Hungarians have a scale of their own, which they probably brought with them from the plains of Asia, long ages ago. It is our enharmonic minor mode with the fourth degree raised a half tone. The Magyar scale starting on C would thus be C, D, E flat, F sharp, G, A flat, B, C. Add to these notes the rhythm of the Czardas, and the Magyar feeling is irresistible.

What Liszt did for Hungary, Chopin did for Poland, Grieg for Norway, and Tschaikowsky for Russia. In each case the composer’s inspiration was the songs of his people. Grieg started by imitating the colorless Niels Gade. But his friend Nordraak, the poet, drew his attention to Norway’s priceless treasure of folk-song. “ It was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes,” said Grieg, and thenceforward he wrote in the Norse idiom. Of course, he was sharply criticised for so doing. “ He stuck in the fjord and never got out of it,” said a German critic; and an American writer stigmatized his compositions as “ map music.” We do not think Homer less classic because his poetry is a literary map of Hellas, or Raphael for painting Italian madonnas. Why then belittle Grieg for being Scandinavian? Edward Macdowell is a map musician in his Indian idylls; yet they will probably prove his most enduring work, and more worthy to live than whole volumes of pseudo-classic oratorio, begotten in the image but not conceived in the spirit of Handel and Mendelssohn.

III

A by-path of nationalism, and equally contributory to the enfranchisement of music, is orientalism — the fecundation of Western art with the spirit of the East. What Loti and Hearn, Burton, Kipling, and Amicis have done for literature, Saint-Saëns, Goldmark, Rimsky Korsakoff, and others, are doing for music. In vain Kipling says, —

Such music as Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and the Scheherazade of Rimsky Korsakoff opens doors of intimacy between Orient and Occident which the logic of pure reason would leave closed forever.

Mendelssohn was the first composer of eminence to give his music a distinctively Eastern tinge. Mozart’s Seraglio and Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens are Eastern in little more than name. But the great chorus in Elijah, “ Baal, we cry to thee,” has a barbaric shudder which could come only from the Orient . Weber coquetted with the East in a comic-opera sort of way; but the first musical Orientalist properly so called was Félicien David, and the work which establishes his right to the title is Le Désert. It is a tone-picture of the Sahara. Tremulous harmonies built upon a long-sustained pedal convey the idea of immensity; the almées dance to strains as Oriental as the ogive arches and fretwork of the Alhambra. The voice of the Orient had been heard, and, from that day to this, the music of the West has been sympathetically vibrant.

Yet our Orientalism is only a compromise. Eastern rhythms we can faithfully interpret; but the tonal idiom of the Orient we can reproduce only when it happens to coincide with Western conventions. The time is coming, however, when we shall hear the music of the East as Orientals hear it. Then our artistic view will expand as the horizon expands when we climb the side of a mountain. Meanwhile, even within the circumscribed range of Western tonality, Saint-Saëns in his Samson et Dalila ballet, and Puccini in Madame Butterfly, delight our senses with tonal beauties undreamed of before. These men do not interpret the East as seen in literature, as Schumann did in his Oriental Pictures. Saint-Saëns knows the Mediterranean littoral from Cairo to the Pillars of Hercules; Puccini bases his Japanese music on veritable airs from Nippon.

IV

The complexity of modern life is realistically mirrored in music. The legendary epoch, when music existed as sweet sound and nothing more, eludes discovery. Even the thousandyear-old Veni Creator Spirit us of Notker Balbulus imitates the creaking of the abbey mill-wheel. Charpentier’s Louise, with its reminiscences of the calls of Parisian tradesmen and mendicants, has its prototype in Jannequin’s Cris de Paris, written in the seventeenth century. The old German composer, Kuhnau, coming a little later, has a realistic portrayal of the combat of David and Goliath, down to the whizzing of the stone from David’s sling, thus anticipating by a century or so Wagner’s representation of the casting of Klingsor’s spear. So far then from being a distinctive mark of modernism, realism is rather a sign of antiquity. Even Bach, long regarded as the abstract musician par excellence, is proved by Schweitzer to be a thorough-paced realist, consistently using progressions and figures illustrative of the text. He pictures the flow of water much as Schubert does it in Auf dem Wasser zu singen; he has formulæ for the representation of a large variety of physical effects and mind-states. It is in its novelty of application, its subtlety, its intensity, that we must seek the modernist trait in realism.

Beethoven was a landscapist in an idyllic way in the Pastoral Symphony. Wagner’s Waldweben brings us nearer to the actual voices of the woodland. In our own day Hans Huber interprets nature as she appears to him in the paintings of Arnold Böcklin. Every theme in the last movement of Huber’s Symphony in E flat is inspired by some example of what has been termed Böcklin’s “ pantheistic nature poetry.” It is a musical representation of an artist’s impressions of nature and, delicate and elusive though it is, it is none the less realism; for the full enjoyment of the music depends on something independent of mere sound, some knowledge in the mind of the hearer. Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht, with its fighting Goths and Huns and vision of the triumph of the Cross, is far more significant than Kuhnau’s naïve battle-pieces, because it derives its sentiment partly from the Scriptures, partly from the famous painting by Kaulbach, and partly from the religious experience of the musician. The same composer’s Sposalizio is compact of religious mystery, the Renaissance, and nineteenth-century sensibility.

Handel could be unconsciously humorous at times, as when he accompanied “And He sent them frogs,” the great chorus in Israel in Egypt, with an undeniably hopping figure for orchestra. But humor does not really come into its musical heritage until Beethoven imitates the tipsy revelry of the Austrian peasants in the Pastoral Symphony. In our day we have become more precise. Poldini’s Poupée Valsante is a tone-photograph of the stiffjointed marionette, realistic to the very running-down of the spring. Musicians turn to sorrow, however, far more readily than to merriment, and one result of this cult of gloom is the macabre. Saint-Saëns set the example in his tone-poem of the dance of death. With xylophone and flattened E string on the violins, he mimics the skeleton dance and Satan fiddling with a bow made out of a dead man’s arm. Charles Martin Loeffler, American by birth, French by instinct, revels in the macabre. His setting of Paul Verlaine’s Cornemuse is characteristic. The piper is dead; but, in the darkling midnight wood, his pipes make music that sounds like the death-rattle in the throat of a woman expiring at the cross-roads, under the shadow of the crucifix. Verlaine gives the ideas; Loeffler translates them into the language of tone. Compare with this weird music the majestic realism of Macdowell’s Eagle, with its passages tremulous with aerial buoyancy. In both cases, thoroughly to appreciate the music, we must be familiar with the poem. Yet, even without this knowledge, the music is beautiful.

Strauss imitates the bleating of sheep, the whirling vans of the windmill, the crying baby, and is almost as ingenuous in his Brobdingnagian way as were Jannequin and Kuhnau before him. Nor are the contemptuous cacophony of the squabbling Jews in Salome, and the snarling of the “ Adversaries ” in Ein Heldenleben, much more subtle. When Strauss tells the story of the Hero’s Life in quotations from his own works, he confronts us with a difficult question. Is he or is he not his own hero? When, in Also sprach Zarathustra, he wishes to suggest the idea of the Deity, he uses the ancient Gregorian intonation of the Credo in unum Deum. To those who have heard that, intonation again and again it is a symbol. But what is its meaning to those who never heard it before? Is it a meaningless succession of tones, or is the melody penetrated with the spirituality of the monkish dreamer who composed it long ago?

When Beethoven, in his Fifth Symphony, tells the story of the struggle of genius against fate, it is the hero as type that interests him. In Tschaikowsky’s Pathetic Symphony the struggle becomes personal. Tschaikowsky admitted that the work had a programme, and that he composed it with sorrow and bitter tears. What the programme was he never told. But the character of the work strengthens the belief in its personal significance. Passion and gruesome mirth are succeeded by the hopelessness of despair. The Adagio Lamentoso is a musical deathpiece.

No mind-state is so strange, so exceptional, that it may not furnish material for musical inspiration. The buzzing in the ears of the deaf Smetana figures in his autobiographic first string quartette; the melancholy of Stephen Heller gives a gray tone to his Promenades d’un Solitaire; Watteau, Prévost, and Massenet collaborate on the score of Manon. Debussy leads us to the borderland where the definite blends with the impalpable. His Afternoon of a Faun is of “ such stuff as dreams are made of.” The faun awakens with recollections of a visitation of goddesses, and the music suggests the coming and going of the golden memory. The music would be beautiful, though the hearer had no idea of what the composer was attempting to portray. But, when we link it with Mallarmé’s poem, its loveliness deepens ineffably. It is the realization of a vision in a medium almost as subtle and rainbow-hued as the mystery portrayed.

V

Every age has its own way of thinking, and devises art-forms adapted to its peculiar habit of mind. What more natural than that the logical imagination of Bach should flow in the exquisite mould of the fugue? Men have experimented in the fugue since Bach’s day; but, in spite of Mozart and Mendelssohn, it cannot truthfully be said that there has been any essential advance in fugal form since old John Sebastian laid down the pen. Neither the genius of Beethoven nor the erudition of Mozart could make the fugue characteristic of their own day. They were merely men of genius writing in a form which had alreadybeen raised to its highest power. The same thing is true of the sonata, though the sonata, with its contrasted themes and threefold development, has a variety of expression of which the fugue is incapable. Nevertheless, when Beethoven tried to make the sonata say the deep things of his nature and reflect the metaphysical genius of the age he lived in, it fused under his touch. That he felt the form unequal to his needs is proved by his attempts to enrich its expressiveness by the addition of fugue, recitative, and operatic aria. The result is beautiful, but of a beauty which does not strictly belong to the sonata. In Beethoven’s hands the sonata is in process of disintegration.

The symphony, which is a sonata for orchestra, shows the same unrestful sense as of an organism haunted by a spirit greater than itself, or, at least, of different order. Schumann’s use of the same theme in different sections, and his attempts to obliterate the divisions between movements, are vain efforts to adapt to new uses a form which has already done its work. Only when the composer is thinking in the musical speech of yesterday, like the novelist who imitates Smollett or Scott, can he hope to achieve any notable success in symphony form. Brahms, in his symphonies, is more like a belated Viennese than a true modern; Tschaikowsky’s symphonies owe their success to qualities which are not truly symphonic at all.

If Liszt had attempted to express the Magyar genius in sonata form, he would have failed. He invented the rhapsody and was successful. If he had tried to transcribe the Preludes of Lamartine into terms of symphony, he would have been foredoomed to failure. But he turned to the symphonic poem, and success crowned his efforts. Where Liszt made experiments, Richard Strauss works with the assurance of a master. His tone-poems diffuse atmosphere, describe character, tell a story. This the sonata cannot do. Nor is it blasphemy to say so. It is not claimed that the symphonic poem is an advance on the sonata or fugue in point of beauty, only that it says different things equally well. The fugues of Bach, and the Waldstein and Appassionato of Beethoven, have not been surpassed and probably never will be. But men have other things to say today, and they must say them in their own way, or they will be silent among the ages.

Perfect form, rightly understood, is not this or that particular form; it is not the suite, the fugue, the sonata, the symphonic poem; it is congruity between the ideal in the mind of the composer and the way in which he expresses it. Form continues to evolve until the contemporary ideal has been expressed; then the artistic generation turns to something else. It may be that even now the tone-poem has served its usefulness, and that composers will have to seek a new medium. Some people think they see that medium in the supposedly formless music of Claude Debussy. They do not admit its formlessness, however. They recognize in Debussy the musician of the vague, the intangible, the elusive. His subjects are the aroma of flowers, the mist and the waves, clouds mirrored in the bosom of the lake, the rain falling softly on the grass. If Debussy shrinks from the definite, it is because the prosody of the schools would be as unpardonable a solecism in the music he writes as the use of the lead borders of cathedral stained glass in an impressionist canvas by Renoir.

Art crystallizes only when it has done its work and a change is imminent. Mutability is the principle of its being. Art does not improve from age to age: it changes. The art of to-day has nothing more beautiful to offer than the melody of Arcangelo Corelli, the Prelude in B flat minor in the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavichord, the Allegretto in Beethoven’s Symphony in A, some of Schubert’s songs, and certain elegiac moments in Chopin. And, unless art has finished its task, we may confidently hope that the greater work of the present day will be the classic music of to-morrow. Modernism, rightly understood, is not a menace, but a manifestation of vitality. What is good in it will live; what is bad will sink into oblivion.