Music Ex Machina

ONLY a few years ago a piano was little more than a piece of furniture. Sometimes the daughter of the house tinkled scales upon it, or a collegian son pounded out ‘Whistling Rufus’ or the ‘Washington Post’; but for the most part it stood silent, majestic, like an inanimate footman, testifying with polished rosewood to the opulence and taste of its possessor. That is all changed now; pianos are no longer silent; thanks to the perforated musicroll, they give tongue unceasingly. To walk down a suburban street on a summer’s evening is to take an aural bath in the history of music. Through the open windows of cottage after cottage float the compositions of Bach, Sousa, Chaminade, Chopin, Moszkowski, Wagner, Puccini, Lehar, and Ethelbert Nevin, all mingling in one stunning potpourri. One cannot make a simple after-dinner call without paying tribute to the player-piano which is one’s host’s newest pride.

To tell the truth, where the performer has taste and is adroit with his levers and pedals, there are worse ways of passing an evening. Bridge and small-talk are both escaped; all that is necessary is to settle one’s self in the easiest chair and listen to the notes of a symphony, a song, a violin concerto, or some other composition suited to the piano. The accuracy of the mechanism is marvelous; themes are brought out, the tempo is varied, the notes are all faultlessly struck. It is interesting, precise, correct; artistically it is comparable to a perfectly good modern gothic façade.

But the evening does not always go so well; instruments vary, performers have differing ideals. Who has not suffered from the over-cautious amateur who sets the tempo-indicator rigorously at the beginning of a movement and never varies it, playing on in phraseless metronomic monotony until a printed direction authorizes a change? The performer of uncertain coördination between eye and hand plays trippingly on past the most positive of signals, collects himself, pauses in the middle of a run, and, with the accent lever always a beat ahead or behind the music, contrives the most bizarre of syncopations.

More practiced hands avoid these faults. They become absolute masters of technique and, scorning tradition, aspire to stamp their individuality on the interpretation. The result when they happen to be musical geniuses is stimulating.

The less successful innovators fall roughly into two groups. One of these is soulful, lingering softly on minor chords, listlessly dragging the sweet sad notes of a Chopin nocturne, insisting on lyric themes, hushing accompaniments to a murmur, and reducing even Liszt rhapsodies to a pensive adagio. Players of the other class are technical, fiery, ‘brilliant.’ They drive their instruments like racing automobiles. Subtlety of rhythm, delicacy of tone, are not for them. They ‘twostep’ through a Mozart quartette as if it had been written for a military band. They tear off trills with the unerring rapidity of a little boy running a stick along a picket fence.

All this is not new. In the days of hand-played pianos we knew the sentimental dilettante, the nervous beginner, the rattling virtuoso, the beautiful pianiste whose attention never shifted from the effect of her pretty arms and shoulders. But the difficulties of the instrument made such things infrequent. If we enjoyed no great plenty of good music, it was not difficult to escape the bad. And even at the worst, old-time recitals were seldom entirely without a trace of mellowness. During the long apprenticeship the pupil lived in a musical atmosphere and could hardly avoid absorbing at least some conception of musical tradition, aims, ideals.

But to-day we do not have to put every-day concerns out of our heads until the very minute we sit down to the piano; and then we confidently attempt to interpret a Bach fugue, a Verdi aria, an arabesque by Debussy, one after the other.

It may be, as optimists maintain, that all this is but the first chaotic stage in the advance to that general musical interest which our race has so conspicuously lacked; that in the listening to hundreds and hundreds of musicrolls taste will develop, critical standards will be inductively discovered, commonplace music will lose its charm. Eventually, perhaps, the extreme of culture will be something beyond our present vague pleasurable sensation at hearing good music. A newly created multitude of music-lovers will seek from musical history and theory the fine delight that comes from comparison, discrimination, understanding; an educated audience will demand nothing but the best at concerts and recitals.

Certainly the player-piano, removing as it does all manual difficulties and tirelessly willing to repeat a passage till it is fully comprehended, can be of inestimable help to the earnest student; and if we choose to subscribe to the pleasant and popular doctrine that the populace has only to become familiar with the good to acclaim it, we may believe that the future is going to be very bright indeed.

But oh, the present is hard to bear! As I sit talking to my married sister, I hear her two little boys ‘improving their taste’ in the music-room. ‘Now T ’ll play,’ says Frank, ‘ I ’ve got a great big fatsy one.’ It proves to be the finale of Die Walkürie. Frank goes at it with serious purpose, announcing every change of tempo. ‘Now I’m at 60 . . . now I’m at 40 . . . there was a place in it where I was up to 100.’

‘There’s one roll,’ Buddy throws in, ‘that goes up to 120. I wish I could remember which it is. Maybe it’s this one.’

Buddy is wrong; the roll turns out to be the ‘Funeral March’ from the Eroica Symphony.

The young performers find it dull, whereupon Frank enlivens the accompaniment with a policeman’s rattle, a device which succeeds so well that he goes on to improvise the noises of the menagerie at feeding-time. The yelping of the wolf-pack is imitated to the life.

At dinner the talk is all of music, but my sister and her husband do not speak with the earnest modesty of novices self-dedicated to a new research; satisfaction with the completeness of their knowledge is evident in every word. And later, when I foolishly admit an admiration for Beethoven and my brother-in-law insists on playing me the choral movement of the Ninth Symphony, his performance with its reeling bacchanalian waltz-time shows the same insensibility to musical and poetic feeling that was apparent in his conversation.

‘What though good may eventually come of it?’ I ask myself. ‘Why should I endure such things? If my brother-in-law should undertake to recite the quarrel scene from Julius Cæsar would I not fell him with his heaviest chair? Why then sit unprotesting by while he holds the noblest child of an artist’s mind shrieking upon the rack? If the unenlightened majority must maul and distort masterpieces of art in order to advance, let them at least realize what t hey are doing, let them feel a fitting shame and practice their atrocities in solitude. For music, the surest guide to dreamland; music which transcends the senses, which transcends even the intellect; music by which the commonplace listener is fired for a little space with the artist’s great soul, and loves, sorrows, aspires, conceives with a thousand times his own power; music, least eart hly of the arts, deserves an acolyte with a touch of heavenly madness; she is too precious a spirit to be the plaything of every stolid Philistine.