The Music Makers
VOLUME 154
NUMBER 6
DECEMBER 1934
BY CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN
LISTED in the county ledgers as housewife, I have four brothers and a sister, the conventional number of parents, two children, and four nieces and nephews. None of us are professional musicians, and we all live together in a quiet, practical succession of days. But strike A on the piano, blow it on the pitch pipe, and to a man we move to the fiddle cases as mechanically as we move, on occasion, to the telephone bell.
People ask us constantly, ‘Who is responsible for all this music in your households? How has it come to pass ? ’
And they add with a vague look of distress, ‘We used to play the piano, but —’
I cannot bear to hear people say this. It outrages me to see my friends go hungrily to concerts and come away only partially filled — the hunger unappeased, or the appetite whetted, perhaps, to an even keener edge. I know what these people want; I have seen them pick up my violin and turn it over in their hands. They may not know it themselves, but they want music, not by the ticketful, the purseful, but music as it should be had, music at home, a part of daily life, a thing as necessary, as satisfying, as the midday meal. They want to play. And they are kept back by the absurd, the mistaken, the wicked notion that in order to play an instrument one must be possessed by that bogey called Talent; one must have been born with specially shaped fingers, or have seen the moon all yellow at the quarter on a Friday night.
To these persons, then, I address myself. In the hazard that I may reveal, not the secret, but the very fact that there is no secret, no mysterious password, no angry gods to be appeased at the portal to the shrine, I offer my musical reminiscences, from the age of seven to thirty-seven. Hastily, in the fear that the words ‘began to play at seven’ may raise again the bogey, I interpolate, before beginning my story, my affidavit that I have seen people begin to play the violin at twenty-seven, the viola at thirty-two, the flute at forty, the cello at sixty-two; not only begin, but go on to the essential goal — membership in a hard-playing, musically exacting, weekly meeting amateur ensemble group.
Copyright 1934, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.
II
We are not the descendants of talented musicians. There has never been a professional musician in our family, nor even anyone noted in his community for musical virtuosity. My mother, with only an elementary knowledge of the piano, — she could read hymn tunes and liked to sing the alto part of a Mendelssohn duet, — somehow instilled into my eldest brother, John, a profound passion for music which he in turn communicated to me, sixteen years his junior. Of the four intervening children, the three boys remained immune to music; as a girl my sister Victoria played Mozart with me, played Beethoven too, and then in due course married a musician and began, as she says, to live music instead of abusing it. In defense of my thesis I must add that Victoria is the one person I know who does not need to play music — does not, that is, need it at the moment. At the moment, she is beautiful, active, and triumphant. If ever she may be less of these things, she has music, as it were, up her sleeve; she knows how to play the piano.
When I say the boys remained immune to music, I except such exercises as playing the mandolin in the Glee Club at college, or even the clarinet in the school band. The clarinet is a noble instrument, an instrument of true music; long and mournful its notes when blown from a brother’s room in the third story. But when he was grown, my brother abandoned his clarinet. Now he is forty; in the intervals of scientific research he solaces himself upon a four-key harmonica, or even, on occasion, upon a large and complicated piano-accordion.
My children, aged six and nine, accept piano playing and sight singing as they accept breakfast and dinner and the hours that strike round the clock. John’s wife and their four children, ranging in age from twelve to nineteen, all play and sing, — and with eagerness, — piano, cello, and violin. String and piano quartets, quintets, octets, choral ensembles, burst into sound at a moment’s notice, the difficulty being, not to make the children play, but to keep them from battle when there are not as many parts as musicians.
What interests me in this family music chronicle is the fact that my mother, with so slight a musical knowledge and technique, could have influenced at least two of her children so that music has been the profoundest and happiest fact of their lives, and from all evidence bids fair to have an equal share in the lives of her grandchildren.
I deem this worth recording, if only in answer to the many mothers who protest to me, ‘ It’s all very well for you to talk about making music a natural part of children’s lives. You and your brother John live next door to each other; you play the violin and he and his wife play the piano; the three of you really know music. Of course you can impart this knowledge and enthusiasm to the six children. But what about the rest of us, who can barely read a hymn tune? How can we direct our children, how can we direct ourselves, along the path of music ? ’
My mother could barely read a hymn tune herself; my father, who had in his youth sung a very tolerable bass, was, by the time I came to know him, wholly indifferent to music. Indifferent, that is, to the hearing of it; he sponsored music and worked in its behalf. For fifteen years he acted as president of the famous Bach Choir at Bethlehem, accepting the office on condition — so he told us — that he should never be expected to go to a concert. At home, my father endured much in the name of music: a room known as Father’s Office was just across the hall from the piano, but never once were we told to stop our playing.
Indeed, my father’s patience in the face of overwhelming sound has always been a matter for marvel. I do not remember his ever listening to me play, but he used to encourage me: ‘Your mother says you are doing very well on your violin.’ He would have said music was a good thing — good, certainly, for girls. For boys, questionable. He had the attitude of his generation. I suspect his eldest son’s piano playing worried my father a little; this intense preoccupation with one of the arts — was it quite the part of a gentleman, of a man of affairs? Not until John became well established as a lawyer did my father’s conscience permit him to cease casting small gibes at what he called the ’long-hairedness ’ of music playing.
III
But what brought music to life in our household and kept it so burningly alive was not my mother’s feeble performance upon the piano, not even, I am tempted to believe, her attitude toward music, but a larger thing — her attitude toward art and toward life. Both she and her sister were trained by family environment — in a way curiously indirect — to a respect for the arts, that serious respect which in the end amounts to passionate, yet entirely unassuming, conviction. My Great-Aunt Eliza and my Great-Uncle Will played piano duets, played them well. In that household a thing undertaken was a thing finished; there were no loose ends, artistic or practical. My mother and my aunt used to wash the dishes — from necessity, not choice; often enough there was no money for a servant. More than once they have explained to me with pride exactly how they washed the dishes. It was a system so perfected as to be almost a ritual; they could, when challenged, clear a table set for five, wash and put away the dishes, have their aprons hung upon the nail and no spot upon the lace cuffs — all in seven and a half minutes.
I have heard also how they made the beds and with what care they mended, in the long hot Philadelphia summer days, the hand-woven linen sheets brought down from the attic. And in these recitals is nothing tedious; the sisters tell their story with excitement, with relish, in the same tone they use to tell how the younger sister obtained her first gold medal from the Paris Salon. Dishwashing or portrait painting, high standards were not high to them, because high standards were expected — demanded.
My great-grandmother, who ruled this household, had that type of simplicity which the sixties produced in New England. Art was a thing foreign to her — but refinement was not foreign to her, nor the discipline of mind and character that goes to the creation, the establishment, of good taste. Good taste, in that simple household, was not a social asset, it was a matter of morals, of what people used to call ‘character’; it consisted in perfecting to the best of one’s ability what one had undertaken to do or to learn or to make.
To these children, perfection was no bogey, no nightmare; by their own account theirs was a house filled with laughter and gayety. Yet I am constantly amazed at the hints which slip from my mother concerning the enormous things which were expected, as a matter of course, from her and her sister. They learned a habit of perfection— and with it bound themselves forever to Perfection’s sister, the dangerous but fascinating habit of Intensity. My mother is eighty; she has never been a stern woman, — her laugh is high and quick, like a girl’s, — but to this day she flies at a task as if the witches were after her, and she expects others to do the same. With stupid people she has patience, but lazy people are beyond her comprehension; she hears of them in astonishment, as though she were hearing of a baboon, something existent but not quite human.
I will not make the boast that my great-grandmother’s spirit has come down undiluted to me and my brothers and our children. I will not try to argue that, as a family without talent, we achieved music through ‘character.’ But I must pause to give tribute to the much maligned Puritan discipline. The stern fanatic eye which said, ‘Do with all thy heart that to which thou has set thy hand’ — that was a hard eye to meet. But, if met, how glorious the reward! I remember well my mother’s words when, at seven, I told her I wanted to play the violin. She took my hands and looked at me. ‘That is not an easy thing to do,’ she said. ‘It will take courage. Do you think you will be up to it?’
Up to it! Years passed before I understood the full meaning of her words; at that moment I did not need to understand them. What child would not have risen to such a challenge? Flags waved, banners flew. But I know now why she used the word ‘courage.’ For without courage no one can be a sincere artist, even an amateur artist. Ridicule pursues the aspiring fiddler. One of the best violinists I know told me that when she first began to play the neighbors’ children — among them her bosom friend — gathered under the window daily and shouted ‘Meow!‘ — shouted it tirelessly, enthusiastically, until her practice time was over. Children to whom music is unfamiliar look upon violin-playing children with a combination of curiosity, ridicule, and that grudging, instinctive respect which even your adult ‘ practical man ’ grants an artist.
But I care not how the world looks upon music, if only the world be not indifferent to it. ‘To music,’ says the philosopher, ‘we must remain inattentive altogether or become altogether enslaved.’
IV
And we who are enslaved, to what quality of this art of music do we owe the strength, the glory, of our chains? What is this close, this hungry relationship between music and life? I know of one answer, at least; of one quality music, alone among the arts, possesses — a warm, a satisfying friendliness. All the other arts are lonely. We paint alone — my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music — ensemble music, not soloism — we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give. Our fiddle bow draws out high C; gives it out, thin and true and long, to three other fiddlers under the lamp. And back it comes, realized, made authentic by the viola G, the clean, the vigorous fifth, softened by the second violin’s E flat, — pleasant , drowsy minor interval! — strengthened now by the cello’s deep, tonic C, the full chesty burr of his open string. The chord dies; and the four of us sit silent, smiling. The first fiddler nods. ‘Not so bad,’he says. ‘Not — so — bad.’
Perhaps it is this warm yet impersonal friendliness of music that causes people to look so wistfully upon our family quintets, our neighborly octets. Certainly I never saw that nostalgic envy creep into the eye of anyone listening to a piano solo. Ensemble, that is the key to musical enjoyment. Your soloist, no matter how skillful, is a bird of different feather, and your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the Muse; he sweats a little in her service.
An instant flash, an instant communication, passes between strangers who discover a mutual love of ensemble playing. Perhaps this same communication is established between mutually discovered bridge players, between fishermen. I do not know, but I do know the reality of this other, the warm invisible bond, the banishment of aloneness, the sudden reawakening, reawareness of life, that only communication brings. To break for an instant that shell, that hard protection with which every adult surrounds himself — what glorious, delicious indulgence! And to know it broken, not in dissipation, — as in any vulgar, too easy effort at communication, — but broken with the brain sharp, the eye clear, the ear alert, and the belly hot with triumph. . . .
V
Sometimes, driving home after an evening of quartets, the thought has come to me: Suppose the Lord had made me, let us say, a tennis maniac instead of a melomaniac. A few years, and I shall be forty — pushed off the court! No wonder people fall into panics concerning old age. But with music one’s pleasure, one’s participation, grows rather than diminishes with the years. Not only are new beauties discovered, new loves introduced, but new meaning is revealed in the old love!
Beethoven, for instance. When I was young I loved Beethoven because I loved the tunes, the melody; as a child I had been literally rocked to sleep to the Kreutzer Sonata: John and the old Steinway — not old, then — fighting it out in the parlor below until my small white iron bed shivered and my spine shivered with it. John was getting ready for Katrina, who would come down from Boston with her violin next month or next weekend. Katrina was an excellent violinist. A formidable alliance, Katrina and Beethoven, for a young lawyer to attempt to enter; no wonder the walls shook and the ceiling of the old parlor rocked to six-eight time! John practised the Kreutzer like one demented; whistling the violin parts, he practised it at night and he practised it before breakfast, and it will haunt me till I die — but I am not sorry. Indeed, it was the Kreutzer that was responsible for the commencement of my fiddling career; I remember well my amazement when Katrina, arriving, took out her fiddle, nodded to John — and did things to the Kreutzer. Magic things: what was this wild, slippery voice creeping in and out, so deep, so high, so like John’s Kreutzer and yet so more-than-John ?
So it was this John had meant when he had said, ‘Wait till you hear the fiddle! Wait till you hear the two of us!’
And now I was hearing it. I sat on the red parlor sofa with my mother; I remember my legs dangling, the pressure of my mother’s hand around my fingers and her quick smile answering mine. I whispered, ‘What is it, Mother?’ She said, ‘It’s Beethoven, child’ — and I was a little offended that she could have thought me so stupid. But I know now that she could not more richly have answered my bewildered question. When they had done I went to John and told him solemnly that I wanted to do that, too, and he laughed his great laugh of pleasure.
I remember his hand upon my shoulder and his face upturned to Katrina, — whom I remember not at all, — his eager voice, ‘Do you think the Infant could do it?’
For years I practised with the Kreutzer as goal; I am grateful to John that he never hinted at its difficulties, its impossibilities, though he more than once hinted at the difficulties of violin technique. ‘You can’t fool with a fiddle,’ he told me. ‘It means work ’ — and he made me, upon my mother’s advice, promise two years of piano lessons before I ever touched a violin. ‘To see if you really mean it, Infant.’ I served my two years’ bondage and I had my reward; indeed, I have been having it ever since!
But Beethoven — Beethoven was magic to me then; Beethoven was melody, swinging, rushing melody, music like a thunderstorm. And indeed I remember, years later, running through the hall in a thunderstorm with John and Beethoven matching it out in the parlor through the open door. . . .
Beethoven is not a thunderstorm to me now; he speaks to my maturity with a voice more quiet, yet more triumphant, than the thunder. He has walked through the thunder and has come out unscathed. It would be an impudence and a vanity for me to attempt to put upon paper what Beethoven is to me now. Nothing can say it save the music itself. . . . Thus far, Santayana was right: ‘Music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon them.’
But I wonder, when I shall be old, what Beethoven will have in store for me? What further, deeper reaches of beauty, what revelation of hours serenely lived?