Chapter V

I am afraid that this quality alone, the fact that the music needs explanation, is not the rock on which Mr. Aldrich splits, so to speak. He writes somewhere else in this same article: “All he asks of his listeners is to forget all they know about string quartet music.” Now this is really too much. That is exactly what Strawinsky does, and why shouldn’t he? Has not every great composer done as much? To quote Ernest Newman again (this time from his book “Richard Strauss”), “All the music of the giants of the past expresses no more than a fragment of what music can and some day will express. With each new generation it must discover and reveal some new secret of the universe and of man’s heart; and as the thing uttered varies, the way of uttering it must vary also. There is only one rational definition of good ‘form’ in music--that which expresses most succinctly and most perfectly the state of soul in which the idea originated; and as moods and ideas change, so must forms.” “The true creator strives, in reality, after _perfection_ only,” writes Busoni, in “A New Æsthetic of Music,” “and through bringing this into harmony with _his own_ individuality, a new law arises without premeditation.” The very greatness of Beethoven is due to the fact that he made a perfect wedding of form and idea. His forms (in which he broke with tradition in several important points) were evolved out of his ideas. Now the very writers who give Beethoven the credit for having accomplished this successful revolution and who write enthusiastically of Gluck’s “reform of the opera,” object to any contemporary instances of this spirit (Maurice Ravel “corrects” with great care, I am told, the exercises of his pupils. “He who breaks rules must first know them,” he says. And I have no disposition to quarrel with this sort of reverence although I think it is sometimes carried too far. However the critic attempts to “correct” the finished pupil’s work, from the work of the past--a sad and impossible task). Why in the name of goodness should not Strawinsky, or any other modern composer, for that matter, be allowed to make us forget everything we know about string quartets, if he is able? Some of us would be grateful for the sensation. Leo Ornstein in a recent article said, “The very first step which the composer must be given the privilege of insisting upon is that his listeners should approach his work with no preconceived notions of any kind; they must learn to allow absolute and full freedom to their imaginations as it is only under such circumstances that any new work can be understood and appreciated at first. All preconceived theories must be abolished, and the new work approached through no formulas.” And in the same article Mr. Ornstein relates how, after he had played his _Wild Men’s Dance_ to Leschetizky that worthy pedagogue murmured, amazed, “How in the world did you get all those notes on paper!” That, unfortunately, concludes Mr. Ornstein, is the attitude of the average listener to modern music. A similar instance is related in the case of Strawinsky. He played some measures of his ballet, _The Firebird_, on the piano to his master, Rimsky-Korsakow, until the composer of _Scheherazade_ interposed, “Stop playing that horrid thing; otherwise I might begin to enjoy it.” And even the usually open-minded James Huneker says in his essay on Arnold Schoenberg (“Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks”), “If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I long for Death the Releaser. More shocking still would be the suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like this music, to embrace, after abhorring it.” These phrases of Huneker’s remind me of a personal incident. My father has subscribed for the “Atlantic Monthly” since the first issue and one of the earliest memories of my childhood is connected with the inevitable copy which always lay on the library table. On one occasion, contemplating it, I burst into tears; nor could I be comforted. My explanation, between sobs, was, “Some day I’ll grow up and like a magazine without pictures! I can’t bear to think of it!” Well, there is many a man who weeps because some day he may grow up to like music without melody! Music _has_ changed; of that there can be no doubt. Don’t go to a concert and expect to hear what you might have heard fifty years ago; don’t expect _anything_ and don’t hate yourself if you happen to like what you hear. Mr. George Moore’s evidence on this point of receptiveness is enlightening (Mr. George Moore who spoke to me once of the “vulgar noises made by the Russian Ballet”): “In _Petrouchka_ the orchestra all began playing in different keys and when it came out into one key I was quite dazed. I don’t know whether it is music but I rather liked it!”

Still another point is raised by Mr. Aldrich. I quote from the “New York Times” of December 8, 1915; the reference is to the second string quartet of David Stanley Smith, played by the Kneisel Quartet (the italics are mine): “Mr. Smith does not hesitate at drastic dissonance _when it results from the leading of his part writing_.” There at last we have the real nigger in the woodpile. The relation between keys is so remote, the tonalities are so inexplicable in a modern Strawinsky or Schoenberg work that the brain, prepared with a list of scales, refuses to take in the natural impression that the ear receives. This sort of criticism reminds me of a line which is quoted from some London journal by William Wallace in “The Threshold of Music,” “The whole work is singularly lacking in contrapuntal interest and depends solely for such effect as it achieves upon certain emotional impressions of harmony and colour.” And, nearer home, I culled the following from the “New York Sun” of December 12, 1915 (Mr. W. J. Henderson’s column), “This is what is the matter with the futurists or post-impressionists in music. They are tone colourists and that is all.” (Amusingly enough Mr. Henderson begins his remarks by praising Joseph Pennell for writing an article in which the post-impressionist painters were given a drubbing; this article is treated with contumely and scorn by the art critic of the “Sun” on the page opposite that on which Mr. Henderson’s article appears.) In all these cases you find men complaining because a composer has done exactly what he started out to do. F. Balilla Pratella in one of his futurist manifestos discusses this point (the translation is my own), “The fugue, a composition based on counterpoint par excellence, is full of (such) artifices even when it achieves its artistic balance in the works of the great German Sebastian Bach. Soul, intellectuality, and instinct are here fused in a given form, in a given manifestation of art, an art of its own times, historical and strictly connected with the life, faith, and culture of that particular period. Why then should we be compelled or asked to live it over again at the distance of several centuries?” And later, “We proclaim as an essential principle of our futurist revolution that counterpoint and fugue, stupidly considered as one of the most important branches of musical learning, are in our eyes only the ruins of the old science of polyphony which extends from the Flemish school to Bach. We replace them by harmonic polyphony, logical fusion of counterpoint and harmony, which allows musicians to escape the needless difficulty of dividing their efforts in two opposing cultures, one dead and the other contemporary, and entirely irreconcilable, because they are the fruits of two different sensibilities.” To quote Busoni; again: “How important, indeed, are ‘Third,’ ‘Fifth,’ and ‘Octave’! How strictly we divide ‘consonances’ from ‘dissonances’--_in a sphere where no dissonances can possibly exist_!” When Bernard Shaw published “The Perfect Wagnerite” he wrote for a public which still considered Wagner a little in advance of the contemporary in music. What did he say? “My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying _The Ring_ by their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has any power to move them they will find that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in _The Ring_--not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programmes tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons and hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner’s music is played to them, exclaim at once, ‘What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabeletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations. What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician.’ The layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn; and I leave him, unpitied, to his fate.” All Wagner asked his contemporaries to do, in fact, was to forget all they knew about opera!