Daniel Gregory Mason

“ In the works conceived partially in a spirit of comedy, to be sure, such as "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote," it finds a whimsical, witty expression for itself which not only seldom strikes a false note, but is often exceedingly amusing. Till's charge among the market-women's pots and pans, the bleating of the sheep in "Don Quixote," even perhaps the baby's squalling in the "Symphonia Domestica," are clever bits of side play, like the "business" of an irrepressible comedian, which are not out of key with the main substance of the music. ”

“ But once such a theme exists it begins to act, musically, of itself, and develops such a network of musically interesting relationships that the listener, fascinated, clean forgets the program in his purely æsthetic delight. Strauss, probably, forgets it too. He does for us, in spite of his programs, exactly the kind of thing that Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann do; he creates intrinsically significant and expressive musical forms (melodies) capable of absorbing our attention and transfiguring all they touch—even a rogue like Till Eulenspiegel—with their æsthetic magic. ”

“ Vanity is the immemorial [273] enemy of art; if the itch to be conspicuous once infect him, the artist forgets all those subtle adaptations, those difficult reconcilements, which were formerly his passion, and makes a crude effect that appeals much more to the primitive minds of the masses. And this he may do quite unconsciously and in the sincere belief that he is pursuing the highest ideals. In the presence of the immediate good, of recognition and acclaim, it is pitifully easy to forget the remote better, the broader, finer, subtler beauty that is not yet understood. ”

“ Each of these men reaches back roots to the primal sources of musical life—Bach and Beethoven: Rachmaninoff through Tschaikowsky, the eclectic Elgar through Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, and others, and d'Indy through Wagner and Franck. Each, as we see in such modern classics as "Toteninsel," the A flat Symphony, and "Istar," can create, in settings of modern opulence of color, nobly beautiful forms, melodies that live and soar in a spiritual heaven. All, too, though in varying degrees, move on as creators should toward the unknown. ”

“ We find it in all really great creative artists, who seem to view life not only keenly, not only sympathetically, but also wisely and as if from above, from that vantage point of a wider insight than that of any of their subjects, so that in their summing up of them they are able to set them in proper relation one to another, and by so doing to get a true and calm picture of human life as a whole. This power of philosophic or poetic vision, this magnanimity, we instinctively demand of the artist. ”

“ The artist, despite the popular supposition to the contrary, depends on his forerunners quite as closely as the scientist. You can no more write a solid sonata without knowing Beethoven than you can work efficiently in biology in ignorance of Darwin. Yet on the other hand this assimilation of the past has to produce, not an academic and sterile complacency with what is, but an equipped and curious advance upon what is to be: the artist, like the scientist, brings all his learning to the test in acts of creative imagination, leaps in the dark. ”

“ If this were all of us, if the first impression which foreigners get of us, summed up for them oftentimes in our inimitably characteristic "Step lively, please," were also the last, and there was nothing more solid, sweet, or wise in America than this galvanic twitching, then indeed ragtime would be our perfect music. But every true American knows that, on the contrary, this is not our virtue but our vice, not our strength but our weakness, and that such a picture of us as it presents is not a portrait but a caricature. ”

“ Or rather, and here is the special irony of the situation, his alternative is not a literal physical hunger, but that subtler hunger that follows the denial of the imperious instinct to create beauty; he has not to starve his body of bread, but his soul of music. For while society withholds with one hand, so to speak, any payment for the best work he can do, [285] because it is too good, because it requires too long to be understood, it freely offers him with the other a bare livelihood, if not more, for work of secondary value—teaching, performance, exposition, anything but creation. ”

“ In other words, while retaining the personal and racial quality natural to all sincere art, he has been magnanimous, intelligent, and unconventional enough to break through the charmed circle of insularity which has kept so many English composers from vital contact with the world. Such insularity cannot but be fatal to art. It is bad enough when it confines the artist to narrow native models. It is even worse when, ignoring native music of the finest quality, such as that of Purcell, it follows blindly, through timidity or inertia, traditions imported by foreigners of inferior grade. ”

“ Better to give them simply a title, as vague and elusive as possible, and foster the mood of day-dreaming thus suggested by avoiding all definite melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic features in the music, while enhancing its purely sensuous charm to the utmost degree possible. Such, carried out with extraordinary talent, is the artistic creed of Debussy. Just as programmism appeals from music to association, impressionism appeals to sentiment, to fancy, and to the phantasmagoric reveries upon which they are ever so ready to embark. ”

“ In the long evolution from the simple to the complex which music shares with everything else we know we may observe two different methods of tone-combination which, working together, have given us the elaborate texture of the modern art. That especially suited to melodic instruments, like those used in the orchestra or the chorus, puts melodies together as an engraver puts together lines, each remaining distinct, standing off clearly from the others, representing a different musical thought, and yet all agreeing, or, as we say, harmonizing. ”

“ There is no magic about the community chorus that can suddenly change bad taste to good. Too often we seem here, as in all other activities for popularizing music, to oscillate helplessly between two evils. On the one hand is the crudity of actual taste: the majority prefer ragtime and the musical comedies to folk-songs or the simple classics. On the other hand is the apathy that comes of prescriptions from outsiders: musical activity that is not spontaneous is sterile. ”

“ The A-flat Symphony is a work intensely felt by the composer, a work that, coming from his heart, finds its way to the hearts of others. And in this respect, in its emotional sincerity, earnestness, and subjectivity, it differs from his other works more in degree than in kind. For in everything Elgar writes there is the preoccupation with inner feeling which we find in such a composer as Schumann, but from which most of our contemporaries have turned away. ”

“ What he may acquire of the special virtue of each school—the delicacy and distinction of the French, the solid structural power of the German, the suave and rich coloring of the Russian, the austere dignity of the English—is limited, not by the accident of birth, but only by his own assimilative power. No element in his complex nature need be starved for want of its proper food. He is placed in the midst of the stream of world influences to make of himself what he will and can. ”

“ Strikingly contrasted as are these two leaders of contemporary music in temperament, in artistic aims, in technical methods, their æsthetic theories are at one in the slight demands they make on the attention of an inevitably inattentive public. Both encourage the listener to look away from the music itself to something that it suggests to him. But impressionism goes further than programmism. May not those people, it says, who find organic melody, development, and form fatiguing, and to whom you give a program to help them out—may they not find the program fatiguing, too? ”

“ And if American life lays almost crushing burdens on artistic initiative, there is also in the best American tradition a courage, an independence, a certain nonchalant and plucky self-reliance that ought to carry an artist far on the solitary path he has to travel. ”

“ Yet these selections, these sacrifices, are at the very foundation of artistic personality. It is no more possible for a human being to be, let us say, at once as subtle as Debussy and as gorgeous as Strauss than it is to be in two places at once. Which will you do without? But the young American [278] composer is at once too timid and too ambitious to do without anything; in the attempt to be everywhere at the same time he cuts himself up into little pieces that end by being nowhere.
The frank and courageous acceptance of limitations is, in truth, the first step toward artistic individuality ”

“ The second half of "You May Bury Me in the East," with its bold festooning of outline, even more strikingly the tune "Going Up," with its piquant silences and its even-paced insistence on "going all the way, Lord," show a unity in their variety, a certain "all-of-a-piece-ness," compared with which even "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" seems scrappy, and the ordinary ragtime effusion pitifully poverty-stricken. There is plenty of internal evidence, too, that these happy results are attributable to genuine musical imagination, and not to luck in the servile following of felicitous word-patterns. ”

“ Finally, however, inspiring as are the hopes these words suggest, the American composer need not await their realization before putting forth those individual efforts without the aid of which, after all, they can never attain it. Music, like society, has reached its present [289] state only through the struggles, against immense odds, of its martyrs and its heroes: not only of Bach, of Mozart, of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, of Brahms, but of countless others who have wrought and suffered in obscurity and with a consecration of their more limited powers to the great cause of beauty. ”

“ We have glanced at the danger of confounding appeal to the majority with appeal to good taste, which is always outvoted, or of supposing that "originality" is of any importance in comparison with merit. From these criticisms certain positive principles thus tend to emerge. It becomes evident that there is a certain gradation of values in the qualities which a folk-music may possess. Distinctiveness of idiom is a merit, but a less vital one than interpretative power; higher than either is beauty, suitability to enter into music that may bear comparison with the best music of the world. ”

“ It is time, for our own sakes, that we paid more attention than we do to this human lover that finds supreme expression in the Symphony in B flat, in "Istar," in the E major Quartet, in the "Jour d'Été à la Montagne." He it is who speaks to the young men, to his fellow lovers of immortal beauty, to the future. For, as one of his most understanding critics, Louis Laloy, has written of him: "Emotion is queen, and science is her servant." ”

“ We have to remember that the baser elements of our own time make a much greater impression on us, in relation to the finer ones, than those of the past. A living fool can make as much noise as a wise man (if not far more) ; a dead one is silent forever. The gold of Beethoven's day, of which he was himself the purest nugget, comes down to us bright and untarnished, so that we forget all the dross that has been thrown on the scrapheap of time. ”

“ Is it not inconceivable that one thus privileged to speak, within the measure of his ability, a world language should ever content himself with a Negro or Indian dialect? It would be so perhaps did we not consider that, in order to speak the world language of cosmopolitan music as it exists to-day, one must spend years in laborious discipline and in obscurity, while any tyro can make a certain effect and gain a certain prominence by stammering in an idiom strongly enough tinctured with local color. ”

“ Ragtime is the musical expression of an attitude toward life only too familiar to us all, an attitude shallow, restless, avid of excitement, incapable of sustained attention, skimming the surface of everything, finding nowhere satisfaction, realization, or repose. ”

“ How else shall we account for the exaggerated emphasis, the over-elaboration of contrasts that seem at times almost mechanical, and that suggest shrewd calculation of the crowd psychology rather than free development of the musical thought? What else explains so well the sensational elements so incredibly childish in an art so mature as Strauss's: the ever-increasing noisiness, the introduction of wind-machines, thunder-machines, and heaven knows what diabolic engines; the appetite for novelty for novelty's sake? ”

“ What, then, is the precise value we ought justly to ascribe to that word "American" as applied to music, and wherein have those we may call champions of the adjective been inclined to exaggerate it? If we analyze their attitude, we shall find them the prey of two fallacies which constantly falsify their conclusions, and make them dangerous guides for those who have at heart the real interests of music in America. The first of these fallacies is that which confuses quantity with quality, and supposes that artistic excellence can be decided by vote of the majority. ”