Thomas Whitney Surette

“ The history of the symphony is the history of all art. It moves in cycles; it marks a parabola. It began as a naïve expression of feeling; it learned little by little how to master its own working material, and as it mastered that, it became more and more conscious in its efforts; as soon as new instruments for producing it were perfected, it immediately expanded its style to correspond to the new possibilities; as its technique permitted, it continually sought to grasp more and more of the elements of human life and human aspiration and to express them. ”

“ Is not this whole world of fine literature, painting, sculpture, and music in the very highest sense, then, an education to the individual?
We march in endless file along a hard-paved way out of the sun, our goal a place where use holds sway. To reach the goal and begin our labors under the lash, catching a glimpse only now and then of stars, of flowers, of brooks, of green fields—only a glimpse, for use holds us fast. ”

“ The chief difference between a symphony and any other form of artistic expression—such as a novel, a play, a painting, or a piece of sculpture—is that a symphony is not a record of something else; it is not a picture of something else; it is itself only. And it is this quality or property of being itself that gives to all pure music its remarkable power. ”

“ Life itself is an inexplicable thing. The great symphony compresses it into an hour of perfection in which all of its elements are explicable. Here that dream of man which he calls by such names as “heaven” or “happiness,” and which he has always sought in vain, becomes not only a reality, but the only reality possible for him. For nothing would be more terrible than endless happiness or a located heaven. ”

“ Beauty is the matrix in which life shall be finally moulded.
All forms of artistic expression, then, require that we shall see the object not as fact but as art. If it is fact—that is, merely an isolated object or event—it remains insignificant until some artist catches it up into the wider realm in which it belongs and sets it forth in some form of beauty. If we accept this conception of all the arts as seeking the inner sense of things, as portraying life in its essence rather than in its outward manifestations, we shall be able to understand the peculiar power of music. ”

“ Mind and feeling, sublimated by the magic of these sounds, must detach themselves and rise to a world of pure imagination where there is no locality.
Reconciliation! A philosophy without a category; a religion without a dogma; an indestructible shadow world which offers no explanations, promulgates no opinions, and has no mission—which exists completely in itself. What more shall we ask for? Why cry to the heavens for a manifestation? Why take refuge in a so-called “system” of philosophy? Why shuffle off the whole problem on a dogma? ”

“ Sculpture is motion caught in a moment of perfection. Music is motion always in perfection. This rhythm exists also in literature and the other arts. Poe would be nothing without it; Whitman uses it in long swelling undulations which are sometimes almost indistinguishable; the composition in a great painting is a rhythm; the Apollo Belvedere is all rhythm. But in music rhythm is a physical, moving property; rhythm in being, not rhythm caught in a poise. ”

“ Sculpture, which makes its effects by the perfection of its rhythms around an axis, and by its shadows,—effects of the most subtle and, at the same time, of the most elemental kind,—it, too, must portray; the emotion must take form and substance, and that form must be drawn from the outward, visible world.
In poetry the same limitations exist. It, too, must deal in human life with a certain definiteness. But the greatest poetry is continually struggling to slough off the garment of reality and free the soul from its trammels. ”

“ How impossible it is to look at pictures with other people. The mind and the imagination demand freedom to wander at will, to ponder, to speculate. What passes from the picture to you, and from you to the picture, is a sort of trembling recognition, too delicate to be shared, too intimate to be uttered. So it is with books. You need silence and retirement so as to feel the perspective of knowledge, so that your mind may wander through whatever courses open to it. ”

“ Furthermore, I believe in keeping the music lesson as a bond of sympathy between the grade teacher and the children. Singing is an entirely natural art for any human being who begins it in childhood and pursues it through youth. I look forward to the day when we shall all sing. I object to the displacement of the grade teacher in the one function of school life which is intimate, free, and beautiful, in which facts, members, places, events, names are forgotten, and in which the spirit of each child issues forth under the discipline of beauty. ”

“ Operas which are both beautiful and reasonable do exist, and one or two of them are actually in our present-day repertoire. The questions we have to ask are these: Can a highly imaginative and significant drama, in which action and reflection hold a proper balance, in which some great and moving passion or some elemental human motives find true dramatic expression—can such a drama exist as opera? Is it possible to preserve the body and the spirit of drama and at the same time to preserve the body and spirit of music? ”

“ If expert sight-singing is not only a false ideal, but one impossible of general attainment in public schools under the conditions at present existing, what does justify our expenditure of such large sums of money? The sole justification for it is to bring children to love the best music, and so to train their taste for it as to make them capable of discriminating between good and bad. Now a thorough test of the children in the kindergarten or the lower primary grades of any public school anywhere will surely reveal that such children start life with the makings of good taste in music. ”

“ Deeds, monuments, cities, and civilizations fade into nothingness, but a few words, or a strain of music turned by an artist, will live on forever. The battle of Gettysburg will become merely a paragraph of history, the causes for which it was fought will be as nothing, but the words spoken by Lincoln will be preserved for all time, not because they were wise, but because they were wise and beautiful.
There is no escape from this condition. An occasional great writer has railed at beauty, only to prove finally that his own permanence depended on it. ”

“ It is in this synthetic quality that much of the greatness of symphonic music lies. No other quality, however fine in itself, can take its place. Schumann, for example, created interesting and beautiful themes in profusion, but his compositions in the larger forms lack a complete synthesis. Bach was the greatest master in this respect. So perfect is the ordering of his material that it gives that impression of inevitability which distinguishes all great art everywhere. It is obvious enough that parallels to this form will be found in literature, for it is a part of life and nature. ”

“ The passion for categorical facts, arranged in methodical sequence term by term, year by year, and culminating in a sky-rocket burst, every fact blazing up separately for an instant as though it really were alive, and then going out while the charred embers fall far apart on a patient earth—this is called Education! But this passion is almost ineradicable—is, indeed, one of the most common of human failings. ”

“ We want a common sympathy; we want above all some means of expression for that sympathy. There have been of late numerous great meetings at which the feelings of men and women have expended themselves in shouts, in cheers, in the clapping of hands, and in other inarticulate methods of expressing emotions. What would not a song have done for these thousands—a song they all knew and loved? Are we forever to be dumb?
Our hope is in the children, to whom music is of inestimable value. ”

“ When we truly respond to it, there is set up in us a certain harmonious vibration which tunes us to one another, to the mother earth, the everlasting sea, and to [Pg 251] that larger world of suns, stars, and planets of which they are a part.
Nothing ever dies. What we call death is only a transformation from one form of life to another. All the music that ever was still sounds; all the music that is to be still slumbers. Life and death are one, and, in the truest sense, the whole universe is a song. ”

“ A symphony is, of course, like other music in being an arrangement of rhythmic figures, of melodies (usually called “themes”) and of harmonies. But before describing it as such—before dealing with its materials, its form, its history, and its place in the art of music—I wish to treat it solely as a thing of beauty expressed in terms of sound. Many people seem to think music an art dealing with objects or with ideas. Some, never having become sensitized to it in childhood, look upon it as of no importance whatever. A large number have tried to perform it on an instrument and have failed. ”

“ Here is reality turned true at last. We shall then have learned one of the great lessons that art teaches—namely, that there is nothing in the world so heroic, so noble, or so profound but that its qualities may be increased by the imagination and the skill of the great artist. For however profound a human emotion may be or however noble a deed, it becomes more profound or more noble when it is seen in relation to the whole of life and over a stretch of time. The artist gives it true perspective, and enables us really so to see it. ”

“ To eliminate beauty from education is to destroy its very soul.
From the law of gravity to Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” beauty is the central element. In physics, in mathematics, in astronomy, in chemistry, there is the same perfection of order and sequence, the same correlation of forces, the same attraction of matter which, operating in the fine arts, brings about what we call “painting,” “sculpture,” “poetry,” and “music.” The whole of nature is a postulate of this doctrine, and there is no subject taught from kindergarten to college which may not be taught as in accord with it. ”

“ The element in Shakespeare’s writings, for example, which reveals his greatness is the same element that reveals Beethoven’s—namely, an imaginative, beautiful and true concept or idea of human life. Beethoven is as true as Shakespeare. The same fancy, the same daring, the same grandeur, the same extravagance of imagination, and the same fidelity to life are found in each. That one uses words and the other mere sounds affects the case not at all, or if at all, in favor of music, since these elements or qualities of life are expressed more directly and more intensely in music than in words. ”