W. J. Turner

“ It was the false idea that music was purely sensual which led Pater to think that music was such an art and that all other arts should attain its perfection. The development of every art is a development farther and farther away from the mere sensations upon which it is founded, and these developments make a web of experience which is constantly being rewoven and renewed (probably without a single strand ever being lost or destroyed) and, without this, music would dissolve into meaningless sounds. We look upon the eye and the ear as beautiful complex creations of life. ”

“ Music is the imagination of love in sound. It is what man imagines of his life, and his life is love. There are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds of life, and it is possible that they may not all be imaginable in sound. I say it is possible, I do not say it is probable. We do not know at present, and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct of mankind has abandoned sound as a means of expression. And [Pg 4] that may happen. There may be no unending future of music, only a limited future. Or the world of music may be like the universe of Einstein, “finite but unbounded.” ”

“ In the music of Beethoven there are no anodynes, no lullings of sense, no deceits of the intelligence, but pure virtus. And this virtus is thrilling absolutely, without reservations. After the tremendous drama of the first movement of the C minor Sonata, for example—a drama in which there is the whole ecstatic misery of life—we are not assuaged by a dream. The conflict does not cease. That wonderful Arietta—surely the most wonderful thing in all music—is no bringer of peace and resignation. ”

“ Just as life uses death—as when we eat meat and transform it into living tissue—so art uses knowledge. Music, therefore, is experience becoming knowledge and knowledge breaking up and becoming experience, and its especial nature lies not in the experience but in the medium. Music is the experience of life and death in sound. ”

“ It is only possible at this stage in the history of mankind to affirm that up till now the highest, most spiritual powers of the human mind have been able to find expression in music. There is nothing in the world’s finest literature that surpasses what we may find in the world’s best music, although, as we shall see later, music may have a virtue that is entirely its own. But it will not surprise us to find ourselves limited to the work of a very few composers when we ask for music that is as highly organized as the finest poetry. ”

“ If the purpose of the Universe were merely to attain to an ever higher degree of complexity for its own sake it would not be littered with these innumerable shapes of death—the violet, the lily, the rose, the cedar, the oak, the pine, the butterfly, the tiger, the elephant, and all other lovely and curious structures. ”

“ Literature which is without this “poetic” quality is, again, mere knowledge, mere fiction. We have no need to seek for examples. A dozen famous names leap to our minds. Rather have we to seek for that literature which is poetic. Similarly in music there is a specific, purely musical quality without which music also is mere science. This quality I will call melodic imagination.
And here an interesting fact emerges. In all three arts the valuable element, the element of life is linked with the imagination. ”

“ My belief is that when I say, as I do emphatically say, that Beethoven is a greater composer than Bach and find my assertion difficult or impossible to prove I am judging by an instinctive but not yet intellectually formalized sense of value, or values, which will only emerge in the future to take a place among all the other principles and standards—the totality of life in its sum of death-shapes so far created. ”

“ The world is not really divided as to who are its greatest painters, sculptors, scientists, mathematicians, musicians and poets. We may not be able to prove to our own logical satisfaction that Beethoven is greater than Bach, that Bach is greater than Haydn, [Pg 55] that Palestrina is greater than Verdi, but we are all strangely certain that it is so. What are we to make of this? Evidently there is a unity somewhere in our diversity, and it is more than a lowest common factor—a far-away dim primitive element, never quite lost sight of but growing ever fainter, linking all men and all art. ”

“ This strange phenomenon is an element in the beautiful myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus must not behold the face of Eurydice when he brings her up from the underworld where she disappeared, for in the physical vision he will be forever blinded to the spirit which is returning with him, who is not the Eurydice that was but the Eurydice that is to be. And the whole life of language is in this process of continuous dying. Words die by becoming abstract, then when they are completely dead they come to life again as members of a more complicated life, the life of the sentence. ”

“ The world about us seems to be material, but exists in rhythm. It is a living world, and it is kept alive by a spiritual force which we can best describe as love, and I end this chapter with the definition with which I began it. All art is the imagination of love, and music is the imagination of love in sound. ”

“ Sometimes the fugue idea prevails and sometimes the fugue-emotion prevails, and the result always is an imperfect fugue. But this imperfection in all its varying degrees is the musical reality. Absolute perfection, absolute unity is annihilation, the end of all things and the attainment of Nirvana. But even the fugue-idea is not a constant unchangeable abstraction or fixed shape. ”

“ I submit that we think so because we find all Frohberger in Bach plus something more which is not Frohberger. But this has a tremendous consequence for, if true, it means that Frohberger is not unique. He is included in Bach. And may we not think that the music which vanishes from human consciousness is the music which is not unique and that so long as a composer is unique his music will be heard? I believe so. It is reasonable to think that every act, everything created has value. Our minds cannot imagine a Universe in which that would not be true ”

“ It is not that touch of nature making the whole world kin, for that—although it might enable us to have some sympathy with all things—would not enable us to range them in value. Such a minute dose of common kinship could not so vitally relate us. It is, on the contrary, by our very essence, by the most spiritual and intense of our desires that we are united. ”

“ But, as I have already shown, a third kind of death, other than the material and the physical, is that of intellectual structure—known variously as tradition, belief, dogma, logic, technique or, most comprehensively, as knowledge. Just as a multitude of deaths were necessary to the evolution of the eye and the ear so a multitude of deaths (an Encyclopædia is a mental cemetery) are necessary to the evolution of the mind. The past experience of music which every trained musician possesses is such knowledge. ”

“ But we can say that its purpose is delight. Ecstasy clothing Himself in a thousand Forms. The Universe delighting in itself preserves itself in death, for in death the imagination of the spirit is made immortal. ”

“ Just as the Sun is the centre of the only system of the physical universe so far formulated—for no centre has been found to the innumerable suns of the stellar universe—so Beethoven is our temporary Absolute in the world of music. And just as the Sun is the source of all vegetable and animal life upon the earth, so I believe that in art [Pg 63] we find the vital spirit which animates our human life. ”

“ The actual fugue must have a meaning, it must be an expression of life; a fugue-in-itself without relation to life, perfect and completely, is an impossibility. Nevertheless a musician like Bach finds in himself the fugue-idea as well as the fugue-emotion, the fugue-form as well as the fugue-content, and there is a constant struggle between them to coincide exactly and to materialize in one indivisible unity. ”

“ Just as it took a multitude of lives and deaths to evolve the human eye and ear—organs with which all men are now born—so it has taken many generations of that mental development we call culture and tradition to create a language that was more than onomatopoeia, and a music that was more than recognizable and, therefore, agreeable sounds. ”

“ What we think is understanding Chinese music when we hear it is merely recognition of that organization of vibration, which we call musical sounds, an organization common to the human ear in all mankind. The major part of popular music consists of stringing these sounds together for the mere pleasure of recognizing them—pleasure in their organization as contrasted with the unorganized mass of mere noise out of which they have been selected; also its use of them in simple combinations expressing simple emotions—sensations of rudimentary organization—which again are common to all mankind. ”

“ It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing are inextricably interblended as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of music, the height or depth or thickness or clarity or muddiness of musical tone. ”

“ If we say that Frohberger is superfluous because Bach is the same as Frohberger, only better, we are saying something very difficult to understand, for how would it be possible to prove that two things can be the same and yet different, one of them being better—except by making goodness depend on quantity? But, obviously, to think that Bach is three Frohbergers is not the same as thinking he is three times as good as Frohberger. As the ordinary man speaks this is not at all what he means. ”

“ It is a source of weakness because in every artist there is a natural tendency to slip into what comes easiest in his medium. In music it is easier to make sounds that merely gratify or stimulate the sense of hearing and the cruder emotions than to make sounds of a more complex character which will express the subtler and finer life of a more spiritual imagination. Infantile music is both easier to compose and easier to hear than mature music, so the public and the musician find themselves in a natural league in favour of the rawer kinds of music. ”

“ I do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not be expressed in music.
Music is the most concrete and physical of all the arts as it is probably the earliest and most primitive. Beasts which cannot draw or write can make [Pg 6] expressive sounds, and the earliest men undoubtedly communicated by sound before they learned to communicate by written or painted signs. But whether at the other end of the scale there is a limit to music’s power of expression no one can say. ”

“ The knowledge of music, then, is the knowledge of the facts, and the facts are, as we saw, the alphabet of music, the twelve artificial semi-tones of the tempered scale. If a musician knows [Pg 21] these and knows those combinations of them which are called intervals—as the combinations of letters are called words—he knows what the man knows who knows the letters of the alphabet and has a vocabulary of words. He may know them by sight, by sound, or by sight and sound. If only by sight he is in the position of a man who can read and write but not speak the words of a foreign language ”

“ Our minds find it difficult to [Pg 39] imagine an exit from the Universe. Where? But the incorporation of the lesser within the greater remains, as stated, a mechanical idea. We can find no satisfaction in a mere increasing complexity of structure. “If that is all that makes Bach better than Frohberger”—we can imagine someone saying—“I never want to listen to music again.” The process, we feel, must have a purpose or a meaning. Well, we have forgotten one vital element. Delight. The Universe is the imagination of its delight. ”

“ We have seen that the development of music is analogous to the development of language. That this must be so is obvious when we understand that both music and language are mental structures contemporary with the human mind, reflecting its development and having their origin in the senses of sight and hearing. No arts have been founded on the sense of touch in its forms of taste and smell. ”

“ But we shall not make the mistake of inventing an artificial and unilluminating distinction between Wagner as a dramatic or programmatic composer and, for example, Mozart or Bach as absolute composers. The difference between all these composers (including Beethoven) lies mainly in inner feeling, in spiritual life, in the individual psyche—not in their musical faculty as composers. It was natural to each one of them that his vital [Pg 70] activity should run into the form of sound-patterns. It is this idiosyncrasy which has made them all musicians and not poets, sculptors, or painters. ”

“ Men and women will look upon their children as artists look upon their works and will wish others to enjoy them. The world will be so changed that none of the problems which to-day set our newspapers printing and our politicians talking will even exist. Our present ideas on sex, morality, beauty and value will in those days appear as strange, as fantastic, as illusory as the ideas of our [Pg 86] ancestors who took Beecham’s pills to cure all ills.
Will the music of such a world differ from the music of to-day? ”

“ Beethoven awakes a feeling so romantic, so idealistic, of so fine and exquisite a bloom that it is guarded by everyone who experiences it as a precious secret. What Beethoven imagined inevitably lures men away from the sensuous delights of Debussy and Strauss, from the fatiguing excitements of Stravinsky and Jazz, from the gaieties of Verdi and Rossini, from [Pg 75] the sentimental nostalgia of Brahms, from the solid satisfaction of Bach, from the sensitive melancholy of Mozart and from the lesser loves of Wagner ”