Modern music

“ Here we are fairly in the face of modern music. What then is modern music? Music at this time bounds forward in the joy of an infinitely developable principle. What is this principle? In its last analysis it is what has now come to be called Harmony, or more specially Tonality. According to the modern musical feeling when any tone is heard it is heard in its relation to some other tone which from one circumstance or another may have been taken as a basis of such relations. ”

“ Our final question, then, resolves itself to this: Are there in the music of our day, known or unknown to the majority, any such vital "thoughts," based on principles that a discerning criticism may see even now to have "triumphed and begun to penetrate the world"? Is there music being written to-day which is modern, not through its pampering to jaded sense or dulled intelligence, but through its intuition and expression of the deeper emotional experience and spiritual aspiration of our time? Is there music, in short, not only seductive to the ear but beautiful to the mind? ”

“ To the union of rhythm with harmony modern music owes its birth, and it is to the first dawn of an attempt to incorporate these two mighty forces that we must look if we wish to date the beginnings of modern music. ”

“ Our scale intervals are the slowly gained triumphs of the human mind. Modern music did not emerge from the darkness of the past until harmony, as we know it, came into active being.
Both melody and harmony are controlled by rhythm. It is the master force of the musical organism. Before man was the ebb and flow of nature had its rhythm. On this elementary rhythm, the one model music finds in nature, the inventive mind of man has builded the wonderfully impressive art rhythms existing in the masterpieces of music. ”

“ You have only to remember that the singer now-a-days must always have the piano accompaniment in order to satisfy our demand for harmony, that we never hear any unmixed melody in set music, in order to see how completely harmony reigns in our music, instead of bare melody. We may then broadly differentiate the modern music which begins at the same time with modern science, from all precedent music, as Harmony contrasted with Melody. ”

“ It is with hypnotic power that these methods and their effects have possessed the musical consciousness of the succeeding generation and, becoming the very essence of modernity, insinuated themselves into the pages of all modern music. ”

“ This obscure presentment of an unknown happiness, which music awakens in us, this confused dream of an ideal and new life, all this is but a prophecy of something which music itself ought assuredly to accomplish. ”

“ In reading the lives of these great musical composers, we can trace the gradual development of music from its earliest days as an art and as a science. Unlike the other arts which have flourished, decayed, and had rebirth, music, as we now understand it, sprang into being out of the ferment of the Renaissance, and therefore is the youngest of the arts—a modern growth belonging particularly to the later phases of civilisation. ”

“ In time, through the combined wisdom of gifted composers and large-minded ecclesiastical rulers, the music of the church and the music of the [Pg 35] people became united, and modern music was born.
Architecture, painting, sculpture and poetry possess practical proofs of their past achievements and on these their present endeavors are builded. Modern music has been compelled to be the architect of its own fortunes. It is the one new art of our era, and, as the youngest in the family of arts, it has but recently reached a high state of development. ”

“ It will thus be seen that the manner in which we are impressed by Music is enormously complex. First, there is the sensuous appeal, the different characteristics of timbre and tone, of rich harmony and full orchestration, of all those devices which are usually described in metaphors of taste and colour. Second, and inclusive of the first, is the emotional appeal, the exhilaration of rapid movement, the gravity of stately chords and broad diatonic melody, the restlessness of broken rhythm and frequent modulation, the shades of surprise which follow upon a sudden change or an unexpected crisis. ”

“ It matters little from what point we view the tendency of musical art as it is disclosed to our vision through its most potent manifestations. We are driven inward upon the central and all-important question, How far can music go in the direction of depicting things which lie outside itself? Is it to convert itself into a language, or shall it sink into a kind of rapt mysticism which shall be accepted in a vague way as a species of philosophic speculation? ”

“ Purpose of the Study of the History of Music.—The purpose of the study of the history of music is to trace the development of the many phases which make up modern music which we cannot but regard as a great social force, an intellectual, an uplifting force. ”

“ It has been well established, indeed, that primeval music was the product of two modes of instinctive emotional expression, the gesticulatory and the vocal, dance and song; and throughout its growth these two strands, however closely they may intertwine, can still be traced. Thus it happens that even to-day we find the complex work of [Pg 100] modern musicians getting a special impress of personality and style according as the rhythmic or the melodic-harmonic faculty predominates in the individual. One man's music will be notable for its strong impulse, its variety and vivacity of rhythm ”

“ If Music does these things, then, surely some of the first conditions of Art are fulfilled. The most modern of modern music can accomplish little more, unless it be to vex the mind with its abstruseness, and to tax the brain in divining the whereabouts of this or that theme, and the entry and passage of some particular "subject" phrase. ”

“ The folk song was ignored successfully for a thousand years, but in certain happy days of the Middle Ages it wooed and won the fugue, and modern music, strong with the strength of musical science, beautiful with the beauty of spontaneous emotional utterance, was the fruit of this union. ”

“ After examining the general course of musical history, ascertaining some fundamental principles, and applying these principles to our special judgments, we shall be able to perceive the greatest musicians of our day in their relations, and to get a perspective view of modern music in which they shall take their proper places. ”

“ We shall shortly examine some typical folk-songs in order to see how this design gradually became larger and more various, and how, through this process, the foundations were laid for the masterpieces of modern instrumental music. We shall see that this advance has accompanied an advance in civilization; that as men's lives have become better ordered, as higher standards of living and thinking have appeared, the sense of beauty has grown until, finally, this steady progress has resulted in the creation of certain permanent types. ”

“ Steadily avoiding all fragmentary, wayward, and distortive expression, using always his consummate mastery of his medium and his synthetic power of thought to subserve a large and universal utterance, he points the way for a healthy and fruitful development of music in the future. ”

“ Just as the introductory essay tries to sketch the general musical environment, as determined by basic principles and developed in history, in relation to which alone the individuals discussed can be understood, so the epilogue seeks to suggest that still larger environment of human feeling and activity on which music, like everything else, depends for its vitality. The first essay considers music as a medium for men, the last considers life as a medium for music. ”

“ Although a century and more has elapsed since his birth the permanent value of his music is still debated, often amusingly enough, by those who seem unaware that, whatever the theoretical rights of the case, in practice his principles are the reigning ones in modern music. ”

“ Remember always that music is the youngest of our modern arts. Remember, too, that although we can trace its beginnings back to the fourth century of the Christian era, we find that twelve hundred years were occupied with the development of a single form of music,—vocal polyphony, the form in which the mighty masterpieces of the Roman Church down to the day of Lasso and Palestrina were composed. ”

“ Hence we may naturally expect that, in their highest development, the style and structure of Music should present the most complete examples of artistic organism: that they should be, as Mr Pater has described them, the perfect type to which it is the glory of other arts to conform. ”

“ And so we come to the music of our own time, [8] which is but a logical and inevitable result of a century of growth and evolution. What, above all, is characteristic of it? First, its devotion to a "programme"—to a literary or dramatic or pictorial subject. Our modern tone-poet—as we aptly call him—having found ready to his hand an art which can convey with extraordinary vividness moods of longing and despair, ecstasy and jubilation, must make it still more specific and articulate. ”

“ It entails a change in the position of musical art which took place in the painting art centuries earlier, and shows what a modern thing music is. Men no longer expect music to be the expression of noble and exalted thoughts only, but accept it as the expression of all kinds of moods, emotions, feelings and aspirations, whether they be little and intimate, satyric and strange, wildly extravagant, genially humorous, pugnacious, pacific, pastoral, even uproariously domestic. ”

“ Their practice, indeed, unanimously confirms the theory of musical effect which has now been briefly sketched, and which may be more briefly summarized before we pass on to deduce from it some general canons of appreciation and criticism.
Music, we have seen, originates in the spontaneous gestures and cries made by primitive man under the sway of emotion, imitated by observers, and arousing in them the same feelings. ”

“ The art of the musician is shown as an intelligent presentation of sounds and rhythms and inspirations into works displaying beauty or expressing emotion. It is by the handling of the materials of music that the composer proves the beauty of his vision. ”

“ The musical revolution of the seventeenth century involved [180] the development of an art of solo singing and its supremacy over the chorus, the substitution of the modern major and minor transposing scales for the Gregorian modal system, a homophonic method of harmony for the mediaeval polyphony, accompanied music for the a capella, secular and dramatic for religious music, the rise of instrumental music as an independent art, the transfer of patronage from the Church to the aristocracy and ultimately to the common people. ”

“ That music is beyond all the other arts directly expressive of man's deeper passional life scarcely needs theoretic proof; the fact is in the experience of every one who has listened to a military band, to a homely song lovingly rendered, or to a ragged Hungarian with a violin. ”

“ It is the penetration, the ultimacy, of music that gives it such extraordinary power. The other arts excel it in definiteness, in concreteness, in the ability to delineate a scene or tell a story; but music surpasses them all in power to present the naked and basic facts of existence, the essential, informing passions.
A secondary and subordinate advantage of music proceeds from the nature of its material. Tones, produced and controlled by man, are far [Pg 222] more easily stamped with the unity he desires than the objects of external nature. ”

“ It goes without saying that descriptive, imitative, realistic and even morbid music has its proper place in the poetic con-188-ceptions of our contemporary tone-masters. Exception only is made to music that is primarily intellectual or pessimistic. ”

“ Music, to quote John Addington Symonds, ‘is the essentially modern art.’ Nevertheless, even in default of any more specific evidence, we could safely assume that musical culture among the ancient civilized nations had advanced considerably beyond the stage reached by primitive peoples. ”

“ And yet shall Love himself be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred:
O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
Music is Love in search of a word." ”

“ To the lawgivers, the signs themselves are the most important matter, and are continually growing in their estimation; the new art of music is derived from the old signs—and these now stand for musical art itself. ”

“ Borrowing as by right from all the arts, and pressing into its service all that has been won in the region of form and colour to enforce its own message of the spirit, it is nevertheless inevitable that to music it must remain the heaviest debtor, for its chosen vehicle of rhythmic language approaches most nearly to the abstract instrument of the musician. ”

“ An emotion which shakes nations it can concentrate into a few burning lines. [Pg 275] It is never conscious that it is great art; it takes no thought for the means; it is only interested in expressing its message as powerfully and as simply as possible. In doing this it hits upon the phrases that are at the foundation of our musical system, at the cadences which block in musical architecture upon the structure from which all conscious forms are derived.
This popular art, as we have said, has revivified music again and again. ”

“ During those eleven Christian centuries, from the latter part of the fourth century, when the corner-stone for our musical system was laid, until the wonderful exploration period of the fifteenth was well advanced, the masters of music were absorbed in controlling the elements of their art. Since then event has crowded upon event with rapidly increasing ratio. During the past two centuries the progress of the art has been like a tale in fairyland. ”