Musical temperament

“ Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation—the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons—to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. ”

“ Here is seen, it must be admitted, what appears very much like genius in the melody-making power. Something it is, undoubtedly, that shows an innate comprehension, power in expression, and love of harmony, in a degree that is simply intense. The history of the colored race in this country establishes the fact, too, that no system of cruelty, however great or long inflicted, can destroy that sympathy with musical sounds that is born with the soul. ”

“ But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concert. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of life. ”

“ This second and higher "soul" significance shows itself in the emotional appeal of the music, in the feelings it provokes and the mood it engenders. Here sound speaks in parables with an outer story and an inner meaning. The non-musical person hears sounds, but the musical mind hears sense. Whether the tidings be of sweetness, affection, or delight, of strength, vigour, or energy, of sorrow or regret, there is all the difference in the world between the outward comprehension and the inner interpretation. The formal part of the music is the frame, but the emotion supplies the picture within. ”

“ Every character, male and female, is “passionately fond of music.” Which means? That the readers of this stuff consider a passionate love of music to be fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of either, and behold! a lover of music. ”

“ And in general the union of the melodic and characteristic features of such music readily incurs the risk of overstepping the finely drawn boundaries of musical beauty, more especially when the intention is to express force, selfishness, evil, impetuosity, and other extremes of exclusive passion of a similar nature. ”

“ Moreover, the discipline of music is diffused through all the acts of our life. For when we keep the commandments of God, and observe His law, it is certain that our words and acts are associated by musical rhythm with the virtues of harmony. ”

“ For, itself offering no images of things and events to which we may attach the feelings which it arouses, we supply our own. We fill in the impersonal form of musical feeling with the concrete emotions of our own lives; it is our strivings, our hopes and fears, which music expresses. By denying us access to the world about us, music compels us to turn in upon ourselves; it is we who live there in the sounds. For, as we have seen, the rhythmic tones seize hold not only of our attention, but of our bodies also—hand and foot and head and heart, resounding throughout the whole organism. ”

“ I have spoken of certain social conditions which affect music unfavorably. There has been always a certain outcry against music because of its supposed emotionalism. The eye of cold intelligence, seeing the music-lover enthralled by a symphony, raises its lid in icy contempt for such a creature of feeling. The sociologist, observing musical performers, wonders why music seems to affect the appearance and the conduct of some of them so unfavorably. ”

“ It is not agreed as to whether birds can appreciate music. They respond to it, and even imitate it, as in the case of the mocking bird, but we cannot be sure that their singing is for “pure joy,” or for the love of the melody rendered. With the majority of men we know that musical tones arranged in melody or harmony act as original satisfiers, by and in themselves. “Music hath power to soothe the savage breast.” ”

“ For when the musical meaning is specialized through the emotions that are the burden of the song, it necessarily loses the power which it would otherwise have of expressing one's own inner life—once more, what it gains in definiteness it loses in scope. It no longer possesses the unique function of the musical. ”

“ And so in the nineteenth century men came to feel that beautiful music cannot be merely contemplated and admired, but must be lived with and felt. Accordingly composers of this period emphasized continually the sensuous in their music, developing orchestral colors, dazzling masses of tone, intense harmonies and biting dissonances, delicate half-lights of modulation, and the [Pg 221] deep magic of human song. The change in attitude from music as a thing to be admired to music as a thing to be felt is perhaps the chief musical fact of the early nineteenth century. ”

“ And if such feeling-tones exist independently from harmony it is evident that they would enter into every melody in addition to the strictly musical feelings of harmony and that they deserve consideration as a factor of music. ”

“ There could be no question as to the utter incongruity of any dramatic picture of ordinary events, or ordinary personages, finding expression in musical utterance. Genuine and profound art must always be consistent with itself, and what we recognize as general truth. Even characters set in the comparatively near hack-ground of history are too closely related to our own familiar surroundings of thought and mood to be regarded as artistically natural in the use of music as the organ of the every-day life of emotion and sentiment. ”

“ Harmony was there; man, classifying and arranging the sounds, created music.
We all know what man has been able to get from it since then.
Man, past master of the musical realm, is to-day still in the infancy of art, from the standpoint of control of light. ”

“ Just as one early man placed straight and curved lines in such relations that they pleased the eye by their mere formal harmony, while another placed them in such relations that they pleased by suggesting some aspect of man or nature, so did early music spring with one musician from the mere pleasure in the successions and combinations of tones, with another from the desire to convey in sound a suggestion of the thoughts aroused in him by his intercourse and his struggles with his fellow-men and with the world. ”

“ The second cause for the concreteness of the musical experience I take to be certain emotions and feelings which are aroused by association, not with the rhythmic elements of music alone, but with the tone-color, intensity, and melody also. There is a human quality, a poignancy and intimacy, about much music, which can be understood only through its analogy with the sounds of the human voice. ”

“ From this double bondage to the rhythmic-melodic powers of human expressive movements and to the thought content of language, musical art finally frees itself. While the musical instrument was at first a means designed to assist man in his endeavour to give direct expression to his emotions, man's activity in the case of 'absolute music' becomes limited to the mastery of the instrument itself. ”

“ When musical taste has passed from a sentimental intoxication with the sensuous beauty of the sounds themselves, the beauty we admire is primarily beauty of form or structure. The musical connoisseur likes to trace the recurrence of a theme in a symphony, its deviations and disappearances, its distribution in the various choirs of wood-wind, brass, and strings, its interweaving with other themes, its resilient, surprising, and apposite emergences, its pervasive penetration of the total scheme. ”

“ If, indeed, music were just a means for the arousal of feelings, it would not be a fine art, but an orgy. For, in order to be aesthetic, feelings must be not merely stimulated by, but objectified in, the sense medium, where they can be mastered and known. But the intimacy of music is not in contradiction with the freedom and objectivity characteristic of all art. For musical feelings, although they are experienced as our own, are nevertheless also experienced as the sounds; in music we live, not as we live ordinarily, within our bodies, but out there, in a rarer and unpractical medium—tone. ”

“ With few exceptions music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound. ”

“ It is then the less surprising, though it is surprising still, that they were contented in their music to gratify their sense of melody and rhythm, without exploring the mines of musical enjoyment which have been opened to modern audiences by the discoverers of counterpoint and harmony. ”

“ Its specifically artistic emotion, the power it shares with all other arts of raising our state of consciousness to something more complete, more vast, and more permanent—the specific musical emotion of music can become subservient to the mere awakening of our latent emotional possibilities, to the stimulating of emotions often undesirable in themselves, and always unable, at the moment, to find their legitimate channel, whence enervation and perhaps degradation of the soul. ”

“ To express calmness, decision, et cetera, avoid rubato.
It must now be evident to the reader that this whole matter of musical nuance is too subtle to be treated adequately in a book of this character, and it becomes necessary for us once more to advise the amateur to study music, both vocal and instrumental, in order that his latent musical feeling may be developed into a ripe and adequate musical taste. ”

“ We ourselves have constant opportunities of remarking the intense emotional effects due to mere pitch, tone, and rhythm; that is to say, to the merely physical qualities of number, nature, and repetition of musical vibrations. We have all been cheered by the trumpet and depressed by the hautboy ”

“ All of our experiences are connected together by subconscious filiation; but it is only in art that their residual feeling tones have a full opportunity to come into the mind; for in everyday life they are crowded out by the hurry of practical concerns. In the earlier stages of the development of music they must have contributed a still larger share to musical expression, when the different forms of music were connected by habit and convention with particular crises and occasions, religious, domestic, and social, in the life of individuals and groups. ”

“ Well, no one, I think, will question the existence in us, at the present day, of something that may well be called, in general terms, the musical faculty. For the musician as we now know him—and, indeed, have known him for [199] some centuries—music is a means of emotional expression that can function without the aid of poetry or even of speech. ”

“ Of what importance is the musical value of a composition, if it can only be sung with doubtful success, and if the voice is obliged to struggle with it, instead of having it under control? You attach less importance to the free, agreeable exercise of the voice than does the unanimous public. I do not wish to excite compassion, but to give pleasure by a beautifully developed style of singing. You pay some attention to adaptability to the piano or the violin: why are you usually regardless of fitness for the voice? ”

“ To this enjoyment, which exists parallel with the succession of sounds, should be added the pleasure of the hearer's adapting his personal feelings of the moment to the general sense of the performed music: a theme marked with melancholy will move a whole audience of thousands to sadness, each person of whom will associate his feeling with some particular object. This impersonality of the musical phrase and its adaptability to individual feelings explain the taste of the masses for music, and its power over them. ”

“ Let us always keep in mind that, while the psychological effect of music remains a considerable mystery, and the appreciation of great music must be a personal and individual act involving a certain receptivity and sensitiveness to musical impressions, yet the perception of the logic or sense in a piece of music is a long step towards understanding it, and one of the best means of cultivating that receptivity and sensitiveness. ”

“ Indeed, it would seem that the time has not yet come for attempts to be made to improve upon the works of those great musical luminaries; for they have left too much that is deep, classical, charmingly beautiful, and soul-satisfying. The musical world has paused, not caring to go farther, to conscientiously study their noble creations, so fruitful in the delights, the soul-elevating influences, which they afford. ”

“ That is, the possibility of musical expectation, and pleasure in its satisfaction, is conditioned by the possession of a tonality- feeling which covers the constituents of the piece of music, but which has not become absolutely mechanical in its action. Just as rhythm needs an obstacle to make the structure felt, so melody needs some variation from the obvious set of relations already won and possessed. ”