XVIIA MASQUE OF MUSIC
Here is an evocation of a projected Masque of Music. Not a Miltonic hymn in praise of the melting art, nor yet an Alexander’s Feast celebrating its power, after the manner of John Dryden, but a grandiose vision which would embrace the legend of sound from its unorganized beginnings to the to-morrow of the ultimate Kalmuck. It is written with such men as Reinhardt, David Belasco, Gordon Craig, Stanislavsky, Michel Fokine, and Richard Ordynski in view. They, or artists of their calibre, might make the idea viable in the theatre. What music would best envelope my Masque is a question answered by the composers whose names are figuratively deployed. Or what gifted American composers might “set” the Masque in a symphonic poem! Where this kaleidoscope would be produced and how many evenings it might need for complete interpretation are puzzles I do not seek now to solve; suffice to add, that I have for the sake of dramatic unity placed myself at the centre and circumference of this prose recital, as sensations are veritable hallucinations for me. In a performance the spectators would occupy the same relative position....The curtains of Time and Space drew apart. I stood on the cliff of the World, saw and heard the travailing and groaning of light and sound in the epochal and reverberating void. A pedal-bass, a diapasonic tone that came from the bowels of the firmament, struck fear to my heart; this tone was of such magnitude as might be overheard by the gods. No mortal ear could have held it without cracking. This gigantic flood, this cataclysmic roar, filled every pore of my body. It blew me about as a blade of grass is blown in a boreal blast, yet I sensed the pitch. Inchoate nature, the unrestrained cry of the rocks and their buried secrets—crushed aspirations, and the hidden sorrows of mineral, plants, and animals became vocal. It was the voice of the monstrous abortions of nature, the groan of incomplete or transitional types, born for a moment and shattered forever. All God’s mud made moan for recognition.
It was night. The strong fair sky of the South was sown with dartings of silver and starry dust. I walked under the great windbowl with its few balancing clouds and listened to the whirrings of the infinite. I knew that I was close to the core of existence, and though sound was less vibratile than light, sound touched earth, embraced it, and was content with its eld and homely face. Light, a mischievous Loge; Sound, the All-Mother Erda. I walked on. My way seemed clearer....
Reaching a plain, fabulous and mighty, Icame upon a Sphinx, half-buried in sand and looming in the starlight. As I watched her face I felt that the tone had ceased to surround me. The dawn filtered through the dark and there were stirrings abroad in the air. From afar sounded a fluttering of thin tones. As the sun shone rosy on the vast stone, like a clear-colored wind came back the tone from the sea. And in the music-filled air I fell on my knees and worshipped the Sphinx, for music is a window through which we gaze upon eternity. Then followed a strange musical rout of the nations; I saw defile before me Silence, “eldest of all things”; Brahma’s consort, Saraswati, fingered her Vina, and Siva and his hideous mate, Devi, sometimes called Durga; and the brazen heavens were like a typhoon that showered appalling evils upon mankind. All the gods of Egypt and Assyria, dog-faced, moon-breasted, and menacing, passed playing upon dreams, making choric music, black and fuliginous. The sacred Ibis stalked in the silvery footsteps of the Houris; the Graces held hands. Phœbus Apollo appeared. His face was as a shining shield. He improvised upon a many-stringed lyre of tortoise-shell, and his music was shimmering and symphonious. Hermes and his Syrinx wooed the shy Euterpe; the maidens went in woven paces, a medley of masques flamed by, and the great god Pan breathed into his pipes.
I saw Bacchus pursued by ravening Mænads, saw Lamia and her ophidian flute, as Orpheussorrowfully sped, searching his Eurydice. Neptune blew his wreathéd horn. The Tritons gambolled in the waves. Cybele changed her cymbals. And with his music Amphion summoned rocks to Thebes. Jepthah danced to her death before the Ark of the Covenant, praising the Lord God of Israel. Unabashed behind her leered the rhythmic Herodias, while were heard the praiseful songs of Deborah and Barak asSt.Cæcilia smote the keyboard. With her timbrel Miriam sang hymns of triumph. Before the Persian Satrap on his purple litter Abyssinian girls, their little breasts carolling to the sky, alluringly swayed; the air was crowded by the crisp tinklings of tiny bells at wrist and ankles as the Kabaros drummed; and hard by in the brake brown nymphs moved in languorous rhythms, droning hoarse sacrificial chants. The colossus Memnon hymned, priests of Baal screamed as they lacerated themselves with knives, Druid priestesses crooned sybillic incantations. And over this pageant of Woman and Music the proud sun of old Egypt scattered splendid burning rays.
From distant strands and hillsides came the noise of unholy instruments with names, sweet-sounding, and clashing. Nofres from the Nile, Ravanastrons of Ceylon, Javanese gongs, Chinese Pavilions, Tambourahs, Sackbuts, Shawms, Psalteries, Dulcimers, Salpinxes, Keras, Timbrels, Sistra, Crotala, double flutes, twenty-two stringed harps, Kerrenas, the Indian flutecalled Yo, and the quaint Yamato-Koto. Followed fast the Biwa, the Gekkin, and its cousin the Genkwan; the Ku, named after a horrid god; the Shunga and its cluttering strings, the Samasien, the Kokyu, the Vamato Fuye—which breathed moon-eyed melodies—the Hichi-Riki, and the Shaku-Hachi. The Sho was mouthed by slant-haired yellow boys, while the sharp roll of drums covered with goatskins never ceased. From this bedlam there occasionally emerged a splinter of tune like a plank thrown up by the sea. No melody could I discern, though I grasped its beginnings. Double flutes gave me the modes: Dorian, Phrygian, Æolian, Lydian, Ionian; after Sappho and her Mixo-Lydian mode I longed for a modern accord.
The choir went whirling on with Citharas, Rebecs, Citoles, Domras, Goules, Serpents, Crwths, Pentachords, Rebabs, Pantalons, Conches, Flageolets made of Pelican bones, Tams-tams, Carillons, Xylophones, Crescents of beating bells, Mandoras, Whistling Vases of clay, Zampognas, Zithers, Bugles, Octochords, Naccaras or Turkish Castanets, and Quinternas. I heard blare the two hundred thousand curved trumpets which Solomon had made for his Temple, and the forty thousand which accompanied the Psalms of David. Jubal played his Magrephá. Pythagoras came with his Monochord. To the music of the Spheres Plato listened. The priests of Joshua blew seven times upon Shofars, or rams-horns. Then fell the walls of Jericho. Tothis came a challenging blast from the terrible horn of Roland of Roncesvalles. The air had the resonance of hell as the Guatemalan Indians worshipped their Black Christ upon the Plaza; and naked Ishtar, Daughter of Sin, stood shivering before the Seventh Gate. A great silence ensued. I saw a green star drop over Judea and thought music itself were slain. The pilgrims with their Jew’s-harps dispersed into sorrowful groups. Blackness usurped the sonorous sun. There was no music in all the universe, and this tonal eclipse lasted long. From remote coasts came faint cries: The Great God Pan is dead! They have slain Our Lord and we know not where to find Him....
I heard as if in a magic mirror the submerged music of Dufay, Okeghem, Josquin Deprès, Orlando di Lasso, Goudimel, and Luther; the cathedral tones of Palestrina, the frozen sweetness of Arezzo, Frescobaldi, Monteverde, Carissimi, Tartini, Corelli, Scarlatti, Jomelli, Pergolesi, Lulli, Rameau, Couperin, Buxtehude, Sweelinck, Byrd, Gibbons, Purcell, and the Bach; with their Lutes, Monochords, Virginals, Harpsichords, Clavicytherums, Clavichords, Cembalos, Spinets, Theorbos, Organs, and Pianofortes, and accompanying them an army, vast, formidable, of the immemorial virtuosi, singers, castrati, the night-moths and midgets of music. Like wraiths they waved desperate ineffectual hands and made sad mimickings of their dead and dusty triumphs.... Again I heard the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach,ever new, yet old. In its weaving sonant patterns were the detonations of the primeval world I had just left; also something disquieting and feminine. But the Man predominates in Bach, subtle, nervous, magnetic as he is in this Fantasia.
A mincing, courtly old woman bows low. It is Joseph Haydn, and there is sprightly malice in his music. The glorious periwigged giant of London conducts a chorus of a million. The hailstones of Handel pelt the pate of the Sphinx. “A man!” I cried, as the very heavens stormed out their cadenced hallelujahs. A divine youth approaches. His mien is excellent, and his voice of rare sweetness. His band discourses ravishing music. The primeval tone is there, but feminized, graceful; troupes of painted stage players in fallals and furbelows present pictures of rakes, rustic maidens, and fantastics. An orchestra minces as Mozart disappears. Behold, the great one approaches, and beneath his Jovian tread the earth trembles! Beethoven, the sublime peasant, the conqueror, the god! All that has gone before, all that is to be, is globed in his symphonies, was divined by this seer. A man, the first since Handel! And the eagles triumphantly jostle the scarred face of the Sphinx. Von Weber prances by on his gayly caparisoned arpeggios, Meyerbeer and Verdi follow; all three footlight folk. Schubert, a panpipe through which the wind discourses exquisite melodies; Gluck, whose lyre is stringed Greekfashion, but bedecked with Parisian gauds and ribbons; Mendelssohn, a charming, girlish echo of Bach; Chopin and Schumann, romantic wrestlers with their muted dreams, strugglers against ineffable madness and sorely stricken at the end; Berlioz, a primitive Roc, half-bird, half-human, also a Minotaur who dragged to his Crete all the music of the Masters; and the Turk of the keyboard, Franz Liszt, with Cymbalom, Czardas, and crazy Kalamaïkas pass. But suddenly I noted a shriller tonal accent, the accent of a sun that has lost its sex, a sun that is stricken with moon-sickness. A hybrid appears, followed by a cohort of players. A huge orchestra plays straightway; the Sphinx wears a sinister smile....
Then I saw the tone-color of each instrument. Some malign enchanter had diverted from their natural uses every member of the tonal army. I saw the strings in rainbow hues, red trumpets, blue flutes, green oboes, purple clarinets, horns glorious golden yellow, scarlet trombones, dark-brown bassoons, carmilion ophecleides, as the drums punctured space with ebon crepitations. That the triangle always had been silver I never questioned, but this new chromatic blaze, these novel tintings of tone—what did they portend? Was it a symbol of the further degradation and effeminization of music? Was art become as the sigh of a woman? A vain, selfish goddess was about to be placed on high and worshipped; soon the rustling of silk would betray her sex. Releasedfrom the wise bonds imposed upon her by Mother Church, music is now a parasite of the emotions, a modern Circe whose “feet take hold on hell,” whose wand enchants men into listening swine. Gigantic as antediluvian ferns, as evil-smelling and as dangerous, music in the hands of this magician is dowered with ambiguous attitudes, with anonymous gestures, is color become sound, sensuality masking as chaste beauty. This Klingsor evirates, effeminates, disintegrates. He is the spirit who denies all things natural, and his revengeful theatric music goes about in the guise of a woman. She hastens its end, its spiritual suicide is at hand. I lifted my eyes. Surely I recognized that short, dominating figure conducting the orchestra. Was it the tragic comedian, Richard Wagner? Were those his mocking, ardent eyes fading in the morbid mist?
A fat, cowled monk stealthily marches after him. He shades his eyes from the fierce rays of the Wagnerian sun; to him more grateful are moon-rays and the reflected light of lonely forest pools. He is the Arch-Hypocrite of Tone, and he speaks in divers tongues. Brahms it is and he wears the mask of a musical masquerader. Then swirled by a band of gypsies, with guitars, castanets, and led by Bizet. Spain seemed familiar land, Spain with the odors of the boudoir. Gounod and Faust go simpering on tiptoe; a disorderly mass of Cossacks stampeded them, Tchaikovsky at their head. They yelledas they banged upon resounding Svirelis, Balalaikas, and Kobzas, dancing the Ziganka all the while. And as a still more horrible uproar was heard I became suddenly conscious of a change on the face of the Sphinx; streaked with grey it seemed to be crumbling. As the clatter increased I diverted my regard from the massive stone and beheld an orgiastic mob of men and women howling and playing upon instruments of fulgurating colors and vile shapes. Their skins were white, their hair yellow, their eyes of victorious blue.
“Nietzsche’s Blond Barbarians, the Apes of Wagner!” I exclaimed, and I felt the ground giving away. The naked music, pulsatile and opium-charged, turned hysterical as Zarathustra-Strauss waved on his myrmidons with frenzied philosophical motions. Music was become vertiginous, a mad vortex wherein whirled mad atoms madly embracing. Dancing, the dissonant corybantes of the Dionysiac evangel scarce touched earth, thus outvying the bacchantes. The roar of enemy cannon pursued them as the last Superman yielded his ghost to the Time-Spirit....
Then there gravely marched a group of men of cold cerebral expression. They carried steel hammers with which they beat upon their anvils the whole-tone scale. Near by hovered Arnold Schoenberg with Claude Debussy, but they put their fingers into their pained ears as the Neo-Scythians, Scriabine, Stravinsky, Ornstein andProkofieff hammered with excruciating dynamics hell itself into icy enharmonic splinters. With thunderous peals of ironic laughter the Sphinx sank into the sand, yawning as it vanished and mumbling: “No longer are there dissonances. Nothing is true. All is permitted!” By a mighty effort to escape the nipping arctic air and the harsh grindings of impending icebergs, I fled.
And that is my Masque of Music.