Music for Museums?
Music for Museums?
I SAW people actually enjoying themselves at a recent piano recital. During the performance of some of the numbers they laughed; at other times they nudged one another and made comments. The conclusion of each piece was punctuated by a certain amount of vociferous applause, and an almost equal amount of disapprobation. One group of pieces on the programme, Claude Debussy’sChildren’s Corner, was familiar; as a result, it aroused less interest than some of the other music played. Albeniz, one of the new men who is making the list of Spanish compositions extend beyond the folk-song, was represented by hisEl Albaicin; Maurice Ravel byGaspard de la Nuit, a very successful attempt to paint atmosphere and character in the very limited tonal medium of the pianoforte; Scriabine by four preludes and a sonata; and Leo Ornstein, the pianist, bySeven SketchesandTwo Shadow Pieces. Mr. Ornstein’s compositions have no truck with majors and minors, thirds and fifths, pentatonic and diatonic scales. His descending fingers strike masses of keys; some auditors seemed to think there is noplan in these assaults on the board. Personally, I am willing to wager that the last piano sonatas of the deaf Beethoven meant just as little to their first hearers. We have become accustomed to the sweet and unsubtle way of the tonic and dominant. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Strawinsky are yet discordant to our melody-soaked and harmony-demanding ears.
Yet, if concert programmes are consulted, one will find in them very little music earlier than the eighteenth century. The symphony orchestra is really a discovery of the nineteenth century. When our symphony orchestras play Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, the reënforcements, the rearrangements, would astonish those old composers as much as the electric signs on Broadway, could they be brought back to hear them. Either one-half the band—nay, two-thirds—must sit still during the playing of these numbers, if the original body of tone is to be preserved, or else some readjustment is necessary. For instance, it is quite customary to allow the full body of strings to play a Mozart symphony, although the wood-winds and brasses are not appreciably greater in number in the modern orchestra than they were in Mozart’s time.Lack of proportion and over-emphasis are the natural results.
It is only the composers who have invented the modern orchestra, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Strawinsky and Scriabine—to mention a few names—who get justice done to their compositions. In fact, as it stands, the modern orchestra exists for the perfect playing of modern music. It is a dizzy, vertiginous force; floods of sound are let loose on the hearer to drown his sensibilities and to make him “feel.” Now, there was something very precise and exact and prim about the peruked band of the day of Haydn, which would have played theSymphonie Pathétiqueas if it were theMarche Funèbre d’une Marionnette. Music in the good old days did not cause women to swoon and men to swear. There were no Wagnerites then. (Are there any now?) The composer ofArmidewould not have inspired an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. So when the modern orchestra plays Mozart it makes just a little too much of it. Mozart and Strauss! It is the difference between Cimabue and Michael Angelo.
The conflict between periodic conventions and contemporary methods and tastes is always greatand will always serve as an excuse for discussion. There seems to be no adequate reason why we should give up Shakespeare because we do not perform his plays in the Elizabethan manner. After all, a tune is a tune, andVoi che sapetewould probably sound very well played on mandolins if Mme. Sembrich did not happen to be handy to sing it. The Anglican church has found it well adapted for hymnal purposes, as anyone knows who has heardAdeste Fideles. So, perhaps, Bach rearranged by Gustav Mahler, or Josef Stransky, or anybody else who happens to have the time, is to be listened to, just as we are all forced to lend our ears several times a year, whether it be in a concert hall or a restaurant, or on an ocean liner, to Gounod’s idea of a Bach prelude.
There is a great deal of the old music which gives a pleasant impression to the ear if it be not heard too frequently. Mozart, Bach, and Gluck, however, stand the test of frequent repetition better than Beethoven. It would also be a mistake, perhaps, not to give the students of music an opportunity to hear past examples of the art, to establish in their minds a knowledge of the successive steps which have been taken in building upthis arbitrary thing which we call “art-music,” although it is neither the music of the Chinese, who, after all, may be considered an artistic race, the African negroes, the Indians, nor the Japanese. It would not be advisable, perhaps, to have any admirer of present-day art-music believe that it was all that could be said or done in music; an historical survey is necessary. For some of us there is always the question of relative importance. It may be a fact that nobody in the future will be able to extract more beautiful arbitrary art-music out of the air than has been composed by Mozart and Wagner. We are sure that Berlioz, Liszt, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn can be improved on because they have been. Perhaps Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is really better music than any which has been composed before or since. (Personally, I do not for a moment think so.) For the purpose of argument, however, it is necessary to presuppose that some people set up standards of this sort. There are those, doubtless, who are really sincere in their devotion to the composers whose names begin with a B; but there is a larger group whose ears find it easier to listen not merely to music based upon a certain scale, but tocertainmusic based on this scale. As a result, one might say that the very limited attendance on which our symphony orchestras may count is largely made up of middle-aged people who are never contemptuous of familiarity.
The principle, of course, is all wrong. Still, when every person in a vast population is expected to enjoy arbitrary art-music, one cannot expect perception or taste. In our civilization everybody is supposed to “love” music. Poor though we may be, we send our daughters to the music-masters. From cottage to cottage the echoes of the pianoforte resound and, especially in the beginning, each pupil is given a taste of what is known in the provinces as “classical” music. Czerny is hauled out to teach the fingers how to be agile. There must be a taste of Bach’sWohltemperirtes Clavier, a Chopin waltz or two.... Heller is a favorite with small-town teachers, and then the student may burst gaily into the intricacies of the latest air by Irving Berlin. Now, why is it that the newest of the arts—at least the newest from the arbitrary point of view from which we consider music as an art—is taught to almost all the children of all the lands? They are actuallybeaten with sticks to drive them to the keyboard. To be sure, children are also taught to read, for more cogent reasons. It would do no harm to anyone to be taught to read music; but to be taught to play it is like being taught to act. What if we should all be taught to paint?—Well, after all, why not?
The results are not heartening. The fact is that over fifty per cent. of the audiences who attend symphony concerts cannot carry a tune. Naturally they are not averse to hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played over and over and over again, but I should like to ask these same people how many times during the course of a season they would listen to a masterpiece in words—Hamlet, for instance. How much less often would they care to hear a play by Bernard Shaw?—and yet there are some overtures and symphonies which every orchestra plays every season to its patrons. Some of this music one also hears in restaurants and in the opera house. It is monstrous!
I really do not think that a modern symphony orchestra ought to be allowed to play more than one Beethoven symphony a season. This fossilizationwould be deadening to any art. A set concert programme is almost an occasion for despair under the brightest conditions, but with no new life in its make-up, it had better remain an unperformed programme. When an orchestra is the medium through which a new musician pours out his inspiration to the world, there is meaning in the organization. When it ambles idly through Brahms and Bach it occupies the same place in the world’s affairs that the museum does. Why should all our orchestras insist, except on rare occasions, on being museums?
We have seen that only an inert audience may be counted upon from the ranks of the music students of the country. More interest might be expected from auditors prepared to be unprepared. To be sure, every conductor is keen to put a few “novelties” on his programmes every year. This season, for instance, a symphony by Sibelius, which has been played in Europe for some time and has been performed here before, has been hauled out again to make the critics foam at the mouth. Igor Strawinsky’s early work,Fireworks, composed and published in 1908, has been vouchsafed us. Since then Strawinsky, who, to mymind, is the most brilliant of the new composers, has written three ballets,The Firebird,Petrouchka, andThe Sacrifice to the Spring, and an opera,The Nightingale. Not a note, so far as I am aware, of these most interesting scores has been heard in New York, although Paris and London are thoroughly familiar with them. Schoenberg is as yet barely a ghoulish name in this country, to be whispered shudderingly until some daring soul makes the Austrian composer a conventional thing of the past. The Kneisels have at last taken him up, if that means anything, and, of course, Ornstein has played him. The Flonzaleys have played a quartet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed the five orchestral pieces. Chicago, too, has heard these. This is as far as we have gone with Schoenberg. There is really no use of referring to so bad a performance as the Russian Symphony Orchestra gave of Scriabine’sPrometheus. We hear too much Strauss now. There was a time when we did not hear enough. The academic Reger was feared like the plague for whole years. Now that his message means as little as possible, he jumps from programme to programme.
Symphony concerts, then, as they exist in America—and to a lesser degree elsewhere—are museums, where one may inspect bits of old musical armor, tunes inSèvres, tinkling lace shawls from Brussels, or harmonious bowls of the Ming period. The audiences are shameless so-called music-lovers who dawdle through endless repetitions of theEuryantheoverture, and who whisper exquisite trifles to one another about the delights of an audition of a Mozart symphony. Really there is nothing so smug, so snobbish, to be found in the world as the audience of a symphony society, unless it be a string-quartet audience. Beside these groups you find opera-goers are simple human beings. Both the organization and its supporters, then, we discover, are simply corrupted by cob-webs. They are things of the past that persist in going on. A live orchestra, built on living principles, which played new music if it played at all, would serve not only to develop new composers, but also new ideas. One can talk intelligently and even quarrel with one’s neighbor about a new Strawinsky work. At best, if one is a critic, one can write a column about how Gustav Mahler doubled the brasses in a Beethoven symphony andthus became the most arrant of knaves, or, if one is not a critic, one may say, “I like Mr. Stransky so much when he conducts Liszt!” To be sure, the snobs and the smug would be bewildered by the novelties. Perhaps they wouldn’t even go to the concerts, although that seems unbelievable. But there would be new audiences. At a recent concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in New York, Dr. Muck dared to place three unfamiliar works on the programme. (God knows this was an unusual proceeding.) Not one of these was formidable; not one of them new, except to those comfortable ladies and gentlemen who have sat through concerts devoted to Beethoven and Bach so long that they should know the tunes by heart. Yet the protests were many and loud. I think Dr. Muck really stirred up an interest in music by this procedure.
But if our symphony societies are dead, what of our string quartets? Chamber music! Its title explains it. It is music intended to be played at home ...music intended to be played, not to be listened to, except, perhaps, by some doting members of the performers’ families. Suppose you play the violin and you can find another violinist,and a ’cellist, and a violist, you invite them all to come to your house some night and you take down Schubert’s quartets, or Tschaikowsky’s, and entertain yourselves. Father, reading his paper, listens listlessly.... Sister Mary doesn’t object to giving her ear occasionally, but there is no concerted attention devoted to you. Nor should there be. People do not, as a rule, attempt to play piano duets in public. Why they should play string quartets I do not know. Yet you will find the cult of the string quartet is almost a mystic body. There is a great deal said about this being the “highest and noblest” form of music (arbitrary art-music), and a great many people are impressed with the idea that to know the string quartets of the masters in itself constitutes a liberal education. To know how to play them does, in fact, make for a certain education, but to listen to them—well, that is a different matter. The string quartet plays in the very dustiest part of the museum in which “modern” concerts are given. Its audiences are fanatics who have gone mad over an old religion, and while they will listen on occasion to trios, sextets, and piano quintets, their idea of the limitations of the possible combinationsof instruments is circumscribed.... To my mind, there seems to be no good reason why we should not have a duet between child’s voice and flute; two guitars and two mandolins make very pretty music.
I really do not know whether it is the concert-going public which makes snobs of the critics, or the critics who make snobs of the public. It is certain that the music critics are loftier in their self-created mountain strongholds than almost any body of people since the worthy mastersingers. They are the cataloguers of the museum, and as each set of performers takes out an old doll and makes its arms and legs wobble, and teases it to cry “Mama,” they express their delight or their displeasure over the results. If a new doll, by any chance, is brought in, it is quickly sent to the basement by these judges, unless it imitates not only in appearance, but in gesture as well, some old doll. Montemezzi is a doll who did not win the disapproval of the critics because they had been hearingL’Amore dei tre Reor something like it all their lives.... Zandonai, on the other hand.... New dolls are not wanted in a museum which contains the works of Beethoven, Bach, andBrahms. Pratella’s name does not even begin with a B. But neither does Strauss’s, nor Debussy’s. After all, however, if one writes criticisms one must have a standard, I hear you objecting. Most critics do, mercifully enough for their readers, for if one’s standard is not to accept any innovations after a diminished seventh, it at least gives his readers an opportunity to be aware of what he means when he says that a work is discordant. When a seasoned examiner of musical criticism meets this word he understands that the critic means that the music under discussion is quite different from that of Weber and Puccini. There may be, on the other hand, very good reasons to suppose that to an unprejudiced ear, one not fed up on art-music, the new music may not be any more discordant than the hum of a factory, the roar of a city, or any of the familiar rhythmical sounds to which our ears are so accustomed that we accept them. The Hottentot and the Chinaman find real pleasure in what we call discords, and, as a result, they have achieved in their music complexities of rhythm which would be beyond the grasp of the ordinary composer of our art-music.... It is alone the critic’s point of view,well-defined, which makes him comprehensible when he disdains to be more scientific in his criticism.
There would seem to be a better way, unless the critic can describe his emotions as poignantly as Pater painted his impressions of theMonna Lisa. Why not a scientific description? For years columns and pages have been pouring over to us about the “discordant” Schoenberg, but nothing which actually gives you an idea of Schoenberg has yet appeared, at least not under my eyes. (I might except a few paragraphs in Huneker’s article.) One could give an idea of what the music really was like, at least to a musician. Or one could make a confession, such as I heard Alfred Hertz make after the first performance in London of Strawinsky’s very beautiful opera,The Nightingale, in which instruments are combined with such strange effect that it is almost as if the composer had discovered a new scale of tones: “I am considered a good musician. When I am conducting an orchestra I can detect a false note in the furthest bassoon, or the nearest flute, but in the second act ofThe NightingaleI could not name a single note.”
January, 1915.
January, 1915.