A Deeper Music
Margaret C. Anderson
Apiano, alone on a stage; shadowed light around and above it; ivory and ebony moving out of the shadow; and the silence that hangs there before the musician plays. There is nothing like it in the world,—nothing more wonderful....
There are “revolutions” going on in all the arts. The revolution in poetry is coming in for a lot of discussion, so that even the layman is conscious of it. His feeling about it is that some effeminate beings called Imagists are trying to emasculate the noble art of poetry. But the thing is happening right under his nose and he is careful to keep posted, in order to be able to defend his favorite theory. As for the stage, he knows that Gordon Craig and Rhinehart have been using screens instead of marble pillars painted against red velvet curtains. In painting he knows all about the cubists and futurists; he even knows that the donkey’s tail story was something of a joke. In sculpture he has heard of an unreasonable reaction from Rodin, and he has probably seen Brzeska’s head of Ezra Pound. In the ballet he has a rather clear idea of why the old classical form wouldn’t serve; perhaps because the Russians have demonstrated so clearly what it was they could do with the new form. In opera he thinks very little is happening. He is right.
But the slowest revolution of all—and the most interesting—is that which is just beginning in the art of the piano. It is the slowest because it is not the public alone that is bound to the old form. The masters themselves have not visioned toward a need that would make a new form inevitable. The need is—a deeper music. And it is the most interesting because the convention that has bound the piano,—virtuosity,—is a more worthy convention than that which has restricted any of the other arts.
There is a universe of the arts in the piano. But it is not a universe now. It is a stunt. The piano has been used for stunts for years and years and years. It will go on being used that way for years. Well, I am the last one to deprecate the art of these stunts. I think they are beautiful—some of them. I think they have their place. But they have served it too well. I love them more than I love all the opals and rubies and sapphires and emeralds and topaz and amethyst and pearl a jeweller can dip his fingers into and spread out for your dazzled senses. But I love poetry more than jewels. And I love music more than poetry. In the music of the piano you get the best illustration that music is a thing beginning and ending in itself, a thing not of story or image but of sound, a thing that must be understood quite simply in its own terms,—as Hiram Kelly Moderwell puts it, a thingthat must be heard and not seen. And in the revolution that is beginning you get this first pure principle combined with another; that the music of the piano must reach to the passion of life. This is quite different from saying that music must be a dramatization of human life. It is merely saying that ballet dancing could never have produced an Isadora Duncan.
I imagine that Harold Bauer must have said something of this sort to himself. He has certainly said it on the piano. His attitude toward the piano has this sort of prophecy in it. It is a matter of the beauty of sound. The methods of approach of all the “masters” have been the same. They have imposed something upon the piano. But Bauer has approached the handling of the piano as Debussy approached composition—or Schönberg.
When Schönberg wrote that “the alleged tones believed to be foreign to harmony do not exist; they are merely tones foreign to our accepted harmonic system”, and that “tonality is not a hard and fast compulsion directing the course of music but a concept which makes it possible for us to give our ideas the requisite aspect of compactness”, he was saying practically what Bauer has suggested about the touching of the piano: that virtuosity is only a means to an end, that the springs of the art have been drying up, and that until the musician canhearbetter he is not worthy of the sounds the piano has to give him. You can’t play César Franck with the same hands you use for Liszt. You must change your hands into different “feelers”. The piano will give you the quality of almost every instrument. It is as though Bauer had said: “They call this an instrument of percussion. They have laid down its limitation. But I doubt very much whether it will stay within that limitation. I suspect it does not stop there but goes on into a realm where sound is of infinite development.” That is why you hear an organ when he plays César Franck; that is why you realize how the Imagists have worked when he plays Debussy; that is why you get a sense of painting in all his music. Bauer puts on the sound like paint. He knows, as Romain Rolland has said, that every art tends to become a universe in itself; that music becomes painting and poetry, that painting becomes music, etc. And Bauer is not a genius. He has merely suggested what will happen to the piano, and paved the way for an openness of mind about it. He has made a good many people gossip of how his scales won’t compare with those of the other great ones; but he has made a good many more suspect that there has been something lacking in the ultimatums of the piano athletes. He has done many simple and dynamic things to bring the piano into its own.
But the full achievement of this will go beyond what has been heard yet anywhere; and the man who does it will be scorned as the greatest fool or madman of his time before it is fully understood. It doesn’t matter. The thing will happen—I hardly know how. I hardly even know words with which to tell what it will be like. It can only be told on the piano.
In hisSpiritual AdventuresArthur Symons has a story of a musician who says more true things about the piano than I have ever found anywhereelse. One of them is this: “Most modern music is a beggar for pity. The musician tries to show us how he has suffered and how hopeless he is. He sets his toothache and his heartache to music, putting those sufferings into the music without remembering that sounds have their own agonies which alone they can express in a perfect manner.” This is where the “lions and panthers of the piano” have failed most: they have not loved the sounds enough. They have not allowed each sound its full life. This is the real reason why the piano has stopped short of itself. They might almost as well have played bells. You can strike bells which will bring out any number of tunes, loud or soft, with every possible variety of phrasing.But your interest will be in the tune rather than in the sound.You can’t limit the piano to the tunes that can be played upon it. You don’t treat a violin that way, nor an organ. And of course you can register a piano almost as fully as an organ with the “stops” that are in the ends of your fingers. How fascinating it is, and how wonderful!
But most piano recitals are like recitations—or some sort of performance on a school platform. Their beauty ends with the beauty of style, phrasing, finish, tone, taste. It is diction rather than music. It is science. Busoni is not a prophet; he is an orchestra. Hofmann loves style more than he does sound. Godowsky loves patterns more than sound. Gabrilowitsch loves delicate sounds intensely, but has no feeling for the sounds of great chords. Zeisler loves rhythm more than sound. And so on. Paderewski loves the piano. He is genius, pure and simple—though of course there is nothing less pure or simple. He may do what he likes—break sounds into bits, crack them like nuts. It doesn’t matter. He never fails to communicate a mood to the instrument—the mood of his personal equation. And that is art. “Przybyszewski playing Chopin”—that would also be art. What have the excellent piano concerts you hear to do with art, with inspiration? Piano playing is certainly something to be surpassed. Music is the thing! And that means ecstasy, madness, divinity,—the beauty upon which all the ends of the world are come. The design of sound.... Each sound that comes out of the piano is something alive....
And now for the interesting part.
When I talk of the “new music”—which will be different from Debussy and Schönberg and all the rest of them—I am not talking of how far beyond the limits of known harmony, or the anarchy which disregards any harmonic system, we shall go. Undoubtedly, as far as all that is concerned, “some day some one will dig down to the roots and turn up music as it is before it is tamed to the scale.” This seems to me a settled fact. But I am much more interested in the piano itself and the deliverer who is to set it free from the lie which has grown up around it and make it vibrate to a truer color. It is all in the plane of vibration, I believe. It will come about in three ways: through the mechanical development of the piano, through a new type of music, and chiefly through the new type of pianist.
You will have your Mason and Hamlin—(this is not advertising; it is merely a conviction)—you will have that great dark-winged-victory standing alone on a stage; you will care a great deal about the color of the light around and above it—the tones of the walls within which your beautiful sounds are to live; you will touch that ivory and ebony—oh, there are no words! You willseethose sounds against the color....
You may write a program for your audience—something like this:
I believe the right technical approach is simply a differentare the most beautiful there are anywhere in the world—more beautiful than the wind in trees or the moan in the sea or the silence that is heard on deserts;I believe that these sounds live only by a certain magic of invocation. There are no rules for them—unless perhaps you want to read Bergson.I believe the right technical approach is simply a different kind of friendship—or love affair—with each sound.I believe that tone goes way beyond the range between pianissimo and fortissimo, between legato and staccato, etc. Tone is radiance, eagerness, light, darkness, devastation, something that melts, something that cries and burns, something that shatters.I do not believe in playing “programs”—ending with a blaze of Liszt. I couldn’t play theCampanellato save my life, but I don’t see that it matters.I do not believe in “program” music—beginning with Bach (now that the public has learned to applaud him) and ending with Liszt. I couldn’t play theCampenellato save my life, but I don’t see that it matters.I do not believe in nature music—babbling brooks and warbling birds. I believe in nature mood, just as I do in the mood of all great phenomena.The music I have made will be sometimes merely the curve of a mood—like the curve of line in Watts’sOrpheus and Eurydice; or merely the design of a color or a scent. But always it will keep close to two fundamentals: that “hard gemlike flame” and the rhythm of sex.
I believe the right technical approach is simply a differentare the most beautiful there are anywhere in the world—more beautiful than the wind in trees or the moan in the sea or the silence that is heard on deserts;
I believe that these sounds live only by a certain magic of invocation. There are no rules for them—unless perhaps you want to read Bergson.
I believe the right technical approach is simply a different kind of friendship—or love affair—with each sound.
I believe that tone goes way beyond the range between pianissimo and fortissimo, between legato and staccato, etc. Tone is radiance, eagerness, light, darkness, devastation, something that melts, something that cries and burns, something that shatters.
I do not believe in playing “programs”—ending with a blaze of Liszt. I couldn’t play theCampanellato save my life, but I don’t see that it matters.
I do not believe in “program” music—beginning with Bach (now that the public has learned to applaud him) and ending with Liszt. I couldn’t play theCampenellato save my life, but I don’t see that it matters.
I do not believe in nature music—babbling brooks and warbling birds. I believe in nature mood, just as I do in the mood of all great phenomena.
The music I have made will be sometimes merely the curve of a mood—like the curve of line in Watts’sOrpheus and Eurydice; or merely the design of a color or a scent. But always it will keep close to two fundamentals: that “hard gemlike flame” and the rhythm of sex.
All this will come under the classification of those things which are so worth knowing that they can never be taught. It will belong to that individual who can say the new word—his own word. It will make the piano something we have scarcely dreamed of. It will make up an art that has nothing to do with the four walls of a room. It could not be set to “Questions and Answers” inThe Ladies’ Home Journal. It will have little to do with accomplishment, but everything to do with that which is of all things the highest manifestation of life.