It was, then, of the highest importance that all knowledge that was to be preserved be cast in metrical form. A wandering minstrel was able to tell one country about the battles of another country by making a song about them. The nature of the Gods and the religious duties of men could be preserved for succeeding centuries because Homer made a poem out of them. And so poetry was a thing of incalculable value.
In these practical matters, of course, the music was not of the same importance as the words. We do not know, in fact, to what extent music entered into the reciting of the old poems. But it has been conjectured that even the longest poems, like the Iliad, were usually intoned and rose into something like a set melody in the more impassioned parts. Certainly the shorter poems always tended to find a tune for themselves. It is even quite likely that the bards invented words and tune at the same time. The long Robin Hood poems of England were usually sung and not spoken and we possess some of the curious tunes with which they were traditionally associated. Among the earlier minstrels much of the music was improvised in the course of the recitation, though as the poems became old and widely spread it is likely that they were associated with precise melodies or melodic motives. On the whole, it seems that little of the metrical literature antedating the art of writing was without music of one sort oranother. All early references, however, tend to regard the tune and the words as one and the same thing. It seems to some, therefore, since melody is not mentioned by itself, that music was of slight importance. But the truth seems rather to be that the melody was inseparable from the words and not to be thought of apart from them. And the music seems to have been of the highest importance in giving dignity and seriousness to the poem.
What the music of the earliest poems was like we have no exact means of guessing. The writing of musical notes is of comparatively late invention and there was no way to preserve the old tunes through the changing centuries. When the traditional poems were committed to writing the sacred marriage of verse and music usually ended in a divorce. We have, however, a Finnish melody of great age, sung to an epic fragment, which might be taken as typical. It consists of few notes (which can safely be said of nearly all primitive tunes), but the stanza is long and the winding melodic line is highly expressive. But in general we cannot hope to know the earliest melodies of the European nations. We can fumble our way back about a thousand years and then we are met by the blackness of mystery.
But we know that the songs were there and that they gave to little lives the opportunity of being big. We find it hard to realize how important they were, now that telegraph wires have connected all parts of the world, when a message can be sent from San Francisco to Moscow and back in a day, when all that has happened the world over (and much besides) is spread out before us on paper at our breakfast tables the next morning, when all knowledge is classified and published and can be found in any good public library. Imagine yourself living in a village or working on a farm without these things. It is a day’s walk to thenext village. The next country lies beyond the mountains and there are no passes over, and besides there would be no way of living if you left your work, unless you went as a pilgrim. Every year a few young men wander away seeking their fortunes and never come back. Every year a few men come seeking their fortunes and stay. One or two men have wandered the world and come back home, telling wonderful incoherent tales of what happens beyond the mountains. But this is all the news you get beyond the gossip of your town and the country around—except that once in a while comes a wandering minstrel or juggler with tricks and songs. He will tell you the political fortunes of the next kingdom and whether its king is likely to go to war with your king and whether you will thus be forced to serve in the army. He will tell you the gossip and scandal of the courts. He will tell you the customs of other people and will give you practical hints that may save you trouble in your work. And, best of all, he will tell you new stories to vary the monotony of the village gossip. So you will spend a wonderful afternoon listening to him in the village square, and when he is gone you will have something to think and talk about for weeks to come.
Thus the wandering singers served as newspapers. And their best songs were remembered and repeated (and improved upon) to serve as history from that time on. But history might also be made in another way. The skalds of the northern races accompanied their chiefs on their battles in order to sing of them afterwards. But they were there as historians, not merely as poets. ‘Ye shall be here that ye may see with your own eyes what is achieved this day,’ King Olaf is recorded to have told his skalds on the eve of the battle of Stiklastad (1030), ‘and have no occasion, when ye shall afterward celebrate these actions in song, to depend on the reports of others.’ The skalds were there,that is, as true witnesses of the events, as the specialized repositories of historical information. We cannot suppose that their reports were altogether truthful. They were doubtless expected to ‘forget’ many things that might seem inglorious. But their songs often passed to the people. And, if the king or chief had made a bad record with them, be sure the songs became changed in people’s mouths to show him in his true character. And very often the people, or their own singers, made the narrative songs themselves, dealing out praise or blame by their own justice without fear or favor.
In religion song was a matter of the highest importance, as it has always been. A prophet might reveal the will of the gods, but, unless he were a poet or had a poet to help him, he could not make people remember it. And so in all primitive races the priests were poets and musicians. By the beauty and impressiveness of their songs they proved their right to interpret the divine will. And only in poems could they preserve their doctrine for their successors. But in time the priests generally had to give up their prestige to those who were first of all poets and singers. The gods of Greece were interpreted and made known to the people by the poets. The Teutonic and Norse gods were made known in the epics and sagas. No one else spoke to the people with the same religious conviction as the poet. And so the poets have always, until the most recent times, partaken of a certain religious sanctity. Dante and Milton served as interpreters of religion to their fellow creatures—as beings set apart ‘to justify the ways of God to men.’
Thus song, then, was the chief agent of civilization to primitive man. All that is supplied in our lives by railroads, telegraph lines, telephones, newspapers,books, and libraries was supplied to primitive peoples by song. But this still represents only half the value of song. If it gave to primitive men all the practical service which specialized inventions are rendering to us, it also gave them the romance and beauty which we have largely lost from our lives. Every simple, primitive person, we have said, sings—either his own song or his neighbor’s. We have in great abundance the records of what their songs were about. The subjects cover nearly the whole range capable of artistic treatment, but chiefly the great human experiences—love, pity, nature, death, the supernatural.
Slowly, after much imitating and experimenting, men learned to sing their feelings. This achievement was so important that there is hardly another one to be compared with it. For the growth of civilization has been simply the growth in men of consciousness—consciousness of themselves and their surroundings. And every new song that men were able to make for themselves marked a new step in consciousness. To us it seems quite obvious that a deer, for instance, has four legs. But the fact is obvious only as everything else is obvious when it is really looked at. The great difficulty is to get people tolookat things. And it was probably a real (and most important) discovery when the primitive huntsman realized that the deer he had been hunting had four legs, and not three or five. He simply hadn’t thought about the matter before. He hadn’t observed clearly. Now he had added one more fact about life to his mental treasure house. He had become one more degree clearly conscious.
Now, art has been the chief agent of this advancing consciousness through the centuries. Our huntsman perhaps never thought about the number of the deer’s legs until he tried to draw the deer with a bone knife on the wall of his cave. But when he had tocreatethe deer in a work of art then hehadto come to clearconsciousness about the matter. And the same is true of every song that simple people have made. It necessitated true observation. It forced its author tosee. It may seem childishly obvious to say in a song that the bluebells are blue, but most people pay little attention to the question. It is something to have thought the fact worth mentioning.
But it was much more. It was not only an increase in consciousness. It was an increase in experience. By singing over his little song about the bluebell the peasant enjoyed the bluebell a second time in his imagination. It is nothing against the song that the blueness of the bluebell is obvious. Most of the beautiful things in life are obvious but nevertheless go unrecognized. The important thing about the song is that somebody enjoyed the blueness of the bluebell so much that he had to sing about it.
The great use of these personal songs to people was that it helped them to feel at home in the world. ‘The first poet of human things,’ says the Countess Martinengo-Cæsaresco, ‘was perhaps one who stood in the presence of death. In the twilight that went before civilization the loves of men were prosaic and intellectual unrest was remote, but there was already Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.’ Death as a mystery was a horror too great to be borne. But death made into a song could be looked at and in some degree known. The awful sense of helplessness as people stood beside a fresh grave was alleviated by their singing of their grief. When the mystery had become incarnated in a work of art they could face it and know who their enemy was.
Every man who feels emotions craves expression of them. The ability to express is perhaps what separates man from the animals. The man who cannot achieve the expression of what he feels sinks back into a spiritualnumbness in which joy and sorrow are of less importance. But the man who is able to see the things that are within him and about him—to see them clearly enough to express them in songs—is able to take his place in life and go on to more consciousness and more power.
Something like this is the service songs have performed to men’s souls. But, most of all, of course, songs have taught men how to love. As men began to realize that love must be more than a mere blind craving they had to answer the question: ‘How much do I love her? How do I love her?’ And the question had to be answered in some kind of concrete terms. One old French lover says in his song that if King Henry gave to him the town of Paris on condition that he give up the love of his sweetheart, he would reply to Henry the King: ‘Take back your town of Paris; I love my sweetheart more, heigh-ho, I love my sweetheart more.’ And when we read the fine straightforward old French in which the song is sung we know that he meant it. It is evident that the whole estate of love and marriage has risen to a vastly higher level when the lover, instead of saying, ‘I want my sweetheart,’ can sing, ‘I want my sweetheart more than I want the town of Paris.’ So songs gave to life definite meanings and values.
In the beginning, as we have said, it is probable that everybody made songs for himself. Helen Vacaresco noted a long song improvised by a Roumanian peasant woman who was going mad; the woman was suffering under a great sorrow and was trying to express it. Being simple and without knowledge or fear of artistic forms and laws, she was able to express it. And each day she wandered in the fields singing the song she had composed, changing it little by little. It was notmade for the sake of making a song, but for the sake of expressing her sorrow. It was, of course, only half a song and a half a mechanical repetition of her troubles. But it had its beauty of word and something like a set melody; it was an emotion objectified, put into a work of art where it could be looked at and known.
Here was song at its very earliest beginning. It was spontaneous, it was personal, it was utterly sincere. And, because it sought some objective form, it was a primitive work of art. We may imagine the earliest songs starting in just this way. Perhaps this Roumanian peasant woman had her counterpart thousands of years ago. Her song, or part of it, was heard and imitated by others who felt the same sorrow. It was changed in passing from mouth to mouth. Needless words were dropped, weak expressions were strengthened. As men became able to look more clearly at their trouble the essential things in the song were emphasized or put in a more emphatic position. Everything was dropped from it that did not express the very heart of the emotion. The lines perhaps became more rhythmical; the verses began to balance and contrast with each other; the metaphors became more brilliant or more precise. Soon all members of the tribe knew it, and when the young men wandered away to other lands they took the song with them.
At the same time a similar perfecting process was going on in the music. The original melody was perhaps little more than a chant of two or three notes, the tune rising when the emotional pitch was raised and dropping when the movement became more calm. The tune was at first not thought of as a thing in itself. But gradually people became conscious of the two or three notes in their relation and succession. And they began to make them more varied, to express the changes of emotion more accurately. The melody became divided into stanzas and lines corresponding withthe words and showed in itself where the thought came to a partial stop and where it began again. Then people began to notice peculiar figures which they had unconsciously put into the melody. They made use of these, balancing or contrasting them to add beauty to the tune. And gradually the melody came to have beauty and meaning of its own.
This series of changes perhaps occupied centuries, for the artistic power of primitive men advances very slowly. The singers had not yet thought of putting this song in rhythm; and it was yet many centuries before they would feel anything like a musical scale. Rhythm had probably developed among people as a thing in itself, not directly connected with musical tones. Rhythmic movement is common to all men—in walking, in running, and in the beating of the heart. Dancing must have arisen spontaneously from an excess of emotion. Such dancing was perhaps accompanied by the clapping of hands, the beating of sticks, or the pounding of some primitive drum. Then with the invention of some primitive musical instrument the tribal musician began to play a simple dance tune in rhythm, a tune of two notes, at first an aimless shifting from one note to another, and later an organized melody with tonal figures and balances and contrasts.
It is probable that these two elements—rhythm and melody—were developed separately and were at first regarded as separate arts. At least it seems certain that singing was at first without rhythm. It must have been a wonderful day when somebody thought of combining the two—of singing the old song with metre and accents. But this, too, must have developed very slowly, being at first no more than an accenting of each alternative note. At the same time the song had probably been divided into line divisions. The singer then probably developed his rhythm from both ends, so to speak, building a more complex series of accents fromthe single group of two notes, and at the same time subdividing the line into sections. After several more centuries, perhaps, the tribe possessed a song that was fairly metrical and regular.
All this time the notion of a scale—a set succession of notes from which the notes of the tune were to be chosen—was entirely lacking. It came comparatively late in musical development, though it is the first incident in musicalhistory. At first each melody was its own scale. Then, as people began to observe similarities in the tone relations between several melodies, they began to have a conception of the regular succession of tones which was common to all of them. Such a succession, a mode or primitive scale, was of but three or four notes. By arranging the semi-tones several new scales could be formed. And by here and there adding a note above or below the scales could be enlarged.
With the enlargement of the scales melodies became enlarged in range. More opportunities arose for the balancing and contrasting of melodic devices. The tune became more complex, more regular, and more beautiful.
It was now several centuries since the song had first come into existence. Since that time it had undergone perhaps a dozen transformations, each so unlike the other that nobody would have suspected they had any relation. But they were different forms of one and the same song. For songs have ancestors and descendants just as men do. Our song may have had a numerous progeny. As it passed from one province to another certain phrases of the melody lingered in people’s minds and found their way into other songs. Perhaps a line or two of its words became common property and were used as the refrain for a new song. Certainly as people made other songs they perforce made them somewhat in the image of the great ancestor.
Thus for centuries—ten, twenty, or thirty, likely as not—the song was growing and changing, or at least giving birth to children before dying by the wayside. And folk-songs are still alive, growing and changing. It seems possible that the years of their natural life may be numbered, for it is becoming harder every year for them to live in their new environment. But they are still in the land of the living and may continue for centuries to come, and if so they are bound to continue to grow and change. Thirty centuries of growth have not taken place that songs may stop growing right here. Perhaps the songs of to-day may seem as crude to people five hundred years hence as the songs of five hundred years ago seem to us now.
We must always remember that songs of every kind are primarily composed in the spirit of this typical folk-song. Even the most learned composer is spiritually a descendant of the crazy Roumanian peasant woman, and his songs, if they are real songs at all, are of the same spontaneous kind as hers. However much he may be occupied with conscious scholastic principles, if his music does not somehow sing in this natural, artless vein it is but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The impulse to song is the soul of all true songs the world over.
What this impulse is has occupied the minds of theorists for many a year. Their explanations are perhaps not important, since whatever their conclusions we still posses the wonderful song literature which is at our disposal. But their theories are at least interesting, if only to prove that song, like love, is one of those human things that can never be utterly explained.
Primitive people almost invariably attribute musicto divine agency. We know the story of Orpheus, who moved the beasts and even the rocks and trees to tears by his sweet singing. We know also the story of the competition of Apollo the harp player and Marsyas the flute player. The Chinese say that they obtained their musical scale from a miraculous bird. The legend is interesting as showing how people tend to invent a supernatural explanation for the artificial laws which are felt to need some sort of superstitious bolstering up. For it is recorded in Chinese history that this scale has several times been changed by edict of the emperor, who considers an orthodox scale a very important thing to insist upon and wishes to have his word accepted as divine law. The Japanese tradition is that the sun-goddess once retired into a cave and the gods devised music to lure her forth once more. The story suggests the practice of certain primitive tribes who sing and dance during a solar eclipse, either to scare away the evil spirits or to beg the sun-god back into their midst. The Nahua Indians of North America say that the god Tezcatlipoca sent for music from the sun and made a bridge of whales and turtles by which to convey it to the earth. The Abyssinians have a tale to the effect that Yared transmitted music to men, the holy spirit having appeared to him in the form of a pigeon. But in the story of the Javans there seems to be a kernel of scientific truth. They say that the earliest music was suggested to them by the wind whistling through a bamboo tube which had been left hanging on a tree.
The theories of the earlier musical philosophers of the nineteenth century were not so unlike these legends as they seemed at the time. These men had a limited historical outlook and were inclined to discredit, when they did not ignore, the music preceding that of Palestrina, just as the historians of painting before Ruskin’s time tended to regard all Italian painting beforeRaphael as mere experimental bungling. To these earlier philosophers music was a thingdiscoveredrather than a thingevolved. In their view music had always existed in a sort of secret treasure house instituted by a beneficent creator for the edification of men. All melodies and harmonies were piled in there awaiting the explorations of musicians. The explorations were undertaken by the ‘inspired’ artists, those who had been endowed with finer ears and more daring imaginations. All musical history was a story of the development of music from its imperfect state among the primitives to its perfect state with Beethoven. This description may be exaggerated, but it is certain that the earlier theorists considered music as a self-existent thing, with its own laws and its own principles of beauty—laws and principles which must be discovered by the elect among artists instead of being evolved by the peoples. As to the impulse to song and to artistic creation in general they laid it to that mysterious thing, ‘inspiration.’
Schopenhauer’s theory has a modern ring and is excellent poetry even though it can hardly rank as science. He says that while the other arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—represent the Idea, which is the reflection of the Will, music represents the Will itself. It is pure energy, the nearest thing that exists among men to the essence of reality.
With Darwin all this kind of speculation changed and the theories of musical origins became more a matter of biology than of music. Darwin traced the impulse to song to the love-making of animals and primitive man. He showed how in Nature beauty is continually being made the adjunct and servant of love—how the bird sings or the insect dances to attract its mate. Many theorists have sought to explain the whole of art as originating in the sexual impulse. But in this theory, as in all, there are data on both sides of thequestion and the explanation is interesting rather than valuable.
Herbert Spencer pursues the same biological line. But he traces the impulse to song from the surplus of energy in living things. Nature, as we know, is prodigal, producing thousands of eggs or seeds where she expects only scores of insects or plants to grow. And so she gives to each living thing more energy than is needed to keep it alive and healthy—or at least more energy than is neededall the time. With this surplus of energy something must be done. And that something among men is art. When a wild rose-bush is put in rich soil it grows a double rose and a larger one. And so, when a man has a little more than enough for his material needs, he attempts to decorate and beautify his surroundings. To Spencer the typical example of nascent art is the child who dances out of pure joy of life. But others object to this, saying that this dancing of the child (and all similarly spontaneous art) is lacking in the very quality which makes art—namely, discipline and control. It is selection and control, they say, which makes any work of art more than a mere daub of color or conglomeration of sounds.
Certainly the biological theories have not satisfactorily explained the second great element in artistic creation—the impulse to refinement. We have seen that once our typical folk-song was invented by the Roumanian peasant woman it could not stay as it was, but had to take new forms, changing continually, and, as we see it, usually for the better. What is it that makes men dissatisfied with a crude, formless melody and desirous of making it regular and organic? Perhaps it is no more than the impulse to play which children show when they arrange pebbles in new and strange shapes on the sand or savages when they daub their faces with new colors of war-paint. Again the surplus of energy? Perhaps. Perhaps when peoplehave become familiar with their primitive melody they notice a peculiar turn of the phrase and take pleasure in seeing what they candowith it in the way of repeating it and inventing contrasting phrases. At any rate, there it is, this impulse to refinement, more mystery for the theorist and more entertainment for the music lover.
On the whole, these theories probably err in trying to simplify the case too much. More likely music has not one simplecause, but many interactingcauses. Like every individual man whose ancestors are a multitude, song must be the result of many, many causes.
We have been speaking chiefly of the folk-song, the fountain of all vocal music. But the art-song, that is, the song for a solo voice with instrumental accompaniment, which is quantitively but a small part of vocal music, is the special study of this book. For convenience we date the beginning of this art-song from Schubert, regarding the song writers who preceded him as mere experimenters. Accordingly, at the time of the writing of this book the art-song, one of the four or five great divisions of modern music, is hardly a century old.
It is, of course, a somewhat arbitrary division that separates the art-song from song as a whole. The arbitrary division is justified by its convenience. Schubert may fairly be said to have infused a new spirit into song writing and most of the songs written by established composers since his time have been written in his spirit. So we find an extensive and remarkably homogeneous song literature, the product of the last hundred years, which in its form and intent separates itself from the folk-song. The songs on the boundary line are few. The songs before Schubertwhich give any evidence of this recent spirit are hardly to be found at all. It is as though a new god had descended from the skies and taught a new kind of art to his creatures.
What is this distinction we draw between the folk-song and the art-song? The superficial elements of contrast are apt to be misleading, for, while most folk-songs are simple, many art-songs are simple, too; and, while many art-songs are irregular and peculiar, their irregularities are rarely so great as are to be found in the earlier folk-songs. The distinction must be sought in the spirit of the songs. It becomes more eloquent the more we study the two sorts. It forces us continually to seek further back for the true character of each, so that at last it seems as though we needed two different souls for the singing of them. The folk-song speaks for man in the mass; the art-song speaks for man the individual. For the folk-song, let us always remember, was composed not by an individual, but by a mass, each member of which may have contributed one or more of its beauties. If it had sung of a joy or sorrow which belonged exclusively to its original singer, it would have held no interest for other people and would have died with its composer. Those folk-songs were, of course, most popular which spoke for the interests and emotions of the greatest number of men. We can justly say that those folk-songs are greatest which sing of the things that are common to all men in such a way that they can be understood by all men. But in the composition of the art-song precisely the opposite influences are dominant. The composer, if he is to make his mark in the art world, must not write exactly like other composers, but must distinguish his work in some way. He must call attention to himself or his work by writing in a style that is not quite like anybody else’s. Fashionable or critical audiences will pay little attention to the man who seems merelyto be repeating what a greater man has written before him; these audiences continually crave a novelty or a sensation. Everything forces the conscious composer in these days to be as personal as possible. His song then expresses the feelings of one individual in one particular style.
It has always been a nice question of taste whether one prefers to observe the type or the individual. Would you have your love song one that could be sung by every lover, high or low, or one that would ring true for you alone? If you are quite honest you will probably have to admit that you will swing from one to the other from time to time. At times it will seem vulgar that you should be rejoicing in precisely the same sentiments as those which are sending the Italian bootblack into a seventh heaven; your delicacy, your sense of dignity will demand that your love be your own, like no one else’s on earth. And, again, the precious selfishness of cultivating your own soul with such conscious care when it is such a tiny part of humanity—such a reaction will make you praise heaven that you and the bootblack can sing the same love song and feel the same love.
However you feel about it the art-song has chosen to specialize on individuals. Not only on individual persons, but on particular feelings of those persons. The folk-song expresses the type emotion—love, sorrow, or patriotism; the art-song expresses some particular shade or nuance of these emotions. The Scotch folk-tune which we sing with Burns’s stirring words, ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ expresses magnificently the defiance of patriotic bravery. It might be the song of anybody facing odds in defense of his beliefs. Schubert’s song, ‘Courage,’ has exactly the same note of defiance, but, so to speak, only a particular section of the great general emotion. His defiance is that of a man broken down with sorrow and misfortune, who in one superb momentvows to conquer by pure force of will power—a vow which we know is impossible of fulfillment. The modern French composers are especially apt at catching a particular delicate phase of a mood or emotion and rendering it so that it would never be mistaken for another phase, however much the two resembled each other. Have you never caught yourself moodily looking at the last glow from a sunset and wondered whether you have ever had a moment just like that before—a moment which the slightest change in the things about you would have spoiled utterly? Such a moment it is the delight of the art-song to portray; it is almost unknown to the folk-song.
The folk-song, again, presents an emotion in its sum total; the art-song presents it in its component parts. With their capacity and zest for exactitude song composers have continually, since Schubert’s time, given more and more attention to accuracy of detail. In one of the earliest of Schubert’s songs, ‘Gretchen at the Spinning-wheel,’ the girl is musing of her lover while she is spinning. The whirr of the spinning-wheel is in the accompaniment and enframes the whole song. But when the girl sighs, ‘And, ah, his kiss!’ Schubert felt that she would surely not continue her mechanical spinning. So he makes the whirring stop in the accompaniment and in its place comes a lovely succession of chords—one would say like a blush. Now a folk-song would have paid no attention to such a detail. It would have caught and probably caught with wonderful accuracy the spirit of the whole song. But the variation of mood in the words would not have affected the music. It could not, because the folk-song, unpublished and disseminated among many untrained persons, must be easy to remember. It is accordingly most often cast in a regular stanza form and the same melody is repeated for each verse of the words, though the heroine change therein from the noon of joy to themidnight of sorrow. The great majority of art-songs, therefore, are not written in stanza form, but follow the words with specially adapted music from beginning to end. (This is the so-calleddurchkomponiertes Lied.) The form of the art-song tends to be free in the extreme, while that of the folk-song is usually strict and regular. In the art-song the tendency toward exactitude of delineation sometimes goes to extremes. The music tries to be just to each phrase, or even to each word, and the song as a whole is lost in the details. But in general the good art-song shows not only the emotion as a whole, by means of its formal or modal unity, but also the component parts of the emotion placed side by side. We might say that the art-song follows the impressionistic method of showing the component colors on the canvas and letting the eye blend them into the resultant, while the folk-song follows the older method of mixing the components on the palette and showing only the blended result to the eye.
The highest glory of the folk-song is to express what unites men. The highest glory of the art-song is to express what differentiates men. The folk-song includes; the art-song selects. The folk-song is general; the art-song precise. The folk-song tells of life as man found it; the art-song tells of life as man made it.
Nearly everything that is distinctive of the art-song involves conscious planning. However spontaneous and unrestrained aLiedersinger may appear on the concert platform, there is behind his or her interpretation a whole conscious network of selection and rejection. A good folk-song, as everyone has noticed, asks for no intellectual comprehension—it ‘sings itself.’ But an art-song rarely ‘sings itself.’ It must besung. And this is precisely one of the beauties of the art-song—the feeling that it has been achieved by art, that it is the working-out of somebody’s intention, that it has beenpersonallypropelled.
A good Lieder singer is like some weaver of a delicate design in silk. Every crossing is planned and the worker must not let a single thread slip through his fingers. Every detail of a song must be understood before it can be interpreted. This does not mean that the singer must have a ‘reason’—a logical argument in words—for everything done. Usually words and arguments about a song only befuddle the artistic sense. The song must beunderstoodin musical terms—by comparing each phrase with similar phrases in the song, by trying different tempos, different phrasings, different qualities of voice. Tounderstanda song in the musical sense is to know when you sing it that you could have sung it in ten or in fifty other specific ways, but that you chose to sing it exactly inthisway. It requires a great deal of attention to fix in your ear accurately all the little beauties and peculiarities of the melody, the distinctions contained in tiny variations of tempo, and so on. The facts are all obvious in the song, but they demand attention. So the process is exactly that of the primitive folk-singer who noticed, to his delight, that bluebells were blue and that the deer had four legs. And, like the folk-singer, when you have consciously noted a multitude of these obvious facts you feel more at home in the world—you have completed a step in your education.
If the singer is obliged carefully to select and reject, he is only doing what the composer did before him. For the song writer’s task is one that will test the soundness of his musicianship and his art. The song is short. It will probably be sung among a number of other short songs. It has every chance of being forgotten. The composer can waste no time. With little or no preluding he must strike a melodic phrase that in smallest compass is worth hearing and worth remembering.He has none of the opportunities of the symphonist or the opera writer. He cannot lead up to his chief theme with a long expressive orchestral crescendo. He cannot introduce it at the moment when his audience is keyed up and receptive over a tense emotional story. If the melody of the song is not worth the trouble, no amount of decoration can make it so. If one phrase out of four in the song is good and the rest mediocre, the song is as much a failure as though it had no single bar of beauty. When the composer has written his song, he has committed himself. He stands exposed to the universe without protection, without excuse. He has chosen the test with which genius is tested—to be great within narrow limits. If his music speaks to the heart it speaks in words of one syllable.
If the basic materials of a song are so simple, it is evident that the misplacing of a single note is a very serious error. The expressive phrase might have stood in a dozen slightly different forms. It was a delicate judgment and selection that chose exactly this one. The phrase, if it is to express something of importance, must suggest a great deal more than it can say. This is the problem of thelyric—the personal song of the emotions—whether in words or music. If a poet is to express the whole tenderness and fury of love in eight, twelve, or sixteen lines he must select just the right details that will suggest the whole epic of love that he did not write. The structure and the language may be simple in the extreme. ‘My luv’ is like a red, red rose,’ sings Burns in one of the most beautiful love lyrics ever written. The poem is only a succession of the simplest poetic figures, similes; impressive effects of rhyme and metre are not to be found. But every one of the similes is a masterpiece, suggesting in striking manner the variety and extravagance of the lover’s feelings. ‘My luv’ is like a melody that’s sweetly play’din tune,’ continues the poet. ‘As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, so deep in luv’ am I’—and from this point the imagery sweeps up and up with increasing majesty and frenzy—‘And I will luv’ thee still, my dear, till a’ the seas gang dry. Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun; Oh! I will luv’ thee still, my dear, while the sands o’ life shall run.’ We can imagine Milton building up a long and magnificent description, in a whole blank verse canto, of the rocks melting in the heat of the sun. But Burns dazzles our imagination by just mentioning the gorgeous picture and then pressing on to another.
The themes of a good song are like this. They picture the heart of an emotion that might be made the subject of an opera; they establish instantly a mood that might dominate a movement of a symphony. They picture one detail of the building and let it imply the whole vast edifice.
Schumann, in the middle section of his song,Widmung, has such a melody, one which leads us straight to the centre of a mood as profound as one can find in many symphonies:
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Du bust die Ruh’, du bist der Frieden etc.
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One can imagine Beethoven building a long, superb movement out of this theme; the ’cellos would take it over rich bass harmony, the counterpoint would grow deeper and more complex, a grand crescendo of many measures would lead to a climax with the brass; the whole body of violins would take up the theme in unison; it would be exchanged between the wood-winds and strings; and the movement would fade away on some magical effect with the theme in the high registers of the violins. The theme is abundantly worth such extended and serious treatment. Schumann uses it for two lines and then returns to his original motive. Ifhis purpose had been to get the greatest possible effect out of given materials, such a procedure would have been criminal wastefulness. But his purpose was to express the spirit of the words. So he used the theme as the expression demanded, not begrudging a motive which would have served him for a whole symphony movement. And, thanks to this restraint, he made a perfect song.
And the restraint which the composer showed in using themes in naked simplicity must be reflected in the delivery of the song by the singer. Conscious restraint is foreign to the spirit of the folk-song, excepting for the universal rule that every work of art must show some reserve power. But in the art-song, artificed as it is with conscious pains, reserve in the singer is a virtue in itself. Unless one feels that every detail of the delivery is firmly under control one has an uneasy sense that the singer may fly off the handle at any moment. And this feeling robs us of any sense we might have that the singer has a message to give.
Most concert-goers know only too well how little this principle is regarded among Lieder singers. Is there one singer out of ten who does not try to transcend his or her song? Is there one singer out of ten who would not rather have his or her hearers at the end of a piece exclaim: ‘A great singer!’ rather than ‘A great song!’ And to force their personalities to the foreground singers will abuse their songs from beginning to end. Often they do it intentionally, sincerely believing that this is the only kind of singing that is effective. But in a great number of cases, without doubt, it is done unconsciously, as the natural and only way of singing. A special coloring on one of the singer’s pet tones, a long pause on a high note, an exaggerated retard in a sentimental passage—these sins against taste are being constantly committed by singers whose only interest in songs is to advance their personalreputations. In a way they are not to be blamed, for competition is keen; a hundred fail where one succeeds, and that one succeeds usually only by forcing his personality on the public; and the public is inclined to beblasé, to demand picturesque personalities, and to grumble if a singer is ‘ordinary.’ Singers need intelligent audiences as much as audiences need intelligent singers.
But, whatever may be the lamentable state of actual conditions, a song, if well sung, is sung with intelligent restraint. The ideal singer will give a song as he believes it should be given, without concession to the prejudices of the audiences, content to let the work of art speak for itself and to allow people to forget the workman in their joy at the work.
And as soon as the demand for restraint is met, the singer discovers a new and kindred demand in the song, one which is quite as inherent in the art-type. This is the demand for style. Style, as an artist uses it, is a ticklish thing, one which cannot quite be put into words. But every working artist feels it as a value. For, if the singer is to pick and choose (as the composer picked and chose previously) in the singing of a song, he must do so according to some principle. This principle, if it be genuine and not arbitrary, will be the style of the song. It will make the hearer feel that the interpretative details were not only chosen carefully, but were chosen well. It is that subtle thing that seems to make the song ‘hang together.’
Style, in short, is one more of the typical characteristics of the good art-song. The style of a song is unique. No two songs, thoroughly well sung, have exactly the same style. The style is developed out of the music itself; it is implied in the notes as they rest on the printed page; it has awaited the discerning eye of the interpretive artist. And so when a song has been thoroughly understood and ‘lived in’ by the singer, it will always have a personality or style of its own which will hover above the song and embrace every note. An art-song which on hearing does not reveal a unique style is either a bad song or a good song badly sung.