Chapter VTHE MUSICAL TEMPERAMENT
What makes a musician temperamental? Tell a musician he is temperamental, and he will take offense. Yet perhaps the thing in his personality of which he is most proud is the possession of a musical temperament. This characteristic inconsistency has a basis in psychological fact; namely, that the exhibition of artistic temperament frequently leads to attitudes and actions which the rest of the world may criticize and view with amusement; but, on the other hand, the finest expressions of musicianship would perhaps be impossible without the possession of an artistic temperament.
Many persons who pass as musicians are neither temperamental nor musical. A great many of those who ply the art of music do not have musical minds in any basic sense. Their art consists in certain skills often built into a purely matter-of-fact organism. I therefore see no reason why such people in the musical world who do not show any artistic temperament have any reason to boast of the fact.
The highly temperamental musician is a species of genius in some degree. As such, he has been described by musicians, scientists, and psychiatrists in a very copious body of literature on the subject, especially that dating since the time of Lombroso, who regarded all geniuses as degenerates. The modern psychiatrist has frequently presented a picturesque view of the temperamental person in terms of the rising science and art of psychiatry, which is supposed to explain all deviations from normal behavior in terms of psychopathology. The old saying was that we are all more or less sane; the psychiatrist today says we are all more or less psychopathic. The current literature on mental hygiene is characterized by this point of view. Another point of view has proved fascinating since the coming in of Freud, in that deviations of this sort are accounted for in terms of suppressions,defense reactions, and other manifestations of the libido. Much light is thrown on the problem by the great musician's exaltation of the artistic mind in action, thus revealing essential temperamental traits on the basis of first-hand experience and artistic theory. A temperamental musician is the most merciless portrayer of his own species. Since the temperamental person is always an interesting person, all of these accounts are lively and each revealing from its own point of view, giving us much genuine insight into the nature of the temperamental person in all fields.
Descriptions of the musical temperament are, as a rule, vivacious and luminous, thrillingly interesting. If a competent analyst would follow Stokowski for one day during the season and picture in high lights, full of concrete examples, the experience and behavior of this great conductor from the whirl of emotional enthusiasms and conflicts into which he awakens in the morning to the convivial abandon during refreshments after the evening performance, we should have a spicy and animated picture of the musical temperament. If written by the smart commentator in the columns ofEsquire, it might even be racy. Such pictures have often been drawn in fragments. A similar picture might be made exclusively by direct quotation from biographies, autobiographies, and letters of great musicians, such as Beethoven and Wagner, whose lives are now on record. The temperamental musician is not competent to analyze himself because he does not see himself as others see him. Literary chats about musicians are full of quirks and eccentricities giving realistic examples of a temperamental life. These might be organized into a fairly complete characterization of a distinctive musical temperament.
All such exhibits would be of the emotional type, dramatic extravaganzas, interesting and significant, and there are many such extant. The inceptive science of the psychology of music takes a different point of view, aiming to account for the highly temperamental person partly in terms of heredity and partly in terms of inherent elements in the situation in which he lives and performs. The music psychologist must content himself to deal in a cold analytical way with verifiable and orderly facts in order to contribute something toward a scientific foundation for a systematicand functional psychology of the musical mind. In attempting this approach, I realize how tame and stilted such an effort must seem to the fiery musical temperament; and even at its best the psychologist will regard the account as speculative, because it is seldom based upon experiment. I have delved into musical biography and autobiography of great musicians with an eye toward the discovery of their outstanding mental characteristics from a psychological point of view. On this basis I must make a bold venture by attempting to trace the elements in a musical situation which lead to the development of temperamental behavior and thus contribute toward the answer to the question, "What makes a musician temperamental?"
Physiological irritability.The highly-gifted musician responds physiologically to sound stimuli to a very high degree because he has inherited a genetic constitution which is anatomically and physiologically exceptionally responsive to sound. In other words, quite apart from consciousness of sound or thought of music, his physical organism responds to acoustic stimuli of all kinds which keep nerve and muscle in a state of tension. This tends to create a state of unrest and irritability. Without leading to actual hearing, it may arouse associations of a sort of dreamlike or dramatic nature which may play a very large role in the conscious life. It may create a state of well-being and happy associations, but perhaps more frequently irritation and noxious day-dreaming associations and emotional eruptions. The sounds may come from a squeaking chair, the sizzling of a kettle, the song of a bird, the cry of an infant. Most frequently sounds affecting the organism in this way are inconspicuous and commonplace in the environment; but they may often be strong; such as, the rattling of a train or the chattering in a crowd, of which the musician does not become conscious, although physiologically irritated.
Tonal sensitivity.All great musicians are highly sensitive to sound in all its elements. A physiological irritability acoustically leads to a profuse awareness of sounds. This sensitive and selective hearing gives the musician a richness of material in the musical medium. He becomes intolerant and rebellious to disturbing sound stimuli which have no such effect upon unmusicalpersons. To him, the world of sounds has infinite richness of resources for musical pleasure, but equally exceptional resources for the suffering of musical pain.
Artistic license.To the trained musical individual sounds are heard as different from what a matter-of-fact listener hears. The hearing of pitch, loudness, time, and timbre is not in the ratio of 1:1 with the physical sound, but always runs into artistic analysis and interpretation with artistic license. The musical interval, the dynamic phrasing, the rhythm, and the tone quality are always heard in relation to their artistic setting. Here we find auditory illusions operating in their fullest glory. The pitch value varies with the quality of the sound. Time may be a substitute for stress and vice versa. A subjective rhythm is richer and far more realistic than the physical rhythm. The quality of tone is heard in relation to its musical meaning. To the musician, the hearing is not so much a question of true pitch, formal accent, temporal rhythm, or vowel quality as it is a matter of musical balance and a recognition of artistic deviation from the true. Meticulously exact performance of a Bach score would be musically intolerable. Notes are frail symbols. The performer must interpret even the shortest measure rhythm or single note value. Thus, while fine sensory discrimination in all the aspects of sound is essential for correct hearing and tone production, the more essential thing is his ability to play with artistic power and impulse in hearing and producing artistic balance and artistic deviation from the rigid. In this artistic balance and deviation, he may be guided by certain artistic rules, but his direct emotional interpretation is far more significant. In this lies individuality. He is constantly tempted to be extravagant.
Thus, in all the variants, combinations, and modulations of pitch, loudness, time, and timbre, the musician hears, feels, and gives meaning to fine and subtle distinctions, many of them quite divergent from the physical tones. At this level, temperament shows itself in exceedingly fine responsiveness to tones which may be a matter of utter indifference or impossibility to the unmusical. This capacity is largely inborn, both in the way of sensitivity to sound and a general nervous, if not neurotic, disposition,and is in itself enough to make the musician different from other people. Artistic license as a medium for self-expression is, therefore, clear evidence of a musical temperament.
Ear-mindedness.The successful musician is ear-minded as distinguished from the painter who is fundamentally eye-minded. This ear-mindedness grows out of his genetic auditory constitution at birth and develops through the practical use that he makes of the various attributes of sounds. Fundamentally, it is the tonal image which, in the great musicians, is practically as vivid, stable, and complete as the ordinary perception of the actual physical sound. His memories, his imagination, his creative work practically all operate in terms of his powerful auditory image, usually supplemented by strong motor and visual imagery. This makes him different from the businessman, the objective scientist, and the man on the street. The fact that he can live subjectively in this tonal world gives him a type of isolation in which he feels the superiority of his power and becomes disposed to assert his rights, privileges, and dominance in a domain in large part separated from ordinary affairs. Thus, the powerful imagery becomes one of his richest and most fundamental resources for exclusiveness as a musician and, when cultivated in the field of artistry, tends to set him apart from the rest of the world.
Affective response.Since the business of the musician is to hear and produce beautiful effects in sound, he differs from the ordinary listener in that sounds of all kinds not only have intellectual orientation value but are habitually responded to in terms of beauty or ugliness, pleasure or pain. They give him warmth or chills, both of which create feelings of unrest. Instead of identifying a sound as the rumbling of a train, he identifies it as ugly—something which disturbs and irritates him. Instead of identifying the sound as the song of a bird, he responds vigorously in terms of likes and dislikes.
Emotional pursuits are usually sexually stimulating, and persistent emotionality is likely to manifest itself in love "scenes", good or bad. As a mate, the temperamental musician may be a most ardent and exquisite lover or a most irritable person to live with. This is aggravated by the fact that the artistic behavioris worshipped by the opposite sex, often to an annoying degree. Hence, love, self-defense in love, and a sense of superiority in love are keynotes to the temperamental musician's life.
The esthetic mood.The musician is in search of the beautiful and therefore, conversely, responds unfavorably to the ugly. His professional life is, in the main, emotional as distinguished from the intellectual life of the scholar in other fields or the action-patterns of men of affairs. Whether he is a virtuoso, a creator of music, or a director, he is working on emotions through emotions, trying to re-create for the listener the feelings with which he himself is imbued. He lives so intensely and habitually in this activity that he becomes recognized as highly and persistently emotional. This extreme emotionality in his daily work sets him off against the matter-of-fact mind. We say of the intensely artistic person in action that he burns himself up. The emotional life is expensive and flitting; it flashes and explodes and is in danger of running out of control.
This emotionality tends to transfer not only to other forms of art but to ordinary things and situations; such as, money, raiment, or social amenities. Sometimes this takes the form of the characteristic bohemian. He may spend his wages on payday and starve the rest of the month in utter complacence. All his life tends to be set at high tension. He lives dominantly in a mood and therefore often becomes objectionally moody through his impulsive behavior.
Exhibitionism.There is an accretion to the musical temperament in a sort of hierarchy of defense reactions which may be characterized as exhibitionism. The musical mind is pulling on one end of a leash, as it were, trying to drag the more or less resistant and incapable into his own beautiful emotional life, and he feels the drag. Therefore, he becomes impatient and uses ways and means of exclusiveness in withdrawal from the world, or he takes the opposite attack—display. To him, countless means of personal display justify their end, the glorifying of his noble art. Therefore, we see the musical temperament in this artistic form in the manner of living, eating, dressing, and sleeping, and in the demand for hero worship. We see this in the extreme form inthe conductor who feels that he must have his choir, his orchestra, his band members each individually at his command. He is like a general in action. For this purpose, he must pose as a great authority, as a hero standing for something superior in the way of personal interpretation, as a critical judge of the beautiful, as having undisputed power, feeling the necessity of imposing his own emotional individuality on a comparatively cool and often resistant group. This is true on a smaller scale in all musical leadership, composition, performance of the virtuoso, musical criticism and passionate listening.
Symbolism.The main function of the great musician is to make his music symbolic. He must take the listener out of the humdrum attitudes of life through the avenue of musical feeling into a state of abandon, which, in its extreme form, approaches ecstasy and obliviousness to material surroundings and facts. Even the devices of program music give but remote and stilted aid. His function is to enable the listener to live the art as he himself lives it symbolically. In this respect he differs from the sculptor and the painter who, while cultivating this symbolic attitude, are clearly held to the necessity of utilizing objective realities. It is not easy for the musician to take himself out of this mood. At the moment that he talks shop and business, the symbolizing habit is constantly pressing in upon him. Through his mastery of the symbolic life he feels rich, exclusive, powerful, and self-contained. Some people think that is queer.
Precocity.Since, as a rule, the musically gifted are proportionately precocious, they begin early in childhood to realize their peculiar gift for musical appreciation, individual interpretation, and often fabulous child performance as more or less child prodigies. This tendency to become a prodigy is inherent in musical precocity and starting early makes him conspicuous as a child, interferes with his adaptation to the behavior of the common man, and leads to a specialization and intensification of those elements which gain for him the approbation of his constituency, a following for the hero, and towering admiration. On the other hand, it makes him an object of ridicule.
Usually it is the narrowly-educated musician that is strikinglytemperamental. To excel in his art, supreme effort has often centered upon that goal at the sacrifice of a broadening education and the development of a well-rounded and healthy-minded personality. Current academic recognition of music and improved facilities for training will decrease the number of temperamental musicians. After all, temperament is not all a gift: it is largely acquired through learning in the school of hard knocks. It is often a cheap imitation.
What then is the musical temperament? It is a species of the artistic behavior found in all artistic pursuits, arising partly from heredity and partly from training, environment, and simulation; intensified by high sensitivity, highly-strung disposition, dominant ear-mindedness, emotional strain, lopsided education, pursuit of esthetic goals, leadership and hero worship, and often a forced precocity.
This type of analysis could be carried much farther, but these items may suffice as fair samples to show that the artistic temperament in music is an essential gift demanded by the nature of the art. It may be good or bad, inborn or cultivated, genuine or simulated, and often runs into eccentricities so that we frequently view it in a superior attitude of amusement. But let us thank all the gods in the Kingdom of the Muses for their great gift, the potentially good musical temperament.
Consider These Questions
When the director of the professional symphony orchestra faces a group of temperamentally hardened performers in rehearsal it is war to the finish—victory or defeat. Recall some characteristic historical instances of artistic strategy in such a situation.