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THE present spiritual revolution has long been coming upon us, although the bewildering effect of certain astounding political and social events upon the minds of thinking people has brought it suddenly to a head. Authority in its many abstract forms has been overthrown, and a spiritual republic has been proclaimed. Mankind has been challenged to throw off, once for all, its doubts and burdens, and the intellectuals, looking to the example of the great French revolution, have once more raised the cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," this time on behalf of the "fourth estate," of the Worker as opposed to the Capitalist.
The Great War had a particularly deracinating effect upon the artist, who is by nature non-political. He, who had planned to spend his life among the high places of human thought and achievement, suddenly found himself a mere number in a military organisation, and when the revolt against militarism came, he was only too ready to throw in Ms lot with the proletariat, with Socialists, Independents or Communists. It is by no means difficult to use art as propaganda for a cause, for the number of artists of very strong individuality is small, and they are, as a class, as subject as other men to the herd instinct, whether it tends for the moment to abstract idealism or its opposite. In the last resort, undoubtedly, most men put their individual well-being before their allegiance to a party; the proletariat abuse the bourgeoisie, but their grand ambition is to belong to it, while many an artist who pretends to scoff at the middle classes belongs to them body and soul. The genuine, the inspired artist, is indeed a born anarchist of a harmless type. His impulse to go his own way irrespective of convention is the opposite of middle-class; yet he is forced to realise that his work, once accomplished, will serve principally for the delight of the middle classes. His life is not that of the "classes"; yet he cannot ignore them; while from the "masses" he draws the common human bases of his art; so that the relationship existing between the "classes" and the "masses" can never be indifferent to him. He must evoke a response from them, even when he thunders against them, for if he does not get it he perishes. Although the enthusiasm of a crowd of followers, a clique, may shoulder him into a position of temporary prominence, they cannot support him for ever against the weight of public indifference or repudiation.
For these reasons, political and social revolutions touch the artist nearly, although he lacks the social sense--that is to say, he will not make the same response as other men to the outward convulsions of the society in which he lives and works; he will simply ask himself how these convulsions are likely to affect public understanding of, and sympathy with, Ms work, and he will be roused to a re-estimation of his chances of artistic immortality.
Long before the present troubles began, the artist became conscious of a cleft between cultural and folk art. To-day high art has become "precious" and narrow, while the people revel in what in Germany is called Kitsch, catchy, meretricious stuff. "Art" of this type is at present more wide-spread and more popular than ever before. The word Kitsch was coined by the aesthetes and thrown contemptuously to the people; for the existence of the thing both sides are probably to blame.
There is no doubt that the people as a whole are exceedingly inartistic. Their right to like obvious and broad effects in art is not disputed, but it is a right which the average man with his love of comfort and hatred of mental exertion abuses most shamefully. Modern life, with its machine-made industrialism, has worked a profound change in the people who once produced the folk-songs and dances which were the sources of music; they have ceased to be artistically creative and are content with the cheap rhythm and degraded sentimentality of musical comedy. The cinema is in itself a magnificent discovery, but at present it usually offers mere sensational matter to satisfy the lust of the eye, and demands no kind of mental activity.
The creative artist thus naturally turns away from the people; it is no part of his calling to provide them with superficial amusement, which is all they demand, and sooner or later comes the parting of the ways, if he is to maintain his integrity. Often, however, he continues to cherish the hope that through the best in the folk he may find a way to the hearts and minds of the crowd and become a popular artist in the truest and best sense. It is a hope loudly proclaimed at present, but it has little to support it; for the same period which had seen the rise of the art industry in all its ramifications--the great routine concerts, the art-dealers and endless art exhibitions--is also the age of the degradation of art through artifice. Skill in the handling of artistic media has been acquired at the cost of artistic meaning and significance. We are offered a glorified form of handicraft.
This tendency is very noticeable in literature, where formal facility and rhetoric have increased beyond measure. The author no longer seeks a style which will illumine his subject; he seeks instead a brilliant "subjective" style without objective basis, misusing the most universal means of expression to advertise his own personality, and doing incalculable harm thereby. Style of this kind not only diverts attention from essentials and hinders clearness of thought upon the subject of which it treats, but it falsifies the subject itself with its sham sparkle. Since art seeks literary expression to an unprecedented extent at the present time, the disastrous effects of such "literature" upon it--especially when it handles the art of music which transcends expression--may be imagined.
Artifice is, moreover, very widely employed in the performance of musical works. Constant and greedy exploitation for business purposes tends to destroy the freshness of certain compositions, and artifice is used to cover the difficulty. When a conductor has performed a work of Beethoven so many times that he has lost interest in it, he looks round for a personal interpretation which will alter essentials of tempo, dynamic, and structure in the composition and give the public the amusement of contrasting the nuances of his exposition with those of other conductors. Under this treatment the aspect of the work gradually changes till it becomes almost unrecognisable. The same process is employed in operatic production, and on all hands the creative artist is sacrificed to the exponent. This phenomenon was apparent before the war, but it greatly increased during the succeeding period in Germany owing to the spiritual blockade imposed upon that country and the inability of her artists to move about with freedom.
Yet more significant than the foregoing is the development of artifice in the work of art itself.
Programme-music demanded neither more nor less than a perpetual re-adjustment of form to content. This particular type of music arose, indeed, from a sense that the elements of music and their organisation in the sonata were outworn, but that they might be replaced to some extent by matter drawn from the other arts or from experiences of life and nature. At the same time it was believed that music with a clearly-defined programme, a characteristic motive such as forms the basis of a poem, would appeal to a wider range of people, yet whatever value may attach to programmemusic at the present day it certainly never succeeded in reaching the spirit through the senses as did music-drama. Neo-Romantic music suffered the reproach of not being romantic enough; it was unfortunately named.
Aesthetic philosophy recognises no incongruity in the association of music with spatial phenomena, nor in the close connection between musical and visual representation. Melody is defined as movement and the chord as a mass of characteristic density formed by the "stratification" of intervals. The attempt to express events in terms of music, to paint in tone, was thus natural and inevitable. Both architectonic and colouristic musicians derive from John Sebastian Bach; the sense of tone-colour did not begin with the Romantics, but was expressed long before in the orchestration of Haydn The Seasons; while programme-music arose out of the yet older connection of music and words.
Nevertheless, tone-colour was first consciously pursued by a later generation of musicians who had gained in sensibility at the expense of artlessness and spontaneity. The miracle of delicately-graduated colour in music was made possible by a new aesthetic temperament, susceptible, nervous and intellectual.
Colour as such, be it understood, is inherent in instrumental diversity of tone, and we have already sketched its development in intensity and delicacy through improved orchestral technique. It was naturally used for operatic purposes at an early date, as in the work of C. M. von Weber. Its fascination once revealed, its use increased very rapidly. The instrument even becomes an individual personality, as with the cor anglais in Berlioz, a source of inspiration up to quite recent times -- while the possibilities of combination appear inexhaustible. The constant reinforcement of the orchestra is, indeed, almost terrifying, for no limit can be set to the multiplication of the strings (which have long outgrown the quartet), to the increase of wind and percussion instruments, to the stirring effects obtainable from kettle-drums, bass and other drums, cymbals and triangles, not to speak of harps, celestas and pianoforte. All this makes for increased delicacy of expression, as well as for increased volume of sound, while at the same time the peculiar tone-values of individual instruments become more marked. High pitch and low are associated as a matter of course with light and darkness; the trumpets and trombones supply all shades of yellow down to the deepest red perceptible to the acute sensibilities of the modern man, while the flutes and oboes suggest every delicate tone of blue and green.
Colour is associated with key, as well as with the timbre of an instrument. This is no new discovery, for Schubert, Mattheson and E. T. A. Hoffmann among others dallied with the idea in their day, though only in a half-playful, fantastic way. It is now used deliberately, for conscious knowledge has established a connection, previously apprehended intuitively through the senses and imagination, between key and situation. It is strange that the significance of the key should be the subject of such close study at a moment when it threatens to fall into disuse. The heightening effect of the sharp keys, the subduing influence of the flat keys, lead to their natural and inevitable association with gay moods in the first case and grave in the second. Equally instinctively one feels the force of Wagner's use of the 136 bars of E flat major in the prelude to Rhinegold, the significance of the key in the Fire Enchantment scene, in the Valkyrie Ride, in the beginning of the Götterdämmerung and the Valhalla motiv. At the same time there can be no doubt that the peculiar tone of the instruments, as for instance that of the tubas in the Valhalla motiv, is more important to the emotional effect than the D flat major key in which the motiv occurs.
The disintegration of the key-tonality is increasing tonecolour in modern music. Insistence on chromatic discords has shaken the sense of tonality, and music relies more and more for effect upon the chromatic notes--that is to say, the modification of chords by notes foreign to the scale--and upon the delayed resolution of dissonances. At the same time the brilliant possibilities of the modern orchestra have tended to destroy the feeling for logical modulation; and harmonic development, now bound up with a type of instrumentation which glosses over knotty points, is made to serve colouristic effect only. Orchestral beauty appears to promote rhythmic lawlessness by releasing it from all responsibility for the structure of the work as a whole. Furthermore, it lowers the value of melody. Triviality is excused on the ground that programme-music has a right to represent trivialities, only the manner in which the subject is treated being important.
The above remarks are intended to apply to the tendencies of the age as a whole, rather than to individual composers or their works.
Programme-music, in the course of its development, has called a new system of aesthetics into being. It could not be otherwise; for as intellectual conceptions began to play more part in both the origin and construction of a musical composition, it became increasingly a subject for discussion and debate. Literary dialectic entered the realm of music.
As the instinctive and elemental forces which make for "pure" music declined and the means of expression outgrew the matter to be expressed, music itself tended towards artificiality. Form was sacrificed to beauty of colour, and although, in theory, form should be capable of perpetual renewal from the "plot" on which music is made, it was found that "plots" which required musical illustration were less ready to hand than had been supposed; their formative impulse did not maintain its strength. "Programme-music" was merely a brilliant interlude in the history of music, important only when it ceased to be merely representational and became an imaginative delineation of mental impressions. In its long course of development it strengthened the instrumental trend of music and, in so far as it avoided the clear outline of the sonata-form and made for orchestral vagueness, it prepared the way for impressionistic effects--for the formlessness of German Impressionism as opposed to the formal perfection of French Impressionism.
Music of this kind is entirely remote from the average music-lover who listens to symphonic work chiefly as a refuge from reality; he wants romanticism as a compensation for the hard facts of life, and he craves for what is mysterious and beyond the scope of reason. It is true that the majority of listeners are affected by mood and colour in music, but these cannot supply the place of the lyrical adagio, for the ordinary music-lover thinks of music as "pure" music, quite distinct from the other arts, and as set apart for expressing the feelings which transcend definition. Music conveys these mystic values of love and beauty to him with redoubled force when it expresses and re-expresses them in a strong and sharply-defined form, logically worked out to the least detail. It is said of Richard Wagner that he freed music from the old academic and professional spirit and, in so doing, appealed to a far wider audience than any previous composer; and it is true that he was, in a sense, a brilliant amateur who gave music a place in human culture which it had not held hitherto; yet as a result of this mighty achievement, music was for the future bound up with the explanatory word. Wagner's co-ordinating genius succeeded in blending words and music with great effect, but it is a combination which lends itself to abuse in less able hands. Since that time, a host of "intellectuals," literary men and poets, have undertaken to expound the composer, to rescue him from the limitations of his profession, to save him, in short, from the fate of being misunderstood. Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler were surrounded by a swarm of such advocates, and no modern composer can escape the panegyrics of Hermann Bahr and his type. Debussy enjoyed the advantages of such literary favour to the full, for the Frenchman betakes himself to words more readily than the German. Unfortunately the mediocre composer is scarcely less the subject of such cults than the great; if he cannot attain prominence on his merits he can be talked into it. There is no such thing as a misunderstood genius in these enlightened days, but there is many a manufactured one.
This activity is, however, encouraging proof of the widespread and increasing interest in music which is now acknowledged as pre-eminent among the arts. In the music-drama the other arts were pressed into the service of music in striking and public fashion, and since then an increasing number of poets, philosophers and painters have acknowledged its direct influence. The movement is bound up with a mystic tendency, strong in Northern art to-day, and particularly so in Germany.
The course of musical development has thus emphasised the distinction between "instinctive" music and "artistic" music. Colour and emotional suggestion appeal to many minds, but the so-called absolute sense of pitch and tonality has no connection with the tone-colour sense and may be actively opposed to it. As impressionist charm increased, pure musical values declined in estimation. The ear was perverted by the increasing chromatic alterations of the chord, which--like the rhythmic lawlessness which accompanies them--reflect the modern artistic person's acutely susceptible and receptive temperament and deficient sense of purpose and rhythm. At the same time the charm of colouristic music provided special opportunities for the poseur, while literary artifice increased in poets and exponents of music.
An art based on charm, on sensuous excitement rather than on character and purpose, eventually reacts on the manhood of the artist, while untrammelled self-expression leads to egoism, and egoism expresses no more than the most superficial qualities of the self.
Painting and music drew very close together as the painter felt the attraction of a formless, colourful and impressionistic type of composition. Aesthetic philosophy found parallels in the two arts, such as a similarity between the "build" of the sonata and the well-defined outlines of a certain school of painting. Both were now to be replaced to make room for a new artistic form, but how was this form to be attained?
In France, the Impressionist movement in music, led by Debussy, followed Impressionist painting, and music became "artistic" in a vain attempt to copy the art of the studios. Musicians dabbled in colours without seeking either a spiritual or technical basis from which to work, and they discarded the old music built on the polyphonic phrase before they had made sure of a new. In Impressionist music, Germany was admittedly further from artistic form than the other countries of Europe, which were already beginning to form a musical Entente.
Much valuable energy was expended on innumerable musical experiments, while the gulf between cultural and folk music rapidly widened. A narrow and exclusive circle of artists and littérateurs were preoccupied with what is called "advanced" art, leaving, the wider public untouched, while on the other hand academic philistinism found its public all too readily. It was an age of "party cries," of "tendencies" and "movements," of much talking and much writing. Was music to take her orders and direction from painting? Each of the great arts shared the same tendencies. It was felt that the restlessness of the age was unsuitable to great art; but it was hard to fix on a definite aim in the welter of staleness, boredom and triviality. The new aesthetic science postulated a comprehensive philosophy behind all art, and deduced a "will to expression" therefrom. Such an outlook was necessarily a strain on artistic simplicity, an intellectual burden, to which was added for the modern artist the oppressive sense of the long history behind his art. It was nevertheless good that philosophy and the "will to expression" should be recognised as the only possible bases of great art. Hatred of triviality is the sign of an artistic conscience opposed to every form of sham; but unfortunately, in the concept of sham art the painter came to include not only smooth emptiness, but Nature herself, the musician, melody and everything which suggests melody. Aesthetic philosophy, hastily assimilated, led to ill-advised and hasty work, while the "will to expression," baffled by the problems of form and content, gave rise to eccentricity.
Art fell into a condition of chronic experiment. Experiment, indeed, is welcome, is justified, when it is made in good faith and based on real imagination and technical skill, and it must not be forgotten that, while "movement" and "progress" are not interchangeable terms, the first is as natural to art as it is to life.
In the early days of the present century the revolt against triviality gave rise to Futurism in Italy and France. The main idea of the movement was to transcend both objectivity and Impressionism, but it became a kind of inverted artificiality, continually running after some new thing. Its doctrines were applied to music--which essentially transcends objectivity--to justify the abandonment of the accustomed forms, and led to countless experiments.
"Expressionism" arose, a new catch-word which might have been invented by any art-dealer, but which acquired a real and deep meaning in Germany. "Expressionism" was a revolt against the irresponsibility and mere pleasing facility which had become associated with "Impressionism," and it stood for the plain and terse expression--uncomplicated by the projection of the ego into the thing to be expressed--of the eternal values of the noumena behind phenomena. It demanded a return to primitive simplicity in the mind of the artist; and, in painting, a more "absolute" and abstract form was sought, approximating to music and based on tone-colour.
Behind the idea, the programme of the expressionist artist, the will to achieve good, original and distinctive work was unmistakable; but the mixed conceptions of Expressionism found the media of art somewhat intractable. Primitive simplicity was sought in various ways, some natural and genuine, despite eccentricities; some forced or meaningless, for the new term brought in its wake, as usual, a new host of copyists. In Germany, certain organised groups of artists took on an almost military character, proclaiming a kind of mino.rity dictatorship. The eccentricity which only genius can justify became a fashion and a pose.
"Party cries" current in the German Revolution invaded the region of art, and the new movement--its soundest ideas exaggerated--became a method of influencing the masses, of flattering the proletariat. This type of Expressionism was as ready for a holocaust of artistic traditions as was Communism for the annihilation of the bourgeoisie.
Expressionism in its essence, however, arose naturally and inevitably in the course of artistic development, quite apart from either the German Revolution or the would-be WorldRevolution of the Russians. In Germany, unfortunately, the spiritual blockade led to a kind of intellectual in-breeding; but no sooner had the barriers between the nations fallen, than the unity of artistic thought became apparent; only its formal outward expression has local variations.
Triviality, imitation and tradition are alike combated on all hands, and there is to-day a widespread determination to have done with artifice.
We have outlined the movement in painting because the painter's watchwords inevitably affect music, particularly at a time when painters such as Kandinsky pay unprecedented homage to music. Many of these painters are frustrated musicians whose attempts to transcend objectivity have approximated their art to craftsmanship and design. They are obsessed with the idea of projecting music into space, of localising the temporal art. There is an attempt to express the motion of music through the medium of colour cinematography.
But in contemplating the connection between the two arts, it does not do to forget their differences. The barrier between music and painting consists in the difference of their media. Music (with which alone we have to do here) cannot in actual fact keep pace with the rapid succession of experiments in painting, since its problems, both of form and material, have an entirely different basis. In practice, various tendencies in music live side by side, for the sonata and symphony are not dead, either in their one-movement or cyclical forms. The cyclic principle which demands an organic development of the motiv persists, though signs of decay in form are not wanting. Programme-music and Impressionism also survive, the former labouring under the burden of instrumental over-elaboration.
Certain types of music, again, are preserved through their hold on the affections of the public, which displays more partisanship in music than in the other arts, while elements of musical form--slowly developed in the past history of the art--are frequently so closely intermingled in a particular work that it is impossible to say to which type it belongs. Nevertheless both the modern composer and the modern sympathetic student of Ms work perceive the need of renewal in music, a renewal which can only be found by way of experiment. The movement to exclude all artifice, to aim at expression and expression alone, may lead to the goal, which we seek, but the more audacious would do well to remember that a complete revolution is impossible in art, that the link with the past must be preserved.
The painter has not been quite successful in transcending artifice through Expressionism, and the musician has succeeded still less. In literature, artifice survives even the tendency to condensation which reduces the serial story to the dimensions of the essay. Artifice, indeed, when contemplated dispassionately, is seen to be a necessary concomitant of a time of transition and experiment.
The problems of expressionist music are very numerous. The sense of dissonance is weakened and resolutions are no longer desired, while sequence is considered tiresome and discursive. Rhythmic liberty has become absolute freedom of beat, not to be confused with the rhythmic liberty which existed in primitive music before the introduction of the bar. The present disappearance of the bar is due to a conviction that rhythmic possibilities are exhausted. A further step has been taken in the direction of atonality; the support of tonality exists no longer and the result is apparent chaos; but it is a chaos full of potentialities, and there is no need to despair, even if atonality should lead temporarily to complete anarchy.
The human voice is an exceedingly important factor which is in danger of being forgotten. The many adventures of instrumental music, chromatic artifice in its many manifestations, have all tended to depreciate the value of the voice, while the interminable type of melody called "spoken song" made mistaken use of it. The voice, moreover, depends on the natural vigour and richness of the musical matter which is now felt to be outworn. At the same time its frictionless quality is very cogent in works for choir and orchestra. Opera still depends principally for its effects upon the human voice, and there is still much vitality in the peculiarly German short song. Vocal music, again, is undoubtedly endangered by the unsatisfied and insatiable longings of the over-sensitive modern temperament.
Can the people, as a whole, help in any way to bridge the gulf between instrumental and vocal music? There is no such thing as artistic education among the masses, but there is a spark of true artistic feeling there which might become a conflagration. Education and training alone can produce nothing better than artistic mediocrity, and, as things are at present, there is a danger that a levelling spirit will affect all branches of music as it has affected opera; the ordinary threatens to crowd out the extraordinary in art.
At the same time the spark of true art in the folk could be cherished and fed by the right leaders. While the existence of the orchestra--overblown and over-elaborated as it is--is threatened by the financial crisis, a new kind of communal music is emerging in the form of workmen's choirs, whose joyous and spirited activities are a marked contrast to the "artistic" but very un-festal atmosphere of the ordinary concert. This new choral music is a product of the new age and will prove its worth in the future.
A "mass" movement towards art can neither be forced nor hurried, for people as a whole are still devoted to shams and sentimentality; but teachers of strong personality might do much. Middle-class musical culture has fostered a knowledge of art, but has choked the sources of inspiration with a superfluity of concerts and musical discussion, and the wide-spread habit of score-reading has done much to destroy delight in music as a living, passionate experience.
A reconciliation between cultured art and folk-art is an urgent necessity.
The period is a critical one in the history of art, and the future possibilities are many; but it is time for us to consider the phenomena presented by actual composers and their work, and so view the situation from another aspect.
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