Modern Music

STRAUSS, Debussy and Schönberg stand out as great peaks from a range of lesser composers of all nationalities, a few of whom are yet notable in their several degrees for strongly individual qualities. The younger men amongst them carry our hopes for the future of music and their works deserve the most sympathetic consideration.

There is no disguising the fact that Richard Strauss has a very slender following among these younger men who are out of sympathy with his apparently reactionary attempts to construct a synthesis from insufficient material. They consider his later works old-fashioned under a veneer of modernist technique, and they believe that he has abandoned true progress for stereotyped routine and bourgeois complacency. Debussy, Schönberg and Stravinsky are nearer the ideals of these young composers, through a community of opinion on essentials which differs widely from that of Strauss. Debussy, it is true, interests them mainly as a stage upon the journey to Schönberg, who stands for the allsufficiency of music as a non-representational spiritual entity, and for absolute freedom in the use of the artistic medium. The doctrine that every chord is admissible, that what was formerly admitted only as chromatic modulation should stand justified on its own merits, in short, that all previously established rules are questionable, and that the raw material of music should be tested by its successful use as a means of expression alone, appeals to adventurous youth.

OUR survey has comprised a mixed company of composers of many lands and peoples, some of them, no doubt, insincere or second-rate; yet one cannot watch all this wide-spread and intense artistic activity, the younger men groping towards the new dawn of music through mists of experiment and apparent chaos, without a sense of participation and intense interest. Every influence which makes for union must be used to combat the racial and national hatreds which separate the artist from his brother artist. Such union is the goal towards which the best minds of the present day are striving by various and often apparently conflicting means. It is the one way which can lead mankind through difficulties, confusion and irresolution to a higher kind of simplicity, to a new and better convention. The dominance of "charm," which undermined and finally destroyed rhythmic strength and left music colourful but superficial, must be combated and music must once more become "pure" music, expressionist not representational, balanced, sensitive and yet strong, possessing a new melos, a new rhythm and a new form. Charm, while ceasing to be dominant, will not be excluded; it will have its place in new form founded on creative will, a deeper and more sincere development of the art.

OUR wanderings have brought us within sight of a clearing, but many a mile of thorny scrub yet lies between us and open country; for these days of universal social convulsion have strengthened the material and spiritual forces which are the perpetual enemies of music.

Among these hostile forces of a material kind are politics, which stand for cunning, convention and tenacity; technique, which would reduce life to a formula; and commerce, which considers nothing beyond the best means of extracting immediate profit from whatever lies nearest to hand. Political aims, as a matter of course, leave music entirely out of account. One can see in European history that music was victimised by politics till, as a professional art, itself became political and thereby crippled its own proper powers. So strong, however, is the musical instinct in Germany that, though politically subordinate to the spirit of militarism, it has yet preserved a life of its own. Even in Germany, however, technique and commercial considerations have proved destructive to art. The Great War, a tremendous militarist and commercial contest, has strengthened the forces of materialism and encouraged the worldly-wise doctrine of the uselessness of the arts.