The Why of Music : Dialogues in an Unexplored Region of Appreciation

DONALD N. FERGUSON THE

WHY OF MUSIC ' Dialogues in an o

Unexplored Region of Appreciation

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS /

Minneapolis

© Copyright 1969 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America at the Lund Press, Inc., Minneapolis

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-15088

PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI, AND IN CANADA BY THE COPP CLARK PUBLISHING CO. LIMITED, TORONTO

PREFACES, like epilogues, are usually 'written after the book they introduce has been -finished. Being usually the author's purview of his finished effort, which always differs somewhat from his original intent, they seem to me nearly identical and so to belong at the end . . . Indeed, I am not sure whether what I have placed there is Preface or Epilogue, and 1 have entitled it accordingly. If you read it before you read the book you will see, perhaps more clearly than if you begin at the beginning, the point toward which the rather discursive conversations tend. If you read it again, as a kind of summary, it may serve to make that point sharper.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A GLEAM IN THE EYE 'SOMETHING MORE" THE MUSICAL IMAGE HOW THE MUSICAL IMAGE IS PORTRAYED HOW FORM CONTRIBUTES TO THE IMAGE SOME HOWS AND WHYS OF MUSICAL COMPOSITION SOME HOWS AND WHYS OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCE STYLE AND TASTE IMAGE AND STYLE IN BACH CLASSICISM IN HAYDN AND MOZART ROMANTICISM IN BEETHOVEN BEETHOVEN • THE SECOND PERIOD BEETHOVEN • THE THIRD PERIOD VERBAL AND MUSICAL IMAGES IN THE SONG THE MUSICAL IMAGE IN THE LEADING-MOTIVE TWO NEW QUESTIONERS A COMMON MUSICAL IDIOM WHAT MAKES GOOD MUSIC GREAT? EPILOGUE, OR PREFACE? INDEX

3 17 31 45 58 75 87 99 114 129 147 165 183 197 22O 240 254 277 290 303

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The Why of Music

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A GLEAM IN THE EYE

W

HENI was welve or so, a pianist of considerable

distinction gave a recital in our little town. Having shown a decided interest in music and some knack for the piano, I was taken to the concert. Next to me sat one of our prominent "senior citizens" — a crusty old gentleman who had borne the rank of Major in the Union Army. His presence at this entertainment, which was for our community quite unusual, was due, we were sure, to a sense of civic duty rather than to any native interest in music. He sat with decorous inattention through the first group on the program (a Bach fugue and a Beethoven sonata), adding merely a few perfunctory spats to the generous applause. But the next group began with the Liszt arrangement of Schubert's Hark, Hark! The Lark; and as it ended he turned to me with an astonished gleam in his eye. "Pritti — ent it!" were his only words, uttered in that accent which marked him for us Midwesterners as a Down Easter; but the gleam, I will still swear, was one of genuine interest. I do not remember my own response. Some fifty years later, if I had still been twelve, I should probably have said, "That sends me! "—a phrase whose genuineness seems to me akin to that of the Major's gleam, and which I find a heartening antidote for the pessimism nowadays frequently evoked by the spectacle of teen-age behavior. Not only the Major and I but the whole audience —for the most part musically illiterate — were "sent" by that charming little piece. Where we were sent, none of us dreamed of inquiring. We knew we had been, 3

THE WHY OF MUSIC

for the moment, in a region of delectable sensation that somehow roused the imagination; we admired the skill that had sent us there; the other numbers had sent us to other and quite dissimilar corners of the same region; but although we were sure we had "seen" in each corner something of high interest, we could not in the least have told what we had seen. But we had seen, as well as heard, that something. Having been for many years a teacher of music in several of its many aspects, historical, theoretical, and practical, I have come to think the question as to where music sends its hearers and what they see there as one of considerable importance. As with physical excursions to famous sites, the object to be visited rather than the journey itself constitutes the principal reason — the Why — for the trip; yet all too often that musical Why is barely glimpsed, because our guide (the performer) persists in calling our attention to the tonal vehicle which transported us, and to the superlative skill with which he has "driven" the vehicle. From my professorial chair I had to organize what might be called guided tours through various musical fields. They had of course to be organized upon a generally established academic plan whose rigidity my students often resented because, instead of "sending" them, it confined them to dull and apparently remote regions of historic fact or laborious technical routine; and although I felt sure I was leading them toward an ultimate view of the all-important musical Why, I could often detect, if only in wandering eyes, the unuttered but devastating sophomoric question, So what? Although our academic plan was intended to break down that legitimate but oversimple question Why into its several essential parts, I came to see that our curriculum (literally, our "racecourse") led rather toward the mastery of a variety of Hows, leaving the Why to be explored (if at all) in the academic field of aesthetics — another technical discipline whose forbidding verbiage bars it from the organized musical curriculum so that it is generally relegated to a rather minor position in its more proper field of philosophy, where few music students have either time or inclination to pursue it. A Why, however, that may be both the original and the final purpose of music-making, lurks behind every How: too often invisible in the glare of the How, but still discernible by one who has become uneasy as to his appreciation of the art. This book is intended as another guided tour: in part, along the familiar roads of formal music appreciation, already copiously mapped and heavily traveled, but chiefly into the byways where, all but hidden be4

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

hind the many brilliant Hows that line the more familiar road, that essential Why lurks. The tour is open, not only to academically accredited students but to that hypothetical figure called the average man; and I have begun it with the gleam in the Major's eye because I believe that even he — musically, a less-than-average man —descried for that brief moment the possibility of a relation between music and his own world of experience that might justify the musician's preoccupation with what, until that moment, had been for the Major a trivial diversion. That his mind was lit, even momentarily, by a musical spark, was doubtless an accident. But similar sparks, catching in more receptive minds more inflammable heaps of imaginative tinder, have ignited hotter fires at which, from the beginning of music's history, such minds have been warmed. What the original spark is, or by what sort of charge it is generated, I cannot pretend to say. But the tinder it ignites is more than that little store of exceptional musical sensitivity which the individual happens to possess. It is also his mentally distilled store of nonmusical experience, filed somehow in the memory, with tiny wires attached that lead both to the area of musical sensitivity and to that of present consciousness. When those wires are charged, the resultant glow in the mind — the glow of past experience galvanized into life and fused with present awareness and future expectation — can be very brilliant. The gleam in the eye is a sign that the mind is glowing. It will glow, of course, even when no more than its "purely" musical area is excited, and the response of that area, measured as Seashore and later psychologists have attempted to measure it, is a fair index of musical sensitivity. But that measurement fails as an index of musical mentality; for music stimulates many others than the purely musical area of the mind. The masterpieces of religious music, for example, excite the religious as well as the musical consciousness, and would never be judged as masterpieces if they failed to do that. The real Why of those works, then — the original stimulus to their creation and the model after which they were shaped —was not the musical but the religious consciousness; and we shall find not only that similar extramusical spurs have instigated much secular music, instrumental as well as vocal, but that this nonmusical influence is discoverable in the musical texture itself. This Why — this fertilizing commerce between music and human experience — although tentatively acknowledged, receives little critical attention, whether in the books on music appreciation or in the severer 5

THE WHY OF MUSIC

analytical studies. Indeed, the musical avant-garde flatly denies its interest and even its existence. It points out that music neither portrays nor symbolizes the tangible facts of experience, and it reasons — quite lucidly — from that dubious premise that the long-cherished belief in that relation was a fiction. The Why of music, then, must lie in the interest of music as music. This book attempts, with a minimum of technical language, to support, in the general mind, the possibly shaken belief that that relation does, did, and will exist; that a general interest in music purely as music neither did nor does exist; and that the relation of music to experience, instead of being a fiction, is a demonstrable fact. That very general fact, however, is not self-evident, so that in the course of its demonstration innumerable questions may arise. Many representatives of what I envision as the general mind have put these questions to me, but I shall not falsify that mind if, for convenience, I put the questions into the mouth of a single character, and answer them similarly in my own person. In that composite character I am hoping that you, dear reader, will often recognize yourself. You will find him, at any rate, an earnest and intelligent questioner, reliant, as he should be, upon his own musical perception, and unconvinced by any reasons other than those which he can recognize as logical. To guide your eye to which of us is speaking, I shall designate you as F (for my Friend, Fred) and myself simply as I. Having thus been subpoenaed as collaborator, and having overheard my comment on the Major, you begin: F. Do you mean we're going to make a book about a gleam in the eye? 7. Not, to be sure, about that mere effulgence. But it was a sign, wasn't it, that the Major was "sent"? And we're going to try to find out what sent him, and where? For he found himself, for a moment, in an unknown region of his imagination; and it's really that region, in the general mind, that we're going to explore. Less figuratively, we're hunting for the basis of a sound musical judgment — a reasonably competent musical criticism. Literally, criticism is a judgment — a discrimination — of value; and while you may rightly call the Major's gleam the sign of an infantile discrimination, you will admit that more percipient eyes, such as your own, also gleam. I am going to contend that what his eye, or yours, gleams for — however vague or trivial it may seem to you now — will prove to be an 6

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

important item in our critical summary. Do you know a more trustworthy sign that value has been recognized? F. Perhaps not; but merely to recognize value isn't to measure, or even to establish it. There are certainly much more dependable measures of value. /. I didn't call the recognition of value a measure of it, and I'm not proposing the gleam, although I think it a fairly accurate sign of interest, as a measure of value. But mayn't it at least serve as a divining rod? F. Gleams in the eye and divining rods! If your critical laboratory hasn't any better apparatus than that, I don't think our critical effort will get very far. /. It won't. But with what, then, would you stock our laboratory? F. Certainly with something more factually analytical. Isn't the awareness of coherent musical design — of form — of primary importance? As I studied them in school, the processes of musical structure, according to which the masterpieces of the literature were shaped, rest on physical fact and structural principle which I should think no criticism could ignore. 7. Did your eye gleam for structural principle? or for the general pattern of sonata or fugue as you found it described in your textbooks? or even as exemplified by Bach or Beethoven? F. Sometimes. . . . But sometimes it didn't. 7. Then was it the pattern you admired, or something in the pattern? And if it wasn't the pattern as such, what was it? F. Well, the tonal substance, as I remember the examples, was sometimes appealing and sometimes not. And it was the same with the rhythms, which were mostly very much alive, but were sometimes rather perfunctory. But the real appeal of the music was not so much emotional as intellectual — at least it was so represented; and your gleam in the eye seems to me the evidence of no more than the critical apparatus of Philip Hale's "noble army of music lovers who know what they like." 7. Is that army's discrimination, then, based on no more than an appetite for tonal sensation and rhythmic nudging? I'm not so sure. I grant that the apparent musical public is always larger than the real, and I suppose your noble army and my apparent public are largely identical. But my real public has determined, probably more than any other influence, the survival of the masterpieces you spoke of, and I'm not convinced that its critical judgment has been directly, or even unconsciously, based on 7

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the analytical principles you've just set forth. I'm sure I admire sound musical structure as much as you do. But let me give you an example of what a too-exclusive pursuit of structural analysis may lead to. I lunched one day with a visiting professor (of chemistry, I think) at our university, who had evidently been taught that it was his duty to understand music as it was made. He summed up his achievement in criticism with the phrase, "I think I have learned, now, how to recognize Bach's terminal cadences." Which did he belong to — the real or the apparent musical public? Frankly, I consider my Major's critical judgment, however puerile, more soundly based than his. F. Possibly. But your examples are too extreme to have much critical value. Doesn't your own liking, which is partly determined by your knowledge and your respect for structure, increase with your insight into structure? 7. It does. But I believe my insight comprises more than structure, and I think the boundary of such insight ought to be extended as far as possible. You didn't include in your catalogue of values the immense store of knowledge which historians have accumulated about music. Doesn't what you know of the history of the symphonic or the fugal forms illuminate any given example of those forms as you hear it? F. It does, and my eye may even gleam when that light is turned on. It seems to me there are two kinds of historical illumination, the structural and the environmental. I think, perhaps because I've been taught to, that the structural is more illuminating. But that wasn't the kind of gleam you saw in your Major's eye. He probably didn't know that music had a history, nor had he any notion of the structural skill displayed, even in that little piece. 7. Mmmm . . . And yet his eye gleamed. If it wasn't for structure as such, or for history, of which I'm sure he had no inkling, what did it gleam for? F. I should say, only for sensuous pleasure — which I'm sure I enjoy as much as he. I suggested it in my catalogue of values, but, critically, I don't rate it very high. And anyhow, isn't it, as the old proverb says, non disputandum? 7. If it were separable from the other values, I think I'd agree. But it isn't separable. It is fused with your structure and with other values as well, and the product of the fusion is a kind of amalgam or alloy, like brass. So alloyed, its constituents are no longer copper and zinc. They've 8

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

become brass. And, alloyed, even your musical elements, tone and rhythm, aren't the simple entities, tone and rhythm. They've become music; and to see those elements in the structural amalgam of music is to focus your attention on the parts, rather than on the whole. F. You're surely not denigrating structure? 7. I'm not. But the ultimate function of the structured musical elements is to make sense; and if the only sense they make is that of coherent organization, I think relatively few listeners would be interested. For you don't need to be instructed — unless by actual listening experience, as even my Major momentarily was — to understand the sense of music; and if you understand that sense, which may be more than sensory or structural, the essentials of structure will appear, as I think they ought, to be appropriate to the whole sense you apprehend. The sense — the life, the imagery that makes your eye gleam — isn't in structure as such. F. Maybe not; but it couldn't have been there without the structure. 7. Nobody will dispute that, but it doesn't answer the question as to where the life is. Your structural analysis will tell you what sort of musical thing was made, and how it was made. Your history will tell you when and where, and against what background of musical experience, the thing was made. Those facts are indeed a part of the whole sense the music conveys. But unless you choose to consider the thing as just another experiment in musical structure, they don't tell you what the immediate creative impulse was — the real reason, why the thing was made. Doesn't that Why also demand an answer — an answer somehow derived from the life your eye gleamed for? F. I think I see what you're driving at. There must have been something more, either in the structure itself or in its history, to account for what you call the life of the music. But isn't that something just as nebulous as the gleam in your eye? You can answer your question as to the why of Beethoven's Fifth by invoking the rigmarole about Fate knocking at the door. But how much does that tell about the music itself? I find that story, if I recall it while I listen to the music, an irrelevant bore. 7. Are you sure you've not taken the knocking as literal? What Beethoven is reported to have said about the "meaning" of his famous motive was, SO pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte — Thus Fate knocks at the door — which is quite another matter than mere represented knocking. For Schicksal, literally, means "that which is sent" — by Fate, if you like; but the German word Schicksal hasn't necessarily the inimical implica9

THE WHY OF MUSIC

tion usually read into the English word Fate. I can't of course be sure just how Beethoven meant it, but I do know he was a thumping democrat, and I've a notion that what he was really thinking of was the advent of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Whether or not that actual image was in his mind doesn't really matter. But whether in this or a hundred other recorded instances you take Beethoven's words literally or figuratively, you'll have to agree that for him nonmusical experience had a genuine contribution to make to music; and if you're going to account for that contribution on structural grounds alone, I think you'll have to enlarge your definition of structure considerably. F. Lord! Are you trying to say that this "something more," this "indefinable something" that visionaries always evoke when they don't know what they're talking about, is so positive a factor in musical creation that critical study ought to find a way of identifying and defining it? 7. Haven't you already tentatively admitted that structure, as the professors define it (for it was the professors, not the composers, who concocted your definition) doesn't account for every value you find in music? Isn't the gleam in the eye a recognition, either that something more is present in structure than your definition accounts for, or that reference is made through that structure to something that can at least be tentatively defined as nonmusical experience? F. You make the Fifth, and can doubtless make the Eroica — and of course the Pastoral, and even the first three movements of the Ninth — look as if they were so related. But doesn't that very linking of the stuff of music to nonmusical experience narrow the perspective of those pieces — drag them down into association with mere mundane event? 7. If you try to find Napoleon in the Eroica, or Robespierre in the Fifth, you will do just that. But it will be you who did it. That music is not "about" specific men or specific events. It is about heroism and Schicksal — concepts too big to be reduced to the dimension of individual persons or events. Yet, heroism and fate are meaningless words unless their origin is seen to be in event. Do you find the music, seen in that broader perspective, contaminated? F. Perhaps not. . . . But isn't that portion of the literature in which nonmusical experience is reflected a pretty small fraction of the whole body? Isn't the Well-tempered Clavier, and still more the Art of Fugue, purely abstract music? 7. Frankly, I don't think so — nor do you, or else you wouldn't speak 10

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

of one pure abstraction as being more abstract than another. But perhaps you are subconsciously qualifying that term. Etymologically, what is an abstraction? F. Mmmm . . . abstraho . . . to draw away . . . Then it means a drawing away from something — in the case of music, away from the world of ordinary experience? 7. That seems to be the sense in which you and the purists use it. But hasn't the word another meaning? What is an abstract? F. In law, I suppose it's a summary — of content. 7. Drawn out of that content? F. Obviously. 7. Then if we can find the something more we're looking for, mayn't this sense of the word — implying that the music is drawn out of nonmusical as well as musical experience — be much more applicable? F. Then you see the Well-tempered Clavier as drawn out of both? 7.1 do; and I suspect that your view is the same. Don't you often find the Preludes in that work appropriate to their Fugues? Yet you can hardly ever find even the slightest structural relation between them. How, then, will you account for the appropriateness? F. There's a similar tone that is obvious enough; but I'll have to admit that it isn't structural. 7. Then the Fugues have also a "tone"? And that tone also isn't structural? F. It seems to be in the structure but not of it. Of course, the Fugues are much more elaborately "structural" than the Preludes, and I can't always see their appropriateness to the Preludes; but it is sometimes striking. 7. In the Passions and the Cantatas there are hundreds of fugues, set to words. Do you find in that music any appropriateness to the verbal text? F. Well, I heard the B minor Mass for the third time, last month. I confess I hadn't paid much attention to the texts during the first two performances, but this time, when that incredible opening burst out, I think I saw what the words Kyrie eleison might mean to a man as deeply religious as Bach must have been. 7. A little contribution from environmental history? And what did you make of the huge fugue, set to the same two words, that follows? F. The tone wasn't the same, although it was still tremendously strong, and I was a little perplexed. And the second Kyrie eleison, although set ii

THE WHY OF MUSIC

to the same two words, was utterly different. But it did make a high musical contrast, both with the first Kyrie and the Christe eleison. Wasn't that what Bach was aiming at? /. In part, no doubt. But did it occur to you that the first Kyrie eleison was addressed to the First Person of the Trinity, and the second to the Third Person? F. I'm afraid it didn't. But I can see it now, and . . . well, . . . almost thou persuadest me. 7. It isn't I who am persuading you. It is Bach. You find in both pieces an appropriateness, if not to the immediate sense of two words, at least to two liturgical implications in them. Now go back to your Well-tempered Clavier — to textless and, as you thought, abstract music. Is that the music of a man abstracted from all worldly interest? F. I heard a group of "advanced" piano pupils play the whole First Book, not long ago, and they made it sound as if it were just that. But when I fumble through the music for myself, that's not the impression I get. The Prelude in E flat minor seems to me one of the most poetic musical ideas ever put on paper. 7. Oughtn't you, if you are an abstractionist, to have called it one of the purest of musical ideas? But do you really see it so? Is there not a man — perhaps BufFon's Vhonrme meme — a man with senses, affections, passions, somewhere implicit in that music? And does the music lose interest when it is seen as human? F. Mmmm . . . The Prelude is, isn't it, a kind of musing — on some sort of vision. I almost know what the vision is, it is so compelling; but when you try to embody it in some human substance, don't you reduce the dimension of it? 7. Its purely musical dimension? Possibly. But, conversely, don't you enlarge the dimension of the human substance that is capable of the vision? You ask what the musing is on — a question you didn't ask so long as the musing seemed embodied only in tone. But was it ever a purely musical vision? You say the piece seems a kind of musing — on something you can't quite define. If that musing were purely musical, wouldn't you know, through your own musical faculties alone, what it is on? Didn't the man, Bach, first see that human vision? And didn't he, through a very remarkable . . . perhaps transubstantiation is the word . . . embody it in tone so that you and I could at least glimpse it? 12

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

F. It seems so. But you still don't tell me what the musing was on. Can you answer that one? 7. Probably no better than you; but certainly not by looking at the structure of the music only. Perhaps it will help if we think for a moment of what the musing wasn't on. The vision wasn't of any concrete object? F. Certainly not. 7. Yet you found it a meaningful vision? F. Decidedly. 7. What sorts of things do you find meaning in? F. I suppose in the things I encounter, not only actually but vicariously: in the things I remember; in the things which — quite tautologically — have meaning for me. I. There are a good many of them? F. Myriads. 7. Then may not this vision, incorporeal as it is, have arisen out of some contemplation of the meaning — the possible import — of a host of concrete things? Of things ordinarily quite unrelated to one another but now suddenly undergoing a meaningful conjunction? Don't we similarly conjoin ordinary things to make not only ordinary but sometimes quite extraordinary sense out of them? But is that the only sense they possess? And have we, after all, anything else to make sense out of? F. Nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu"? * You do bring my vision down to earth. But I grant that you land it gently, and perhaps it isn't too deflated to rise again. 7.1 hope it isn't. But while it is on the ground, will you see how far structure, as you define it, will go toward accounting for the vision you get from that Prelude? It is a fairly homogeneous texture, so a few bars will do (Example i).

EXAMPLE I

F. I'm not much good at formal analysis, but I'll try. What I can see is a persistent, broad triple rhythm, which in prosody I think they call the Molossus. Above it, since the texture isn't really polyphonic, there's a * There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

rather rhapsodic melodic line. Perhaps it seems rhapsodic because it almost always moves by skip, instead of in the conjunct, step wise fashion of more lyrical melody. I suppose you can say that a rhapsodic style is suitable to the portrayal of a vision. The harmony, whether or not you would call the chords unusual, is somehow very suspenseful, but perhaps most of that suspense comes from the rhythm. Its long steps look heavy on the page, but in spite of the slow motion they're very elastic. But these things, however suggestive, don't add up to any vision. What have I left out? 7. Nothing, apparently, that is essential to structure — unless the tonal substance itself is essential. Doesn't structural analysis often ignore that substance? Doesn't it consider notes as disembodied pitches — tones in the abstract? You said you found the harmony suspenseful, and the rhythm also. Suspense is suggestive, but in the purely structural sense it suggests only resolution of the tension of discord or of incomplete musical period. Do you think a minuter analysis of structure would have accounted for your vision? Is structure as such suggestive of visions? Or does the structured thing, seen as thing rather than structure, suggest them? But that thing will then be more than a mere structure. F. It didn't to those advanced pupils who played the Well-tempered Clavier, although their performance set forth the structure very clearly. But neither is my vision in the mere tonal substance as such. And if you say, as you must, that it is somewhere in the structured tonal substance, aren't we right back where we began? 7. If all you still see is structure as such, and tonal substance as such, I think we are. All you see there is the What and the How of the music, not the Why. Doesn't your vision somehow embody the Why of the structure — its purpose? Isn't that purpose extra-structural? And instead of trying to describe purpose in terms of structure, oughtn't you rather to try to describe structure in terms of purpose? Of purpose that is possibly more than structural? F. If your more than structural purpose were more concrete, I'd have to agree. But the tangible stuff of music, which is tone, has no generally accepted implications that lead outside the field of purely musical contemplation. Of course, you can make representative noises out of tone. My Mary Ellen, when she was three or four, found out how to hold down the "loud" pedal of the piano and at the same time rumble her little *4

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

fists on the bass notes. It made, for her, electrifying thunder, but it wasn't music. 7. Aren't you assuming that the only possible reference to the concrete experience out of which, I think we agreed, most of our visions are generated, must be through the representation of literal facts of such experience? Everybody will agree that music can't do that. Yet you found a vision in the E flat minor Prelude. Was that a vision of concrete fact? F. Certainly not. But doesn't that illustrate and even establish my point? 7. Does it? Was your vision, then, just a tonal apparition? F. If it had been, I suppose the dull performance would have evoked it — faintly, at any rate. There wasn't any real vision there. 7. Are you suggesting, then, that visions come from competent manners of performance, rather than from the performed music itself? F. I got my vision of the Prelude, one day, with my own clumsy fingers, so that can't be true. But I got it out of the music, so it must be somewhere in the music. 7. Doesn't that illustrate and even establish my point? F. It seems to establish your "something more" as a possibility, but it doesn't go very far toward defining it. 7. Do you expect that definition to be easy? It has taken us a long time even to establish that the something exists, but we've at least learned a little about what to look for, and where to find it. Shall we go on hunting? F. If it's in the music there must be a way of finding it. I suppose it is, really, just what the noble army sees when it calls music the language of the emotions; and that notion has persisted long enough so that there must be something in it. The word language, if it implies an organized verbal structure, doesn't seem too far off the beam, for the phrases and sentences of music do resemble, in pattern, those of language. But if that word implies the sort of communication that language conveys, everybody would call the analogy false. There just aren't any "words" in music, and its process of communication must be altogether different. You've pretty well convinced me that music does — or at any rate can — somehow relate to things: to facts of experience that don't seem to be either portrayed or symbolized in notes. But if the something more we've glimpsed — I suppose we've hardly done more — is that sort of communication, haven't we got to find out not only what that something is but 15

THE WHY OF MUSIC

also how it is conveyed? And if that is what we're to hunt for, I'm eager to begin. /. You are looking pretty far ahead, but I think you're right. But hadn't we better try to find out more about the something, before we try to see the process by which it is communicated? Mull it over, and let's see what we come up with.

16

"SOMETHING MORE"

FOUND my friend's last questions stimulating. They were common-sense questions which, if we were to get on at all with our problem of finding a solider basis for criticism, had to be answered. Yet the answers, as he saw, were not simple, and I wondered how he had got on with them. I could see that he had found them perplexing, for he was hardly inside my door, on our next day together, when he began: F. Your "something more" still seems fairly clear — especially in the two Kyries. I found time to go over my score of the Mass, and I could see that they might well have been addressed, as you said, to the First and the Third Persons of the Trinity. Indeed, those two Persons — of course as Bach saw them — seemed to be in the music and even portrayed by it, even though any notion of a physical resemblance was out of the question. But I still can't describe what I saw, any more than I can describe the "vision" I got from the E flat minor Prelude. /. Need you be disturbed by that vagueness? Isn't your certainty that you saw more than purely musical meaning in the music enough to go on with, at least for the moment? F. I'm convinced that I saw something more than music. But the words — and your hint of their reference — defined the "objects" of the two Kyries, and I can't tell whether it was the words or the music that really conveyed the more than musical meaning. /. Wasn't your "vision," evoked by the Prelude, considerably like your impression of the Persons? That title certainly doesn't suggest more than musical meaning.

I

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

F. I see that, and if I didn't, I think I'd doubt the reality of my visions. I don't doubt it, even though I can't explain them. And if you're contending that your musically illiterate Major saw anything like that vision in Hark, Hark! The Lark, I'm still more puzzled. /. Do you think you got a vision from Bach because you, by comparison with the Major, are musically learned? If so, just what did your learning contribute to your vision? You agreed that something more than musical structure must have evoked it. May not my Major — and your noble army — be capable of glimpsing it? Indeed, if they can't, would there be any noble army? F. Perhaps not, although I'm not so sure. . . . Of course, the vision in the Lark, if there is one, is very different. 7. But you'll agree that he had one? F. I'll take your word for it, although I still suspect he was lit up by nothing more than musical charm. /. Then I take it that you, also, find the Lark charming? F. Of course, although the charm, especially of Liszt's arrangement, has somewhat faded — just why, I don't know. It seems somehow overdone—too ornamental. The song has the same real lilt, but that lilt is . . . well . . . intrinsic. 7. And you think the Major responded only to the ornament? F. That's about it. 7. But, granting the excess of ornament, isn't the lilt also intrinsic to it? And do you think the Major responded only to the excess? F. Mmmm . . . The excess grew out of the lilt, and while he was charmed, I'm sure, by the ornament (and so was I), he must have felt the lilt, too. 7. Then, if we pretend to be critics, oughtn't we to make the discrimination between lilt and ornament? If you think of the song, do you find any excess? And if you don't (and I'll assume that you won't), just what do you find in the song that, like the lilt, is more than merely charming? Weren't there really three contributors to the piece as the Major heard it — Schubert, Liszt, and the pianist? Mustn't you take all three into account? F. Weren't there four? Aren't you forgetting Shakespeare? 7.1 am, inexcusably; for he was possibly the main one — the instigator, certainly, of Schubert's "vision," and probably of the Major's —and yours and mine. 18

S O M E T H I N G MORE

F. Do you suppose the Major knew the poem? * 7.1 doubt it, and I should have doubted, before I saw his eye gleam, that he was capable of responding to Schubert's vision of it. I doubt, also, that Schubert saw the poem as Shakespeare intended. It is, as I think Cloten called it in the play, a "conceited" thing — "conceived," that is, in a vein of somewhat strained poetic imagery that isn't immediately suggestive of music. But there's no conceit in those winking Mary-buds. Even when you think only of the words, don't they "send" you, musically"? I'm sure, from the modulation Schubert makes when he begins to sing of them, that they sent him, too.

EXAMPLE 2

F. Are the Mary-buds, then, your vision — your "something more"? I don't think those buds are portrayed in the music, any more than the flying, singing lark, or Heaven's gate, or Phoebus' steeds, drinking at their uncommonly tiny watering trough. 7. None of those things is portrayed, as you call it, and to hunt for such a portrayal would only lead us off the track. But the modulation does send you? F. I get a twinge from it. But isn't that a fairly common "change" — to the key of the flatted 6th of the scale? I get that same twinge whenever I hear the change, and it certainly has no direct implication of Marybuds in it. 7. There you go again, hunting for just what we said you couldn't find — a literal portrayal. The twinge is common, and I'm sure it evokes a gen* In case you have forgotten it, here is the text: Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chalic'd flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes; With every thing that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise; Arise, arise! (The harmonic "change" is sketched at bar 3 of Example 2.)

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

erally similar response, just as does the augmented 6th chord — especially with Schubert, who uses it almost like a leitmotiv for pain. You get a twinge from this flatted submediant chord. Is it painful, like that from the augmented 6th? F. Definitely not. 7. Then what sort of twinge is it? Hasn't it as definite an implication as the augmented 6th, which you'll agree implies some sort of pain? F. In general, I think I should call it warm. 7. The very word I should have used. I could find a hundred instances to which we should have given the same response. Don't you find something of the same twinge in the verbal suggestion of the buds —not merely as buds, but as opening their eyes? Aren't they responding to warmth — yielding to it? Isn't that the implication you get here —the sense, rather than the image, of a kind of embrace? F. I see that you can interpret both words and music so, but it seems rather farfetched. 7. Suppose yourself the performer. It is your business to evoke the vision, if there is one. Will you play this passage in the same manner as the music that leads up to it? Hasn't the modulation, in itself, a warmth which it would be an offense to the music not to realize? F. The music demands, because it provides, a new color at that point. But mayn't that color be a purely musical delight? 7. It is certainly a musical delight, but is it purely musical? It is appropriate, isn't it, to the yielding of the eye-opening buds? I postulate only warmth as positively characteristic of the modulation; but it comes in precisely with the verbal image of the buds, and in conjunction with that image doesn't the warmth become enriched? You can't deny the conjunction, but isn't it the real why of the modulation's appearance there? Don't forget that the song is really an Aubade — a plea that my lady sweet may also open her eyes — to the singer's warmth. F. Mmmm . . . You think, then, that you're explaining structure in terms of purpose — of nonstructural purpose? It seems so here, but we haven't said a word about the beginning of the piece. If there is a nonstructural purpose here, mustn't there have been one there? Or can you deduce it, somehow, from this particular passage? Isn't there rather, for the whole piece, a purely musical purpose, originally structural, to which this passage is merely incidental? 7. Originally structural? What started Schubert off if it wasn't the 20

"SOMETHING MORE" poem? And if that was the origin, wasn't the whole structure incidental to it? As you and I now speak, in English sentences, isn't it essentially our purpose to utter the thought —to project the image —that is in our minds? Doesn't the substance of that thought — the image of the thing we're talking about —govern both our choice of words and their arrangement into sentences? F. Of course. But except for syntactical coherence, which we all expect, I don't have any model of structure to which I try to make my sentences conform. If I were a poet — if I had such a model — mightn't the substance of my thought (which needn't be very weighty) be shaped in accordance with it, and thus be really incidental? 7. It might. When I was a boy there was a current passion — perhaps kindled by one Elbert Hubbard — for what I might call sentences suitable for framing. Their model was the frame, for they certainly weren't weighty. I think the fashion spread to the framing of some sentences from the English Bible, whose model wasn't a frame, but whose weight seemed, in those days, appropriately emphasized by the frame. Do you think the scholars who made that marvelous translation were primarily concerned with sentence-structure and verbal sonorities? F. I suppose not, and I can see that, under sufficient pressure, it might be the same with the composer of music. But if this "something more," which I begin vaguely to see as a nonmusical image, really is, or at any rate provides, the purpose of the musical utterance, what becomes of the vision of beauty itself — of the purpose to create a beautiful thing? 7. Mmmm . . . We haven't said a word about beauty, so far, and yet that is the common name for the quality or the value first sought for in almost any work of art. But I think we haven't spoken of it because we don't know what it is. The Major said the Lark is "pretty" — probably because beautiful was for him too "expensive" a word. You think his word implied no more than sensuous pleasure, which you say you wouldn't equate with beauty. We shall perhaps have to tussle with that word, some day, and I'm afraid we'll both be in for a fall. . . . But we were talking about the translators. Were they trying to make the verbal image — the sense they had to convey — beautiful, or were they trying to put beauty into the sense they had to convey? F. The answer is obvious, but I don't think your example is really typical of the artist's problem. He isn't a translator, he's a creator. 7. Of beauty merely? I thought you had begun to see our "something 21

THE WHY OF MUSIC

more" as an image of nonmusical experience — an image which the artist is, in the better sense of the word, beautifying. If so, he has two objectives — to evoke his image and to beautify it. Are those two aims so different from each other that they can't be fused? I'm not insisting that the nonmusical image must be kept so far in the foreground as to override or impair the image of beauty. I'm only saying that in what I call good music — and if I knew enough about the other arts, I think I should say, in all good art — the two are fused. You will probably defend the claim of music to sisterhood with the other arts. Could music sustain that claim unless it pursued both purposes? F. Mmmm . . . Aren't you really defending program music? 7. Not the rather garish examples of it that you probably have in mind as you ask that question. But, contrariwise, are you not contending that music has no relation to significant experience? F. Not after what we've found in the Kyries. I'm only contending that it can't portray, as program music tries to do, the objects —the facts themselves — of significant experience. /. Haven't we already agreed that it can't? Schubert didn't literally portray any single object named in the poem —not even the marigolds, whose mention "sent" us both. At that moment we both get from the music alone an implication of warmth — one which amplifies itself for me, and apparently for you, into an awareness which I verbalize as yielding. That word isn't adequate, and I had to qualify it a good deal to make it even intelligible as a description of the image the music evokes; but the feel of it was there from the beginning, and I'm sure I should be much less interested in the music than I am if I got no such implication from it. F. Then your "something more" is not a structural fact but an implication possibly resident in structural fact? And you expect the noble army to catch such implications? 7. It is an implication, which must be either resident in or derivable from structural fact. My image of yielding, as you said, is not intrinsic in the modulation to the flat submediant. For the sensitive ear, I think the sense of warmth is intrinsic; but I don't even know just how sensitive an ear must be to perceive that warmth. The notion — the image — of yielding is probably mostly derived from the poem, although the poem hints only circuitously at that notion, so that it is there implied, rather than directly suggested. But the music, being capable of intrinsic warmth, augments that suggestion so much that the whole verbal image is made 22

"SOMETHING MORE" to blush with it; and I think the notion of yielding is a fairly direct inference from the warmth. F. And you expect the common soldier in the noble army to be capable of that pretty remote deduction? 7. Do you think that soldier doesn't know what yielding is? Hasn't he, if he is alive at all, lived a thousand varieties and intensities of that experience? How many of them can be conveyed by that mere quirk of the lips which we call a smile? How rapid and how far-reaching is your own inference from such a gesture? And if its most conspicuous characteristic is warmth, is your deduction, as you call it, so remote? F. Your own deduction seems to me pretty strained. The "face" of music, to common vision, doesn't very closely resemble a human face, and while its "gestures," as you call them, can be seen as smiles or frowns, I think the world looks to music for what it calls a beautiful face, and doesn't much bother about the gestures. 7. You admit that the gestures may be there] and if they really spring, as smiles and frowns do, from what may be significant inner workings of mind and feeling, isn't it the business of criticism to interpret those gestures? And if your noble army has any skill at all in interpretation, oughtn't that skill to be cultivated rather than minimized by attention to the prettiness of the face? F. Human faces in repose show as much character as when they are animated by emotion. Don't you see that character as design? And if the musical face shows fineness of design in itself, need it grin or scowl to emphasize that interest? 7. The main features of design, seen in the bony structure of human faces, are, I suppose, inherited; but don't those faces reflect the sharp impacts of experience as well as their hereditary origin? And can't that be also true of the musical design? F. I suppose it may, to sensitive ears. But even the physical gesture might be misinterpreted, and the musical one seems to me much more precarious. If the implication isn't caught, or a wrong implication is attributed to the design, won't the hearer be led into a false estimate of its purpose? 7. If the implication is there, but isn't caught, the only perceived value — the only basis for critical judgment —will be the design. But will that judgment be any sounder than one that is based on a misinterpreted im2

3

THE WHY OF MUSIC

plication? Go back to your student performance of the Well-tempered Clavier. Was it bad because the design was badly projected? F. The themes, in the fugues, were almost always in the foreground, and the other voices were clear. I suppose that means that the designs were clearly projected. But everybody I talked to after the performance thought it was dry and unmusical. One student, though —the one I thought the best — seemed at times to be trying to play musically, but to be hampered by something. Maybe that something was a restriction imposed by his teacher. (I know the chap. He has a tremendous technique, but frankly, I don't think him very musical.) /. The E flat minor Prelude, I should think, must have disappointed you extremely. F. The "good" student played it, so it wasn't so bad. 7. You found something like your vision in it? F. I thought he had, largely, the same idea as mine, only it didn't come off. /. Then is it possible that what you call musicality in performance is the projection —whether it is the intended one or not — of some sort of vision? And is that a vision of design only? F. Well, I heard one of our local pianists, one day, play the F minor Prelude and Fugue as if Chopin had been the composer. I don't know which was worse, his performance or the pupils'; but he did play a Chopin group musically. But didn't he just misunderstand Bach's style, whereas he understood Chopin's? 7. Where did Bach and Chopin get their styles? Out of rule books? Wasn't that where your "advanced" pupils got theirs? Both composers were, of course, "musical" — in the sense of native aural and technical gift. But didn't each speak in the musical idiom of his own day, only with a vast enlargement of it which their native gift made possible? Was their individuality — their personal idiom —earned (for it was the fruit of work) only by cultivating the plot of talent that each had inherited, without fertilization from the outside world? Or was their effort directed toward that world, as a contribution not merely to its delight but to its understanding? F. I'm quite sure that pianist thinks music was intended only to offer tonal delight. 7. But you knew better. How did you know? Were you judging from some preconceived notion of style, borrowed from someone whom you 2

4

"SOMETHING MORE" thought a better judge than yourself? Didn't you find—perhaps by what you will call intuition — that the real implication of the music wasn't conveyed? Or can you explain your certainty by reference to some misinterpretation of the style as style and the texture as texture1? The pupils played, you thought, unmusically. He played Bach musically, but still wrongly. It seems to me that this word musical, invoked to describe certain manners of performance, is really an evasion of the critical problem. Hasn't musicality itself got to be explained? and possibly by reference to our "something more"? F. What a spate of questions! But I gather that you hold what we ordinarily call musicality to be "something more" than the mere sensibility to tonal appeal and the interest of structure? 7. If you'll give me the right to take later exception to my own words, I think I'll agree. That "mere sensibility" is of course essential, and I don't know just where the something more comes in, or what it adds. Musicality becomes evident pretty early. I remember once hearing my little daughter, who sang all day about the house, burst out with a long strain of improvised melody that I would now give a good deal to have been able to write down and preserve. I was too astonished to do that, but I'll bet there was a loud gleam in my eye. She was then about five years old. I can't suppose she "constructed" that melody out of acquired structural knowledge, and it had for me implications inconceivable to her. Just the same, she made that music, and she was no more than five. She must have been imitating something, but this was too spontaneous to have been mere imitation. . . . Yes. I do think the something more was there, for her and me and I don't know how many others. F. My little Mary Ellen makes up things at the piano that are comparable. She finds coherent phrases of melody and harmonizes them, sometimes quite strangely but with assurance that she's right. I suppose she gets her harmonies from the little pieces she has been taught to play, but they're not precisely those harmonies. I stand agape when I hear her. I see that she is absorbed, when she's improvising, far more deeply than when she plays her learned pieces, and what she's absorbed in seems to be something very like the vision I got when I fumbled through the Bach Prelude. And I think she loves that piece as much as I do. ... Do you suppose her vision of it is anything like mine? She's only nine, but she is musical. /. Bach made his Inventions for beginners at the keyboard, and he 2

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

wasn't talking down to them. The F minor three-part Invention is a pretty elaborate example of triple counterpoint, but it is also, for any mature musical mind, an adventure into regions of the imagination as deep as your Prelude is lofty. I am sure he intended that piece not merely to teach his pupils what triple counterpoint was, but to show what could be done with it imaginatively. But if there isn't something more than music-making in that piece, I'm hopelessly deluded. And there are many other adventures of that kind in the collection. F. Mary Ellen began to study the first one in two parts for her last lesson. Her teacher showed her, and she showed me, how almost the whole piece was made out of the little phrase it begins with, but she shapes that little phrase, intuitively, so that it sings, and she's delighted with the piece. She's fascinated with the reappearances of the pattern, and can see both its inversion and the augmentation of its first four notes. In fact, she has learned those big words and sees what they mean. But what she does with the phrases, although it is patternmaking, is "something more" than that; and while I can't define the something, I'm pretty well convinced that it exists. Do you think a sharper definition is possible? /. If we go on thinking of it as a mere something, I'm afraid it won't be. But haven't we fairly well determined, not only that it exists, but that it is a reference — no matter how obscure — to nonmusical experience? F. I certainly don't see any external experience to which that Invention can imaginably refer. But I also see that all the features of the structure could be made clearly audible without the musicality she puts into them. Therefore, I suppose you can say, there is something more than structure there. But you could also say that structure itself is something more than is nominated in the usual definition of that word. /. Is your idea of structure any more than an idea of pattern? And isn't the structured thing — this Invention, for example —more than its pattern? F. You mean, I suppose, that your something more is contained in the structured thing. But just what is it? Where, in the musical substance am I to look for it? Has it a shape? And how, if it isn't a fact of pure structure, do I grasp the intimation it offers? For you are supposing the conveyance of a recognizable reference to experience while at the same time xv and just how that is to be accomplished is more than I can see. 7. Then let's go over, for a minute, what we think we've already found. 26

"SOMETHING MORE" Maybe the answers to your questions will turn up if we look at our examples from a somewhat different angle. You saw, in the Kyries, intimations of the Persons, and in your Bach Prelude something you called a Vision. Were those Persons, or the "object" of your vision, factually portrayed? F. They couldn't be. They aren't factual or objective realities. 7. Then what characteristic of them was portrayed? F. I suppose you want me to say it was the way I feel about them. But is that a characteristic of them? I should think it's a characteristic of me. I. Isn't the way you think about anything your way of thinking — your vision — of that thing? And isn't the way you feel about that thing a characteristic of your way of thinking about it? and, correspondingly, a characteristic of that thing as you think about it? Are the Persons, as you see them in the Kyries, the mere theological figments of the imagination they may appear if you think of them "realistically"? Are the marigolds, similarly, just flowers? F. You seem, by insisting on this feeling aspect of thinking, to be suggesting that not only music but all our means of communication may be seen as the language of the emotions. 7.1 don't think the notion is wholly absurd. Isn't your interest, in anything whatever, also an emotional attitude toward that thing? Isn't there such a thing as a passion for scientific truth? And is the idea (or the image) of Science, for the scientist, wholly unlike the idea (or the image) of the Third Person, for the theologian? F. Probably not, but the resemblance is certainly remote. I don't think I see what you're driving at. 7. As imagined "objects," Science and the Holy Ghost are, at the least, very unlike. But the scientist believes in Science, just as the theologian believes in the Holy Ghost; and belief — because it isn't absolute certainty—is an emotional attitude toward the object of belief. The believer, whether scientist or theologian, can't see the object of his belief otherwise than in the perspective of his belief; his image of that object must therefore be colored by his emotion; and language, to communicate that image adequately, must in some degree be the language of emotion. F. That seems true enough, but what has it to do with music? 7. Isn't it true of our images of common things as well as of abstruse or abstract objects such as Science and the Trinity? And isn't your feeling — your emotional attitude — toward any of those common things appropri2

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

ate to the thing itself? In fact, when you look closely at your image of anything of consequence — an image which you fondly "believe" to be quite factual — isn't your feeling toward it a "something more" such as we've been looking for in music? F. Your analogy is interesting, anyhow, but whether it will hold is still a question. You find, credibly enough, a "something more" than objective fact in my mental image of a simple factual experience. That something is an emotion — or at any rate, an emotional attitude toward the experience. You've suggested, rather less credibly, that there is a "something more" in music than the sensuous appeal of the tonal stuff and the interest of its structure. Now you seem to be saying that these two somethings are not only analogous but are actually related. Can you demonstrate that relation? 7. For myself, to a considerable extent, I think I can. Whether my demonstration will satisfy you is a question which only you can answer. But from what we've found today it looks, doesn't it, as if the something more in music were an image — perhaps, rather, an awareness — not of the facts of experience but of their significance: a significance which, for him who encounters the fact, takes the shape of an emotional attitude toward the fact? F. Compared to the mental image of fact, the emotional attitude toward it looks too obscure to be formed into an image. But we certainly do discriminate the facts of experience as significant or insignificant, and I can see that significance, perceived, can take the shape of emotion. In fact, an emotional attitude is, in a way, an immediate inference as to the consequences that may follow or accrue from the fact. But if you can't portray facts in music, you haven't anything to draw inferences from. I. Haven't you? Assume that our something more is a portrayal of the emotion an experience arouses. If, as I think we agreed, your emotion is appropriate to the significance you found in the experience itself, isn't that feeling a part of your whole image of the experience? And mayn't you then, with some confidence, infer from the portrayal what sort of experience aroused that sort of emotion? Didn't we, with the two Kyries, infer from the feeling-character they portrayed, that the two Persons were the "objects" of that feeling? F. I suppose we did. . . . It's rather a backforemost inference, isn't it? It moves from feeling backward to fact instead of from fact forward to feeling. 28

SOMETHING MORE

7. Precisely; but it isn't always so difficult as that one. You will instantly distinguish a dirge from a dance. How else than by such an inference will you distinguish them? Those two words dirge and dance alone suggest in themselves two very different sorts of experience, but the music, if it is at all appropriate, will define those words better than the dictionary can. For the music will portray the depth of the experience. F. When you once see the inference it doesn't seem obscure, and I can see that I have been drawing exactly such inferences without realizing what I was doing, or how much they contributed to my whole interest in the music. But must there not be a method behind such inference — a readjusted focus of the musical attention? For if you draw your inference from the music, there must be features of the music that suggest the inference? 7. It's a question, isn't it, of the image your mind forms of music — of the tonally appealing substance that is shaped, by what you call laws of structure, into interesting, and hence significant, forms. What you first saw was what Clive Bell used to call "significant form." He couldn't, and I think we've found that we can't, account for all the significance we find in art by reference to structure alone. Yet your method of analysis, pursued to its limit, will take account of every note in the musical structure, just as your parsing of an English sentence will take account of every word in the sentence. For the purpose of verbal analysis you classify words as "parts of speech," and show the grammatical relation between them as a pattern of structure. But words, as we use them, are "something more" than parts of speech. They're symbols for things and acts and for their qualities and their relations; and, since experience is initially an encounter with things and acts, it would be more sensible to describe words, in their communicative purpose, as the "parts of experience." Mayn't notes, although they aren't symbols, perform the same function? F. I can see that they did just that in the Kyries, and in my E flat minor Prelude, and even in the Lark, but I can't see how they did it. Notes, as you said, aren't symbols, nor is the emotion they communicate divisible into parts that symbols could stand for. It's just a kind of suffusion that colors the whole image of experience. My kind of structural analysis can't account for that kind of suffusion. But can any imaginable analysis account for it? 7. We certainly haven't found one, yet. But if the communication occurs there must be some sort of process behind it. I think we're agreed 29

THE WHY OF MUSIC

that the communication is possible, and we've formed a vague notion of what that communication is; but we still don't know what it is, beyond saying that it is somehow related to nonmusical experience. Your image of music as structure seems clearly insufficient. We've got to redefine that image somehow. I think that's the thing to begin with, rather than the process of communication. See what you can make of it for next time. F. I'll try, but I'm afraid I won't come up with much. I suppose I've got too many remnants of my absolutist notions in my head. Rectifying a perspective on a thing as nebulous as this is something of a problem!

3°

THE MUSICAL IMAGE

Y FRIEND, next day, came rather slowly up the

M

steps to my door, and I judged from his gait that he was still puzzling over the questions we had raised. So

I asked him: /. Well, how did you get on with the musical image? F. Not too well; but I think I found, on the way here, what the trouble was. I kept looking for an image of fact, although it was quite clear from our conversation last day that if the music offered any nonmusical image at all it could only be an image of feeling. I'm quite capable of emotion, in response to or along with almost any sort of factual experience; but the notion of feeling itself, imaged apart from the circumstance that arouses it, is hard to keep in focus. You said, I'm sure quite rightly, that the factual circumstance underlying the Why of a musical idea could only be imagined by a kind of backforemost inference from the portrayed emotion. But I'm afraid my mind won't work backwards. /. Didn't it work backwards when you got from the Kyries your inference as to the Persons addressed in the music? F. I didn't get them. You got them for me. 7. No, I didn't. I merely showed you they were implied, and I perhaps identified them more sharply than you would have done; but from the merest hint of their presence you saw them for yourself, with your own imaginative eyes. I don't think you could have seen them if they hadn't been there; and I'm sure your mind worked backwards to find them. You had only to look at the music in another perspective than that to which 31

THE WHY OF MUSIC

you were accustomed. And I think your noble army's mind is equally capable, at least of that sort of inference, if not precisely of that rather obscure one. Is there any essential difference between that inference and the simpler one that instantly distinguishes a dirge from a dance? And isn't it precisely that discrimination, however infantile it may appear, that makes your army an army and not a rabble? F. It could do with some better officers. Concert audiences — regiments on parade, if you like — often behave like a rabble. But if you think of it as an army, what is its objective —its "enemy" —if you can pursue the figure that far? /. Mmmm . . . Did you ever hear a musical performance that was greeted, not with immediate applause, but with a long interval of stunned silence before the applause began? And can you remember the tone of the applause when it finally burst out? I think that both the silence and the noise celebrated a kind of victory; and I think that army's "enemy" was something like the mystery I suppose every man sometimes stops short to wonder about —the mystery of how he got here and what it means to be made of dust and still to be alive. Of course, you don't make any treaty of peace with that mysterious enemy, but even a momentary victory is heartening. And when you remember that it was celebrated by a lot of very common soldiers, you wonder how far intellectuality is likely to contribute to the treaty you hope for. F. That does make the army look less like a rabble. . . . But if, on occasion, the enemy is actually faced, and by every one of the silenced listeners, then there must be some process of suggestion or portrayal, capable of working in musically sensitive minds, that makes the mystery (your "enemy") recognizable. Is the image we're supposed to be looking for today an image of that mystery, or some feature of it? And can we find out how such an image may be portrayed? I know we're speaking in figures, and probably confusing ourselves with them; but the figure does give a glimpse of the image. 7. The mystery is implied, I think, in the image, but we won't get very far if we attempt to draw it as a mystery. We see it in and through ordinary experience, and we found, last day, that music might portray one aspect of experience — the emotional attitude we take toward it. It is through experience, isn't it, that we get our notion of the mystery? And we'd better stick to the common ground of it, else, flying too high like Icarus, we may melt the wax on our wings. . . . You thought, at first, 32

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that structure and substance as you saw them yielded the only really tangible image. We found something more in that image. Therefore your image was deficient. We're trying to find out just where it was deficient. If we look again at your former image, in the light of what we've found, we may be able to spot the deficiency. Your image consisted only of tonal substance and structure. Let's look at the substance, as you saw it. Can you describe it? F. Well, they taught us in school that the elements of music were melody, harmony, and rhythm. But melody and harmony are already musical structures, not elements. They're made of tone, and I should think tone —the only really tangible musical substance —is properly an elemental substance of music. 7. I'm sure you're right, there. But you thought of music as abstract — as "pure." Is tone, as musicians produce it, pure — as an element surely ought to be? F. It's of course a composite of fundamental and partial vibrations. What the physicist calls a pure tone has no partials. But neither voices nor instruments can produce such a tone, and I'm sure nobody would like to see a choir of tuning forks substituted for the strings in our orchestras. There would be no color, no warmth, no sweetness. 7. You mean, then, that color or warmth or sweetness are essential to musical tone. But how do you recognize sweetness in a tone? Do you put it on your tongue? Do you see its color with your eyes, or feel its warmth on your skin? F. Those terms are of course figurative, but they do describe qualities of tone as the ear discriminates them. 7. They do, indeed, and many in the noble army may be as sensitive to them as is the trained musician. But if you apprehend a musical tone, merely as a tone and without any structural relation, as implying or conveying or exciting sensation which only tongue or eyes or skin can actually feel, aren't you already — before you have anything but the bare tonal element of music — going outside the frame of purely musical reference into fields of nonmusical experience? F. Undoubtedly; but you're not going very far, and your tonal impression is still mainly musical. You'll have to amplify those suggestions a lot before you get any real hint of nonmusical experience out of them. Do you draw any significant inference from the whiteness of a white house, or the brownness of a brown one? 33

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7. Enough, I think, to note that the color is appropriate to the whole design of the house as a place to live in — or is inappropriate, which will be more noticeable. I only meant to show that there is extramusical reference in the tonal stuff of music, even before it is made into music. And I think you'll find a similar suggestion in the bare stuff of your other musical element, rhythm. How do you define rhythm? F. In general, I should think it's a pattern of motion — or perhaps motion in a pattern is better. Or just patterned motion. /. Any of your definitions will do, I think, for our purpose. In music, I take it, you see the tonal stuff as in motion. Is that motion purely musical? F. Mmmm . . . I rather think the pattern of musical rhythm is purely musical; but the fact of motion suggested by that pattern isn't necessarily musical at all. You see the fact in any moving body. But, come to think of it, the tonal substance isn't a physical body, so that I suppose our notion — our image — of musical rhythm is only figurative. . . . But doesn't that very fact make it purely musical? And even if you see it as real, must you take it as a reference to extramusical experience? 7. Whether you take it so or not is for you to decide. If you insist on a reference to actual, physical manifestations of motion, you will very likely go far beyond the average listener's imagery. The music represents a motion-impulse, not the physical achievement of that impulse. But the portrayal of that impulse can be very vivid, and if it does lead you outside the purely musical region — and you just admitted that it might do that — then it is no longer purely musical. You said that motion is a function of any physical body, and it is obviously a function of our own human bodies. Mayn't tone, in motion, which without motion stimulated imaginary visual and tactual and gustatory sensation, make your limbs, real or imaginal, enact motor impulses? F. Imaginal limbs? What are they? 7. Haven't you ever "walked on air"? If your noble army discriminates a dirge from a dance, doesn't it do so, at least in part, by sensing the speed and weight and energy — and consequently the purpose — of musically represented rhythmic steps? F. I suppose one does sense such things . . . and also the tensions you feel in harmony, and in melody that aims at a climax. But . . . 7. But are these a valid ground for inference? Wait and see. Those tensions, which you think you enjoy as tensions merely, are more numerous 34

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and more subtle than you think. Melody, for instance, must go either up or down; but in that simple fact the rhythmic impulse is given a direction which the rhythm itself doesn't indicate, but which may add a lot to the purposefulness of the rhythm. You just said that melody "aimed" at a climax. Can you think of a musical climax that isn't attained by upward melodic or harmonic progression — perhaps intensified by a contrary, downward progression of the bass? F. I can't remember any. The contrary motion of the top and the bottom in the closing subject of the Pathetique sonata illustrates your point. But, come to think of it, that up and down direction is just as fictitious as the motion of the musical "body." High tones aren't any farther from the ground than low tones. They only sound as if they were. /. And everybody sees them so, and that image of space helps to make the rhythmic illusion compelling. But the goal of melodic motion isn't merely a higher or lower note. There's another sort of tonal suggestion that is much more intense. You were looking at it when you spoke of the tensions of harmony; but even those tensions wouldn't be so tight as they are if it weren't for tonality. Play up the C-scale from C to B and stop there. You will say the B wants to go to C. It doesn't, but you want it to, and the whole implication of tonality — of a keynote that governs all the notes in its scale — is well illustrated in that one progression. But that keynote has more tentacles than an octopus, and the "pulls" of discord to concord are all felt in the perspective, as you might say, of tonality. We needn't catalogue them. They're wholly familiar, and you may, of course, see all of them as purely musical tensions and relaxations. But I think my Major's astonishment came from a vague realization that they were the counterparts of tensions he had felt in his own body; and I think your noble army senses them in the same way. F. I can see that the implications of bodily tension are there, and they're obvious in your dirges and dances. In fact, they're really representative. But you're surely not trying to make out that music is a representative art? The patterns of musical structure — sonatas and fugues and variations — don't represent anything. And as the intricacy of those patterns increases, won't you soon reach a level where the literal implications are submerged in a higher structural interest? 7.1 wonder. We've nearly lost sight of the musical image we were supposed to be hunting for, but I think your question about music as a representative art may put us on the track of it again, and I'll answer that ques35

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tion directly. I do think music — great music — may be seen as a representative art. And I'll go even farther. I doubt that the whole value of that music can be grasped if its representative suggestions are ignored. But I'm not saying that music represents the things —the literal facts —of extramusical experience. The musical image is, first of all, a musical image — that of an organized tonal body. I think we agreed that it was also something more than that. We've found many implications of motion and tension in music that resemble the bodily behaviors of men. Isn't that resemblance possibly visible as representation? Aren't the motions and tensions of a dirge or a dance those tensions and motion-impulses which men feel as appropriate to the occasions they celebrate with dirges or dances? Those two words imply two very different sorts of occasion. Doesn't the music also imply them — far more vividly than the words do? F. I've agreed to all that. But you don't answer my question as to the submerging of that implication in more highly organized music. /. Don't I? Doesn't experience itself also rise to what you call higher levels of intricacy? And may not your more elaborate or abstruse musical structures be designed in such a way that the implications of their tensions and rhythms haven't been submerged in purely musical interest? Mightn't I, perhaps a little mischievously, call yours a "merely" musical, instead of a "purely" musical apprehension of this higher interest? F. Perhaps. But if you carry your implications so far as to turn them into stories — the kind of stories the noble army loves — I might retaliate by calling yours the "mere" interest of a musical gossip. /. If I go that far, I shan't object. All I'm asking now is your recognition that the tensions may be legitimately interpreted as those of extramusical experience. Mayn't our musical image be, to the extent of that legitimate reference, an extramusical image? F. It may be, of course, and I must admit that when such a factor appears in the image —as it does in the Kyries — the interest in what I thought of as pure form is enhanced. It looks as if what I was seeing — and had been taught to see — as musical form was only the skeleton of form. Your view of the image does put flesh on its bones. Just the same, that skeletal pattern is discernible under the flesh, and it's essential to the structure. And there's a lot of structural function even in the flesh you put on it. 7. If there weren't there would be but slim grounds for anything more than sensuous interest in music — to say nothing of the inferences I'm 3