Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/591

 the imperial freedom of Bach. Division into distinct movements was less obligatory, and within movements the old rigidity of plan was more and more thrown aside. Development was determined by impulse or some dramatic plan rather than by the fixed regimen of sonata-form. Although Wagner was probably the most original thinker in this new movement, Liszt became its most conspicuous leader. It was on the basis of the latter's work that the 'New-German' school rested.

But closely connected with the whole work of Wagner and Liszt was another tendency, essentially radical in nature, though unable to proceed alone. This was the movement of the so-called 'colorists' or impressionists. Here the Frenchman Berlioz was an energetic leader. His style was evolved from a novel regard for the expressive capacity of tone-qualities or timbres as compared with that of tone-patterns. Berlioz himself was not eminent in melodic or harmonic invention, but he had a remarkable instinct in perceiving and utilizing the powers of orchestral instruments. He was emphatically an orchestral virtuoso, with the virtuoso's desire to exploit effects. His experiments naturally reacted upon general style. But in music, as in pictorial art, color-effects can never be divorced from effects of outline and plan. Hence the orchestral colorists and the dramatists drew together, each group deriving something from the other.

The term 'program-music' is constantly applied to most of Berlioz' work and much of Liszt's, since they often directed the hearer's mind by verbal titles, mottoes or 'arguments,' and even strove to depict the sequence of physical facts by tonal means. This entire line of effort has been the topic of endless debate—perhaps unnecessarily. Music, being a progressive or discursive art, must pursue some plan or program of procedure. This plan may be one of tonal patterns and dispositions, as in the older polyphony and in all classical writing; or of dramatic characters and events, as in the opera and the oratorio; or of personal sentiments, however occasioned, as in the song or ballade; or of anything else where there is a distinct process or flux of thought and feeling. That this process or flux may be associated with concrete images, such as may also be embodied to some extent in words, action or pictures, is abundantly shown by all music with a continuous verbal text. The only question is whether textless music for instruments is essentially hampered or distorted by having the definite direction of a verbal title or other intellectual annotation. It is certainly true that any attempt to restrict music to those processes of thought that can be thus definitely described