Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/201

* MTTSIC. 165 MUSIC. fines the techniciue of an emotion thus: "First an intellectual state, then orjianic and motor dis- turbanee-s, and tlien the conscioiisness of these disturbances, whioli is the psychic state we call emotion." This clear definition of a very compli- cated process may be applied to the effects of music upon a sympathetic listener — naturally synipatliy must be jrranted. else all nuisic ad- dres>es itself to the deaf. A vast mirror of sub- jectivity, music appeals to each of us according to our temperaments. It paints upon tlie back- groimd of our consciousness enlarged meanings of ourselves. Composed of alternate souml and silence, it reaches our very soul with its rhythmic pulsings and sensuous qualities. It is at once the most impersonal and most personal of all the arts. It traverses the keyboard of our desires and arouses noble ambitions or sensual crises as well. It is an immoral art; it can be impressed with equal facilitj- in the service of church or tavern. Its very plasticity makes it an agent for evil and nevertheless a powerful aid to worship. It is because of this easily molded nature that music has served in every camp, has gone to the wars, has soinided the psalms of peace, has been the bone of contention between warring schools and factions, has led the bride to the altar, and intoned the grief for the dead one. ilusic, in some form or other, has always ac- companied man on his march through the ages, tracing in spiritual mimicry his evanescent emo- tional gestures. Captive to his baser senses, a column of smoke by day, this agile protean art has played the pillar of flame, a burning eloquent sign in the darkened skies of revolt, superstition, and misery. A potent symbol, 'a mighty fortress' during the Jliddle Ages, music served tlie Church faithfully, and when enfranchised it has as faith- fully recorded the great emotions of secular souls. Ariel and Caliljan — to what purposes has this versatile art not lieen put ? At first man played ui)on a reed to his mate: then he grew in love with his tune for its own sake. To-day, after putting the art through all its probable paces, it has been harnessed to the Drama, and, from being the exponent of pure, formal beauty, it is pressed into the service of the Characteristic. The Chi- nese, thousands of years ago, discovered the charm of ugliness, and it would seem that mod- ern music is striving for that goal. Rosenkranz has written a volume on .Esthetics of the Vf}ly, and in the general hurly-burly, topsy-turveying of the arts, it would not be improbable if music played the part of devil's advocate in the new O'sthetic dispensation. The line of demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly is slight, for beauty is a relative quality, and ugliness often proves its capital foil. To show how shifting has been the standard of musical beauty one has only to consult history or personal memories. A decade may transform the musical map. depos- ing reigning monarchs and elevating to the pur- ple the veriest newcomer. Music is a fickle god- dess. How far symbolism may be pushed in music is seen in the attempts to pin down the phrase to precise meanings. It is true that there is a key- symbolism, that not by chance have the great composers selected certain keys — keys that, in Wordswfirth's happy expression, are inevitable. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is inconceivable in C sh.nrp minor or E flat minor. C minor is a por- tion of its life. Berlioz has compiled a table of key characteristics and a certain theorist does not hesitate to call F major rugged; B major, energetic; E major, radiant, warm, joyous; A major, frank, sonorous; D major, gay. brilliant, alert: and so on through the list. Here again temperament counts, all else is purelj' arbitrary. JNIusic has the power of evoking moods, that is a common experience; and it has on the formal side analogies to architecture, for it is struc- tural, it is architectonic, and its subject is imi- tative of no known model. This has led Walter Pater to asseverate that all the arts in common aspire "toward music, music being the typical or ideally consummate art, the object of the great Anders-iitrehen — reaching forward — of all art, of all that is artistic or partakes of artistic quali- ties." It is "the blending of the animative thought and embodying vehicle," the absorption of the matter into the form of which music is the one perfect example among the arts, that at- tracted Pater. "All art constantly aspires to- ward the condition of music," he wrote, and made of sensual presentation, emotional .suggestion, and technical perfedtion the archetype for all the arts. The danger of this view lies in the .slighting of music's tremendous evocation of our subliminal depths, of spiritual shades. These cannot be exorcised by technical loveliness or richness of emotional eloquence. Beethoven has taught us in his symphonies that from tone may be wrung almost an ethical meaning. The Platonic theory of an ideal type for all the arts could not have failed to impiess Pater. But it stops at the outer porches of the ear, the tone which should pene- trate to the inner sanctuary losing on the way some of its grosser connotations. His doctrine is that art is always striving to be independent of mere intelligence, that the vaguer the subject the greater the impact of the thrill upon our souls. Gustave Flaiibert, who is the creator of both the realistic and the symbolistic school, had some such idea ; for he wislied his prose to be as independent as music, to float in mid-air by rea- son of its euphonj' and rhythm. And there can be no doubt that it is the perfect balance found in Beethoven's phrases, both the meaning and the music, that makes of them the greater type for all future symphonists. Poetry is the usual standard for painter, poet, sculptor, and com- poser, and, as .John Addington Symonds shows, this is as much of a heresy as Pater's. F. V. H. Myers writes : "The range of human thoughts and emotions greatly transcends the range of such symbols as man has invented to express them ; and it becomes, therefore, the business of art to use these symbols in a double way. They must be used for the direct representation of thought and feeling, but they must also be combined by so subtle an imagination as to suggest much which there is no means of directly expressing. This power gives birth to the art of the musician, whose symbols are hardly imitative at all. but express emotions which, till music suggests them, have lieen not only unknown, but unimaginable." To each art its particular province. There is music in Milton; Wagner is a great painter; Bach an architect; and through the marmoreal prose of Flaubert rings the sound of the sculp- tor's chisel. But this 'reaching forward' is, as Symonds says, "at its best a way of expressing our sense of something svibjective in the styles of artists or of epochs, not of something in the arts themselves." The subjectivity of a critic