Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/34

 singing without a message is no more withheld than is the power of stringing together meaningless words from bad writers. I do not suppose that he applies these observations to dance music. But the application there is obvious. Dance music imitates the movements and figures of the dance just as sung music does the movements and figures of speech.

From this it results that if music can be called an imitative art, it is not so in the same sense as the other arts that are so denominated. It cannot, as do sculpture, painting and poetry, of itself represent to us the objects that it imitates. These must be present before we can recognise them in musical imitation. We must take note of the words, gestures, or (in dancing) the steps, in order to know exactly what the music that goes with them means. In a word—for music, imitation is not an end. It is a means, a condition, the condition which it must observe in order that its expression may bind itself to the thing’s own expression and reinforce it.

We have only spoken of vocal music and dance music. But there is another branch, pure instrumental music without dance or words, the sonata, chamber music in its various forms, the symphony. How are we to apply to these the theory of imitation?

What object can we say that instrumental music imitates? As far as instrumental music is concerned, are not those critics right to whom musical ideas appear as a sort of creation ex nihilo, absolute inventions, modelled on no given material?

The difficulty does not escape Grétry’s notice. And we see him in the course of his career resolving it in two successive fashions which give rise to reflection but can by no means satisfy us.