Deryck Cooke
The Language of Music
8vo. xiv+289 pp. Preface by the author, 1958
[ix-xiv]. Indexes [pp. 275-89].
First published in hardback, 1959.
First published in paperback, 1963
Reissued in paperback, 1989.
8th printing per number line. Year unknown.
Contents*
Preface
1. What Kind of an Art is Music?
2. The Elements of Musical Expression
- The Tonal
Tensions
- Major and
Minor
- The Thirds,
Major and Minor
- The Sixths,
Major and Minor
- The
Sevenths, Major and Minor
- The Seconds,
Major and Minor
- The Fourths
- The
Augmented Fourth or Diminished Fifth
- The
Ambiguities of the Minor System
- The
Vitalizing Agents
- Volume
- Time
- Pitch
- The
Characterizing Agents
3. Some Basic Terms of Musical Vocabulary
- Ascending
1-(2)-3-(4)-5 (Major)
- Ascending
5-1-(2)-3 (Major)
- Ascending
5-1-(2)-3 (Minor)
- Descending
5-(4)-3-(2)-1 (Major)
- Descending
5-(4)-3-(2)-1 (Minor)
- Arched
5-3-(2)-1 (Minor)
-
1-(2)-3-(2)-1 (Minor)
- (5)-6-5
(Major)
- (5)-6-5
(Minor)
-
1-(2)-(3)-(4)-5-6-5 (Major)
-
1-(2)-(3)-(4)-5-6-5 (Minor)
- 8-7-6-5
(Major)
- 8-7-6-5
(Minor)
- The
Descending Chromatic Scale
4. The Process of Musical Communication
- The Creative
Imagination as Rhythm
- The Creative
Imagination as Melody
- The Creative
Imagination as Harmony
5. The Large-Scale Functioning of Musical Language
- Symphony No.
40 in G minor (K. 550) by Mozart
- Symphony No.
6 in E minor, by Vaughan Williams
Index of Subjects
Index of Names and Works
Index of Music Examples
*The sections of the chapters are not listed in the
book's table of contents. But they do occur inside the book and are given here
for a better illustration of its scope.
===============================================
This is not a review. Keepers of the blue flags, make
haste to mark it.
This is not a review for the simple reason that this
is a truly great book. Now, mediocre books may occasionally give rise to a
great review. But great books nearly always demonstrate only the mediocrity of
the reviewer. My own mediocrity is a well-known public secret. It needn't be
stated yet again. This is why I will leave Deryck Cooke to tell the whole story
in his own words. I do believe this is by far the finest possible "review"
of this neglected masterpiece. I hope to convince every music lover, layman or
professional, that The Language of Music
is very well worth his time, no matter whether he agrees with Deryck or not.
There are several points more I should like to make
by way of preface.
The first one is about what cannot be quoted here:
the 98 musical examples. I will try to indicate a fair number of these, but
keep in mind that my selection, partly because of space limitations and partly
because of personal prejudice, is much more limited than Deryck's. He has
supplied a great deal more examples than I have mentioned.
Don't be fooled by the relatively small number of
musical examples. Most of them (1-67) occur in chapters 2 and 3, and they often
consist of quite a few sections that use substantial part of the English
alphabet. I think the longest one is ''Ex. 41'' which reaches up to ''p'' and
deals with the infamous diabolus in
musica. Also, there often are, space permitted, several examples on a
single line and under a single letter, all neatly marked with names of
composers and years of composition.
As a rule, Deryck has tried to illustrate how every
one of the motives he discusses has been used for at least two centuries, from
the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth (from Bach to Stravinsky in other
words), though occasionally he goes back to the thirteenth century and obscure
works by now nearly completely forgotten masters.
Deryck has taken lots of pains to make his book
accessible to the layman. It goes without saying that a trained musician will
find it an easier and more profitable read. But the musically illiterate
needn't be intimidated. In the text Deryck explains carefully every single
example: where exactly it comes from, why it is used to illustrate this particular
point. Many of the motives come from vocal works (opera, oratorio, lieder) and
the sung texts are always provided, and though they are often self-explanatory
they usually enjoy the same lavish treatment as the more elusive instrumental
passages. When ''pure'' music is given as an example, instrumentation is always
provided, so in this case, too, it is easy to locate the passage in question on
your CDs.
For the sake of clarity the quotes are given exactly
as they are in the book. All italicized words and passages have been reproduced
faithfully. My own additions appear in square brackets. They deal exclusively
with footnotes and omissions; the latter are marked with ''[…]'' and, when
necessary, a short summary is supplied. Personal opinions have been rigorously
and as far as possible suppressed.
The quotations supply as much of the author's context
as possible, but they are by necessity highly selective. Nevertheless, I
believe they do show, if not the full scope, at least the essence of the book.
Now I leave you to Deryck's impeccable prose.
Addendum [December 2013].
Addendum [December 2013].
I have
included as many photographs of the original music examples as I could. The quality is far from
stellar, but it is hoped that they are at least legible and may complement the
text. Blurred words and wavy staves are not defects of the book but of my
equipment and skill as a photographer.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
The impulse to produce this book arose out of the
following considerations.
When we try to assess the achievement of a great
literary artist, one of the chief ways in which we approach his work is to
examine it as a report on human experience. We feel that, in his art, he has
said something significant in relation to life as it is lived; and what he has
said - whether we call this a 'criticism of life' or a Weltanschauung or something else - is as important as the purely
formal aspect of his writing. Or rather, these two main aspects of his art -
'content' and 'form' - are realized to be ultimately inseparable: what he has
said is inextricably bound up with how he has said it; and how he has said it
clearly cannot be considered separately from what he has said.
The same is unfortunately not felt to be true of the
artist who makes his contribution to human culture, not in the language of
speech, but in that of music. Music is widely regarded nowadays, not as a
language at all, but as a 'pure', inexpressive art, like architecture; and even
those who do feel it to be some kind of language regard it as an imprecise one,
incapable of conveying anything so tangible as an experience of life or an
attitude towards it. Thus Albert Roussel spoke of 'the musician… alone in the
world with his more or less unintelligible language'. And Aaron Copland has
expressed a similar opinion, in a slightly less radical way: 'Is there a meaning to music?' - My
answer to that would be ''Yes''. Can you
state in so many words what the meaning is? - My answer to that would be
''No''. Therein lies the difficulty.'
Hence, at the present time, attempt to elucidate the
'content' of music are felt to be misguided, to say the least; the writer on
musical matters is expected to ignore or only hint at what the composer had to
say, and to concentrate entirely on how he said it. Or, to put it in the
contemporary way, he is expected to concentrate entirely on the 'form', which
is not regarded as 'saying' anything at all. Thus the two inseparable aspects
of an expressive art are separated, and one is utterly neglected - much to the
detriment of our understanding of the other. Instead of responding to music as
what it is - the expression of man's deepest self - we tend to regard it more
and more as a purely decorative art; and by analysing the great works of
musical expression purely as pieces of decoration, we misapprehend their true nature,
purpose, and value. By regarding form as an end in itself, instead of as a
means of expression, we make evaluations of composers' achievements which are
largely irrelevant and worthless.
But there is another, more serious consequence of our
attitude: one whole side of our culture is impoverished, since we deny
ourselves the possibility of enlarging our understanding of human experience by
a specifically musical view of it. After all, if man is ever to fulfill the
mission he undertook at the very start - when he first began to philosophize,
as a Greek, and evolved the slogan 'Know thyself' - he will have to understand
his unconscious self; and the most articulate language of the unconscious is
music. But we musicians, instead of trying to understand this language, preach
the virtues of refusing to consider it a language at all; when we should be
attempting, as literary critics do, to expound and interpret the great
masterpieces of our art for the benefit of humanity at large, we concern
ourselves more and more with parochial affairs - technical analyses and
musicological minutiae - and pride
ourselves on our detached, de-humanized approach.
This used not to be so. Some years ago it was
regarded as the normal procedure to evaluate composers - notably Mozart,
Beethoven, and Brahms - according to what they expressed. But unfortunately
this approach was too vague and unscientific: the interpretation soon strayed
far away from the actual stuff of the music to become a kind of private
transcendental self-intoxication with words. And it was no doubt the wild and
baseless conclusions of some of the writers of those days that led the
aestheticians of our own time to lay an embargo on the interpretation of
musical works. Better ignore the whole vexatious question, they must have felt,
than wallow in such a morass of subjectivity. What Goethe, Baudelaire, and
Kafka said may be valuable data for the final understanding of humanity; what
Beethoven, Berlioz, and Mahler said is certainly not - simply because there is
no way of agreeing as to exactly what they did say.
But perhaps we have given up the problem a little too
easily. Perhaps, since music is the expression of emotion, and we so strongly
distrust emotion nowadays, we have not been eager to come to grips with the
problem at all. There is no reason why it should not prove capable of solution,
as other problems are. If we cannot at present tell for certain what anything
said in the language of music really means - if we continually argue about the
'emotional content' of this or that composition - we should not therefore
despair of ever finding an objective basis to work on. It may be that we have
just not yet found a way of understanding this language, and that much of our
interpretation of it is simply misinterpretation. We too easily assume that our
private interpretations are fixed and immutable; we should remember that any
one of us, at any time, may completely misinterpret the 'content' of a piece,
and yet still enjoy his experience of it, even though it is based on a
misapprehension. When this happens to the musically uninitiated, we smile, but
it can just as easily happen to the musically sophisticated, for we none of us
really understand the language.
[…]
This book is an attempt to bring music back from the
intellectual-aesthetic limbo in which it is now lost, and to reclaim it for
humanity at large, by beginning the task of actually deciphering its language.
It attempts to show that the conception of music as a language capable of
expressing certain very definite things is not a romantic aberration, but has
been the common unconscious assumption of composers for the past
five-and-a-half centuries at least. It attempts to isolate the various means of
expression available to the composer - the various procedures in the dimensions
of pitch, time, and volume - and discover what emotional effects these
procedures can produce; but more specifically, it tries to pinpoint the
inherent emotional characters of the various notes on the major, minor, and
chromatic scales, and of certain basic melodic patterns which have been used
persistently throughout our musical history. It also investigates the problem
of musical communication, through the various stages from the composer's
unconscious to that of the listener; and it offers detailed interpretations of
two non-programmatic symphonies - Mozart's Fortieth and Vaughan Williams's
Sixth - as specimen examples of how it may perhaps be possible to come to some
objective understanding of the 'emotional content' of 'pure' music.
It is hoped that this book will serve as a broad
preliminary survey of the ground, and perhaps also as foundation of which
eventually to build a more comprehensive classification of most of the terms of
musical language; and that it will thereby make it ultimately possible to
understand and assess a composer's work as a report on human experience, just
as we do that of a literary artist. It is not imagined, let me hasten to add,
that such assessments will take the form of philosophical discussions of conceptual
arguments, since music cannot express concepts; nor that they will be 'digests'
of the 'meanings' of various works, for the same reason; rather, since music
can only express feelings, it is thought that they will probably be in the
nature of interpretation of emotional attitudes, somewhat akin to the type of
analysis perfected by Wilson Knight for the elucidation of the 'content' of
literary works - an examination of the 'images' used, and an interpretation of
their emotional and psychological connotations.
The investigation of musical language is confined to Europe , since if music is an international language
within a given continent, it is certainly not an inter-continental language. It
has also been confined almost entirely to art-music (including modern popular
music): although the roots of musical language must certainly lie in
folk-music, this approach has been completely rejected, for the simple reason
that it is impossible to verify the original emotional impulse of folk-tune.
Even in those many cases where a text has come down in conjunction with the
tune, it is impossible to be sure that it is the original text; people are at
any time only too capable of taking, say, a gay old tune and writing some
melancholy new words for it. The investigation is further confined to tonal
music, i.e. to music in a key, in the widest sense of the word, whether written
by Dufay in 1440, Byrd in 1611, Mozart in 1782, or Stravinsky in 1953. It does
not in any way attempt to deal with the entirely new musical language which has
arisen out of the abrogation of tonality by some composers during the last
half-century; since this new language clearly bears little or no relation to
the long-established one based on the tonal system.
Nevertheless, if the findings of this book are
accepted, a certain widely-held view on the new non-tonal language would now
seem, on the face of it, to amount to a logically inescapable conclusion, which
can be briefly stated as follows. Since the new language is unrelievedly
chromatic by nature, it must be restricted to what chromaticism always was
restricted to expressing - what indeed we feel even the very earliest
chromaticism of the sixteenth-century Italians still to this day expresses -
emotions of the most painful type (though a wide variety of expression can
naturally be achieved by presenting these emotions in diverse ways - gently,
fiercely, satirically, grotesquely, even jestingly). It may be objected that
since this new music makes no use of tonal centres, its persistent chromaticism
has not the same expressive connotations as that of tonal music; but expressive
connotations it must have, and how else can they be interpreted except in
relation to the (much expanded) tonal system, which ultimately derives its
expressive qualities from acoustical facts? Thus, from the purely negative
point of view, the fact that the new music shuns the basic acoustical
consonances of the octave, fifth, fourth, and triad, suggests that it does not
express the simple fundamental sense of being at one with nature and life. This
may by no means be the case, of course; it may be that we are just
misapprehending the new language, as we have often tended to misapprehend the
old. But the burden of proof that it is not
the case should now be fairly and squarely on the shoulders of non-tonal
composers and theorists. If this state of affairs calls forth a clear and
convincing outline of the expressive
aims of the new language, with an account of some of the terms of its
vocabulary and some of its forms of expression, to offset ever so slightly the
present welter of aridly technical, not to say purely mathematical exegesis, no
one will be more pleased than the present writer, who whole-heartedly admires
such of this music as he has found expressive of emotion.
[…]
What Kind of an Art is
Music?
Although all the arts are essentially autonomous,
owing to the different materials and techniques which they employ, there is
clearly a kind of bond between them. We speak of the 'architecture' of a
symphony, and call architecture, in its turn, 'frozen music'. Again, we say
that certain writing has a 'sculptural' quality, and sometimes describe a piece
of sculpture as 'a poem in stone'.
Admittedly, much of the phraseology which traffics
between arts is purely metaphorical,
being concerned only with the effect
of a work of art. Thus, in calling a statue 'a poem in stone', we merely
indicate that its effect on us is of that impalpable kind we normally receive
from poetry; we do not make an objective statement about the sculptor's
intention or technical procedure. Such a metaphor, while useful for descriptive
purposes, cannot help us to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of art.
On the other hand, comparison between one art and
another can help towards this end,
when the comparison is not metaphorical,
but analogical, being concerned with
the artist's intention and technical procedure. Thus, when we speak
of the 'architecture' of a fugue, we are making an objective statement that its
composer has constructed it by methods analogous to those of the architect -
that he has grouped masses of non-representational material (tone instead of
stone) into significant form, governed by the principles of proportion,
balance, and symmetry; and this throws some light on a particular type of
music. In using such analogies, of course, we must keep in mind the difference
inherent in the use of different materials.
Analogies of this kind are continually being made
between music and the other arts. Besides speaking of the 'architecture' of a
piece of music, we use the term 'tone-painting', and we say that composers who
are preoccupied with expressing character, mood, and feeling, have leaning
toward the 'literary'. And there is no doubt that music can be analogically
related to each of these three arts: to architecture, in its quasi-mathematical
construction; to painting, in its representation of physical objects; and to
literature, in its use of a language to express emotion.
[…]
Let us now relate music analogically to architecture,
painting, and literature, in more detail, and see if this can help us to
establish the true nature of music as an art.
We may turn first to the analogy with painting, since
this would seem to be the least essential, existing only in the case of a
limited number of works, and passage of works. It exists where the composer
imitates physical objects in terms of sound, addressed to the ear, as the
painter does in terms of light, addressed to the eye. (We need not concern
ourselves with painting which does not represent objects, but abstract
patterns, since this is rather a case of painting's analogical relationship to
music.)
There are three ways in which music can represent
physical objects. First, by direct
imitation of something which emits a sound of definite pitch, such as a
cuckoo, a shepherd's pipe, or hunting horn. Here the parallel with painting is
almost exact: the painter can represent the visual but not the aural aspect of
the object, the composer the aural but not the visual. (In the case of a cuckoo,
the composer may even be said to have the advantage, since to anyone but a
naturalist it is a purely aural phenomenon!)
The second way is by approximate imitation of something which emits a sound of
indefinite pitch, such as a thunderstorm, a rippling brook, or rustling
branches. Here the composer's representation is inevitably less faithful than
the painter's: a painting of a storm strikes the eye as a more or less exact
reproduction of the appearance of a storm, but a musical representation of
storm strikes the ear as only an approximate reproduction of the sound of a
storm. […] Nevertheless, even here, the composer has a certain compensatory
advantage: he can reproduce the sensation of physical movement which the
painter can only suggest.
The third way in which music can represent physical
objects is by the suggestion or symbolization of a purely visual thing,
such as lightning, clouds or mountains, using sounds which have an effect on
the ear similar to that which the appearance of the object has on the eye. Here
music at once approaches closest to painting, and recedes farthest from it. […]
Knowing as we do, that the first of Debussy's Three Nocturnes is entitled Nuages, we are persuaded into
interpreting the shifting patterns of sound in terms of the visual imagination
- shifting patterns of light such as we experience from the movement of clouds.
But if Debussy had not given the Nocturne its title, we should have been
uncertain what the composer intended to represent, if anything at all.
(The fact that, in such cases, a title is necessary
to set the imagination working, is often taken as proof of the illegitimacy of
this kind of musical tone-painting. But it is not always realized that even
some poems are not fully intelligible without their titles. Take this one by
Tennyson:
He clasps the crag with
crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely
lands,
Ring'd with the azure world,
he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him
crawls;
He watches from his mountain
walls,
And like a thunderbolt he
falls.
One wonders whether, if Tennyson had merely called
this poem 'Lines', readers would have realized exactly what it was supposed to
be describing. Once the actual title is known, of course, there is nothing
ambiguous about the poem at all.)
[Consultation with the second index reveals that the
title in question is The Eagle.]
Frequently, music's three methods of tone-painting
are fused, or superimposed on one another, in a single composition. In
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, for example, the direct imitation of bird-calls
(cuckoo and quail) interrupt the approximate imitation of a murmuring brook,
while the third bird-call (nightingale) is also approximate; the thunder in the
storm movement is approximately imitated, the lightning and rain are suggested,
and these are followed by the direct imitation of a shepherd's pipe.
So far, our attention has been strictly confined to
the element of imitation; but this, of course, is neither the composer's nor
the painter's sole intention. The imitation is only a framework on which each
type of artist, using the materials of his own art, superimposes his vision of the imitated object, or his subjective experience of it. Beethoven's
comment on his Pastoral Symphony is apposite here: 'more feeling than
tone-painting'.
[…]
To sum up: tone-painting is a legitimate, if
subsidiary function of music. Its value increases the more it is used as a
vehicle for the composer's subjective experience of the object represented; and
it is by means of the actual notes chosen by the composer that the experience
is conveyed. Here the analogy with painting ends, since there is obviously no
connection between the technical organization of notes and that of paint.*
[*Footnote: ''Comparisons such as those of
piano-writing with black-and-white drawing, and of orchestration with colour,
and of a certain type of impressionist orchestration with the pointilliste technique in painting, are
clearly metaphorical, and cannot bring us a deeper understanding of the nature
of music.'']
[…]
First, however, it should be said that any piece of
tone-painting is of negligible value unless it is integrated into some kind of
musical structure; and this brings us to our next section, an examination of
the analogy between music and architecture.
[…]
In the case of music, the analogy would seem to be
particularly close, in that, as has been mentioned, both composer and architect
group masses of non-representational material (pure sound in time, and stone in
space) into significant form, governed by the principles of proportion,
balance, and symmetry. At first, our analogy looks to be simple and conclusive
one: music is the audible, as architecture is the visible, embodiment of pure
form. Stravinsky adheres to this view of the matter: 'One could not better
define the sensation produced by music than by saying that it is identical with
that evoked by the contemplation of the interplay of architectural forms'.*
[*Sourced as ''Chronicle
of My Life, translated from the French, p. 93.'']
But let us look into the analogy a little more
closely. How far can we apply it? To all music, or only to certain kinds of
music? It is easy to justify the common application of it to some of the
greatest music ever written - the contrapuntal masterpiece of the old
polyphonic composers, down to and including Bach. In these, the themes are
sometimes scarcely more emotionally expressive than bricks or blocks of stone
(e.g. those in Bach's 'great' organ fugues in A minor and G minor), and are
used simply as raw material capable of being built up into large-scale
sound-constructions by means of interwoven lines, various sections being
balanced one against another in size, until their combined mass makes possible
a final climax, setting a seal on the whole like a dome.
[…]
What is more, the experience provided by this kind of
music is definitely akin to that provided by architecture - the enjoyment of
the beauty of pure form. What attracts us is not so much the thematic material
as the satisfying way in which it is woven together; not so much, say, the
fugue-subject, as the masterly working-out of it in stretto, to produce a sonorous climax.
The analogy holds good, of course, for all music that
is primarily contrapuntal: for the non-expressive fugal music of later periods
(lesser, both in amount and calibre), and for that limited amount of modern
music in which non-expressive material is organized contrapuntally by means of
quasi-mathematical 'laws' similar to those which governed the old-style
polyphony (much avant-garde serial
music, and the music of Hindemith, for example). In all these cases, the raw
material is nothing, the intellectual construction everything, and the impact
on the listener almost entirely a formal and aesthetic one. But once we step
outside of the limited world of polyphony, in which the intellect predominates,
the analogy becomes vague and unprofitable, for two reasons. Firstly, the
difference in the materials comes to the fore: the musical material of
non-polyphonic music is not inexpressive like that of architecture, but is charged
with human feeling. Secondly, in the manipulation of such material, purely
intellectual techniques are replaced by methods in which the intellect is to
some extent at the service of feelings.
[…]
A typical contrapuntal point or fugue-subject has no
real significance until it takes its place in the construction as a whole; but
a theme in a sonata, like a hand in a painting or a line in a poem, is already
of absorbing emotional interest in itself, even if its full significance is
only appreciated when its integration into the overall form is understood.
Indeed, in music, as to a greater degree in literature, a work can be
outstanding in spite of being cast into a most unsatisfying form: we listen to
works like Boris Godunov and Delius's
Violin Concerto, as we read books like Tristram
Shandy and Moby Dick, not for
their formal beauty, but for the fascination of their material.
Actually, in many cases, the thematic material of
polyphony is itself expressive, even highly expressive: a few examples are the
opening Kyrie in Bach's B minor Mass, several of Purcell's string fantasias,
'For with His Stripes' in Messiah,
Mozart's C minor Fugue for two pianos and the Quam Olim Abrahae in his Requiem
Mass. Indeed, musical material (as it is hoped to show in this book) is by its
very nature expressive; though of course its expressiveness can sometimes be
extremely slight. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, the architectural analogy
holds good for all polyphony, whether expressive or inexpressive, in that the
construction is primarily intellectual and the impact primarily formal; and it
breaks down outside polyphony because the construction is guided by feeling and
the impact is to a considerable extent emotional.
[At this place Deryck reminds us that even the
greatest contrapuntal masters, for instance Bach and St. Mathew Passion, have
composed music which, much like the symphony from later periods, is ''dramatic
in conception'' and can be described as ''succession of contrasted events in
time following one another by chain of cause and effect''. Here there is a
footnote about Bruckner who ''alone of the symphonists found an 'architectural'
way of composing his symphonies - balancing masses of melodic harmony one
against another; but this is an isolated phenomenon which need not concern us
here.'' Deryck also points out that the dramatic and emotional nature is
obviously even truer for lieder and opera. He even gives Debussy's L'apres-midi- d'un faune as an example
of work ''constructed (if so tough a word may be used) more like the poem to
which it was intended to form a prelude - as a succession of changing moods
melting in and out of one another according to the logic of emotion''. He then
sums up the situation so far:]
Clearly then, we cannot press the architectural analogy
too far (as many are intent on doing at the present juncture of musical
history). It has really just as limited an application as the analogy with
painting: only a certain type of music, to a certain degree, can legitimately
be regarded as pure, quasi-mathematical form. Other music has a different kind
of form, and has a wider significance than is imparted to us by its form alone,
being expressive of the composer's subjective experience.
So we may say that, except within very closely
defined limits, music is neither a representative art, like painting, nor a
purely formal art, like architecture. What kind of an art is it, then?
In some way or other, it conveys to us the subjective
experience of composers. But in what way? […] To try and answer this question,
we must turn to a consideration of the analogy between music and literature,
and an investigation of the problem of music as language.
But first, a fairly lengthy digression will be
necessary, in order to try and settle a vexed point. So far, this book has
persistently begging the question whether music does in fact express composer's
subjective experience - a question which everybody once assumed instinctively
had an affirmative answer, but which is assumed equally instinctively by many
modern musicians to have been answered once and for all in the negative. If we
are to establish the right to make any analogy at all between music and
literature, the question will have to be re-opened and some reasons sought to
support an affirmative answer.
[…]
It is not the intention here to investigate every
theory of music considered as expression; theorists are notoriously limited by
abstractions. I propose to deal with the matter in a more concrete way, setting
forth the current case against the view of music as expression, in the words of
two of our most outstanding present-day composers; and adducing several
arguments on the other side - the views of other composers, the view of a poet,
the experience of listeners in general, and the practice of composers in
general.
First, the negative view, in the words of Stravinsky:
'I consider that music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all, whether a
feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature,
etc…. if, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something,
this is only an illusion, and not a reality'.* Obviously, everything depends on
what Stravinsky means by 'express': if he means 'express explicitly, as words
can', his remark is a truism; if he means 'convey to the listener in any way
whatsoever', he is merely offering an expression of opinion, without adducing
any proof.
[*''Stravinsky, Chronicle
of My Life, translated from the French, pp. 91-2.'']
Composers' theories tend to be based on their own
artistic needs, and it is evident that Stravinsky, bent as he has been on
removing music as far as possible from the romantic aesthetic, would naturally
formulate a theory of this kind. It is an extremist theory, the product of an
intensely individual composer's mind; but it has been widely accepted, as
coming from such an eminent source, and its effect on contemporary aesthetic
thought has been most harmful. Aaron Copland, himself a disciple of Stravinsky,
and a composer who cannot by the wildest stretch of the imagination be called a
romantic, has justly described Stravinsky's attitude in this matter as
'intransigent', saying that 'it may be due to the fact that so many people have
tried to read different meanings into so many pieces'. He also adds the following:
'Heaven knows it is difficult enough to say what it is that a piece of music
means, to say it finally so that everyone is satisfied with your explanation.
But that should not lead one to the other extreme of denying to music the right
to be expressive'.*
[*''Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music, Chap. 2.'']
It is worth noting that, until Stravinsky came out
with his flat statement to the contrary, everyone naturally assumed that music
was expressive. Let us call in another, earlier composer, not an out-and-out
romantic of the Wagnerian type, but one firmly grounded in the classical
tradition.
Mendelssohn once wrote: 'People usually complain that
music is so ambiguous; that it is so doubtful what they ought to think when
they hear it; whereas everyone understands words. With me it is entirely the
converse. And not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with
individual words; these, too, seem to me to be so ambiguous, so vague, so
easily misunderstood in comparison with genuine music, which fills the soul
with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to
me by a piece of music which I love are not too indefinite to be put into
words, but on the contrary too definite. And so I find, in every attempt to
express such thoughts, that something is right, but at the same time something
is unsatisfying in all of them….'*
[*''Mendelssohn, Letter to Marc Andre Souchay; Berlin
Now when Mendelssohn comes to give examples of thoughts (Gedanken) which music gives rise to, we find he is using the word
in the generalized sense of 'mental activities', and in fact means feelings, rather; since he specifically
mentions resignation, melancholy, and the praise of God. And those who have
found music expressive of anything at all (the majority of mankind) have found
it expressive of emotions. Let us here call in another witness, not even a
semi-romantic composer this time, but one of the clearest-minded of classical
poets.
Dryden, in his 'Song for St. Cecilia's Day', showed
that he regarded music as emotionally expressive:
The soft complaining flute
In dying notes discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers,
Whose dirge is whisper'd by
the warbling lute.
Sharp violins proclaim
Their jealous pangs and
desperation,
Fury, frantic indignation,
Depths of pains, and height
of passion
For the fair disdainful
dame.
No doubt in Dryden's mind at all! As he said earlier
in the same poem: 'What passion cannot Music raise and quell?' And emotional
reaction to music has been the experience of listeners everywhere. One has only
to read descriptions of musical compositions in programmes or musical
biographies, whether in English or any other language, to find the writers
limping in their more pedestrian way after Dryden: confident themes, agonizing
chords, wistful melodies, ferocious rhythms, jubilant climaxes….
And the composers: what did they themselves think
they were doing? Neither Stravinsky nor Mendelssohn tells us, but one of the
most classical of all composers has done. Listen to Mozart: 'Now, as for
Belmonte's aria in A major - 'O wie ängstlich, O wie feurig' - do you know how
it is expressed (ausgedrückt)? - even
the throbbing of his loving heart is indicated (angezeigt) - the two violins in octaves…. One sees the trembling -
the wavering - one sees how his swelling breast heaves - this is expressed (exprimirt) by a crescendo - one hears
the whispering and the sighing - which is expressed (ausgedrückt) by the first violins, muted, and a flute in unison'.*
Nothing could be more definite than that.
[*''Mozart, letter to his father, Vienna
[…]
In any case, it is undeniable (as Chapters 2 and 3
attempt to demonstrate) that composers have consciously or unconsciously used
music as a language, from at least 1400 onwards - a language never formulated
in a dictionary, because by its very nature it is incapable of such treatment.
[…]
Again, we may note how the tragic subjects of the St.
Matthew Passion and Die Winterreise
forced on Bach and Schubert a heavy (almost too heavy) preponderance of minor
keys; while the lighter subjects of the Easter Oratorio and most of Die Schöne Müllerin turned them
inevitably towards the major. Did anyone ever set the Resurrexit of the Mass to
slow, soft, minor music? Or the Crucifixus to quick, loud, major strains? Try
singing the word 'Crucifixus' to the music of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, or
the word 'Hallelujah' to the music of Crucifixus in Bach's B minor Mass!
Stravinsky himself has complied with the common practice in these matters. In
the Symphony of Psalms, the first two
movements (settings of somber prayer-psalms) are in E minor and C minor
respectively, while the last (setting of a praise-psalm) moves between E flat
major and C major. […] Within the orbit of tonality, composers have always been
bound by certain expressive laws of the medium, laws which are analogous to
those of language.*
[*''The ambiguities of the major-minor opposition (as
shown, for example, by the Dead March in Saul
being in the major) are dealt with in
Chapter 2.'']
So we must admit that composers have set out to
express emotion, and that listeners have felt it to be present in their music.
But we must still consider Stravinsky's opinion that 'if, as is nearly always
the case, music appears to express something, this only an illusion, and not a
reality'.
This point of view has been set forth in greater
detail by Hindemith in his book A
Composer's World. His theory is that music does have an emotive effect on
the listener, but the apparent emotions are not those of the composer, nor do
they arouse the real emotions of the listener; in Stravinsky's words 'this is
only an illusion'. Hindemith says: 'Music cannot express the composer's
feelings. Let us suppose a composer is writing an extremely funereal piece,
which may require three months of intensive work. Is he, during this
three-months period, thinking of nothing but funerals? Or can he, in those
hours that are not devoted to his work because of his desire to eat and sleep,
put his grief on ice, so to speak, and be gay until the moment he resumes his
somber activity? If he really expressed his feelings accurately during the time
of composing and writing, we would be presented with a horrible motley of
expressions, among which the grievous part would necessarily occupy but a small
space.' Later, he continues: 'If the composer himself thinks he is expressing
his own feelings, we have to accuse him of lack of observation. Here is what he
really does: he knows by experience that certain patterns of tone-setting
correspond with certain emotional reactions on the listener's part. Writing
these patterns frequently and finding his observations confirmed, in
anticipating the listener's reaction he believes himself to be in the same
mental situation.'*
[*''Hindemith, A
Composer's World, pp. 35-6.'']
The naïveté and illogicality of this analysis, coming
from a composer of Hindemith's mental stature, is truly regrettable. But we
have to remember again that composers write out of their own experience; and we
know that Hindemith is, and sees himself as, a superior kind of craftsman, not
an 'inspired genius' - that, in fact, he rather derisively denies the existence
of inspiration: 'Melodies can, in our time, be constructed rationally. We do
not need to believe in benign fairies, bestowing angelic tunes upon their
favourites'.* Being this kind of a composer, he is unable, despite his
intellectual insight into musical construction and his laudable concern for
music's moral values, to understand the deep unconscious urges that gave birth
to music of the deeply emotive kind - viz., most of the music written between
1400 and the present day.
[*''Ibid., p. 97.'']
There seems to be in Hindemith's analysis an almost
willful refusal to understand that an artist has two separate selves: the
everyday, conscious self, which is a prey of many passing trivial emotions, and
a deep, unconscious, creative self which is always there to return to,
'inspiration' permitting, and which is apt to intrude itself intermittently, as
'inspiration', during his everyday life. If Hindemith has no personal
experience of this, surely he has heard of the fits of 'absent-mindedness' that
some great artists have been subject to, when this occurred? Surely he must
have some conception of the way in which this unconscious creative self
persists beneath the distractions of everyday life, concentrated on its
all-important realities?* When we state that a composer, writing a lengthy
piece over a long period, expresses his emotions in it, we really ought not to
have to explain that we mean his deep, permanent, significant emotions, not the
superficial fleeting ones called forth by trivial pleasures and
disappointments.
[*The footnote quotes ''Graham Greene, speaking
through the character of Maurice Bendrix, the narrator in The End of the Affair, Chap. 2.'' The passage runs as follows: ''So
much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be
preoccupied with shopping and income-tax returns, but the stream of the
unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead;
one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come
as though from the air… the work has been done while one slept or shopped or
talked with friends.'']
[At this place Deryck illustrates the fallacy of
Hindemith's hypothesis how a funereal piece might be composed over a long time
by speculating how Beethoven's unconscious might have worked on the creation of
the Funeral March from Eroica. There
is a comparison with Tennyson's Ode on
the Death of the Duke of Wellington in this respect. He then continues:]
We must now turn to the second part of Hindemith's
theory - that concerning the emotional reaction of the listener. He says: 'If
music does not express feelings, how then does it affect listener's emotions?
There is no doubt that listeners, performers, and composers alike can be
profoundly moved by perceiving, performing, or imagining music, and
consequently music must touch on something in their emotional life that bings
them into this state of excitation. But if these mental reactions were
feelings, they would not change as rapidly as they do, and they would not begin
and end precisely with the musical stimulus that aroused them. If we experience
a real feeling of grief - that is, grief not caused or released by music - it
is not possible to replace it at a moment's notice and without any plausible
reason with the feeling of wild gaiety; and gaiety, in turn, cannot be replaced
by complacency after a fraction of a second…. The reactions which music evokes
are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings…. We cannot
have musical reactions of emotional significance, unless we have once had real
feelings, the memory of which is revived by the musical impression. Reactions
of a grievous nature can be aroused by music only if a former experience of
real grief was stored up in our memory and is now again portrayed in a
dream-like fashion.'* Again, he says: 'Paintings, poems, sculptures, works of architecture…
do not - contrary to music - release images of feelings; instead they speak to
the real, untransformed, and unmodified feelings.'*
[*Hindemith, op. cit., pp. 38 and 49.]
It is difficult here to know where to start - there
are so many fallacies. Let us return to the Eroica Funeral March, and consider
the listener's reactions. In the slow, heavy, dragging rhythm, the minor key,
and the mournful melody, he will recognize the type of funeral march, and
Beethoven's own individuality of expression, with its indefinable grandeur,
will convey that it is a funeral march written by a noble mind in connection
with a noble ideal. Will the music awaken 'former experience of real grief,
stored-up in the memory, and now portrayed in a dream-like fashion'? Surely
nothing of the sort: the listener's capacity for feeling grief (certainly
intensified by any strong personal grief he has experienced) will be aroused by
the music into feeling (through the distorting medium of his own temperament,
admittedly) the personal grief of Beethoven, made incarnate by him in that
music. He will feel as he has never felt
before. (In listening to Chopin's Funeral March, he will experience another
quite different personal grief, belonging to a quite different man - a grief
more loaded with despair - and again, he will feel as he never felt before.)
The listener thus makes direct contact with the mind of a great artist,
'interpreting' his expression of emotion in the same way that he will
'interpret' an emotional letter from a friend: in both cases, mind meets mind,
as far as is possible. And if the listener has no capacity for feeling real
grief (as opposed to petty chagrin), he will, of course, not really comprehend
the Funeral March at all.
Hindemith's two reasons why musical emotions are not
'real' will not hold water. In the first place, emotions called forth by music
do not 'begin and end with the
musical stimulus that aroused them': begin, yes, since a specific emotion
cannot be awakened without a stimulus; but end, no, since it is many people's
experience that the feelings aroused by a piece of music can persist for days
afterwards, without memory of the actual notes that caused them. In the second
place, the idea that diverse emotions cannot succeed one another swiftly is applicable
only to placid temperaments: Hindemith himself is no doubt possessed of
remarkable equanimity, but more volatile people often find themselves switching
suddenly from depression to gaiety with or without external stimulus. And this
is found quite commonly in art itself - in literature for example. One has only
to consider the violent transitions of mood, from deep gloom to joyous ecstasy,
in Keats's Ode to a Nightingale.
In any case, what is meant by saying that the
emotions aroused by the other arts are more 'real' than those of music? […] In
one sense, emotion conveyed through music is more real than that conveyed
through the other arts - because it is more pure,
less bound down to a 'local habitation and a name'. The true expressive
difference between the arts is that painting conveys feeling through a visual
image, and literature through a rationally intelligible statement, but music
conveys the naked feeling direct. As the composer felt, so we may hear, and
feel: what he saw, or thought, does not interfere.
This brings us to a further difficulty: the supposed
vagueness of the emotions expressed in music. Hindemith, like those of whom
Mendelssohn spoke, finds music ambiguous: 'One given piece of music may cause
remarkably diverse reactions in different listeners. As an illustration of this
statement, I like to mention the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh
Symphony, which I have found lead some people into a pseudo feeling of profound
melancholy, while another group takes it for a kind of scurrilous scherzo, and
a third for a subdued kind of pastorale. Each group is justified in judging as
it does.'*
[*Hindemith, op. cit., p. 40.]
Hindemith is undoubtedly right in his observation
that people react in different emotional ways to a given piece of music, but
his statement that each reaction is equally justifiable fails to take a simple
psychological point into account. Could it not be that some listeners are
incapable of understanding the feeling of the music properly?* This can even
happen in the explicit world of literature: I have seen Edmund from King Lear played as a superficially
cynical butterfly, and the audience reacted accordingly, with giggles; but a
close reading of Shakespeare's text does not justify this conception in the
least. Similarly, the great German actor, Gründgens, plays Goethe's
Mephistopheles as a self-tormenting fallen angel. And if actors can so distort
the emotional make-up of a part, one wonders how many people read, say,
Shelley's Ode to a Skylark as a
pretty and pleasing piece of poetry, or take Moby Dick to be merely a stirring sea-story.
[*''The answer is, of course, yes; and this explains
why 'tests', in which the reactions of a random collection of individuals are
classified and analysed, prove nothing. Sympathetic understanding is a
pre-requisite: what would be the use of applying such a test to, say, one of
Blake's prophetic books?'']
The fact is that people can only react to the
emotions expressed in a work of art according to their own capacity to feel
those emotions. Hindemith describes what too often happens (taking it as a
general rule for all listeners): 'The difference in interpretation stems from
the difference in memory-images [of emotions] the listeners provide, and the
unconscious selection is made on the basis of the sentimental value or the
degree of importance each image has: the listener chooses the one which is
dearest and closest to his mental disposition, or which represents a most
common, most easily accessible feeling'.* Such people, whom one knows to exist,
are just plainly unmusical: suppose that such a listener's 'memory-image' has
no connection with the emotions expressed by the music at all? If someone were
to declare the Eroica Funeral March
to be a sanguine piece, we should unhesitatingly accuse him of being
emotionally undeveloped. […] The truly musical person, with a normal capacity
to respond to emotion, immediately apprehends the emotional content of a piece
of music to the degree that he can experience it.
[*Hindemith, op. cit., p. 40.]
Ought we not always to be trying to expand our
capacity for comprehending what the composer is trying to express, rather than
accept the first 'stock response' of our emotions? One is not entirely at the
mercy of one's superficial feelings; it is always possible to penetrate deeper.
For example, my own (and others') experience of Mozart's major-key music has
been: (1) in childhood, pretty music; (2) in adolescence, graceful and elegant,
but trivial music; (3) in maturity, graceful and elegant music often shot
through with deep and disturbing emotions. Here I would unhesitatingly maintain
that in cases 1 and 2, we were not really understanding Mozart at all.
Let us now examine the second movement of Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony. It is in the minor, has a heavy monotonous rhythm, and its
theme opens with twelve repetitions of the same note, marking that rhythm;
also, the movement has a 'trio' section in the major. It should hardly be
necessary to point out that these are the emotive elements of the Funeral March.
Consider Beethoven's own Marcia Funebre
in the Piano Sonata in A flat, Op. 26, and that of Chopin in his Sonata in B
flat minor. Consider also Schubert's later use of exactly the same rhythm
(again to repeated notes) in his 'Death and the Maiden'. The two main
differences between the Allegretto of
the Seventh Symphony and the genuine funeral march is that the rhythm is not
doted, and the tempo is rather quicker. (Much depends on the conductor's tempo,
of course; Beethoven is reported to have said he should have marked the
movement Andante, which would bring
it nearer to the real funeral march tempo.) The absolute individuality of the
movement is that it is a rather lighter, more gentle type of funeral march: it
is, in fact, a restrained elegy, rather than a heavy lament. But a 'scurrilous
scherzo'? A 'subdued pastorale'? One is bound to regard anyone who reacts in
this way as either superficial, unmusical, or unsympathetic to Beethoven.
[…]
Of course, no words can ever describe precisely the
emotion of this movement, or any other. The emotion is, in Mendelssohn's words,
'too definite' to be transcribed into the ambiguous medium of words. However,
the emotion is there, is real; and unless the listener recognizes, consciously
or unconsciously, the relationship of the movement to the basic conception of
the funeral march, his experience of the music will be false; and once this
relationship is pointed out to one who is quite unaware of it, it can
revolutionize his whole emotional response to the work, unless he sincerely
cannot (or obstinately will not) feel the connection.
Of course, to a more subtle degree, a piece of music
does convey something different to each normally responsive listener. […] But
anyone who conceives a quasi-funeral-march movement to be a 'kind of scurrilous
scherzo' must be considered emotionally abnormal (or simply unmusical) to a
degree.
One final difficulty remains. Is the traditional
language of music, to which we have referred, a genuine emotional language,
whose terms actually posses the inherent power to awaken certain definite
emotions in the listener, or is it a collection of formulae attached by habit over a long period to certain verbally
explicit emotions in masses, operas, and songs, which produce in the listener a
series of conditioned reflexes?
It seems most likely that the answer is simply
'both'. It would be useless to deny that the continuous and consistent use of
certain terms of musical language throughout five centuries or more must have
conditioned us to accept them without question; and it must have helped to
intensify their effect, pinpoint their character, and codify them clearly. But
it is difficult to believe that there is no more to it than that. In the first
place, one can only wonder how (to quote Hindemith) 'certain patterns of
tone-setting' ever came in the first place to 'correspond with certain
emotional reactions on the listener's part', unless the correspondences were
inherent, as are, for example, those between certain faces that we pull and certain
emotions we intend to express - delight, scorn, or disgust. Again, it seems
surprising that throughout five centuries or more all European composers
without exception - some of them violently revolutionary in other respects -
should have accepted the established connotations of the various terms without
demur (see the music examples in Chapters 2 and 3), and that this has proved
the only unchanging aspect of music. One might have expected a revolutionary
composer to try and cut loose from those connotations - to insist on using,
say, the major 1-3-5-6-5 of innocent joy to express some dark and evil emotion;
but nothing of this kind has been attempted.* In fact, it is possible to
discover, as Chapter 2 tries to show, close natural correspondences between the
emotive effect of certain notes of the scale and their positions in the
acoustic hierarchy known as the harmonic series; it seems improbable that the
'strength' of the fifth and the 'joy' of the major third, for example, should
not be inherent in their 'basic' positions in the series.
[*"Actually, with the advent of atonal and
twelve-tone music, we have at least witnessed a revolution which implies a
total break with the past, a repudiation of even the old terms of musical
language, and an attempt to recondition the listener to a new set. Whether it
will be successful is not yet clear."]
Ultimately, it is for the reader to make up his own
mind; in the meantime, the foregoing may perhaps be taken as reasonable support
for the view that music is a language of the emotions, and we may proceed to
consider in more detail the analogy between music and literature.
The analogy between music and literature, then, is
that both make use of a language of sounds for the purpose of expression. But
the analogy is only valid on the plane of emotional expression, since abstract
intellectual statements such as 'I think, therefore I am' are outside the scope
of music, and the power to describe the outside world belongs to the analogy
with painting in the case of both arts ('tone-painting' and 'word-painting').
[Here follow discussions how even single words and
notes can have emotive effect - for example Browning's poem Pippa Passes with its first line
''Day!'' and the solo trumpet that opens Wagner's overture to Rienzi - and how musical settings of
poems - e.g. Schubert's Gretchen at the
Spinning-Wheel - can perfectly mirror the emotions of the text. The
emotional content of ''pure'' music, that is music without words, is
investigated by another extensive comparative analysis of the Funeral March
from Eroica and the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.]
Words are poor things, except in the hands of a poet.
The emotional adjectives I have used above are only feeble labels to indicate
the general feeling of the music. To return to Mendelssohn, words are 'so
ambiguous, so vague'; in every attempt the emotion of the music in words
'something is right, but something in unsatisfying'. No one, least of all
myself, would want to attach verbal labels to the deep feelings aroused during
a performance of the Eroica Symphony.
Nor would I be misunderstood concerning my comparison with Tennyson's Ode: the
last thing I would think of while listening to Beethoven's Funeral March is
this poem, which obviously expresses the same basic emotions, but through the
agency of another man of another race with another attitude towards life, and
through another artistic medium. Each says what it has to say in its own way,
and there is no such thing as translation or equivalence. My only reason for a
comparative verbal analysis of the two works is to endeavour to indicate that
music functions very much like poetry in making a coherent and unified
statement out of conflicting emotions.
[…]
We have another difficulty to meet here. It is
usually objected, when one offers an analysis of the emotions expressed in a
musical work, that music has a logic and constructive method of its own, that
it ultimately has to stand or fall as a piece of music. With this no one would
disagree, and one would hardly bother to make an emotional analysis of a work
which one did not already know to be technically excellent. Actually, there is
no conflict of ideas here at all. Any artist has to weave the emotions he is
expressing into an intellectually and emotionally coherent statement; and
emotions woven into this artistically formal way do not cease to be emotions
because they do not float about vaguely as in everyday life; in fact, they
become even more 'real' by their isolation and sensitive combination in a great
work of art. The great artist makes a supremely 'right' statement of the
emotions one feels oneself but cannot organize into a satisfying expression.
Music is no more incapable of being emotionally
intelligible because it is bound by the laws of musical construction, than
poetry is because it is bound by the laws of verbal grammatical construction.
In fact, in both cases, it should be a truism to say that the construction of a
work of art is guided both by the feelings and the intellect: the intellect
brings craftsmanship to bear on realizing the overall shape which is felt before it is intellectually
apprehended.
[…]
But still, it will be objected, we have not proved
any inherent connection between the notes and the emotions they are supposed to
express. That is, of course, the task of the rest of the book.
The Elements of Musical
Expression
The task facing us is to discover exactly how music
functions as a language, to establish the terms of its vocabulary, and to
explain how these terms may legitimately be said to express the emotions they
appear to.
Beginning with the basic material - notes of definite
pitch - we must agree with Hindemith that musical works are built out of the tensions between such notes. These
tensions can be set up in three dimensions - pitch, time, and volume; and the setting up of such
tensions, and the colouring of them by the characterizing
agents of tone-colour and texture, constitute the whole apparatus
of musical expression.
Let us now distinguish between the various ways in
which these dimensions can function, beginning with that of pitch. Pitch-tensions can be regarded in
two different ways - as tonal tensions
(what the actual notes on the scale are) and intervallic tensions (in what direction and at what distance the
notes are from one another).
[This is where the book starts becoming forbiddingly
technical. The quotes, correspondingly, become more selective, but, hopefully,
still intelligible and coherently organized. Certain amount of technical
language cannot be avoided, but it is kept to minimum. Weighing the importance
of the different ways of musical expression, Deryck declares that pitch and the
corresponding tonal tensions are the fundamental elements, all of the rest
being merely (though sometimes powerfully) qualifying influences.]
And ultimately, the fundamental element of pitch is tonal tension, in so far as it can be
separated from intervallic tension: for example, '5-1' does mean something
vital and all-important apart from its incarnation as a rising fourth or
falling fifth; whereas 'a falling fifth' does not mean anything very concrete
unless we know whether the tonal tension is, say, 8-4, 7-3, or 5-1. What the actual notes of the scale are -
this is the basis of the expressive language of music: the subtle and intricate
system of relationships which we know as tonality. In this system we shall find
the basic terms of music's vocabulary, each of which can be modified in
countless ways by intervallic tensions, time-tensions, and volume tensions, and
characterized by tone-colour and texture.
[…]
Tonal Tensions
This section brings us to the heart of the problem of
musical language, the persistent neglect to tackle which is responsible for the
meaninglessness of most attempts to elucidate the 'emotional content' of music,
and also for the widespread belief that any such attempts are futile, music
being emotionally ambiguous. The simple but amazing fact is that, although
certain general directional movements of pitch have occasionally been analysed
as 'symbols' (Schweitzer on Bach, for example), no one has ever tried to
analyse the expressive qualities inherent in the tonal relationships between
the different notes on the scale. No one has seriously got down to the business
of discovering, in each particular context, exactly
what the notes of the scale are and what tensions exist between them.
[At this place there is a lengthy and vastly
technical history how our tonal system evolved. Briefly, it all started in the
ninth century when a third note was added to the two that had been used since
the ancient Greeks. Later the system gradually became more complex with the
addition of more notes, but this is quite beyond my understanding. Deryck also
defines the ''harmonic period'' in European music to which his study applies:
from about 1400 to the present day, that is the mid-twentieth century. Having
mentioned briefly the basic - though vague and disputed - difference between
major and minor, namely to express positive and negative emotions, Deryck gets
down to business: ''an examination of the different tensions existing in the
major and minor systems''.]
The Thirds, Major and Minor
That the major third should be found to express
pleasure should surprise no one, since it is present, as we have noticed, early
on in the harmonic series: it is nature's own basic harmony, and by using it we
feel ourselves to be at one with nature.
[Earlier in the book the appearance of the major
third is said to have happen in the twelfth century. In this section there is a
great deal of historical background - for instance, how the major third was for
centuries repressed by the church as a symbol of the secular, pleasure-loving
life - but this is skipped here for the sake of brevity. The musical examples
range from anonymous English composer in 1425 to Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony
in 1937, ''an example of 'optimistic' Soviet music'', and even to
''Polly-wolly-doodle'' that ''shows the use of the major third on popular
level. In between there are the ''Ode to Joy'' from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony,
the Brindisi from Act 1 of Verdi's La
Traviata and others.]
What about the minor third? […] Being lower than the
major third, it has a 'depressed' sound, and the fact that it does not form
part of the basic harmonic series makes it an 'unnatural depression' of the
'naturally happy' state of things (according to Western ideas).
[…]
If, at this point, it is wondered exactly what is
meant by saying that the minor third functions expressively as a depression of
the major third of the harmonic series - whether such a thing has a genuine
aural significance, one cannot do better than indicate a context in which its
effect is isolated, and can be clearly heard.
[The example is Wotan's recitative "Als junger Liebe" from Wagner's Die Walküre where,
according to Deryck, the minor third of the vocal line can be heard ''jarring''
with the major one in the accompaniment of cellos and basses. Further examples
about the association of the minor third with feelings of grief range from a
''Dies Irae'' setting from the thirteenth century to Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex in 1927. In between, there
are the beginning of Iago's credo of hatred in Verdi's Otello, the aria ''Können Tränen meiner Wangen'' (freely translated
as ''If my tears prove unavailing…'') from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, the
gloomy beginnings of Beethoven's and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphonies, and
others.]
The strong contrast between the 'natural' pleasurable
major third and the 'unnatural' painful minor third has been exploited
throughout our musical history. Inevitably, it suggests a sudden switch from
pleasurable to painful feelings, or vice
versa (Ex. 27).
[Examples range from Dufay in 1474 to Britten in
1954, including Irving Berlin's song ''Let's face the music and dance'' from
the soundtrack of Follow the Fleet,
1936, as a ''pop'' example. And there is another alternative.]
Latterly, composers have discovered a different way
of exploiting the expressive power of the opposition between the major and
minor thirds: leaving the third fixed, and altering the character by shifting
the tonic and dominant, or the tonic alone (Ex. 28).
[Examples include the opening of Tchaikovsky's Fourth
Symphony, the so-called ''Faith-motif'', and Britten's Peter Grimes: ''Ellen tries to coax Peter out of his bitter humour
with a soothing phrase in E major, ''Warmed by new esteem that you find''.
The Sixths, Major and Minor
When we turn to the second most common note in the
major-minor antithesis - the sixth - we find that the contrast functions in
much the same way as with the third. Again, the major interval is used for
pleasure, the minor one for pain. Here are a few examples of the expressive use
of the major sixth (Ex. 29).
[These range from a troubadour song by l'Escurial in
the thirteenth century (''To you, sweet lady'') to Britten in 1944, again from Peter Grimes: ''Her breast is harbour
too, where night is turned to day'', Peter dreams of finding peace with Ellen.
Also the end of the love duet from the end of Act I of Verdi's Otello, where the lovers embrace and kiss,
the theme that is repeated in the end of the opera out of purely dramatic
considerations.]
The minor sixth has an entirely opposite effect:
[Consider examples from Machaut's motet ''With
sighing heart, grieving I lament'', c. 1300, to Qua Theba moritur, urbem serva… (''Save the city of Thebes
The Sevenths, Major and
Minor
With the sevenths, there is no such clear antithesis
as with the thirds and sixths. Perhaps it is best to begin by showing that the
minor seventh, like the minor third and sixth, is expressive of painful
feelings:
[''Cricifixus'' by Binchois, c. 1440, the orchestral
passage ending the Simpleton's lament in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, 1869, Mimi's crying out woefully at Rudolf's
groundless jealousy (''Mi grida ad ogni istante…'') from Puccini's La Boheme, 1896, and others.]
[After extensive discussion about the minor seventh
in different contexts, Deryck turns to the rather more elusive major seventh.
There is only one example here, the final duet of Radames and Aida O terra addio, which may be said to be
one of the rare instances when a major key expresses painful feelings, in this
case ''the hopelessness of their longing''.]
The Seconds, Major and Minor
As with the sevenths, there is no clear-cut antithesis
between the major and minor seconds. And again, we may begin by showing the
painful nature of the minor interval (Ex. 35).
[Mozart's Cosi
fan tutte, 1789, the point where ''Ferrando is in a fury of grief at his
betrayal of Dorabella'', Strauss' Don Juan,
1888, portraying his ''death, or, according to others, expressing the feeling
of Lenau's lines on the ageing libertine, which preface the score - 'the fuel
is burnt out, and all is cold and dark upon the hearth.'']
[The major second is another elusive note, ''largely
neutral one, common to both major and minor systems''. Examples include
Mahler's The Song of the Earth,
1908-9, the last section of which ''expresses his infinite longing''.]
[The fourths are skipped for the sake of brevity.]
The Augmented Fourth or
Diminished Fifth
The augmented fourth and the diminished fifth are, of
course, the same note; […] Its relationship to the tonic is that particular
tension which we have mentioned earlier as embodying the 'flaws' in the
harmonic series, and in the whole musical scheme of things - diabolus in musica. […] When composers
have wished to isolate this tension, they have usually done so by taking the
interval between the tonic and the sharp fourth: this should normally act as a
modulation to the dominant (see Ex. 38); but when it is exposed without any
resolution of any kind, it becomes diabolus
in musica indeed, for it acts as a 'flaw' which destroys the integrity of
the tonic key - thus removing the music outside the categories of human joy and
sorrow inherent in the scheme of things; it is hardly surprising that composers
should have used it to embody 'Old Nick' himself, his deputies, substitutes,
and influences:
[Examples range from Buxtehude in 1683 to Britten in
1954. Included are Don Giovanni's terrified cry ''Ohime'' when he offers his
hand to the Statue in the end of Mozart's opera, 1787; three examples from
Liszt: from the beginnings of the Dante Sonata and the Dante Symphony, both set in Inferno, 1837 and 1855, and his
''Mephisto Waltz No. 2'', 1880. Boito in Mefistofele,
1867, and Gounod in Faust, 1859, also
used it, as did Saint-Saens in his Danse
Macabre, 1874, Busoni is his Doktor
Faust and many, many others. After listing all these examples, Deryck
applies a healthy dose of cynicism and supplies a touching self-reference:]
All of which makes one wonder how much composers have
been influenced by the phrase diabolus in
musica. Only Gounod had anything to say about his augmented fourth; but he
did not mention it by name, and was obviously under the illusion that he had
made a profound discovery! To try and elucidate the point, I am forced back on
my own experience; I trust I shall be forgiven if for a moment I mention small
music in connection with great. When I made a setting of Burns's poem Tam O'Shanter, I had led Tam as far as
the church and reached the key of F; I expected some 'inspiration' to descend
on me to express the diablerie of the
'witches and warlocks' dancing Scots reels in the house of God, and it
descended in the shape of a bagpipe drone not of F and C, but of F and B
natural. The interval became pervasive, and as the dance got wilder, the music
moved into B major, apparently of its own accord. At that time, although the
term diabolus in musica was of course
familiar to me, I had not yet begun to investigate the properties of the
augmented fourth or diminished fifth as an expressive tension, much less made
the above collection of musical demonology. Hence, if it is admitted that the
mysterious thing known as 'inspiration' functions in the same way with
composers of no account as with the great, the all-important difference lying
in the quality of it and the ability to build on it, it would seem likely that
composers have turned unconsciously to this interval to express the devilish, for its actual sound, which derives from
the 'flaw' in the harmonic series, just as they have turned instinctively to
the major third for its naturally joyful sound.
[Here follow extensive discussions of the vitalizing
agents - volume, time, and pitch - and brief mention of the characterizing
ones, that is tone-colour and texture. All these are in their own way
important, but all are also of secondary importance to the tonal tensions.]
Some Basic Terms of Musical
Vocabulary
So far, the attempt to analyse the functioning of
musical language has necessitated that most dubious procedure, the breaking
down of an indivisible unity into its component parts, which have no genuine
separate existence. There are, strictly speaking, no such things as 'the major
third', 'quick tempo', 'loud volume', etc., considered apart from the
innumerable contexts in which they occur.
[…]
Our justification is that this method is the only
possible one, and we are now going to try and put the parts together again with
a better idea how they are likely to interfuse with one another for expressive
purposes. The first step must be the examination of small-scale examples of the
total functioning of musical language - combinations of two or more notes into
those short phrases which are the basic terms of musical vocabulary. Once
again, though, various uses of these terms will have to be separated from their
contexts, and examples will have to be gathered from different periods and
different composers, to establish the emotive significance of each term. In
fact, as we shall now be dealing, not with single notes, but with melodic
patterns, we shall be playing, a little more seriously than usual, the game
known as 'twisted tunes'.
This piece of foolery, which crops up from time to time
in professional musical circles, has afforded a good deal of harmless amusement
in its time, as a radio feature, a parlour game, and a stand-by for anyone
planning a musical quiz. It goes like this: having discovered a case of two
composers utilizing the same bit of tune, one intrigues people by demonstrating
the fact, or by trying to confuse them as to which is which. And there the
matter usually ends: few try to puzzle out why such resemblances should be.
[Here there is a comparison between Wagner's Parsifal and Verdi's Otello: both at one
place use ''the same triadic phrase - 1-3-5-6-5 in the minor system''. The
former is Parsifal's agonizing cry ''Erlöse'' after receiving Kundry's
''soul-seducing kiss'', and the latter is the instrumental passage that
accompanies Othello's looking down on the sleeping Desdemona, still loving her
yet determined to kill her. Clearly, this is no case of imitation: Wagner died
before Verdi even composed Otello,
and the Italian Maestro had never heard Parsifal
when he came to deal with the Moor in music. So:]
But how are we to explain the similarity, or rather
the near-identity? Coincidence? There are an enormous number of them in music.
Before trying to answer the question, let us first assemble our collection of
such 'coincidences', as they have occurred throughout the ages. But although it
is necessary to play at 'twisted tunes', a pledge is given that there will be
no 'twisting' of the kind whereby you can prove anything. In giving examples
of, say, 8-7-6-5, anything only approximate like 8-7-6-4, or 8-7-5-3 will be
shunned like the plague. In any case, there are far too many exact similarities
for us to bother with approximations.
Ascending 1-(2)-3-(4)-5
(Major)
We have postulated that to rise in pitch is to
express an outgoing emotion; we know that, purely technically speaking, the
tonic is the point of repose, from which one sets out, and to which one
returns; that the dominant is the note of intermediacy, towards which one sets
out, and from which one returns; and we have established that the major third
is the note which 'looks on the bright side of things', the note of pleasure,
of joy. All of which would suggest that to rise from the tonic to the dominant
through the major third - or in other words to deploy a major triad as a
melodic ascent 1-3-5 is to express an outgoing, active, assertive emotion of
joy. Composers have in fact persistently used the phrase for this very purpose
(Ex. 53).
[Examples range from Byrd in 1611 to Vaughan Williams
in 1931. They include three from Mozart alone: the climax of Belmonte's opening
aria (''Und bringe mich
We may as well clear up a thorny point at the start.
It is not 'twisting' to say that 1-3-5 can materialize in composers'
inspiration as 1-2-3-5, 1-3-4-5, or 1-2-3-4-5 […] And it is obviously desirable
to exemplify, not only the basic term itself, but the two or three different
forms it can take. However, to jumble the different forms together in a block
example might awaken suspicions that it had been difficult to find exact
examples, and that variants had been dragged in to fill historical gaps. (The
opposite is the case - it has been difficult to choose a few examples from the
plethora of material.) Wherefore, the four different variants of the basic term
have been separated, each with examples in chronological order.
[Two notes more about the musical examples in this
section. One of them is the opening of ''Rock around the Clock'' which ''swept
the world in 1956 - as sung on the record by its exponent Bill Haley, who
substituted 1-3-5, with unerring instinct, for the actual tune's less ebullient
1-2-3.'' This ''pop'' example is in the company of Johann Strauss from 1867, tempo di valse scored for violins and
played piano. This is probably the
only musical example in the whole book the identity of which Deryck does not
disclose. He mentions only that it ''needs no comment''. Consultation with the
excellent appendix apparatus reveals exactly what one suspects: The Blue Danube
Waltz, or An der schönen blauen Donau
if you prefer the original title; see p. 5 in this score.]
-3-(4)-5+(Major).JPG)
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-3-(4)-5+(Major).JPG)
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[Keep also in mind, as later mentioned by Deryck,
that the so called vitalizing agents can significantly change the appearance of
the phrase, though not its emotional character. For instance:]
Naturally the vitalizing agents express the degree
and kind of joy: for example, the quiet, calm, assured joy at Berlioz's
Resurrection Chorus - piano 4/4 moderato, even rhythm, legato; and the violently animated,
vociferous joy of Beethoven's Gloria - fortissimo,
allegro, impulsive rhythm, non-legato.
[…]
Ascending 5-1-(2)-3 (Major)
To leap from the dominant up to the tonic, and thence
to the major third, with or without the intervening second, is equally
expressive of an outgoing emotion of joy.
[Examples range from Compere c. 1510 to Delius in
1930. Notable ones include the so-called ''Sword Motive'' from Wagner's The Ring, the idée fixe of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, and a folk-tune from the
Coronation Scene of Mussorgsky's Boris
Godunov.]
-3+(Major).JPG)
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[…]
Ascending 1-(2)-3-(4)-5
(Minor)
Substituting the minor for the major third in the
1-3-5 progression, we shall expect to find the resulting phrase expressive of
an outgoing feeling of pain - an assertion of sorrow, a complaint, a protest
against misfortune - and we shall not be disappointed.
[Examples range from an anonymous Italian composer c.
1470 to Bartok in 1930. For example, Tamino's cry for help (''Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe, sonst bin ich verloren'') from Mozart's The Magic Flute, several instances from Schubert's gloomy song
cycle Winterreise, such as the
telling phrases ''You who once rushed along so gaily, impetuous stream, how
still you are now, with never a sound to greet me'' from ''Auf dem Flusse'', father's
plead to his sons from Bartok's Cantata
Profana and the ''pathetic and bitter popular song 'Brother can you spare a
dime' - the protest of the out-of-work American war hero.'']
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[Deryck concludes this section by declaring that
those ''writers who connect the opening of the slow movement of Schubert's
Ninth Symphony with the feeling of Die
Winterreise are not mistaken''. He also suggests that the opening of
Mahler's Second Symphony may be understood as ''a fierce protest against
suffering''.]
Ascending 5-1-(2)-3 (Minor)
If the major version of 5-1-3 stresses joy pure and
simple, by aiming at the major third, the minor version expresses pure tragedy,
by aiming at the minor third. And to move upward firmly and decisively from the lower dominant, via the tonic, to the minor third, gives a strong feeling of
courage, in that it boldly acknowledges the existence of tragedy and springs
onward (upward) into the thick of it, as composers have realized.
[For example, Wagner and his musical description of
tragic heroes in The Ring: the
opening of the ''Volsung'' motive that refers to the ''brave but long-suffering
hero Siegmund''; the first notes of the phrase ''attached to him when the
Valkyrie comes to announce his death (he sings it to her again and again, first
questioningly, then defiantly)''; and the beginning of Siegfried's heroic
motive, ''perhaps the supreme example of the phrase''. Also, Otello's defiant
cry ''Ho un arma ancor'' after which he stabs himself in the end of Verdi's
eponymous opera.]
[Deryck suggests (highly speculatively!) that these
examples may explain a good deal about the finale of Brahms' First Piano
Concerto, its opening being perhaps an expression of ''grief-stricken youth's
courageous, even heroic resolve to leave anguish and consolation, and get on
with the business of life - in the midst of which, as Schumann's sudden
extinction had made clear to him, we are in death?'' The Schumann-reference is
because the first movement of the concerto was reportedly inspired by his
demise at the age of 46.]
Descending 5-(4)-3-(2)-1
(Major)
If to fall in pitch expresses incoming emotion, to
descend from the outlying dominant to the point of repose, the tonic, through
the major third, will naturally convey a sense of experiencing joy passively,
i.e. accepting or welcoming blessings, relief, consolation, reassurance, or
fulfillment, together with a feeling of 'having come home'.
[For example, the opening phrase of Handel's sublime
aria ''Ombra mai fu'' from Xerxes,
where the great Persian warrior is ''represented as passively enjoying the
delights of his garden''; the opening phrase from Schubert's equally beautiful
''Der Lindenbaum'', where ''the jilted lover finds comfort and consolation in
his favourite linden-tree''; and Zerlina's ''pacifying her jealous lover'' in
Mozart's Don Giovanni (''Batti,
batti, o bel Masetto'', to be exact). Towards the end of the section Deryck
again extends ''the interpretation drawn from musico-verbal contexts to a
purely musical one'', this time discussing the broad major theme from Carl
Nielsen's Fifth Symphony: ''an excited welcoming of the relief which has been
expectantly striven for, a triumphant acceptance of joyous fulfilment.'']
-3-(2)-1+(Major).JPG)
-3-(2)-1+(Major).JPG)
Descending 5-(4)-3-(2)-1
(Minor)
Substituting the minor for the major third in the
descending 5-3-1 progression, we have a phrase which has been much used to
express an 'incoming' painful emotion, in a context of finality: acceptance of,
or yielding to grief; discouragement and depression; passive suffering; and the
despair connected with death.
[For example, again Schubert's ''Der Lindenbaum'',
the lover's rejecting the consoling thought of dying peacefully beneath the
linden-tree: ''Ich muss auch heute wandern''. Also, Dido in Berlioz's The Trojans, with his ''dramatic and
despairing cry'' that he wants to die: ''Je vais mourir!''; the opening of
Verdi's Requiem; the despair of Serena in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess; the lament of Xenia in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov; the Arioso dolente from Beethoven's Sonata Op. 110; and the lamentoso opening of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony. Some of these
examples, such as the last two, contain additions such as ''a final major
seventh, which adds a more bitter feeling to the basic mood.'']
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Arched 5-3-(2)-1 (Minor)
To rise from the lower dominant over the tonic to the
minor third, and fall back to the tonic with or without the intervening second,
conveys the feeling of a passionate outburst of painful emotion, which does not
protest further, but falls back into acceptance - a flow and ebb of grief.
Being neither complete protest nor complete acceptance, it has an effect of
restless sorrow.
[For example, the ''Lachrymosa''-themes from the
Requiems of both Mozart and Verdi; the beginning of Schubert's ''Auf dem Wasser
zu Singen'' or the ending of his ''Gute Nacht''; the renunciation of love from
Wagner's The Rhinegold: ''Nur wer der
Minne Macht versagt''; and perhaps most poignantly of all, Violeta's aria from
the last act of Verdi's La Traviata:
''Addio del passato bei sogni ridenti'', that is her bidding ''farewell to the
past, to the fair smiling dreams''.]
1-(2)-3-(2)-1 (Minor)
To base a theme on the tonic, only moving out as far
as the minor third, and returning immediately, is to 'look on the darker side
of things' in a context of immobility, neither rising up to protest, nor
falling back to accept. Composers have frequently used this progression to
express brooding, an obsession with gloomy feelings, a trapped fear, or a sense
of inescapable doom, especially when it is repeated over and over.
[For example: ''Dies Irae'' and ''Confutatis
Maledictus'' (the bass line) from Mozart's Requiem; Don Giovanni ''suddenly
transfixed by fear as the flames of hell flicker around him'' - ''Da qual
tremor insolito'' - in Mozart's opera; the ominous chorus calling
''Marguerite'' in the Church Scene from Gounod's Faust; the Funeral March and opening theme of the first movement
from Chopin's Second Sonata; the composer ''said nothing about this theme at
all, but surely we need not talk of 'pure music' now'', Deryck adds. He
mentions that the phrase is common to the closing bars of the first movement of
Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and the opening theme of Rachmaninoff's Third
Piano Concerto.]
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[It should by now be clear how Deryck's method
operates and what he is trying to achieve. So the remaining ''basic terms of
musical vocabulary'' shall be skipped for the sake of brevity. We are instead
continuing with something less technical but every bit as provocative.]
[But before that it may be useful to remind the
reader that Deryck was a composer himself, though minor and occasional one.
Nevertheless, he must have had this kind of special insight into the process of
musical composition that cannot be learned by any other way except through
personal experience. I suggest you keep this in mind while reading his highly
speculative ventures into the minds of great composers.]
The Process of Musical
Communication
Having isolated the elements of musical expression,
and identified the basic terms of musical vocabulary, we have to some extent
prepare the way for an attack on the main problem - how a large-scale musical
work functions expressively as a whole. But before we can turn our attention to
this, a number of important questions remain to be answered. How, precisely,
does music communicate the composer's feeling to the listener? Granted that the
same phrases are used over and over again to 'express' the same emotions, how
are they made to 'convey' composers' own personal experience of these emotions,
and of various shades of these emotions? To phrase it another way, how is a
musical phrase made to bear a particular 'content'? What is content, in reality? How does it get into the music? And how
does it get out of it again, and into the listener? Only by answering these
questions can we come to understand exactly in what sense is music expressive,
what sort of things it can express, and how far we can hope to give a sense of
them in words.
[…]
To begin at the beginning: how does a musical work
originate in the composer's mind? Normally as a conception. This can arise in four main ways. (1) From a literary text which the composer feels
an urge to set to music (masses, anthems, songs, some operas and oratorios).
(2) From a 'literary' idea which the composer feels an urge to
use either as a basis for a vocal and instrumental composition (some operas and
oratorios) or as a programme for a purely instrumental work (symphonic poems,
and programme-symphonies like Berlioz's Symphonie
Fantastique). (3) From an ideal or
concept which the composer feels drawn to use as the basis of a purely
instrumental work without a specific programme (Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, or Carl Nielsen's Inextinguishable). (4) From a 'purely musical' impulse - the desire, say, to write 'a great symphony' (Schubert's
Ninth).
What motivates a conception? Why does a composer
suddenly feel an impulse to write a work founded on a certain text, programme,
idea, or musical genre? Something more than a passing whim, surely: it must be
that he has something to say, whether he knows it or not. In other words, a
certain complex of emotions must have been seeking an outlet, a means of
expression, of communication to others; a state of affairs of which the
composer may have been quite aware, or only half aware, or completely unaware.
The moment of conception is the moment in which the nature of the complex
emotions become entirely clear to his conscious mind - except in the case of a
'purely musical' impulse: here the emotional stimulus of the conception often remains
almost entirely unconscious right through the whole process of composition, and
beyond it, since it is finding expression in the inexplicit language of music,
which is emotionally unintelligible to the conscious minds of its most powerful
exponents.
And what is meant by a conception? Usually a vague
sense of the nature, mood, and shape of the work to be composed, with the
separate parts and the actual material as yet unrealized, or only partly
realized. Examples are Beethoven's conception of a great symphony in honour of
Napoleon which resulted in the Eroica,
and Wagner's decision to make Siegfried and the Nibelung myth the subject of a
new type of opera - music-drama - which materialized in The Ring.
What is the next stage in the act of musical creation?
The event known as inspiration - the
sudden materialization of a musical idea in the composer's mind. It has been
called 'next' stage, though it may in fact precede or accompany the conception.
An example of the former is the Hebrides Overture of Mendelssohn. Writing home during
his Scottish tour, he said: 'In order to make you understand how
extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the
following came into my head there'*; and he noted down the opening theme of the
work in his letter. The inspiration came first, then; but the conception (that
of a 'seascape' overture) must have followed close. Conception and inspiration
can be simultaneous: when Schubert read Goethe's poem 'The Erl King' and sat
straight down and set it to music then and there, he must have experienced the
conception (a tone-painting of a gallop through a stormy night) and the
inspiration (the drumming accompaniment and expressive vocal line) more or less
at a single mental event. But frequently, inspiration takes its time in following
the initial conception. William Byrd and Hugo Wolf pondered over words, the
latter sometimes waiting for years for inspiration to arrive; Wagner brooded
deep and long over mythology; Haydn, in his later years, prayed; Beethoven
wrestled; Cesar Franck played other men's music; Stravinsky sits at the piano
and probes. Ultimately, however, what eventually turns up, whether quickly or
slowly, whether 'pure' or in connexion with words and ideas, is musical
inspiration.
[*Mendelssohn's words are sourced as ''letter to his
family, 7 August, 1829''. After a two quotations on inspiration more, one by
Copland and one by Byrd, Deryck continues with the reportedly mysterious
origins of this suspicious phenomenon:]
But inspiration does not come from nowhere: nothing can
come out of nothing. Music as we know it could not be created at all but for
the existence of a long tradition of past music; and every composer draws
continually on his experience of this tradition - which cannot be anywhere
else, for him, but in his own unconscious
mind. In the composer's unconscious is stored all the music he has ever
heard, studied, or written himself; some of it, to use the Freudian term, is
'pre-conscious', i.e. more or less accessible to the conscious faculty of
memory, but most of it is forgotten, or half-forgotten. And it is from this
storehouse that inspiration must come: any new musical idea which suddenly
'comes into the composer's head' must be created in some way or other out of
his experience of the music of his predecessors and contemporaries (and of his
own music), which belongs to the vast mass of life-experience retained in his
unconscious. In other words, what we call 'inspiration' must be an unconscious creative re-shaping of
already existing materials in the tradition.
This unconscious process has always been regarded as
an ultimate mystery, but our identification of the basic terms of musical
language, in Chapter 3, offers us a chance of coming to grips with the problem
at last. For in the music examples in that chapter, we have a mass of detailed
evidence to support the hypothesis that inspiration is an unconscious
re-shaping of already existing material: all the 'inspirations' assembled there
have quite obviously arisen out of the various composers' experience of the
music of their predecessors. Our hypothesis is, in fact, already confirmed in
one particular field - that of melody
- and we may use this fact as a starting-point for our investigation of the
problem of inspiration. No doubt the unconscious process of re-shaping must
also occur in the fields of harmony and rhythm; but let us ignore these for the
moment, and concentrate entirely on the melodic element, since we have the
evidence at our disposal, and since melody, as we have tried to show, is the
fundamental basis of musical language. We can begin from this undeniable fact:
that the 'basic term' type of inspiration, as profusely exemplified in Chapter
3, is clearly a matter of reproducing certain well-worn melodic formulae in new guises.
At first sight, this would seem to be a bewildering
state of affairs. Many of the inspirations in the music examples of Chapter 3
are of the highest order; yet how can there be anything 'inspired' about a
process which merely reproduces, in slightly different form, something which
has already been used many times before? How are we to reconcile this constant
reliance on the same melodic material with the indisputable fact of the
creative vitality of 'inspiration'? Before we can solve this problem, we must
first answer the preliminary question (posed at the beginning of Chapter 3 but
left unanswered there): how is it that composers do return again and again to
the same few scraps of melody?
There can be only three possible explanations of the
fact that a handful of melodic phrases have been used over and over again:
plagiarism, unconscious 'cribbing', and coincidence. The first of these may be
ruled out straightaway since, apart from isolated examples like Handel and
Bononcini, composers have not been guilty of intentionally stealing other men's
themes as basis for their own works; and in any case, we are concerned only
with unintentional, unconscious resemblance.
Unconscious cribbing seems a fairly obvious explanation in
certain cases, where the 'inspiration' is clearly a reproduction of another
composer's idea in easily recognizable form: here 'inspiration' functions
simply as the sudden return to consciousness of an actual theme by another
composer, once heard, since forgotten or half-forgotten, and now no longer
recognized when it reappears.
[Here Deryck gives as an example the famous incident
with Manuel de Falla (from his biography by Jaime Pahissa). In short, the
opening theme of Nights in the Gardens of
Spain came to de Falla very much like a genuine inspiration. Later he was
horrified to discover that it appears note for note the same in a zarzuela by one Amadeo Vives. The
mystery was explained when it was remembered that both composers had stayed at
the same Madrid
Similarly Wagner, rehearsing Act 3 of The Mastersingers one day, and arriving
at Hans Sachs's words 'Mein Freund, in holder Jugendzeit', suddenly realized,
and pointed out with a smile, that the melody was straight out of Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor. And others
have noticed that in the The Ring,
the Rhinemaidens' motive appears to be from Mendelssohn's Melusine Overture, the theme accompanying Sieglinde's dream from
Liszt's Faust Symphony, and the
Nibelung motive from Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden' Quartet - but here we
run up against an obstacle. Is the last of these three examples in fact a case
of 'unconscious cribbing'? We are all too apt to jump to conclusions in these
matters. It is not certain that Wagner ever heard any of Schubert's chamber
music; this may be just as much a coincidence as is the resemblance between the
tragic themes of Parsifal and Verdi's
Otello (Ex. 52).
[More details about ''Ex. 52'' were mentioned above.
Deryck concludes that such examples of unconscious cribbing, even when pointed
out by the composer himself, ''take us on shaky ground''. There is no simple
explanation for such resemblances, and it would be as difficult to attribute
them to unconscious cribbing as to deliberate plagiarism. At any rate, neither
any of these nor both of them can account for the profundity of examples in
Chapter 3. So we are left with the third and, at first glance, most
unsatisfactory explanation:]
The answer to our problem, then, can only be
coincidence - which would seem to be no answer at all, unless we are prepared
to believe that the world is ruled by blind chance. Yet it is in fact the
correct and perfectly satisfying answer, if we despoil the word of its acquired
connotation of chance, and understand it in its simple generic sense of
'happening together' or 'happening in the same way'. For it is clear from the
examples in Chapter 3 that, in tonal music, things just do happen over and over
again in the same way, melodically - but for a very good reason. There are only
twelve notes in the scale; and a tonal composer intent on expressing a certain
emotion is limited to fewer; and there is not an infinite number of shapes into
which he can weave the few notes at his disposal - in fact they will often fall
quite naturally into those familiar patterns which we have called the basic
terms of musical vocabulary. Given the structure of the scale, with its tonic
and dominant, and that of the triad, with its third, these patterns were
inevitable from the beginning: they might be described as propensities to group certain tonal tensions together in certain
ways, which crystallized into habitual
propensities, and were handed down unconsciously as elements of the musical
heritage of Western Europe . Some of them, such
as the 'wailing' minor 6-5, and the 'innocent' pentatonic (major) 1-3-5-6-5,
must date back into pre-history; others, such as those involving the augmented
fourth or the chromatic scale, are obviously of later date, and the process of
their growth into habitual propensities could no doubt be accurately plotted by
painstaking research into the history of expressive idioms in music.
It does not seem fanciful to suppose that, in the
tonal composer's unconscious, a state of affairs exists which can be described
metaphorically in the following way.* (1) Memories of the innumerable
expressive uses of each of the tonal
tensions must attach themselves together in groups, by the association of
ideas (or, rather, by the association of feelings); and each group of this kind
must be attached to a kindred group of memories of sense-experiences,
life-experiences, and literary and artistic experiences, also by the
association of feelings. (2) These composite groups must contain within them
certain sub-groups, each attached to a specific melodic use of the tonal
tension concerned, i.e. to one of the basic
terms of musical vocabulary: for example, of the vast number of
associations connected with the major sixth, many will be attached to the major
6-5, or 8-7-6-5, or 1-3-5-6-5, or to other patterns involving the major sixth,
no doubt, not identified in this book. (3) Memories of the expressive uses of
certain keys must also attach
themselves together, by the association of feelings, and these groups must also
attract memories of life- and art-experiences, thereby forming the well-known
associations in composers' minds between certain keys and certain moods. Owing
to individual idiosyncrasies difficult to analyze, these associations tend to
vary from composer to composer, but there is a large measure of agreement
(owing to the historical development of key-signatures, instruments, etc.): the
'tragic' C minor, for example, the 'common light of day' C major, the 'brilliant'
D major, and the 'luxurious' D flat major. Naturally, in view of this, the
various basic terms will be attracted with greater or less intensity to the
different key-areas.
[*''One says 'metaphorically' because, as Freud
admitted, one imagines a kind of topography, in discussing unconscious mental
events, which doubtless bears no relation to the (so far undiscovered) physical
reality. This latter must be akin to the intricate layout of the electronic
brain, though naturally of infinitely greater complexity; in the meantime, one
realizes that, although it is necessary to talk of a basic term as though it
were a kind of spatial pattern, it is nothing more tangible than a kind of
habitual propensity.'']
Returning now to the question of inspiration, and looking
back to the music examples of Chapter 3, we can see that 'inspiration' can
often mean 'the breaking through into consciousness of a particular basic term,
in a certain form, from a certain key area'.
[…]
How does the process actually work? Let us try and
imagine how inspiration of this kind would function in the case of a tonal
composer who had conceived an opera on the subject of Hamlet. The opening
(assuming it to be the same as Shakespeare's), with its combination of night,
bitter cold, and armed guard, disquiet, and a foreboding of tragedy, would
inevitably call forth inspiration from the key-area in his unconscious closely
connected with such gloomy associations - undoubtedly a minor one, and if the
composer were in the Mozart-Beethoven-Wagner succession, it could easily be C
minor. In this area, the tonal tensions connected with tragic feelings (minor
third) or with anguish (minor sixth) would be stimulated to rise to
consciousness, already integrated into one of the basic terms - perhaps the 'heroic'
rising 5-1-3, or the 'anguished' 6-5, or the 'brooding' 1-3-1, or perhaps a
conflation of two or more, according as the composer felt the scene (and the result no doubt would be deployed in march
rhythms, piano, in mysterious
tone-colours and textures). Later, the ghost might well arouse the augmented
fourth; and at the very end of the opera, Hamlet's dying speech might easily
call up the descending chromatic scale (slow tempo, inevitably, and soft
dynamic).
But in itself, all this is not enough. The
inspiration may be of the highest or lowest order. If our imaginary composer is
a tyro (or a genius on an off day), the basic terms will make their appearance
as inspiration of the feeblest kind; if he is a great composer in the throes of
true creation, they will materialize as the powerful inspiration out of which
masterpieces are made. What determines the quality
of an inspiration of this type? It can only be the vitality of the 'particular
form' in which the basic term comes to the surface: in the unconscious of the
genuinely great creative composer, the breath of life is blown into it in some
way.
And what is it that blows this breath of life into a
basic term? It can only be that mysterious, unconscious power, the creative imagination, which, in the
words of Coleridge, 'instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered
fragments of memory, puts together some form to fit it….' And how does this
creative imagination exert its influence on the stock material at its disposal?
If we look at any of the examples in Chapter 3, one fact stands out
unmistakably: the well-worn pattern of the two or more notes has been stamped
afresh with a new creator's personality almost entirely by being given a particular rhythmic articulation at a
given tempo. Volume, tone-colour, and texture may have played their parts
in making the term the composer's own, but it is by being infused with an
individual rhythmic life that it has really been created anew. So we may say
that in inspirations made out of basic
terms, the creative imagination must function mainly in the rhythmic sphere.*
[The footnote mentions three motets by Byrd which are
an excellent example of the ''essentially rhythmic nature of the creative
imagination'' because in all of them ''the volume is only implicit (there are
no dynamic markings), and the tone-colour and texture are the basic, habitual,
inescapable 'black-and-white' of the polyphonic period - the human voice and
the a cappella choir.]
[For the sake of brevity, the rest of Deryck's
important discussions of the creative imagination are omitted. In the section
about rhythm the ''Gloria'' from Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is extensively analysed, namely how he managed to
create something glorious out of a rather ordinary thematic material. The
section about melody takes as an example the opening of Beethoven's Pastoral
Symphony and attempts to explain how the creative imagination might work without the benefit of any of the basic
terms from Chapter 3. The discussion about harmony is of course confined mostly
to Wagner's Tristan. In between there
are relevant ''digressions'' on the content-form conundrum and on the other
side of the equation, that is the conversion of 'pure' sound back in emotion by
the mind of the receptive listener. The chapter ends with Beethoven's
brilliantly succinct summary of the whole process of communication: Von Herzen
- möge es wieder - zu Herzen gehn! - 'From the heart - may it go back - to the
heart!']
[The last chapter consists mostly - though not
entirely - of severely technical analysis of two large-scale works. I limit my
selection to parts of the prefatory remarks, the general introduction about
Mozart's music, and the concluding paragraphs.]
The Large-Scale Functioning
of Musical Language
Everything that has gone before must have aroused in
the reader's mind the question: 'What happens when we move off the plane of minutiae?' The initial theme of a
movement may begin with a basic term, so that bit of it expresses that
particular emotion - granted; but how does it go on after that? And what
happens when this theme is developed, brought into contact with other themes,
and 'worked out' in conjunction with them? Single phrases may be very
expressive in themselves, but they have to be built up into an overall
structure; and surely this building-up must proceed by the laws of purely
musical logic, heedless of expressive considerations? Can a musical structure function continuously as expression, in
reality? Is it not rather a purely musical pattern woven out of fragments of expressive
material? And does not this account for what Hindemith calls the 'delirious,
almost insane manner of appearance' of the emotions expressed in a piece of
music?
In answer to these questions, we may reply with a
sentence from Chapter 1 of this book: 'Music is no more incapable of being
emotionally intelligible because it is bound by the laws of musical
construction than poetry is because it is bound by the laws of verbal
grammatical construction'. The artist who has something to communicate through
the medium of his chosen language - be it speech or music - must be the master
of that language, not its servant. We should laugh at a literary critic who
maintained that verbal language had a logic of its own which made it incapable
of coherent emotional expression; then let us laugh at the musical theorists
who say the same of musical language - for it is they who have said so, and not
(with one or two very recent exceptions) the composers. The whole misconception
stems from some strange delusion that because music cannot organize its
expressive terms into those of logical sequences of intellectual meaning
peculiar to verbal syntax, it is debarred from any kind of coherent expression
whatsoever: any idea that there might be entirely different but equally coherent
kind of organization of expressive terms, peculiar to musical syntax - i.e that
our so-called 'purely musical logic' might be just as much an expressive logic as is 'purely verbal
logic' - seems far from the thoughts of most modern theorists.
[After showing in detail which motives, how and to
what effect Tchaikovsky used in the finale of his Sixth Symphony, Deryck
continues:]
Such an example shows clearly that music has its own
method of coherent emotional expression, quite different from that of
speech-language. This method is nothing more mysterious than the presentation
of some general but clearly-defined attitude towards existence by the
disposition of various terms of emotional expression in a significant order. And musical form is simply the means of
achieving that order. The finale of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony is of course an instance of the simplest kind -
a case of romantic rhetoric; but it is not thereby a false example. However
complex and allusive the form of an expressive musical work may be, it is still
simply the means whereby the composer has expressed an emotional attitude
towards existence by imposing a meaningful order on expressive terms; and it is
the continual failure to recognize this fact that is responsible for our generally
ambiguous and fruitless approach to music - which can be summed up as 'form is
form, and expression is expression, and never the twain shall meet'. Consider
the normally intelligent commentary, so often encountered in musical
biographies and concert-programmes, on a sonata-movement of an expressive
masterpiece. The writer has obviously apprehended the basic emotions of the
music through his innate musicality, since he has labelled the themes with
emotional adjectives - say, 'the heroic first subject' and the 'sorrowful
second theme'; but the moment that he has encountered the 'transition section'
with its 'busy passage-work', and the 'development' with its 'fragmentation and
re-integration of the main material', he has moved on to another plane altogether.
It seems as if he must feel that expression gives way entirely to 'pure form'
at these points, for we are suddenly faced with arid technical description such
as 'in a short transition section a four-note rhythmic figure deriving from the
second bar of the first subject is worked up in imitation, reaching a powerful
climax in the key of the submediant'. After which we may well be switched back
suddenly to the expressive plane: 'then follows the sorrowful second theme'.
Such writing is quite useless, not only because the
layman cannot understand it and the professional does not need it, but for the
more fundamental reason that the expressive significance of the 'transition
section' (i.e., the emotion conveyed by this working-up of a fragment of the first
subject) is not stated, and thus the ultimate point of the passage is ignored.
Having stated that the composer began with a 'heroic' theme, the writer has
neglected to tell us what happened to it, considered
as a heroic theme; why should we care, then, whether it is heroic or not,
if it suddenly becomes nothing more than a technical gambit? Of course, the
actual sound of any passage is instinctively apprehended as emotion by all
genuinely musical listeners - a category which may well include the commentator
himself, who is merely defeated by the problem of trying to get it all into
words; nevertheless, the fact remains that in all our writing and thinking
about music, we do most unfortunately tend to preserve the fallacy that musical
form cannot function continuously as expression, whereas in fact the two things
are only two aspects of another of our indissoluble unities.
[…]
Emotion… creative imagination… the reader will be
getting restive. Are musical compositions entirely the product of inspired somnambulism?
Does the intellect play no part at all? What of the sheer hard work that goes
in the art of composing? When a composer
comes to the task of building up his overall structure, does not his technique take over?
No one would wish to deny that a composer, however
richly endowed with creative imagination, must possess a first-rate technique
if he is to achieve satisfying forms, or that the acquiring and applying of
such a technique are intellectual activities involving an enormous amount of
hard work. But the question is, where exactly in the process of composition
does the creative imagination leave off and the technique take over? The answer
is, surprisingly enough, nowhere - as we realize when we look a little more
closely at the question. It implies that first of all the creative imagination,
working in the unconscious, provides an inspiration of some kind - say, a short
melodic-rhythmic phrase; and that after that, the technique, applied by the
conscious mind, begins the task of building up a form - a large scale pattern
into which the inspiration is integrated. But this widespread conception of the
process of musical creation is naïve in the extreme. There is no such simple
'first of all' and 'after that': technique is present at the very beginning,
and the creative imagination keeps on working to the very end. The two move
together hand in glove all the time, and are indeed nothing other than two
different functions of the same faculty.
[Here follows an in-depth analysis of the
relationship between technique and creative imagination. The extremes among
great composers are Beethoven who struggled with nearly work of his, and
Schubert who regularly poured out whole songs impromptu. Deryck finishes with
an insightful touch on the latter and Mozart as opposed to slower, more
intellectual and less instinctive composers (probably including himself), and
an elaborate summing-up worth quoting in
toto:]
Actually, anyone who has ever composed, on whatever
level, knows that terrible moment when the brain goes on spinning notes from
which the breath of life has been withdrawn, and however hard it tries, gets
more and more bogged down in meaninglessness. […] Schubert (like Mozart) was
one of the lucky ones, whose creative imagination rarely deserted him, and whose
technique was often practically inseparable from it, for it apparently
functioned much of the time in the same smooth, swift, somnambulistic way.
Summing up, we may say that the creative act in music
is a unity - the transformation of a complex of emotions into musical form -
normally manifesting itself as a continuous process divisible in to stages
which overlap, as follows. (1) A complex of emotions within the composer's
unconscious presses for an outlet - for expression, communication to others, in
musical form. (2) The composer's 'ability to use his stored-up knowledge for
the building up of forms' functions unconsciously, adumbrating a general
overall pattern which the form will take: this we call 'the creative
imagination providing a conception'. (3) The 'ability' functions again
unconsciously, actually transforming the current of the basic emotion of the
complex into a small-scale musical form: this we call 'the creative imagination
providing inspiration'. (4) The 'ability' functions consciously, spinning the
'inspiration' into larger forms, which are continually scrutinized by the
unconscious faculty of cognition, and accepted, modified, or rejected,
according as they fulfil, or fail to fulfil, the demands of the original
conception: this we call 'the technique building up the overall form under the
control of the creative imagination'. (5) During the building up of the overall
form, the 'ability' still manifests itself unconsciously all the time,
transforming the other emotions of the complex into other small-scale musical
forms, and these are also spun into larger forms by the 'ability' working
consciously: this we call 'the creative imagination continually providing
further inspirations for the technique to work on'. (6) The work stands complete
as the accurate transformation of the composer's complex of emotions (content)
into musical form (form) by the composer's 'ability' functioning unconsciously
(creative imagination) as a transformer of single emotions into small-scale
forms (inspirations), and consciously (technique) as a builder of small-scale
forms into a large one (form); acting in its latter capacity (technique) as a
realizer of the potentialities (conception) envisaged in its former capacity
(creative imagination).
[Here the discussion becomes forbiddingly technical,
including references to Hans Keller's celebrated Functional Analysis. One
illuminating point about the numerous sketches for Eroica left by Beethoven is worth noting:]
A study of these sketches makes it quite clear that
the technique is only doing on a large scale what the creative imagination (or
the technique itself in Beethoven's case) does on a small one - building up the
correct musical form of the composer's emotion. […] Just as the creative
imagination, in putting together the small-scale form which is an inspiration,
makes melodic, rhythmic and harmonic tensions interact in the most fruitful way
for the composer's expressive purpose - rhythmically accenting or harmonically
emphasizing this or that moment of rise and fall in pitch, this or that tonal
tension, so can Beethoven's technique be seen functioning, on a larger scale,
in building up the massive first movement of the Eroica Symphony. […] And it is impossible not to get the impression
that the technique is only impatiently laboring its way towards some definite
expressive end already envisaged by the creative imagination; and that the
latter is only waiting all the time to recognize and ratify each scrap of it
the moment it materializes, in the same way that it did while the Funeral March
theme was being groped for.
[…]
Symphony No 40 in G minor
(K. 550) by Mozart
Mozart may with truth be described as the most
persistently misunderstood composer of all time: owing to his miraculous blend
of intense emotion and perfect classic form, he has remained an enigmatic,
ambiguous figure from his own day to ours. Although in each age he has been
loved and admired in no uncertain measure, it has proved ultimately impossible
to strike a balance, to see him steadily and see him whole.
His contemporaries were unable to understand him
because he was so new: they complained of his bizarre effects, of his straining
after unnatural emotionalism, and one writer declared him to be 'a sectary of
that false system that divides the octave into twelve semitones' (!) To their
ears, nurtured on the normal 'tasteful' classical style of the galant and rococo periods, Mozart's exploitation of the expressive power of
music, in chromatic melodies and dissonant harmonies, appeared to be wild and
perverse experiments; and the perfect (but ever-new) forms in which he
controlled this turbulent material seemed to be bursting at the seams.
[…]
The romantics, on the other hand, could not
understand him because by their time, half a century after his death, he had
become a remote composer whose music was written in an outdated style. After
the Beethovenian expressive revolution, they were beginning a further 'advance'
towards conceiving music entirely as the most intense expression; and as they
went on giving a more and more rhetorical emphasis to the emotive tensions and
patterns of musical language, Mozart's subtle employment of the same tensions
and patterns in the clear-cut outlines of eighteenth-century sonata-form
appeared to be a purely artificial expression of emotion. The form, realized to
be perfect now that the 'modernisms' had vanished, was everything. There were,
of course, works in which Mozart appeared as an unmistakable forbear of the
more turbulent brand of romanticism - the D minor and C minor piano concertos,
the Statue music in Don Giovanni, the
Requiem Mass - and these were acknowledged and admired as such; but with
strange exceptions. For instance, at least the first and last movements of the
Fortieth Symphony belong to this category; but Schumann seems not to have felt
this at all. He was criticizing the poet Schubart's idea that keys are
connected with certain emotions, and particularly his equating of G minor with
'displeasure, discomfort, worrying anxiety, discontented gnawing at the bit',
and commented: 'Now compare this idea with Mozart's Symphony in G minor - that
floating Grecian Grace!' In fact, as true Mozartians know, the key of G minor
was nearly always used by Mozart for the emotions listed by Schubart, and not
least in this symphony: never did a great composer and penetrating critic more
openly betray a 'blind spot' than Schumann did here. Of course, Schubart was
wrong in supposing keys to have universal connexions with particular emotions;
as has been mentioned, the emotional connotations of keys are entirely a matter
of the psychology of the individual composer. But his choice of words looks
very much as though he might well have been thinking of Mozart.
Those romantics who actually worshipped Mozart did so
entirely for his supposed 'divine purity'. Tchaikovsky and Brahms acknowledged
this in their different ways: amid the heavily expressive romanticism of their
own music, they looked back and glamourized him as a kind of musical angel. In
short, the true essence of Mozart was inaccessible to the Romantics, since his
music had become 'old music'.
Our own age has retained the romantic period's
conception of Mozart as a 'pure' composer, but adopted a different attitude.
Whereas most romantics sensed the emotion in the music, but were more
fascinated by the apparent 'purity' of the expression, many modern musicians
refuse to admit the presence of any emotion in the music at all: it has now
become pure sound-structure, an intellectual and aesthetic delight. We are
under constant pressure, from the written and spoken word, to make only a
half-response to all music - to admire the form without apprehending it as
expression - and especially so in the case of Mozart: the general judgment of
the twentieth century, ratified during the 1956 bi-centenary celebrations, is
that his music is 'impersonal' and consists of superbly-wrought sound-patterns
not connected in any way with human attitudes and feelings.
This is sad ingratitude to a man who portrayed so
eloquently the joys, sorrows, hopes, fears and desires of the very human
characters in his operas, and who in general lavished upon us the riches of his
heart and soul (as well as his mind) in some of the most moving music ever
written. If our enjoyment and understanding of his art are not to be sadly
impoverished, we cannot too strongly oppose the fashionable dogma. Mozart, like
all other composers, wrote his music out of his total experience; far from
being impersonal, it is in fact the expression of the richest personality in all musical history, for he was the most
universal of the great composers. If this seems a large claim to make, consider
how many sides to his character there are, as revealed in his music: a
Christian spirituality, like Bach; a sense of the power and the glory of life,
like Handel; a sense of fun, like Haydn; a grim, tragic power, like Beethoven;
a mercurial wit, like Rossini; a wistful, 'innocent', child-like tenderness,
like Schubert; a yearning intensity and demonic force, like Wagner; an erotic
sensuality like Richard Strauss; a desolate melancholy and acute anguish, like
Mahler. This long list can be heavily substantiated by many passages from his
works. And there is, of course, a caressing charm, a kittenish playfulness,
like only Mozart; an elegance, sophistication, and exquisite taste, like only
Mozart. And all of these form the unity that was Mozart's balanced personality.
In fact, the only thing that Mozart's music lacks is what the twentieth century
declares it to consist of entirely - purity. It is not pure at all, as
Palestrina is pure. It is far too human for that.
[…]
It should be clear by now that to say that a composer
writes music out of his whole experience is not to entertain crude notions of
music's dependency on life - to imagine, say, that the melancholy of the
Fortieth Symphony was the immediate result of an influx of bills into the
poverty-stricken composer's home, or that the comparative joy of the Jupiter arose out of the receipt of a
large loan from a friend. An artist's emotions are not the playthings of
trivial events, being rooted in his unconscious, where they form his basic
life-attitudes; the Fortieth Symphony and the Jupiter are visions of the sadness and the joy of life
respectively, as experienced by Mozart - not in his superficial, everyday
reactions, but in his deep, enduring self.
To ask what was Mozart's 'state of mind' when he
conceived and wrote the Fortieth Symphony in a fortnight or so in the summer of
1788, three years before his death, or to dismiss such speculations as
irrelevant - both these approaches to the work are equally meaningless. His
'state of mind' was what it always was, a compound of many conflicting
elements; and if physical deterioration and growing penury had brought
melancholy uppermost, thereby helping to crystalize this last and finest of his
G minor protests against life's terrible sadness, these misfortunes did not in
the least prevent him from creating immediately afterwards the last and finest
of his C major paeans of life's inexhaustible wellspring of gladness. He knew
the naked emotional realities of life and could express them to the full in his
music; the immediate 'state of mind' forced on the man by the contingencies of
physical existence was not important to the creative artist.
We are assuming in advance that the Fortieth Symphony
is a melancholy work, an assumption
for which material proof will be forthcoming; and indeed true Mozart-lovers of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have realized this instinctively,
proving that prevailing fashions are all too often set by the uncomprehending.
But it is precisely these fashions, these dogmas, that we are combating, not
merely contradicting, but attempting to prove them wrong. My own first
experience of the Fortieth Symphony, like that of many other people, was as a
child, knowing nothing of musical history or aesthetics, or of the many writings
about the symphony, but reacting instinctively with the comment 'What a sad
piece of music!' Yet so excellent a musician as the late Richard Capell declared
that he could see nothing of all this supposed melancholy in the work; the
opening, he said, belonged to the world of comic opera, being very like the
music given to the young girl Barbarina in Figaro,
fretting over her lost pin. We can call this a blind spot, if we wish, but what
are we to reply to it?
[Deryck does reply by showing in detail, through
painstaking musical analysis, that such connections with the ''world of comic
opera'' are sheer nonsense.]
[From this point on the analysis of Mozart's Fortieth
becomes more and more technical, more and more incomprehensible for the layman.
The rest is skipped and so is the whole about Vaughan Williams's Fifth, a work I
have never heard a single note from. But before quoting the concluding
paragraphs of the book, let's finish with Mozart and his ''miracle of
formal-and-expressive unity'' in suitable style:]
My analysis has had to be expressed in the ambiguous
medium of words, but let it not be thought that it is intended in any way as a
'translation': it is meant to be a clue, to lead back to the music itself. The
words 'anguish', 'joy', 'despair', and 'obsession' are only hazy (but, one
hopes, basically accurate) symbols for the particular kind and degree of
anguish, joy, despair, and obsession which Mozart expressed precisely in his Fortieth Symphony, and
which we can only experience by listening to that work.
[…]
We may say then that, whatever else the mysterious
art known as music may eventually be found to express, it is primarily and
basically a language of the emotions, through which we directly experience the
fundamental urges that move mankind, without the need of falsifying ideas and
images - words or pictures. A dangerous art, in fact, as was realized by Plato,
the fathers of the medieval church, and Tolstoy, all of whom wished to control
and confine the use of it. But under the guidance of the intellect and the
enlightened moral sense, it is surely as safe as anything human can be - as
safe at least, shall we say, as religion or science.
[…]
Music is, after all, as Schoenberg said, 'the
language in which a musician unconsciously gives himself away…. One day the
children's children of our psychologists will have deciphered the language of
music. Woe, then, to the incautious who thought his innermost secrets carefully
hidden and who must now allow tactless men to besmirch his most personal
possessions with their own impurities. Woe, then, to Beethoven, Brahms, and
Schumann - those men who used their human right of free speech in order conceal
their true thoughts - when they fall into such hands! Is the right to keep
silent not worthy of protection?'*
[*''Schoenberg: 'Human Rights', in Style and Idea.'']
These are wise, if cryptic words. The composer,
expressing unconscious emotions in the inexplicit language of music, and often
not fully realizing himself exactly what he is saying, does indeed 'gives
himself away': being certain that whatever he has said can only be felt by the
musically sensitive, and not clearly identified, explained and discussed, he
can let out all that he obscurely feels in the depths of his being, while still
remaining 'silent' (i.e. inexplicit). Wherefore it seems likely that the
fundamental (i.e. psychological) 'content' of some musical masterpieces may be
quite appalling and even horrifying; and when the language of music is finally
deciphered, some terrible secrets may be revealed, not only about the
particular composer, but about humanity at large. Any superficial approach here
will be fatal: we all mistrust those so-called 'psychological analyses' which
reduce a work of art narrowly to some supposed and only half-proven complex or
neurosis of the artist, existing mainly in the psychologist's own imagination.
A psychologist of deep insight and great understanding will be called for;
perhaps psychology will have to link hands again with philosophy and
metaphysics before the language of music yields up its innermost secrets.
However it may be, these must eventually be yielded up, and we should not
shrink from them; for man's besetting virtue is curiosity, and his ultimate
quest is to discover the truth about himself.
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