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

DONALD N. FERGUSON THE

WHY OF MUSIC ' Dialogues in an o

Unexplored Region of Appreciation

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS /

Minneapolis

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

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-15088

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

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

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

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

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The Why of Music

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A GLEAM IN THE EYE

W

HENI was welve or so, a pianist of considerable

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

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

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

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

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

EXAMPLE I

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

'3

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

A GLEAM IN THE EYE

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

16

"SOMETHING MORE"

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

I

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

S O M E T H I N G MORE

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

EXAMPLE 2

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

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

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

3

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

4

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

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

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

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THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

SOMETHING MORE

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

3°

THE MUSICAL IMAGE

Y FRIEND, next day, came rather slowly up the

M

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

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

THE WHY OF MUSIC

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

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

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

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

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tion directly. I do think music — great music — may be seen as a representative art. And I'll go even farther. I doubt that the whole value of that music can be grasped if its representative suggestions are ignored. But I'm not saying that music represents the things —the literal facts —of extramusical experience. The musical image is, first of all, a musical image — that of an organized tonal body. I think we agreed that it was also something more than that. We've found many implications of motion and tension in music that resemble the bodily behaviors of men. Isn't that resemblance possibly visible as representation? Aren't the motions and tensions of a dirge or a dance those tensions and motion-impulses which men feel as appropriate to the occasions they celebrate with dirges or dances? Those two words imply two very different sorts of occasion. Doesn't the music also imply them — far more vividly than the words do? F. I've agreed to all that. But you don't answer my question as to the submerging of that implication in more highly organized music. /. Don't I? Doesn't experience itself also rise to what you call higher levels of intricacy? And may not your more elaborate or abstruse musical structures be designed in such a way that the implications of their tensions and rhythms haven't been submerged in purely musical interest? Mightn't I, perhaps a little mischievously, call yours a "merely" musical, instead of a "purely" musical apprehension of this higher interest? F. Perhaps. But if you carry your implications so far as to turn them into stories — the kind of stories the noble army loves — I might retaliate by calling yours the "mere" interest of a musical gossip. /. If I go that far, I shan't object. All I'm asking now is your recognition that the tensions may be legitimately interpreted as those of extramusical experience. Mayn't our musical image be, to the extent of that legitimate reference, an extramusical image? F. It may be, of course, and I must admit that when such a factor appears in the image —as it does in the Kyries — the interest in what I thought of as pure form is enhanced. It looks as if what I was seeing — and had been taught to see — as musical form was only the skeleton of form. Your view of the image does put flesh on its bones. Just the same, that skeletal pattern is discernible under the flesh, and it's essential to the structure. And there's a lot of structural function even in the flesh you put on it. 7. If there weren't there would be but slim grounds for anything more than sensuous interest in music — to say nothing of the inferences I'm 3<5

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looking for. Whether you see those functions as structural or referential, they are in fact tensions and motions that are the product of a kind of musical energy. But, in either view, isn't it the business of criticism somehow to measure those energies? F. If we could calculate them, in dynes, we should certainly have a much sharper image of structure. 7. Of structure only? But I like your figure. Haven't we, in fact, some kind of a dynamometer? F. Do you mean the auditory nerve? Or the center to which it leads? It registers the smoothness of consonance and the roughness of dissonance, and is very sensitive to intensities of all sorts. 7. Is there nothing beyond that center? Can it make all the discriminations on which the appropriateness of a musical device to its purpose must be decided? Who or what makes that final discrimination? F. I suppose you mean my mind. But since that mind, like my auditory center, is mine, it must be my self — the owner of my mind — that decides. 7. An even bigger center. And that self, which discriminates degrees and intensities of warmth and color and smoothness in tone, and sees them as appropriate to the tonal design (whose proportions and balances it also perceives) — doesn't that self know these things from having perceived them in a host of other, quite nonmusical objects? Mayn't it look at musical agreements and conflicts as quite similar to the agreements and conflicts of ordinary experience? F. Of course it may. But you're surely not suggesting that every musical consonance or dissonance implies a corresponding state of peace or war? I can see that it might, but only in a mind — a self — addicted to gossip. Isn't your apparent musical public made up of minds like that? 7. You're going to an extreme as unjustifiable as the one you accused me of. All I asked was an admission that the hint or the analogy is, on occasion, possible. F. I've already admitted that. But I think your occasions will prove rare. 7. That should be easy to test. I could find a hundred concrete examples, but I'll suggest two. Each is on a single theme or figure, so that the image it conveys won't be confused by a lot of detail such as we would be likely to find in longer pieces. You know the Chopin Preludes? I think the one in C minor, No. 20, and the one in F major, No. 23, should serve. You'll agree, I'm sure, that neither of those pieces is warlike? 37

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F. Heavens, no! /. Neither one, certainly, makes any direct reference to war. But are they equally wwwarlike? F. Why, the F major (Example 3) never even heard of war. . . . But, on second thought, maybe the C minor had, although it's now thinking of something else (Example 4).

EXAMPLE 3

EXAMPLE 4

7. I'll not ask you what the F major is thinking of, but could you characterize it in a word or two? F. For me it's the very epitome of exquisiteness. 7. And for me. But what is exquisiteness? F. Literally, I think exquisite means "sought out." In this case, I should say it meant "contrived with the utmost care for beauty." But don't ask me to define that word! 7. I won't. But I think I may ask you where you got your notion — your image — of beauty. Did you get it by noting the care with which the music was contrived? F. Contrariwise, I suppose I must have got the notion of care from the beauty of the music. In fact, it almost spoils the beauty to think of the care. Could music be more unselfconscious than that Prelude is? 7.1 don't know of any, and I think your word probes the beauty of the 38

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music rather deeply. The piece makes me think of Debussy's Fills aux cheveux de lin. Her first four notes are the same scale-tones as those of Chopin's "girl" (his Prelude is certainly not of the masculine gender), and the languid grace of Debussy's girl is perhaps just as lovely; but every move she makes is that of a poseuse — a touch-me-not. But isn't there a self in Chopin's piece, even if it is unselfconscious? F. You do raise a lot of questions! The Prelude is feminine rather than masculine, but must one therefore endow it with a body — and even, since we agree that it is unye/fconscious, wtih a mind? Aren't you drawing a pretty long bow? /. You, not I, first saw the music as unselfconscious, and with that word you amplified my own image of the music. But I'm not asking you to see the piece (as Debussy's was meant to be seen) as a portrait. I'm only suggesting that if you see femininity in it, that quality — which isn't a purely musical quality — is, and probably was from the beginning, a feature of your musical image. Do you now, since you question the imagery of body and mind (which you also contributed), want to erase the notion of femininity altogether? Won't you weaken the sensitivity of your dynamometer? F. Mmmm . . . I'm trying. . . . The piece, with what you called its femininity erased, becomes a fabric of delicately designed spangles — a fascinating object, but only an object. 7. Then what you took to be the dynes of purely musical energy were generated by more than purely musical heat? F. I'll have to admit that some of them were, but a lot of them were purely musical. If they hadn't been, I don't see how the musical thing could have been created. Doesn't a vast preponderance of musical energy go into the shaping and the animation of the musical substance itself? How far are you conscious, when you listen to music, either of the vague "something more" we hunted for, or of this musical image we're now tracking down — which seems to be only the something more in a tangible guise? /. I'm conscious enough of it to look for it, and to be disappointed if I can't find at least a trace of it. I do have to look for it; if I don't it will usually be quite invisible. What we found, when we looked for it in this Prelude, is a trace of femininity. I suppose you can think of femininity in the abstract, but you don't really see it as disembodied. Consequently, we erected a feminine figure, which isn't really there at all, but in which a 39

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very evident quality of this music could be seen, more clearly than when we thought of it as an abstraction. Were we "gossiping," as you called it, when we invented this figure, or were we only illustrating, through the figure, a quality of the music that we both found essential? F. I suppose you can say that the illustration brings the abstraction into sharper focus — makes it, in the guise of a factual experience, more tangible. Our notion of femininity as a quality must be abstracted out of our experience of femininity. /. Do you remember the etymology of the word experience"? F. Mmmm . . . experior . . . to test, isn't it? Then experience is really tested fact — first tested, I suppose, as fact, but also evaluated, as we're evaluating femininity, as having meaning. 7. And that meaning appears, doesn't it, in the relation of this tested fact to innumerable others? F. Of course. . . . Then is your musical image an image of meaning? No wonder it's obscure! /. It's more than an image of tone or tonal organization, at any rate, and it isn't addressed exclusively to the ear, or to the auditory center. Who, or what, if it is an image of meaning, finally perceives it? F. I suppose you again mean the mind, or the self that owns the mind. . . . But the image, and the meaning, will differ with every individual self; for the meaning I see arises in my mind, out of my background of experience. Are you really suggesting that music, while making no tangible reference to fact, can still portray your awareness of meaning in fact ,and portray it so vividly for me that I can infer the factual basis of that meaning? 7. Not the factual basis of that meaning — the immediate experience that evoked my image of experience. But you and I live in the same world of fact, don't we? We encounter, by and large, the same sorts of experience and form the same sorts of images of them; and we interpret them, if not always to the same conclusions, at least pretty similarly. What you call your background of experience isn't yours alone. It's partly mine, too, as I think all our discussion shows. A very large part of it is common to us and was also to our forebears, who learned it from their forebears and taught it to us. Did you invent the multiplication table? Would you, or could you, have invented it, unaided? You got it, as you did most of your background, through various media of communication. I'm only trying to show that music may be such a medium. 40

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F. A "universal language," then? Isn't that a notion for the birds — or for the gossips? /. Yes, if you take language merely as a specific process, rather than more largely as a medium, of communication. Any means of communication must have its own process — its own way of imaging the facts of experience it tries to communicate. But the meaning of the facts of experience isn't in the facts themselves as they exist, out there in the world. It is in you who see those facts; and your image of an experience is in large part a vision or an awareness of that meaning. I'm only saying that music, which can't make intelligible reference to the shapes of facts, can make intelligible reference to the meaning of facts. . . . And I think the birds, which somehow agree on the time and the place for their migrations, think so, too. F. Maybe they do. But has the meaning of fact a shape — an identifiable contour — such that it can be imaged? /. That's our real question. Since the meaning of fact is in you, you'll not be wise if you look for its shape somewhere outside yourself. Of course, the meaning of the fact you see hasn't the shape of the fact you see. Yet you recognize that meaning as somehow appropriate to the fact — so much so that you judge the fact itself to be significant or insignificant according to the meaning you see in it. A snake in your path is momentarily highly exciting, but not very significant, and you'll soon dismiss it. More complex experiences, such as the problem of fostering your little Mary Ellen's musical talent, are less exciting, but more significant. You feel an immediate emotion — repugnance — for the snake. But you feel, for your daughter's education, another kind of emotion. What would you call it? F. Concern, perhaps? /. Thank you for the word. It's a good one. . . . You wouldn't call your repugnance for the snake, concern? F. Of course not. But what are you getting at? /. I'm trying to find the pattern of concern. F. If ever there was a wild-goose chase! What would you do with it if you found it? /. Compare it with the pattern of some music which has, for me, a tang of concern about it — as I'm sure you'll agree the Kyries have. But before you dismiss me as a goose-chaser, let me say that I'm doubtful about my word, pattern. The content of a concern is more identifiable 41

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than its pattern. Yet you feel a different sort of concern for different things — your daughter, for example, and the State of the Union; and I think you'll agree that while the thing you're concerned about has usually an obvious pattern, your concern for the thing — your feeling about it — has its pattern also. F. If so, it's the obscurest pattern I've ever "seen." What similarity is there between the thing you see and your feeling about it? /. Well, you see and feel at the same time, in what seems like a single awareness, so that it's hard to tell whether you're seeing or feeling; but you'll agree that your feeling is appropriate to what you see, which is really what you understand the thing to be. But seeing isn't feeling, and I suspect that feeling, which I'm sure we're right in calling concern, has some sort of pattern. It has, anyhow, a character. Perhaps I can't tell which is which, but it's that character that I'm trying to bring into focus, and the image of it will be clearer if it has a pattern. . . . Maybe what I'm driving at will be clearer if we look again at our two Chopin Preludes. We ordinarily think of concern as having depth (which is a possible characteristic of a pattern). Which of the two seems to you the more deeply concerned? F. Obviously, the C minor. 7. If you looked at the music abstractly — as pattern only — would you give that ready answer? F. Probably not. 7. Then if this piece isn't just a musical pattern, it is also a pattern of concern? F. Or a musical pattern into which concern has somehow been injected. I'll have to agree that the musical pattern would never have been shaped as it is if an attitude of concern hadn't been somewhere in the background. Just how that attitude got into the music remains a question, but I see that it has got to be answered before your musical image comes clear. And the question becomes all the harder when you ask what the concern is for. . . . Because you don't feel concern about nothing. 7. You don't, indeed. Yet the thing you're concerned for is what gives your concern its pattern — or its character. In fact, that concern, as we said, is an inference from the thing — the circumstance — that confronts you. But if you find concern itself vividly portrayed, as it is in the C minor Prelude, oughtn't you to be able to infer from the portrayal, not the precise circumstance, but the sort of circumstance that aroused it? 42

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F. Ideally, perhaps you ought. I suppose we did something like that with the Kyries and my E flat minor Prelude. But the circumstances in the background of those pieces are themselves so obscure that you can't identify them. And yet those pieces are certainly more deeply concerned than either our two or any others of Chopin's Preludes. 7. When you say they're more deeply concerned, aren't you — to that extent — identifying their backgrounds? F. It's a pretty vague identification. /. So, if you try to explore it, is the background of any other concern; and the deeper it is, the more obscure you'll find its roots. How many "things" (and that vague word is all you can probably find to identify them) — how many things, past, present, and future, contribute to your concern for your little Mary Ellen's musical education? And how many more for her general welfare? You couldn't list them all if you tried for hours. Yet they're all summed up in your immediate concern, and you'll not deny that your concern is appropriate to its object. You've mentioned a few of the facts in speaking about her, and you expected me to understand — not the facts, which are easy to see, but your concern for those facts. And you expect me to understand because you believe me capable of concern (if you didn't, you'd never mention the facts). Isn't it evident that concern is a kind of fusion of two awarenesses — those of fact and its appropriate feeling-consequence? F. A very complete fusion. I hardly know which is which. /. Yet factual knowledge isn't feeling. Well then, if the feeling is appropriate to the fact, and if I could portray the feeling by itself, just as words might portray the fact, might I not expect you to infer, with reasonable accuracy, not the precise factual occasion that aroused your concern (for there were a thousand facts) but the general nature of its factual background — which is really all you know about it, anyhow? F. Oh! That's your musical image, is it? A portrayal of feeling that builds itself, by inference, into an image of experience appropriate to the feeling? 7. That describes it pretty well. But you must be careful not to build your factual image too solidly, or else you'll go right back to what you were afraid of at the beginning — to your gossiping. F. That's what I was going to warn you of — castles in the air. 7. 7 know. I've built a good many of them. But are the ivory towers of the purists any more habitable? 43

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F. I've never tried to live in one — perhaps because those I found living there seemed to find it so awfully hard to get out. Against that fear, your notion of the musical image as rooted in the world of experience looks reassuring. But it raises a good many questions. If it is a musical image, its pattern can't be very different from what everybody sees as a musical pattern. You've pretty well convinced me that what I thought was all of a musical pattern was only a part of it. It was full of implications that I didn't see. But it was still a pattern; and haven't we, somehow, got to discriminate the features of it that arouse your inference of concern from the features that appear simply as pattern? /. I'm not sure how far they're discriminable — they're nearly inextricably fused. But something like that, I should think, must be done. I think you'll find a lead in the motions and tensions we looked at. The purist, of course, sees those motions and tensions, and ponders them minutely. But he sees them in the guise of music — as syntactical forces only — and sees his pattern as a product of those forces. We found them, today, full of extramusical implications — implications that seem to add up to something like the character of concern. Certainly, if the notion of concern is to be conveyed by a musical pattern, then the constructor of that pattern will have to be guided by those implications as well as by the purely syntactical principles of structure. If the elements of music are, as you said, tone and rhythm, then musical syntax is analyzable into facts of tonal tension and motion. Concern is a state of mental tension, often manifested through bodily motion. There lies a parallel that seems to me important. For if the syntactical tensions and motor impulses of music can be so shaped as to portray recognizably the tensions and the motor impulses of concern, then our search for the pattern of concern may be more than a wild-goose chase. See what you can make of that hint. F. Your musical image at least begins to be discernible. I'll try; but don't expect too much of me.

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S MY friend came up my steps for our next eeting

A

there was a gleam in his eye that seemed to portend a newly awakened interest in our problem. He began at the moment I opened the door: F. I don't pretend to be any great shakes of a psychologist, but I believe I've hit on something that may make that backforemost inference that bothered me —and maybe the musical image itself —look as if it were capable of a scientific demonstration. Anyhow, it looks like your pattern of concern. 7. Then, as Hamlet said when Horatio told him he thought he'd seen his father yesternight, For God's love let me hear! Maybe our image can be made to appear, even to the skeptics, as something more than a ghost. But don't forget that science is a very severe critic. F. I've only a hypothesis, of course, but I think it has facts to support it. To begin with, the syntax of musical structure, and consequently the intelligibility of music to the general ear, depends, doesn't it, on the two properties of the musical substance — tonal tension and rhythmic motion? I. Everybody will agree to that, at any rate for music up to the 1920'$. But those properties, seen simply as musical facts, account for no more than musical structure. F. I haven't finished. As you said, the real implications of tonality — of tonal tension — which can be suggested by playing the C-scale up to B 45

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and stopping there, seem to be similarly grasped by all the noble army. Rhythm, as a motion impulse, is even more obvious to them. All they need, then, to grasp more subtle structures, is practice in listening? /. I'm sure of that. But you're still talking only of structure. Say on! Come to Hecuba! F. She's just around the corner. Tensions and motions, the bases of musical syntax, are also the essential factors — I think the psychologists will say they're the elements — of emotion: at least as a physiological response to an exciting stimulus. In a sense, then, they provide the syntax of what you might call the emotional attitude assumed toward the stimulus. 7. The notion of an emotion as having a syntax will probably strike the psychologist as novel. Yet I think he'll agree that a fairly constant feelingcurrent does underlie one's factual awareness of complex experience. We called that current concern, and since it seems to hang together, just as the details of the experience do, perhaps he will be willing to say that concern has a syntax. . . . Goon. F. Concern, anyhow, is the over-all emotional factor of a mental attitude toward experience. Like any other emotion, it is felt as a nervous tension — a tension appropriate to the encountered experience. Such nervous tensions have to escape; and they're vented in the activation of striped muscles — in bodily motions or motion-impulses which, whether they're inhibited or overt, may be seen as having a rhythmic pattern. That is psychologically true, isn't it? /. No one, I think, will dispute it. F. Well then, mayn't the tensions and the motion-patterns of the musical body be seen as the counterparts, and consequently the portrayals, of the nervous tensions and the motor impulses of the human body under emotion? — the tensions and impulses of concern? 7. Hecuba was just around the corner! I've been leading up to something very like your hypothesis ever since we started our discussions, and it's very heartening to have my conclusions anticipated. Your hypothesis does seem to me to offer something of a scientific basis for the musical image we've been trying to define. But whether the evocation of that image is capable of a scientific demonstration is another question. The psychologist must have some kind of a measuring stick to apply to the object he's studying, and he also —like any other scientist — must usually prepare that object for laboratory examination. He's quite right, of course, in insisting on laboratory proof of any hypothesis. But I'm 46

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afraid that concern, the object of our experiment, isn't amenable to his kind of preparation. He can perhaps determine which glands or muscles are activated, and with what force, when a given stimulus is applied — even such a stimulus as music. But concern, as we're thinking of it, is a vastly more complex reaction than he can dissect into its component factors. Can you see a possible measuring stick for that? F. / can't, of course, and, at least while I was in college, I don't think the psychologists could, either. They ran experiments that were supposed to determine how far we students — their guinea pigs —reacted similarly to a given musical stimulus; but I didn't think those tests proved much of anything. They gave us score sheets divided into eight or ten little boxes, with each box containing maybe a dozen words — placid, stirring, melancholy, nostalgic, and the like — the names of common emotions or emotional states. Then they played a piece of music for each of the boxes, and we were supposed to check the word that corresponded to the emotional character we felt to be aroused by the music. I didn't think my own answers very accurate, and I don't believe the sum of all the others' answers would have been any more dependable. 7. Can you see, in the light of your hypothesis, why they weren't dependable? F. Well, in the first place, there wasn't any clear objective shown for the test — no notion of what we're calling concern, or the image of concern. The words seemed dumped into the boxes like discontinued items in a half-price sale, and the only basis for choice was individual preference. Words like melancholy, if you have time to think of what they imply, can evoke an image of feeling and even of some circumstance that might induce the feeling; but we had no time nor any instruction to think of things like that. Besides, the pieces usually had contrasting themes or sections, to which one single word couldn't possibly correspond; and the pieces themselves seemed to me pretty cheap. 7. You're still angry, aren't you, over a misconducted experiment. There have been better studies, on sounder models; but I still think the intricacy of our image is too great to be tested in the psychological laboratory. F. Then my notion that your backforemost inference may be scientifically demonstrated goes glimmering? 7. Yes, and no. Your hypothesis seems to me — but I'm no psychologist — in accord with long-established psychological principle. But that prin47

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ciple was established by observation of the immediate emotional reaction to what you might call shock-stimuli, and it is almost wholly physiological in its description of the emotional process. I don't doubt that what we call significant emotion works according to that same process. But your awareness of a significant emotion is more than the consciousness of being confronted by an exciting circumstance. Any present circumstance, if it is significant, is one which, in some of its details, you have encountered before — perhaps a thousand times before. Each encounter has left its mark on your consciousness. Your memory revives something — often the feeling, rather than the detail — of that encounter. You have therefore in some measure prejudged the present occasion, both intellectually and emotionally. You are also aware that in the indefinite future similarly significant occasions may arise. Your image — your immediate concern — is a complex of all these awarenesses, seen in the perspective of your always alert self-interest. How are you going to measure and evaluate, scientifically, such an object of experience as that? F. You couldn't, of course, evaluate or even identify all the details. But I think you could demonstrate the existence and the weight of the more conspicuous ones — enough to make the working of the process of inference not only plausible but convincing. 7. Oh, you needn't convince me of the plausibility of your hypothesis! But I'm not a scientist, and I want to believe in it; and that, to the scientific mind, is a dangerous attitude. So far, we have little more than a hypothesis — a theory. But if the theory is sound, we ought to be able to see it work in actual practice. The examples we've looked at have apparently illustrated the musical image we think we've found. We assume the "reality" of the image. But we need to see how it is embodied in the musical substance — whether it is an accident or a purposeful creation. Can you think of any examples you're curious about? F. I'd like to go into the two Kyries again. I saw their relation to the Persons, and was convinced that it was real; but I didn't see how the relation was established. Of course, the two words suggest, liturgically, the two images, but they don't suggest two such different images, and that difference must somehow have been conveyed by the music. Will analysis of the motions and tensions really show the differences? 7. It should; otherwise, the process of analysis will be proved false. Let's first define the process. We have two elements of musical suggestion: tonal tension and rhythmic motion. We are assuming that these corre48

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spond to, and therefore may possibly portray, the nervous tensions and the motor impulses we feel when we are confronted by and deeply concerned for some object of experience. Those bodily manifestations of concern portray what we feel, rather than what we know, about the object. But we are sure (although I doubt that we can explain that certainty) that our feeling, which comes from and forms a part of our knowing, is appropriate to, and therefore in a way representative of, our knowledge — of our whole cognizance of that object. Do I state the hypothesis clearly? F. So far as I can see, very precisely. /. Well, then. Here is the theme of the first Kyrie with the text. Bach's adjustment of the music to the words —or rather, of the words to the music, may be important, so we must look at that as well as at the notes (Example 5). We may take the syntax of the theme for granted, although it, too, is effected by the tonal motions and tensions we are going to study as somehow showing reference to the First Person. Tonal motion—rhythm—is perhaps easier to observe than tonal tension. (The two, as we said, are fused, so you can't fully isolate them; but you can largely see the rhythm for itself.) We are assuming that you will in a way enact within yourself the motion you see in the music. You may have to innervate some of those imaginal muscles you questioned, but when you do enact the rhythm, what sort of purpose do you find as a spur to that action? (Don't look for the Person, yet. This is only a hint.)

EXAMPLE 5 VF. Mmmm . . . Kyrie is uttered only once, and the meter of eleison three times, although the word itself is uttered only once. "Have mercy," then, is the real burden of the thought, and it seems to be made insistent by the curve of the melodic line. The three curves are symmetrical, but the last one is floriated — for higher intensity, I should think. Kyrie is all on one note, but the rhythmic step is very firm and solid, and that solidi49

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ty seems somehow to persist through the eleison, though I don't see just how. Maybe it's because the four-note figure for eleison, although it has to begin on an upbeat, takes steps of the same length as Kyrie and so maintains the ictus of the beginning. Each repetition of the eleison-figuTe is a step higher. I suppose that's really a tonal tension, but it either reinforces the rhythm or is reinforced by it — I don't know which. 7. Nor do I, but I think you're right. Which is which is probably a sort of chicken-and-egg question, but you'll find other tonal tensions similarly compounded with rhythmic. I said you shouldn't yet look for an image, but perhaps the hint of one is broad enough already for us to take note of it. Do you get a hint? F. There's certainly bigness and power, almost illimitable, in the rhythmic march alone. The music keeps on marching, even while it is praying for mercy. /. I see it so, and I think anybody else would. Now, what do you make of the tonal tensions? F. I'm not sure I understand all of them, but what I do see seems in accord with the rhythm. That G in the bass gives a new harmony for the B that is the only note for Kyrie. If the bass had gone up to D and so kept on with the B minor chord, the strength wouldn't have been half so great, and the rest of the bass seems to have the same purpose. The stepwise ascent for each eleison-figurz "counts" more than it would have done if Kyrie weren't all on one note. But the first eleison-figuxe, falls an augmented 4th (which they taught us in school wasn't a vocal interval), and the longer downward step for the next one makes it more insistent. They both land on F#, and even the third one seems to rest on that note, although the F# is only in the moving bass. Maybe that firmness keeps the insistence of the melody itself from seeming overdrawn. . . . But the rhythm serves the same purpose. 7.1 think you've noted the main facts — enough of them, anyhow, to draw inferences from. Now put the facts together, seeing them in the theme as features of a musical idea, but looking also for the "something more" that may build itself into an image. What do the rhythm and the tensions, enacted imaginatively, add up to? F. Well, I sense, just as I always did, a sort of Miltonic strength in the language itself; but it never occurred to me until you pointed it out that there might be a nonmusical purpose implied in that strength. Now, if I ask what that purpose was, and think of the two words of the text, I can 5«

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see it as related — or at least relatable — to the idea — the image — of the First Person which I'm sure the words imply. It isn't an image of that Person, but it's appropriate to that image, and I can see that it really portrays the concern for that inconceivable figure that a man with such religious convictions as Bach must have held would try to project for a congregation. 7. Do you know, from the music itself, that it's addressed to the First Person and not the Third? For the words won't help you to make that distinction. F. Those two words don't, but the liturgical implication does, and I doubt whether without them we should have got the implication of a Person from the music alone, in either piece. Yet, given the liturgical hint, the implication of the Third Person is as clear in the second Kyrie as is the First Person in the first, and it is a musical implication. You asked me to take the first one to pieces. Will you do that with the other? 7. I'm not sure I shall do it any better, but I'll try. Here is the theme (Example 6). The motion is so quiet and fluid that you hardly sense it as rhythmic, but the two words, as in the other theme, form an address and a plea. I find the Third Person more definitely implied than was the First, even though the image is more intangible. There's no intimation of power whatever, but the obscure tension of that diminished 3rd seems to me wholly appropriate to the mystery and the spirituality of the idea. There's no real rhythmic drive, and I think the act of contemplation is strongly implied in that absence. The plea, accordingly, is more tense tonally than rhythmically — a single broad curve up to the subdominant, with a cadence that echoes the downward portion of the curve. The first Kyrie seems to demand a solid tone, but I can't imagine the second as sung, at first, otherwise than almost sotto voce (That's another inference, of course, that involves the question of performance, which we'll have to

EXAMPLE 6 51

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leave for another day; but it's an important question.). I've analyzed less minutely than you did, but isn't this enough to go on with? F. There's enough, anyhow, to show that this music isn't addressed to the First Person. And it does seem astonishingly appropriate to the Third. I suppose it really only points a finger at the image we have derived from it, but the finger certainly seems to point in that direction, even if the images of the Persons are derived from the text and its liturgical implications. And those implications were more familiar to Bach's congregations than to you and me. This isn't the Third Person, but it is the concern Bach felt for that Person. And I think we understand Bach when we feel as he felt toward it. 7.1 think we do, and I think an attentive and sensitive listener, without making our elaborate analytical effort toward a demonstration of what we see, would get much the same implication. I'm not sure that we didn't really see all that we've demonstrated before we undertook to explain our image. The facts we've adduced seem absurdly few and pretty flimsy, when you look at them as mere facts, and of course every one of them can be seen as a fact of structure only. You were something of an abstractionist when we began, and you probably heard the Mass abstractly. Yet, even from that angle, you couldn't help seeing something of what we think we've found in the music. Is the structure, after you see the image, any less interesting than before? F. Of course not. Your question seems almost absurd. The structure is all there, and it is even more interesting as structure. But I see that our image isn't scientifically accounted for. You got the image of the Third Person almost wholly out of the interval of the diminished 3rd; for there isn't anything in the rest of the theme that has the specific character of that interval. Yet you seem to think the sensitive ear of the untrained listener may grasp the image of the Person as well as you do. Does such a listener know what a diminished 3rd is? I didn't, until I began to study harmony. 7. He doubtless wouldn't know it by name, but I think he would know it by ear. He will feel, as keenly as you and I do, that the third note of that theme is pulling toward the F#, and that is the real reason why the trained ear calls it Efl, and not the Ft] it seems to be to one who knows no more than the simplest names for the black and white keys on the piano. Do you really know any more about the pull of the interval when you know its name? Wasn't it from the pull that it got its name? Indeed, isn't 52

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the pull possibly more vivid for an ear — or rather, a mind — that can go no farther in analysis than to think, "That's a funny kind of an F"? F. Perhaps; but the names do help you to think more precisely about the things they stand for. I suppose, too, that the rhythms, for which I haven't any precise names (although if I knew more about prosody I might find them) aren't really felt unless they're imaginatively enacted. . . . And I guess you don't enact either rhythm or interval-tension in the intellect. /. You don't enact them in the intellect, but you do assess their values there — perhaps after you've enacted them, but also while you're enacting them. We've said little about this enactment except to note that it occurs, and is a considerable source of our image. Your distinction seems to me important. F. It felt so when I glimpsed it. Will we run off the track if we pursue it? 7.1 think not. We have been pursuing it — for ourselves; but we're perhaps somewhat exceptional listeners. Some of your common soldiers, anyway, will respond to the Kyries as we do — will see a very real and very direct implication of religious feeling in the music. They may be quite unaware of any reference to the Persons (I remember, when I was in college, a timid voice interrupting a lecture on the Reformation with the question, What is the Trinity?). Even for us, that reference is an implication, not a direct reference to the Persons. F. I suppose you mean that the notion of the Persons is rooted in a vaguer but perhaps broader religious consciousness? /. Isn't that religious consciousness far more evident in the Kyries than are the Persons? Didn't we derive our notion of the Persons out of our own, probably vague, religious consciousness? And isn't your common soldier as capable of that consciousness as we? F. Our notion of the Persons would probably look as naive to the trained theologian as the soldier's religious consciousness looks to us. Are you trying to say that his vague judgment of significance (if he forms such a judgment) is all that is needed for a critical estimate of the music? 7. Of course not; but I am saying that the foundation for his judgment is the same as ours. You don't suppose, do you, that we've discovered and described all the significance in the Kyries'? Have we done anything more than amplify a significance we apprehended before our powerful intellects went to work on it? And mayn't your common soldier, accord53

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ing to his lights (and ours were all ive had to work from), have sensed a similar religious significance in the music without being able to interpret it? We found a reference to the Persons in the music. The common soldier in the musical army of Bach's day was more aware of those Persons than you and I are. Maybe a good many of the small group who actually heard this music caught the implication, as we've rather laboriously done. But what is portrayed there isn't the Persons themselves. It's the concern for what those Persons stand for; and that concern, in one shape or another, is still alive. Do you think your common soldier incapable of it? F. If you're referring to his usual choice, which isn't for deeply concerned music, and his usual behavior when that kind of music is put before him, I think you'll have to agree that his capacity for concern, although it may be still alive, looks puerile. 7. Mmmm . . . I asked you the other day, if you had ever heard a musical performance greeted by a stunned silence. I once heard such a silence. I believe it was at least thirty seconds long. The audience was patently an underprivileged crowd — shop attendants and such. The piece was the slow movement of a Bach violin concerto. It was beautifully played, but so were the other numbers, which were merely enjoyed. I think that audience realized — perhaps for the first time —that music could portray what you and I are feebly describing as concern. And I think their amazement came from their perception that this concern was not only the composer's and the performer's, but their own — not only a concern for art, but for men. F. You're again trying, aren't you, to support the old adage about music as a universal language? This is a pretty convincing instance, but isn't it one against a million? Even Gray could imagine but one mute inglorious Milton in his churchyard. 7. Was he altogether imaginary? Didn't those villagers possibly understand their Milton better than the glorious one? And mayn't he have helped a few of them toward an understanding of the big one? I am defending the notion of music, not as universal — that idea is chimerical — but as a language of the emotions. That language has to be learned, like any other, as I think we've been finding out; and I think we've found that its subject-matter is important. F. We've learned a few "words" of its vocabulary here together, but I at least am a long way from mastery of it. 54

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7. We'll never reach that goal. But isn't our progress toward it precisely along the road your army marches on? Aren't its drives — and yours and mine — primarily emotional? F. I suppose they are. Perhaps we hardly try to communicate an idea unless we're driven by a sense of its importance. But the idea is the main thing, isn't it? If your emotion — your concern for the idea — were the main thing, then all the niceties we contrive in our verbal and musical language would only be a kind of "something more" added to the vehicle of communication. Will you argue for that? 7. Hardly, although it's thinkable. Your sense of importance, your concern, is for your idea, or rather for the image of experience; and, as you said, we don't feel concern about nothing. Yet, unless your image arouses concern it will be dismissed. For your concern is really your valuation of the image; and your idea is therefore both image and valuation fused into one concept. Or if it isn't a concept it's still an awareness. Which of those two — image and valuation — will you label as a "something more"? And which of them will you be trying to communicate? F. If you can't distinguish them as factors in your idea, I don't see how you can tell which you're communicating. You're really trying to communicate both at once. But if, at the moment, one seems more vivid than the other, I should think you might shift your emphasis accordingly. Either one, then, may appear as a "something more." 7. That looks reasonable, when you think of the idea you are trying to communicate. But you have to have a vehicle, don't you, before you can convey an idea? You won't try to load a ton of weight on a baby's gocart, or put a baby on a freight car for its outing. Your vehicle should be appropriate to its burden? F. Obviously. 7. Then let's look at our musical vehicle. As an object, you will call it a musical form. That form, we think, may somehow be shaped so as to convey the idea, for example, of our Persons. That idea, at any rate, is something more than musical, and we may call it the burden of our vehicle. F. That's the way we saw the Kyries — as vehicles — bearing the images of the Persons, and each vehicle is appropriate to the weight it bears. The first two times I heard the Mass, I think I may have had a notion of the burden, but the vehicle was so interesting in itself that I hardly real55

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ized it might be carrying a burden. Isn't that the way almost everybody looks at musical form? /. I'm afraid so. Even to see so attractive a thing as a musical form as a vehicle for communication is perhaps an exceptional effort. Fourwheeled vehicles, as men contrive them for the conveying of their own bodies, can become much more to the eye than mere means of conveyance. Their shape and their proportion, their color and their internal appointments can demand care far beyond that for transportation. Those "niceties," as you called them, while interesting in themselves, may also be shaped appropriately to the ordinary human persons they are to convey. For the importance of those persons is one of the chief considerations in the design of the vehicle. How much of the value of the idea — that burden of our musical vehicle, which we have difficulty in distinguishing from the vehicle itself — actually resides in that design? F. Are you asking how much does form in music contribute to meaning? 7. In a sense, yes; but I'm also asking whether there is a meaning-value in form itself, which isn't quite the same question. F. And you expect me to answer that one, which you seem hardly able to distinguish from mine? 7. We've been trying to see how such a musical image as that of the Persons — an image of nonmusical experience — is "drawn." I think we can say that the tonal substance of music was there shaped so as to suggest, through something that we apprehend as a musical form, a quite nonmusical idea. But we found also that we saw that form as a form — as an immediately presented image of musical organization. That image of organization has a high interest. In itself, it has nothing of the interest of the Persons. Yet our image of the Persons was an inference from that form. But that inference, however vivid, was only a portion of our total interest in the music. The interest of form as form remained, and I doubt that it was wholly fused with our interest in the Persons. What I'm asking is, how much does the interest of form as form contribute to the interest of nonmusical image as image when the two, as I'm sure you'll agree, aren't fused? For there's a pretty large area where the two values remain distinct. Perhaps I should have asked, What does form, as form, contribute to image, as image1? Is that any clearer? F. I follow your distinction, I think, verbally, and I can see that it involves more than the direct contribution of musical design to the musical 5*

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image. But even the direct contribution is hard to distinguish, since it fuses with the image; and I don't see how to discriminate form, as form, from form that is partly image. I'll have to sleep on that. 7. Pleasant dreams! And my friend left, with a shade of perplexity in his eye.

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H

VING, myself, a rather hazy notion of the problem I had left my friend to ponder, I expected to find him at least as puzzled as I was. But he had seen the problem from quite another angle, as I found when I asked him: /. Well, what did you make of the notion of form and its contribution to the interest of the musical image? For that was the question we left hanging, wasn't it? F. It was. But the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to me that the real question wasn't, as I understood you to put it, the value of form as a contribution to the value of the image, but was rather the old question of the relation of form to content. Isn't content just a more general name for what we've been calling an image of nonmusical experience? 7. I should think so. But how, then, does your question differ from mine? F. Well, hasn't the form that evokes the image got to assume, somehow, the shape or the pattern of the image? Of course, there needn't be, as you said, any image — any nonmusical reference — at all; and in that case the form itself projects all the image there is — an image of purely musical form. And even if there is an image of nonmusical experience, you may fail to get the inference from the projected form. But if you do get it, you get it from that same musical form. And aren't form and content, in that case, identical? 58

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/. Your question, put in that way, certainly does differ from mine. But since you've raised it, we'd better get your question out of the way before we tackle mine. Yet, isn't our discovery of a possible extramusical reference the negation of your question? F. Just how? /. You admit the possible extramusical reference? F. I'm sure it's there. But the reference is conveyed, isn't it, by the musical form, which, although it bears the reference, is the same musical form as before? The content is an inference drawn from the form. Whether you draw that inference or not, the form remains what it was. Nor is your inference so certainly contained in the form that it is evident to every listener — now you see it and now you don't. Seeing it, I'm sure it's there; not seeing it, I shall be sure it isn't. But even if I do see it, it is contained in and projected by the same fact of form. /. Do you really think an object (your musical form) which, on closer scrutiny, proves to bear extramusical reference, to be for consciousness the same object it was when it bore no reference? F. Seen as a fact of form it is the same object. It has a different content, but the form is exactly what it was when it was only a form. 7. And you therefore think the content, although you see it as an addition to the interest of the form, is still identical with the form? F. I see that the form, when it has a referential content, differs somehow from the form that has no content; but the content is still an integral part of the referential form. If it had a different content, wouldn't it have to have a different form? 7. Doubtless; but does that mean that content, whatever it may be, is identical with the form which that content — essentially an extramusical force — must in some measure have dictated? F. If the content dictates the form, and is therefore contained in the form, isn't the form the pattern of that content? And aren't the two, in that case, identical? 7. Aren't they rather, when seen as fused, indistinguishable? F. Won't two indistinguishable things seem identical? 7. Of course they may seem so, and if you try to distinguish them by looking at them in fusion, you will probably continue to see them as identical. But isn't that a dubious method of analysis? F. How else than by observation will you distinguish them? 7. By first trying to identify the general nature of the things you're 59

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trying to distinguish. Those two "things" are form and content. Will you accept the word form as implying shape and organization — in our case, that of the musical substance? F. I see no objection. 7. And you will define content as a reference, conveyed by the formed substance, to something which isn't form at all? To what we have been calling extramusical meaning? F. That also seems true. /. Then if you call these two concepts identical aren't you saying that shape is meaning — that the words shape and meaning, or the equivalent words form and content, are synonyms? Are you agile enough to perform that mental contortion? F. Mmmm . . . It hurts, even to try. The proposition, anyhow, is a verbal absurdity — unless there's an unsuspected crook in the words form and content as we're using them. Apply your logic to the diminished 3rd in the Kyrie. That interval, you say, functioning as a purely musical tension — as a fact of form — isn't the same thing as that interval functioning for the evocation of an image of mystery or spirituality or whatever you choose to call our notion of the Third Person. Aren't you saying, then, that instead of two disparate things becoming one, one thing becomes two disparate things? Is your diminished 3rd agile enough to perform that contortion? 7. I didn't say, and neither did you, that one thing became two. You said that one thing —your diminished 3rd —performed two disparate functions — one of form and one of meaning. Is there any mystery in that? Must the peculiar musical "pull" of that interval function only to evoke the awareness of form? Can't the single tension be registered in two very different centers, one which discriminates shape and one which discriminates meaning, and result in two very disparate but simultaneous awarenesses? You surely don't think those two awarenesses identical? F. They can't be, of course. But the shape of the music, as you said, is in some measure dictated by the meaning of the music, and is therefore appropriate to that meaning. Doesn't it, then, contribute to that meaning, just as the musical meaning of the interval contributed to the musical shape? 7. I'll certainly not deny either contribution. One of them is what we were supposed to look for today. But when you say that shape is a contribution to meaning, are you necessarily seeing that contribution as itdo

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self meaningful — similar in content to the meaning the shape contributed to? Isn't the shape, rather, a heightening of the contained meaning? A heightening that is essentially of a quite different nature from the referential content (the reference to extramusical experience) which the shape contributed to? I'm not denying the value of the contribution. I'm only questioning whether it is a contribution to meaning itself, or a valuable illumination of it. And what we're after today is an account of that value. F. I'm afraid I'm still puzzled. The "pull" of the diminished 3rd is primarily a feature of structure. But that pull has a peculiarity of tension which we find appropriate to the concern that both Bach and we, as well, feel for the Third Person. Sensing that peculiarity, we erect upon it an image of the Person; but the image is really only one of concern. The pull itself is musical. Its value, in that aspect, is a value of form. The peculiarity of the pull is referential. Its value is that of content. Aren't pull and peculiarity — which is to say, form and content — existent in and projected by the same interval in the same instant? And mayn't they then be perceived as identical? /. You're still contorting your logic by calling pull and peculiarity — which are still form and content — synonyms. They happen to be simultaneous, but simultaneity isn't identity. Call them by any other names you please, but you'll never find the concept of form identical with the concept of content, unless, as you said, the only image the form projects — the only discoverable content — is the image of form itself. F. I think I see it, now, and I hope that will lay the ghost of identity for me. But it seems to be a rather perturbed and possibly resurgent spirit. /. Then, if we've disposed of your question, let's go on to mine. It is closely related to yours. I think we're agreed that the origin of our musical images of experience lies in tonal tensions and rhythms. But while the nature and something of the outline of the image is provided by rhythm and tension, do they account for the vividness of the image? F. Mmmm . . . Can you generalize about a question like that? Can you assume an image that is vivid for you to be equally vivid for me, or for everybody else? /. I can't, of course. But if we agree that the image is vivid, I think we can inquire into what makes it vivid. Two very different patterns of rhythm and tension imply, for us, two different Persons. They offer, that is, two different cores of suggestion which we — aided by an indu61

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bitable liturgical reference — build up into two different portrayals of concern: concerns so different that we confidently associate them with the two Persons. We identified the tensions and rhythms that bore that reference. But they were only details of the whole musical pattern, and they wouldn't, presented by themselves, have offered anything like the image we confidently inferred. Didn't the musical pattern, as pattern, vastly heighten the image? Didn't the music, as music, intensify and enrich the images? F. I'm sure it did. If the musical heightening hadn't been there, I doubt that we should ever have seen the image. /. Yet only a few of the musical details were really referential. We saw, then, simultaneously, two different images — one of form and one of reference or content. The image of form is directly presented, by the musical thing itself. You might call this a "real" image. It differs from the implication of the Person, which you might call a "virtual" image. That virtual image — an image of concern — is represented by tension and motion. The real image complements and enriches the virtual image. What we're now after is a valuation of the "real" image, made, as far as possible, apart from consideration of the other. You feel concern for the imaged Third Person. You also feel concern for the real image — the music itself. Isn't it this "purely" musical concern that we're now trying to evaluate? And isn't our immediate question what music does to you when you look at it as music only? How will you answer that question? F. Mmmm . . . Beyond the fact that music, seen abstractly, interests me and delights me, I don't know how to answer. 7.1 think you've a very good answer. Interest and delight are two considerably different states of mind. Each looks simple, but each may involve a very wide area of consciousness. Also, they will almost inevitably overlap, so that you can't tell precisely which is which. Yet, conceptually they are two very different sorts of awareness. Now, add them up. Does their sum represent the whole value you found in the abstracted musical object — the immediately presented form? F. That kind of addition isn't so easy. . . . Yet their total, I'm pretty sure, is less than the whole value I seem to see. I suppose there must be a "something more" — the kind of thing that turned into our referential image of experience. Only this must be a "purely" musical value. At least, we're trying to see it so. 7. Then three things instead of two make up the whole value — interest, 62

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delight, and something more. You don't know what the something is, but you do know it augments the sum of the other two. You also know, to a certain extent, what the total of the three things looks like. The sum of the two known things, subtracted from the total of the three, should be something like the something more. What does the total look like? F. That's a pretty indefinite kind of addition and subtraction. . . . Yet, wait a minute; maybe I have a lead. . . . If I add interest and delight, it seems to me the interest becomes absorbed into the delight — rather than the delight into the interest, for the delight colors the whole impression. Yet the interest isn't lost —in fact, it's heightened. But the addition seems to yield a kind of gratification, more comprehensive than is implied in either interest or delight. Neither sensory delight, I'm sure, nor purely intellectual interest, could rise so high. Maybe gratification is the word, for my whole self seems to feel it. Indeed, mayn't gratification be as richly compounded out of past and present and future experience as concern is? Isn't it, in fact, a kind of concern? /. You did have a lead! Let's explore it. Your gratification, you are sure, is more than sensory, for it is also compounded out of what the self recognizes as past and present and future experience. I believe you're right. But what kind — or perhaps what aspect — of experience contributes to gratification? For you don't feel gratification, any more than you feel concern, over nothing. F. That's where I founder. For while I find both interest and delight in what I was thinking of as musical form (where form is tonal substance and its organization), the gratification I'm talking about is much bigger than the sum of my interest and my delight, and I don't know where the excess comes from. 7. Is your gratification — your response to form — of the same sort as your response to the second Kyrie — an implication, I mean, of some such "object" as the Third Person? F. I don't infer from form anything I can call an object of experience — even so vague an object as the Third Person. Yet what I'm calling gratification f eels like concern. And that raises another question. We've been thinking of the interest and the delight of form as presented: as immediately projected by the formed musical object, and consequently as nonreferential. But if what I feel is concern for something implied in that object, then form itself is somehow referential. Have we been on the wrong track all this time? <53

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7. If we have, we'd better admit our error and try to straighten our course. You said that gratification might be compounded out of past, present, and future experience. But past, present, and future are nouns as well as adjectives — the names of highly composite objects of experience. Are those "things," then, the objects —or, if they can be fused into one image, the object —which, seen in the perspective of the self's largest interest, rouses your gratification? That is the largest —and also the vaguest — area of experience I'm able to imagine, but it is an area, and it seems to include all the smaller and more specific areas of experience that we've been at such pains to infer. Can you see form — of course at its most perfect manifestation — as bearing a reference to the whole area of human experience? F. I'm not sure I'm following your flight into the empyrean, but I think I can glimpse, in the gratification I get from form, an image of order — perhaps of ideal order — in contrast to the near-chaos of the ordinary world of experience. That contrast isn't presented in the perfect form, but it is implied; and if that implication is there, I should think you'd have to say that even form is referential. But I doubt that the gratification I get from a perfected musical form takes any real account of the chaos which is its antithesis. It's just a high gratification, sensed, as far as I can analyze it, as interest and delight in the formed object. And when I get it, I call the object beautiful. 7.1 suspect the reference to ideality you've just discovered, although you see it only as a background for your interest and delight, is a pretty big contribution to your sense of beauty. Indeed, I think you've just stumbled on as good a description — if not a definition —of beauty as we're likely to arrive at. But I doubt that your response to beauty, which is in part an enthusiasm for order, would be what it is if the opposite of beauty —the ugliness you describe as chaos — weren't also implied in your ideal image of order. That implication will be there, even if you don't form its antithetical image while your eye is full of beauty. F. 7 won't form it, anyhow; and I suppose that's one reason why beauty is so hard to define. You can't analyze it while its appeal is alive, and when that appeal has died down analysis can't resurrect it. 7. It can't; and yet, without critical judgment, which can hardly help being analytical, you're in danger of being fooled — of thinking a thing is beautiful because it's appealing. We're all so eager for beauty that we take even a feeble approximation to it for the real thing. Even to that ap64

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proximation, our response is so immediate and so generous that it can't possibly be critical. F. I'm afraid that holds for you and me — and for more professional critics — as well as for the noble army. Tastes change with time (you remember old Ovid's line, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis}* and the reasons why they change are so obscure and so complicated that we wrap them all up in the one reference to time and let it go at that. 7. Which means that until we can establish a firmer basis for criticism than we have so far set up, our critical method will remain pretty much that of the noble army — a method of trial and error. F. Have you suddenly lost faith in our hypothesis? I'm sure it has solidified a lot of my nebulous critical thinking. /. No; but we're still only theorizing — which is one way to live dangerously. And until we can find a more positive semantic basis for the meanings we are reading out of music, our hypothesis isn't out of danger. We've found a lot of meaning in the diminished 3rd of the Kyrie. But although I'm sure the reference to the Third Person is there, and was intended to be there, I'm not sure we're right in attributing so much of it to that one interval. The interval itself, in other contexts, can't possibly be what we're making of it here — almost a symbol for that Person. And we've got to pinpoint its intrinsic reference (and, of course, the intrinsic reference of other tensions and rhythms that we find meaningful) before we really know how much of our image is positive reference and how much is due to the heightening we've discovered today to be attributable to form. I know we shall never arrive at a positive definition of these values; but I think we've got to come a lot closer than we have come to that definition before we can be satisfied with our hypothesis. F. How will you go about it? I. We'll have to take one thing at a time, and it happens that this diminished 3rd raises a pretty definite question. How much is in the interval itself? How much is in the whole musical context in which it appears? How much, that is, is conveyed by the rhythmic emphasis of the notes of the interval, how much by its intrinsic pull, and how much by the harmony? For differences in this context will certainly spell differences in the implication we get from the interval. F. Do you mean that you've got to catalogue all the possible contexts * Times change, and we change with them. 65

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in which every possible interval occurs before you can arrive at any real notion of its meaning? That would be an endless — and I should think a fruitless — task. 7. It would indeed; but a few examples would show what sort of revaluation is effected by a new context for the interval, and we should at least be surer of our inferences even if we had no more than that generalization to work on. F. The diminished 3rd, I should think, is a rather rare interval in melody, but if you can find a somewhat similar use of it for comparison with the Kyrie theme, it might be illuminating. /. There's a remarkably similar one in the first movement of the Moonlight sonata. In fact, the melodic line, for four notes, is exactly in the tonal (but not the rhythmic) pattern of the Kyrie theme (Example 7). Is there any Third Person here?

EXAMPLE 7 F. Not a hint of it. What a difference! 7. Yet there is an implication of concern? F. Decidedly. And I suppose we've got to determine what this very different concern is for — that is, unless we're going to abandon our hypothesis, and I'm not ready to do that. 7. And that isn't all we've got to do. We've got to find out what the contribution of form is; for form must contribute to what you called our gratification, just as it did to the Kyrie or to the Chopin Preludes, or to any other example that shows a referential content. Of course, we can only generalize, but I think this very different meaning in what seems a very similar pattern may give us dependable hints of what other examples of the same interval might yield. The differences must lie somewhere in the patterns. What differences do you see? F. The diminished 3rd has here a quite different "pull" from that in the Kyrie. The phrase itself is more urgent, but the interval-pull is not 66

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nearly so intense. But that seems to be because Beethoven's rhythmic emphasis is on the upper note of the interval, whereas Bach's is on the lower note. In fact, you don't know you've got a diminished 3rd, in the Beethoven, until the phrase fades on it, but in the Bach the Eft, three times as long as Beethoven's Bf, is the crisis-note of the whole phrase. That must make a lot of difference. 7. It does, indeed. And the Dty isn't a flat supertonic, as Bach's Gt] was. In fact it isn't an altered note in the scale, but is the natural minor 6th in Fft minor, a sort of "added 6th" that has for its whole length the "pull" of the minor pth against the C$ in the harmony. And that harmony, for the whole bar, is the 6/4 of the F J minor triad, against which the diminished 3rd is made to sound. Besides, the F J that Bach's interval hugs is the tonic of the scale, while Beethoven's interval hugs the dominant, which is much less of a rest-tone. The intrinsic suspense of the diminished 3rd is still there, but to me it seems much attenuated. In fact, it is the tension of the minor 9th that really bites, while, as you said, that of the 3rd is only a fading tension. F. I think I felt, all along, pretty much what your analysis brings out. At least, it explains why I couldn't find any Third Person in this phrase. 7. That does seem pretty clear. But what image does the music really suggest? Is there, as the familiar title of the sonata implies, any suggestion of moonlight? F. Heavens, no! Who ever invented that title? He was a gossip! 7.1 think it was the German poet, Rellstab. Something in the music set him babbling about moonlight on the Lake of Lucerne. His phrase seems to have stuck, and maybe there is some foundation for his image. But let that go until you've found your own. F. Well, the phrase you quoted is the most intense in the piece, and it's insisted on — repeated — both times it occurs. If I work backwards from that phrase, it seems to me that the whole piece is in a way introverted, but still in that vein. Beethoven's direction to play the whole movement delicatissimamente e senza sordini (that means with pedal, doesn't it?) takes the immediacy out of the pain. Anyhow, there is pain here — pain that I hardly noticed until you put the peak phrase under the microscope. You make a lot out of that bass figure under the diminished 3rd; but is sounds right. 7. Your word, introverted, seems to me exactly right. And if you think of it so, the whole piece seems to me the first thoroughly introverted <>!

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piece I know of. Mozart sometimes catches the same note of introversion, but he doesn't ever dwell on it so concentratedly. You can find it in Haydn, too, but it never —to my ears — emerges as the one essential mood. But the clue to that image does lie in the diminished 3rd. That interval, we thought, accounted for our image of the Third Person. Has Bach's theme the same sort of pain in it that you find in the Beethoven phrase? F. Bach's tension seems deeper, but Beethoven's is more acute. I think the shift in rhythmic emphasis somewhat accounts for that difference. I didn't feel pain in the Bach theme, tense as it was. But the one interval, in itself, can hardly suggest pain in one case and quite another tension in the other. Evidently our analysis was wrong, somewhere, but I don't see where. /. The interval, nevertheless, in both themes, is a primary suggestive feature. We did, I'm sure, attribute to it too positive and too definite a suggestive value. But mustn't there be — unless our hypothesis is wrong — some common feature in the two images? Some feature really attributable to the one interval? F. Well, the Beethoven theme seems, as you agreed, introverted. Is our image of the Third Person — or rather, of concern objectified as Person — also introverted? 7. I never thought of it before, but your suggestion looks important. How else than by introversion could so intangible an image ever arise? But we hardly dare assume, from these two instances, that the diminished 3rd is an interval whose tension portrays that of an introverted mind in action. You'll find that interval, moving in moderately rapid 16ths, in the fourth bar of the Chopin F major Prelude; and we agreed, I think, that that piece was about as zmselfconscious as an utterance could be. Of course, the interval is there only a tiny detail of an utterly graceful pattern, and hasn't either time or emphasis enough to be suggestive of anything like an attitude of mind. In the three cases we've been comparing, time and rhythmic emphasis made a vast difference in the implication of the interval. In two of them, I doubt that we're far wrong in finding introversion implied. In one of them, there isn't a hint of it. Isn't it, then, the deployment of the interval, rather than the interval itself, that yields the implication? F. Mustn't it be that? For if you ascribe a specific emotional character to any interval, aren't you making that interval a symbol for that char68

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acter — making it, in effect, the equivalent of a word? There aren't, after all, so very many musical intervals, and if you attached a specific character to each wouldn't you narrow the musical "vocabulary" far beyond that wide range of reference that it must possess if the images of experience we've found in this interval have any actual existence? 7. I'm sure you're very right. And if you are, it seems to me that you're really pointing toward the contribution of form to the image of experience — the question we were supposed to untangle today. It is the deployment of tensions that yields the image — the deployment of them in such a way that the degree of tension, as much as the specific character of it, portrays the concern which, I think we've seen, is all that music can portray. And since music, for almost everybody, has to be actually heard before any image at all can be conveyed, the performer's insight into the deployment is another factor which we'll have to look into, some other day. F. Do you suppose it was a faulty reading of the tensions in the Moonlight sonata that set Rellstab off on that sentimental tack? I've heard a good many performances of it that seemed to aim at no more than that. And the audience seemed quite satisfied — perhaps because the word Moonlight was on the program. 7. It may well have been that amiable sort of reading. I've heard a good many, by eminent performers, that were modeled on the image of experience suggested by that word.* We've called the image introverted. I think you'll agree that an image of moonlight, which has its fascination for most of us, isn't ordinarily an introverted awareness? F. Not unless the moonlight is only a secondary feature of the image; and this music is so deeply introverted that there's no room for moonlight. Yet, I suppose one might take the undulant triplet figure that persists throughout as representing the lapping of water, and dream the piece away on that note. You'll have to agree that the gossips could make an image of rippled moonlight out of it. 7. Just as Polonius, at Hamlet's suggestion, could see in a cloud the image of a camel or a weasel or a whale. And Hamlet's comment, "They fool me to the top of my bent," is the best answer — unless we should * I heard Paderewski play this sonata one day in London. A critic, in next morning's Telegraph, said, "The audience would have sworn that moonlight filled the hall." I demurred. I was still a pretty green observer of music, but I think my dissent was based on the actual intimation (then quite undefinable) that my Friend and I are finding here. 69

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say "we fool ourselves"; for the point at which fancy loses contact with the fact that originated it isn't easy to define, and I'm afraid we're all often deceived. F. No more often — or at any rate no more seriously — than when we shackle fancy to assumed fact and so interdict its flight. Isn't concern in part fancy? Isn't this movement, which we see as introverted, concerned for an injury to the self that is thinking of itself? And — come to think of it, as I never did until now — doesn't this interpretation of the first movement explain the tempestuous Finale of the sonata? Is it irrational to think of that movement as a release of the tensions of the first? As the sequel to a moonlit dream that conclusion makes no sense whatever. 7. It doesn't, and I'm sure Beethoven would have agreed with you in general. I suppose his swift and vivid imagination would have found our elaborate analysis of his purpose a verbal adventure into what Huxley used to call lunar politics. But I think he would have agreed with the essence of our conclusions. Many of his earlier sonatas, like those of Haydn and Mozart, have movement-sequences and especially Finales that seem, expressively, quite unrelated. I suspect the convention of the happy ending, which ruled in the opera of his day and could often be achieved only by the descent of the deus ex machina, ruled also in sonatas and symphonies. But from the Moonlight on, I think you'll find Beethoven more and more concerned about precisely the sort of coherence you see here. He said, with reference to the Op. 31 sonatas, that he was striking out on a new path; and I think this relativity of all the movements in a sonata was at least one of the objectives he was aiming at. F. You certainly can't find any structural relation between the first and the last movements of the Moonlight, and I suppose my abstractionist friends would pooh-pooh our whole notion as "romantic." I've tried out some of your ideas on them, and they trot out that word as if it offered a final refutation of any genuine expressive purpose in music. I see that in their eyes I'm just an incurable romantic, and they shrug me off accordingly. But while I'm sure their standpoint hides from them the very notion of an image of nonmusical experience, I think they do see — perhaps exaggeratedly — the intrinsic value of form in music, and perhaps its ideality. Not, of course, as a contribution to the image, for they won't even look for one, but as a value resident in the musical "object" —the form itself. That was what we were to look for today; but if you see an extramusical reference in that object, I don't know how the value of 70

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form can be seen apart from the image. We keep coming back to it, anyhow, even when we're trying not to. 7.1 think you're forgetting that the values we're looking for — or that the abstractionists are looking for —aren't fixed, indisputable, factual values. They are assessed by the self that perceives them; and no two selves will set precisely the same value on even so dull a factual object as a puddle in the street. Our facts — and the abstractionists' facts — are tensions, rhythmic and tonal. They function indubitably for tonal syntax. We think they may also function for image-suggestion. If we think they function only for that — and while we were looking for our image of experience, I think we did see them only in that light — we've found that we are wrong. You found a high gratification in what you called order, which is another name for form. The tensions that evoke that image of form are also the tensions that, viewed from another angle, evoke a nonmusical image. Seeing that identity, you thought the image of form and the image of experience must themselves be identical. We've seen how impossible that assumption is. For form, which is directly presented, is seen objectively, whereas the image of experience — or rather, of concern for experience — is seen subjectively. But what is to prevent the objective image from heightening the interest of the subjective one? F. I think I've got that straight, now. But isn't there still another question? Don't you, as a self, ask whether the experience you're imaging is true? I don't doubt that the Kyries, somehow, speak truth, or at least speak truly; but I don't see how I know it's true. 7. Pilate asked the same question, didn't he? Do you really know that anything is true? Aren't you, rather, convinced of its truth — convinced out of your self's experience? But when you encounter what you are convinced is a truthful expression of another self's experience — one that, like our image of the Person, you have never yourself encountered — don't you find, in the back of your mind, an astonished awareness that this experience is also really yours? Aren't you gratified to find your cherished self and its concern enlarged by sharing another's experience? F. Mmmm . . . I'm afraid I more often see such communications as if I'd known them all the time but just hadn't bothered to think them out. And I suppose I flatter myself accordingly. 7. You aren't the only one. Do you remember La Rochefoucauld's Quelque bien qu'on nous dise de nous, on ne nous apprend rien de nou7*

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veau? * We learn, I suppose, only by the enlargement of what we have already begun to know, and interpret in that same light, as true or false, any further enlargements of our understanding. We call our image of the Third Person true, even though we see that it is really an image of Bach's concern for that Person. Bach's concern, which I think I can imagine, even if I can't share it, makes the Person far more intelligible to me than the catechism ever did; and our musical images seem to be a kind of metaphor for something we intuit as an indubitable implication resident in whatever knowable experience happens to have aroused the concern that is actually portrayed. I rather think the concern Bach feels for this Person is akin to the concern we can't but feel, as our knowledge grows, for the mystery implicit in all the tangible facts of experience we ever envisage. . . . Forgive my sermonizing, but it is on that ground that I see religious mystery, which orthodox religion seems necessarily to illustrate in its dogmatic metaphors, as the real model on Bach's dais as he wrote the Mass. F. Or Milton's as he wrote Paradise Lost. For me, at any rate, the dogma they interpret has hardly any factual basis, but I do share their concern, I think, unquestioningly. The mystery I see has an apparently indubitable factual basis, very different from theirs; but the mystery is there, no matter how far you delve into the facts, and maybe we're no nearer the solution of it than they were. /. The truth of it, anyhow, is felt as a conviction — unless you are also convinced that the facts you know are all the facts there are. . . . We're perhaps only walking weightless in space, but that's the region to which music, at what seems to me its highest altitude, "sends" us. Whether or not Descartes's famous "I think, therefore I am" is equally true when you turn it into "I am, therefore I think," the mystery of the assumption "I am" remains as insoluble as ever. F. Yet doesn't Bach considerably illuminate the mystery of being? 7. Don't other composers illuminate it? Mayn't music, even on much lower levels than the Mass, glimpse what it means to be? Doesn't Chopin's little Prelude in F major glimpse, unselfconsciously as we said, a hint of that meaning? Aren't the rather mawkish Preludes in F sharp and B flat, on the other hand, all but unaware of it? Don't you perhaps discriminate the value of those pieces, which are just as well made as our * However well others may speak of us, they never tell us anything new.

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two, pretty much in proportion to their apparent aliveness — their sense of being? Or of yours as you listen? F. Are you justifying the jazz-hounds? /. Aren't they as much alive as you and I? They don't pretend to ponder the mystery as we — perhaps presumptuously — are doing here; but while I find most of their stuff unendurable it seems to me that they sometimes glimpse it as positively as we do. They can't keep it in focus, as Bach does, but they do — after their fashion — glimpse it, and maybe they give a pretty big fraction of the noble army their first glimpse of it — as something portrayable, that is, and therefore communicable. How else than by a portrayal of something common to them all could such an army ever be recruited? F. Communication does mean, doesn't it, a sharing in common, and I suppose the real origin of any communication must be in some image of experience that everybody can see. And you've got to embody that image in some sort of substance, and give that substance a tangible form, before you can communicate intelligibly. The more intangible the image, the more essential the form; and it perhaps wasn't strange that I thought the form and the image identical. But in that light what we've been thinking of as the contribution of form to the image looks pretty important. I don't think the jazz-hounds are much enamored of what I called ideal order, but perhaps they find excitement (and maybe I do, too) in a certain measure of chaos. 7. Order would hardly seem ideal if its antithesis weren't there, and it isn't too hard to infer order out of a portrayal of a certain measure of chaos. You will seldom reach the level of ideality, anyhow. And even when you do, I think you'll have to value it somewhat in relation to the turmoil you've left behind. We've been hunting, haven't we, for the contribution of form to the image of experience, rather than for an absolute valuation of form? I may have a blind spot, but I just don't see how to value form absolutely. F. I thought its value was higher when I supposed myself to be seeing it absolutely, but you've nearly convinced me that I wasn't really seeing it so. But I was blind to the image. 7. And so am I. It is an inference, drawn from a presented fact of form; no two persons can draw precisely the same inference; yet to see musical form without reference to the general, nonmusical notion of form or organization seems to me impossible, even for the most exclusive abstrac73

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tionist; and since that notion of form must be rooted in the facts of experience which are formally organized, I suspect that even his inference (for it is that) will extend into unacknowledged regions of nonmusical fact. How far our inference may be justified is an unanswerable question. We impatiently excluded the image of moonlight as inferable from the Beethoven sonata; yet you found some ground for it in the slow ripple of the triplet figure. F. Yes, if the player makes it merely ripple. We're quite sure the performer will be wrong, and our sureness comes from what looks like a more penetrating observation than such a player seems capable of. Oughtn't we to go into the subtler side of the mechanics of performance? 7. It's a long and rather dry tale, though it is important. It is evident that to satisfy us he must somehow find and project something like the character — the image of experience — that we find in the music; and the adjustment of his technique to that purpose isn't an easy task. F. He's got to see, hasn't he, how that image got into the music? He plays the notes the composer wrote down, of course. But anybody can see from a dull performance, however literally correct, that musical tones haven't, in themselves, any imaginative reference, and even intricate musical forms, projected merely as forms, sound dead. How does the composer inject life into them? Through some sort of musical genes and chromosomes with which he knows how to vivify the musical stuff? How far back toward its origin can that life-principle be traced? Won't the performer's problem be clearer if that question is answered first? Or is it too obscure? Several years ago I heard a string trio of yours that seemed to me rather imaginative. Haven't you, as composer, some answers to it? 7.1 doubt that anybody knows much about musical genetics, and my own effort hasn't been extended enough for me to pretend to the skill and the facility requisite for any large body of composition. I can remember a good deal about how I made the trio, and I think I've seen enough, in my own work, to see a little of what has gone into more important things. If you like, we can talk about this question of origins before we tackle the question of performance. F. I suppose it's just another side of the question of the musical image, but I'd like to talk about it, anyhow. 74

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A

L slant in my friend's eye when we next / \ met seemed to me reflected in hisfirstquestion: V

problem in musical genetics? find any musical genes or chromosomes? /. Of course not. The musical body doesn't grow from an egg, and I think we've already reduced it to its lowest discriminable terms — the elements of tone and rhythm. In fact, it seems to me we've already found all the answer to your question of origins that we're likely to. There are, of course, little nuclei of tonal and rhythmic tension that assume, when they begin to grow, the shape of musical motives. Some people see them as germs, and that word, if not biologically accurate, is suggestive enough to be useful. From such germs I suppose you might say a theme is "born"; but the care and feeding of the infant theme, and certainly much of its maturer growth, takes place in — well, you might say in the schools, where conventions of form do a lot to shape it. But the primary gestation of the motive is still a mystery. F. But some of those germs grow into live musical bodies, while some — structurally just as "correct" — turn out to be robots. The live musical organism bears considerable behavioral resemblance to the human body, and it is in that similarity that we've found the portrayal of concern possible. But some musical motives seem to have been born dead; and what I want to see is how the live ones come alive in the first place. In other 75

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words, you've shown me how to see experience in music, but I still don't see how a composer finds music in experience. /. Isn't that really only your old uncertainty about our backforemost inference? I suppose there's a mystery in the drawing of any inference, but you know as much about that process as I do. F. Perhaps I do, in general, but in this case I don't see how the musical inference begins. If I had any faculty of musical invention, it would be easier. I suppose a composer has his head full of tunes — or at any rate of those little squirming tensions you make musical motives out of. But those little scraps of music, taken out of context (and when they're born they haven't any context), don't have any meaning —even any purely musical meaning worth attending to —in themselves. Yet a composer somehow manages to inject into them not only syntactical, structural sense but the kind of meaning we've been finding in them. Nottebohm shows the successive stages in the growth of a lot of Beethoven's themes — the first stage being, to my apprehension, quite dead. I can see, from the elaborations, that it couldn't have been dead, but I can't see, although the growth is amazing, what went on in Beethoven's mind to stimulate that growth. 7. Nor can I. It seems to me that his earlier sketches of a theme — written down hastily and with no apparent thought of their development — were really only memoranda: things that ought to be remembered, but that only he could reconstruct out of the bald shorthand form in which he wrote them down. But I think you can see from those that themes don't ordinarily emerge from the composer's mind in their fullest, most meaningful shape. The process of variation, which certainly reaches a higher level in music than in any other art, is to my mind just the culmination of that process which turns a motive into a meaningful theme. In fact, all development looks like variation, of one sort or another. It can be a mechanical process only, I suppose; in fact, the mechanics of structure can't ever be ignored; but relativity to experience can be perceived as a factor in the structural problem — indeed, a governing factor. F. That — although it's really largely what we've already seen — blows some of the fog out of my mind. It would be clearer, I think, if we got down to cases. Can you go into that trio of yours a little? 7. I'm diffident about using my own music for discussion, and I have a much better illustration that we can take up after that; but maybe, since 76

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I do remember a good deal about what it came out of, I shall hit upon some phase of your question. F. You've talked a lot about the model on the composer's dais. If you can tell me about that, I think it may help. I can see how the model for a finished composition can be inferred; but I'd like to see how the composition was inferred from the model — if you can tell how that happened. /. Possibly I can, since I've always been a laborious workman at composition, and am possibly more conscious of my steps than more practiced writers are. But don't expect me to tell the whole truth about even my own doings. And if you are bored, remember that I have a much more significant example to go into. F. All I ask is that you begin with your model, if you can. We've found one in every example we've looked at, but we couldn't of course begin with it, and the beginning is what I'm curious about. 7. Well, I had made a couple of heavyish things, and I began with the notion of making something lighter. I don't know where I found the stuff for the first movement, but I got it made, somehow, in pretty much the vein I intended. For the slow movement — the one you asked about — I think I began with Schumann's A minor violin sonata as a type to follow, but I couldn't bring the character of it into focus until I heard, somewhere, what was for me a new and particularly rich chord. It had the "atmosphere" I wanted, and I hunted some time for a way to establish that atmosphere. What I came up with was this (Example 8). Do you find it appropriate?

EXAMPLE 8

F. To the chord? Certainly. It makes the chord into what you said you intended — the core of your image. /. And do you get any image? F. A pretty definite one, but I don't see any Schumann in it. It's very romantic — enough, as I heard from some of the avant-garde after the concert I spoke of, to evoke some thinly veiled sneers. I remember that I did think you had overworked the chord, but the piece appealed to me. I think I called it nostalgic. 77

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/. Nostalgia is properly homesickness, and I wasn't trying to portray that distemper. But that word has come to be perhaps our nearest English equivalent for the German Sehnsucbt, and I was young enough to suffer more or less frequent attacks of that disease. I'm afraid that not only you but the avant-garde were right. F. For that part, perhaps, but the middle section, as I remember, seemed a proper continuation, and it grew, at its peak, very hot. How did that middle theme go? /. It began in the viola, with a simple figure in the 'cello for accompaniment (Example 9). The violin continues with a free inversion of it, in the same pattern.

EXAMPLE 9

F. Its character is different, but it seems definitely related. Mmmm . . . Wait a minute. It's no wonder! The second theme is precisely in the rhythmic pattern of the first! 7. It is, except for one eighth note in the second bar. But I didn't consciously design it so, nor did I even notice the resemblance until the viola player, at the first rehearsal, pointed it out. I hoped you'd notice it, for it bears on your question. F. And you say there aren't such things as musical genes! Mustn't that rhythmic design have been fermenting in your mind all the time you were hunting for your second theme? 7.1 suppose it must have been, and a part of what I felt as "rightness" in what I found was doubtless that resemblance, even though I was quite unaware of it. I'm sure, that is, that I was drawing from my general model of concern rather than from what you may think of as structural principle. And I suspect that other composers unconsciously follow similar leads. It is of course, in a way, a very ancient device, which the historians call isorhythm. Philipe de Vitry, in the early fourteenth century, seems to have invented it, and it became a favorite process with a lot of his successors. But I certainly wasn't imitating him. 78

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F. But wouldn't you, if you had set that process on your dais as a model, have come up with the same result, and with less effort? 7. How can I tell? I could of course have made a dozen tunes on the same rhythmic pattern, but I doubt that they would have had the rightness of this one. Indeed, I don't know, now, how much of that tightness is due to the isorhythm and how much to the contour of the line and its harmony. In fact, I'm still inclined to think the isorhythm "purely coincidental," as the novelists say of their characters when they resemble known persons. F. I hear a lot of talk about design from my abstractionist friends, but much of that sort of structure seems to yield only a robot. Yet even that robot, like one which used to be in a television commercial, seems to be saying, "Gee! I wish I was people!" But it's evident that you can't explain all of an imaginative creation in terms of structure and symmetry. /. Asymmetry, anyhow, can sometimes be powerfully suggestive. In fact, the example I wanted most to talk about will illustrate that fact. Do you remember the Beethoven violin sonata in C minor? Its beginning is this (Example 10).

E X A M P L E 10

F. Whew! You play a lot more in it than I should have seen in the notes! The asymmetry, however, is striking. The first two phrases start you in one direction, but the long F turns you down quite a different slope. Yet that sequel is somehow extraordinarily right, and the image, although I can't verbalize it, is compelling. I don't suppose there is any gossip about its origin, as with the Moonlight? But I don't think a man could draw a line like that without some really definite imaginative model. 7. It was surely more than a robot. I think you can hardly find a more naked portrayal of concern. There isn't, so far as I know, any story about it, but I think we can deduce the model: It is portrayed, we think, by tensions and motion. Their counterpart, we think, is in you. Now enact them, imaginatively. What do you get from the first phrase? F. Mmmm . . . You managed to play it so that the long G sounded expectant, and expectancy is a kind of tension. It vents itself in the six79

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teenths, precipitately, decisively. It seems to me both impatient and determined. 7. And the next phrase? F. It's on the same pattern, on the subdominant, but it is definitely more intense. /. Can you see why? F. Of course, it's higher, but I don't think that makes all the difference. The silence, in both phrases is as expectant as the notes, but the second rest is tenser than the first, just as the C was tenser than the G. Maybe the subdominant triad had something to do with it. 7. That's easy to test. I'll play the second phrase, this time, a tone higher, on the dominant. What is the difference? F. Astonishing, isn't it! The tension seems to have evaporated, not only out of this phrase but out of the first, and the silences are mere pauses. I never realized, before, how tense a mere subdominant triad could be. 7. And the stark simplicity of the two triads gives a directness to the thought that would be quite lost if the sixteenth-note figures, by some searcher for heightened effect, had been projected on unstable, active notes. Doesn't the directness of these phrases pretty well establish your deduction of impatience and determination? F. You played them, anyhow, very vividly in that character. I suppose you could play them as if they were, in essence, no more than two triads, failing even to suggest concern. What did you do to the notes to make them project the image? 7. That's a question we shelved, for today, and anyhow we haven't yet done with the second half of the theme — the asymmetrical part of it. Let's go on with that and leave the How of performance to another time. What do you make of it? You found it related to the first half, even though there is no structural resemblance save for the first note — the tied half. F. Even that isn't in the same character. That F isn't expectant at all. In fact, as you played it, it seemed almost despondent. 7. Has the determination disappeared, too? F. Not exactly, but with the impatience gone out of it, it seems quite another sort of determination. The hint of despondency in the long F seems to continue, and even grow; but I wouldn't call it desperate. The descending line sounds somber, and if it kept on getting softer it would just seem to give up; but the crescendo on those portamento quarters 80

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gives them another — and I think a deeper — determination. Then comes that suddenly piano G and the two quiet chords — a half-cadence that can't help but look forward. It contradicts the crescendo, just as the somberness of the whole second strain contradicts the impatience of the first. It's about as compact as thought can be, and it adds up to a pretty impressive portrayal of concern; but I can't tell at all clearly what the concern is for. I. Aren't you trying to imagine some single event — some factual experience — that might arouse such a response as this? F. I suppose I am, and it's no wonder I don't succeed. Even a novelist would take several chapters to set out a condition of affairs such that it would yield all the implications of that theme. 7. Then you think a lot of experiences, rather than just one, must underlie this theme? I feel sure you're right. Although Beethoven once said that he almost always had something like a program in mind while composing, it would be presumptuous to suppose we can deduce from this music the immediate image of experience that served as program for it. But haven't we agreed that a true concern is the product of past as well as of present experience — and of future experience, anticipated, as well? Isn't so deep a concern as this the product of a thousand occasions of experience, rather than of just one? If so, even a trivial immediate occasion might trigger the complex train of thought you find here. Oughtn't you to ask what sorts of experience generate the impatience and the determination and the near-despair you found in the music — and also the expectant forward gaze of the half-cadence? Those words are but feeble symbols for the living state of mind portrayed in the music. Yet they do help, if not actually to define, at least to delimit, the boundary of the experience you are imaging. Then, if you sense curt impatience, curbed by deeper realization that leads to an unforeseeable end, isn't at least a knowable area of experience delimited? F. Mmmm . . . The image comes into sharper focus. . . . It looks like the reaction to some kind of an offense — a pretty deep one. 7. Against whom? Beethoven? F. It's too big to be merely personal. 7. Against you, then? and me? and all the rest of us? F. That could be. . . . And if it is, it can't be one single off ense. 7. Then there might be a thousand of them? If so, who is guilty? F. You can't indict a thousand criminals for one offense, and even if 81

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there are a thousand offenses, they may be all of one general type. And I suppose they may be against the general conscience, rather than against any enacted law. Maybe you and I are guilty — and even Beethoven himself. We all respect, although we don't always obey, what we sententiously call the moral law; but we'd be in a pretty pickle if we didn't at least respect it. 7. Then to see this music as in some way reflecting or appealing to the general conscience is one way of recognizing Beethoven's model. Of course he didn't see it in those terms, but I believe he would have recognized our notion as at least akin to his own. His concern, anyhow, is evident, and whether or not he recognized it as having the kind of source we're imagining, it isn't thinkable as concern over nothing. F. And I think I begin to see how music can come out of nonmusical purpose, even though we're still deducing purpose from music. You said a composer was a deployer of tensions and rhythms, and it is in the deployment of those things in this theme, rather than from any positive, intrinsic sense in the phrases themselves that the purpose seems to be built up. The sense of the first two bars of this theme isn't, in itself, very profound. It's the repetition on the subdominant that reveals the sense, or at any rate makes it compelling, and suggests the whole nature — but not the notes — of the sequel. Anybody could have invented the first phrase, but no mediocre mind could have deployed it to so impressive a purpose. /. I think we can imagine what such a mind might have done with the first phrase if he had happened to invent it. If he repeated the phrase on

EXAMPLE I I

the dominant (as mediocrity very likely would), and saw, in consequence, no such sequel as Beethoven imagined, he might have thought himself to be pursuing sound musical logic if he went on like this (Example 11). Logical enough, isn't it? F. As obvious as two plus two equals four. 7. And if I play it in C major it's even sillier. 82

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F. Ugh! It sounds as if the hero of Mozart's Musikalischer Spass had written it! /. Yet, hasn't it some of the logic of the textbooks? Not all of it, to be sure. F. Enough, anyhow, to show that Beethoven's was more than textbook logic. And it looks as if it must have been the logic of the nonmusical image that he was following. The other day, I said now you see it and now you don't; but I was mistaken. If I once see it I keep on seeing it — or dismissing it for a more comprehensive image — as I've done with this sonata-theme. But the performer is even more a deployer of tensions and rhythms than the composer. At least, the composer can't write down all the nuances the performer must project if he is to make the image vivid. A long time ago I heard two very eminent artists play this sonata. The performance was of course highly finished, but there was far more finish than imagery in it. There was much drive, but no sense of tragedy. Maybe that word is wrong, but isn't there in tragedy something of the sense of struggle against . . . well, against Fate, if you like? Isn't that a possible name for the thousand obscure offenses this theme is struggling against? You played the theme so that I felt the struggle; they didn't. How did you do it? 7. That's the question we decided to leave for our next discussion, and I'm not sure I can tell you what I did. But if I play the theme "straight," obeying no more than the indications printed in the text, you can perhaps see what is lacking. I shall be playing only the notes; but when I played it before, I wasn't thinking of the notes at all. I was thinking of what I wanted to hear in the notes — of the image we've laboriously described in words, but not of that image in its verbal shape. I think I saw it as a feeling-character in the notes; and that character, inferred from the notes, was the Why of the way I played them. 7 think, of course, that it's the Why of Beethoven's shaping them as he did, and you seem to agree. Here, then, is the theme played "straight." How much of an image do you get? F. There's no expectancy at all in the first two phrases, and mighty little tension, even in the subdominant repetition. The sequel wasn't so bad, up to the sudden piano, but the G's were just three G's, waiting, musically, to go on, but seeing nothing to go on to. I think I could play it as well with my clumsy fingers; but if you can tell how you got that Why into your playing, I'd like to hear it. 83

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/. As I said, that's a rather long, dull story, and we shall have to leave it for another day. Besides, there's another point about the structure of the whole movement that we haven't touched on. It's more pertinent, at the moment. F. Something more in the theme? I thought we had pretty well explored that. 7. Not in the theme as we saw it, but in the later use of it. The "sequel," as we called it — the second half of the theme — never appears again. Yet it was chiefly from the sequel that we got what you just called the sense of tragedy. It steers the mind into a realization of that tragic sense in the first half; but it isn't — as you can see at a glance — the sort of thing that could be deployed as a recurrent feature of the whole sonata form. So steered, however, we take the deployment of the first half— the only thing that is deployed — in the vein of the sequel. Without the sequel, I doubt that we should see the meaning we do see in the whole movement. You'll have to look at the score to see the point. (Example 12.)

E X A M P L E 12

F. Mmmm . . . I see. The violin, not the piano, has the theme in its structurally usable form, without a hint of the sequel. Beethoven repeats the first phrase on the subdominant, but he fills in the silences with that portentous rumble in the piano (how right it is!) and goes on with the sense of the first phrases — but not in the silly pattern of your parody. There is a long F at the fifth bar — intensified by the streaking diminished7th arpeggio — but the sixteenths just go down the scale on beat four, and that phrase is repeated a tone higher, on the tonic chord, with a partial cadence almost as suspenseful as the half-cadence on the three G's. Then there is a little expansion of the sixteenth-note pattern, and after it those thumping, decisive chords. That certainly isn't textbook logic, but 84

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it's the logic of the theme as we saw it, and I don't know how it could have been arrived at without some such nonmusical imagery as we've found. Your parody didn't portray any other than structural concern — any other than a structural Why. 7. Didn't it? I played it indifferently, but I might have played the first phrase in what I think was Beethoven's character. Something of that character could then have been injected into the repetition on the dominant, and the long rattle on the sixteenth-note figure might then have had a sort of purpose in it. But it could never have become the purpose imparted to those first phrases by Beethoven's sequel. F. That sounds as if you thought there was always that kind of Why — that intimation of nonmusical experience — in almost any interesting musical structure. 7.1 confess I always look for it, and feel that I don't know how to play the music until, in one way or another, I've found it. Perhaps I manufactured the trivial image I just found in my parody. (I made it as a parody merely.) And I don't mean that the image is always either as vivid or as weighty as it is in this sonata. But I do think the harmony books ought to recognize, in what they describe as the tonal tensions that effect musical syntax, the possibility that those have more than structural reference. F. I had only a year of harmony in college, and maybe the more advanced students were taught to see that wider reference. But it certainly wasn't taught to us. And I found most of the melodies we had to harmonize — unless they were taken from some significant source — quite intolerably unmusical. 7. Intolerable because they were intrinsically unmusical? Or because they bore no reference to something more than music? F. That's a hard question to answer, at this distance of time. I never thought of musicality as extramusical reference, and I'm pretty sure my teacher would have pooh-poohed the notion. But extramusical reference can be obscure, even if it is real, and you don't, in any case, have to formulate an image of experience to assure yourself that it is there, somewhere, in the music. You trust your intuition, which works much faster than your logic, even if you find, through logic, that your intuition has proved false. In fact, I don't know how far what I call musicality is a quality of organized tone and rhythm and how far it is a quality I attribute to tone and rhythm because I find experience in it. And of course I may find music intolerable because the experience it seems to derive 85

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from is fictional, and the music itself sentimental. . . . Or a performance intolerable because it seems false to the text as I understand it. You made this sonata theme sound full of concern. Then you made it sound almost empty of it. The difference, I'm sure, would be patent to anyone who had ears to hear. There must be a good deal of the Why of composition in a competent performance, even though the performing act looks to most listeners as if the only thing to be explored was the How of it. Will you go into it further? 7.1 said it was a longer story than you thought, and you're likely to be in for a rather tedious lecture, but I'll try. The How of performance naturally has to be concerned with getting the right notes; but that's only part of the How, and I'm not going into it. Also, as I said, I can only talk about the piano; but there's a lot of How in striking the right notes. F. You mean, I suppose, what they call "touch"? Most people think it's a mystery. 7. Maybe it is, but touch is more in the mind than in the hands.

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T

HE question my friend had posed for our next discussion

was the question of music in the aspect in which the vast majority, not only of its unskilled lovers but of its serious students, sees it — that of performance. Indeed, many an unskilled lover, if asked to define music, might offer little more than a vague "It's something you do to a piano." And even the student of that skill is likely to see it only as a How, as a skill which is its own and its only objective. A natural corollary to his definition would be that the more you do to the piano the more music you get; and much of the literature of the piano is patently devoted to the exploitation of the resources of the instrument. Indeed, to hear those resources brilliantly exploited is indubitably a musical experience. Our discussions, however, have been devoted largely to the exploration of music as portraying more extended images of experience than those offered by brilliantly projected tone. The How is still a major problem, but it is possible for it to be overshadowed by the Why — the Why being that image. My friend, as you will have seen, is not only a keen music-lover but an intelligent inquirer into both the why and the how of music, and you will not be surprised to find his first question reflecting his interest: F. When I got home I tried, I don't know how many times, to play that C minor theme as we saw it. The notes are easy enough to play so 87

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that I could keep the image in mind, and I finally came somewhere near a realization of it. But I haven't — perhaps because I wasn't thinking of my fingers — the faintest notion of what I did to the keys to make the notes sound the way I wanted them to. I'm sure my image somehow steered my fingers, but I don't see how. Can you tell what they must have done? /. I'll have to think of my fingers rather than yours, but I think I can. It will seem, as an explanation of what is doubtless the most appealing feature of piano playing, distressingly factual, but I think I can convince you that my dull story is true. Don't be impatient if I begin with obvious and elementary questions. What you did, you did with your fingers? F. Obviously. But I also did a little with my feet. 7. Let's stick to the fingers for the moment. What did they do to the keys? F. Depressed them; the keys impelled hammers which struck the strings; and if you want to be thoroughly precise, they made the strings vibrate. 7. What differences in vibration did your strokes produce — what variations in tone, and by what variations in finger-stroke? F. That's what I'm asking you, because I don't know. But of course anybody can see that the harder you hit the key the more tone you'll get out of the string. 7. What else? For you had to adjust your finger-strokes to your image, and you said there was a lot more. F. I don't know. I studied the action of my piano one day, when the tuner had it out. The hammers rise in one vertical plane, and they strike all three of the unison strings at once, unless you shift the action with the soft pedal so that they strike only two. There's a gadget the tuner called an escapement, but that serves only to make possible a speedier repetition of the stroke. In fact, as far as I could see, the mechanism couldn't produce any other variations than those of loudness. Yet, when I managed to make the theme sound the way I wanted to hear it, my ear heard a lot more than just varied loudness. 7. And therefore you feel sure there must be "something more" than varied energy in a sensitive player's touch? F. Isn't it self-evident? You played the theme much more vividly than I could. You did it with your fingers, didn't you? 7. Mostly. But, like you, I used my feet (and, like Sir Joshua, my 88

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brains), and you found that they contributed something to your design. Which foot did you use? And what did each do to the mechanism, and the tone? Maybe they modified that barren fact of varied loudness which you think can't account for your achievement. F. I used my right foot to sustain the long notes and the chords. But for the sudden piano and the two soft chords I found that the left foot helped. 7. Don't be impatient with my elementary questions. What does your right foot do to the mechanism? F. It holds up all the dampers so that all the strings in the piano are free to vibrate. Any individual key, as long as you keep it depressed, holds up its own damper, but you can sustain a note with your foot without keeping your finger on the key. 7. Does the depressed pedal affect the tone? F. It certainly does. There are a lot of partial vibrations — overtones — in every vibrating string. Other strings in the piano are in unison with those partials, and when you strike a note with the pedal down those strings vibrate sympathetically with the partials. That enriches the tone. You can hear the difference, even if you strike only one string, but you can't hear the partials except as an enrichment. The lower the string, the more partials there will be to add to it. 7. Yes; and the partials of the lower strings will also be excited when you strike the upper ones. Put down silently that C two octaves below middle C. (Incidentally, since you put it down silently, the hammer didn't reach the string. That means that when it does reach it the hammer is thrown — that it isn't under your finger's control at the instant the tone is produced. Your "touch," then, isn't a real touch on the string. It's a throwing — dependent wholly on the energy of your finger-stroke and uncontrollable after that energy has been applied.) . . . Now, with that C held down, whack the middle C triad, C-E-G-, two or three times and release it. ... That one low C-string is sounding not only middle C but the whole triad; it will do just that every time you play the C-triad with the pedal down; and you can see how many similar excitements there must be when you play more complex harmonies with the pedal down. F. I suppose that's why so many people call it the "loud" pedal. The overtones, multiplied, must make the tone louder. 7. They do, but the amplification, measured in decibels, is really pretty slight, and you hear it as added richness rather than as greater loudness. F. But the player can't select those partials. They're bound to be ex89

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cited if you keep the pedal down, and their loudness will still be proportional to that of the strings you strike. My finger stroke will excite them, willy-nilly, so that I must still get, with my fingers alone, no other controllable variations than loudness and pedal-color, which is, as you said, a kind of loudness. How can you project an image of concern with no more resource than that? 7. You can — but it's a tricky business — somewhat control the volume of your partials by what some pianists call "half-pedal." If you're careful, you can lift the dampers so that the strings aren't quite free. The heavier strings, then, won't be wholly silenced, while the upper ones are, and some of your overtones will sound. You can even let the dampers all the way down for an instant without killing all the lower strings. They sometimes call it "flutter-pedal," but you can hardly be sure of the result. The pedal on different pianos isn't always set at the same point for damper-release. . . . But you were asking about the projection of the image. Of course, you can't project an image with only one note, and so far, we've really talked only about a single note. You said that the opening G of our theme, as I played it, sounded expectant. But if I had played only that one note and then stopped you wouldn't have seen it so. The meaning — even the "purely" musical meaning — of any single note depends, doesn't it, on its relation to the notes that precede or follow it? F. Of course. . . . But then I must have gotten the notion of expectancy in reverse — out of the sixteenths and the final C? 7. Unless I did something to the G itself to suggest that notion, I think you must have. F. But what could you have done but strike it and hold it — possibly with pedal — for three beats? 7. How could you tell that a single sustained G was three beats long? I did nothing to mark the beats. F. I suppose I couldn't tell until I heard the sixteenths on "four" and the C, which was pretty obviously "one" in the next measure. I must have counted backwards without knowing it. 7. Nor need you have counted metronomically. You just inferred, accurately enough for your purpose, the familiar rhythmic fact of a pattern which you have learned to call 4-4 time. But now suppose, since you must have made that inference from my counting, that I had held that G just a tiny fraction more than three beats, and had played the sixteenths just enough too fast so that the C — an obvious "one" — fell at its appro90

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priate rhythmic moment. Wouldn't the precipitousness of the sixteenths possibly have made the G, even though heard in retrospect, sound expectant? F. Mmmm. . . . That would be a trick. I don't think I'm musically perceptive enough to detect such a slight deviation from strict time. Neither is the average music-lover. Just the same, I'll bet a lot of musiclovers would have sensed your image, as you projected it the other day. 7. You don't have to see how a trick is done in order to get the effect of it. Did you never detect, and trust as genuine, the faint hint of irony in a friend's smile? Hasn't that hint something of the subtlety of my faint rubato? Of course, if you try, now, to smile in that ironic way, you'll probably overdo it —make a mere grimace. Similarly, if I try now to count my three beats as barely extended and my sixteenths as barely too fast, I shall almost certainly overdraw my image. Anticipating your questions, I studied my playing of the theme after you left, and I found that I really don't know the proportions of those deviations. I played after the model on my dais, and that model suggested my "how." The more often I played it analytically, the worse it got; and if I tried to play it now, with these calculations in mind, I should almost certainly distort it. F. And if your deviations from strict time had been noticeable, I see that the image would have been distorted. But rhythm is only one of the musical elements. Were there tonal differences or subtleties that I must similarly have missed? 7. Quite a lot of them. I don't know that I was aware of them as differences, but if I play the theme "straight" again (that is easy enough to do), I'm sure you will sense them, even if you can't analyze them. . . . There. How does it sound? F. The sixteenths, from which the expectancy of the G seemed to come when you really played the theme, sounded wooden. There wasn't any propulsion in them. They came, I think, very precisely on "four," and the rests after the dead-sounding C and F were only silences. I didn't expect anything. The subdominant phrase had a little more intensity than the first, because it was subdominant, I suppose; but it still sounded indifferent. The sequel, up to the sudden piano, wasn't so bad, but the three last G's were inert. That's all I can see; but I'm sure that the differences weren't merely rhythmic. 7. They weren't, and perhaps you didn't see them because you were looking chiefly at the rhythm. I did, the other day, make the tiny rubato 91

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I spoke of, but I also made tonal differences that were at least as important. This time, playing the theme straight, I made a little accent on the first sixteenth, E|j, and a little more on the final C of the phrase. That accent on Eb detached the sixteenths from the G — left it standing alone — and made the sixteenths begin another group instead of completing the impulse that is properly imparted by the long G. Then, of course, having no particular purpose in mind (notes must sound as if they had a mind), the sixteenths complacently executed their little quick-step and plopped, with an accent, onto the C, where they stopped so completely that there was no expectancy left. You may have noticed that Beethoven slurred the whole phrase, from G to C, in one group. I played that C without an accent, and I think that non-accent contributed materially to the expectancy you found in the phrase. My parody slurred the sixteenths separately from the G, and it was out of that separateness that the long series of sixteenth-note figures came to be what they were. If you put a noticeable accent in the middle of a sequence of notes that is meant to be continuous, you will split the sequence in two — or into more parts if you make more accents. F. Whew! Do you mean that when you perform you have to calculate the weights — the loudnesses — of all the notes, not only in melody but in the supporting harmony? 7. I have to discriminate them, anyhow, and I suppose discrimination is a kind of calculation. You discriminate verbal inflection (which is largely loudness) in the same way. But it isn't a calculation of loudness as such. It's an attempt to shape the tonal contour appropriately to the image of concern I have in mind. From the structure of the piano I do know that if my phrase seems out of drawing, something is too loud, or too soft; for loudness and softness are all I can control with my fingerstrokes on the keys. But a note may also be too long or too short, even if the departure is infinitesimal. In fact, it is sometimes very hard to tell whether loudness or length is at fault. Length may seem like loudness. F. That seems to explain quite factually what everybody thinks of as the mystery of touch. 7. If touch is only a question of fingers, it explains a good deal. But what I do with my fingers will be affected by what I do with my feet. They may round out or spoil the dynamic contour I'm trying to shape. The increment of tonal color the pedal can provide is as important, I should think, as is color in the painter's design. Whether to use the pedals 92

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at all is a question not easily answered — unless you answer it by refusing to use them. Indeed, if your only answer is given by some supposed rule (such as the one, "established" by historic fact, that there were no loud or soft pedals on the harpsichord of Bach's day, and therefore you must play his music without them), you are likely to be so hemmed in by tradition and by sheer mechanical consideration that you will have no vision left for your image of concern — and will assume that Bach felt no concern. That image seems to me the first consideration — or rather, the final one — for the interpreter, just as it is for the composer, be he Bach or anybody else. Having that image on your dais, you manipulate keys and pedals by ear, being conscious of the result as a realization of your image. If you teach them, your fingers and your feet can learn to obey the dictates of that image; and that was what you were trying to do when you were playing this theme at home. F. Then the great question is whether you've actually seen the image — or have seen the actual image — that the music was intended to project? /. Mustn't you be more cautious than that? We've called the image one of concern, and that word seems a fair generalization of what the examples we've looked at seem to convey. As you've often said, one doesn't feel concern about nothing, and we accordingly erect the Kyries into Persons, and find the sonata theme suggesting something that we grandly call a moral law. The words do condense the awareness of concern into a more tangible image; but we're not sure our camel isn't a weasel or a whale. Any listenable performer, I think, will project concern in some form. But if it seems to his audience a concern about nothing, I doubt that they will respond very heartily — unless to the brilliance of his playing, which is quite another object of concern, and may be the performer's only one. F. I did go too far. Your comment makes me think of that performance of the F minor Prelude and Fugue I spoke of the other day. I thought then that the playing was false to what I supposed to be the Bach style, and you began to set me right. But the more we talk, the more urgent the question of style, whether in composition or performance, seems to become. Can we go farther into it? 7. Another day — or days, perhaps. It's a limitless topic. We certainly haven't exhausted the question of the hows of performance. Let's go on with it. F. Well, the mystery of touch, as you explain it, doesn't seem to be a 93

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mystery at all. It seems to be only a matter of more or less definable forces and speeds. Am I going too far again? 7. There's no mystery about the mechanism of the piano, even though the best makers can't make two instruments exactly alike. And the act of touch, which can't be anything but an application of forces to keys, is no more mysterious. But that act has to be guided by what we call an imaginative purpose; and the mystery of purpose is the mystery of consciousness—and of self-consciousness — which nobody has fully explored. Mere consciousness, I suppose, could discriminate varieties of experience, but the conscious self must discriminate for itself the values of experience; and for those values no exact measure has been established. We suppose ourselves to value experience intellectually; but even if that measuring stick were valid, experience is so multitudinous and impinges on us so fast that we can't even use what intellect we have. We feel, both before we think and after, and assume a new feeling-attitude if our thinking shows the old one to have been faulty. We may say, of course, that the thing wasn't worth thinking about; but I suspect we mean it wasn't worth feeling about. F. We do know, at any rate, how experience feels, and I suppose that to portray that feeling must be, in part, the purpose of almost any attempt at communication. And you may be able to arouse, if not precisely to communicate, that feeling without having to delineate the factual experience that aroused it. We're likely to be satisfied if we have the feeling, whether or not we draw our inferential image from it. F. And if we do draw it, and if we project it, as the performer does, we've rather slim grounds for assuming that ours is the real image. Bach and Beethoven, I suspect, would have been impatient with our laborious verbalizing of their imaginative efforts; for construction, after the image (as we call it) has been established, is in the foreground of the composer's effort, and concern for structure sometimes obliterates concern for the image, even in the greater minds. The same thing happens, of course, and rather more often, with performers — the skill of performance, not the skill of construction, being their concern. F. You keep coming back to the image, whose importance I hope I see; but I was asking about the act of touch, and there's a question that I can't answer. That act must be the application of forces to keys. But the piano teachers are always talking about relaxation during that act; and if the problem is one of force merely, I can't see what difference it makes, 94

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whether your attack on the key is relaxed or not. Yet my Mary Ellen showed me how: when she poked her fingers stiffly into the keys, she got a hard, unmusical tone, but when she played the same passage with a relaxed arm and wrist, it sounded much better. I don't see what the virtue of relaxation can be. Yet the difference was unmistakable. 7. You weren't fooled. But it is still true that the relaxed attack, on any individual key, doesn't of itself produce a different tone from a stiff attack. A good many years ago the famous English physicist, Sir James Jeans, was invited to speak on this subject to a convention of music teachers in London. He told them it made no difference whether you struck the key with your finger or the tip of your umbrella: if the force was the same, the tone would be the same. The teachers were horrified. One comment was, "He may be a great physicist, but he's no artist]" Yet Jeans was wholly right. F. Then Mary Ellen's teacher, who is always harping on relaxation, is wrong? 7.1 didn't say that, nor did Sir James. He was speaking about one note only —any one note; and if a great pianist among that audience had struck a single key on the piano nobody could have discerned that he was a great artist. He would have had to play at least a phrase of notes. I'm quite sure that if he had played the whole phrase stiffly, he wouldn't have revealed his artistry; but that would have been because he couldn't control the successive forces he applied to the keys so as to give the shape to his phrase that would have made it musical. But even if all his attacks had been relaxed, he might also have shaped the phrase so badly that it sounded "poked." F. Then if relaxation doesn't affect the tone as you strike it, the value of relaxation must lie in the preparation it gives for your next fingerstroke? 7. Exactly. A phrase of melody, like a phrase of words, has a certain peak of intensity toward or away from which the other notes (or words) lead. There is no rule, either in music or language, that will tell you where that peak is. You determine it only by understanding what the phrase means. (Of course, your understanding is your self's; but it may also be mine, and there is such a thing as "common" sense, which is often a feeling). Not only this peak but all the other notes in the phrase have their relative emphasis —an emphasis which the piano must project almost wholly through relative loudness. Seeing this phrase-shape, you will ad95

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just the forces you apply to the image you have in mind; your fingers learn to make this adjustment just as your voice learned, long ago, to supply to your words the much more complex values of dynamic emphasis and tonal quality that we call inflection; and the condition of your mechanism — hand or voice — should be such that you can apply those forces with the greatest discrimination and the least muscular effort. That's what the relaxed attitude does for you. F. I think I see, now, where Mary Ellen's teacher is a little wrong. I think she supposes that the attack itself is relaxed. But a contracting muscle can't be a relaxed muscle, can it? 7. Of course not; but its action can be impeded by the contraction of a lot of other muscles — those of wrist and elbow for instance — whose energy isn't necessary to the attack. But don't worry too much about Mary Ellen's teacher. She may not have a wholly correct notion of what the muscles do, but if she's getting the result, she's doing all you can expect of her. The relaxation has to be modified according to the energy demanded by the music, and if the passage is very loud you may have to stiffen your wrist and pound. The louder the music gets, the less apparent the discriminations of loudness become. Subtle effects can hardly be realized except on the general level of piano. The ear is much like the eye, which is more sensitive to what you might call slight inflections of light than to gross inflections. Even out-of-tuneness is much more discriminable in piano than in f one passages. F. Sensitive performance demands vastly more discrimination than I dreamed of whether in loudness or pedal-color or rhythm. You might measure the loudness in decibels, but you can't measure color —or, I think, even rubato — by any precise units. But have you no mechanical aid toward the calculation of force for related notes? 7.1 don't calculate, as you persist in calling it, exactly what forces I am to apply to the keys. I imagine their results beforehand. But I do sometimes, for a longish note or for a graduated ascent or descent, keep on the pressure with which I struck this key until I strike the next one — or maybe increase or diminish it according to the dynamic pattern of the phrase. It doesn't, of course, do anything to the tone, but I think I gauge my next stroke more accurately if I make believe that I am still producing the tone after I've struck it. I've seen pianists wobble their hands on keys as if they were producing a violinist's vibrato. It may help some hearers' illusion, and it doesn't do any harm. But the graduated pressure may 96

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sometimes be a useful guide. Any crescendo on a single piano tone must be an illusion; yet we all think we aon us so fast that we can't even use what intellect we have. We feel,hear it, if it is appropriately managed — and accompanied. And the pianist's behavior at the piano has a good deal to do with the illusions he creates. F. For the noble army, it certainly has — more, I sometimes think, than his actual music-making. /. Yet you daren't ignore that army. You said, one day, that it could do with some better officers. Who are those officers? F. I was thinking of the music teachers. Most of their comments seem to relate to the method — the How — of performance. One day I went backstage to carry a greeting to a newly imported European star. A prominent local teacher was speaking to him. "I couldn't help wondering," she said, "of what school you were? I don't recognize it." He looked rather blank, and I suspected he didn't quite dare reply, "The school of music." But that was the way he had played. 7. You mean she had certain notions of style, perhaps chiefly regarding the way the piano was handled, to which she thought all good piano playing must conform — a Leschetizky or a Breithaupt or a Matthay "method," to name but a few? F. I suppose you might reduce the word style to method —to the dimension of a mere appearance or pattern of action. It would be pretty sophomoric. But I've heard guides in picture galleries talk about the way paint was laid on canvas as if that were the only question. Have we got far enough, now, to go into the question of style? It does mean manner — at least to me — but it means more than just the How, doesn't it? Especially if there's an image of experience to realize. Maybe we've looked at the elements of the question enough so that I ought to be able to shape my own answer; but so far I've only confounded my own confusion when I tried. 7. You aren't the only one. But we may at least see something of the dimension of the word style, and I'm willing to have a go at it. Think it over. You came up with a method for communicating the musical image, and you may be able to untangle this question, or at least get a start on it. I've really not much notion how big the question is. We've only touched on the how and the why of piano playing, and that's a much simpler question than that of style. The how of playing other instruments is related to the question we've been at today, but I don't know the techniques of other instruments well enough to talk about them. 97

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F. But if the player's problem is primarily to shape his phrases meaningfully, won't at least the dynamics of the design be the same for any other players? Of course, if your instrument allows you to produce your tone for its whole duration, you can shape and color it more than the pianist can. His tone production has to be effected at the instant his hammer strikes his string. But your way of shaping phrases seems to me a general, not a merely pianistic way; and I think I've gotten some fairly clear notions as to the how of violin playing from what you've said about the piano. For the Why is the root question, and the How will certainly be faulty if it doesn't grow out of the Why. Besides, since there's a style in playing, won't those more detailed questions be answered, at least in part, if we can get at the why of style? 7. I'm afraid the why of style is a bigger problem than you think. But if we admit we're not angels, we may at least rush into its area. I'm as eager as you to explore it, even if I seem overcautious.

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"N CONTRAST to the rather simple question of the mechanics of performance, that of style which my friend proposed as our next topic promised to be a poser. As his first comment showed, he had been puzzled as to how to approach the problem, but I thought he had a fertile lead into it: F. As I understood the question, we were to get at the problem of style by trying to isolate it, somewhat as we tried to isolate form; but I found I couldn't do it. Form, as we saw it, turned out to fuse so completely with content that, while the two are clearly different as concepts, they're all but indistinguishable entities when they appear embodied in the features of an art work. And style, which I think everyone sees as one aspect of form, seems to fuse so solidly with taste, which seems like one aspect of content, that I couldn't discriminate them except as concepts. Taste, certainly, isn't the same thing as style. Yet you sense taste in the guise of style — as taste all wrapped up in stylistic drapery; and when I see them so I can't distinguish them. 7. Mmmm . . .You've made a beginning, anyhow. You seem to have looked, as we did with form and content, for their origins, and we at least got under the skin of the question by that approach. Can't you go on? Your lead looks promising. F. I went a little way, on that same tack, but I'm not sure of what I found. We agreed, I think, that form really originates in content, and it seems to me that style, similarly, begins with taste and grows out of it — rather than taste out of style. But there is — or at least there comes to be

I

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— such a thing as a taste for style itself. If, then, you cultivate that sort of taste, you will say that it grew out of style, or out of your preference for a style. But that seems to me a different sort of taste from the selective judgment that is ... well, is first attracted to a kind of imaginative wild flower and then fertilizes and crossbreeds and prunes and trellises it into the elaborate blossoming thing we call an artwork. Doesn't taste — sound taste — at least select the plant to be cultivated? 7. Are you reshaping, more prettily, the old adage about silk purses? I agree with you, but I'm not sure we aren't both wrong. Your idea that style grows out of taste of course accords with my prejudices in favor of what we've been calling an image of experience as the origin of art. A taste that really grew only out of style would dismiss nonartistic experience as irrelevant to art — as an actual encumbrance rather than a source. That, indeed, seems the most vocal, if not the most generally held, critical credo nowadays. We'll have to go into it, some day. But don't styles, while they may have originated in images of experience, become, when generally adopted, the stereotyped patterns in which experience of all sorts is dealt with? The heroic couplet of Pope's day was imported, I think, not directly, but by a kind of imitation, from France. It certainly was not the most natural vehicle for essays on Man or on Criticism. And weren't the musical forms that became current in many periods — motets, madrigals, sonatas, fugues, and the rest — similarly often adapted to subjects for which they weren't very well suited? Or, if you prefer, weren't those subjects adapted to the forms, and in various degrees distorted by that conformity? F. I suppose so. They used to lecture, in our English courses (for freshmen, who of course couldn't be expected to have any critical judgment), about how the writers in a new period "got away from all that"; and we were left, so far as I could see, with the inference that greatness really consisted only in getting away from all that. I think we, even as freshmen, could see not only the shallowness of that sort of criticism but the danger to real thinking that the neat epigrams in the couplets ran into; but the lecturers hardly mentioned the thought that was distorted by being fitted to a Procrustean bed. Wasn't that tailoring at least a part of what the nineteenth century got way from? 7. Doubtless; but the couplet, when it was successful, had a very sharp point that pricked, I've no doubt, through a lot of rather thick skins that wouldn't have responded to a gentler, possibly more thoughtful stab. 100

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And are you sure you and I can think otherwise than in familiar, congenial patterns that we have adopted rather for their facility than for their actual fitness to their burden of idea? Familiar patterns of thought can become as habitual as familiar paths for the feet; and we are likely to think they lead to the goal we're aiming at, although it ultimately (in a later period) turns out not to have been our goal, after all. The notion of progress, always so enthusiastically hailed, then turns out to be fictional, doesn't it? F. Only, I think, if you become convinced that there isn't any real goal — or that the goal is a fiction, which is nearly the same thing, but not quite. For even if you see your own goal as possibly fictional (because all the former goals have proved so), you needn't have lost the spur to go on hunting for a more factual one. You'll see your goal as having been striven for by your predecessors, as well as yourself, and — to come back to earth — you'll be shaping your style after the taste — the model — that implies your goal. But if you think there isn't any goal, then you can only shape your style — and your taste — after the model of style. 7. I'm pretty sure, anyhow, that in that case you'll develop an artificial, acquired taste. Wild flowers aren't often the object of that sort of pursuit. Yet, in great measure, all our adult tastes are acquired, from experience and education and habit all fused together, so that to hunt for their source is an all but hopeless task. Most of us, however, retain our affection for wild flowers, and while a few of those, like lady-slippers, are orchids, there's a lot to be studied in the commoner species. F. Then, after all, the original sensory implication of the word taste is the thing to begin our inquiry with? 7. Yes . . . and maybe to end with. For your final acceptance or rejection of an artwork is still considerably determined by the primary sensory attraction or repulsion aroused in your artistic taste buds. Taste, even on that lower level, will almost certainly influence style, and may even govern it. If, then, on the primary level, taste is a sensory discrimination, what does it discriminate? F. Grossly, as a sort of biological function, I suppose it discriminates the edible from the inedible — or possibly the nourishing from the unnourishing, for the obviously unnourishing would hardly be tasted. But although you might experiment, valuably, among edible foods —and spiritual nourishments as well —there are considerable differences in taste-appeal, and I suppose the pleasanter will likely be chosen, even over 101

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the more nourishing, if the food-resources are great enough so that taste can so far indulge itself. /. And criticism, conversely, if it concerns itself with the question of nourishment rather than the pleasure of the palate, may then become a sort of worried calorie counting? We've been doing that with our hypothesis, haven't we — perhaps too much of it? Haven't we been forgetting that we all sense, in the surface an artistic viand presents, something of your biological taste-appeal? We expect that flavor to permeate the whole substance and even I — an inveterate musical calorie counter — am critically pretty unhappy if it disappoints me. Taste buds, whether lingual or musical, are indifferent to calories. But they are very exigent. F. Aren't they, in fact, very considerably the selectors of the artist's substance — the stuff he likes to work with — and so, in part, of his chosen subject or "model," as we're calling it? Style must be, in part, the manipulation of that substance, and the artist can choose his substance largely for its manipulability. If that were the only object of his choice, his style would be appropriate to substance only. Even there, style and substance, in his finished work, would be so fused together that you couldn't distinguish them. But you could still argue that the style grew out of the taste that selected the substance. 7. And, as mostly happens with music that pleases my taste, if there's also a model — an image of experience — that the composer is drawing from, the appropriateness of the style to that model will also have to be considered. Style, then, will become fused with both substance and model, and your critical problem multiplied accordingly. F. It will, indeed. For style and substance and model are each conceptually distinct entities; but they fuse into one single artistic appeal, and the question of appropriateness, which is answerable only if you distinguish those entities, becomes very elusive. For the style may appear so appropriate to the substance that you don't notice its inappropriateness to the model. That's what happens, very conspicuously for the unthinking, in such a travesty as Rossini's Stabat mater. But I suppose that inappropriateness might be much more subtly disguised, and deceive us as well as the unthinking. /. We who think we're thinking may also be deceived. But an example shouldn't be too hard to find. Naturally, we should look for a composer who is conspicuously a stylist . . . Chopin, perhaps? But our two Preludes won't do. Substance and image, we agreed, are there wholly akin. 102

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. . . Maybe the Berceuse will serve. Its model is definitely indicated in the title, and the music has all the earmarks of Chopin's style (Example i3)-

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F. A great many, anyhow — those of his gentler, suaver manner, and his very individual kind of ornament. But weren't you looking for the distinction between the two kinds of appropriateness — not only that of style to substance, but also that of style to model? I don't see that distinction in the Berceuse. I. Maybe they're both there. We're only trying to make sure. The title, certainly, indicates, or at least suggests the model — the singing of mother to child. Taste for the gentle and the suave could well help to define or discriminate that model, and it certainly determined the choice of the musical substance. How far does that stylized substance accord with the model — the image of experience suggested by the title? F. Pretty far, I should think. The cradle rocks, audibly but not obtrusively, from beginning to end. The D[? in the bass is regularly there, on the first beat of every bar, and you don't hear any modulations (although you think you do) until the hint of G(j major, near the end. Ingenious, isn't it? 7. Very. Ingenuity is certainly a legitimate feature of style. But is it also a likely object of the concern we're calling taste? F. Why not? 7. I was only asking. It's a part of our question. You've mentioned, so far, only rhythm and harmony. Their motion and tension — our criteria of appropriateness — are indeed well suited to the subject. How about the melody? For if you read the word Berceuse and "see" a rocked cradle, and feel tenderness and so on, I suppose you will also envisage a mother, singing? F. Well, the melody is certainly gentle and tender, and its flow is as suave and songful as could well be. There are only four bars of it, really. 103

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The treatment — the style, or one feature of it — is that of variation, of a kind, anyhow, on those four bars. /. Ingenious variation? F. Not in the sense that you have to hunt for the theme in a lot of intellectual contortions of it. Chopin isn't playing the formal game of variation, and the style would be wrong if he were. This seems to me the right kind of ingenuity for the theme, and the theme is really quite visible — at least until the thirty-seconds begin. /. And thereafter? F. Well, with those the relation to the theme does get more vague. But with a theme only four bars long, obvious variation would soon have appeared mechanical. I confess I can't find the theme in the later figurations; yet, they don't seem to have forgotten it. I suppose the repeated formula in the bass suggests it. And of course, the "singing" becomes florid and pianistic. Even Trilby, whom Svengali hypnotized into singing the A|? Impromptu, couldn't have managed this. But do you mind the extravagance? 7. The piano sang the melody at the beginning, and I can hardly complain if it elaborates it after its own taste. And anyhow it resumes its singing in the quiet Coda, where I suppose you will hear the mother's voice again — singing, or maybe humming? F. I haven't, I find, "seen" the mother very clearly, even at the beginning, and she's no clearer at the end. But the baby goes to sleep quite aff ectingly with those two final chords. 7. Oh! The baby! Was he really there all the time? We didn't even think of him until he went to sleep. F. Ugh! . . . You remind me of a phrase that was current on a radio hour a long time ago: "You nasty man!" . . . You've shattered a cherished — though, I must confess, an already somewhat tarnished — image. 7. Of what? F. I'm not sure, any more. The cradle rocks, and the first phrase of melody is just as gentle and tender as I always thought it; but there just isn't any baby, and I'm afraid there never was — either for Chopin or for me. 7.1 was just as unhappy as you when, one day, the bubble of my illusion burst. But I don't see how we can avoid the conclusion that we've uncovered, for ourselves, anyhow, a beautifully disguised untruth. I can't see that the untruth lies in the style itself, looked at only as style. It is per104

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fectly consistent as an example of style. But the title does imply a nonstylistic image, and Chopin must have drawn from that since, even for us, there is still a cradle — unless you refuse to interpret the accompaniment as a rocking, which would be stupid. But, as Wordsworth said of Dryden, "his eye is not on the object." It was focused on style — on the stylized musical "thing" he was making —and the object implied in his title was only on the periphery of his retina. We might profitably compare this with another example in which style as ornament is quite invisible, but is still there, and with an appropriateness that is certainly unimpeachable. It's Schubert's tiny Wiegenlied. You can play the essence of it with one hand (Example 14).

EXAMPLE 14 F. That does it! Even without the words, there's a real mother, singing to her own, very real baby. Chopin's isn't a mother-image at all. It's somebody singing to her imaginary self as an imagined mother, rocking a pink cradle all draped in cloth-of-gold netting, and her baby's only a china doll! 7. You nasty man! You certainly do demolish our illusion — with a hammer. But a hammer is a rather blunt critical instrument. Mustn't we, if we pretend to be critics, dissect rather than smash our illusions? We agree that Chopin's image, if not wholly false, was at least flimsy. But ivhy was it flimsy? Isn't that the question? F. Yes, and also why isn't Schubert's flimsy? It's just as gentle and tender, but it's never artificial, as Chopin's is. No one, I should think, would doubt its genuineness. 7. And because of that, its value is harder to establish critically. It would seem like proving an axiom. The lawyers have a phrase for such obviousness: res ipsa loquitur (the thing itself speaks); and when it speaks you are silent. But the comparison is striking, and if we believe in our hypothesis, we ought not to shirk the effort to apply it. Why, then, isn't Schubert's image flimsy? Answer your own question. F. Well, even in your condensation of the music there's a cradle rocking — perhaps more naturally than Chopin's, though it's by no means as 105

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expensive a cradle. (That's an inference, of course, but I think it's justified.) Schubert's accompanying rhythm is really just as pervasive as Chopin's, but it is less conspicuous in itself, and on that account more contributory to the actual singing, and it isn't ingenious. Chopin's ingenuity was for substance, not model. The harmony, in both pieces, is just tonic and dominant; but Chopin's never deviates from its one pattern, and while I don't find it monotonous, its maintenance does become sophisticated. Sophistication is the last thing you think of in the Schubert. Schubert's melody, by comparison, is utterly simple and homely, while Chopin's, although it is unstrained, now seems somehow contrived. . . . I've talked a lot, but I don't think I've said anything that wasn't obvious from the beginning. /. You've made some things a little more noticeable, and that's at least one objective of criticism. Perhaps you can't account, factually, for unsophistication; but you might illuminate it by accounting for some of the sophistications we haven't noticed in Chopin — in his melody, I mean; for the artificiality of the later figurations is undeniable. Both melodies, I think, follow a natural intuition by beginning on the 3rd of the tonic chord. (It has a quiet warmth, whereas the tonic would be too solid and the 5th too tense to project the image.) Both, also, go to the 5th of the scale; but Schubert's goes directly, still on tonic harmony, whereas Chopin's dips to Eb before it rises and that same sort of curve, always with an active note on the beat, occurs three times in succession. It's very graceful, but it is a little self-conscious; and I can't find a hint of that attitude in Schubert. Chopin's figure of accompaniment — partly through the 6-8 meter — is, similarly, much more fluid than Schubert's. Ease and grace, as immediate characteristics, seem to me far more conspicuous in Chopin than in Schubert. But a kind of tenderness is there also, in full measure; and if you ask for no more than those qualities, seen for themselves without reference other than to the musical thing that is being presented, you may be — as perhaps we were before we were disillusioned — quite satisfied. You have, in the presented thing, a musical image, in which you see fluidity and grace, and even find tenderness. Fluidity and grace are characteristics visible in inanimate objects. You think of them primarily as manifested through motion, but the graphic outline of a static object may also seem fluid or graceful. Tenderness, on the other hand, isn't a characteristic of inanimate things, and it hasn't so definite a design. It's an emotional attitude, often evoked by your perception of fluidity or grace or a 106

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hundred other qualities, in living objects toward which you feel tenderness — children, kittens, sweethearts, and a thousand others. But because your feeling is compounded with imagination, you can also feel tenderness toward, or even see it in, inanimate things which in any way resemble the animate thing for which tenderness was an immediate response. And . . . F. Will you let me interrupt? I don't want to get lost. Aren't you saying that while you primarily see fluidity and grace and the rest in objects — and in this music of Chopin's, which is an object — you may legitimately feel tenderness, not only toward but in the music? In music, I mean, that is primarily fluid and graceful? And that the distinction between seeing and feeling — since fluidity and grace, enjoyed, are no longer merely factual percepts — becomes impossible? 7. That's the crux of it, but not the whole conclusion. You began, today, by asking whether style, which can be seen quite objectively, grows out of taste. If you do see it objectively —as a factual characteristic of an art work — you can hardly come to any other conclusion. But I suspect that we've both been looking at style as a more positively objective fact than it is — and taste, conversely, as more subjective than it is. For as with form and content, which you saw as analogous to style and taste, their boundaries, when they become fused, become obscure. Without realizing it, I think you really defined those boundaries in your assumption that style grew out of taste; and — again without realizing it — we've both been accepting that definition. For taste, as you thought of it, was a discrimination of nourishment; and we both assumed that that nourishment could only be derived from ordinary nonartistic experience. F. But didn't we agree that there might be such a thing as a taste for style? 7. We did; but I think we also agreed that there wasn't much nourishment to be derived from that sort of style. Which means that we predefined style, just as we did taste, too precisely. F. But didn't the Berceuse illustrate that unnourishing sort of taste quite decisively? 7. Yes, if you care to accept that one example as proving your theorem. But we selected it precisely to illustrate our view of the question, and we could have found a thousand others that would have served the same end, but might have been equally deceptive. Go back to the Kyries. Can you find no purely stylistic elaborations in them? How about that canonic 107

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imitation on the theme of the second Kyrie? * Isn't it, with its extraordinary harmonic tension, a tremendous musical moment? For us, if we already see the hint of the Third Person in the theme, it vastly enhances that image. But even if that image hadn't occurred to you, wouldn't you get, from what you could see only as a stylistic maneuver, a big mouthful of spiritual nourishment? F. Not, I think, if the theme itself hadn't been tasted as nourishing in the first place. Aren't you reneging on our hypothesis? /. Perhaps I am; but I think, too, that the hypothesis as we put it may propose, as essential, a more definite image of experience than can justly be expected of motion and tension. I do think those musical forces are the source of our interest in music as more than an exciting noise; but I also think they may be exerted, nourishingly, by what is definable rather as stylistic manipulation than as immediate imagistic purpose (if there is such a word). And taste for that sort of style can grow out of the style. In fact, since a composer must be pretty consistently aware, if not immediately conscious, of the style-problem as one of coherent organization in his musical thought, I suspect that he will develop a manner that is distinctively his, even in the merely syntactical organization of his work. I'm afraid I've forgotten — or have at any rate ignored — the shape of music as music, since I so inveterately look for an image of experience in it. And the shape of a composer's tonal substance — the style of it as substance — can be very characteristic. F. Can suggest Buffon's rhomme meme, you mean? /. Exactly. How do you know the man, Bach, the better — from the few scraps of biographical information that are trustworthy, or from the images of experience you find in the Mass or the cantatas or the Welltempered Clavier or the Suites? Those images, as I've been trying to say, are largely projected by stylistic devices. And how can you see him in his music if not because — far more than in those actual events in which he was often a rebellious participant — his actual self is there? We say the second Kyrie suggests the Third Person. If it suggested only that image, I think neither you nor I should have been interested. It suggests that Person as Bach saw it; you and I, out of a few scraps of theological doctrine, can form a notion of the Person and see it in the music; but what we are really interested in is Bach's attitude toward it, and I suspect we're only interested in that attitude insofar as we can share it — * Between alto and tenor at bar 35, and between soprano and bass at bar 40. 108

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imaginatively, of course, for the Person can't possibly be the same "object" for us that it was for him. F. And we've only made a beginning of understanding his attitude — or his music — if we see the music as portraying only the Person? It did enlarge the music a lot to find the Person in it. 7. I'm sure it did. But didn't it portray Bach himself more vividly than it did the Person? Isn't the man — the living "thing" like ourselves, contemplating an object of significance — also more vivid in that tremendous opening outburst and in the first Kyrie than is that object on which his eye was fixed — the First Person? It's the same, even with the Christe Eleison. That "portrait" is of course vastly more stylistic than the others — so much so that the image of the Second Person, overlaid with ornament as pictorial convention had long projected it, is much harder to discern. But I still think the ineffably gentle figure Bach always saw in the Christ is there, and I "see" Bach in that piece more than I see the Christ. F. That image of the Second Person, I confess, I never did see in that piece, although I might now be able to find it. But the essence of the incarnation and the crucifixion — portrayed in the Et incarnatus est and the Crucifixus not as mere events but as events with an immeasurable significance, and by a comprehending mind —is also there. And so is Bach. 7. And if a man ever looked over the brink of eternity, Bach did in his first vision of the words, et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. I almost wish he hadn't gone on to finish the Credo with that jubilant outburst — where the last trumpet sounds, even in the voices — on the same words and their sequel. That, again, is relatively stylistic, although it does suggest an image — a narrow one, compared with the other. . . . What I'm driving at is that if you see only style you see it as disembodied—or as embodied impersonally in a musical object. If, through that styled object you see the derived images we've been talking about, you'll see the image embodied in the musical object. That, for me at any rate, is a great addition. But that image, seen as an object of concern, is bigger still, and more "truthful," for the object is only inferred, while the concern is really portrayed, and in that guise it can't help — if it is a real image — being alive and human. When you look at the whole musical substance, styled as it must be to be intelligible, there are many features in that substance that are in themselves quite nonreferential but 109

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that still enhance the image incalculably. I can't tell how they do that — your idea of form as order only partly explains it; but I must agree that they do. And consequently, in spite of my doubts, I believe your first notion — that style grows out of taste — is sound, for the taste buds seem to be more than primary. F. If taste, as I was thinking of it, is a discrimination of possible nourishment in the object of taste, I don't see how anyone can disagree. But you haven't, in what you've just said, taken any account of the taste for style, which you acknowledged as a very real possibility. /. Haven't I? I thought I was doing just that when I referred to the nonreferential factors of a really referential musical substance —or to the heroic couplet as an omnibus pattern in poetry. The image you get from nine out of ten of the pieces you hear isn't vivid enough to appear as an image of actual, definable experience. Yet you recognize that music as alive — to be sure, with various degrees or intensities of the lifeimpulse — and if you don't, I doubt that you will be interested enough to listen. Even if you find it (as school-fugues and a good many others are) a well-executed pattern that has been used for the portrayal of life, and so think you are seeing in its neat correctness an example of style, you'll have no more than an exemplification of rules for style, not style itself. I doubt that any live person would develop a taste for a dead style. (I'm not referring to the ancients, whether in literature or music. A live style doesn't die.) But standard patterns are useful things for people in a hurry, and they may serve to convey, even though they hardly contain, a lot of images that wouldn't be conveyed at all if the pattern had had to be contrived precisely to accord with its image-content. The very strangeness of such a perfected pattern might make it look meaningless. Wasn't that what happened with Henry James — and possibly with a lot of contemporary composers? F. I suppose so; and in one way even the Berceuse is an example. It looks like a cradlesong, even if there isn't any baby; and that appearance — that style, at least in one aspect of style — is so attractive that the absence of the most essential feature of the image can go unnoticed. It's a good example of the kind of style for which it's easy to cultivate a taste. And, once you see its preoccupation with nonessentials, it suggests something of what looks like a real problem of criticism. /. It seems to; but until you know more of what those essentials are, no

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you'd better be wary of the critical formula implied in your discovery that there's no baby in that piece. Doesn't your ear still enjoy the Berceuse, even though your mind finds it wanting? F. Do you mean that a taste for style may be critically legitimate? /. I'm not arguing for what you might call "absolute" style. I doubt that I could find an example of that style that either you or I should find significant. But don't you still find the Berceuse gentle and tender? Along with its elegance, I mean? That elegance isn't absolute. F. Has anybody, until the twentieth century, argued for absolute style? A lot of contemporary music professes to "contain" nothing else; but I suspect that that music, for its champions, exhibits a lot of values that aren't recognized in their —or our —rather narrow definition of style. Will you try to show that what they see as absolute is really referential? — and that musicality, therefore, is recognition, even if quite subconscious, of that reference? /. I suspect it is, even though the very idea of a reference may seem abhorrent to the absolutists. I'd like to talk about that, someday; but your musical predilections seem to be much like mine, and I'm afraid they will taint our conclusions. F. I have a young friend — a twelve-tone composer and a rather rabid enthusiast for modern art of all sorts — who still recognizes many of the values you and I have been finding in conventional music. In fact, he said, one day, that unless it is somehow related to experience, he can't see much virtue in any art. I can't report his point of view adequately, but he is full of ideas, and he usually makes them sound reasonable. Could I bring him along someday? He's a most likeable chap, forthright in his opinion, but not pigheaded. I think your two minds would meet. 7. I'd certainly like to know him. You've been, as I say, a rather easy convert to my notions, and I'd like to try to defend them against a tougher adversary. For while we think we have arrived at really reasoned conclusions, we can't deny that we've also been bolstering a lot of native prepossessions; and when an argument seems to support those, you're not likely to see many flaws in it. F. I'll ask him about it. I don't know when, or even whether, he can come, but I'm sure he'll be an interested and interesting opponent. . . . But before you take him on, couldn't we go into more examples of the kind we've already studied — look at them, I mean, chiefly from the angle in

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of style? You answered a question, one day, about the Bach style I thought was violated in a performance of the F minor Prelude and Fugue, by asking where Bach got his style. You hardly answered your own question except by suggesting that it came, at least in part, out of his experience and represented his concern for experience. You merely invoked, that is, the hypothesis you've been building up. There's a Mozart style and a Beethoven style, and so on, and there's a more general French and German and Italian style, and, as the books seem to describe them, the features of those styles might almost be absolute. I'm enough of a convert to your ideas so that I'm not satisfied with that explanation, but I still don't know how to apply your hypothesis very well. Our talk about the Kyries has been illuminating to me. Couldn't we do more of it — not necessarily with the focus on style, but on content seen through the drapery of style? Illustrative examples do a lot for me. 7. It took us several days merely to suggest our hypothesis. You could make a big book out of the application of it to the work of any great composer, or any nation. I'm quite unequal to such a task, but — since we're only exploring, and certainly are not posing as definitive critics — I may be able to help. Where do you want to begin? F. With Bach. Aren't there a lot of movements in the Mass that are just as vivid with meaning as the Kyries^ Isn't that meaning the why of their style? All the style-studies I ever read seemed to be concerned only with the how of it. The why perhaps doesn't explain the details of the how, but it does illuminate them. 7. If this were a course in school, I'd assign you one for study. Why don't you see what kind of why you can find for the Qui tolas'? I don't believe anybody ever made music like that without a more than purely musical purpose. Of course, solos like the Laudamus te are much more stylistic, and the contrast between those two movements would be interesting. There's a why in the contrast, too, that may be as big as the how. F. I'll try the Qui tollis, but you'll have to help me out. 7.1 doubt that you will need to spend much effort on the formal structure. You'll find it wholly lucid, although it's not in any of the patterns that rule in much of Bach's instrumental music. If you report, however meticulously, on the musical subject-matter and its manipulations, I think you'll be dealing with taste as it grows out of style. We've fairly well determined (for ourselves, anyhow) that it's the other way round: 112

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that while the taste that appreciates form may grow out of the experience of form, it also fuses with the taste that grows out of experience; and that is the taste you'll be looking for. F. That isn't the sense of the word taste as it's ordinarily used, but I think we've demonstrated that our taste buds can discriminate the nourishing as well as the gratifying. That, anyhow, is what I'll look for.

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FRIEND'S idea that we study the problem of style practically, rather than theoretically, by looking at it in the works of an undetermined number of composers, seemed the natural sequel to our last day's discussion. But both the selection and the focus of our study of the few works we could find time to examine began, in the interim, to appear a more troublesome problem than I had expected, and I was not surprised to find him in the same perplexity when I asked: 7. Your suggestion of looking into style as it is exhibited in actual works of actual composers seemed wholly sensible. But while we arrived at a good many notions as to what style is, oughtn't we to decide a little more precisely how much we are to include — or exclude — under that term? You were going to look into the Qui tollis from the Mass, and I suppose you did; but weren't you a little puzzled about just what to look for? F. I was, indeed. It was evident that I must include what our hypothesis seems to reveal, but the whole notion of style includes much more than the image of experience the hypothesis suggests, and I found, when I tried to include the other items we talked of, that I didn't know whether I was thinking about style or about something else that I had no name for. 7. I'm inclined to think that the more narrowly you define style the less useful your definition becomes, and maybe our hypothesis has suffered similarly from too sharp a definition. I'm glad you haven't abandoned it, but we've greatly modified our first statement of it, and it might

MY

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be well to reformulate it accordingly. Will you have a try at that problem? F. Well, the basic outline is that the apparent tensions and motions of the musical "body" may be seen as representing the nervous tensions and the motor impulses of the human body when it is emotionally excited; and that outline doesn't seem to me to need any restatement. I haven't found any reason to abandon that notion, and I don't know how to state it any more clearly. /. But you do find it difficult to "interpret" music in its light — and to incorporate your interpretation into whatever may be your definition of style? F. Of course. Nervous tension and motor impulse aren't emotion as emotion is known and felt. They're only the characteristic disturbances of an emotionally excited human body. Emotion is known and felt in the mind, not in the nerves and muscles. At the level of my statement of it as tension and motor impulse, the hypothesis leaves out the consciousness of it, and particularly the self-conscious awareness it excites; and without that you'd have only the mechanical responses that a robot might give to a stimulus. /. Go back for a moment to your mechanical bodily response, which you say the music may portray. Does the conscious self, feeling the tensions and motor impulses of its own body, interpret them as the evidences and the characteristics of an experience? That's what you say the self does with the musical portrayal of the excitement. F. That sounds like the old James-Lange theory. It had been extensively discredited before I studied psychology in college. The response is excited by the stimulus — the experience — as anyone would suppose, and not the experience by the response; but the response, so excited, does appear appropriate to the experience, and therefore to be a consequence of the experience; and since the musical portrayal of the excitement must precede the interpretation of that portrayal, your question seems to me pointless. But it's still true that neither the bodily tensions themselves nor the musical tensions that portray them directly portray the external experience — the actual event — that aroused those tensions. They both portray the self's awareness of the importance of that event — the attitude of mind that we called concern. What we're saying is that if you scrutinize that concern — whether it is portrayed by music or by many agents other than music — you can infer with some confidence the sort of experience "5

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that aroused it. That evidence wouldn't be accepted in a court of law, but when you scrutinize it, as we did the diminished 3rd in the Kyrie, it can be convincing. /. That seems to hang together as far as the question of expression goes. But it says nothing about style, unless the fact of appropriateness you mentioned is a fact of style. Style, basically, is organization, isn't it? And the stuff of music has to be organized as music — organized on what appear to be intrinsic principles of tonal and rhythmic cohesion. Those cohesions are effected by the very same tonal tensions and motions that you find appropriate to the portrayal of concern; but purely musical organization needn't be at all concerned with your image of experience. In fact, musical organization is really a different concern, concurrent with that for the image but focused on quite another sort of appropriateness — that of tonal syntax and general pattern. F. And you can see that syntactical concern as the whole and the only problem of style. But if you mingle the concern for the image with the concern for syntax, then you have a larger problem of design. The composer has to deploy the purely musical tensions and motions so that they become the conveyors of an image of nonmusical experience — become what you might call the elements of expression. Yet the product must appear as a truly, if not a purely, musical design. That certainly enlarges the notion of style. 7. And that isn't all of that notion. You've very largely ignored the musical taste buds, which to a quite incalculable extent select and thus determine the primary make-up of the tonal substance the composer is organizing. How much of immediate sense-appeal, or what particular type of sense-appeal he is to offer, is no small part of his problem. That senseappeal, as we found with the Berceuse, can distract the composer's (and the listener's) attention from what, if you are looking for an image of experience, ought to be the main concern. F. Yes; and the interpreter's (the performer's) taste buds can distort either the image or the purely musical design out of all recognition. I rather think my pianist, with his playing of the F minor Prelude and Fugue, consulted nothing but his taste buds. /. You're certainly right in including the performer's taste in the whole problem — and your own as well, as listener. I don't see how you avoid assuming — although it can't be more than an assumption — that with a composition you like, your own taste buds, when they signal your liking 116

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for the music, are very like the composer's, and your judgment of a performance—your acceptance or rejection of it —is likely to accord with the dictate of your ear. Its physical taste is indeed, as the Latin proverb has it, non disputandum. That phrase really means that tastes ought not to be disputed, not that they cannot be. But perhaps that is only because they're so dictatorial that you can't argue with them. You can't, however, ignore them, and that fact ought to keep us from overconfidence in our critical judgments. F. Can you be any more confident in intellectual judgments? the historians' for instance? I heard Walter Gieseking, I think during his first tour of this country, play Bach's B flat Partita. It seemed to me an incomparable performance, utterly musical but still wholly like Bach, and the whole audience was an enthusiastic as I was. I never heard him play any Bach after that, but I heard somewhere that the musicologists had got after him and made him tone down his style of Bach-playing. I've heard much of their learned playing from other pianists, however, and it seemed to me so little considerate of Bach's taste buds — or at any rate of mine as Bach activates them — that I was repelled. I remember hearing one Bach-hater say that his music was all "teedle-eedle-eedle," and this learned way of playing it sounds just like that to me. /. Possibly because my own taste buds seem to be much like yours, I'm inclined to agree with you. The historians — and particularly the students of Auffiihntngspraxis — don't seem to have much regard for any but carefully instructed taste buds, although the uninstructed ones must always have existed, and I suspect that their primary working hasn't greatly altered. You can educate — and miseducate — tastes, and you can dull the sensitivity of the buds, but I doubt that you will wholly abolish their contribution to our final judgments. Don't they in some measure account for William James's distinction between tough-minded and tenderminded people? F. You apparently can't, anyhow, educate that distinction out of existence, and I think our hypothesis, recognizing the buds (for they do considerably affect our images of experience), gives a broader basis for the study of style than historical criticism alone can provide. We're certainly not trying to abolish history. 7. I'm afraid some historians will think we are. But I guess we've revamped our hypothesis enough so that we can go on with your project. 117

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What did you make of the Qui tains'? That is, of its style, for we're looking for more than an image of concern. F. Well, partly because we had found two such very different implications in the two words, Kyrie eleison, I looked at this text more closely than I should have earlier. In most choral music the few words of text are so endlessly repeated that you don't listen to them; but they do — and should — dictate many details of the musical substance and the style. These words are addressed to the Christ — Thou that takest away the sins of the world; but Bach puts almost all his emphasis on peccata (Example 15). I don't believe that emphasis is liturgically intended, but as Bach sees it, it yields an extraordinarily appealing phrase. It makes the actual prayer, miserere nobis, although it is cast in appropriate two-note motives, sound a little perfunctory. But the image, anyhow, centers on the attitude of penitence, and that can't be far from the liturgical sense of the words. And it does project what we said the musical vehicle was suited to — an attitude of mind toward experience, not an object of experience. 7. And how about the musical texture itself? For there's where the style really is.

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F. Well, you might call it accompanied fugue, I suppose, although the theme comes mostly in canon. It's really a more or less fugal texture, rather than formal fugue. I suppose you could call the two miserere phrases a countersubject, but their combination with the peccata theme seems to me dictated more by the sense of the words than by regard for the ordinary fugal pattern. I should think that sort of design demands as 118

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much stylistic skill as does the formal pattern. And the taste buds were very active. It was they, surely, that chose the tonal substance for the piece, and kept it homogeneous throughout? You "see" the texture, of course, but it never distracts your attention from the image of concern. /. The texture of the voice parts doesn't, but did you notice the instrumental accompaniment? F. Only so far as to see that it belonged. But to make it belong is also to exercise style. /. It is, indeed. And this accompaniment doesn't merely belong. I had occasion, once, to rehearse the orchestral part alone. It turned out to be — as I wouldn't have had the wit to see if I hadn't heard it so — a wholly complete and satisfying orchestral piece. It doesn't emphasize the peccata theme; in fact the whole instrumental texture is much less sorrowful than the vocal, and that is a fact of style that I don't think I fully understand.* The violins have a continuous eighth-note supporting motion in two-note, repetitive motives; the two flutes, until near the end, have a motive in sixteenths; the whole instrumental texture is rather thin and has a delicacy that is perhaps intended to lighten the sonority of the voices. You don't hear much, when the voices are singing, except the bass and the flutes. I tried to find a way of making the whole orchestral texture more audible, but I couldn't do it without minimizing the singing to a point where the vocal sense was reduced to a murmur. F. I should think that was patently not Bach's intention. He has quite another, much more vehement phrase for suscipe deprecationem nostram — it seems almost declamatory — and if the prayer weren't audible as a prayer, one wouldn't expect so much stress on the plea that it be accepted. The long descending curve on that phrase at the end seems somehow imbued with the sense of sin that was so conspicuous in the long note for peccata. But even if it is conspicuous, it isn't burdensome. The choir isn't singing mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But neither is it singing perfunctory, merely liturgical words. Your warning that we may be overemphasizing our images of concern is probably needful, but I can't see how this music — or anything else I know of Bach's — could have been conceived unless out of some such image of experience as precisely this * The movement is an adaptation to the Latin text of an earlier cantata, "Behold and see, was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow" — a different, still kindred image of concern. But this piece, like the Crucifixus, which was adapted from the cantata, Weinen, klagen, sorgen, zagen, is so perfectly adapted to its new image that no discrepancy can be discovered.

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text provides. To say that puts a slant on the question of style that I suppose the purists will indignantly repudiate; but whether it's my naive taste buds or a more educated musical apprehension that determines my judgment, I can't see the details or the whole fabric of the style of this piece as purely musical. /. Having found an image of experience in it, you can't; but the purist, who is as earnest a music student as you or I, can, and while I of course see, by and large, the same image as you, I know that neither of us sees either all that is there, or even what we are sure is there, with enough certainty to make our image a dependable factor in the critical estimate we're trying to establish. F. Aren't you overcautious? The data for the image are there, for everybody, but it takes much musical experience even to recognize the data. Whether the taste buds of any individual have any lead from the perceived data into the imagination where the image arises must be an individual question. Nobody can answer that. But everybody can feel concern — which is the best name we can find for what the music actually portrays, and you're surely not wise to reject the image as a real factor in the critical judgment of the musical object. 7. I'm only trying to find a more definite and dependable basis for the image than we've established so far. The question makes me think of a day, a long time ago, when with a couple of friends I went up a not very high mountain in southern Oregon. At the top there were clouds below us, and clouds on the southern horizon. One of those, very white and very far away, seemed curiously pointed — smoothly conical. All at once it became too firm for a cloud and turned into Mount Shasta. Even as a cloud, it had been a compelling sight, but when I realized that it couldn't blow away it took on a new beauty. If I hadn't known, from maps, where Mount Shasta was, and where I was, it might have remained for me a cloud. . . . I suppose the liturgy is a map that tells what and where the Qui tollis is, or the Kyries, or the other numbers. Without it we should never have seen the Persons or this image of penitence; but once you have seen them you're pretty sure they won't blow away. F. The map helps, but you can get on without one. I can't define the image Bach's E flat minor Prelude evokes in me, and the map of structure isn't any help; but that image won't blow away, either. . . . Have we done all we can with the Qui tollis? You had an assignment, too — a more 120

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general one. Did it include any of the arias? I don't get any image at all out of the Laudamus te. Do you? /. I get some help from our liturgical map, but I'm not sure I read it rightly. And there's another map — the historical — that I think you have to consult —one that explains the elaborate ornamental facture of the piece. The Italian opera was already rather solidly established in Dresden in Bach's day. He didn't think much of it. I read somewhere that he used to ask Friedemann, his oldest son, "Well, shall we go over to Dresden and hear the pretty little tunes?" But those tunes had captivated the public and were making rapid and drastic changes in its taste. Bach found that he had to conform to fashion, and the da capo Aria, highly ornamented and sung on the stage by similarly attired prima donnas, was certainly the structural model for this piece. Yet it has a certain conventional, if not actually liturgical, appropriateness. The whole Gloria is a joyous utterance, and the act of praise and glorification — also exemplified, I should think, in the decoration of the churches — isn't ordinarily performed in humble surroundings. The image of the Christ as the King of glory wasn't, I'm sure, Bach's usual vision of the Saviour; but he could see Him in that light, and I think that is the natural view of the Laudamus te. The singer needn't —as I once heard Mme. Albani do —smirk her way through the aria as if it were the trial song in the Barber, even though it is a severe trial of the singer's skill. Indeed, for the phrase adoramus te I think you can detect a different note — a kind of fervency — that I don't feel in the music for the other three sentences of the text. But any liturgy has its dry spots, and Bach could offer no more than this musically brilliant setting. I'm sure we needn't go into its brilliancy. F. It might be found to yield, I suppose, something of that indirect contribution to meaning that we found in form itself, but it certainly isn't one of the great religious moments in the Mass. The choir has most of those — rightly enough, for religion is a universal, not an individual attitude of mind. 7. The etymology of the word — a "binding together" — implies that. F. And isn't that what Bach saw in the Credo:1 He took that ancient Gregorian tone for a subject, which makes the music more than narrowly Protestant, and the incessant imitations on that tone and the huge augmentation of it at the end seem like a participation of all Christendom in the confession of belief. 7. Your word confession makes me think of another instance of Bach's 121

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individual consideration of the words he's setting. I'm on rather shaky ground, here, but it seems to me that his theme for the beginning of the Confiteor (Example 16) reads into that word a meaning it doesn't properly have there. It is Englished as "I acknowledge" (one baptism for the remission of sins); but the theme sounds as if he understood the word in its more usual sense of "I confess" (the sins that baptism is to remit). But whether or not that is the sense of that phrase, the music goes on to another affirmation of universality in the introduction of the Gregorian tone as a third theme in what can be seen as a huge triple fugue set to those words. (In remissionem has the second theme.)

EXAMPLE l6

F. I found the end, on et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, quite literally full of the blasts of the last trumpet — not only in those instruments but in the voices. I've heard a lot of people complain of Bach's "instrumental" voice-parts, and I suppose this and a lot of other running figures are hard to sing, but this trumpeting was electric in vividness. 7. But perhaps you didn't notice (maybe you were getting tired) the extraordinary passage that introduces that vivid Finale to the Credo1? It is set to the same words, Et exspecto, and, as I said the other day, if ever a man looked over the brink of eternity and managed to tell what he saw there, Bach did just that in that passage. It comes without any warning or any special direction for performance in the score, and I have heard conductors run over it as if it were just some more of the Confiteor. The trumpeting looks obvious enough, in its verbal context, although only a high imaginative faculty could have made it so vivid; but this approach to the trumpeting seems to me one of the most supreme imaginative feats in music. There's an enharmonic modulation — too intricate and obscure to be adequately described in words — that opens your eyes on a new and 122

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quite unearthly landscape (Example 17). You think it's the region of infinity; and I don't know how any vehicle other than music could project such an image.

EXAMPLE 17

F. I'm afraid I missed that altogether. Maybe it wasn't brought out. But the resurrection, after the Crucifixus, seemed credible, if only through the sheer joyousness of it. And that Sanctusl Milton had a hard time of it trying to put into words the image of Dominus Deus Sabaoth, but Bach's music sounds as if he had really seen God. That was for me the crowning moment in the Mass. /. It is, while you are listening to it anyhow. (The triplet figures are supposed to represent a choir of angels.) But there are many other "crowning moments." You'd better not attempt comparisons. One of those moments, for me, is in the approach to the Et incarnatus. The long duet on Et in unum Dominum is pretty doctrinal in verbal idea, but Bach's canon in the unison comes as near as one could to making real the notion of the unity of the godhead. Comparatively, the music is dry. But when he comes to the words, qui propter nos homines, et propter nostram salutem, the whole harmonic color as well as that of the two voices changes and the warmth— . . . well, we talked about the warmth in Schubert's image of the marigolds; but if you want to see how many degrees of warmth can be implied in that one word, just compare those two passages. F. Isn't that the passage where, as one program note I read put it, the descending arpeggios in the violins "illustrate" the descent of the Holy 123

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Spirit? The commentator sounded a little apologetic for Bach, but even though I'm no devotee of program music I wasn't offended. And the Et incarnatus and the Crucifixus project, as they surely should, the central mystery of Christianity. 7. Don't ask me for any words in comment on those two pieces. If ever a mystery, as you rightly call it, was realized, it is in that music; and if anyone wants to see a portrayal of the genuineness of religious experience — whatever his doubts about the genuineness of creeds and all that — he'll find it there. But it is no less vivid in the Agnus Dei, for which again I've no words. . . . But we've run on, already, with too much talk. We were going to talk about style, and almost all we've talked about is the images we see in the music. F. Aren't they a feature of style, and a pretty important one? /. They're one objective of the stylistic effort, whether they're images of musical or nonmusical experience; but even if we see the images of experience as nonmusical, the purely musical image is also there, and it is largely in the manipulations of the musical stuff and in the quality of that stuff as it impinges on our aural taste buds that the image of style — for that's still another image — is generated. F. Then style is another "something more"? 7. More, anyhow, than can be accounted for by analyzing either manipulation or image — which is all we've tried to do. Today we've almost ignored the manipulations, except insofar as they seem designed to project the images. If the image is there, that may not be too gross an error. But we have ignored the taste buds, and they may have more to do with style than the syntactical manipulations — at least insofar as those are syntactical, for they're all but dictated by what you might call syntactical necessity: the need to make musical sense. F. Then are we to look for this something more in the buds? 7.1 suspect they're a larger factor in our whole awareness of style than they seem to be when you describe them as primary sense organs merely. Their response to the artistic stimulus is immediate and, I think, persistent; but it is variable by so many influences that there's no way to keep track of it. You will probably hide your native taste-response if, in the presence of a more educated response, it momentarily appears, say, plebeian. You can educate it by fairly long exposure to that same influence. But how deeply your education penetrates is, to say the least, uncertain. Much of your style —and your appreciation of style —grows out of 124

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taste, and your original taste buds aren't inactive during that growth. Bach's were highly educated, but they were never dulled, and I wonder whether anybody ever had so just a native equipment as his. The changes in musical or literary style that appear periodically in the history of the arts are very considerably educated changes — educated, to be sure, by many other influences than the timidity engendered in all of us in the presence of supposedly superior taste. But when the pendulum swings backwards, doesn't it reveal the persistence of the primary sensory preference? Didn't classicism appear to the romantics as overeducated, and correspondingly undernourished by primary sense-gratification? And, contrariwise, doesn't the contemporary revulsion from romanticism indicate a primary as well as an educated objection to surfeits? F. Surely those periodic changes in taste signify more than the mere swing of the sensory pendulum? 7.1 didn't deny that, but your question points up the complexity of the problem. We've no quantitative measure of either the sensory or the more intellectual components of taste. Those changes are for the most part qualitatively discriminable, but a qualitative measure, applied to unknown quantities isn't very dependable. Each of us has, I suppose, a vague quantitative measure for his own primary sensibilities and his intellectual capacity. But other selves, as we see them from outside, show, in different directions, both more and less sensitive taste buds, and more and less intellectual aptitude, than our own; and, having no quantitative measures, we lump the whole fact of difference into a general estimate of what we call character. At least, we see both taste buds and brains at work in any significant personality, and we expect his utterances to conform to, and very likely to enlarge, that estimate. And . . . F. And seeing all that at once, in significant — or perhaps in insignificant — artworks, we find in them Buff on's rhomme meme, or at least the best part of him? 7.1 should think so. It would be more than fatuous, of course, to imagine we can see all of the man, Bach, in his work. But in that view we do see his bigness and his humanness as well, more clearly than would be possible through any process of stylistic analysis that has ever been devised. And even if we can't define his style, factually, any better than we've done, we've seen it in fuller outline than would have been possible if we hadn't, intuitively, been looking for the man all the time. You won't I2

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go very far toward understanding that man merely by learning to recognize his terminal cadences. F. Nor gain a pleasure much higher than that of self-flattery over your attainment in musical discrimination. 7. Don't be too harsh (as perhaps I was). We haven't found the whole man in the music, and analysis did help us toward what we did see. And are we wholly free of your charge of self-flattery? We're sure the stylistic analysts won't tell us much about the man. We're sure that our image of experience is an essential factor in the whole process of style. But we're a long way from an adequate concept — to say nothing of an adequate verbal definition — of style. F. If there had ever been such a definition formulated, I think we'd have heard of it. But haven't we really been aiming toward it ever since we started? Isn't the notion that music relates somehow to human experience as old as music itself? That relation seems to have been largely a matter of faith — an artistic religion whose evidence was in things not seen. Yet, as in your lawyers' phrase, the thing itself spoke; and it seems to me now as if abstractionism were an attempt to silence that speech. Much of it, of course, wasn't worth listening to, but neither is much abstract music. And our hypothesis, however unstably you may feel it to be established, looks to me like an important contribution to the definition of style. 7. We can at least hope so. But abstractionism, even in our rather unfriendly definition of it, contributed, in the guise of form, much to our notion of the image, and therefore to the definition of style. The really thoughtful abstractionists, although they reject the more concrete images we erect on what we call a portrayal of concern, do find a relation in their music to what they see as the loftier reaches of the imagination. Aren't they possibly erecting an image of what you might call the essence of artistic experience — which includes order, just as truly as did your definition of form? Isn't all art, really, an abstraction — out of, not away from, human experience of one kind or another? Experience is certainly more than an encounter with raw fact. And do you think Bach, who knew religious experience somewhat as we see him portraying it in the Mass, knew nothing of that essential abstractness of art? F. Mmmm . . . That certainly adds another requisite to the definition of style — one we're not likely to pinpoint. And it's got to be there, hasn't it, in anything we recognize as art? . . . I was going to ask whether 126

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there was any real difference in style between Bach's religious music — that in which the words give you at least a lead toward the image of experience—and his instrumental music. I can't see any but the obvious differences in method, which aren't very great. You could set words (if you could find them) to the E major Fugue in the Well-tempered Clavier, Book II, which seems to me as vocal as any music I ever heard, although the parts may not be really singable. And I'm sure you would know, from the music, what sort of text to select. That piece sounds to me like a kind of nonliturgical Credo, and many others are just as suggestive, although of course of quite different images than that. /. Frankly, that seems to me a distinction wholly without a difference. The method — the structural plan — is essentially the same in abstract or "absolute" music as in what we might call "relative" music. A fugue is a fugue, whether for voices or instruments (or both), and instrumental music will often strongly suggest recitative, which is all but verbal in inflection, and is a departure from regular methods of formal organization. Of course, if you refuse to see any concern in instrumental music, the difference will be there; but it will be your refusal to see it that makes the distinction. And pure abstractionism would have to make even vocal music absolute, since it must refuse to admit any relation between the meaning of the text and that of the music. Along the line laid down by that distinction, I just can't think about music. F. Then, although we shall never arrive at a definition of style, you think we were on the road to a concept of it even in the cursory glance we've given, today, to the Mass? I was going to suggest that we spend another hour on his instrumental style; but perhaps that would be needless — for this immediate purpose. 7. Another hour? We could spend months on the Mass, and years on the cantatas and other vocal works; and although his instrumental music is maybe only a fifth of his whole output, it would fill endless days. For the glimpse of style that is all we can hope to get, I doubt that another hour on instrumental music would do more than fortify the notions we've already formed. . . . That isn't to say they don't need fortifying. F. Then you think we'll arrive at a truer concept of style by going on, as I suggested, to later composers? 7. To get a notion of what style is, haven't you got to study many very divergent styles? Bach and Handel are generally supposed to have brought what is called the baroque style to its culmination. Where, in 127

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such a unified concept of style as that implies, are the two very different men, Bach and Handel? And where are the dozens of lesser figures (some of them, like Heinrich Schiitz, not much lesser) that preceded them? It's true enough to say that the Renaissance composers "got away" from the style of the Gothic writers who preceded them, and the baroque "got away" from the general manner (if you want to, call it a style) of the Renaissance. But style, if you envisage the century and a half of the baroque period, hardly implies more than polyphony, which was to be superseded by the homophony of classicism, which again is by no means a sufficient definition of classicism. Haydn and Mozart, two very different men, wrote in the general manner of their period; but their styles have an individuality that implies the man behind the manner. F. But isn't the general manner of classicism worth defining as a manner that reflected a point of view toward what we're calling experience? And wouldn't a definition of classicism, in relation to, if not in terms of, style, help toward the understanding of Haydn and Mozart, who did think and feel considerably in the manner of their period? If we're not to look at Bach the instrumental composer, can't we go on to them? 7. The term classicism is used to describe (as Gothic and Renaissance and Baroque are not) a literary era as well as a musical. It's much the same era, and the literary and the musical manners are really very similar. Classicism, in consequence, has a more sharply defined meaning than those words, and is correspondingly — at any rate for me — a much more useful critical word. I doubt that we can do much, in our hour, to define both the general manner and the way two men used it; but we can try. As you did for today, take some composition of Haydn or Mozart that looks representative, and we'll see what we can make of it against the general notion of classicism. I'll add my bit, and we may come to something useful.

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OTH my friend and I expected our proposed approach to he scanning of style in Haydn and Mozart —that approach being an attempt at the definition of classicism — to prove difficult. But he hadn't (as I half expected him to do) given up trying, as his first comment showed: F. I thought I had a fairly clear notion of what classicism meant, but I got into a muddle when I tried to apply that notion to music. I suppose my definition of classicism was derived from the not too extensive studies of literature I had been put through in college, and when I tried to see musical classicism in that literary light it wouldn't come clear. Anybody can feel the difference between the musical manner of Bach, on the one hand, and of Haydn and Mozart on the other. But I don't see in their styles enough resemblance to the literary manner of Pope and Dryden — or even of Gray and Goldsmith, who seem to me rather more "musical" poets — to find the literary implication of the word more than superficially applicable to Haydn's or Mozart's music. What everybody calls classicism is discriminable enough as manner or style; but the mental attitude behind that manner must be the real source of it, and I think that's where my confusion lay. I don't think I grasp Haydn's or Mozart's attitude. At any rate, Bach's seems much clearer. 7. Perhaps that's because we've looked into it a little farther. Perhaps, also, Bach's attitude toward life was really simpler. I'm sure you're right in looking for something behind their manner — or rather their manners, for Haydn and Mozart are more different in style than they first appear.

B

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We'll probably not get far into those minuter differences; but if it is right to see those men as classicists, their generally similar way of speaking must have seemed to them appropriate to what they felt as the ruling attitude in their day. Yet, while you will naturally expect to find classicism in music as somehow analogous to classicism in literature, I don't think you'll find it so by looking for a similarity in pure structure. There is, in any musical style, a rather obvious pattern-similarity between musical and verbal sentences; but the principles of linguistic and musical syntax are so different that the mere likeness in pattern turns out to be quite superficial. I'm sure you must look for some common imagery behind the surfaces. F. That's just where I foundered. Haydn and Mozart don't seem to me much concerned about what they have to say — at least, not with the sorts of image we found behind Bach's music-thinking. I ran over, as well as I could, six or seven piano sonatas of each, and I couldn't find more than occasional hints of what I should call real concern. I'm sure, at any rate, that there wasn't, except in one Mozart sonata, any single concern that seemed to rule the whole piece as the concern for the First and the Third Persons rules the two Kyries. The music talked — or just chattered — intelligibly and very charmingly; but except in the slow movements it didn't seem to talk about anything in particular. Literary classicism, I was taught, was a high condensation of thought. This music looked more like a diffusion of it. /. Haydn's and Mozart's musical images of experience, particularly in their piano sonatas, are rather diffused. But if you look for a sharp image of experience in any but exceptional examples of their work — for the sort of image that the eighteenth-century couplet so deftly condensed — won't you again be expecting musical thought to follow too closely upon the literary lead? Haydn, particularly, often runs off the track of one musical idea onto another with an indifference to continuity that would have damned a poet who committed it. But aren't both he and Mozart continually charming? And on the general level of their thought —at least in most of the piano sonatas — isn't that enough? What would become of Haydn's charm if you made his idea (it's often hardly more than a gleam in the eye) pursue the stern logic of a Bach fugue? F. That, obviously, would never do. But is his running off the track — or even his original gleam in the eye — in accord with the classical man13°

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ner of thinking? You seem to be saying that classicism in music is nothing but a purveying of charm. /. Charm certainly isn't all there is to musical classicism, but something like charm — a reflection of aristocratic manner — is an important feature of classic style. Aren't you still trying to find literary classicism in music — looking for images that will exemplify the "solider thinking" you demand of classicism? I do think the word classic, even in its literary sense, justly applicable to the music of Haydn and Mozart, and of their lesser contemporaries as well. But I rather think that only the minor part of the images of experience that yield the patterns of classical music originates in the "passions" (as the eighteenth century called them) with which the poets and the imaginative prose writers of that period attempted to deal — often not too successfully, as some now think. . . . Or, if they really originate there, their portrayal is so mannered that they're all but invisible. F. I'm getting lost. How the classic character of eighteenth-century literature can be found in eighteenth-century music when neither the images of experience that originate the patterns nor the patterns themselves are alike — that is more than I can see. /. I didn't say the literary and the musical images weren't alike — and perhaps the same. I said they weren't the sort of images we've been looking for in other music. The images that make music classical must somehow be like those that make literature classical — otherwise the analogy won't hold. And we're pretty sure it does. F. What sort of images are they, then? I still don't see what you're driving at. 7. Maybe I'd better take the longer way round — it is often the shortest way home. Interrupt when you like. . . . I think we should realize more clearly than we have that the logic — or at any rate the continuity — of music that portrays experience is very different from the continuity of language that portrays the same sort of experience. Haydn, and even Mozart, who is more "logical," can both run off the track of one musical idea onto another without disturbing our sense of continuity, or even our awareness of an implied aspect of experience; but a poet, running off as abruptly as that, would give us an intolerable jolt. I think that is because experience, as delineated in words, almost always appears as a complex — a sequence — of events: a sequence in which the later event appears as the consequence of the earlier. 131

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F. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"? That's a pretty shaky logical theorem, but it often appears true. I think I follow you, so far. Go on. 7. The syntax of language, having to deal with ^accessions of events in time, almost constantly suggests a time-sequence. That's why verbs have tenses. Music needs no tenses, for it doesn't portray events or their sequence, although it implies, in a way, their logical relation. What it does portray is our concern for event; and that concern may be related to far more than the logical sequence of event which language, in order to arouse a similar concern, would have had to portray. Prior and even future event will almost certainly be included in our image of concern, and maybe — because you feel concern as immediate — you could say that music always speaks in the present tense; but the implication of time — of logical consequence — though possible, isn't an essential factor in concern as it is felt, nor in the musically evoked image of concern. F. That sounds reasonable enough. In fact, you've already said much the same thing. But I don't see where it's leading. 7. I'm leading to a very big complex of events that is implied — perhaps very remotely — in the word classicism. We see it as an artistic manner; but that manner reflects a social attitude that also evokes the sort of concern we've been thinking of. Yet it rests on a factual experiencecomplex. Perhaps if I call it a "convention" you'll see what I'm driving at. F. It does give me a lead. Go on. 7. I've got to make another start, as remote as the first one, but this time I hope we'll come into the clear. I think we're also forgetting that literature was regarded by the reading public in the eighteenth century (a much smaller but a more homogeneous public than ours) as literature — as an artistic effort addressed rather exclusively to that public. Like any other public, that body was highly sensitive to the conventions it lived by — conventions it seldom inquired into, but some of which it still might uphold even to the death. A good part of what that body saw in its literature was a reflection of those taken-for-granted conventions, a support for its "corporate" concern for them. The manner in which that concern was projected was as important as the matter that underlay it. In fact, if the manner conformed, the underlying idea might be wrong without evoking more than a minor qualm of dissent. (That may happen also with Romanticism or any other attitude.) F. I think I understand you now. But aren't you saying that manner, 132

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as manner, which we've so far taken as merely a secondary contribution to our images of experience, may become a primary vehicle of expression? And won't that considerably weaken our hypothesis? 7. So what? Are we to see our hypothesis as inviolable? And anyhow, I think we shall extend it, rather than violate it, by what we're finding here. The factual ground even for the musical images of concern we've uncovered is slight. Won't an image, seen as no more than a support of established convention but projected by a vehicle which patently conforms to that convention, possibly imply concern for that convention, even though the concern is projected merely by general design, rather than portrayed by directly suggestive tension and motion? Mayn't a musical design, whether or not its suggestive tensions and motions relate to recognizable occasions of experience, still project the gratification of a devoutly adhered-to convention? be seen as artistically fortifying that convention? Aren't we oldsters, as the enthusiasts for contemporary structure see us, bothered by their gleeful overthrow, not only of the older conventions of tonality but of the whole social attitude that, for us, tonality, as manner merely, stood for? F. You did go rather a long way round, but I think you got me home. Isn't the thing we call atmosphere much the sort of thing you've been describing? It's a big factor in any artistically intimated image. That word does focus the image more sharply than gratifucation did. and i

guess you have enlarged the hypothesis, rather than demolished it. Our taste buds are rather avid for the flavor of atmosphere, and maybe atmosphere can actually nourish the spirit. 7. And they get it through the eye as much as through the ear. But the design of music, which we say we "see" as design, seems to me almost as much a visual as an auditory image, once it is apprehended. And that "vision" — that exercise of the visual imagination — may be a much more significant contribution toward our total musical image than we've so far recognized. Well then, if our enlarged hypothesis is still workable, let's see what some examples of Haydn's and Mozart's music look like in its light. What did you find in the Mozart sonatas you read? F. I read only the easier ones, of course. Of Mozart, the little one in A with the variations and the big one in C minor with the Fantasia for introduction seemed the most characteristic. Most of the others seemed rather like teaching-pieces — but not of the kind they sell nowadays. (Example 18.) »33

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7. Several of the sonatas were just that —written for his pupils, since the music shops weren't so opulently stocked as ours are. The one in A was an immediate favorite, and it has never lost that rank. Andante grazioso

EXAMPLE l8

F. Well, substitution of variations for the conventional first-movement sonata form is unusual; but these are certainly charming, with what looks to me like the charm of the period. Was it a little daring to call a piece a sonata when it hadn't a proper sonata movement? 7.1 suppose ive might say that Mozart was thinking of the earlier sense of sonata as implying a played piece, in contrast to the cantata, which literally is a sung piece. But I doubt that he was so history-minded. His technique of variation is very simple, as was Haydn's. The dullest ear could find the theme without trying, and neither one seems to have foreseen the intellectual possibilities in the form. For Bach, variation meant the addition of a new melody to the fundamental harmonic progression — the bass that had underlain the theme. What we see as a theme, as in the Goldberg variations, appeared as a recognizable though very florid melody; but he didn't vary that melody, and I think he rather preferred the Passacaglia form, where the bass was more plainly set forth. He did slightly anticipate the later scheme in a rather short piece, the Aria variata alia maniera Italiana; but that, like his few adventures toward the later sonata form, was hardly more than an experiment in a style not his own. And neither Mozart nor Haydn seems to have had much prevision of what Beethoven was to do. . . . But go on. I talk too much. F. I don't find much to talk about. My brother used to call this Mozart's "ten o'clock in the morning" sonata, and his phrase seems apt. The theme, anyhow, is as fresh as that hour of one's day ought to be — or maybe the ten o'clock year of a correspondingly long life. The first variation with its incessant dainty appoggiaturas appeals, the most of any of them, to my atmospheric taste buds. The second seems a little perfunctory. But the third, in minor, as I played it, struck me as having a strain of pathos in it — pathos of the kind you mustn't overemphasize. But if it isn't there, the contrast with the graceful cross-handed variation that f ol134

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lows would hardly be seen. The fifth one becomes for me somewhat overornamental, but the ornament is exquisite, and the last variation just bubbles over with the gaiety that really underlies the theme. I can see how this piece, with its perfect, Dresden-china taste, might well have been taken as fortifying at least one aspect of eighteenth-century social convention. 7.1 think it may have been intended — quite subconsciously, of course — to do just that. In contrast, did you ever happen to hear Max Reger's orchestral variations on the same theme? F. Once, yes. I thought it really an awful piece. The program notes raved about its contrapuntal ingenuity, some of which even I found obvious enough; but I thought Mozart, even if he had admired the skill of it, would have shuddered at its taste. The classicality of the theme — its proper atmosphere — was hidden under what I thought was a mere display of technical wealth. 7.1 think you'll have to admit that it was a brave display, but I didn't like it any better than you. The comparison opens out a whole region of taste that our timid definition didn't even attempt to explore. We'll find a good many similarly questionable items if we go on, but we'll never arrive at a final definition. . . . The C minor, of course, is a much bigger piece. What did you find in it? (Example 19.)

EXAMPLE 19

F. You said, a minute ago, that neither Mozart nor Haydn had much prevision of what Beethoven was to do. I should think this Fantasia anticipates a great deal of what was to come. Isn't the tension of that opening phrase as romantic as anything in Weber or Schubert? The two little interjections in the treble do mitigate the tension — appropriately, I suppose, for eighteenth-century ears; but the continuation, with the big phrase falling and falling into unexpected harmony, drops you into a pretty deep hole, and the tempestuous conclusion is even more alarming. '35

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And isn't the Sonata, although I know it wasn't originally so intended, at least a credible sequel? 7.1 said that Mozart couldn't foresee what Beethoven was to do, and if we go on to him, I think you'll come to agree. But I didn't intend to belittle Mozart's effort, and I was, I'm afraid, not only talking too much but implying an untruth. The Fantasia is patently romantic, and it does anticipate the nineteenth-century manner in a good many details. But do you find the Sonata in the same vein? F. It doesn't bear so obvious a romantic stamp, but it is an appropriate sequel. The upward arpeggio is, I suppose, conventional: it establishes the key. But there's an impatient drive in its rhythm that I find compelling, and the two following phrases, this time, intensify rather than mitigate it. Compared to Mozart's usually very courteous language, the chromatic continuation, with those explosive f s, projects a mood which I should think the complacent music-lovers of Mozart's day would have felt as something like desperation. Of course he doesn't harp on that mood, but the second subject isn't all honey. The slow movement does talk about something else — and talks very beautifully; but the Finale is as bitter, to my taste buds, as the Fantasia. 7.1 won't dispute that, nor do I think we need to demonstrate our impressions by analysis. This music is quite evidently from the same dramatic mind that conceived the Scene of the Commander. . . . What, in comparison (although it may be odious), did you make out of Haydn? F. Much less of such exquisiteness as there is in those variations. Yet I believe there's more of the man himself than Mozart lets you see, in either his piano sonatas or his symphonies. There's often a kind of quiet humor, whether in the themes or in the episodes, a chuckling that is just as charming as Mozart's exquisiteness, even though it's on a lower plane. And Haydn's sonata-form movements are much less clear and symmetrical than Mozart's. His second subjects often aren't where you expect to find them, and they're more subordinate. In fact, they're sometimes not there at all. He makes the conventional approach to the proper relative key, and then, instead of the new theme you expect, he gives you the first subject all over again. I found that rather disappointing, as a design. 7. He does that, occasionally, all his life. The Military symphony, written in 1794 for Salomon and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, has the first theme, in the dominant, in the second theme's place. It does seem odd, but I rather think he's following an older and a quite rational con136

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vention. Bach, and the polyphonists generally, seem to have felt that a single musical movement should be on a single predominant idea or theme. Subordinate episodes were of course allowable — even fugues sometimes have a lot of episodic matter. But the sonata — essentially a homophonic structure — if it was to attain to any large dimension, had to become polythematic, or at least bithematic; and to oust the polyphonic, but monothematic convention was something of a problem. A co-ordinate second subject, to one accustomed to the older tradition, would be as confusing in its presence as the absence of it was disappointing to you. F. And co-ordinateness, when bithematic contrast is also essential, must be rather hard to attain. I remember learning the pattern of the "Viennese classical sonata" as they called it, in school. "Teacher" diagrammed it on the blackboard, showing the subjects and their keys and the transitions between them. But the relativity of the two main subjects to each other — the thing on which the real unity of the movement depends — wasn't diagrammed, and of course couldn't be. Anybody who could make up a first subject could make up another and call it a second theme, and he might go so far, even mechanically, as to make the first "masculine" and the second "feminine." (I believe that distinction was hinted at in our course.) But there's a lot more than mere sex-contrast in a really relative second theme, and I don't see how the sonata form could ever have been perfected if some such image of concern as we've been finding in music hadn't been fermenting somewhere in the composers' minds. /. I'm glad you said "some such image" instead of "some such hypothesis as ours" was fermenting. Music isn't made out of formulated hypotheses, and I'm not sure good criticism can be, either. They're no more omniscient than your "teacher," and they always leave out important things. Haydn's images, although they seldom portray any deep concern, are almost always vivid, and they might well have been blurred if he had spent too much effort on organization. F. Then would you say that Haydn, whose images seem "classical" enough, but whose form is less highly organized, was a less classical composer than Mozart? 7. Isn't that question merely academic? How could you answer it unless you had a mere rule-of-thumb definition of classicism to measure their work by? Do you suppose Haydn and Mozart thought of themselves as classicists? We're trying to find an adequate definition of that 137

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word by looking at the character of their music, not to characterize their music according to our concocted definition of the word. F. But mustn't the word, if it has any real meaning outside that of mere manner, imply the conditions that circumscribed their thinking, and to that extent determined the character of their images? Maybe, if Mozart was more the classicist than Haydn, that only means that Haydn was less circumscribed than Mozart —less aware of the conventions you spoke of. My question wasn't altogether academic.

EXAMPLE 20 7.1 have (I hope) a horror of pedantry, and I was only trying to guard against it. But we've run into that danger by trying to come to conclusions with too little of fact to base them on. We can at least look at more important examples than the piano sonatas. You spoke of the G minor Symphony of Mozart (Example 20 *) as highly significant. I'm sure it is. What, then, do you find in it? (Whether it bears the stamp of classicism doesn't matter, for the moment.) F. Well, I heard two very different readings of it, several winters ago, * This symphony and the Jupiter (Example 21) are hardly discussed as to their structure, but the character we found in the music should be fairly evident from this sketch of the principal themes. The main theme of the first movement is shown at A, its continuation at B, and the second theme at C. The two themes of the slow movement are suggested at D and E; those of the Menuetto, combined, at F (this is the second section; the upper voice is an addition to the lower, which began in G minor); and the two principal themes of the Finale will be seen at G and H. 138

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and it's from those that most of my impressions come. (I have one not very satisfying recording of it, but I seldom play it. I get annoyed by the utter sameness you must get from repeated hearings on the phonograph, even if the performance is good.) At the first performance the conductor took the fast movements very fast, and I was almost bored before the first movement, short as it is, was over. I suppose that may have been his notion of the Mozart style, but I never got a glimpse of Mozart the man, or of any other man than the conductor. That three-note motive in the main theme (ta-ta-mm) just danced, lightly and charmingly, and so did all the rest of the movement. 7. And the second performance? F. That was a different matter. It was considerably slower, and the motive seemed to throb instead of merely dancing. In the development, where the motive is so insistently repeated, it became almost tragic, although it was never forced. In the first performance even the whole development sounded rather complacent, and in the recapitulation the second theme, which is in G minor instead of G major, had the same tone of prettiness that it had in the exposition. In that performance there was only a How. In the second there was a Why — and a big one. I couldn't, of course, see the how of that Why, but it must have been something like what you spoke of when we talked about the piano. Anyhow, the motive throbbed, with a sort of half-concealed distress; and the minor key for the second theme in the recapitulation was another implication of that same distress. 7.1 don't want to put ideas into your head, or erect images for you, but did you notice any similarity, in the persistence of that throbbing motive, to Beethoven's insistence on the four-note motive in his C minor? F. I didn't think of it, but it is evident. Beethoven is much more violent, but perhaps he isn't, really, more insistent. I should think Mozart's concern, and the image behind it, was just as vivid as Beethoven's. But it wasn't the same image. 7. How are you so sure of that? F. Well, without any reference to Fate (whether you take the word in the English or in the German sense), Beethoven's motive is bolder and more uncompromising than Mozart's, and the excitement it portrays is more reckless. He just says, "Damn the torpedoes!" and goes ahead. Mozart wouldn't say that — in music. 7. Oughtn't we to ask what makes Beethoven's motive bolder? '39

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F. It was vivid enough so that I didn't bother to explain it. By comparison, Mozart's motive is much more elastic. It almost dances, although it rather throbs; but Beethoven's motive, while he might also have made it dance, just hammers at you as Mozart's motive never does, even in the development. 7. I'm not so sure Mozart's motive doesn't hammer, but that's a matter of opinion. However, there are a few facts that seem to me indisputable. The last, the crisis-note, of Beethoven's motive always falls on the downbeat; that note is almost always approached by skip, which makes it more decisive than is the stepwise motion in Mozart; and when that last note is prolonged it becomes very positive in emphasis. Mozart's motive is too short to be so emphatic; it gains its momentum by two immediate repetitions on the same notes; and that momentum is vented — you might say, relaxed — in the rather graceful upward 6th, the "feminine" ending of the phrase. That ending is so persistently kept that it seems to me to mitigate, rather than intensify, the hint of purpose in the repetitions of the motive. What you (I think very rightly) call the throbbing is toned down by that feminine ending; Beethoven's hammering is toned up by his persistent emphasis on the downbeat. Those details would hardly be significant if they were less persistently dwelt on; but for me they add up, in Mozart, to something you can certainly call distress, and in Beethoven to something very like rebellion. F. Then will you call Mozart's toning down of distress a classic gesture? Isn't he heeding the convention of restraint that he found accordant with all civilized behavior? /. I certainly agree. Our evidence, as you said, would hardly hold in a court of law; but convention doesn't need judicial approval in order to rule with an iron hand. It does, usually, wear a velvet glove, but once the hand grips you the velvet doesn't much mitigate the pressure. How about the slow movement? F. The Andante is so beautiful in both sound and design that I've hardly ever been aware of anything but its charm, which is certainly classic. But I did always get an undertone of sadness — it seems, now, another aspect of the veiled distress of the first movement — even though it was hardly visible on the surface. I can't account for it. Can you? 7. No better than for the distress; and words, about that exquisite thing, will pretty certainly sound offensive. But I do think that even the 6-8 time, with its fluid motion, contributes to that sense as no imaginable 140

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duple time could do. The chords in the second violins and violas have another sort of throb in them, and the 'celli, with their quiet chromatic tension beneath the chords, help the surface to grow into a melodic idea that emerges, with the little dotted figure, into actual melody. The little three-note phrases that follow define the character unmistakably, and the bite of those forte octave-leaps that begin the second theme is subdued at once in a way that rounds out the image quite marvelously. But I can't find a better word for the image itself than your word, distress. It's quite another aspect of it, but it's still just that. F. And isn't the Menuetto, with its violence, still in the same picture? I should think a good many of the tenderer minds must have been shocked by it, but it's as appropriate to Mozart's whole image as Beethoven's Scherzo is to his. 7. Everybody but Beethoven calls his a Scherzo, and I wonder if Mozart's title may have been a concession to those tender minds. Haydn, with less provocation, makes a good many minuets much faster and more vigorous than the actual, rather stately dance, and even uses the title Scherzo. And though Mozart's last movement does concede a good deal to the convention of the happy ending, there's more than a hint of disstress in the sudden forte roar after the upward tripping of the arpeggio that begins the main theme. And I should think the distorted harmony at the beginning of the development is pointedly in that same character. F. Then is that distress, which the whole symphony seems to be projecting, really in the classic vein? As we're looking at it it seems to me more personal than the usual, rather high-flown image that typical classicism projects —and a good deal more convincing as distress. /. I suppose you can take your choice — as your two conductors did; but I know which I should choose. Compared to later composers' versions of distress it is rather completely veiled, under the conventional classic surface. I don't know, of course, how far Mozart expected his hearers to lift the veil, but I'm pretty sure that both the distress and the veil are there. . . . Maybe there's a confirmation of that notion to be found in the Jupiter. (Example 21.*) * The two main themes of each of the first three movements will be distinguishable at a glance. The Finale, really in sonata form, has five themes, all of which, in the Coda, are played simultaneously as in Example 21. I have numbered them in the order in which they appear in the movement. Numbers i, 2 (bar 19), and 3 (bar 56) form the "first subject group" of the sonata form; Number 4 (bar 74) forms its second subject, and is accompanied by the tiny Number 5 at bar 76. The 141

EXAMPLE 21

F. How do you mean that? 7. Well, if you lift the veil of the Jupiter, what do you find? F. There's certainly no distress, anywhere, nor any feeling that I should call personal. In fact, I don't see that there is any veil to lift. But there's a lot of what Elgar called pomp and circumstance — a lot more than he could portray. 7. And doesn't the pomp celebrate, not the royal or imperial person, but the institution of royalty or empire — the high convention of civilized living in its most brilliant aspect? — and its narrowest? The spectacle is magnificent, but, to us democrats, it is hardly more than a spectacle. It doesn't evoke any personal response in us, but in Mozart I think it did; and that's what I think I see when I lift the veil. He had his suspicions, justifiably, of such imperial persons as Josef, but I rather think the institution of empire was, for him, divinely ordained. F. Mmmm . . . That makes the Jupiter look much less abstract than I've always thought it. There is something under the veil. 7. Can you imagine a composer assuming two such apparently diverse manners merely as manners — saying to himself, now I'm going to write a piece in this style, and now in that? The pieces would be mere exercises development section manipulates them in bewildering variety, and the Coda plays them all in combination. You cannot identify them all, as you listen, but to know that they are there is exhilarating. 142

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in manner; and Mozart was long past the need for such setups. I'm sure there is as much of an image — as much of conviction — behind the Jupiter as behind the G minor, or the E flat, which is as happy as the G minor is distressed; and there's also as much classicism in those two as in the Jupiter. F. Then the convention of classicism is a convention of life more than of art? 7. Mustn't it be? We keep on talking of classicism as manner merely. Saintsbury defined it as "method," which is pretty much the same thing. But unless you are merely doing setups, how can you pursue manner or method in the abstract? Haven't you got to have an objective — a really compulsive Why — to set you going and keep you going through such a creative effort as a symphony? F. Then if classicism is more than method, that suffix -ism is something of a nuisance. It abstracts too much: abstracts away from what you might call the classic philosophy. 7.1 think that's a real danger. Seen as a mere -ism, it is certain to become, sooner or later, what somebody once described as a "wasm." Mozart the man was as subject to what we call the romantic impulse as was Schumann, and so was Bach and so was Josquin and so were some of the unnamed inventors of the Gregorian chant; but all of them portrayed that impulse in the guise of the musical conventions of their own day. Every established convention has its characteristic manner, and we do learn a good deal about those conventions by discriminating the details of the manner. In fact, there's a good deal of romantic madness in the classic method. F. Then that's what distinguishes the C minor Fantasia and the Introduction to the C major string quartet from the general run of Mozart's pieces —and Haydn's as well, for I found moments in his sonatas that hadn't the classic character I was looking for as I read them. 7. I called the madness romantic; but that word is no more precise in suggestion than classic is. We can't avoid using those words — they're in everybody's vocabulary, and they are useful, if you don't define them too narrowly. But they aren't mutually exclusive. Mozart, portraying in opera what the eighteenth century called the tender passion, is really just as romantic as any nineteenth-century composer. I don't know an operatic utterance that pulls at my heartstrings more powerfully than Elvira's aria, Mi tradi, in Don Giovanni. It was a later addition, and the only '43

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place Mozart could find for it was just after Leporello has escaped with his chair tied to his bottom — a moment of sheer buffoonery — where the aria is so out of context with the action that it is usually omitted. But for real pathos, in the best sense of the word, you'll go far to find its equal. The Elvira you've seen, so far in the opera, would never, in the final scene, have knelt to the Don to beg him to mend his ways; but this aria makes that gesture not only credible but almost intolerably true. F. I've heard Don Giovanni many times, but I can remember the aria only once, and I'm afraid the point of it escaped me. But surely the aria isn't in the romantic manner"? /. It isn't in the manner of the later Romanticists, if that's all you mean by your word romantic. It is simply in the manner that Mozart found appropriate to the very subtle truth he had to portray. It happens to be, as manner, that of the Jupiter rather than the G minor. But both those pieces and the aria were generated out of experience, not merely as he felt it but as he understood it; and his understanding was pretty deep. F. Then I suppose I'm still seeing only the -ism. /. I think you're overvaluing the manner that suffix implies, to whichever word you attach it; and I'm afraid we make the same mistake when we talk about impressionism or neoclassicism, or even modernism in its many varieties. Mozart's inherited manner was what you are calling the classic manner. But he was both prescient enough to grasp and skilled enough to command the romantic manner when the truth he saw demanded it; and when he wrote in the one or the other he wasn't merely trying on two different coats. F. Isn't it rather rare for an artist to belong, in a sense, in two different camps? Doesn't that happen, mostly, with lesser figures — with men who really have no style of their own? But Mozart is Mozart, whether he's writing the Jupiter or the G minor. 7. I should say it was rare. Beethoven had three different styles, but after he'd developed a new one he didn't — and very likely couldn't — revert to the earlier one. On the other hand Saint-Saens, who could make a pretty fair facsimile of half a dozen styles, really had no style of his own — perhaps because he hadn't anything very significant to say. But while Mozart wrote chiefly in the style of his day (which you and I, but not he, call classic), and wrote in a romantic way when he found it appropriate, he was really adjusting his manner to the thing he had to say. Much of his work, of necessity, was small talk — astonishingly interesting, consider144

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ing its objective, because he was a very great artist and couldn't bear to bungle the utterance even of commonplace ideas. But I doubt that he saw the Jupiter and the G minor as essays in two different styles. They were made after two very different models; the style differs because the models differ; but as you said, Mozart is still Mozart, in each. F. But isn't the man more visible in the G minor than in the Jupiter? I. He is more easily visible — to you and me, who have little sympathy for the idea (or the ideal) of a divinely ordained imperial regime. We sympathize, immediately, with the attitude of human distress because we have undergone it; we merely view, without much sympathy, the attitude of the imperialist; but I doubt that we see the man — the devout imperialist — when we see only his distress. We, too, have ideals, which are there even when we are distressed; our distress may even relate to and derive from those ideals; and we should think our selves rather ill portrayed if only our distress were represented. F. That expands the notion of classicism considerably. It is more than a manner. It's an attitude — you might even call it a philosophy. And I suppose, if your vision were keen enough, you might find Mozart's attitude, or traces of it, in any of his work. /. In his mature work, anyhow. In fact, the dichotomy we're seeing in the two symphonies had been quite clearly set forth earlier. The two string quintets of 1787 —the year before the symphonies — are remarkably similar, even to identity in their keys. The G minor quintet is even more palpably distressed, except for its more carefree ending, than the symphony in the same key; and the C major quintet, although it hasn't the pomp and circumstance of the symphony, seems to me to imply, even more fully, the same philosophy. It isn't an imperial piece, as the symphony is, but it does "celebrate" — if that's the word — that ideal of order which you found to be a significant contribution to our image of experience. The man seems to me as truly portrayed in the one piece as in the other, but you need both portrayals — and many others — if you are to see the whole man. Mozart is really quite a figure! F. And classicism is quite a philosophy — more, at any rate, than is implied in its dry sufHx, -ism. You can tack that suffix onto "romantic," of course, and I suppose that's our next problem. I. We've seen enough of classicism, at any rate, to call it a philosophy — an attitude toward experience — rather than a mere manner of portraying experience. Romanticism, I think, will demand a similarly broadened H5

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definition. But if they are attitudes rather than particular manners, need they have been confined to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? F. You mean there were earlier classic and romantic eras? 7. Why not? Haven't ideals — the basis of our definitions — often shifted? Wasn't early Christianity, with its new belief in a loving, paternal God as opposed to the pagan gods, which were mostly personifications of blind fatalistic powers, essentially a romantic movement? Wasn't the later organization of the Church, with its lofty ritual, the adoption of a classical attitude toward the same belief? Wasn't the Reformation, which in Germany, anyhow, felt itself to be a return to primitive Christianity, another romantic movement? And wasn't Calvinism really another sort of religious classicism? Both those doctrines did crystallize into manners, and inspired very different artistic expressions, but they both originated in views of experience rather than in views of art. F. That, anyhow, makes the notion of classicism look much less dry, and it gives me a lead I hadn't thought of toward Beethoven, who I suppose will be our next man. 7.1 think it may help. But perhaps we'd better get the general notion of Romanticism out of the way before we look at the man. See what you can do with that word. It has a considerable dimension.

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TAVING agreed with my friend that classicism, while visible simply as manner, also reflects an attitude of mind toward more than manner, I expected him to look similarly at Romanticism. I was sure we could not hope for a precise definition of that term, but I hardly expected him to trip over the most obvious stumbling block on the road to it. And I found that I was also less surefooted than I had supposed. He began: F. This notion of Romanticism seems to me the most elusive, will-o'the-wisp idea I ever tried to tussle with. Classicism, unless our whole conclusion about it was wrong, must originally be a way of looking at experience, and I'm sure Romanticism must be just another. But the classicist's "model" is experience crystallized into established tradition, while the romanticist, although his model is still experience, hasn't any tradition. The romanticist is on his own; he seems to "draw" from the model of the immediate emotion he feels when experience hits him, and while that is a vivid model, it's also very elusive. For if you're a romanticist, the emotion you're trying to portray is yours, and to a considerable extent must be yours alone; and although other people, hit by the same experience, seem to feel very much as you do, it seems to me this subjective attitude is much more precarious than the classicist's. Isn't he often justified in charging the romanticist with sentimentality? Isn't the romanticist, portraying his own hot feeling, almost sure to exaggerate it? /. Then are you ready to define sentimentality simply as exaggerated feeling, and romanticism as sentimentality? Won't you, if you pursue

H

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that line strictly, have to erase most of the nineteenth century from the pages of music history? For the recognized Romantic Movement covers most of that century. F. There's my bother. I can't erase the nineteenth century from the pages of my history of music. If I did that, I should be excising most of what seems to me my native sensibility to music. Almost any subjective view of experience will have a tang of sentimentality about it, and that tang seems to me to originate, when the view is expressed in music, in one's native sensibility — in one's musical taste buds. But the heredity of those buds goes back a lot further than the nineteenth century, and I'm still inclined to trust them. Mine were mostly educated on nineteenthcentury fare, and I can see that my education was narrow. But even though I don't know how far they were miseducated, nor what I can do to educate them more competently, I suspect they will still operate, and continue to qualify all my musical judgments. /. You can hardly be wrong in trusting them. You've really no other native equipment to trust, and to educate them so far that they wouldn't operate would be, I should think, to distort rather than refine your musical judgment. . . . Yet our maturer judgments are formed by educating our original taste buds. . . . Would you say, then, that romanticism — which is one kind of taste-education — trusts native taste further than does classicism? F. Isn't that evident? 7. It seems so to me, and if that assumption is sound, it may give us a beginning of our definition of romanticism. But it will be only a beginning, for you're immediately confronted with the question, How far can you trust your taste buds? They're really very exigent, and to trust them too far may lead to that exaggerated feeling you're calling sentimental. F. Isn't sentimentality exaggerated feeling — a great fuss about things that don't really matter? 7. You may certainly call that sort of fuss sentimental, but I'm not sure that sentimentality is always that sort of fuss. You've still got to determine whether the thing you're excited about really does matter, and that's not so easy. It may concern you very much today, and relatively little tomorrow; but next year you may find that today's exaggerated judgment was sounder than tomorrow's indifference. F. And my taste buds will still be contributing to that judgment. 148

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7. They will. So I think you had a better lead when you said the romanticist was on his own. He's projecting his individual, subjective attitude (whether today's or tomorrow's) toward the experience he's concerned with, while the classicist, dealing with experience he feels to be important, has the support of an established, traditional attitude toward it — a kind of consensus that accepts the status quo as undebatable, somewhat as does Pope's very debatable dictum, "whatever is, is right." But the classicist's judgment, next year, may also be overthrown. Indeed, in the light of your definition of sentimentality, mayn't the whole classic attitude (which the next century found to be insecure) be seen as an exaggerated and therefore a sentimental attitude? Mayn't even the elegance and the quiet self-assurance of the classic manner betoken a degree of sentimentality? F. Mmmm . . . That's certainly a new angle from which to see classicism. But aren't you making our proposed definitions, whether of sentimentality or of romanticism, impossible? First we agree that classicism can't be defined as manner only. Then we find that its underlying matter — the consensus that laid the foundation for that manner — is so unstable that we can't stand on it. But if I was right in saying the romanticist is on his own — that he has no supporting consensus — then any definition of romanticism we can formulate will be still shakier. 7.1 agreed that the romanticist was on his own, but I didn't say he had no supporting consensus. He has another and a less clearly formulated consensus than that of the classicist — one that intuitively rather than articulately rejects the classicist's tradition as unsound. The public the romanticist appeals to is much less highly organized than that which established the classicist's tradition. But it is perhaps not a less intelligent public, even though its taste buds haven't been so carefully educated. And I'm not trying to make the definition of romanticism impossible. I've only suggested that you can equate sentimentality not only with romanticism but —just as truly, if not so obviously — with classicism. In either case it isn't really an equation. And I think the whole question of sentimentality is almost irrelevant to our problem — our definition of romanticism. F. Then if I follow what you said was a better lead — the notion that the romanticist is on his own — wouldn't it be safe to say that romanticism is individuality? 7. If you put it as a precise equation, I'm afraid it won't do. But I'll cer149

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tainly agree that individuality in viewing experience (the underlying matter of romanticism) is a high and perhaps essential characteristic of the romantic manner. The consensus the romanticist invokes isn't, like that of the classicist, a formulated tradition, but it is, as a consensus (a "feeling together"), possibly a tradition (a "handing over from one generation to another") in process of formulation. Nobody can answer finally the really fundamental questions that experience poses in any thinking mind: a today's consensus may be truer than any established convention, which is only yesterday's answer to those questions. F. And even that answer must have been proposed, originally, by an individual. /. By an individual in a position of authority, but perhaps not with the brain of an authority. The romanticist sees that he can't establish, but can only contribute to, the understanding of experience that everybody is looking for. He has to plead his case; and his manner can hardly be other than that of the impassioned advocate. Of course, for that reason, he is more liable to sentimentality than is the classicist; but the classicist isn't immune to the danger. F. That helps. You do feel yourself being persuaded by the appeal of romantic music, whereas the classicist seems to speak with an authority he believes to be unquestionable. Of course, if you accept his authority you're being persuaded, even though you don't realize it. But his manner is different, and it seems to me that this distinction takes a long step toward the definition of romanticism. 7.1 don't know how long the step is, but perhaps it takes us as far as we ought to go on our own. Our definition, so far, largely ignores the romantic manner, which, like the manner of the classicist (especially if his eye isn't on the object), can be assumed with relatively little attention to the matter. So assumed, I suppose you can say that manner becomes mannerism, and maybe that's a truer description of the objectionable kind of romanticism than the word sentimentality suggests. You may easily become so allergic to a manner that you throw out its possible reference to matter — pour out the baby with the bath. There have been a good many more authoritative definitions of romanticism than we can hope to offer. Goethe, for instance, after having abandoned (as he thought) the romantic attitude, laid down the dictum: classicism is health; romanticism is disease. What do you think of that? F. At a first glance it looks like the reaction of a convalescent from an 150

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overindulged appetite —in fact, a rather repentant hangover. Still, it's true enough with regard to a lot of romantic music. Didn't we find the Berceuse mildly diseased? But as a categorical definition, his antithesis seems to me too sharp. 7. Then how about Pater's famous phrase, "Romanticism is strangeness added to beauty"? F. It looked all right when I first heard it, but I find that I don't really understand it. Just what kind of strangeness is he talking about? Is it some sort of mystery, or perhaps the thrill that makes ladies swoon? The word added looks right, since the strangeness, whatever it is, is obviously there; but isn't beauty of design different enough from its opposite (clumsiness or ugliness) — and also rare enough — so that it has an intrinsic strangeness? I don't understand him. 7.1 suspect Pater was thinking of the beauty that classicism envisages — the perfectly organized, totally relevant choice and adjustment of every detail in the artwork to every other. If that relevance has been attained, then no detail of the work can be taken away; but also no detail can be added. Yet, to this perfection he proposes to add strangeness. It can't, of course, be just plastered onto the classically beautiful thing. It's got to be an intrinsic component — added at the beginning. And the only sort of strangeness I can imagine an artist adding is that which your word individuality suggests — the novel aspect which even ordinary experience may assume when it is seen by an exceptionally penetrating, imaginative eye. F. Doesn't the classicist's eye penetrate similarly into the experience his tradition has already imaged? 7. Of course; but his image is confined by his tradition, and his manner — his portrayal of the image — must likewise conform. I don't know that my rather strained exegesis really illuminates Pater's phrase, but I think the strangeness he's talking about is what you might call the individuality of the romanticist's image of experience. Go back to Mozart's Jupiter and his G minor symphonies. Don't they illustrate both the manner and the matter of classicism and romanticism? Then go back to your E flat minor Prelude, and to things like the Crucifixus and the Agnus Dei from the B minor Mass. Isn't the tang of romanticism as strong in them as in the Mozart symphony? F. You mean, I suppose, that the Romantic Period, as you suggested the other day, wasn't the only romantic period? And that classicism is '51

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similarly undatable? . . . And that there's really not much use in any elaborate search for definitions of those terms? 7. That's putting it too strongly. I mean that if you take your distinctions between them as definitive and categorical, you will almost certainly deceive yourself. Neither the manner nor the matter (the image) of a musical composition is more than predominantly of the one order or the other. A distinction of manner is more immediately evident than one of matter; but if you pigeonhole your compositions definitely in the one category or the other you may falsify your whole critical effort. You bind yourself to a judgment of value limited by those terms; and the words aren't comprehensive enough to be trusted so far. We've found the word individuality to be fairly suggestive of the distinction we're trying to establish. There will certainly be an individuality of manner — no composer of competence can help handling notes in a way that is his own. But manner only isn't a very dependable index of value. The individual view of the matter — again, the individual image of experience — seems to me much more indicative of the value that sound criticism ought to be looking for. F. Then haven't we done enough preliminary theorizing so that we can look at Beethoven? He's generally spoken of as a transition figure between classicism and romanticism, and I'm sure I have glimpsed both attitudes in his music. /. We might better have begun with him and based our theories on what we found in his music. But we are both tolerably familiar with him — enough, perhaps, to justify our not very abstruse theorizing. The question is, What to begin with? F. The Moonlight and the violin sonata turned out to be really suggestive, and I can fumble through the earlier piano sonatas enough to get further inside them than I can with the quartets or the symphonies. Aren't they generally indicative of what we're looking for? 7. They are — and much more than we can find time to look for. The series of piano sonatas, if you look into them for the man, rather than the classicist or the romanticist we've been trying to discover, seems to me a dependable, if incomplete, autobiographical sketch. Those abstract, pigeonholing categories look pitifully meager alongside the man they're supposed to interpret. The question is, where to begin looking for the man. 152

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F. The violin sonata and the Moonlight are both relatively mature. I'd like to see what you might call the "portrait of the artist as a young man." 7. Then the place to begin is at the beginning. You've surely read through the first of the thirty-two (Example 22). Atte-gro

EXAMPLE 22

F. Yes; but does that reveal anything to speak of? I've always wondered how he came to include it along with the other two in that Opus. It's very simple, and rather bare. /. Can't simplicity have implications? And mayn't bareness be the best means of conveying them? F. I won't dispute that; but I don't see the implications here. 7. Then let's look a little closer. The theme is very nearly in the same pattern as the main theme in the Finale of Mozart's G minor Symphony. Mozart trips lightly up the arpeggio; but Beethoven's isn't a tripping gait, and his theme ends with that snap on the triplet figure. (Mozart's implication has to be conveyed by another phrase — a sudden violence — that completes its sense.) Of course, if you play the sonata Presto, as many do, instead of simply Allegro, as Beethoven directs, you'll have to trip to get to the top on time. But if you respect his marking you can make the notes firm and purposeful, as I think the compact design of the theme implies. (The theme is also quite like that of the Mozart C minor Sonata we looked at.) The upbeat, you'll notice, isn't marked staccato as the following four quarter notes are. To respect that notation makes a considerable contribution to the rhythmic sense of the theme. And it took me some time to learn how to resist the temptation to a crescendo up to the final loud phrase. But I think Beethoven meant what he said. And aren't the simple, almost thumped triads more appropriate to the theme than a more figurated harmony would have been? F. Those things certainly do make a difference. And that broader ff phrase at the end: isn't it really an amplification of the triplet figure? It condenses a lot into a few notes. '53

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/. And the "bare" dissonances in the continuation of the theme are just as pregnant. Also, the simple downward scale that makes the transition anticipates the second theme. What do you make of that theme? (S.H in Example 22.) F. It looks like a free inversion of the rising arpeggio of the first theme. . . . And, by Jove, it's in the same rhythmic pattern as the first theme — just as in your trio! 7. And I'll wager Beethoven didn't calculate that isorhythm any more than I did. Moreover, it's almost in A flat minor instead of in the orthodox major; the following little three-note figures that climb up to the transitional scale (one of them on a diminished 3rd) have a lot of expressive juice in them; and the closing theme, with its C flat, is wholly appropriate to the character of the other themes. Need we go any further? You can squabble if you want to about whether he's a classicist or a romanticist, but there's a man behind that music. F. And that man's a good deal more competent musician than I supposed him to be. He's much the same person I thought I could see in the second sonata, in F sharp minor; but while that portrait is much fuller, I think there's also much musical verbiage, and the emphasis sometimes gets a little theatrical. 7. And while the third sonata, in C, is the most ingratiating of the three, I think you'll find that the man is still more hidden under the formal dress suit of the virtuoso. . . . Is this enough to begin with? F. It's a good start. But isn't the man we're now looking for usually most evident in the slow movements? The Adagio in the first sonata, by comparison with the next two, looks rather innocuous. 7. It doesn't "hurt" you, if that's what you mean by innocuous. Your word isn't unsuggestive, for the tension of a significant slow movement does hurt, even while you're enjoying it. But that movement is from a piano quartet written ten years before, in Bonn, where Beethoven was being inoculated with classicism. Its sentiment is just the sort of thing the orthodox might frame and hang on the wall to remind them of their orthodoxy. The next two are contemporaneous with the first movement, and they do somewhat project the future. But if you want a real portrait of the young artist when he's fired by a tragic image, go to the Largo e mesto of Op. 10, No. 3. But don't go into that movement until you've gone thoroughly into the first. i54

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F. That first movement stumped me, so that I didn't really try to get into the Largo. I. It's no wonder. It is really hard to play, and unless you can obey the Presto it sounds thin and wiry. That Presto, however, isn't so fast or so light-footed as it would have been if the piece had been written in 2-4 time. These are quarter notes, not eighths, and I'm sure that notation is significant. But its tension is very high, and is remarkably maintained by a little structural device that permeates the whole piece. It's nothing but those first four descending notes in the theme (Example 23). They're conspicuous enough, if you look for them, but they're never obtrusive, and they give an extraordinary animation — as well as a coherence — to the whole movement, whose vitality fluctuates but never really lets up. The whole movement seems to me a kind of anticipation of the first movement of the next sonata, the Pathetique; and while it isn't so vivid a portrait of the man, I think it's just as true.

EXAMPLE 23

F. Mmmm . . . I certainly missed a lot! There's the four-note figure in that B minor theme (bar 24) that looks as if it were a second subject, but can't be. I suppose it's a kind of lyrical counterpart of the first part of the theme. 7. It's a part of what Tovey calls the "first subject group" —if there happens to be a group. The second subject is also a group. It begins with that four-note phrase (obviously the opening phrase of the sonata) in bar 53. (That's a long appoggiatura, so that the figure is of four even eighth notes.) And the figure, or its inversion, accompanies the lyrical spurt of the second member of the group (66); and after that it's all over the place —even on the surface of the quiet half-note interlude (106) and in the transition to the development section. You could hardly use a small structural feature more continuously; yet it is always subordinated to what we're calling the self-portrait, and to fix your attention on it i55

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would put the portrait all out of focus. . . . But, to revert to our text for the day, is this man a classicist or a romanticist? F. If you did fix your attention on the figure, I suppose you would call him a classicist, but he's rather rough for an aristocratic drawing room. And I don't find a trace of sentimentality, even in what you called the lyrical spurt of the second theme. If he's not already a romanticist, he's well on the road to becoming one; but I certainly don't know which he is at this moment. In fact that question really begins to look silly. 7. Maybe the answer will be easier if we look at the Largo (Example 24). You'll have to go through the whole movement to see the full im-

EXAMPLE 24

port of this and the other themes. There are four of them before the double bar that marks the end of the exposition, although the last one is hardly more than an extended cadence. You might see this as a sonata exposition, highly condensed. But the development isn't on these themes. It's on quite another — warm, and what the older critics used to call consolatory. But, just as in the Eroica funeral march, where the consolatory C major theme ends with a tremendous rhythming, quite unexpected, this one reverts to the tension of the first part, and ends with a booming pianistic figure that looks, on the page, quite ornamental, but isn't. There's a recapitulation, with the fourth theme taking the place of the second, and a Coda on the main theme deep in the bass that sinks to a catastrophic E flat minor, and then, after climbing the climactic hill, ends with the booming and a few bars of musing on the main theme. You'll hardly find a gloomier piece in the whole literature, or one that holds you in a tighter grip. . . . Now how will you pigeonhole your man —as classicist or romanticist? F. He won't let go for a single instant, will he! But I didn't hear a sentimental note. . . . And he does persuade. . . . But his persuasion makes our critical lingo sound like pigeonhole English. Yet, if we hadn't looked 156

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at the music critically, I wonder if we should have seen as much as we have. There's no structural relation that I can find between this and the first movement, and I didn't expect such a thing as this to follow it. But while I can't pinpoint it, this does seem a logical sequel. How, though, is he ever to go on? For I suppose there is a sequel to this. I'm almost afraid to hear it. 7.1 should think he must have had the same problem after the funeral march in the Eroica, and maybe this helped him to solve that one. Anyhow, he does solve it here, and with nothing more than the conventional Menuetto. (That wouldn't have done, in the Eroica, of course. He had to have a bigger piece.) Can you imagine a gentler thing, or a more appropriate kind of gentleness, to suggest after such a pronouncement? You may call the idea of alleviation sentimental, if you like — that's a matter of opinion; but I can't find a sentimental note in the piece. F. Not unless you find that bouncing Trio exaggerated, and sentimentality doesn't usually exaggerate in that direction. . . . But he couldn't possibly end the sonata on the note of the Menuetto, nor can I imagine what note ought to be struck. What does happen? I don't remember ever hearing this sonata in recital, although I once heard somebody play them all. /. Generally, when I've thought Beethoven uninteresting, I've found that I had been looking for a kind of interest that wasn't there, and had missed a quite different interest that was there. But I can't find that interest in this Rondo. It reminds me of Falstaff's phrase about "a man made after supper of a cheese-paring." The Rondo does let you down. But I suspect that's why you haven't heard the sonata in recital. I can imagine he intended it as a kind of sequel to the Menuetto; but that doesn't really make sense unless you forget the first two movements, and you're not likely to forget those. . . . I give up. F. Then the convention demanding three or four movements in a sonata, and that of the happy ending, defeated him? 7. That guess is as easy as mine, and it perhaps looks truer; but the man who wrote the first three movements was shaking his fist at a good many conventions, and I doubt that he would have knuckled under to that of the happy ending. F. Having made a Menuetto after the Largo, some sort of Finale had to be made, hadn't it? And the Menuetto is certainly right. Was the notion of the happy ending really an escapable convention? '57

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7. You're right, of course; and if he had to have an ending, it had to be happy. Only this one isn't even that. F. Is it any worse as a sequel than the Rondo after the funeral march in Op. 26? Hadn't he the same sort of problem there? 7. Well, for one thing, that sonata isn't nearly as sharply focused on experience as this one is. The march doesn't come out of the Scherzo, or the Scherzo out of the Variations, so that you have a much more diffused image of experience, even though the march is more definite in implication than anything in this sonata. I puzzled over that apparently flimsy Rondo for a long time. But it now seems as related to the march as anything could be that wasn't in the same vein. It doesn't express any related mood. It is merely fresh and perhaps green — like the trees in the sunshine as you come out of the funeral service — and I think that's the way you ought to play it. But I can't find any way to play this Finale. I find no image in it. I'm doubtless quite wrong, but I don't see where. F. I've read somewhere that Beethoven made his Op. 26 sonata in imitation of Mozart's little A major. Or in competition with him. Is that true? 7.1 believe so. Beethoven was a jealous god. His variation-theme is of course vastly weightier than Mozart's. It seems like a sort of secular hymn — fervent, where Mozart is lighthearted — and the variations of course correspond. The tinge of pathos you found in the third Mozart variation becomes, in the Beethoven, about as tense and somber as music can become. I'm sure there is an underground link to the funeral march. The variations are just as beautifully made as Mozart's, and since you will probably judge Beethoven's image to be more significant than his, you may argue that his work is the finer. But Mozart's is more exquisite and more immediately delightful. I rather think the comparison is odious. It brings you back to your taste buds. Their verdict is more primary than your final judgment of the weight of the image, and they seem, in such a case as this, to rule even more despotically than your intellect. If this really was a competition, I just don't know who won. Buds and brains aren't amenable to any single principle of operation, but I don't see how you can rule out either one, or prescribe their proportions. F. But Beethoven's variations do portray more of the man than Mozart's, and I don't see how you can deny that this piece is bigger — and better. Don't your taste buds help to discriminate richness as well as 158

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flavor? And isn't richness at least a possible sign of — well, of nourishment? 7. Oh, it is so for me, as must be evident in all our talk. But I'm only trying not to be too confident in what may after all be a sort of prejudice. . . . In any case, this piece shows how profound a variationist Beethoven already was; and that same skill, which is an insight into the very germs of musical meaning rather than a mere skill, is what makes all of Beethoven's developments so pregnant. For development, in music, is really variation. But the precise variation form seems to me hardly possible in any art other than music. You have "motives" in painting and architecture, and you can "vary" those interestingly; but those motives are subordinate details, not themes, in the musical sense. And "motive," in literature, has quite a different implication. The only attempt I know of at what you might call a literary theme and variations is Browning's The Ring and the Book; but while that is certainly a literary achievement, I think you'll agree that — if only because of its length—it's rather labored. F. Don't the pianists pretty often labor to make the variations "remember" the theme — keep its line visible — and think that's all there is to do? Each of these variations in Op. 26 has as much character as an individual piece, and so have Mozart's. But I heard a well-known pianist, last winter, play Beethoven's Thirty-two Variations in C minor, and all you could hear, as a friend of mine said, was an awful lot of tonic and dominant. 7. He wrote them at the peak of his second period (1806-07), but gave them no opus number, which makes some people think he didn't regard them very highly. And you've probably heard the story of his finding a pupil pecking at them and asking her, "Whose music is that?" "Yours." "Oh, Beethoven what an ass you were in those days!" But I can't help thinking he was really talking of her playing. The piece is a sheer wonder. The theme is only eight bars long, but it packs more elemental energy into those eight bars than you could ordinarily find in eighty (Example 25). Is that a classical theme? F. Hardly! 7. Is it sentimental? F. Even less. It isn't romantic, either, in the ordinary sense of that word. But it's about as individual as an utterance could be, and if romanticism is individuality, that word is big enough to cover it. Yet it doesn't persuade. It insists. *59

EXAMPLE 25

7. Isn't insistence one mode of persuasion? F. Primarily, I should think insistence was a mode of compulsion. But if the thing insisted on is self-evident, as this seems to be, you can be both persuaded and compelled. That's what this theme does to me, and I assent, unreservedly. But I still don't know exactly what I'm assenting to, so I suspect I'm more compelled than persuaded. 7. The "thing" must be our image, mustn't it? We know we can't define it precisely. It's only inferentially a factual image, with the facts inferred as types, rather than as precise occasions of experience. But they're common enough, both in your experience and mine, so that we recognize their influence. Even if you can't identify the facts, can't you type them? F. I suppose it was that "type" that I assented to. And the compulsion, forceful as it is, wouldn't have persuaded me if it weren't insisting on what becomes, when you grasp it, a self-evident image. We found the image — the model — behind the C minor violin sonata to be something like an infracted moral law. This theme feels much like that one, and perhaps the image is the same, only in a different perspective. It's more positive, and it hasn't a qualifying sequel such as the sonata theme has. Maybe you could say it is an assertion, if not of the law itself, of the existence of the law. The feeling of offense isn't there. 7. That notion of a moral law is big enough, anyhow, to be seen in endless new perspectives, so that any true portrayal of it needn't seem repetitive. Hasn't somebody proved (or maybe only insisted) that in all extant drama there are only seven basic plots? And mightn't you even compact those seven into one huge one that you might call human experience? Of course, out of the endless varieties of experience, you can manufacture artificial combinations of detail into quite plausible-looking occasions of experience, and we can easily be fooled into an apparently genuine feeling-response to such occasions. What else are most of the whodunits? I suppose we do discriminate the real from the unreal intellectually; but 160

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that discrimination, largely made out of past experience that has become a feeling-attitude, begins in feeling and ends there. You justify your feeling (if you can) by reference to the facts; but you act on your feeling. . . . I think you're right in saying that this theme somehow portrays your indignation over an infracted moral law. F. Or asserts the existence of that law — perhaps it doesn't make much difference which. . . . Then maybe the theme in Op. 26 is just another and a quieter assertion of its existence? You called it a kind of secular hymn. And if that's true, assertion needn't be indignant. But you'll be stretching the boundary of your images pretty far. 7. Yes: to the boundary of experience — which is correspondingly wide. But within that boundary, don't you discriminate (of course, for the most part hastily) any experience as good or bad? I don't say your discrimination is always just; all I say is that you make it. But, once made, the experience will fall for you into one or the other of those categories. And when you and I, and perhaps the million also, agree on its goodness or its badness, aren't we fortifying our notion of the moral law? Isn't that agreement a tacit recognition of the romanticist's consensus? F. Then you're contending that our musical images of experience are to be similarly discriminated? You'll have a sweet time of it, trying to establish that proposition with those who hold that art has nothing to do with morals. 7. Don't think I haven't had many such sweet times. But their only defense, so far as I can see, must be an assertion that art has nothing to do with ordinary experience. And my opponents — although I can seldom convince them — are often momentarily disturbed when they see how far their assertion narrows the boundary of art. F. And of their perceptive selves. . . . It looks as if this man, Beethoven, was trying consciously to enlarge that boundary — or both that of art and that of interpretable experience. 7. Wasn't Mozart or any other significant artist trying to do the same thing — to enlarge our awareness of the implications of experience? For our high-sounding "moral law" is nothing but an implication we find in experience. F. Then classicism and romanticism are just different ways of projecting that implication — the one a ritualized view, and the other individual? 7. The two views yield very different manners, but beneath the man161

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ner it seems to me that's about all there is in the distinction. Of course the individualist is more likely to get sentimental over his subject than is the ritualist; but the ritualist isn't immune. Beethoven sometimes, to my apprehension, does get sentimental. (Look at the Adagio con molta espressione of the B flat sonata, Op. 22.) But it's his individual outlook, not his sentimentality, that makes him a romanticist, and I don't know where you'll go to find a composer with a wider-ranging imagination. F. Wider-ranging? Isn't that the real danger with romanticism? Don't sentimentalists, exaggerating everything that evokes feeling in them, "imagine" all sorts of impossibilities and harp on them as if they were realities? 7. They call that sort of thing imagination, but I think Coleridge gave it a better name — "fancy." What he calls imagination is a new and really interpretative vision of reality —so far as reality can be understood. Fancy also usually begins in a glimpse of reality, but it makes all sorts of ghostly apparitions out of it, creates nameless fears and ecstasies, and then asks us to believe those apparitions are real. Beethoven wasn't a fanciful composer, but he was about as truly imaginative as any artist in the whole field. We've only looked at his so-called first-period work, but even there the range is already wide. F. There's certainly a wider range of subject-matter — of image, which we've agreed is the wellspring of imagination — than I can find in Mozart or Haydn, or maybe even in Bach. But Bach's world wasn't so big as Beethoven's. 7. If we're right in thinking even the musician's imagination to be rooted in reality, I suspect that there's the real difference. Even from the little we've studied, we certainly won't doubt Bach's imaginative power. But if only because Beethoven's world was larger and fresher than Bach's, he "keeps his eye on the object"; and the penetration of that eye —the justness of his valuation of what it sees — seems to me superior. F. Then it's primarily subject-matter, rather than style, that distinguishes his three periods? 7.7 feel very sure of that. Isn't subject-matter — his image of the world as he sees it — the basis of any man's thinking? Don't you judge the penetration of any man's thinking — his philosophy — by the apparent range and depth, as well as the precision, of his thinking? And mayn't there be dependable indications of that depth in his thinking about quite ordinary 162

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things? Of course, it's much easier to discriminate stylistic features than to identify the images of experience out of which those features grew, but I doubt that you'll understand them fully by studying them merely as features. F. Mmmm . . . The style of the Pathetique is that of an extrovert; that of the Moonlight is that of an introvert. Don't the psychologists tend to distinguish those two attitudes as mutually exclusive? Beethoven seems to be both, and I don't know which vision is the more penetrating. Is that perhaps a sort of measure of his dimension as an artist? 7. Those terms serve to type men — and artists — quite illuminatingly, and I suspect that Beethoven was both, and that you're right in seeing that ambivalence as one measure of artistic stature. The first period is mostly extroverted (the Moonlight, and the E flat —the other Sonata quasi una Fantasia in Op. 27 — are quite exceptional), and the second period is still largely the work of an extroverted mind. But the third, which became articulate only after a considerable interval in which creativity was almost at a standstill, seems to me predominantly introverted. It's only a generalization, of course, which you might state by calling the extroverted attitude, according to the vigor of its emphasis, a declarative or an imperative mood, and calling the introverted attitude subjunctive. Both antitheses, anyhow, suggest an attitude toward experience, rather than merely toward art. F. We've only scratched the surface of the first period, I suppose, but we've dug up a good deal. Can we go on to the second period next day? /. We could stay on the first period for a good many days without more than scratching its surface, but in a single hour spent on the second we may at least expand our notions, both of Beethoven and of romanticism. F. Aren't the piano sonatas still largely representative of his attitude of mind? I can't play them, but I can fumble through most of them enough to see what they're "about," and while I can study symphonies and quartets with the recordings and the scores, I find that I get inside the piano music with my clumsy fingers better than by just listening to records and attempting to analyze more intricate pieces. 7. There are fewer piano sonatas in the second and third periods than in the first, but they're more pregnant, and the images seem to me just as significant as those of the bigger works for quartet or orchestra. The 163

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Waldstein and the Appassionato, sonatas represent the peak of the second period, but Opp. 78, 8ia, and 90 illustrate the transition to the third period quite clearly. I'll dig a little way into the Waldstein — or the Appassionata, whichever you choose . . . and perhaps into Op. 54, which is more significant than most people seem to imagine. You take the three later ones, and we'll see what we come up with.

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I

WAS eager to see what my friend had done with the assignment I had given him, but he reminded me that I had also undertaken a by no means easy task: F. I could see, in the three sonatas you asked me to study, a very definite departure from what I understand as the method, whether of the first period or of the Waldstein and the Appassionato, which aren't firstperiod works. But you surely ought to take up those — or one of them, at any rate — before you ask me for my rather uncertain conclusions. Otherwise, I'll be trying to illustrate a transition from the unknown to the unknown. 7. Well, the two big sonatas do represent the generally accepted notion as to the character of the second period, and to take the later things before the earlier would be to put the cart before the horse. But I'm likely to do a lot of talking about either of the two big ones, and we'll probably have time for only one. For I do want to go into Op. 54 a little, even though it's in your transitional area. You may take your choice of the two big ones. F. Well, the image behind the word Appassionata seems to be pretty clearly hinted at in the music, while Waldstein suggests no musical image whatever. In fact, I don't think I see its image. The music gives me a lot of vivid moments, but it doesn't seem to condense into one over-all image as the Appassionata, I'm sure, does for everybody. The performances of the Waldstein I have heard were all very brilliant, and I have a notion that there's something wrong with that brilliancy, although I don't know what it is. 165

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/. Chiefly, I suppose, because / feel that way about it, I am quite sure you're right; but our hypothesis, if it's any good, should tell us something about ivhy we feel as we do. Look at the main theme (Example 26). What do you make of it?

EXAMPLE 26

F. Well, there's hardly a visible melodic line until the third bar — unless the repeated E's are meant to be heard as melodic. But mustn't you take them so — as a single melodic note with a kind of pulsation in it that one couldn't feel if that E were just struck and sustained? It would die out long before the F#, and the chords would begin to thump, even if you played them pp. The line, anyhow, seems to be E-FJ-G, with that little ornament at the end. It's a very tiny theme for a big piece, even if you add the figure in the treble. 7. I'm sure you're right about the pulsating E, even though the notation perhaps doesn't establish it as melodic. But the little tag at the end isn't an ornament, and neither is the treble figure (which is an amplification of it), although you may see them both, in their merely visual aspect, as decorative. Our hypothesis suggests that the listener may imaginatively enact the motion and the tension resident in a musical idea. What does this theme, if you enact it, make you do? F. I hardly know. With the long E, I think I draw in a very deep breath. 7. Which you exhale with the "ornament," as you called it? F. Yes, but . . . 7. Yes. But why did you draw it in? And how did you exhale it? What was your compulsion? For you don't breathe that way without some reason. Was it terror, which usually affects your breathing? F. You gasp for terror, and this is the remotest opposite imaginable to a gasp. But I don't know any name for it. 7. Neither do I — or for what seems to be implied in the music. The nearest word I can find is serenity. It implies, etymologically, a clear sky, and that spectacle has its implications for everybody; but the music seems 166

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to me to have more implications than the word, and I think that's what this movement —and in fact the whole sonata —is "about." (Of course, it's a spiritual sky.) F. That contradicts most of the impressions I've gotten from the performances I've heard, but it does make sense. And the richness of the repetition on the E\) chord seems to prove it. The harmonic disjunction is quite unexpected, but it becomes inevitable, once you grasp it. 7.1 believe Carl Bricken, who tried to reduce all the values of musical stimulation to the terms you just used — unexpectedness and inevitability — would have applauded your analysis. But I think we can profitably go beyond his antithesis to a broader synthesis — the image our hypothesis proposes. There is further proof, also, of the sense we're finding. Every single time this theme appears, it is marked pp — even in the Coda (at bar 262), although that soon becomes very exuberant. Moreover, there's just one ff in the whole exposition (62), one in the development (155, leading to the recapitulation), and one in the recapitulation itself (at the parallel to 62). There are two at the very end, for final emphasis, but they don't really contribute to the image. Did you ever hear a performance that respected those markings? F. I've never studied the score enough to remember such details, but my recollection is of a great deal of virtuoso soaring. So played, the piece wasn't uninteresting, but — for me, at any rate — the image you're beginning to derive wasn't there at all. In the performance I liked least, that long passage of triplet figurations in the development was articulated very clearly, and the repetitions, all about equally forte, got so tedious I was glad when they stopped. Why did Beethoven spend so much time on those figures? They don't seem to say anything. 7. In themselves, I suppose they don't. But they come out of the transition from the second theme to the closing group, and they derive rhythmically from the triplet accompaniment that will presently be added to the second theme, which we haven't yet looked at (Example 27). What do you make of it? F. The eye might take it as a rather simple harmony-exercise, but if the ear was looking for a clear spiritual sky, I don't know where it could find a clearer one. And that staccato approach is expectant of precisely what you get in the theme — although you wouldn't know how to realize that expectation for yourself. The tune just goes down and up the scale, with never a skip in the line nor a quirk in the harmony, but the 167

E X A M P L E 27

color, especially when it drops to the lower octave, is a treat for the musical taste buds. I. Much of that color — which is largely an appeal to primary taste buds — comes from the key of the theme. Did you notice it? F. I did, and I didn't. I saw that it was in E instead of the orthodox G, but it sounds perfectly right. I. The key is as right as the theme itself, and you can see how right it is if I make the transition modulate by taking bar 26 a third higher and transposing the rest of the transition similarly so as to land on D for the beginning of the staccato octaves. That brings the theme in on G. How does it sound? F. It is shrill, because it's too high; but it's also quite colorless, which must mean that the wrong key was for Beethoven the right key. But just how he discovered its Tightness is for me unimaginable. 7. And for everybody else — probably even for Beethoven. You're really inquiring into the mystery of creation, which we're not likely to solve. Until you inquire into the why of it, the how of this theme — this harmony-exercise, as you called it — looks very simple. But there was a why; and even if you have such a clue to it as our image of serenity suggests (and it's no more than a clue), the how itself remains a mystery. F. Then let's go on with the clue. I can see in it the why of the triplet figures that ornament the theme, and they look as if they would be very hard to play appropriately; but I don't get the sense of the forte arpeggio figure that follows, and then plays so large a part in the development. That's the passage that bored me in the performance I spoke of. There doesn't seem to be any melodic line, except for the E-Fft-Gft. I suppose you could say that those three scale-notes relate to the first three scalenotes of the main theme, but they haven't the same character, and they're forte, where the main theme was pp. I. The relation is more evident to the eye than to the ear, and I doubt 168

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that it is really a derivation. I may be quite wrong, but it seems to me that this brief passage — and far more, the long one in the development — isn't really trying to say anything. It is a kind of dwelling on the awareness engendered by what has already been said — a kind of maintaining of the implication of the image, rather than a direct contemplation of the image itself. Both the principal themes are quiet — serene, if my feeble word adds anything to the image; but those two themes fill you with an awareness that can't be subdued. This arpeggiation seems to me like the release of that awareness. To repeat the theme any further would be the worst kind of tautology, but to dismiss it would be to ignore, if not the image, at least the significance of it. F. Then you take it as a kind of incoherent surging-up of the implications that have already been conveyed — something which, if the image were more mundane, you might call a jubilation? /. Doesn't it make sense that way? Many passages in familiar music do the same thing. Look at the long sequel to the second theme of Chopin's G minor Ballade. It has a somewhat more definite melodic figure than this, but it is only the aftermath, not the substance of that thematic idea. And this device of jubilation, as you call it, is frequent in Beethoven. Look at the long passage in the development of the Eroica. It just roars and tosses, harmonically, on a rhythmic design that is really very like this one. I don't think there is a mightier passage in music; but there's nothing there — just as there's nothing here — but rhythm and harmony. The current of concern, started in the theme, flows much more abundantly than it would if he had kept harping on the theme. F. If it's as important as that, isn't there rather too little of it? — in the exposition, I mean. 7. Maybe. But he is designing a sonata form, and he has his exposition to complete. The triplets turn into sixteenths (after the decrescendo); they run down the scale and up again on the only ff in the exposition, over repeated chords that I think derive from the opening; they culminate in the two bars of E major octaves (66) that sound as if they should begin the closing subject, but don't; and then the note of quietude is returned to, for what seems to me an affirmation of our image of serenity. The final three-note figure with its crescendo and sudden p doesn't really add anything to the little hint (74) of the disappearing main theme that you heard in bar 23, but it does make an expectant transition to the development. F. And he has to make but one restatement of the main theme, deep 169

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down, in F major, to orient you to the real brightness of the image, which seems to me what the development is really "about." "Teacher," in college, used to call the development section of the sonata a "free fantasia." This one looks as if there had been an object on which a percipient eye was fixed, and that isn't exactly a "free" imagination. . . . But isn't it terribly hard to play? The notes are easy enough to hit, but to make them convey the image — or rather, the feel of the image, for the arpeggiofigures don't portray serenity — must be a problem. /. I never could master it. I used to play the Appassionato, fairly well, but this one, although I think it's technically easier, would never come right. The critics are agreed, I think, that tragedy is easier both to write and to perform than comedy, and that may apply here. I suspect, anyhow, that the roles of Prospero and the melancholy Jaques are harder to play than Hamlet's. Do you remember La Rochefoucauld's Nous avons tons assez de -force pour supporter les maux d'autrufi * We do bear other people's misfortunes quite easily (perhaps because we have a good deal of practice in brooding on our own —which seem heavier than theirs); but our joys are more ephemeral, and when we encounter such a state of clairvoyance as this sonata portrays we hardly know how to participate in it. Yet, so far as it goes, our notion of Beethoven's image of experience looks true. F. By comparison, anyhow, the image the virtuosi project looks really ephemeral. But Beethoven seems to maintain his image right through the whole sonata. /. He does, and I suspect that's what made it into a two-movement sonata. A conventional slow movement was written, you know (it is the Andante favori, in F), and it took a very heated argument to convince him that that interpolation would defeat his whole purpose. It is appropriate to the general image, but it is so long that you can't keep the image in focus. I don't know, of course, that this incident made him see the possible Tightness of a two-movement sonata scheme. (We thought the Moonlight was really that, but he didn't.) The Waldstein is, because, as you said, the last movement is essentially another aspect of the first. The Introduzione is exactly what it was supposed to be — still another aspect of the same image, for the moment actually probing its depth. . . . We haven't time to explore the Rondo, but its main theme (really, the only one, for the others are relatively incoherent arpeggiations, like those in * We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others. 170

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the first movement) seems to me a sheer marvel of clear drawing from what is ordinarily a very indefinite model. F. Doesn't the boom-ta-ta of its rhythm "send" everybody? /. Even more certainly than the second theme of the first movement. That rhythm is already there, gently disguised by the 6-8 time and the thirty-second note, in the first notes of the Adagio molto, and it is partly that approach that makes it so compelling. His notation in the booming passage (381) that precedes the Prestissimo is fascinating. The three silent bars have, instead of the conventional whole rest, two quarter rests, so that the silences beat the rhythm just as the chords do. (Some editors, unfortunately, have missed the point, and print whole rests.) F. It's a wonderful approach. But it has always seemed to me that the virtuosi I heard played the Prestissimo too fast — as if that word were a challenge to their fingers. Am I wrong? 7. 7 think, emphatically, that you are right. The theme comes back in "diminution" at the beginning of the Prestissimo; that word does say, "play as fast as you can," and the theme is obviously "diminished." But your "boom-ta-ta" comes back (at bar 39 of the Prestissimo), augmented to what I think should be its original speed, and with an arpeggiation of its harmony in triplet quarters; and I feel that it ought to sound as its original self. I should be happier if Beethoven had written doppio movimento instead of Prestissimo. The quarter rests I spoke of throb with that rhythm, and it ought to continue. The octave scales, in that tempo, won't have to be played glissando (which I don't believe to be suggested by Beethoven's fingering (with little finger and thumb, throughout), or divided between the two hands, as von Billow suggested. But then, I never was a virtuoso. F. Your doppio movimento, anyhow, would maintain the image of the beginning of the movement. And that image is really related to that of the first movement, whereas, in the performances I've heard, that relation was wholly lost. It does look as if that were the real reason why this is a two-movement sonata. 7. Anyhow, the two-movement idea seems to have been worth thinking about. Op. 54, written at about the same time as the Waldstein, has — and could have — but two movements. F. I heard it only once — in the course of that rather dutiful performance of the whole cycle of Beethoven sonatas, which I dutifully attended. 171

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I don't remember a word of it, but I believe it struck me as a kind of "sport." /. If you study it, I think you'll find its parentage legitimate enough, but it does look like a conscious experiment in the two-movement idea, whereas the Waldstein looks as if its two-movement form had been the surprising product of an unsuccessful effort in the older three- or fourmovement design. Schubert's "Unfinished" symphony — even though he began a scherzo — seems to me another example. Its two movements are two aspects of one image, and I think Schubert stopped because he realized that there was just nothing more to be said about it. But Beethoven, here, isn't rectifying an error. F. The form of the first movement, merely to the eye, looks very odd. 7. And sounds so to the ear. The contrast of two subjects, which I take to be the real essence of the sonata form, is here so great that, if you look for two related images behind them, the relation seems — to me, anyhow — undiscoverable. I think I could understand the long octave passage if it were a transition to something related to the beginning; but this turns out to be the only second theme there is, and it is so extended that it all but dwarfs the quite tangible image of the Menuetto idea. Neither is there the usual development. The main theme comes back in F and stays there; the octaves come back, briefly, in F, and stay there; and the rest is a very delicate ornamentation of the one clear image. To look for the usual satisfactions you get from a formal sonata is to be disappointed. But if you don't look for those, and think of the piece as an essay in an unexplored field, it is very interesting. F. I can't, at any rate, imagine a slow movement of any sort between the two. 7. Nor can I. There's simply no possibility of anything but the "perpetual motion" that actually happens. That is lucid enough for any ear. It's related in mood, if not in design, to the Menuetto theme, so that — as with the Waldstein, but on a far smaller scale — there seems to be but one image as its nonmusical model: that suggested by the Menuetto theme. F. It's no such image as that the Waldstein was drawn from, but it is still an image, and the second movement is patently in the same vein. But the correspondence is nowhere so vivid as that between the two movements of the Waldstein. Does that suggest that the image itself was less vivid? For Beethoven, I mean. 172

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7. Less vivid? How can I tell? Mayn't the image of even a trivial experience be vivid, while that image lives in the mind? While it lives, you're likely to think it worth telling about. But even a significant image of event is bound to fade, and you really judge its significance only when you resurrect it and correlate it with images of other past or even future events. Significant images, such as that of the Waldstein, are really accretions of actual or imagined experience which somehow coalesce into the feeling-attitude that we think we see portrayed in music. But if you narrow that image into one of immediate event, it will become the very "program" that you rightly detest. The attitude portrayed in this sonata is less significant — less rich in its background of experience — than that of the Waldstein; but Beethoven thought it worth telling about, and so do I. F. Then are you ready to say that the significance of an artwork is proportional to the significance you find in the attitude portrayed by it? 7. That would be as absurd as for the structuralist to find artistic significance directly proportional to intricacy or novelty of structure. Some critics do, but artworks aren't philosophical treatises, and they shouldn't be seen so, even though they may be motivated by a profound philosophy. But to admit even a hint of that motivation implies that philosophy has a place in art, and I suspect that if you put your proposition so that it included, along with your philosophy, everything that makes an artwork a work of art, I'd have to agree to it. Isn't philosophy a discrimination of significance in human experience? But that discrimination is as difficult as experience is complex, and we'll find any categories we try to set up repudiated, even in our own minds, before we've got them half established. . . . Let's plod along on our lower road. What do you make of Op. 78? And what does it contribute to our notion of romanticism? For although we haven't said a word about it today, that is a part of our question. F. From what we've found in Op. 54, it looks to me as if this were another and a more assured essay in the same direction. The romantic tang is there, in both pieces, although it's much more pronounced in Op. 78. But just what gives it that flavor is hard to tell. The piece certainly isn't sentimental. In fact, if it weren't for the little introductory Adagio, I might almost have called it flippant. It's astonishing that four bars in a certain vein can alter the tone of a whole piece, but that's what the Adagio does — for me, anyhow. '73

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7. And for me. Let's see if we can find a little of the why (Example 28). What do you see? F. It's about the gentlest utterance you could imagine, and like the themes in the Waldstein, it's perfectly simple. But that's only an assertion. It doesn't explain anything. The motion is tranquil, but so is that of many melodies — even rising ones like this — that haven't the flavor of this one. There must be, somewhere, a subtle appeal to the primary taste buds. Maybe the key has something to do with it, but not many who I'm sure will grant the gentleness will know that the key is FJf instead, perhaps, of F major.

EXAMPLE 28

7. You don't have to know exactly what the key is to sense its flavor, and I think the taste buds are deeply involved. They do contribute to the image, and if we weren't trying to be critics the image would be all the why we'd ask for. Once more, "the thing itself speaks," and while there must be reasons why it speaks, I doubt that we shall find them as convincing as the thing itself. They may, however, support it. You spoke of the melody as rising. If its whole trend were downward, there might still be gentleness; but would it be this sort of gentleness? F. Obviously not. Then perhaps there's something in the low beginning — on the slightly unstable, somewhat propellant 5th of the chord — and in the diminished triad that just slips over to the tonic with its 3rd in the melody at the end of the first phrase? 7.1 should think so. And that diminished triad isn't a dominant yth. A C# in that chord would have weighted it down so that it wouldn't have "slipped over," as you put it, to the tonic. F. And that tonic chord has its warmest note (Aft) in the melody, but with the rhythmic emphasis softened — for the feminine ending of the phrase. Then there's a yth added to that chord to lift the line to the subdominant, and a 9th on the dominant at the peak. 174

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/. It's a leading-tone yth, not a pth. Put a C# below the Eft and, still worse, a B above the G# (in bar 3), and you'll have an intolerable overweighting. And don't forget the bass — nothing but that low F#, which mitigates the already very smooth and quiet dissonances. F. I hardly noticed it until the end, where the little figure of thirtyseconds poises itself in a way that makes even these four bars sound, if not exactly complete, expectant of something else than more of this same gentleness. I should think he might easily have made a longish discourse on this one idea, but he knew when to stop! 7. And knew what sort of "something else" to go on with. What do you make of that? F. I could find only the flimsiest of reasons for what I saw in the Adagio, and I'm afraid I should flunk this test even worse. But, once you've seen the character the Adagio imparts, aren't the reasons for the second movement of the sonata much like those? The musical stuff, especially in the last movement, is gossamer-light; yet it has the same gentle import. But it doesn't want to be torn to pieces. 7. I think you might have noted the warmth of the second phrase of the main theme in the Finale, where, toward the end (155), it not only goes down into the bass as it did in bar 90, but is legato all the way, as it hasn't been before. It seems to me to hint at the same underlying character as the Adagio. . . . Will you go on, then, to the others? F. You didn't mention Op. 79, which does seem, by comparison, rather trivial, so I went on to Op. 8ia. It bothers me. That programmatic theme with the words Lebe wohl! above it is really affecting in the introductory Adagio, but it always sounds, in the Allegro, as if it had been "dragged in by the hair of its head," as Mozart said — I think, of some forced modulation. The title of the sonata (Les adieux, ^absence et le retour) is general enough so that I can ignore its association, either with some unidentified adored one, or with the Archduke Rudolph, who seems to have been the actual traveler. But those hints of fact throw the image I get from the Adagio out of focus as soon as the Allegro begins, and it doesn't come back with the second theme, which is Lebe ivohl over again. 7.1 can't help thinking that Beethoven imagined some kind of intonation of the main theme of the Allegro that will keep the image in focus, but I've never been able to discover it exactly. The Adagio is right, if you don't image the occasion too precisely (the music isn't saying, "parting 175

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is such sweet sorrow"), and the Ajj that begins the Allegro reiterates its urgency in the G and the F and the E|j that follow (Beethoven marks the G, and by implication F and E|? also, tenuto). That gives a very different motion-impulse from the Turn, tiddyump-tiddyump-tiddy-ww, pum that you usually hear, which, to my ear as well as yours, banishes the image of the Adagio. I'm sure the music is full of the well-wishing implied in wohl, but I don't know how to render it. F. Neither is the Andante lovelorn. There is a burden — as hard, I suppose, to portray justly as is the proper urgency of the Allegro —but (to be very naive and programmatic) it isn't unbearable. /. 7'm sure you're right there, and the joyousness of the Return is exuberant only for a moment. The real main theme seems to me just quietly contented — readjusted, if you like, after the Absence — and that is a state worth talking about if you can project the image of it and keep it in focus. If you do, those booming sforzandi at bar 27 (Beethoven marked them only in the first two bars, but some editors, and more performers, keep on banging all the way down) have just the right vigor to complement the fullness the contentment has so rapidly brewed up; but the little ornament of the same phrase that follows is just as right, and the second theme (two melodic lines that will be inverted) seems to me wholly in the picture. I don't care a hang who the protagonists in the action are. . . . But let's not forget that we're to see all these pieces in the perspective of romanticism. How, then, did you make out with Op. 90? For I suspect you'll find that piece making a pretty close approach to the romantic manner. F. The romantic tang, at any rate, becomes very marked, but I don't get any clear image. The opening motive (Example 29), at first incisive and then gentle, is so sharply designed that it seems as if it must be intended to portray an attitude of mind toward something; but I just don't see that something. Musically, of course, it's perfectly right, and the two lyrical phrases that follow, although the contrast is high, seem a natural sequel to the first one. They're lyrical enough to compel any ear. But I still can't bring all three things into what you might call a universal focus, although I'm sure they ought to be seen so. 7. Aren't you perhaps overworking our hypothesis? It has yielded some rather definite images — that of the second Kyrie and the violin sonata; it would be satisfying if every phrase we analyzed in its light came as clear as those; but we've had to be content with several much less posi176

EXAMPLE 29

tive inferences. You're sure — and so am I — that the romantic tang pervades the whole piece. Would you say that if you heard only the first two forte bars? F. Probably not. But in the light of the following piano phrase the first one assumes something of that quality, and the next four bars, always rising and slightly modulating, heighten the tang, even if they don't define the image. The phrase they progress to, suavely descending to that long dominant chord in E minor, seems a very individual attitude of mind toward something or other, but I still don't know what that something is. /. Then what isn't it? F. Well, it's obviously not militant or denunciatory; it's not bitter, although that long chord has real depth; in fact, it doesn't seem in the least introverted, and while it's serious, it isn't in the least sad. There's really a lot of affection in it, but there isn't a trace of romantic passion, and I'm sure no one would call it sentimental. 7. Quite a catalogue, for one who couldn't see any image. It would take a good many analytical words to establish, as far as our hypothesis can, either the things that are there or that aren't. But I'll accept your findings without question, and I think you will come to agree that you have added something to our definition of romanticism. But you haven't spoken of the third phrase, except to say that it belongs with the others. What does it add? F. Well, although I just this minute noticed it, it is almost precisely in the rhythm of the first phrase, and has something of its contour. That 177

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enormous drop, I suppose, took all my attention. In fact, these eight bars are almost a paraphrase of the first eight, in design but not in character. Those were the least romantic in suggestion; these are the most. They seem to complete the image — but I still can't bring it into focus. /. What does the enormous drop do to you? If it took all your attention, it must have done something. F. It tenses me, as any long fall would; but, long as it is, it falls gently. Even the second fall, to a fp, is without a thud. In reality, I don't seem to fall. Instead, the tension of the long descent grips me like an embrace, or the grip of a hand on my arm. It's not in the least passionate, in the ordinary sense, but it is full of what I should call an outgoing warmth — more permanent than the heat of passion. I don't see that this motion or this tension portrays the behavior of either bodily or spiritual muscles, but the more I "enact" the phrase, the more that impression grows. It's like what you see when all the features of a friend's face show accord, not only with something you've said but with a lot that you couldn't say. /. A gleam in the eye, then? Perhaps we'd better leave it at that, even if we seem to be overworking our hypothesis. But the eye, I think, has a good many spiritual muscles. . . . Goon, then. F. Need we go on in much detail? The two-note motive of the opening "three-owe," on the rising octaves, B and E, gets the musical discussion going, and he seems to me to shift that emphasis (47) so that the two notes become "ewe-two," and then suggest his second theme (55) on that pattern. It's at first rather like an inversion of the rising octaves (24) that started the discussion; but the variant that follows (61) warms it up quite marvelously, and the little suspended motives of the close (from 69) make the tang of the whole exposition unmistakable. The structure looks very subtle, when you come to examine it; but the tang, I think, must have been the model for the structure. I. For the structure only? Didn't you, a minute ago, discover a fairly tangible image, even though it was of something you couldn't say? F. I suppose I did. Only it's not a very clear image when you can't define it. 7. Perhaps it's not very clear; but isn't the accord you spoke of — the friendliness — vivid, even though it isn't seen as an act of friendliness? You saw it as a gesture — an act — of friendliness rather than of passion. But that act, as you said, isn't portrayed by the music, and the grip you felt wasn't — as that act might have been — perfunctory. Indeed, a dozen 178

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other gestures, indicative of what we describe in that lean word, friendliness, might have been suggested to a dozen other listeners as signs for what you felt in the music. But if this music, as we now see it, does put into tone an awareness — we call it a feeling, but it's much more than that — an awareness of something that can't be said in words, and if it bears the stamp of individuality (as this does), and is highly persuasive (as this is), then haven't we here a fair example of unsentimental romanticism? F. If those two values — individuality and persuasiveness — are all that make up romanticism, I'll have to agree. But it is also true that the tang I sense in this sonata is romantic as I have been accustomed to think of romanticism, and I don't think your definition goes all the way. /. You've been accustomed to think of romanticism as, at least in some measure, sentimental. Are you suggesting, then, that it is, in some essential, sentimental? Everybody will agree that it may, and often does, become so; but didn't I almost convince you, the other day, that classicism might also be sentimental? F. I'll agree that the overdrawn response to an overdrawn image is sentimental, but I don't know just where overdrawing begins, and neither do you. We use the word sentimentality for feeling we think is overdrawn, and sentiment for feeling that isn't; but those words are no more precise than our thinking, which is largely governed by occasion. 7.1 doubt that anybody is immune, and that's why I said the classicist may be guilty of it. ... But do you find any sentimentality in this sonata? F. Not a whit of it. But I suppose an inveterate classicist in Beethoven's day — one of those whom you call a sort of backforemost sentimentalist — might have found it so. 7. And perhaps the last movement more than the first? F. Perhaps. But 7 shouldn't say so. It's on a more obvious plane of feeling than the first, but it isn't sentimental, and it's a wonderful complement to it. The two-note motive of the transition to the second theme hints just enough at the opening of the sonata so that you sense a connection without being overburdened by its intellectuality, and the two singing phrases that follow (42 and 61) are in a melodic vein that I have never heard in any earlier Beethoven. I couldn't find any third theme, although this is a rondo, but you don't want one. And the warmth when the tenor gets the main theme (232) is . . . well, it seems as romantic as anything of Schumann, but it never cloys, as he sometimes does. 179

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7.1 take it that you find the romantic tang more pronounced in this movement than in the first. But is your image any clearer? F. Verbally, no; but musically it is so vivid that I don't want any words for it. The thing itself speaks. 7. But it does speak of experience? F. The tang pervades the whole sonata, and it's so deeply enjoyable that any listener who felt it (and I don't see how he could help feeling it) might well ask for nothing more. I suppose he would say the tang belongs to the music just as the scent belongs to the flower, and let it go at that. But the scent has a purpose for the flower, and the tang of this music — I'll call it a tang of kindliness, but that's a feeble word for it — can't but be the product and the characteristic of a human relation which, if you look into it, is really motivated by a similar purpose. And if the tang is a symbol of that purpose, maybe the listener who senses it merely as a tang is being nourished by it without knowing it. In fact, I think I was nourished by this piece, even though I couldn't — and still can't — bring the image of experience it implies into focus. But I'm sure there's experience behind it. 7. And again, although you don't know what the experience is, you're pretty sure of what it isn't, and I think the tang, which is largely emotional in suggestion, is a fairly safe guide to what the essential features of the experience would prove to be if we could bring them into focus. The image is less clear than that we found in the violin sonata, or even the Waldstem. But isn't it less clear because it is more inclusive, and ranges over less tangible areas of experience? And may not the romantic manner, which you sensed in the tang, have been the only manner in which Beethoven could have explored those areas? Being uncertain of the detail of what he sees, but still deeply convinced that he is seeing truly, can he project his image otherwise than as he sees it — as an individual — but with a conviction which he cannot but hope will persuade? F. Mmmm . . . Since the conviction itself, as well as the persuasion, may be — but need not be — sentimental, it looks as if your two words had gone about as far as two words could toward a description, if not a definition, of romanticism. When you first proposed them, the other day, they seemed dry and abstract, and you do have to bulge them almost to bursting before they're adequate. I guess you haven't burst them yet, but do they account for a romantic period — or the Romantic Period of the 180

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nineteenth century, which most people think of as the only one? Don't they also describe music long antecedent to that time? 7. The second Kyrie, for example? Has not that, and still more such a piece as the slow movement of Bach's concerto for two violins, the romantic tang? And isn't it possibly that same tang which bulges our two words — quite incalculably? F. The tang is an elusive fact for the analyst, but it seems to be keenly perceived by a lot of hearers who remain quite unaware of the image it colors, or of the structural ingenuity that projects the image. 7. But hasn't experience, as you encounter it, a tang? And don't you — however intellectual your valuation of prior experiences that contribute to this one — more often than not take the tang as a valid sign of that value, and go on from there? F. You mean that the essence of a musical image may be grasped, merely as tang, by an ear too uninstructed to be capable of structural analysis? 7. Of the sort of analysis we've been making, and of the much more elaborate analytical detail which we might have adduced in support of our conclusions? Yes. If that weren't possible, I doubt that there would be a musical public; and, as I'm always insisting, without a public, music would have no history. At any rate, if the intellectual aspects of music had to be mastered before its portrayal of an image of experience could be grasped, there would be about as much likelihood of a romantic movement in music as in mathematics. F. I'm afraid my mathematics teachers in college thought I was a kind of mathematical romanticist. . . . But are you implying that romantic movements, of which you found two in the history of Christianity, originate with the technically unlearned? 7. So far as romanticism is an artistic manner, it can originate only with the artists; but if it is right to think of it as an attitude toward experience, I don't see why it shouldn't have welled up from below the level of art. It's idealistic, of course, and everybody soon learns how dangerous wishful thinking, which is one kind of idealism, can be. But that isn't the only kind of idealism. Beethoven, along with Schiller, ardently shouted Seid umschlungen, Millionenl —a gesture which hasn't as yet been very generously enacted. It was perhaps fantastic (a vagary that romanticism is liable to) for you to feel a kind of embrace in the third strain of Op. 90; but as an individual rather than a universal impulse I think there may be 181

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a kinship with the symphony. That strain, anyhow, isn't what I should call a classic utterance. F. Yet it is a feature of an orthodox classical form — if you can call the sonata a classical form. /. I could argue, plausibly I'm sure, that the very essence of that form — its contrast of two opposed but related themes which, at their most vivid pitch are images of experience — is romantic. Of course, it was first perfected as a design by composers whose background was what we are calling classic, and I suspect that many hearers (like Weber at his first hearing of the Fourth symphony) felt Op. 90 to be rather heretical. To us, the departures from orthodox form seem insignificant; but the themes, seen as images of experience, are suggestive of the romantic attitude, and the sonatas that follow, although they go far beyond this one in both form and character, seem to me a natural outgrowth of what is at bottom an astonishingly expanded vision of experience. F. Then can we go on to those, next day? 7. To one of them, anyhow — to Op. 101; but I doubt that we shall get much farther. I've studied it a long time, and I've never got anywhere near the end of its interest. It's very hard to play, at least in the fast movements, but I think you can make out a good deal from the slow ones. Do what you can, and we'll see where we come out.

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YFRIENDneedednpromptingtobeginournext

M

discussion: F. What a piece that Op. 101 is! Why is it so seldom played? I think I've heard it only once — in the course of that cycle I spoke of — and I'm sure it must have been very unperceptively performed. Of course, 7 can't play it, but when I began to look for an image, my fumbling fingers uncovered a lot that I'd never seen before. The piece seems fifty years ahead of its time. The substance is as pliant as anything of Schumann, and the tang is just as romantic, but without the excess that he seems to revel in. /. It is generally agreed that the piece is exceptional, and I can't understand why it's not more often played. But I think you can find, in the last quartets and the later piano sonatas, passages that have as strong a romantic tang as this. It doesn't seem to me, however, to pervade the others as fully as it does this, and since I suppose I'm an incurable romanticist, I'll confess that this one has the strongest appeal of them all. It has for me the vividest image, but that may be because of the dedication and the little story behind it. F. I noticed the dedication to the Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, and I remembered that she had been a pupil of Beethoven's; but I don't remember any story. 7. It's very simple. She was Beethoven's most talented pupil, and her playing still astonished Mendelssohn when, many years later, he finally persuaded her to play for him. Baron Ertmann was an officer in the Aus183

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trian army. He was stationed in Italy (the Austrian part of it), and while they were there Dorothea's only remaining child, a little boy, died. She was so stricken that the Baron feared for her mind, and managed to be transferred back to Vienna. The change didn't help. But one day she went to see Beethoven, who knew of her loss. After a few words of greeting he said, "I think we ought to speak together in music this afternoon," and he began to improvise for her. And the rest of the story is that she wept and was comforted. F. Oh . . . Then did the sonata come out of that improvisation? The story accords with the image I've begun to see behind the music. /. No one knows. Beethoven had the dedication added after the title page was engraved because he "wanted the sonata to be a surprise for her"; but the only proof that the music may have come out of the improvisation rests on internal evidence, and that is shaky testimony for the musicologists. But even they can't deny the possibility, and I think we may be right to bolster our image with the story. What did you find in the music itself? F. Well, we said that Op. 90 was gentle, but this first movement is tender as it never occurred to Op. 90 to be. Yet it isn't one whit more sentimental. /. You speak of the pieces as if they were living persons, and I think you're right. A man with Beethoven's imagination is more than just one man. F. And if individuality is a real factor in romantic art, I should think this sonata about as convincing an example of what you called unsentimental romantic art as one could find. 7. I'm sure it is. But even though we're trying to contrive some definition for the word romanticism, doesn't it rather shrivel the music to categorize it by that dry -ism? Let's get to the image itself, if we can find any definition for it in the music. What you call the tang is certainly there, in the very first phrases. But perhaps we shall be surer of it if we can account for it in the notes (Example 30). What did you find, for yourself? F. Well, the lingo of harmony — with which I'm not too conversant — is perhaps too dry to give an account of an image of experience, but if you can interpret it, I think I can at least make a sketch of the progressions that yield the image. The whole curve of the first phrase seems to me to be on dominant harmony, but there are continual modifications of it—a diminished triad on "three," a yth on "four," a light touch on the 184

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tonic at "six," then, in bar 2, an appoggiatura E against what would be a subdominant triad, only it becomes a supertonic at "three"; but this whole half bar is based on the open 5th of the dominant, to which the whole harmony goes, on "four." I think those are fairly accurate names for the fluctuant tensions of the one dominant harmony; but I couldn't find any words less directly suggestive of the image they evoke. /. When you parse an English sentence you look chiefly at the words as mere parts of speech, and with your eye on the sentence as a mere grammatical object you may be very little aware of the image those words were intended to symbolize. At best the individual words can symbolize only bits and pieces of the factual complex that constitutes that image; but the syntax of your sentence arranges those bits in a way that not only makes them cohere into a recognizable sketch of the image as you see it, but makes the image itself appear as having a value — an interest — that is recognized in quite another region of the mind than that which merely perceives the bits —the facts — as facts. You described, similarly, bits and pieces of the musical sentence you were parsing — certain tonal combinations which evoke sensations of tension and motion from whose character and sequence you infer an image of tenderness. Individually, neither those tensions nor any other features of the music directly symbolize or otherwise portray that tenderness. Yet, shaped and syntactically related as they are here, those features do — for you and me, at least — evoke that image: evoke it in quite another region of the mind than that which perceives tension as tension and syntax as syntax. In that remoter region — and only there — you would be quick to recognize similarly objective facts — the quirk of a smile or a glint in the eye — as implying tenderness. For you see that those gestures, although they would be harder to parse than the musical phrase, have also for the perceptive mind a syntax —the constant undercurrent of concern with which we contemplate any interesting object or any purposeful act; and that syntax of concern — that "putting together" for the mind of things that really matter — is the actual source and origin of both verbal and musical syntax. . . . All of which (for I ran on much longer than I intended) simply means that your parsing, interpreted, was less dull than you thought. . . . You spoke only of the tensions, but our hypothesis is supposed to take account of the motion also. What do you make of that? F. Verbally, no more than I did of the tension. The motion is as fluid 186

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as the harmony, and, for the ear, just as simple. The whole exposition, up to bar 35, is in the simple two-bar phrases of the beginning; yet there's never a hint of squareness, for the phrases seem to have a constant, quiet propulsion somewhere inside them that carries you on from one to another without the slightest hitch, to bar 16. (I can hardly believe it, now, but I'm sure the man I spoke of who played the whole series of sonatas took this movement as being a kind of barcarolle!) What that quiet propulsion means (and a lot of it must come from the tensions) I can't in the least verbalize, as long as I see it merely as propulsion or tension. But if I go beyond those literal facts, and take the music in a fashion I should once have called purely musical, I sense in the very first phrases a gentle hand on a troubled shoulder (mine, I suppose), and that sense doesn't really fade, but rather gets richer, all through the movement. I suppose the music may have been inferred from the story; but it now looks as if one might infer the story from the music. 7. You don't (as I suggested you should) keep your eye very sharply focused on the rhythm; but you do sense it as propulsion, and that perhaps sums up the purport of what a more precise observation would have recorded. The fluidity of the 6-8 meter is certainly one contributory fact. Whether the quietude comes from a hand or an eye or a voice or the pressure of merely a sympathetic presence doesn't really matter. Tension and motion together (and you do sense them together, not individually) seem to me to portray that undercurrent of concern I was just talking about. 7 won't quarrel with you about your derivation of the story from them, although one who assessed those things individually as no more than musical tension and motion might well be dubious of our image. That image seems vital to you and me, but it does come, in part, out of our own "disposition," as Aristotle called it, and we'll probably continue to be sorry for one that can't derive the image, just as that sort of disposition will be sorry for our gullibility. . . . What did you make of the form of the movement? F. It never occurred to me until yesterday that there might be a question of form, although I'd been living with this movement all week. If unity and variety are the real essentials of form, I should think this was about as perfect an example as you could find. But what name to give it is another question. I spoke of the exposition, a minute ago, as ending at bar 35, and what follows is patently development; but I can't find any real second theme in the exposition. The quiet phrase in the bass at bar 187

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25 will do for a closing theme; but the only second subject seems to be that four-note figure in the left hand at bar 16, and that seems more of a continuation or an interlude than a theme. And although the development is clearly enough begun, there's no definite beginning for the recapitulation. The main theme does emerge, out of the development and an octave higher, at bar 58, but almost at once you're at the parallel of that clinging suspension on Eft at bar 9. The rest is recapitulation, and in the orthodox tonic key of A, with a Coda on the second theme; but you have to hunt for these things, and when you find them they seem to me like the two grains of wheat in the two bushels of chaff. Yet, as an apprehended form, I don't see how anything could be more satisfying. And he who doesn't see some such image as ours as the model from which it was drawn must be of an impervious mind. 7. Mmmm . . . So many men, so many minds. . . . I'm not a dissenter, but we'd better not be too sure of our images. What model do you think the second movement was drawn from? The same as the first? F. If it was, the angle was very different. I couldn't play it with any vividness, but I could see that it wasn't a march for ordinary feet. And maybe those feet did belong to the model. You couldn't see any feet in the first movement, but you would know that if they were there, they'd be as light as these. /. And they'd march, here, with a gaiety akin to the tenderness we found there. That, to my notion, is exactly what they seem to do (Example 31). There's no stomping, anywhere. There's a vigorous propulsion in the first sf chord that is lightly renewed in the half notes in the next phrases, as well as in the legato of the melodic phrases themselves, after the upspring on the last half of the bar. The elasticity isn't impeded anywhere, and there's a capriciousness in the design of the melodic line that accords perfectly with the rhythm. The first period is eight bars long, but it adds up as 3 + 2 + 3, and that irregularity (which you don't notice, because it's so cleverly concealed) contributes a good deal to the image. It continues, to the same purpose, in the second section. F. The texture, both here and in the first movement, is much more polyphonic than in the earlier sonatas, and that, too, seems to contribute to the images we've formed of the two movements. Of course, you can't imagine them in a homophonic texture, but you may wonder whether he began to think polyphonically and found ideas that grew out of that manner, or found ideas that compelled him to adopt the manner. 188

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7. A good many musicologists, I think, would choose your first alternative; but to suppose the ideas, whether in this or any of the later works, as generated out of a newly adopted and perhaps excogitated polyphonic manner seems to me impossible. Beethoven, grown deaf and grumpy with misfortune (which he didn't take lightly), became almost completely isolated from the world he had set out in his youth to conquer. His imperative manner was appropriate to that effort, and he held to it with no more than natural alteration up to 1812 — the year of the Seventh and Eighth symphonies. But then, for reasons no more cogent than had already often arisen, he found himself somehow unable to compose. His head was full of ideas, but they refused to be written down. This sonata is one of the first works in the new style he was at last to discover. It may be (although there is no record of it) that he found that style by speculating about the relative virtues of homophony and polyphony. Rather, I think, he had been remaking his philosophy — fitting it to a world that was bigger and deeper than the one he had proposed to conquer — and I think he had to make his new method out of his philosophy. This sonata isn't, anyhow, in an imperative style. F. Nor could it have been put together by theory. There's more than structural imagery behind it, even though the structure is almost unimaginably perfect. And from what I could make of it, that is even more true of the little Adagio that follows. It is introductory to the last movement, and the first is evidently intended to be kept in mind, since its first two phrases are recalled. But the substance of the Adagio — especially the first eight bars, which I could play tolerably — struck me as about the most . . . I guess I'd better leave it at that. There isn't any word for it, but whatever it is, it is "the most." 7. Yet you seem to expect me to find the word. All we can do will be to walk around it and note a few features, but they may help. First of all, look at that beginning —on the dominant in A minor after the F major 189

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that ended the March (Example 32). It has an extraordinary strangeness, if you can manage to wait just the right amount of time before you strike it. You know, with that single chord, that you must put your shoes from off your feet. The piano in Beethoven's day could shift its keyboard so as really to play una corda, probably giving a more ethereal color than our soft pedal can produce; but if you can manage to strike our due corde with the right force you will still find the color as full of implication as the chord itself. The long E of the theme is made suspenseful by the beginning on the first inversion, and by a shift to the 5th in the bass

EXAMPLE 32

and the added yth, D; then, having come almost to rest on the tonic, the E, still propelled by its changing harmony, generates the graceful figure that completes the measure — a mere "turn," but a gesture of ineffable . . . well, since it is ineffable, like you I'll leave it at that; but the propulsion is still strong enough to make another curve before the phrase really comes to an end. And don't miss the symmetry of the underlying bass in the two bars. Both of those three-note groups, on two active tones and a rest-tone, really give the propulsion, although you sense it in the melodic line. The next phrase seems quite "consequent," if you take the first as "antecedent" in the usual structural sense. The tension of the prepared major yth, E, isn't aurally very high, but it pushes the line on up to F, on subdominant harmony, and the Neapolitan 6th, B|j, seems to subdue the tension, or at any rate to darken it, so that there is a kind of hush on the 190

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dominant cadence that follows. That sixteenth, Gfc|, after the G# is about the hardest single note to play that I've ever met with, and one of the most meaningful. It isn't in the least necessary for the harmonic transition, but without it, although the minor triad that follows would have been quite acceptable, the whole "complexion" of the next phrase would have been changed. That one note warns you that something extraordinary is coming — and it does; but it isn't the perfunctory continuation of the first four bars — the reference back to the opening phrase — that orthodoxy would propose. In fact, it isn't a structural continuation at all. It's quite a new suggestion. But I believe the few simple chords of that next phrase with their breathless ascent lift me to as high a spiriutal level as I've ever attained, and the next phrase, miles below, somehow assures me that what I "saw" up there was real. It is more a plea than an assertion, but my assent, with the quiet C-major cadence, is complete. F. Those eight bars seemed to me as I played them the most breathless musical moment I had ever lived through. There isn't an unusual musical "word" in the whole strain; yet, every chord sounds as if you'd never heard it before. And the continuation is almost as amazing. First, the thematic phrase with its curve completed, and imitated high up; then the same phrase halted on its high E and re-echoed, but with the bass descending (the bass is written in grace notes, but surely they're meant to be pedaled?), and then the diminution of the melodic line against those diminished yths that make the image swirl! 7. But the swirl doesn't merely make you dizzy. You're brought down again, to a warm, meaningful earth, with your ear still full of expectation, and that little cadenza brings back just enough of the first movement so that this Adagio seems the completion of your first image. F. And it's also the transition to another image which, judging from the matter of the transition, must somehow be still another aspect of the one "model." But that last movement was too much for my fingers, and I had to give up. As far as I could go — which was to see a clearly designed sonata form with a huge fugue for development — I found I'd lost sight of my image. The Allegretto and the Adagio shaped most of that image; you found, between those movements and the little March, a relation I should hardly have seen; but I can't see the relation to this one, even though the transition seems to point to it. 7. It perhaps led you to expect a thematic relation which, so far as I can see, doesn't exist. But neither is there any thematic relation between the 191

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slow movements, or between those and the March, so that the only relation there is seems to be one of character. But the character we've seen is, largely, that of the slow movements. Haven't we, perhaps, looked too exclusively at it"? Haven't we quite forgotten the fact that Beethoven was working out, a little unconventionally, a conventional four-movement sonata sequence? And although the spur to that effort may have come from some such image as we have inferred, wasn't there, for him, an equally cogent image of that form to be considered? Call the image of form a Procrustean bed, if you like; but may not our half-formed image be another? And aren't we, in making that bed for ourselves to lie on, attempting to fit Beethoven's gigantic imagination to it? F. Our image seems so convincing, and so clearly derived from the music, that I suppose we do forget that what we're seeing is our image and not Beethoven's. Even with the story behind it, our vision can't have been precisely his. Yet the tang of that image is perceptible to anybody's taste buds — his included — and I'm not going to abandon the gratification it gives me merely because I can't tell precisely what emotional condiments originally went into it. I don't believe, that is, that the last movement of this sonata, although it's served as another course, was prepared without some sense of tang-appropriateness to the others. /. Neither do I. But if the tang is there, there must be a condiment, as you call it, to produce it, and we're happier —as critics, anyhow—if we think we've found it. The opening of this last movement is patently more robust than anything before it. In fact, your gentler tang isn't even suggested — though it may be hidden by the stronger flavor and still be present. Beethoven says to play it fast, but not too fast, and with decision. May not this robustness complement and perhaps activate the rather static image we've formed? F. Perhaps. The robustness is sturdy, but it isn't boastful. Only four bars of it are forte, and the running sixteenths that follow, with the two fermate, are quite simply gay. Then the two real voices of the beginning are inverted in what I suppose you could call double counterpoint, but the passage doesn't sound that learned. /. Nor does the complementary phrase (21), although it, too, is imitated. And it isn't merely complementary. It not only has something of the tang of our image, but it seems to me to anticipate the second theme (41), which, if you can manage to make it float above the sixteenth-note figure, obviously derived from the main theme, will have as much of 192

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your tang as anything in this context could. (The curve C#-A-E in bar 22 certainly anticipates the Gft-E-Gft in bars 39-40; and that curve generates most of the second theme.) The sequel (p dolce, at 53) is a new addition, but the forte figure (61) is the diminution of the D-E-C#-A in 21-22. The close of the exposition is an obvious recall of the main theme in a lighter mood, with a staccato figure for cadence. . . . New as this image is, hasn't it something of your tang? F. Now that you bring it into sharper focus, I think I half sensed it, so far, for myself; but I bogged down at the fugue, which seemed suddenly to turn very serious, although its theme is just the main theme in minor with a staccato extension. Isn't at least the tang of the fugue new, even though it has the substance of the main theme? Like most unprofessional listeners, I suppose I grasp the sense of music more from its tang than from its intellectual reference, whether to structure or image. Am I wrong, then, in thinking this development rather too recherche for its context? 7. I'm a professional, I suppose, and the tang interests me as much as it does you. But is the tang really new? It is remote from our original image, but didn't we find a real relation? And, if you admit the Tightness of the fugal process for development, must you cavil at its length? Fugues have the reputation of being recherche, and maybe that superstition is still in the back of your mind. But if this movement began by projecting our original image in a new, unexpectedly kinetic aspect, can you imagine a better vehicle for the portrayal of its latent energy than this fugal device? He might have dramatized it — split his theme into fragments and pounded the table with them — but wouldn't that have falsified its energy — if we're right in thinking the energy just another aspect of our image? He does pound the table once, with his huge augmentation of the theme in the bass at the end of the fugue (185). But again, he is not only projecting an image. He is making a piece of music in which the image will, if it exists, be grasped along with, and for most listeners as secondary to, its musical interest; and to me this heavy emphasis, coming at the end of the development, isn't overdone, whether as a feature of musical form or as a contribution to the image. F. It certainly gives the recapitulation a thrust. It made me expect a heightening of the exposition, and when I didn't get it I felt a little deflated. But I begin to see, now, that it wouldn't have been "in the picture," whether of this movement or the whole sonata. 193

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/. Whether you get it merely as tang, or try (as I'm afraid we've rather ineffectually done) to relate its image to that which we found in the earlier movements, the "picture" of this Finale is so different in substance and detail that the relation certainly isn't self-evident. But I think the recapitulation (so far as it can, while it is seen as an essential of the form) and the Coda, especially, go pretty far to establish it. The reprise is shorter than the exposition; the vigor of the main theme is subdued, after only eight bars, by a new and much gentler version of it (202); the second theme is considerably altered in design, featuring the interval of the 7th; and while the rest is the same as in the exposition, it seems to me to get a softer tang from those alterations. And the whole Coda is similarly gentled. The staccato figure at the cadence makes an accompaniment for a really tender reminiscence of the main theme; the complementary phrase from bar 21 that was omitted in the recapitulation turns up unexpectedly and with more point than it would have had in its former place (287); the two-note motive that begins the main theme becomes a delicately cadential descending 5th against the running sixteenths; and a little figure from the theme is toyed with, ritardando, in a fashion that I can't help seeing as a quizzical valedictory smile. All this has a tang as pronounced as it could be while the prescription of sonata form was being filled; and I think that tang is unmistakably flavored from something like our image of the earlier movements. F. But if tang is more perceptible than such details of structure as you have just brought out (and I suppose there may be a lot more), I should think the reasonably sensitive listener should be able to catch the drift, even if he missed the fine points. 7. He will if the performer brings them out, not as features of an intellectual structure but as the tang of a known or imaginable experience. I'm convinced that the less than average audience that held its breath for the Bach concerto I spoke of got the essential purport of that piece as fully as did the relatively few learned listeners who heard it; and even their amazement was a response to the tang, rather than to the learning. This movement, a sonata form, hangs together because it satisfies (just as did the Passacaglia in the concerto) certain expectations of coherence and design in the listener's mind; but without the tang it would appear as just another example of the form, or at any rate of coherence if he didn't know the form. But to project the tang is, to my notion, the performer's principal task. 194

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F. Then "the tang's the thing," and its appeal really is to the conscience of the audience, rather than merely to its taste buds. I suppose the barcarolle-tang I caught from my performer's reading of the first movement was really an appeal to taste buds; but the conscience wasn't much activated, and in the last movement even the taste buds were undisturbed — the pleasurable ones, anyhow. . . . Yet, the first movement did have a mildly romantic tang. His image, if he had one, now seems quite false; but if our sense of the romantic is as dependent on the tang as it seems to be, isn't that precarious ground for a critical judgment? /. You just said that the proper appeal of the tang was to the conscience, which is a very complex critical organ. Now, you seem to be reverting to the taste buds, which, physically, are only distantly related to the conscience. I doubt that they could discriminate, unaided, between a true and a false image of experience — or, what is pretty much the same thing, between sentimental and unsentimental romanticism. Overheated feeling does repel the taste buds, and they may appear to be the ground on which we reject its appeal; but I think you'll find that your tang penetrates beyond them, even though their discrimination, which is very immediate, may seem to be the only basis for your judgment. Your buds, quite unaided, would probably recognize the first and third movements of this sonata as romantic, but the second and fourth can be read — and rather interestingly performed — as impersonal and objective, and to that extent classic. We've found, we think, features that controvert that opinion. Individuality is certainly there, and persuasiveness seems to me to be evident if you take the features I spoke of in the sense in which I see them. I doubt that the romantic tang will be there unless those features are so seen, but if they are so interpreted — and if the distinction between classic and romantic is worth making at all — it seems to me that even the few pieces we've studied illustrate fairly adequately the emergence of the romantic attitude out of the classic. F. Even if you see it as classic, the appeal to the conscience is here evident enough, but Beethoven's appeal is more inclusive of experience, more individual, and more insistent. I suppose that appeal might be seen as in itself sentimental. Conscience, as Beethoven regarded it, has been all but psychoanalyzed out of existence in our day, and current ethics hasn't found a very adequate substitute, although I feel that the remnant of its conscience is still uneasy. 7. Beethoven is reported to have said that if the world really understood '95

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his music and took it to heart, there would be no more war. That of course could be said of countless other utterances (for instance, the Golden Rule) whose "moral"—usually sententiously stated—is much the same. But his images seem to me to be more self-forgetful than those of the generality of preachers, and they seem to have been taken to heart before they were projected: to come alive, as the tenderness of this sonata comes alive —which helps to make an image convincing. I don't think you can psychoanalyze his kind of conscience out of existence, and I believe there are many later romantic utterances that are of the same order. F. Can we go on to some of those, next time? The song, for instance? There's bound to be a verbal image there, and the problem of making the verbal and the musical images coincide seems to me a difficult one, whether for the composer to solve or for the critic to judge. The man who said he didn't care who made the nation's laws if they would let him make its songs had a point; but it wasn't he who made our songs. 7. The field is vast, and we perhaps shan't find so adequate an illustration as the instrumental music has offered, but it will be interesting. I should think Schubert and Schumann will likely be our chief exponents, but I shan't promise to stick to them alone, or to their songs — for they sometimes sing just as convincingly with instruments. I shan't attempt to give you any precise assignment, nor to follow one myself, but we may come to something.

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A

S We next met, my friend loked to me a little shamefaced, and I suspect that I looked the same to him, for I .had found the apparently simple question he had proposed more perplexing in detail than I had thought it. He began: F. When I asked that we inquire into that fusion of verbal and musical images in the song, it seemed almost too simple to occupy our whole hour. But when I began to think into it I ran into nothing but dead ends. In what I think to be a good song that fusion does happen, and if I'm not mistaken, it is really what makes the song good. But the verbal image, as you focus it on your mental retina, doesn't look like the sort of image we've been inferring from music itself, and I suppose that's what threw me off. Of course, there are innumerable songs in which there is no fusion at all — only the combination of a heedless tune with the rhythmic jingle of a poem — tunes like that to Heine's "Lorelei," which everybody knows. His verbal image is vivid enough, but the tune doesn't even attempt to reflect it. And even the verbal image — the image of feeling, which you expect the music to reflect — isn't very sharply focused. Heine begins by telling you he's sad, although he doesn't know why; and then he tells the story of the siren and the fisherman — a story he can't get out of his head. But you can't see why it should make him sad, unless he himself has been caught in some similar whirlpool of experience, and you're only left to infer that — if you're really supposed to. The only vivid image in the 197

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poem is the fable, but the tune has nothing I can see to do with it, or with Heine's sadness either. There are thousands of songs, just as inept in their music as that one, and I know that's not the sort of song we're trying to study; but they are popular and they persist, and maybe to find out what's wrong with those will help to find out what's right with the good ones. 7. Well, badness is perhaps too obvious to spend time on, but among a thousand popular songs there are a few that are really good, and perhaps, if we ask where the goodness lies, we'll have hit on a beginning for our inquiry. Foster's little Swanee River is a good song, isn't it? What makes it good? F. The two images do fuse, anyhow, all the way through. You won't find the poem in any anthology of English verse, but I don't think it's really bad, and it goes with the music at every minute. I'd like to hear some great singer include that song on his program — unless he attempted to make it bigger than it is, which he probably would do. Everybody, I think, senses the fusion of words and music in it, and nobody cares much whether the poetry is good or not. In fact, almost all the real sense of the words seems to be in the music already, and the image, if you don't inflate it, is so vivid that it hurts. 7. It would be easy for either singer or accompanist to inflate. Foster hardly knew more of harmony than the three primary triads, and I'm always tempted to thicken them (it's easy to do); but I'm sure his version is really better than any other. His image is vivid — I suspect because he probably made both the words and the music at the same time, and made them out of that quiet loneliness that both his words and his music portray. But most songs, of course, have two authors, the poet being the originator of the image; and if we are to get anywhere with our inquiry hadn't we better look first into the verbal image and find out, if we can, what makes a poem singable? F. That was another of my dead ends. I read a lot of English lyric poetry, and while I found most of it interesting, technically as well as imaginatively, hardly any of it seemed really singable. There's some real feeling, but more of what I'd call idea, in Lovelace's "I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more!" but there's mighty little musical imagery in it.* * "To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars": Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind, That from the nunnery

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7. Couldn't you sing about the nunnery of Lucasta's "chaste breast and quiet mind"? F. Yes, but that isn't the essential image of the poem, any more than Heine's sadness is the theme of "Lorelei." This poem is arguing a case, and you don't sing an argument. I've a notion that Lucasta would have rather resented being jilted for so impersonal a Mistress. The argument, if you think into it, is really sound; but the image of Honour is seen, rather than felt, and you won't sing very convincingly until you feel, rather than see, your experience. 7. Then, obvious as it is, haven't we arrived at one fairly certain criterion for the singable lyric poem —that it must project one predominant feeling-image? (Of course, there can be subordinate features, but they've got to contribute to the dominant one.) F. One of my English professors in college defined a lyric poem as "one thought." I didn't, then, quite see what he meant, but it begins to make sense, now, and Lovelace's poem is poetically lyric, even if its image isn't singable. In fact, I often found a stronger musical impulse in an occasional phrase in Paradise Lost than I did in Milton's more formally shaped lyric poems. 7. Then you don't find the conventional stanzas of lyric poetry essential? They may have originated the simple A-B-A pattern that is called song form even in instrumental music. F. Isn't the stanza-pattern rather useless for song? And isn't that fact evident enough in the general superiority of what the Germans call the durchkomponiertes Lied * over the strophic? There are stanzas in the poem of Schubert's Der Wanderer, but if you always heard the music with the words, you'd never know it. 7. There are stanzas in Schubert's Litanei, and his music is wholly strophic in form; but I doubt that you'll call Der Wanderer, compelling as it Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly. True, a new Mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield. Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more. * A song "composed throughout" to fit the sense of its text.

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is, superior to it. It is true that the poet somehow managed to keep the image-stresses of Litanei alike in their position — on the B of the A-B-A form —in the three stanzas, so that the tune never disagrees with the words. That happens very seldom, but when it does, and with an image as compelling as this, I rather think the stanza form contributes to the total image as the song composed throughout to fit the words can't do. Formally, the music in Der Wanderer is much more diffuse than in Litanei, where the one idea is vividly projected. F. I should think the difficulty of keeping the poetic stresses in the same position in successive stanzas — since a poetic image may comprise much varied detail and an unpredictable sequence of intensities up to its climax — was the real reason why the durchkomponiertes Lied was invented. 7. That may well be true, but it doesn't explain what the musicality of the verbal image really is. F. No; and aside from the fact that it must be an image that arouses what you might call a singable concern for the experience itself, I doubt that you can explain it. Even that prescription isn't accurate. Some verbal images, highly suggestive of music, are quite unsingable. For instance, Milton's tremendous description of Satan's expulsion from heaven: Him the Almighty Power Hurl'd headlong, flaming from the ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition. The biggest bass voice in the world, with a Wagnerian orchestra behind it, trying to sing those words would sound puny. I suppose Milton thought of his poem only as read — of course, aloud; yet almost every word has a hint of musical imagery in it, and every word is somehow bulged with meaning to a hundred times its ordinary size. That bulging is just what music, properly added, does to ordinary words; but I don't believe it could do it to these. Yet I can imagine a sonorous speaking voice reading them quite adequately. I think there's some mystery there, but I can't unravel it. 7. Doesn't poetry itself bulge the ordinary sense of words? Neither you nor I can imagine adequate music for that image. But you would call that sonorous voice "musical," wouldn't you? F. I suppose I should, for the quality of its tone would at least appear musical, even though there was no precise pitch, nor more than a faint scansional approximation to the precision of musical rhythm. But even 200

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if the verse, in itself, were consciously musical, as in Southey's poem about how the water comes down at Lodore, or still more in that wonderful little thing of Verlaine's: Les sanglots longs Des violons De 1'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur

Monotone.

I don't think anybody in his senses would try to set it to music. 7. Probably not; but 'why not? You agreed to call the sonorous voice, reading Milton, "musical." Appropriate reading of these two poems would sound even more like music, for the verse is, as you said, "consciously musical." Does that mean that such musical words can't be sung? Or does it mean that there are two kinds of musical words — those that sound like music, and those that suggest music but don't imitate it? F. Well, if you tried to make music to words that already sound like music, wouldn't you be painting the lily? While, if you only sensed the lily in the words, your music might raise that implication into a reality more significant than the flower. Verlaine's verbal violins seem remarkably real when you hear them as words, but to combine them with musical tone — with that of actual violins — would kill the verbal image. /. Then there are two kinds of musical words? F. Apparently; and it looks as if the poetic image of a singable experience will be more provocative of actual song if it leaves the musicmaking to the musicians. 7. Yet, if the poem projects the "one thought" you spoke of even though there's no verbal music in it, and if the experience itself is only incidentally musical in suggestion, may you not still properly call the poem lyrical? For music, although we're contending that it is the language of the emotions, never pretended to be the language of all the emotions. F. Mmmm . . . The range of what you might call poetic emotion is certainly much wider than that of musical emotion. Lovelace's Honour suggests a poetic emotion, but it isn't, as he projects it, musically suggestive. Neither is his "Stone walls do not a prison make." In fact, no image in all the English poetry I read was ever more than incidentally musical. Yet it is good poetry. 201

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7. Isn't it possible, then, that our English poets generally thought of music as an acceptable and even charming decoration of their art, rather than as a contribution to their poetic imagery —as an adjectival rather than a substantive complement to it? F. Lovelace certainly wasn't thinking of music as an indispensable adjunct to his song, nor did any of the other poets I read. In fact, I rather think the texts of our best-known English songs — things like Adelaide Proctor's Lost Chord, for example — are, as poetry, banal. 7. Mightn't you say, then, that our finest English lyric poetry, seen in poetic perspective, is too good — too inclusive in imagery and too skilled in poetic technique — to be set to music? F. That is certainly a novel idea for a musician to propose! But it does suggest one good reason why we have no such song literature as the Germans have. There are many good English tunes — Greensleeves, for example — but you won't find their texts, any more than Foster's, in the anthologies. On the other hand, the best German poetry — poetry that is in every anthology — has been set, and unlike Heine's "Lorelei," very appropriately set, to music. Why is that so? Nobody will suppose (as everybody seemed to when I was a boy) that the Germans had a lot of musical corpuscles in their blood that Englishmen and Americans didn't have. Anyhow, the English composers in Elizabeth's day were the peers of any Continental musicians, and there must have been much really English musical sentiment still alive in Handel's time to have turned that German expatriate — almost, anyhow — into an English composer. Why did that sentiment wane? Why did the English poets expect music to offer only a decorative adjunct to their verse, whereas the Germans made theirs — as you think when you hear Schubert's Winterreise cycle, for example — so that it seems incomplete without the music? 7.1 can't pretend to explain the English lapse, which must have been rooted in other soils as well as in those of music and poetry, but I think I can see at least one sound reason for the ultimate superiority of the Germans in song. I believe it goes back to the Lutheran Reformation and the part that music played in that movement. Luther's religion was sung more effectively than it was preached. The texts of those old German chorales (perhaps in accord with Luther's dictum that every true believer was a priest) were a very different literature from Marot's paraphrases of the Psalms which, with other Scriptural texts, were all that Calvin, for fear of heresy, would countenance as suitable for religious mu202

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sic. The texts of those Lutheran hymns — interpretations of the popular sense, rather than the doctrine, of Christianity — often make rough reading; but they're full of conviction, and the tunes, grown out of the same virgin soil, voice that conviction more forcefully still. F. I think I see what you mean. In college, I belonged to a little group of Bach-lovers. We rehearsed, quite thoroughly, Bach's motet, Jesu meine Freude. The English of the title, in our edition, was "Jesus, Priceless Treasure," * which conveys quite another than the immediate implication of "meine Freude," and the translation of the text of the hymn was often pitiful. One verse begins, Trotz, trotz dem alien Drachenft — which was amiably turned into "Death, death I do not fear thee!" Could vivid conviction be more weakly watered down? /. That's the point I'm trying to make. In that motet each verse of the hymn, except the last, is differently harmonized, to accord with the sense of the text, and the third (your Trotz, trotz) and also the fifth are rather extended variations on the tune. It was Brahms who discovered that these 'were variations (for they are rather remote), and that fact is perhaps not wholly complimentary to the musicologists; but I'm sure Bach didn't intend to write over the heads of all his congregation, and some of them may have seen the point. For the congregation had sung this and a hundred other hymns by heart (their hymnbooks had only the words); and they had all heard, at intervals during the endless services (four hours in the morning and three in the evening) other equally familiar tunes, fugued and canoned and made into cantatas and organ pieces like Bach's Choralvorspiele, by composers who were trying to elevate those simple tunes into musical commentaries, not only on the texts of the hymns but on the sermons to which the hymns were chosen as appropriate. Being believers, they were looking for that illumination; knowing the tunes by heart, they could not fail to grasp at least some of the devices used in their elaboration; and I think Bach's congregations, and a good many others, comprising most of the population, were attending without knowing it the best course in music appreciation that was ever offered. F. I've read that Bach's disillusionment, toward the end of his days, suggests that his congregations weren't very attentive; but those who had * Meine Freude is highly personal in the German, whereas the English "priceless treasure" suggests something in a shop window. t The vigor is untranslatable. The sense is something like "To hell with the old dragon." 203

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charge of the church music seem to have realized its possible meaning, and I can see that the poets, too, might have sensed that value, and have written in expectation of a meaningful, rather than a decorative, musical complement to their verse. And I should think that since their poems were often so plebeian, reaching out (as Trotz, trotz really does) into everyday life, the German people were also getting a sense of the possible relation of music to other than religious experience. I don't suppose the Huguenots were any less devout than the Lutherans, or less sensitive to music; but their application of music to religion (which even the Lutherans sometimes found good enough to adopt into their own services) was far less down to earth. And the regulators of the English service music, who insisted that only one note be sung to a syllable so that the words "could be understanded of the people," perhaps permitted even less of a background for general musical comprehension than the French. But I still don't see how, with such a musical background as Byrd and Morley and Weelkes and others had provided, English poetry remained as unconscious of musical meaning as it seems to have done. /. My argument can't of course be proved —or disproved — statistically, but I think the fervency and the rather uncultured character of the average Lutheran's belief, along with his intuitive sense of meaning in the music he sang, provided an exceptional background or soil for the growth of German musical understanding. I find an interesting parallel, here, to the literary war of the ancients and the moderns. Those people who adhered to the Catholic faith seem generally to have clung to the classics — the Greek and Roman writers — as models, while the more independent-minded, "protesting" peoples cultivated their own less cultured imaginative impulses. F. Then the Sturm-und-Drang movement in Germany, which yielded the sort of lyric poetry that can be sung, was a sort of backlash against the borrowed, courtly, essentially classic tradition? /. In a sense, yes, although there was more than literary tradition involved. In England as well as in Germany, religious controversies were far more widely debated than were the literary. The English were as independent-minded as the Germans, and their literary achievement, in the seventeenth century, was higher. But the Reformation in England, was Calvinistic rather than Lutheran, and the Thirty-nine Articles nowhere suggest that every true believer is a priest. The Church of England bases its authority on the Apostolic Succession, and its ritual, like the 204

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Catholic, is imposed upon the believer rather than derived from his belief. I'm not suggesting that the Anglican's belief was less fervent than the Lutheran's, but music — even Byrd's (who remained at heart a Catholic) — wasn't, for the Anglican, what it was for the Lutheran; and I suspect that English church music, like English lyric poetry, grew out of cultured rather than virgin soil. F. Then that's why so much of English lyric poetry (Shakespeare's included) is what you called the "Lark" — "conceited"? /. I used that word because Shakespeare did — and after him a very wise professor of English of my acquaintance (while commenting on "Drink to me only with thine eyes"). It had not for Shakespeare what the learned nowadays love to call a pejorative sense — the sense in which we ordinarily use the word. It implied, rather, an active imagination — one concerned with the niceties of art. Every artist is concerned with those — often, overconcerned. But just where it becomes superfluous is a question nobody can answer — least of all, those who, in any period, are actively concerned with the pursuit of contemporary movements in art. I do think the pursuit will almost inevitably lead to the sort of dead end that you and I ran into with today's question, and maybe, while we are backing out of the one we've run into, we may be entering another. But it looks as if the Germans, in both instrumental music and song, had found the longest open road. F. You had one good reason for their success, and nobody will dispute their achievement; but didn't they often also run into the dead end of sentimentality? I'm thinking particularly of Heine's little "Du bist wie eine Blume." Isn't he, in that poem, merely gazing on beauty and innocence and purity and wishfully laying priestly hands on its head in the hope that it may reach heaven untarnished? To my notion, that's a flimsy Victorian sentiment.* * The poem reads:

Du bist wie eine Blume So hold und schon und rein; Ich schau' dich an, und Wehmut Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein. Mir 1st, als ob ich die Ha'nde Aufs Haupt dir legen sollt', Betend dass Gott dich erhalte So rein und schon und hold. (Thou'rt like a budding flower, so sweet and fair and pure; I gaze on thee and sorrow creeps deep into my heart. Meseems that I should gently lay hands upon thy head, praying that God may receive thee so pure and fair and sweet.)

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7. Every composer seems to have set the poem in that sense —even Schumann. But must you read it so naively? Isn't there a much sharper antithesis in it —between the Du (the flower) and the Ich (the poet) who is no budding flower? Shouldn't the emphasis be on those words? And as for the priestly hands, isn't the experience implied here very like that in Heine's "Bergidylle," where, pagan though he confesses himself to the simple mountain maid, he still dubs himself a Ritter von dem heil'gen Geist — a knight of the Holy Ghost? F. Mmmm . . . That's certainly a different image, and you can read the poem so. But if you did, you wouldn't set Victorian music to it, and if you really implied the experience, you'd make a better song. But could it be done? /. / couldn't do it, but I think Hugo Wolf, if he had tried, might have come very close to it. He has done just as difficult things, and I'll show you, presently, a similar comparison that will illustrate, if not prove, my point. This instance, however, has somewhat sharpened our vision of the poetic and the musical images. A shift in emphasis, from verb to subject, is enough to alter the perspective in which the verbal image is seen so that an altogether different musical setting will be demanded. And that seems to hint quite clearly at the way the poet must use his words if he is to create a singable poem. His problem is to arouse concern by evoking an image of what we may call singable experience. (That image needrit be equivocal.) The business of the composer is to portray that concern. And when the two efforts coincide in character, you may get a significant song. That, anyhow, is something like the fusion of the two images that we started to look for. F. And if the poet tries to portray the concern itself — to use words that tell how he feels instead of telling why he feels — I think he's likely to fail. Isn't Goethe's little "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" an instance? * * The poem reads:

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, Weiss was ich leide. AUein und abgetrennt Von aller Freude, Seh' ich ans Firmament Nach jener Seite. Ach! der mich liebt und kennt 1st in der Weite. Es schwindelt mir, es brennt Mein Eingeweide. Nur wer, etc. (He who alone has yearned knows what I suffer. Alone and set apart from every 206

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When I first read it, I thought it really moving, but when I looked at it the other day, it hardly disturbed me. Mignon begins by naming her two emotions, yearning and suffering — to my mind, an ineffective appeal for sympathy — and then adduces as the cause for her suffering the empty firmament in which she's separated from the one who knows and loves her; then she complains that she's dizzy and her insides are burning — as if she were talking to the doctor. That isn't an experience to sing about. /. Eingeweide, here, means something more spiritual than "innards," and the singer is only a little orphan, torn (you never learn how) from every association of an apparently richly endowed childhood. She is often in company with the old Harper, who is similarly an exile, and those two are supposed to sing the words as "a sort of irregular duet." I confess I don't see how the text could be so treated. Schubert tried to do it, but didn't succeed very well, and his best rendering is for a single voice. He made four attempts to set the poem, and so did Beethoven, whose fourth essay seems to me the best, not only of his attempts but of all those I know. His others are strophic, the second verse beginning with Ach! der mich liebt, etc., which fits rather ill to the music for Nur wer, etc. The fourth is "composed throughout," but with the opening strain repeated at the end. That strain, simple as it is, seems to me right (Example 33). What do you think of it?

EXAMPLE 33

F. It's right enough, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far, and some of it seems to me more literal than the words. Aren't those rests that break up Allein . . . und ab- . . . getrennt overdescriptive? Isn't the agitation over her dizziness almost operatic? And anyhow, isn't the lilt of the 6-8 rhythm too springy for a mind so depressed as Mignon's? 7. As for the rhythm, aren't you ignoring Beethoven's Assai Adagio"? It can make all the difference. In that tempo I think a skillful singer could joy, the endless universe I see all 'round me. Ah, he who knows and loves me is far away. I'm growing faint, a fire consumes my spirit. He who alone, etc.) 207

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make the rests more truly descriptive than they seem to you, and could similarly minimize the drama. But I was really inquiring only into the first strain. Did Tchaikovsky, who made the most popular setting of the poem, realize the verbal image any better? F. His version, when I first heard it, seemed very appealing, and if you interpret Sehnsucht as he did, I suppose it still may. That opening vocal phrase, coming in later in the piano against the voice, cuts deep; but if you think of this music as sung by a little waif like Mignon, it won't do at all. It's full of self-pity — which isn't Sehnsucht; and if that's what is wrong with this piece, I think I was right in saying that the fusion of the verbal and musical images is what makes a good song — or what makes a song good. 7.1 think you were right, and maybe we'd better turn to the two examples I spoke of, which are musically more significant than any we've talked of so far. We've been trying to formulate a prescription for the singable lyric poem —which was perhaps a foolish effort in the first place. You can't reduce that sort of imagery to a formula. All we've seen is that, while singable words needn't be perfectly formed, poetically, they must project what we've called a singable experience; and while we are sure we know, we can't tell what a singable experience is. There are of course numerous songs that project no more than an enjoyable musical experience (most of the coloratura literature, for example). You and I think that any music (and consequently the song) is better if it projects adequately a significant human experience. We can't tell how either poet or composer is to do that, but I think we can tell whether or not it has been done. Two settings of Morike's "An eine Aeolsharfe" by Brahms and Wolf, if we compare them, will tell us something of how well the task has been done. The poem runs thus: "Angelehnt an die Epheuwand dieser alten Terrasse, du, einer luftgebornen Muse geheimnisvolles Saitenspiel, fang' an, fange wieder an deine melodische Klage! Ihr kommet, Winde, fern heriiber, ach! von des Knaben, der mir so lieb war, frisch griinendem Hiigel. Und Friihlingsbliiten unterweges streifend, ubersattigt mit Wohlgeriichen, wie suss bedrangt ihr dies Herz! Und sauselt her in die Saiten, angezogen von wohllautender Wehmut, wachsend im Zug meiner Sehnsucht, und hinsterbend wieder. Aber auf einmal, wie der Wind heftiger herstosst, ein holder Schrei der Harfe wiederholt, mir zu siissem Erschrecken, meiner Seele plotzliche Regung; 208

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und hier die voile Rose streut, geschiittelt, all' ihre Blatter vor meine Fiisse." * ... Do you find a musical image in it? F. Definitely; but not, I should think, a very new one. Haven't poets, from time immemorial, sung the sorrow of lost love? For that, surely, is the theme of this image — the "one thought" of the poem. 7. Has love much changed its character during your immemorial time? I suspect the French phrase, Plus fa change, plus c'est la meme chose, applies to it as well as to other matters in which history repeats itself. Look at the poem a little more closely. What do you find as the "singable" image of experience? F. That of a woman who has come to this terrace to mourn; but just what the occasion of her mourning is is not so clear. I'm sure there was a lover (she says, der mir so lieb war), and the green "hill" the winds come from must be his grave. And this isn't the first time she has come here, else she wouldn't say, "once again begin"; so that her grief must by now have softened, else it wouldn't — as it seems here — be all but submerged in the sweetness of the spring flowers. But those falling rose petals, at the end, do rather symbolize her concern. . . . The image is more subtle than I thought it at first. /. And not, you'll agree, too easy for music to project. But the poem does offer a good many opportunities for the fusion of the verbal and the musical images. Of course, the wind-blown harp would be "illustrated" by any composer, even though, as mere object, it isn't the chief feature of the image. Then, there's the sweetness — whether of the flowers or the memory —which I suspect Morike himself "illustrated," for in her words about it there are seven w's, all stressed, and that vowel seems to me both to sound like music and to suggest it. The syntax, almost * The poem, unrhymed, is in so free a verse structure that it loses little when printed as prose. In the following translation, which conforms to the rhythm of the original, I believe I have more nearly projected its sense than does any of the several English versions that appear in different editions of the music. A few phrases, however, fit Wolf's setting better than that of Brahms: "Leaning here on the ivied wall of this ages-old terrace, thou, of some airborne Muse the mystic and secret-laden instrument, begin, once again begin thy soft melodious mourning! Ye come, ye winds, from far horizons — e'en from that youth's, my dearly belov'd one's, fresh-burgeoning earth-mound. And springtime blossoms, bordering my pathway, pouring out your delicious odors, how sweet your hold on my heart! You whisper into the harp strings, now attuned to my own intimate sorrow, waxing along with my yearning, and waning as it wanes. But, of a sudden, as the wind rises more strongly, the harp strings' wilder outcry now renews, with a kind of sweet terror, all my soul's immediate sorrow; and here the full-blown rose now strews, wind-shaken, all her fair petals beneath my footsteps." 209

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throughout, seems purposely inverted beyond the usual German usage — patently to create a very appropriate suspense; and while you won't expect to find a characteristic tonal tension with every w, I think its implication might well, in some slight measure, dictate the general character of the music. . . . 7 think your sense of the verbal image is just; but could the poem (like "Du bist wie eine Blume") be read in another sense? For that would yield quite another musical image than the one your reading implies. F. Well, two words, Knabe (boy) and Hugel (hill), seem to me a little obscure. Is Knabe a usual word for a lover? And Hiigel doesn't ordinarily mean grave. If, then, you ignore the Klage (lament) she invokes from the harp, or can find another reason for it than death, I suppose you could see her Sehnsucht — and indeed her whole concern — as occasioned merely by her lover's absence. Or you could even take Knabe as "son"; but that is pretty farfetched, even though it doesn't ignore the lament. Either reading weakens the poem, to my mind. 7. Well, let's see if we can tell in what sense Brahms and Wolf understood it. Here is Brahms's invocation (Example 34). What implication does it give to the words?

EXAMPLE 34

F. None, in particular. The descent on the A flat minor triad is somber, but neither this beginning nor the rest of the invocation seems to me to anticipate the plaint that is to come. It looks as if the poem — or at any rate the image we see in it — hadn't bit him very deeply. Does he perhaps think the Knabe is still alive? 7. Perhaps that question is too factual to have a musical answer, but the translation in one American edition (Krehbiel's) speaks of the winds as having come "a long journey, Ah, from the lover I loved so dearly, past 210

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grass-covered hillsides" and that translator seems to have drawn from the poem no intimation whatever of death. Brahms, of course, worked from the poem itself; but maybe he saw it as that translator did. . . . Let's see if Wolf's image is any nearer our own. What do you make of his Invocation (Example 35)?

EXAMPLE 35

F. It is really in recitative, like Brahms's, and the voice part, by itself, isn't much different, although it is a little more tense and declamatory. But it's on the C sharp minor triad, and that F sharp minor chord against the G# gives the whole line a quite different pull. Even if we hadn't debated it, I think I should have from that tension a premonition of the image we've found in the poem; and the D and G naturals in the next phrase, unobtrusive as they are, are still the right notes for that image. The syncopated B, for du, gives the rhythm enough impetus to carry it over the long appositive phrase to Saitenspiel; the octave drop to geheimnisvolles seems to imply the sense of that word; and the unexpected chord on the last syllable of Muse tells you, as I think Morike did (but Brahms didn't), what sort of spirit is being invoked. The suspense of Morike's syntax, anyhow, is rendered much better. . . . I don't believe Wolf saw the Knabe as alive. 7. I'm sure he didn't, but we'd better wait and see, with Brahms. The harp itself is wordless, so that both composers must use it only to accompany the singer's plaint; and both, I'm sure, do just that. But the singer's image, although it may envisage death, is now more sweet than bitter, and to render that image rightly is a problem of no mean subtlety. What does Brahms's beginning (Example 36) "say" about the image? F. The harp is sweet, as it should be, but the voice seems to me too placid even to hint at bitterness. That Fb, under Ach! von des Knaben, 211

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is only a little dark, and the symmetrical rhythm for der mir so lieb 'war makes even the F[j sound perfunctory. I can see that the voice mustn't get too bitter, but if those two phrases were sung with the inflection that would imply the death that is in the background of our image, they would sound overdrawn. I'm more sure than ever that the Knabe, for Brahms, is alive. Was he so for Wolf? For, in a way, that's the crucial question for our image. 7. I'm not sure Wolf's setting of the same words will answer it, but while he keeps the sweetness we found in the poem very much in the foreground, and while your singer could make Wolf's phrases placid enough to suggest little else, I think the rhythming of Ach! von des Knaben, with the insistence on E and the triplets (especially the syncopation on grunendem}, is wonderfully in accord with the poetic image as we've read it. Wolf's harp is a little more sonorous than Brahms's, and he has a melodic figure above it which "motivates" the whole piece (as Brahms's slight melodic figure doesn't); yet it never turns bitter (Example 37). Am I not right? F. The music is, anyhow. Brahms's melody is very smooth and symmetrical, but his notes for Ach! von des Knaben, etc., don't seem to have anything to do with the words — unless, indeed, that youth is just over the hill, in which case nothing matters much. His harp figure, too, is so short that its ictus can hardly help being monotonous; and isn't the high A{? for frisch, even if it is sung piano, overstressed? It quite overtops the image of the lover. Wolf keeps the notes about the winds in the middle register, so that the next phrases, although they're not strained, really hurt. And that syncopated attack on grunendem does bring out the greenness and the peculiar value of the u. I. I'm not so sure Brahms's harp figure must get monotonous, but 212

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Wolf's doesn't. It is long enough so that it can be varied in length, and can begin on "two"; and the motive in the right hand is really two motives, so that its first three or four chords can stand alone. He uses only those to accompany the image of the flowers and their sweetness, and the second half, which has more momentum, is reserved for the rising wind and the harp's outcry. F. Do you take them as "leading-motives," then? I. Your question should be, Did Wolf (not I) take them so? And if you'll allow a leading-motive to be allusive rather than representative, I think I'd have to answer yes. Wolf was an ardent Wagnerian, and must have been sympathetic to that technique; but I really don't know where to draw the line, even with the Wagnerian motive, between allusion and representation. The arpeggio figure, for both Wolf and Brahms, is patently representative of the harp, but it isn't, as a literal imitation, in the least allusive. Yet you can't imagine a setting of this poem without a harp persistently sounding, and, for the singer, that Saitenspiel seems to me powerfully allusive. So there you are. Now you see it, and now you don't. F. The verbal image isn't very sharply focused, and I suppose that 213

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blurring was intentional. Seen images are sweet, but those half-seen are sweeter. The singer invokes the harp, which obediently begins to play; but her words are then addressed to the winds that excite the harp strings. But whether the delicious odors are brought by the wind, or come from flowers here under her feet, isn't, I think, wholly clear. (Not that it makes much difference.) And it is the wind that whispers into the strings, even though the subject of sauselt, which must be ihr, could be the "you" which is the flowers that grip her heart. (Again, it doesn't make much difference, for whatever ihr may be, it is "brought by wellsounding sorrow," which, frankly, I don't understand; and yet the image of her concern is vivid.) 7.1 can't help you — or myself — with those words; but I'm sure Wolf did everything possible to make them contribute to the image. And he is particularly careful to make the phrase, mir zu siissem Erschrecken, parenthetical — which Brahms wasn't, for he makes a rest after Harfe and (in all the versions I've seen) omits the commas after iviederholt and Erschrecken, making mir sound as if it were the object of iviederholt, which of course it can't be, and almost making Regung a kind of object of Erschrecken. (KrehbiePs edition translates iDiederholt mir, etc., "call me back to a passionate terror.") Morike is hard to understand, but he isn't talking that kind of nonsense, and it's a pity we can't have better translations of our favored foreign songs. If really singable translations existed, and were sung, I've a notion the musical images in those songs would be a lot more vivid for those who "never listen for the words." F. You're really raising the vexed question not only of song but of opera in English, aren't you? 7. In a sense, yes; and we haven't time to go into it. But isn't that, really, one aspect of the question we're raising — that of the fusion of the verbal and the musical images in the song? What has happened to this verbal image, both from our closer attention to the words, and — as far as we have been able to illustrate it without competent performers to effect it — from the fusion of word and tone? F. Well, the verbal image — or rather, the verbally suggested image, for what you apprehend isn't merely the factual experience but the concern that experience arouses — turns out to be the really governing factor. It determines the character of the music. If you were to sing Brahms's setting with the vocal inflections that Wolf's setting demands, you'd overdraw almost every phrase. Brahms — for what looks like con214

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formity to formal design —sets the phrase, Em holder Schrei, etc., as nearly as possible to the placid melodic curve he used for Ihr kommet, Winde (Example 38), which not only falsifies the verbal syntax, as you said, but makes the terror oversweet; and it sentimentalizes the Seele by minimizing the suddenness of its emotion. (I still don't understand either what a susses Erschrecken may be, nor why her emotion is so sudden, unless it was aroused by the outcry of the harp; but I'm willing to take her word for it, and it does heighten the image of her concern.) And there's no implication in Brahms's music for the falling petals. They just fall — of course, very sweetly. But they fall in that gust of wind that also raises the harp's outcry, and for her those two facts are related.

EXAMPLE 38

/. Neither we nor Morike himself can put that implication into words, and if we don't know exactly what it is, we can't tell whether or not it is in the music. But Wolf does meticulously follow Morike's syntax and its implied verbal stresses (Example 39). The accompaniment is all on the second of the two opening motives; the rose petals fall to a fading of it; and that at least makes a generally appropriate design for the implication we're sure is in the words. And he doesn't stop there. The whole twobar motive of the accompaniment to Ihr kommet goes on in the piano, and fades, on what is really an extended plagal cadence, into a silence that leaves her standing there until she, too, disappears. Isn't this a fairly complete fusion of verbal and musical images?

EXAMPLE 39

F. A more complete fusion is unimaginable, I should think, and while the romantic tang is strong, I don't, any longer, find the image sentimental. The Brahms, on the other hand, at least by comparison, is almost offensively so. 2I

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7. This is a relatively early song of Brahms, and we shouldn't be too critical. He hadn't, at school, much literary training, so that such a masterly management of a sophisticated rhythm as you find in the later Sapphische Ode, or such imagery as that in Feldeinsamkeit, could as yet hardly be expected. And he doubtless thinks of song as primarily the utterance of a merely accompanied singer — which is a quite rational notion. But it compels the invention of melody in the purer sense, and it is evident that he was trying to embody the verbal image of this poem in melodic lines that would conform to that rule. His accompaniment, although it contributes to the general image of the harp, is nothing more than that. Wolf's whole concept is different. His song is really a duet, the accompanist being the singer's partner. His melody, like Wagner's, isn't a single line in a single voice. It is a line, but it isn't necessarily on the surface, or in the singing voice; and it is rather the line of the whole musical thought than a definite melodic progression, so that if you try to isolate it you can't find it. His first phrase (for Ihr kommet, Winde, fern heruber) is as purely melodic as if Schubert had conceived it, but it never returns, even though its four bars of accompaniment recur, literally, for Und sauselt her, etc.; those four bars thus function formally, although you may fail to note the identity; and unless you're a very inexperienced listener, I think you will find the line of thought wholly consistent, even if you don't see it as a single line of melody. Nobody would try to compose such a poem as this strophically, but it seems to me that Brahms is trying to retain as much of strophic coherence as he can; and some of your disparagement of his effort lies, I think, against that attempt, which may or may not be an error, according to your point of view. F. And on the same ground, the inexperienced listener would probably prefer Brahms's version to Wolf's — unless he paid as much attention to the verbal image as we have done, and as Wolf did. . . . What a nuisance that tower of Babel committed! It is hardly more possible to translate a poem into another language than to translate music into words; yet, you'll hardly get the musical definition (for it is that) of such words as these unless you can apprehend the fusion of the verbal and the musical images. 7. You'll miss a lot, of course, if you don't understand the words; but if the music is sensitively projected I think you'll get a good deal of the image from it alone. Let's see. You play the voice part on that piano, and 216

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I'll play the accompaniment on this one. Read the words while you play, so that you give them their proper emphasis, but listen to your notes as music. I know this won't be what the scientist would call a controlled experiment, but I think it would give to any listener a considerable intimation of the essentials of the image of experience. . . . There! You "sang" very well. What did you get? F. Much more than I expected. And I think it would prove to any listener that music can speak to the same purpose as words — can, in fact, define them, when that purpose is to evoke the concern that experience arouses. The verbal image was in my mind all the time; I was looking for a musical definition of it; you can say, then, that I read that image into the notes. But if we play Brahms's version with the same verbal image in mind, I should have a very different musical definition of it. Wolf's music, at any rate, defines the words, as we read them, more amply than the words define themselves. 7. Did our playing, while it of course couldn't compete with actual singing, give you the sort of satisfaction you get from a well-made instrumental composition? F. You asked me to keep the words in mind in order to give the vocal line its intended contour, so that I suppose I wasn't hearing the piece as merely instrumental; yet that contour seemed to me thoroughly musical and satisfying, even without the verbal image. 7. Then the process of song composition doesn't differ essentially from instrumental composition. Form and syntax are alike? F. I see no essential difference. Why do you ask? 7. I'm only trying to substantiate our hypothesis a little more firmly. If there's no real difference, then Op. 90, for example, may project the significance of verbally undefinable experience just as truly as we find this music projecting the sense of Morike's poem. If music can convey, not the verbal sense but the concern that poem aroused in Wolf and in Brahms — patently, two different concerns; if we can answer fairly confidently so crucial a question for concern as that you raised — whether the Knabe was living or dead — and can answer it by reference to the music alone (for we had nothing else), then it seems to me that our assumption that the musical image is an image of experience, or that it at least may be such an image, is undeniable. F. Didn't our study of the second Kyrie establish that assumption? 217

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7. To our satisfaction, yes; but it might be argued that we were reading that implication into the music out of the oft-forgotten fact that the three-fold elelson is liturgically an address to the three Persons of the Trinity. In many musical settings of the mass, the second Kyrie is merely a repetition of the first. Bach's first Kyrie could hardly have been so repeated; but it might be argued —in fact, you did begin to argue —that his second Kyrie was designed only to give the ear a desirable musical contrast. It does that, to be sure; I shan't be surprised if your purist friend whom you're going to bring, one day, to our discussion, will argue that there's really no factual basis for any other conclusion; but I'd like to have as big a bag of ammunition as I can collect before he comes, for his argument, to him, will be just as convincing as ours is to us. F. That will prove quite true; but what sort of ammunition, in addition to what you already have, are you looking for? Indeed, is it more ammunition you need, or a more accurate aim of your gun? /. Perhaps that's it. We've come fairly close to what we see as the bull's-eye, but your friend may say that we've not even seen the target, which, I suspect, he will say is "pure" musical enjoyment, or musical interest, or maybe some other sort of excitement that we don't even know how to name. We have adduced a good many enjoyable musical devices as contributing to our musical images of experience. Those devices can be, and to a larger extent than we've recognized they ought to be, enjoyed as musical devices, even though our interest in the image they evoke is greater than in the device. You and I also enjoy the devices as such, but we find them far more enjoyable when they contribute toward an image of concern. He, if he's a real purist, will think our image irrelevant — something of a newspaper account of an event which, as musical event, is beyond the reporter's ken. F. Well, although John is a lover of opera, he hasn't much use for Wagner. Yet mightn't we get some ammunition out of Wagner? The leading-motive is a musical device, but it has a definite extramusical reference. I don't know how useful a study of it may be for your debate with him, but Wagner's and Strauss's manipulation of it sometimes seems to me vividly suggestive and sometimes only perplexing. We'll be dealing with the same fusion — that of verbal and musical images that make the song what it is, but maybe there will be some additions. /. For me, Tristan is the most consistent in its use of the leading-motive 218

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of all the Wagner operas. We of course can't go into the whole texture of the opera, but the more cogent motives may, if we can find out what they really mean, contribute something to our ammunition. Take the Preludes first; see what their motives mean in themselves; then see whether what you've inferred from them is borne out when they combine with words and action.

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M

if FRIEND'S face showed a grumbling frown when we next met, and he began without preamble: F. This leading-motive leads to more dead ends than the song did. Before I began to think about it I thought I knew what a Leitmotiv —a. leading-motive — was; but when I tried to define it I found that I couldn't distinguish it — except structurally, as an operatic device —from any other meaningful musical theme. The term originated, I suppose, with Wagner's maturing musical method, but it seems to me that the thing existed long before he began. There are lots of characteristic motives in Mozart and Gluck, and probably in Monteverdi. And what is Beethoven's sarabande-opening for the Egmont overture that recurs, diminished, as second theme in the Allegro, or that long low C exploding into a chord that hits you like a bullet at the beginning of the Coriolanus — whzt are those but leading-motives? And isn't even that theme we looked at from the C minor violin sonata as pregnant with dramatic meaning as any operatic motive, even though the drama is "enacted" only by a pianist and a violinist? 7. Our hypothesis is evidently at work in your mind, and I of course don't want to inhibit it. A leading-motive must be, as you say, a meaningful musical theme like that of the sonata. But its "lead" is more definite. It points to something in the action of the drama — often, a person or an object, but more likely a psychological force resident in that object. It 220

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doesn't, however, pretend to portray the object, although the association may be immediate enough so that it seems to be portrayed. All it really suggests is the force. You establish — or fail to establish — the association. F. Then my association focuses the meaning more sharply because I form an image of the object, but association doesn't really heighten the motive's intrinsic musical meaning? 7. How could it? Our hypothesis assumes, doesn't it, that the intrinsic meaning of a musical phrase lies in its portrayal of our concern for an object of experience, and not in its portrayal of that object. Any object, then, which seems to hint at that concern may be imaged as its origin; but it is the listener who takes the objective hint, and the range of actual reference in the motive is, for him, dependent on his sensitivity to its inherent implication. When he is watching the unfolding of a dramatic action, the range of his association will naturally be bounded by that action, and the reference of the motive will be more precise than when the action — as with the sonata — is only imaginary. But I can't see any essential difference between your sonata-theme and the leading-motive. The sonata-theme portrayed the response to an offense — or a thousand offenses; but it didn't describe the offense. F. But mayn't you, if you associate the motive only with some definite feature or object of the drama, as the guidebooks seem to do, be narrowing its frame of reference while you sharpen its definition? 7. You certainly may. I had a rather vivid illustration of that blunder, the first time I heard the Ring. Just as the houselights were going down a very voluminous lady shoved her daughter and herself into the two vacant seats beside me. The music began, and every time a new motive appeared she jabbed her elbow into her daughter's side and hoarsely whispered the name she had learned for the motive: The Rhine; Alberich; The Gold, and so on. It wouldn't have been so bad if the natural law that action and reaction are equal and opposite in direction hadn't also operated, but her jabs reacted upon me in accord with the law, and her whispers instructed a good many others as well as me. I must admit she had learned her lesson from the guidebook very thoroughly, but I doubt that she sensed in the music much more than the names she had learned. F. Then the leading-motive, at its best, has an indeterminate frame of reference — a frame that is, or should be, expanded out of its intrinsic portrayal of concern? At its worst, it is only a signpost? 7.1 should think so. At its simplest (which isn't necessarily its worst) 221

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it may refer to a single "object," like the Aeolian harp in our two songs; at its best its objective reference may prove to be all but undiscernible, as with the first Tristan motive (Example 40), for which I suspect we'll have difficulty in finding a name. While Wagner, through his handling of it, imparted unsuspected force to the leading-motive device — made it, in fact, "lead" —he never used that term for it. He called his themes Grundthemen, and handled them very much as the symphonist handles his "subjects." Indeed, he was almost as much a symphonist as a dramatist — with the result that you often have to look for his opera down in the orchestra pit instead of on the stage. F. Certainly, if you're going to grasp his whole dramatic idea, you've got to keep one eye — or one ear — on the orchestra almost constantly, and I suppose that's why he was so long misunderstood. Even the most compelling voice, singing the most appealing melody, but with nothing more than a "big guitar" for accompaniment, could never evoke the complex feeling-images you constantly get from Tristan. I. His melody, although he called it "endless," is certainly not the continuous, self-contained musical line you get from the singer in the Italian opera. In fact, his singer's part often looks as if it had been plastered onto an already existent orchestral texture, and I suspect that even we, who think we're wholly familiar with his method, are prone to look for the core of the idea in the vocal utterance and miss the real musical image because it isn't projected by the feature we're attending to. Still, that may have been his fault as well as ours. He, also, too often commits the blunder the French are so careful to avoid: il dit tout — he says everything — instead of stimulating his hearer's imagination by projecting the really salient feature and letting it work in his hearer's mind. When you say too much you are likely to be heard too little. F. I find that more true of Wagner's words, than of his music; but if you use too many words and then set them to music, you do doubly tire your listener. That long love-duet in the second act is really too long, and it is so —at least in part —because much of its text, unless I'm mistaken, is just plain silly. His images of Day and Night as metaphors for the two worlds in which the lovers must physically or spiritually live are really vivid; but even about them the language gets terribly flowery. For instance, that maundering about "this sweetest wordlet, and" sounds more like 'Any and 'Arriet than like Tristan and Isolde. 7. If the text of the whole opera were no better than the words in that 222

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scene, I doubt that we should have chosen to talk about the music at all. But the text isn't all so silly as that. I find myself really interested in the drama of the first act, quite apart from its music. If it were merely spoken, it would seem too short; but it takes more time to develop a musical image than a verbal one, and operatic texts have to be condensed if they are to be effectively set. Do you remember Othello's phrase: "O, lago! The pity of it, lago!"? That word pity, addressed at that terrible moment to the most pitiless villain in all drama, is as rich in feeling-imagery as any musical motive could be. But Boito, understanding the composer's problem, omits it entirely from his operatic version of the scene — and omits it, I'm sure, because the musical current of Othello's rage couldn't endure an interruption for the musical portrayal of the sense of pity. Its momentum would be quite lost. But Isolde's rage, as she tells Brangane of her experience, is so managed that important musical motives can be interjected against the all but continuous "narration" theme. F. I confess I never understood the purport of that sailor's song at the beginning until I read the text, and so I didn't see that Isolde, hearing him sing about that Irish "girl he left behind him," forgets that she's a princess and thinks the sailor is singing about her. Now, reminded that she is being taken to Cornwall as King Mark's bride, she is ready to sink the whole ship and herself with it. When I grasped her response to the sailor's song, I understood her temperament much better. And her Narration, as they call it. 7. Isolde's Narration has, as background, a single, persistent motive which, in itself, portrays no more than the vague unrest that any chromatic descent is likely to suggest. (The line is very nearly that of Tosti's "Goodbye!") But it can be slowed or hastened — and, being a somewhat perfunctory vehicle, interrupted — for the interjection of other, more definitely referential motives. F. And they do point up her determination. 7. They do, indeed. She is bound she will have it out with Tristan, and sends her maid, Brangane, to command him to wait on her. He evades the summons until Brangane repeats it verbatim, and then, with Tristan's permission, his man, Kurwenal, sends back an insulting answer. Only from Isolde's Narration does Brangane learn that "Tantris," the Cornish knight she once helped to nurse, was the slayer of Morold, Isolde's fiance; that when Isolde found, from the nick in Tantris's sword, that it was he who had slain her betrothed, she raised that sword to kill him, but the 22

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wounded man's eyes, as he looked up from his pallet, melted her heart. And now Tantris, after having "sworn a thousand oaths of gratitude and loyalty," comes back as Tristan, seeking her hand "for Cornwall's tired old ruler —for King Mark, Tristan's erne!" It is evident that Brangane's solicitous wheedling won't calm Isolde's rage. F. Perhaps nothing less than a magic potion could calm it, but, up to the crisis, the situation is psychologically quite credible, and although the drinking of the potion makes tremendous theater, I can't help feeling that it vitiates the rationale of the drama. It makes you believe what you know can't be true. Even LSD could hardly work that miracle. 7. Mmmm . . . If it really makes you believe in it, perhaps it isn't wholly untrue. If the effect of the potion is no more than the miracle it seems to be, the scene is a lie; and if the motives that accompany it make you believe it, they're lies, too. One of those is this opening motive of the Prelude. Do you think that's a lie? (Example 40.)

EXAMPLE 40

F. When I first heard it I played it on the piano from a vocal score I'd just bought. I don't believe any other single phrase of music bowled me over as that one did. I knew the legend, but not Wagner's version of it, so I had no precise notion of what it might be supposed to mean; but I remember saying to myself, out loud, that that was the truest love-music I'd ever heard. I still think so. 7. Then if the potion was mere magic, this can't be the motive for the potion? (Ernest Newman, in his early Study of Wagner, took it so.) F. Certainly not, unless you accept the miracle. 7. Well, we'll have to check the sense of the motive against the text and the action; but perhaps we'd better follow the plan I suggested and see what the music itself seems to say before we do that. Can you see anything in the notes that supports the truth you felt them to project? F. Well, the most striking thing is of course the tang of that first chord. I suppose the approach to it must be partly responsible for its effect, but those three unharmonized notes don't sound in the least unusual. Maybe 224

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that's why the chord does sound so, for if I heard it by itself I think I should call it, quite simply, a supertonic yth-chord in E flat minor, or a leading-tone yth in G flat. But it doesn't sound so, nor is it spelled so, nor does it resolve into either of those keys. I can't account for it out of my rather hazily remembered harmony book, but neither its tension nor its behavior is like that of any ordinary yth-chord. /. I've seen a good many different analyses of it, but I think you've hit on the real secret of its effect in saying that it doesn't sound like a ythchord, even though it is the precise audible equivalent of one. The signature, if Wagner knew how to spell music (and I think he did) indicates either C major or A minor; and since the phrase ends on a quite undisguised dominant yth in A minor, I should think one might assume that it also begins in that key. The three introductory notes (which, with the D#, sometimes occur as a separate motive, but one of less interest than that we're thinking of) will then be 1-6-5 m A minor. But the A is so short and so rhythmically weak that you would hardly take it as keynote; the F is so long and so heavily stressed that it sounds like a tonic, rather than the active note that it really is; and the E moves so soon to Dfl: that it, again, doesn't sound like the rest-tone — the 5th of A minor —that it really is. Ambiguity is as real in these notes as in the chord, although it is less striking; yet, however you take the whole phrase, it makes musical sense. F. Even now I've got to think an A minor triad on that first note before I can hear the F as 6 in that key. I believe I've always assumed the F to be a tonic, or possibly the 3 in D minor; but neither of those notions makes the chord any clearer. Nor do I yet see the chord as in A minor. That G# doesn't sound like the leading-tone it must be if it is in that key. 7. It doesn't; yet it is just that: it "leads" to A, just as it should; the E goes not to the E[j you thought you heard, but to D#, an augmented 6th above the F in the bass, and the B is an augmented 4th above the F. Didn't your harmony book describe a chord which it figured as 6+/4+/3 and called a "French 6th"? F. Yes; but this, if you figure it, is a 6+/4+/2+; and that isn't the same thing. 7. It isn't, but it becomes precisely that. The G# — the 2+ — after having sounded long enough to make you think it is an A(j, goes quite regularly up to A, so that on "six" you do hear your French 6th; but the A, instead of falling back to Gf, has an upward momentum that makes it 225

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take another "appoggiatura" step up to B, the 5th of the dominant yth of what is unmistakably A minor. F. Mmmm . . . Then all the intervals in the first chord are augmented intervals, just as they are spelled, and they function so, except that the D#, the augmented 6th, allowably goes down to D, the yth of the dominant. /. The intervals do function as augmented, but their tension is so far mitigated by being combined into the equivalent of a gentle yth-chord that what you hear is a sort of fascinating musical double-entendre. F. Isn't it more like a purely musical metaphor, in which the tones assert one identity while they really imply quite another? /. Is your old purist ghost rising again? I suppose you may see the notes so, but if you carry that notion to its logical conclusion, you'll be contending that every enharmonic succession is metaphoric. Wagner, anyhow, was quite aware of the ambiguity, for he sometimes spells the chord as an augmented 6th and sometimes as a yth, and just after the drinking of the potion he ties the whole yth to its augmented equivalent (Example 41). The harmonic ambiguity you noted is there, exactly as

EXAMPLE 41

you first saw it, but I don't think the motive is a purely musical metaphor. It's a metaphor of experience, expressed in music; and I think Wagner supposed it to be intelligible as such. He may even have seen the two notations of the chord as having different — but of course related — connotations; but those are too subtle for me to fix, and I won't try. Isolde, however, sings the words, Ich trink' sie dir! to the three introductory notes of the motive, with the chord written as a yth, coming on the last word, with all possible emphasis and really sustained during the descent of the scale, and the equivalent coming, just as she throws down the cup. The whole motive must, I should think, have something to do with the potion or the drinking. Does our analysis of the chord make that something any clearer? F. Not much, I'm afraid. I'm still perplexed by the potion itself, I suppose. I've seen somewhere a notion that Isolde really wanted Brangane to 226

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mix the love-potion, and that Brangane interpreted her order so; but I can't see any real sense in that notion, either. /. That makes as tangled a problem as that of Hamlet's madness. I think Isolde knew a hawk from a handsaw, and so did Tristan, who drinks without a qualm "oblivion's kindly draught." F. And even if Isolde did mean that Brangane should mix it, the lovepotion would remain just as miraculous as ever. That miracle sticks in my crop. I don't see how Wagner, contriving as tense a dramatic situation as that which leads up to the drinking of the potion, could have believed, any more than I do, in the efficacy of it. 7. I'm pretty sure he didn't. He saw primal passion, just as we do, as the real motivation of his drama, but I don't think he was sophisticated enough to view that passion as the behavior-pattern of a mere mechanism, or — consequently — the potion's effect as like that of LSD, which it would be if you take it literally. F. Then do you take the potion itself as a symbol, either of love or of life? The motive might, then, refer to the potion. 7. Neither as a symbol nor as a direct agent either of life or of love, but as something which triggered into action an already existent force — a force that needn't be seen as miraculous. I take it that, as the text literally suggests, Tristan and Isolde drink the potion in the belief that they will both straightway fall dead. They don't. They find, to their utter amazement, that they are still alive. But since the drinking was a deathdaring act of reconciliation between them, the barrier that hedged their nascent love has fallen, and passion takes full possession. But it was the act of drinking — their mutual acceptance of death — and not the liquor in the cup that worked the miracle. And it could have worked just as effectively in King Arthur's day, when this experience is supposed to have happened. F. Then the real miracle wasn't even in the drinking. It had happened long before — when Tristan looked up at Isolde, about to strike him with his own nicked sword. That fatal fluid — the mediaeval equivalent, I suppose, of Cupid's dart — that was supposed to pass between the eyes of two smitten lovers had already done its mischief. Isn't that, then — the mischief, I mean, not the glance nor any later concrete act or incident — what this opening motive is really about? 7. That's what we're trying to find out. Will you be content to call this a "Mischief-motive" and let it go at that? 227

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F. It would look queer in a guidebook, but that word, as we're now thinking of it, is more appropriate than "Potion-motive," or mere "Lovemotive," or (of all things) "Tristan-motive," as I found it labelled in a collection of Wagner's opera texts by one Edmund Kuhn. What dramatic sense can Wagner's music make if his themes are as differently interpretable as that? /. I don't know how these names were arrived at, but they must have been suggested by a comparison of the motive, when it is conspicuous, with the words or the action at that same moment. That looks like a reasonable procedure, but it tends to make the motive into a symbol for the thing you associate it with, and that can lead to inextricable confusions. You hear the motive in the Prelude as we've been thinking of it, and you get from it some such intimation as we've drawn. But in the first scene, just before Isolde invokes the winds to wreck the ship and everybody on it, you hear the motive in the orchestra against her words of contempt for the feeble sorcery that can brew no more than balsamdrinks.* (It has now a driving rhythm and a less equivocal harmony, but it's the same motive.) Toward the end of that scene Brangane, pleading to be told of Isolde's trouble, sings, to those jour rising notes, "Sage, kiinde, was dich qu'dlt" (Tell me truly all thy fear).^ Then, at the beginning of Scene ii, when Tristan is first seen by Isolde, she sings, aside, but again to those four rising notes, Mir erkoren, mir verloren (Chosen by me, now lost to me), t I confess I can find no association between the motive and the reference to sorcery, but in the other two cases the reference is definitely to what you called the Mischief, and there the words are sung to the motive. I've a notion that when you hear a Wagnerian motive sung by an actor, there is likely to be some reference in the words to what we're calling the "meaning" of the motive. When you hear it only in the orchestra — when the opera is down in the pit — its reference may be quite remote from the immediate scene; but when you hear it sung, the connection will be more direct. But even the sung words won't give you a "definition" of the motive. F. And that, I suppose, is why you asked me to find out for myself what the motives in the Preludes "meant." Until the curtain goes up the opera is in the pit, but it is still the opera. You get a musical preview of the * Schirmer's vocal score, pp. 8f. t Ibid., p. 13. t Ibid., p. 15. (The printed translation is here quite false to the sense of the German text.) 228

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act to come — or at any rate of some of the psychological motives that will impel the action. But when the curtain goes up you expect to find the musical and the psychological motives somehow akin to each other, and I should think our curiosity about just what features of the action have been previewed is natural. The words do set forth, and to some extent, define, the psychological motives. Don't they then also define the musical motives? Isn't that definition what we've been looking for? 7. Mmmm . . . How far do the words really portray the psychological drives, and thus define the musical motives? Don't the words, for the most part, merely bring into focus the factual experience that is enacted on the stage, rather than portray the psychological drive that impels that action? Isn't it the musical motive that portrays that drive? And in doing that doesn't it really define the words? and the action? I said I thought the first act of Tristan might prove interesting if its words were merely spoken. They do project a coherent, tense drama. The music, also, is so interesting that most of it could be satisfyingly projected by the orchestra alone. The Preludes of course must speak for themselves, but so does the music of many scenes — conspicuously the Liebestod, which used often to be performed as an orchestral piece, with the singer's phrases — which sometimes, in effect, resemble Schoenberg's Sprechstimme — indistinguishably mingled with the orchestra's. If you had heard it only in that way, and with no program note to tell you with what kind of experience the music was associated, you would hardly have imagined the actual dramatic experience it is associated with. It doesn't, in fact, portray that experience as an event. But I believe you would agree that the music portrayed a kind of ecstasy — a "being outside oneself" — without which Isolde's death would be a conventional fiction. You would further agree that this was not a religious ecstasy, nor a Buddhistic contemplation of Nirvana, but a state induced by the Mischief. Would Wagner's words have evoked so vividly all your image of that state? Doesn't the music define the words? F. It doesn't relate to or qualify any individual words, but words are rather fumbling symbols for the ecstasy they're intended to project, and the musical portrayal is a hundred times more vivid than the verbal. . . . Even so, ecstasy isn't ordinarily considered a fatal condition, and although you made the drinking of the potion look natural, I don't believe you can do that with Isolde's death. /. That question is beside our present point; but would you have been 229

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any happier if Isolde, in the last act, had come with King Mark instead of before him and, in the melee, had been fatally wounded? There wouldn't, then, have been any ecstasy — or if there had, it would be less realistic than her actual behavior — and your Mischief, which seems to me the prime motive of the whole story, would appear far less significant than you thought it to be when you first played the music for it. Its force would have evaporated, and the end of the story wouldn't be the outcome of the beginning. . . . But let's get back to our problem —the sense of the themes in the Prelude. What happens to this theme? F. I'm not sure whether its four rising chromatic notes, added to as in bar 17, or preceded by that drop of a yth as in 25 (Example 42), really have the same reference as they did in the first phrase. The four notes seem to come out of the opening motive, but the harmony no longer pulls two ways at once; yet, if the reference to the first form of the motive isn't intended, I should think this as much a fault of style as the use of a relative pronoun whose antecedent was uncertain.

EXAMPLE 42

I. Their "antecedent," I'm sure, is — if you want a word for it — the Mischief. They both have a single "pull," but so may the Mischief, mayn't it? And while there are some quite new phrases, don't they all contribute, as you listen to the whole Prelude, to the portrayal of the one concern that was projected in the first motive? Let's go on to those. There's a new one in bar 17, just as the one you mentioned ends (Example 43). I don't know just where this one ends —if it does end. It runs into the one you spoke of in bar 25. Is it a contribution to the Mischief? F. I remember that when I first read the Prelude I almost heard the two names, Tristan and Isolde, sung to those notes, and they do occur so, just after the drinking of the potion. Isolde also is Tristan's last word, to the same notes. But to see these as motives for the two protagonists seems childish. /. It would narrow the reference of the music to a pin point. I think you really found the Mischief in the first motive when you first played it on the piano. Doesn't this one also portray some kind of a concern? 230

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F. Mmmm . . . In contrast to the first, which is wholly introverted, this one seems to be not only "out-turned" but "out-gomg," and it pulls only in that direction. I don't see just where it's going, and the intervals aren't peculiar, as the others were. But if the first motive was the beginning of the Mischief, this one looks like a release of it. And it breaks, later, into Isolde's narration just where she tells Brangane how Tristan looked up from his pallet, not at her hand nor at the sword, but deep into her eyes, so that his suffering melted her heart.* That needn't have been the beginning of the Mischief — she'd been nursing him a long while — but it may have been the moment when they were first conscious of it. /. Like most of the other motives, this occurs in spots where the verbal designation of it (here as the "glance-motive") is hard to fit to it. It underlies, persistently, Brangane's plea that Isolde confide in her; t it underlies also Isolde's reference to Tristan, "who turns his eyes away from mine"; t but it is sung, immediately thereafter, by Brangane, who asks if she means "that marvel of all peoples," and again, ironically, by Isolde, who answers, "who, shrinking from my whiplash . . ." The whiplash is Streich (stroke) in the German, and she may be referring to her own eyes, fixed stonily on Tristan; but passages like this don't exactly bear out my notion that, when the motives are sung, the words refer — however obliquely —to the intended import of the motive. After they've drunk the potion, however, begin to look into each other's eyes, and finally ejaculate their names, it comes in just as it does in the Prelude; § and there's at least some good reason for the verbal tag, "glance-motive." I think we may go on. Where is the next motive? F. I suppose it's that which I spoke of as containing the chromatic four-note rise of the first motive, in bar 25. As far as I could see, it doesn't occur in the opera until Brangane begins to talk about the potions: Den hehrsten Trank, ich halt1 ihn hier. || It accompanies those words. But * Ibid., p. 34. ^ Ibid., p. 12. t Ibid., pp. 16-17. § Ibid., pp. 91-92. \\lbid., p. 54. 231

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just as in the Prelude, the bass of this motive there grows insistent on a three-note figure (Example 44), which pointedly accompanies Isolde's answer, "Your're wrong; I know it better." This bass-motive, I should think, must refer to the death-potion; but if it does, then the other ought to be the motive for the love-potion. Of course you don't yet know, while you're listening to the Prelude, anything about these potions, and you'll have to wait a long time before there is any reference to them on the stage. Even then, although they're important objects for the drama, the musical reference to them seems hardly more than illustrative. The three-note figure for the death-potion does convey a vivid implication of its purpose; but the other, with its chromatic four-note rise, has for me more relation to the mischief than to the love-potion. I confess, I'm stumped.

EXAMPLE 44 7. It was you, not Wagner, who insisted that this "ought to be" the love-potion motive. Aren't you trying to define both of the motives too precisely? to give them merely objective reference? The mischief and the glance that started it, although they generate the chief events of the drama, are really psychological drives — musically portrayable concerns. The potions, objectively, are mere things, not drives, and their musical portrayal as things is merely illustrative. I grant that if you see them only as things, Wagner's juxtaposition of them in this passage * strongly suggests that these are merely illustrative motives for the things. But up to the moment when they drank the potion, Isolde's drive — her fixed determination — was that both she and Tristan should die. She knows what these potions can do, for she takes the death-potion from the casket and shows it to Brangane as the one to be prepared. But mayn't the grim motive—it's in the orchestra, not in her voice — be telling us, the audience, not of the potions but of her purpose with them? And may not the other — in the orchestra also, not in Brangane's voice — be telling us that Isolde, * Ibid. 232

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who knows too well the mischief worked by that glance, is rejecting its appeal? Isn't it the drives, rather than the potions (although they may initiate the drives) that the music speaks of? F. Of course it's only the drives — the concerns that experience arouses — that the motives can really portray. Our hypothesis seems to me to establish that as all but proved. But to identify the drives — to discriminate one from the other — you have to infer the experience that can generate the drive. Don't you, then, in drawing that inference, so clearly relate the drive to its originating experience — identify it so clearly in terms of that experience — that the name for your experience becomes the name for your motive? Aren't "mischief" and "glance," after all, essentially names, not for the drives, but for the experiences that aroused the drives? And are you wrong, as listener, to label the motive with the name of the experience it really refers to? /. If your label for the experience also labels the drive suggestively enough so that you perceive the drive as implied in the experience, it will likely be as good a label as you can find. But that's just the trouble. You can hardly label, accurately, any experience, even in its merely factual aspect. It consists, objectively, of things: for instance, it's a potion, which implies no significant drive. So you qualify that label with the prefix love-, or death-. Your label will now suggest, first of all, the effect the potion will have on the drinkers of it. But it may imply not only the effect of drinking but the purpose of that act. Maybe, as I suggested, the act will be more potent than the ingredients of the potion. How much of that potency will be implied in your label? Won't you — as the etymology of those two words happens to suggest — be taking the words potency and potion as having a single root? Poto (to drink) and potior (to have power) aren't exactly synonyms; yet won't you be in danger of taking them so? Your word mischief whose meaning we built up by a long discussion before you happened on the word itself, is for you and me a very suggestive label for the opening motive. For the reader of a guidebook it would be not only inadequate but grotesque. F. Mmmm . . . Aren't you really impugning the whole scheme of leading-motive suggestion and structure? 7. I'm impugning the guidebooks, not the system, although the system also has its faults. (For one thing, it makes you and me hunt for labels when perhaps we'd be better off without them.) The facts of experience, which are all that your labels can usually name, don't immediately sug2

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gest the drive, which is all that the music can portray. The books, then, may leave the reader — like my voluminous elbowing lady — seeing only the factual object in the music, when, in reality, it isn't there at all. There's one more motive in the Prelude that may perhaps illustrate my point. It stands out, in the Prelude, far more vividly than it does later in the act (Example 45). Did you find a name for it?

EXAMPLE 45 F. In the Prelude, it seems like the release or the activation of the tensions that have been building up from the beginning, and you don't need a name for it. It occurs, I think, only twice in the first act: first, where Brangane fetches the casket,* telling what it contains — "these mighty magic potions"; and then when the lovers, having drunk the potion, celebrate the "budding and blowing of passionate longing."! From the words, I got the notion that this must be the motive for the love-potion; but right after its first appearance comes that reference to "the greatest draught," sung against the other motive we talked about that begins with the drop of a yth. That other is much more conspicuous in the excited passage after the drinking; but so are many other motives. They all combine to heighten the image you form of the whole scene, and if you tried to discriminate them while you were watching the scene, you'd lose half the impact of it. 7. Then does it really make any difference which of these two themes you call the "potion-motive"? Does either of them refer, specifically, to the potion? Ought they to be named at all? You both hear and see this opera, and you expect that what you hear will help to form a more just image of the experience you see. Wagner's alliterative phrase for the music dramatist's art as Tanz-Ton-Ticbt-Kunst (Ticht — Dicht) — "Dancetone-poetry-art," where "dance" means "action" — does describe the purpose of his effort, but it doesn't give any formula for the alchemy that combines the three arts. And to name the motives, as the guidebooks — and we ourselves — try to do, doesn't yield that formula. F. Well, you asked me, if I could, to find out what the motives mean * Ibid., p. 53. t Ibid., pp. g6f. 2

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in themselves. I couldn't report on that assignment otherwise than in words. I found, by accident, the word mischief, indicating the nonmusical "thing" the first motive relates to. That word does no more than point a finger at the thing, but it does identify that thing more sharply than did my first phrase, "love-music," and the search for the word has been — for me at any rate — fruitful. Are you really proposing to give up that search? /. I'm only wondering how far the search, when it yields a name, becomes misleading, and how to avoid that error. The Prelude begins with the Mischief, dwells on it for a little, and "qualifies" slightly the portrayal of it: expands and fragments the musical phrase. Then comes another motive which we agreed to name by the word glance. That word, interpreted (as mischief must also be interpreted), refers not only to an act but to its portentous consequences. One of those consequences is the mischief. The glance, as an event, preceded the mischief, but you will hardly argue that Wagner on that account should have begun his Prelude with the glance-motive. Music deals with the consequence, not the sequence, of events. That consequence you and I think of, in accord with our hypothesis, as "concern," and I think we're at least on the right track. These themes and their manipulations portray that concern. But themes and their manipulations are themselves also musical events. To be understood, they have to occur in what we perceive as a logical musical order. But that order — that musical time-sequence — isn't the order in which the physical events that aroused the concern occur. It's an order dictated by the logic of musical structure. To name the musical events (the motives) in terms of the physical events which they can only interpret in terms of concern, is to interject, in some measure, the notion of "physical-event-time" into a portrayal of concern which, as concern, is quite unconscious of that sort of time-sequence, and is thus quite indifferent to it. That's why I wondered whether the motives ought to be named at all. The names are bound to be misleading. F. What an exegesis! You sound like a musical theologian. . . . But when you asked me to find out what the motives in the Preludes meant, did you expect me to report the meaning I found in some other language than words? Some assignment! 7. It has taken us I don't know how long to hint at the "meaning" of five short musical phrases. We've been at it, anyhow, much longer than it takes to play the Prelude. We've found four words — mischief, glance, 235

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love-potion, and death-potion — as names for the motives, but we don't even yet know which of two motives our word love-potion refers to. How much more does the Prelude, after our elaborate exegesis, actually say than it said before we began? Does it, in fact, project the sense of the words we've put into its mouth? I'm quite sure that if it were played, right now, you and I should find a good deal of appropriateness in those words. But we put them there. No ordinary listener will take all the trouble we've taken to find those words, or his own equivalent for them. We have, I'm sure, somewhat illuminated the sense of the motives. But are our names for them really an equivalent of the sense we've found in them? Will they serve as scrip in the exchange of ideas about them, or on the problem of musical meaning in general? F. Oh, I see. You're trying to get ready for your encounter with my absolutist friend. I had lunch with him the other day, and he'd like to come — perhaps more as listener than participant — to our next session, if it's all right with you. As I said, he's a very obsessed modernist — a twelvetone composer, most of whose music is too obscure for me, but whose convictions you can't but respect. He's also a friend of Henry's — the violinist I spoke of the other day — whom I know better than I do John, the composer. I told him of what we had found in the Beethoven C minor violin sonata, and he seemed quite excited by the image we'd drawn from it. Both he and John would like to come, next day, if you'd care to have them. Would you mind? I think they can both argue without getting angry. 7. I'm afraid I may sometimes sound angry if our conversation takes the turn it often does on various questions that will probably turn up. But if your friends can see that I'm only very deeply interested, I hope they'll both come — and perhaps come more than once, for those questions aren't simple. I've a lot to learn about twelve-tone composition, and if John doesn't get too impatient he may be able to enlighten me about a lot of things I don't understand in that system. . . . But we've left the question of the Preludes to Acts II and III hanging. Shall we go back to them? F. They seem much more objective in reference than the first. Aside from that harsh ejaculation of what I think they call the "Day-motive" that comes at the very beginning, the whole Prelude to the second act is just an anticipation of Isolde's anticipation of Tristan's coming. Everybody raves — or used to — about the love-duet and of course the Liebes236

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tod; but this Prelude, and still more the scene that follows, seems to me the vividest thing in the whole opera. The "mischief" motive of course turns up — you perhaps need it as the basis of the excitement that is coming — but it isn't dwelt on, and the whole portrayal is amazing. I suppose the quiet surge of that first 'cello motive could portray other sorts of anticipation than Isolde's, at this moment; but that high, clinging phrase that follows! Doesn't it almost literally stretch out eager arms (Example 46)? The Day-motive of course will have to be "explained," when it comes, but the others speak for themselves. Those motives are all I saw.

EXAMPLE 46

/. You missed one, but you will hardly see its importance from this first projection of it. It wells up out of— or rather, after —the "mischief" motive, and its essence is projected in only one swift-moving bar; but in the love-duet, and again in the Liebestod, it is augmented into a soaring figure that is almost the climax of those two scenes (Example 47).

EXAMPLE 47

F. I certainly did miss it, but from the inconspicuous way it's projected in the Prelude you might wonder whether Wagner foresaw the use he was going to make of it. It doesn't add much to my image of the Prelude. /. Neither, probably, does that harsh Day-motive that begins the Prelude and then disappears completely until the lovers, after their first transport, begin to remember what kept them apart on the ship. This is really the Prelude only to the first scene, not to the whole act, and the two main motives are so clear in their portrayal of Isolde's eagerness that I'm sure we needn't study them any further. The Prelude to the third act is similarly only to its first scene, and has only two motives. Need we go into those? 237

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F. Perhaps we should, if only to admire them. The first — although I didn't notice it at once — is a palpable transformation of the first motive in the opera, but with all the ambiguity gone out of it — except for those lonely ascending violins that always make me think of Dante's Nessurf maggior dolore (Example 48). The motive itself now pulls only in one way; but those violins at least try to pull in another, and maybe the ambiguity is there, after all.

EXAMPLE 48

7. It's rather far to seek, but your suggestion is imaginable, and pertinent. The shepherd's pipe aims in the same direction, and you might say that it belongs to the Prelude, since nothing happens onstage until it's over. And if you're looking for formal design, I think you'll find the unaccompanied sailor's song that opens the first act a rather interesting parallel to this English horn solo. Whether or not you attend to the motives, you can hardly fail to sense an intimation of dread in this Prelude, just as you sensed the mischief in the first one, or Isolde's eagerness in the second. But no more in this than in the others do the motives become the symbols of specifically namable things. They will portray terrible things — perhaps most of all that outcry of Tristan's,* Ich selbst, ich haW Ihn gebraut, when he realizes that the potion they drank was brewed out of his own experience, not out of simples. F. Mmmm . . . Then is that where you got your evasion of the magic in the love-potion? 7. Maybe. I don't know. But it seems to me that however fumbling our interpretation of the leading-motive has been, we've at least glimpsed it as a device for music drama that — as you said at the beginning — doesn't differ essentially from the theme as a device for what is often called — and I think, miscalled — "absolute" music. F. I convinced myself, by trying to define the leading-motive as dif* Ibid., pp. 256f.

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ferent, that there was no real difference, whether in drama or song, between music set to words or action and music in which words or action are only implied. Of course, if you insist that there is no implication, there will be a great difference. But none are so deaf as those who won't hear, and — 7. I'm afraid the question isn't quite as simple as that. Isn't there a lot of music — a lot of Mozart, for example, but also of Beethoven or even Wagner — from which you get what I'm sure is genuine musical delight, but which you and I hear without sensing the slightest reference to anything other than our immediate musical experience? Hasn't our hypothesis, by concentrating so sharply on music that is meaningful, failed to consider the vastly larger body of music that is heard by the million simply as music? All music is made of the two "substances," tone and rhythm. If there is good music which is heard only as music (and there is), can you tell how those substances are to be manipulated so as to make the music referential to nonmusical experience? F. You're asking, aren't you, whether the act of hearing (or, rather, of listening, for listening is expectant, whereas hearing is only acceptant) — whether the act of listening may justifiably be expectant only of structural interest and sensory delight? That's the million's usual response, but doesn't our hypothesis question its justification? 7. Of course; but how effective is that questioning? Can we really show the million what they haven't seen — or at least make them look for it? — show them not only the Why but the How of extramusical reference? All they look for is the how of sensory delight. F. I can't tell how it's done, but I can tell — up to a point, at least — whether it has been done. I suppose that point can't be determined except by the individual for himself. But isn't that uncertainty as certain for any other art as for music? Aren't you just beginning to worry about how you'll manage with Henry and John when they come? 7. Perhaps I am; but I don't want to "manage" so that vital questions like this are evaded. . . . Never mind. I'll try to think it out. Do bring them next day, and tell them I don't expect them to pull their punches.

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S WE had hoped, my friend brought two interested musical acquaintances of his to our next meeting: Henry, the violinist he had spoken of, and John, a young composer who was attracting considerable notice. Since our hypothesis was really the question at issue, I took a little time to put it succinctly before them, but Fred, hitherto my only questioner, had already briefed them on its essentials, and they appeared to understand the general idea, although they were doubtful of its practical application to the problems of criticism. John (hereafter, /) broke off my probably rather professorial exposition a little impatiently: /. Your hypothesis, as you call it, is simple enough so that I should think anyone could understand it, and I can see that if it works it may help to indicate what a composer is really driving at. But if I look at my own effort as a composer I don't recognize your hypothesis as in the least a description, either of my choice of what you might call subject-matter or my effort in handling that matter. I've been attracted, lately, to the serial technique, and I've found it pretty useful as a technique, although I don't see it as the rigid rule of procedure that — if I understand him rightly — Josef Rufer, for instance, sees in the method. But while I try to make a tone-row that is musically interesting, I shouldn't know how to shape that row after what Fred, reporting your conversations with him, once described as a "model" — a preconceived image, either of a human emotional situation or, as he called it, the "concern" for that situation that one would doubtless feel if he were involved in it. I confess, I

a

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don't know why I find some of my stuff worth going on with, while some of it I throw away as uninteresting. But the interest that makes me go on with it is, so far as I can see, a musical interest; your "image" is a nonmusical object of interest; and to shape a musical "thing," which a composition w, after a nonmusical model seems to me not only useless but impossible. My model — although I don't know where I get it — seems to me a musical model, and I'm sure my music would get all out of drawing if I tried to adjust it to what you call an image of experience. 7. I've composed enough, I think, to see what you mean. At any rate I've spent a lot of effort on what I think you quite rightly call "drawing." A clumsy, awkward, ill-adjusted musical phrase is so offensive that nobody with any musical sensitivity — whether composer, performer, or listener — would tolerate it. But weren't some of the phrases you threw away drawn quite acceptably, and yet, somehow, musically uninteresting? /. Of course. That's why I threw them away. 7. But they weren't badly drawn? Or, if you don't like that word, badly constructed? /. They may have been, for I didn't bother to finish them; but it wasn't the construction that worried me. I could have fixed that, if it had seemed worthwhile. 7. Then what would have made it worthwhile? Does your word musicality really account for the difference? /. I suppose you're asking me to define musicality. I can't — any more than I can define the taste of beefsteak. But I know that taste, and I can tell the difference between steak and chicken, even if I can't describe it. 7. They're both acceptable to the tongue —and to the nose, which makes more taste-discriminations than the tongue does. Your eye, seeing the brownness of the steak, and your ear, hearing it sizzle on the platter, also contribute to the enjoyment you call taste. Mayn't what you call your musical sensitivity — the basis of your musical "taste" —be activated by more than the auditory nerve? /. It may, of course. Any sensuous impression is likely to arouse a whole complex of responses. But, just as with my food, which I judge by what I call taste, I subordinate other secondary contributions to my musical interest to the main one, which I do get through my ear. My interest in music is in the music and how it affects me. I don't know how or why it does that, but I'm sure that when I am musically excited I'm 241

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not aware of that excitement as brought about by anything as remote from music as a nonmusical experience is. /. [to Henry], Do you, as a violinist, feel the same way John does? Or do you think of the appeal of your performance to a heterogeneous audience as arousing feeling that they may relate to something in their own individual experience? /. Will you let me interrupt before Henry answers? I said I was consulting my own musical interest, but I didn't mean that it was exclusively my own. I don't, when I compose, just talk to myself in music. I hope to be understood by the music-lover — just as Henry does with his performance — hope to have something to say that will interest him. But I say it in music, and I think he will understand it without trying to translate it into words. . . . Now let Henry answer. H. I never thought of it before, but I believe a performer does play to himself, perhaps even more than to his audience. In fact, I think he will satisfy his audience largely in proportion as he satisfies himself. He does think of his audience — because they're right there — more immediately than does the composer, for whom, while he's at work, the audience only imaginatively exists. John, at work, is thinking his own thoughts. I, if I play his music as he intends it to be heard, am rethinking those thoughts. To do that I've got to make them my own. But I'm still me, and I suppose I can't help projecting that me, as well as John, to the audience. Since I'm right there, I suppose that if I could project John's ideas as vividly as he thought them, the audience might, for the moment, think I was John. But if I did that —if I projected John's ideas so that the audience entered into them as I did — then I suppose the audience, for that moment, may think that they themselves are Johns. . . . I see that neither John nor I have answered your question. You want to know whether his or anybody else's musical ideas relate to what you call extramusical experience. He insists that they don't, for him. But while I don't see just how they relate, or what they relate to, I think what I've just said implies pretty strongly that they do — and must do — just that. That means that John, when he writes music, says more than he knows he's saying; but that isn't impossible. 7. Your audience will seldom imagine that they are either you, the performer, or John, the composer. But they may well see that both you and he, like themselves, are men, having "hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions." Will they be interested if they don't see that? And 242

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can music, understood as having no extramusical relation, make them see it? /. If Henry's audience came to hear him play, they presumably had some degree of musicality built into them. Isn't there such a thing as an affection and a passion just for music? If so, can't men cultivate music just for itself? Was there ever a great composer who didn't do just that? And doesn't the real music-lover — the amateur with a lot of musicality built into him — care for it in the same way, but to a lesser degree? 7. The man who has musicality built into him forms, collectively, the real musical public. Having less of that sensibility than the composer, he has more room in his mind for other interests — other passions. Has that musical public, without whose support music would never have attained its present status as an art, really cultivated music only for itself? Will that assumption account for the long and passionate devotion of musicians and their music to the service of the Church, or to secular interests, when a way was found to bring those within its purview? Hasn't music been made, and oughtn't it to be made, in a way that will appeal to the musicality of the public? I know that huge body isn't, intellectually, very impressive. Its powers of communication are painfully limited, but you can't safely measure its actual perception by its vocabulary. If you put a question — even a philosophical question — fairly before them, I'll accept their verdict, even if I disagree. But you'll have to take account of the fact that a great deal of clever effort is expended on putting questions unfairly before the public, in order to get the verdict the questioner would like. I'm not subscribing, unreservedly, to the maxim, -vox populi vox Dei, but I think you'll both have to agree that the public — or that indeterminate figure we call the common man — has something to do with shaping the musical thought of the composer? H. By the performer, he's certainly got to be considered. /. By the composer, I'm not so sure. Was Beethoven, writing his last quartets, "considering" the common man? 7. He wasn't, certainly, considering the commonness of the common man. But I still think if you can really get inside him you'll find a good deal of uncommonness mixed in. Frankly, I can't see how our literatures — of which I hold music to be one — should have been created and preserved unless out of a discomfort with that commonness and the desire to find a remedy for it. /. Aren't you implying, then, that music is a moral agent —that it 2

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preaches sermons? I can't think of a surer way to repel the public than to preach at them. 7. All I find in it is a reference to human experience. I'm quite incapable of formulating what might be called the moral law, but I do (and so do you) observe and discriminate human behavior as good or bad. The discrimination isn't always easy. But I find Beethoven's quartets and Shakespeare's plays and Rembrandt's paintings and Michelangelo's sculptures full of implications that I apprehend as goodness. Is that goodness wholly artistic — a goodness of structure only? /. In other words, isn't the artist a Sunday-school teacher? I don't see myself, or any artist I hold to be great, in that role. /. Then goodness or badness in art is a question of structure only — of course, of structure in the largest sense of the word? /. I'm not sure I know what the largest sense of the word structure is, but I think that's the basis of most of my judgments. Of course, you can't have structure unless you have a substance to be structured, and perhaps I'm thinking of substance rather than structure. In a finished work they're hard to tell apart. F. May I put in a question, here? Isn't that true of music, perhaps more than of any other art? Don't you really make your musical substance out of the commonest materials (tone and rhythm), and either make that substance as you shape it or shape it as you make it? And while you're at it, can you tell which you're doing? or, when you've finished, which you've done? And hasn't that uncertainty something to do with the point you're trying to make John see? Mayn't your substance — not the raw material of tone and rhythm, but the partly shaped thematic substance you are really working on — possess implications that you don't observe, although the shape you're trying to give your stuff will never come right unless it conveys those implications? And mayn't any composer, as John does, suppose that the structural purpose of his work is the only purpose he had, while all the time he was being guided by those implications? I've heard only a few of his things, but they don't sound purely structural to me, whatever he says about them. /. I suppose I don't really know all that's going on in my head while I'm writing. I'm busy getting the notes and the shape right — every note contributes to that shape — and I'm thinking in notes so exclusively that I'm not aware of anything but the Tightness of them as a projection of my musical idea. 244

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7. Oh! Your musical idea. Is that idea, then, the model you're drawing from? /. You might call it that. Sometimes a musical idea —a theme or a rhythm or a harmonic progression that's interesting — comes into my head without any apparent reason. It may be already shaped into actual notes. More often, I rather f eel a musical impulse — a vague musical shape that I have to turn into notes before I can work on it. When I've done that —if I can —I've got notes that, so far as I can make them, project that idea in a shape that musicians can play: can reproduce in much the same form as I thought it. What I've got is music and nothing else; but I suppose I did have some sort of model to draw from. 7. You say, in effect, that if your drawing conforms to your model, you've succeeded. There is, then, always that "if"? Or do you sometimes find that your drawing was good, but that your idea — your model — wasn't so good as you thought it? /. That happens, of course. And, as I said, when I find the stuff isn't good I usually throw it away. 7. Which, in that case, was bad? Your idea or your drawing? /. Mostly, I think, the idea. If only the drawing is bad, I can usually fix it. 7. Then how do you tell a good idea from a bad one? For it isn't, you say, a mere question of drawing. /. Mmmm . . . I suppose I do, if I have drawn it interestingly, think a bad idea may be a good one. I do, sometimes, give over working on things like that — things that I later find shallow or uninteresting, even though, for a while, they looked all right. More often I throw them away after very little work on them because I already see that they aren't worth working on. They just go stale. 7. Is that staleness a structural fault? Either an error in your work or an unworkableness in the stuff? /. I don't bother to reason about it. I just see that the stuff — or maybe the idea behind the stuff — was empty. 7. Empty of what? /. Of musical interest: of the kick the idea gave me when it first hit me. I usually lay such things aside, because I've often found that the emptiness was in me, not in the stuff, and that I was just tired of the effort of working them out. Sometimes, when I take them out again, they're as 245

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fresh as they were at first; but sometimes they're still stale. Then I throw them away. /. I can't help being interested in the "kick" you spoke of, for it seems to be that which, if it persists, really accounts for your interest — or, if it doesn't persist, accounts for the staleness. You're not so skilled in composition, are you, that you see, in a musical idea as it first occurs to you, all the kick or all the structural possibility there is in it? /. By no means. I find, as I go on, all sorts of possibilities that I never dreamed were there. And the more possibilities I find, the more intense the kick becomes. /. Do you use every possibility — every manipulation — you find, or are some of them "empty," as you said? /. Of course I don't use them all. Some of them just don't fit. 7. You use those, then, that contribute to your idea, and the idea grows as your manipulations succeed. But does the idea grow bigger out of the manipulation, or does the manipulation grow bigger out of the idea? /. I don't know. What difference does it make, so long as it grows? That sounds to me like a chicken-and-egg question. I'm a chicken-fancier. /. You're right, of course. The objective of the egg is the chicken. But individual chickens come from individual eggs; and the maternity of any individual egg — and the paternity of it as well — makes a great difference in the chicken. H. May I interrupt? Aren't you, in effect, saying that the composer is the mother of the musical idea, while the father is the world of larger, or more diverse ideas? That figure, literally pursued, suggests a rather odd love affair, but it does imply the sort of conjunction that makes musical history — or that history makes. I've never been able to see how music could have been propagated as it has unless it were somehow fertilized by the world. There are a good many species of music whose origin we — who have no tolerance for any other than the tempered scale — pay little or no attention to. And even within our own circle there have been numerous species whose origin seems to me quite inexplicable unless on the assumption that the world had a good deal to do with it. The histories of music classify them under such heads as Renaissance and Baroque and Rococo, and describe features of what they call style as if style were no more than a manner of manipulating tones. But it seems to me that each one of those styles really implied a whole background of convention, not 246

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merely in manner but in belief; and I don't feel that I've projected the music unless I've projected the belief as well as the manner. If that Chaconne of Bach's wasn't full of belief, I'm a hopeless sentimentalist. /. The music histories and the books about musical form certainly don't define, for me, more than the surface of what / see in the Chaconne. But when you say it implies belief, I suppose you're referring to Bach's devoutness; and while I sense an abounding earnestness in that music, I don't see that it is actually anything more than a musical earnestness. Everybody can sense earnestness or triviality in music, and many other characteristics in between; but when you begin to turn them into earnestness or triviality about religion or morals or other general notions, I don't see that you have a leg to stand on. /. Don't we? You say you find the earnestness or the triviality of music to be "purely" musical. Those words earnestness and triviality, however, aren't really musical terms. They apply to recognized mental attitudes toward a host of nonmusical experiences. Isn't there at least the tang of the wider sense of earnestness and triviality in your mind when you apply them to music like the Chaconne — or to the Polonaise from Mignon, which seems to me an example of earnest triviality? /. Is a mere tang — which anyone would sense as very different in those two pieces — a dependable reference to anything more than the general area of experience it relates to? There are many other tangs in music that you might discriminate as clearly as you do those — tangs of color and tone-quality and suchlike; but those, to my ear, are purely musical tangs, and I don't believe you could establish them as having any extramusical reference. Your tonal tension and your rhythmic motion — the foundations of your hypothesis — are, in themselves, purely musical factors. Are they, in the two pieces we're comparing, any more suggestive of religiosity or triviality than the color or the tone? And don't you sufficiently realize the character of your music when you see it as a characteristic of the music itself, without involving yourself in airy speculations about the music as being about something that isn't music? /. That seems to me a question which you, absorbed in shaping your music after a purely musical model, may answer in one way, and Henry, absorbed in performing your music as you intended but also trying to make it musically significant to his audience, may answer in another. I'd like to hear from him. H. That question isn't easy, and I'll probably fumble the answer. 247

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There's no music of consequence, surely, that wasn't meant to be performed, and you can't be wrong in asking what the performer's share is — or ought to be — in the projection of what John sees as a purely musical idea. For an audience — even if it's only the performer himself preparing his recital — is implied in the act of performance. That musical idea is somewhere in the notes; but even if I "pronounce" all the notes accurately, I may still distort the idea almost as absurdly as does the speaker of the Prologue to Pyramus and This be in the Midsummer Night's Dream. I've not only got to "stand upon the points" — the written or implied punctuations; I've got to inflect those notes, sometimes very subtly, in order to convey their real sense — or at any rate the sense I see in them. We're trying to find out whether that sense — which is more than the literal sense of the notes — is "purely" musical. I don't think it is. When I play well, I do, of course, feel a musical excitement. But that excitement is also akin to that which I feel when I'm involved in some kind of an experience, real or imaginal (for you can feel imaginal experiences almost as keenly as real ones). That excitement — or that part of my musical excitement — isn't musical. But neither is it precisely the excitement I should feel if the experience I was involved in were happening to me while I play. I think it's the excitement I feel as I contemplate that experience. Anyhow, when I feel that I've projected that contemplation, I'm sure my audience-response is much more cordial than when I don't project it. They tell me, in the greenroom, that I've played "so musically"; I don't suppose anyone in the whole audience had the same "image of experience" as I had; but even if they didn't, they somehow got the point, and I see that maybe you, with your hypothesis, are aiming at something which, as Fred said, John was "saying" without knowing it. /. If you were to etymologize all the words I speak in a sentence — even this sentence —I've no doubt you might come up with a lot of meanings in those words that I didn't intend. Similarly, Fred, or anybody else, may read what he pleases into my music, and I can't prevent him. Maybe, for the musical etymologist, it is there. But it's not my meaning. /. Your figure raises an interesting question. You might have insisted that music, which has no words, has therefore no etymology. Your point would have seemed more solidly established, but your analogy would have fallen. For I think music does have a kind of etymology — a "rootmeaning" — which our hypothesis is trying to discover. Words refer, primarily, to things and acts: tangible objects and happenings in the 248

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world of factual experience. That reference is more or less fixed and established. Music doesn't have any such fixed symbols. If definite symbolic meanings had been attached, for instance, to the intervals of melody or the chords of harmony, musical "language" would long since have gone bankrupt. There aren't enough intervals or chords to go around, in so complex a world. But experience isn't merely an identification of things and acts. It is a distillation of the meanings men see in things and acts. Etymologically, experience implies a testing — an experiment; and the larger sense of that word is just that: a testing for the truth that is in those things and acts. The truth doesn't lie in the factuality of those things. You distil it out of their factuality — of course, at your peril, for if your ingredients are wrongly identified, your distillate may be poisonous. But that distillate is so complex that you have to swallow it as a distillate — just as you swallow your doctor's doses — and you determine its value very largely by the way you feel after you've swallowed it. Your feeling isn't a mere immediate excitement. It's a product of long human experiment with things and acts — experiment which has shown the perils that lurk in all of them and has handed down many more than ten commandments as to their use. You are sure that the "feel" of music as music is a valuable excitement. So am I. But if it can also be the feel of proved experience, will its value be diminished? /. Not, I suppose, unless with your "imagery" you either miss the perfection of the musical design, or — what seems to me worse — use your intervals and your chords in the stale nineteenth-century way and project a string of cliches, so familiar to every ear that I suppose you can hardly bear to listen to them as music, but have to hunt for an image in them to make them palatable. Half the time, while your common man is looking for his image — which I think he abstracts chiefly out of the tang of that old-fashioned sweetness — he'll be missing the tang of newness — of musical adventure — in the much wider range of tone-relations that all the contemporary idioms enjoy. I don't say that you can't find images in the music you and Fred have been talking about, and you do, with your hypothesis, seem to account for them as being in the music and not merely in you, as I always thought they were. I'm only saying that for me the image is the smallest part of the interest in music, and I think the relatively small public for contemporary music feels the same way. 7. Contemporary music doesn't, as your last sentence implies, very deeply interest the majority of what used to be recognized as the en249

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lightened musical public. To me, the attitude of that majority seems to be one of inquisitive but unconvinced toleration. You undoubtedly feel that I belong to that majority, and you probably tolerate me as a possible convert. Indeed, in one way, I am already converted. I neither expect nor hope that the musical idiom of the future will be the musical idiom of the past. If contemporary composers tried to go back to any past idiom whatever, their music would seem as dead as a school fugue. New musical idioms have appeared in the wake of every new interpretation of the world, and I don't see how anyone can doubt that that new idiom is, in some measure, a product of that new interpretation. But, however new it may appear at the moment, it's the same old world they're interpreting, and every new interpretation has ultimately proved wrong, in some particulars. What proves it 'wrong? You are probably repelled by the frequent sentimentality of nineteenth-century music. You will find the same flaw in the other nineteenth-century arts. Was it a flaw in artistic method only? Or did the method correspond to and grow out of the prevailing attitude toward the world — the prevailing interpretation of it by men who were as distressed as you by the falsity of the interpretation they had inherited? Doesn't twentieth-century music reflect for you a good deal of the general attitude toward the extramusical twentieth-century world? /. It does, in a way; however, just as I sense in nineteenth-century music a tang of sentimentality, but don't find in it any such precise images of experience as Fred has reported out of your discussions, so I see in twentieth-century music a general appropriateness to the twentieth-century world as I see it, but don't find there any image of specific twentieth-century experience, or any recognizable reference to the general thought about the contemporary nonmusical world. . . . Except, of course, that good contemporary music feels contemporary, while bad contemporary music just sounds that way, for the moment, and then goes stale. 7. What makes it go stale? Is there any general agreement on that question? It seems to me very important. /. I've never tried to answer that question categorically, but I can see that it's important. I think I can tell what makes romantic music repellent, but I'm not so sure of what I don't like in the contemporary music I don't like. I frankly dislike the romantic tang. It has for me an odor of staleness, and I hold my musical nose when I smell it. It makes me think 250

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of a florist's shop — or a funeral parlor. The flowers themselves are beautiful, but their combined odor is overpowering. And it's something like the smell of incense, burnt to give an exotic odor to a living room. I always suspect it's there to hide other, and maybe staler, odors. /. I, too, can smell romanticism when it goes stale. But you also condemned bad contemporary music for its staleness. Has it then, for you, the same romantic odor? Or is this another kind of staleness? Both of them must lie somewhere in the music. /. I'm afraid I used that word, stale, without thinking. The staleness of romantic music seems to lie in its outworn vocabulary — an endless succession of secondary yths — that gives the whole texture a mushiness that has no real solidity beneath it. It's that vocabulary and the slithery chromaticism it breeds that smells. But the texture is full of sequences — more squeezings of the perfume bottle — and there are sententious cadences and whipped-up climaxes that are really only for rhetorical effect. Contemporary music, of course, avoids all that. But it hasn't any established idiom, so that I can't describe precisely what goes wrong when it goes stale. It seems to me, however, that it uses the freedoms of the contemporary idiom, either recklessly for mere effect, or scholastically, for a show of intellectuality, which is only another kind of effect; and neither of them brings the musical idea to its really inevitable conclusion. That falseness doesn't smell, but it offends my musical sense in about the same way romanticism does. 7. For one who doesn't pretend to have thought about the questions we're raising, you see a good deal. I'm particularly interested in your remark about the lack of any common idiom in contemporary music. It looks as if it would give us a lot of leads. I'm sure a great deal of my own attraction to or repulsion from contemporary music depends on whether I understand — or think I understand — the composer's idiom. I'm still, with most contemporary composers, far from grasping their style, and I'm sure that's because their idiom is strange to my ear. Most of the critical discussions I read seem to me to be concerned with the syntactical manipulations of the musical stuff — the mechanics of style — rather than with the more individual and personal manipulations that I should call style in Brahms or Schumann. In fact, I don't see how an individual style (and I don't know any notable style that isn't individual) could be arrived at unless the individuality of it were a variant in the usage of a commonly recognized idiom. And — 251

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F. May I interject something here? You and I have been looking at music almost exclusively as a medium of communication. John, if I understand him rightly, thinks of it also — but far less exclusively — as having that same purpose. At least, he wants us to understand what he writes. But while the idiom of any language is predominantly designed for communication, that design acquires, with any imaginative writer, a considerable value of decoration. The substance of music is much more decorative than that of language. May not the idiom of music, then, legitimately be seen as primarily decorative, and its communicative function as secondary, or at any rate subordinate? Haven't you, just now, been using the word idiom in its linguistic rather than its musical implication? And isn't John thinking of it — as far as I can see, legitimately enough — as predominantly related to design? /. You're quite right, I suspect, although I won't give up my insistence on the communicative power of music. But this isn't a question exclusively for theorists, which is the role Fred and I have been playing. It concerns the performer — and also his audience — as much as it does us. Henry, I'm sure, will take the role of the performer, and he may imagine us as his audience. We've at least something like an audience's diversity of views. H. Well, you've both set a number of ideas buzzing in my head, but they're only half-formed, and they run into so many fields that I don't know whether I can talk intelligibly about them. I agree with Fred that the musical idiom is by nature largely decorative. At least, that's the way the audience sees it. But I dislike purely decorative pieces, and I feel that in most of the music I like to play there is something really weighty to be communicated. Sometimes, however, I see the thing I'm playing only as a beautiful musical object, whose only meaning is in its sheer beauty. Even that, however, is worth communicating, and I suppose there is something more than beauty — or something other than beauty — in it, just as there is much of sheer beauty in the weightiest of communicative music. You and Fred seem to have found a way of distinguishing the communication from the beauty. I've never tried to do that, since I seem to grasp them both at once. But I can see that if I have misunderstood the communication, I may have distorted the beauty. I — /. You've spoken, I think, only about the familiar literature. How about the contemporary idiom — or idioms? That's what we're really inquiring about. 252

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H. I was going on to that. You yourself said that there isn't any commonly recognized idiom in contemporary music. To my notion, that is what makes that music so hard for the general public to take. They can't tell — and neither can I until I see the score — whether a composition is polytonal or twelve-tonal, or in some other way atonal, as they used to call it, although that word seems to have gone out of fashion. But neither polytonality nor dodecaphony (if you like to speak Greek rather than English) is an idiom. It's only a method or a basis of musical syntax, out of which — if you can do it — you may be able to contrive an intelligible musical idiom. Although you may rouse their curiosity, you can't talk to the public unless in an idiom they can understand; and I think John made quite an admission when he said that contemporary composers hadn't yet established such an idiom. The composer may be quite right in saying, "the public be damned." Their general appetite is for the sensation they get from what they call beautiful, and they're easily fooled. Yet, I do think contemporary music has taught them to revolt at the mushy language of the weaker romanticists, and they will swallow some pretty bitter stuff if they find in it something they can still call beauty, even though it's only the beauty of sensation. If you can add to that sensation something of the communication that is in the great literature of music — and I'm not asking that you repeat that communication — you'll have something. But you won't get it by accident, or by experimenting with syntax as syntax. That wasn't the way Beethoven wrote the C sharp minor quartet. F. I think both Henry and John have seen — as I couldn't make them see before —that our theoretical-looking discussions have really given some pretty important slants on what Bruno Walter, in the title of his last book, called Music and Music-making. I think we're all less pessimistic than he about the future of music-making, but his earnestness is to me very infectious. Can't we go deeper into this question of the musical idiom next time? 7. You're welcome to my notions, and perhaps you can rectify them if they seem myopic — or more likely, presbyopic. I'll expect you.

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A;

T OUR next meeting my two new friends greeted me with much less reserve than they had shown at first, so .that I felt quite hopeful. Fred began: F. We've been trying, on our way here, to find a lead toward the common musical idiom for contemporary music that we felt, last time, didn't exist. We agreed that it wouldn't be found by experimenters in electronic music — that, if it could become an idiom, is still too far in the future to become general — or by such tricksters as the blowers of smoke rings through a trombone, or by John Cage with his "silence" or his prepared piano. That stuff is mere vaudeville, and you can't build a lasting musical idiom on such a sandy foundation. John thinks the serial technique may serve; but twelve-tone music is too obscure for me — or perhaps I should say it's too harsh. I don't suppose there's any real similarity between that music and Jackson Pollock's abstract painting, but they both affect me the same way. /. I don't think the harshness is any real criterion. Musical ears have been getting used to harshness ever since harmony began — even the major 3rd was once a discord — and once you've got used to it you don't hear it as harshness. You do have to teach your ears to hear it, and I suppose you may quit teaching them at any point you please; but once you've got over trying to make every harmonic combination you hear into a chord built on 3rds you won't have much trouble. And there's a logic in the twelve-tone system that makes it look to me like a possible foundation for a generally usable system for structure — which is what 254

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the old tonal idiom was, and what any new musical idiom, if it's going to be valid, will have to be. H. Because I'm a violinist, I suppose I'm maybe the most conservative of us three, but anyhow I've too much affection for what I think is pure violin-tone to relish the harshness of much new chamber music written for what, to me, are weird combinations of instruments. But that really hasn't anything much to do with the question of a new musical idiom. That's the question we were going to tackle today, and I'd like to get into the scrimmage. /. I'm willing to run with that ball, although I suspect I may be thrown for a loss. If only because of its logic, the twelve-tone system does look as if it were the most promising foundation for a new idiom, but while I've worked out a few experiments in that technique, I'm far from expert in it, and I'm sure I could never learn to speak naturally in that style. But it has attracted Stravinsky —a very important composer — perhaps because he has always been, in theory, a pure structuralist. I'm probably a biased judge, but what I've seen and heard of his twelve-tone work seems to me to lack the characteristics of his former rather personal style, and to offer nothing to compensate for that lack. But the system in general, as it is expounded, seems to me to smack of preciosity. /. Of course, if you're going to try to count the twelve tones in the row, and worry over whether one of them has been returned to before the series is completed, you'll have a tonal "cross-note puzzle" that will beat any crossword puzzle I ever saw for difficulty. But nobody with any skill in the technique listens that way, and that "rule," although the theorists seem to regard it as a law of the Medes and the Persians, was sometimes departed from by Schoenberg himself, and far more often by Alban Berg, and by Webern, too, who often worked on rows of much fewer than twelve tones. No real listener to twelve-tone music tries to discover the basic row by ear — unless, as with Berg's violin concerto, it is played "straight," as melody, at the outset. Any ear with the least tolerance of modernity will recognize that row as melody, and will follow its evolutions, I should think, without ever thinking of it as a row. 7. Or even as particularly atonal. In fact, the tonal aspect of it is so clear that I hardly get any impression of atonality from it (Example 49). There are four interlocking triads: G minor with D major (its dominant) ; A minor with E major (its dominant); and then three more notes in the pattern of the whole-tone scale. Yet the impression the harmony 2

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gives isn't that of four triads, and so on. It is, at first, disconcerting to the conventional ear, which doesn't grasp the system on which it is constructed. To that ear — which, as you said, will have to be instructed in the new texture — the music seems atonal. That word means "without the sense of key"; much twelve-tone music — and much that isn't twelve tone —is far more atonal than this concerto; John, I think, is implying that the extremer atonality makes the same musical sense that this does; and oughtn't we, then, to find a definition of the older tonality against which we can compare the new tonality — if it is that — or the new atonality, if that's what this is?

EXAMPLE 49

/. Isn't the old tonality obvious enough so that we needn't waste time trying to describe it? /. The obviousness of it doesn't need any description. Everybody feels the tonic as a kind of gravitational center, around which the other notes orbit. But the gravitational pull weakens as those orbits widen, and you can't tell (since the center may change) just which center is governing the orbiting note you're trying to trace. Also, your understanding of that orbit will be governed in no small measure by the rhythm of the notes — which is to say that your idea of tonality (and probably of atonality as well) is a rhythmic as well as a tonal idea. Think the Berg row we just looked at in duple time. The D then becomes the root of the dominant triad, and the other three triads follow in the order I spoke of. But now, think of the row in triple time. The F#, as root of the diminished triad, brings A and C into the orbit of G minor, and the E major triad that follows jumps right out of that orbit, whereas, in duple time the A became an approximate tonic in A minor and the E triad was merely its dominant. Think the notes in groups of four and you have quite another impression, but all of them are clearly tonal. Which, then, is the right one? /. Obviously, the one your rhythm dictates, if you insist on interpreting the series tonally. But in reality, all of them are wrong. Every time you established a tone-center you restricted the orbits of the adjacent notes so that every move the music made was predictable. Berg's actual 256

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music isn't so predictable as that; and isn't that predictability — at any rate, for what you might call an inquiring ear — the reason for the staleness of most nineteenth-century music? 7. Mmmm . . . You say, "of most nineteenth-century music." If some of that music is definitely tonal but doesn't grow stale, isn't that a sign that the staleness may lie in something else than its tonality? And if you can utterly abolish the gravitational pull, not only of a clearly established but also of a tentative tonic, what basis have you left for cohesion between your notes? For you'll admit, I'm sure, that unless there's some perceptible cohesion between musical tones, a musical form is impossible. /. I certainly feel that the notes of my music cohere, but I don't relate them to any such obvious tonic as you described. I never think of what the analysts may see as the grammar or the rhetoric of my music, but I do contrive what seems to me a musically logical form. 7. But you do build phrases that cohere as phrases, and sentences in which the phrases cohere and come to a logical end? I ask because I can't imagine an intelligible discourse, whether in words or in music, that just runs on in an unpunctuated, uninflected stream. /. But is music really a discourse? And must musical coherence be attained through a precise analogue between musical and verbal phrases and sentences? Music isn't words, and there aren't any musical "parts of speech." Must it, then, copy the conventional patterns of word-structure? And aren't those patterns — those conventions — often academic? Don't you, when you start to say something, very often suggest the gist of your idea in your first few words, and then — maybe as I'm doing now — go on to make a really needless end to your sentence just because you began a sentence and feel an academic obligation to finish it? Couldn't you dispense with the final section of an A-B-A melody without any real loss? 7. Your first question, Is music a discourse? is intriguing. I suppose you can see it as you see a sculpture or a painting — as a thing formed out of a given substance, and cohering accordingly. I can see music so, but I see form in music as ministering to coherence, not coherence as ministering to form, and I'm sure that's the usual attitude. And as for the final section of the A-B-A melody, I think you gave a negative answer to that question when you said that music isn't words. You don't listen to the returning A of an A-B-A melody for the mere musical sense you got when you 2

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first heard it. You want to hear it again, if it was a good melody, because the sense it made (which I think is neither verbal nor purely musical) is amplified by hearing it in the perspective of the B-section — if that was appropriate. I'm as sure as you that we all use too many words — and too many notes — and that both our speech and our music become, for that reason, both tedious and obscure. But that doesn't answer my question about the principle of coherence, which I'm sure will have to be found in your common idiom if it becomes really common. F. May I butt in? You seem to be suggesting that the principle of cohesion in the new idiom will be only the old principle of tonality in a new guise? Is that right? 7. That seems to me a possible answer, and that's why I asked if we oughtn't to define the old tonality a little more clearly. That principle is very deeply rooted in the general musical consciousness, and it has shown a considerable possibility of expansion. Mozart or Beethoven would probably have found it hard to discover the cohesion we easily grasp in the music of Wagner or Strauss or Mahler; but for us that is only an expansion of the tonal orbits Mozart and Beethoven (and their public) were accustomed to. Isn't the freedom, as you call it, of the twelve-tone system possibly a further expansion of that same old principle of tonality? H. I've wondered, rather vaguely, about that. I'm not conscious of altering my tonal perspective, either in playing or hearing new works. They often perplex me, and sometimes leave me completely in the dark; but when I do follow them I believe I'm thinking in what must be my old channel of understanding, and further hearing only makes that old way of thinking seem more right. I've of course no way of knowing whether my perspective is what the composer intended, and if my vision is wrong, then possibly there's another principle at work. But I'm sure that when I do make sense out of the new music, I make the same kind of sense that I make out of the old. /. And that's just what I should like everybody to make out of my music. I really don't see why it should bewilder anybody. But while I'm at work —while I'm trying for cohesion —I'm not in the least aware of any tone-center around which my notes are orbiting. All I ask is that they cohere. 7. You're both suggesting, I think, that tonality is still operating. But you are hunting, just as Wagner and Mahler did, for new orbits. (You're 258

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doubtless hunting for more than mere orbit-novelty, but we'd better leave that "something more" for another day.) And didn't Debussy, with his whole-tone scale, go much further toward what you might call the condition (rather than the principle) of atonality than they did? /. How do you mean that? As far as I'm concerned, that scale is now staler than most of the nineteenth-century cliches. 7. It is, to be sure, because it's so limited to its one hyperbolic orbit and its rather colloid effect; but wasn't it an important step toward loosening the hold of the tonic on its satellites? Play up that scale. C, D, and E seem only 1,2, and 3 in the C-scale. FJ loosens the hold of C, but you aren't yet lost. G#, however, becomes pretty obscure. It seems to be going outward when it ought to be converging toward the tonic that you started from. You can't call it Ab, however, since any rational scale will follow the normal alphabetic order, so that the next note after an F must be a G. But the next note after G is A, which must then be A$; and the next, by the same logic, must be Eft. But you've now arrived at the octave of the note you started with — only this note isn't a C and it doesn't even sound like one, nor does it sound like the octave of the note you started with. It seems to me that the literal sense of the word atonality is already clearly exemplified in that scale — if it is proper to call it a scale. But nobody, I'm sure, is in the least perplexed by it nowadays. /. As Debussy used it, it was always possible to get back into a regular tonal orbit, even if it was an unexpected one. But in that little Prelude called Voiles he doesn't get back, and I suppose there is more of a hint of atonality in it than I'm aware of because he always seems to be just on the edge of a key, even though he never gets into it. But would you call that piece atonal? 7.1 shouldn't, because that word, for me, doesn't properly describe the peculiar cohesions of twelve-tone music either. And I wonder whether your twelve-tone manner of combining several successive notes of the row into "chords" hasn't a prototype in the whole-tone scale, which seems to me more like an arpeggioed chord than a scale. You can build it up, out of old-fashioned superposed 3rds, into a recognizable chord: a dominant pth with an augmented 5th and then an added augmented nth (or 4th). And, like the augmented~5th chord and the diminished yth, it divides the octave into equal (or equal-sounding) intervals,* * As in Example 50. The augmented triad may also be written as C-E-Ab (with Ab its root; but in either case the interval of the diminished 4th (G#-C or E-Ab) 259

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which makes it impossible for the ear to tell which note is the root. The augmented~5th chord is thus in three keys (or six, if you resolve it into both major and minor); the diminished yth is in four keys (or eight), and the six-tone chord or scale is in six (or twelve). All this is perfectly obvious, and I wouldn't have mentioned it if there were not another analogy that seems to me interesting. The whole-tone scale divides the octave into six major 2nds (one of which is a diminished 3rd). The twelvetone scale divides it into twelve minor 2nds, but is quite indifferent as to the note-names, so that the augmented 2nd and the minor 3rd, for instance, are the same interval — just as they seem to be, but aren't, in the diminished-yth chord. What I'm asking is this: Is the twelve-tone scale, whose notes may be — but, thank God, not often are — all sounded simultaneously, also a chord? My old ears refuse to recognize it — or any segment of the row that contains more than four or five notes — as a harmony; but there are keener ears than mine, and I can imagine them as able to discriminate those segments as functioning to the same end as the harmonies I can hear. We four, like the musical public, will probably have different opinions on that question, and I'd like to hear what John and Henry think. /. Your analogy between the six-tone and the twelve-tone scales as chords is interesting, theoretically, but whether it is sound or not is a question I shouldn't presume to answer. Like most contemporary composers, I think of what you call chords as densities. I rather think density, as you hear it, varies according to the number of half-step intervals you hear at the same time; but that is only a rough criterion. The impression of density depends on the context, just as it does in classical harmony, where the major yth may be either a very harsh or a very gentle interval. Of course, if you're using the twelve-tone technique strictly, the notes of any density will be, in a sense, prescribed. They're the next notes in the will occur as the audible equivalent of the major 3rd. In the diminished yth chord, the augmented 2nd (Ab-Bt|) is similarly the equivalent of G#-B (a minor 3rd), and in the six-tone scale the Bb shown in the chord is the equivalent in pitch of the A# described in the text, but its sense in the scale is quite different. 260

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row. Three or four of them, spread out over a larger area than they occupy in the basic shape of the row, I do recognize and discriminate somewhat as I do orthodox chords, but they don't resolve as orthodox chords do. That, I suppose, may be why I hear them as densities rather than as chords. Any three or four consecutive notes of the set, when you hear them simultaneously, come to have something of the familiarity of orthodox chords, but they're characteristic of this row, and so of this piece, rather than of harmony in general, and that's perhaps why they always sound new. H.Then, since you can combine 1,2, and 3 of your row, or 2, 3, and 4, and so on up to 12, i, and 2, you have twelve three-note densities and, similarly, twelve four-note or five-note groups, except that, as I understand, you have to use them in the sequence of your basic set. You can also "invert" your densities, which multiplies their number. And if you do the same trick with the inversion of your row, and with the retrograde form of it and its inversion, and with the twelve possible transpositions of them, you'll undoubtedly have more chords (or densities) than you'll ever find in any tonal piece. You, working them out, may well come to discriminate them, as you said; I, I suppose, performing your music, must also come to discriminate them — somewhat as you do, I hope. But how about the public, which hears my performance but once and has no previous acquaintance with your row? Can they be expected to understand your piece as you do — or even as I do? Frankly, when I play twelvetone music, I'm never sure that I really know what it says, although I of course don't play it unless it makes sense to me, and is to that extent convincing. But if you think the twelve-tone technique is going to become the basis of the common idiom we're looking for, I'm sure you've got another think coming. /. Are you sure you understand Beethoven's music as he understood it? And does your audience understand it as you do? Just how common is the common idiom you're looking at as a model? Don't you make up your program for the kind of audience you expect? And won't you expect that audience to have a certain previous musical experience — gained, perhaps, only through occasional listening — before they can understand either you as performer or the often difficult composers you're interpreting for them? How "common" is such an audience? And how common is the idiom they're listening to? /. May I put in my oar? We've been using this word idiom (I think, 261

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justifiably) as a synonym for language, although we're talking, today, about music as a tonal structure quite lacking in the symbolic reference to general human experience that is the basis of linguistic communication. Music, in that view, will be intelligible as music only, rather than intelligible as also referential. I suspect John is thinking chiefly of the musical idiom as nonreferential, although he recognizes musicality (which he can't define) as an essential characteristic of that idiom. Henry's idea of the idiom is that of a vehicle — of course, very complex and interesting as a vehicle — which somehow bears a cargo of reference to nonmusical experience. If that reference were directly symbolic —if notes or chords were to be taken as immediately suggestive of factual details of nonmusical experience — I'm sure that neither we four nor the million would give it more than a passing glance. It couldn't compete for a minute with language as an idiom — a vehicle of communication. /. Nor, I think, does it even try to compete; and if our talk about music as an idiom implies that sort of competition, I think we've wasted a lot of words. The structure of music is rather similar to that of speech; but you've just admitted that the analogy is only on the surface, and that it doesn't hold when you begin to compare music with language as a means of communication. /. I'm afraid you misunderstood me. I not only admitted but insisted that the process of musical communication is not the essentially symbolic process of language; but I didn't in the least deny that music can and does communicate. It does that, just as the million has always thought it did, by portraying, not the evident facts of common human experience, but certain equally knowable, equally factual, and equally characteristic aspects of experience as everybody knows and reacts to it. I doubt that we should ever have thought of calling music an idiom if it didn't do that. /. I suppose those aspects will all be comprised in the "concern" that Fred thinks your hypothesis can identify as a characteristic of the way in which we know and react to experience. But does your million really think of music and use it as a medium of communication? Doesn't it rather think of music as an art — and use it as an art — without much reference to other than the immediate pleasure it gives them? I'm not speaking merely of heedless teen-agers; I'm speaking of the excitement that a brilliant performance of a great Beethoven sonata gives an experienced audience. How far is that audience aware of anything more than sheer musical logic — which is structural interest — and sheer tonal delight — 262

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which is interest in the substance and the form of the music seen as an artistic object? /. Mmmm . . . You say that the million thinks of music as an art — as the structured delight you just described — rather than as a medium of communication. I'm afraid you're right. But its total response to music is a much more inclusive awareness than is its conscious thought about music; and "structured delight" is a feeble equivalent for the whole awareness — the whole concern —that was in your mind as you spoke. For, as you've often hinted, there is — or isn't — a quality of musicalness in the structured "thing," and if that quality isn't there, I doubt that you will find even the structure interesting. If you could poll an audience of a thousand listeners (a fair representative of the million) I believe you'd find them more keenly aware — and more unanimous in their judgment — of musicality (or the lack of it) than of the structure as sound or faulty. As with any poll, the real problem is to formulate your question. I confess I shouldn't know how to do that, but our hypothesis at least suggests the dimension of it, and that is the beginning of a formulation. F. Then you think musicality — the response of the naive musical mind — is not only a response to the appeal of tone and structure as such, but is also the awareness of a reference, in the music, to nonmusical experience? Our hypothesis seems to me to have established the possibility of that reference solidly enough; but to define the recognition of musicality, in any response, as the recognition of that reference seems to me to go too far. I'm sure you won't call John's an unmusical mind. 7. I won't indeed; but I'm only suggesting that the musicality he demands, which he can't define, is possibly an unf ormulated recognition of that reference. Our hypothesis shows, I think, in the examples Fred and I have examined, something of what that recognition is; but we selected those examples for the vividness of their reference, and we stated our recognition of it in words that aren't, and can't be, a precise equivalent of the whole image of experience the music evokes in our minds. Our images of an experience, whether it is factually encountered or verbally communicated, aren't merely images of the confronted or verbalized facts of the experience. They're also images of our concern for the facts — for the whole experience as it affects us. You don't feel concern about nothing, and I doubt that you ever feel deep concern without some reference to factual experience. And I think that when John recognizes his music as musical he is really recognizing it as concerned about something 263

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besides music, even if he doesn't know, or at any rate can't tell, what that something is. /. I think maybe I can go along with that. It's a pretty vague definition, but it does, in a way, describe what I feel as musicality; and maybe what I feel is, after all, an obscure reference to experience. But hasn't the tonal idiom said everything it could say about that reference? And if so, why shouldn't the much freer twelve-tone idiom come to be recognized as the musical idiom of our day, and maybe of the future? 7. Does that necessarily follow? I know that Schoenberg, who wasn't the only "inventor" of twelve-tone procedures, felt that he had discovered, rather than invented, his system. I won't deny that it may, like Volapiik and Esperanto and other manufactured languages, be put to actual uses of expression for those who will take the trouble to learn it. But it still looks to me like a manufactured, excogitated system, demanding attention as a system rather than as a medium of communication, and consequently unlikely to prove acceptable to the million or to be put to daily use by them. For I think enduring idioms grow out of the daily usages of the million — usages devoted to communication. /. Didn't Wagner really excogitate his idiom? Was his stretching of the boundaries of tonality "usable" by the million who in his day thought him crazy? Yet, as he boasted he would, he became in fifty years the master of the musical world. 7. And after fifty more years he had to abdicate — or was at least sent into exile. But he wasn't exiled because he stretched the boundaries of tonality. It was because, with that very stretching, he portrayed, along with much of concern that was new and true, much that wasn't true but seemed so because it was persuasively said, and was thus accepted as musical. For even deep concern may prove unjustified. It took about fifty years for the general ear to find, in his distortion of tonality which seemed like an excogitated idiom, the musicality which was in part a half-perceived portrayal of hitherto unnoticed responses to nonmusical experience. And it took almost as long to discover the untruths, which seemed just as truthfully portrayed because they were beliefs, hardly questioned by any but the more skeptical minds. If you look into your own aversion to Wagner (which I'm sure I may take for granted), I don't believe you can account for it on the ground of structure alone. /. Maybe not; but aren't his eternal successions of secondary yths and pths and his persistent chromaticism enough to repel anybody who has 264

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learned to sense the leanness of the perfect intervals — the 4ths, for instance, of which Schoenberg made chords until he, too, began to see harmony as density? Do you call Wagner's structure good? His music is all fat. F. And Schoenberg's isn't even lean. It's just bony, and fleshless. 7. You're both talking, aren't you, about substance, rather than structure? And where did either of you get the verbal images you've just suggested if not from an association — essentially metaphoric — with nonmusical experience? And aren't both of you, by implication at least, offering a clear hint of what musicality is, for you? John says 4th-chords yielded to densities. Isn't it likely that those densities may prove as repugnant to the taste of the future as did Wagner's yths and pths? I've no doubt that the great mass of the public thought of Wagner's music as art rather than communication, and prided itself, when it had learned to understand it as art, on that achievement. But you often find that you have perceived things without knowing you've perceived them; and I believe that both the acceptance and the rejection of Wagner's idiom came, first, from its apparent appropriateness to the daily experience of the million, and then from its discovered inappropriateness. 7 find the twelve-tone technique almost unsuggestive of any of the concern for daily experience that I find in tonal music. But my blindness, or ignorance, or insensitivity, doesn't really matter, and I'm not trying to set up my own attitude toward its turgidness (that, I think, is my chief objection) as anybody's guide. You'll not find in all the long history of music an idiom that has been accepted by the million which doesn't reflect, of course, a changing structural taste, but also the sentiment and the belief of that million. Of course, Wagner's idiom was at first accepted — as, later, the twelve-tone technique was — by the rare hundred rather than the million; but the million was converted to its use, not by its logic (although it had to be logical) but by its appropriateness to the million's concern for its daily experience. And today's million, although it is growing tolerant of that logic, seems to me to find mighty little appropriateness to its daily experience. We're trying to find out what the twelvetone idiom offers as a new interpretation of that concern. John thinks its logic is sound enough so that it may be generally accepted. He thinks its apparent atonality an immense advantage, but we three, in various degrees, are skeptical. We haven't — although in spite of John's objection we've tried to — arrived at any clear notion of what tonality is. The 265

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twelve-tone system, so far as we can see, may still be tonal — or pantonal, as Schoenberg came to see it, but that word implies tonality rather than atonality. Oughtn't we to find, if we can, the actual basis of its structural logic? For if the logic is there, it doesn't matter whether it's tonal or atonal logic. F. For my part, I can see no point of reference in twelve-tone music from which either the direction of melodic notes or the degree of density in harmonic combinations is to be felt; and 7 can't — although I admit that John may — see how a musical progression is to be understood as logical unless your ear can tell where it comes from and where it's going. /. The point of reference — the substitute, as I see it, for the tonicis the row: the basic set from which the whole composition is constructed; and the densities, as Henry said a while ago, are prescribed by that row and are characteristic of the piece that is founded on the row. Both melody and density differ, consequently, with every new row that is invented, and there's infinitely more interest in such new and characteristic features than in your old-fashioned chords built on superposed 3rds, and your meekly obedient melodies orbiting around a few fixed tonal centers. After all, there are only twelve notes in the octave, and those fixed centers restrict their orbits painfully. /. There are only twelve pitches in the octave, but in the tonal scale there are more than twelve notes — actually, thirty-five of them* — whereas your scale, so far as I can see, really has only twelve. You make no distinction between D# and E[?, for instance, or, consequently, between enharmonic intervals like the augmented 2nd and the minor 3rd, which you notate indifferently, losing the impact of a great many subtle tonal tensions which the older harmony possessed.t

EXAMPLE 5 i /. But gaining a great many more than we lose; for each row produces, by the simultaneity of successive notes in the row, its own characteristic * Since every pitch in the chromatic scale (except GS = Ab) may have three different letter-names — e.g., the pitch usually called C may be BS or Dbb; and if that pitch is a B or a D, it isn't a C. t A simple illustration: D* is not Eb, nor does it sound so in Example 51 -perhaps not on "one," but when the Bt] turns it into DJ. 266

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densities, while the old system merely repeats, in different keys perhaps, the old chord-formulas. You may have thirty-five different "notes" in your octave, but you won't easily find a piece in which all thirty-five are used; and if you did they would have only the effect of a few chordformulas, tediously repeated by transposition. The twelve notes of the row can also be transposed to any level, and any one of them can be taken in any octave; and if the row is properly constructed, those notes are really emancipated from the rule of the tonic and are vastly freer than are all your thirty-five. 7. A French literary critic I'm very fond of (Emile Faguet), speaking of the literary emancipation from scholasticism effected during the Renaissance, remarked that emancipation, then as almost always, amounted only to a change of servitude. Your densities, contrived by the specific order in your row, seem to me even more subservient to the row than are tonal chords to the tonic. You find yourself emancipated from the shackles of the tonic, but aren't you even more tightly shackled to your row? Isn't the freedom of your tonal movement as essentially predetermined as was the resolution of tonal discord? /. Theoretically, I suppose you're right; but you don't sense freedom theoretically. You sense it as freedom — novelty — freshness — windows opened to let out stale air; and you can't deny that the air in twelve-tone music is freed of the dead-flower scent of mooning romanticism. F. It smells to me more like the air of a closed room that has been sprayed with an acrid disinfectant. But I'll have to admit that romanticism is often cloying. 7. Romanticism has its vices, just as every other artistic movement has. But romanticism isn't a method; it's an attitude toward experience: the reflection, through a method, of the romantic artist's way of looking at the "model" he's drawing from. I think that model is human experience. The twelve-tone system is a method. We're trying to find out, first of all, how far it is workable as a method. But any valid method, surely, is a method of doing something — of achieving a purpose, like that of the romantic artists, bigger than that of manipulating the method itself. Some such purpose, I've no doubt, the musical-minded twelve-tonalists are trying to achieve. We have vaguely described it as "musicality," but we're now concerned with method, and we'd better stick to that question. We can't of course tell, merely by looking at that method, how valid it may be for a purpose we haven't defined, but I doubt that I understand it even 267

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as a method, and I'd like to ask John a few more questions. But let me first summarize the conclusions we seem to have arrived at. /. Go ahead. 7. You propose dodecaphony, or any other sort of atonality, as a method of constructing a well-ordered musical discourse. (Tonality, you'll admit, enabled a good many important composers to do that same thing.) You reject tonality as outmoded, and propose the twelve-tone row as a substitute — as the basis of a more extended coherence than tonality could achieve. The actual notes of your row are still the familiar twelve notes (or pitches) of the tonal chromatic scale, but your row is so constructed as to obstruct effectively the implication of a tonal relation between them. Your densities — your structural substitutes for tonal chords — arise out of the all but unalterable succession of the notes in the row, and consequently assume an individuality characteristic of and dependent on that succession. Am I right, so far? /. It looks all right, but there may be a kink in it that I don't see. 7. Then I'll go on. I've only tried to describe the row as the arbitrarily chosen, purely structural basis that is all I can find described in the books. You said, a minute ago, that the row had to be properly constructed. But you demand in addition a quality of musicality — if not in the row, at any rate in the music made out of the row. I believe you are quite right in that demand, and I suspect that both you and I shall find that we accept or reject twelve-tone music accordingly as it seems or doesn't seem musical. Is that musicality, then (of course, in embryo), in, or not in, the row itself? And whether it is or isn't, how do you tell a good tone-row from a bad one? /. Mmmm . . . That's a sixty-four-dollar question. . . . But how do you tell a good tonal theme from a bad one? Isn't that pretty much the same question? 7.1 hope it is, and I suspect that the fate of dodecaphony will depend, in the long run, on the answer. But you'll admit that a mere succession of notes such as the row usually appears to be — wholly unrhythmed, and with only the faintest suggestion of thematic or harmonic significance — offers little intimation of the character or the structure of the piece that is to be made out of it. The row, that is, is a method of structure, but is not in itself idiomatic. Themes, on the other hand, forecast a good deal of both the character and the structure of the music that is to come. If you know how to read tonal music, you will see at a glance a great many 268

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essentials of both structure and character as you look at the theme. But Schoenberg often has to indicate his leading lines by marks that distinguish the Hauptstimme ("leading voice"). Yet, the other voices are as meticulously made from the row as is this "main voice," and if the predominance of this main voice isn't self-evident, it seems to me there is far more difference than you recognize between the good row and the good theme. I said I hoped the good row would somehow be as identifiable as the good theme, but you have really begged my question. /. I'm afraid my only answer is, "by their fruits ye shall know them." Some rows, like that of Berg's Lyric Suite (Example 52 ), which uses only

EXAMPLE 52

"white" notes of the piano (except Bt]) for its first half and all five "black" notes in its second half, are capable of a very ingenious rearrangement (Example 53), in which the second half is the transposed reversion of the first half, and the reversion of the whole row of course maintains the same tonal suggestions as the direct form. As in the violin concerto, this row — and the Suite itself — is far more "tonal" in implication than is the row for Schoenberg's Third string quartet (Example 54), where — especially if you take the higher DJ —the immediate hint

EXAMPLE 5 3

EXAMPLE 54

of tonality is far less definite. I suppose the public prefers the Suite to this quartet; but I don't think the Suite, much as I admire it, the better piece of the two, and for the same reason I don't see Berg's rather obvious row as better than Schoenberg's. The quartet is much more atonal, but to my ear it's just as convincing —just as "musical." How Schoenberg conceived the row in the first place I of course don't know, any more than I know how Beethoven conceived the main theme of the Ap269

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passionata. Nor do I believe he ever asked himself your awkward question. He didn't need to. He just knew it was good and went at it. I suspect Schoenberg did the same thing. 7. Mmmm . . . Tone-rows, I should think, are more nearly the bare substance of music than are tonal themes. Rows aren't yet music, even though they do dictate your densities and something of the contour of your Hauptstimmen. But if they do that, mustn't your row be in some way a forecast of the goodness you find in the music made out of the row? I know how awkward my question was, and I'm sure you're right about both Beethoven's and Schoenberg's intuition. We'll have to break down the question further. Your two examples of the row at least suggest that symmetry in the construction of the row isn't essential for goodness in the music made of the row. Is that right? /. I rather think it is. You can easily make symmetrical structures (I'm not thinking of mechanical symmetry) out of unsymmetrical rows. 7. Then if that symmetry isn't in the row itself, mustn't it be gained in the music by rhythmic, rather than by tonal organization? For if the notes of the row are "free," as you call them —which must mean free from the gravitational tendencies that tonality imposes — I don't see how the row itself can effect any other than an arbitrary cohesion, individual for each new row you invent. /. And even if it does, there's endless variety in the inversions and reversions and transpositions. And isn't the freedom to invent any number of new rows an escape from arbitrariness, compared to the rigidity of the tonal relations in your scheme of tonality? 7. But there are good and bad rows — musical and unmusical ones. And isn't the compulsion to follow, in your structure, the order of the twelve notes in your row, really much greater than the compulsion to pursue the orbits of thirty-five possible notes gravitating around an undetermined number of tonics? F. Will you let me in again? I'm a rank amateur in these questions, but it looks to me as if you two had come to an impasse. There just can't be any answer to your last questions except the answer that each of your two points of view will suggest. And from my amateur's point of view — which is probably nearer the general public's than yours — it looks as if the real question were that of recognizable musicality. You both recognize and demand musicality in your structures, and you've both been trying to define it in terms of structure, in spite of your admission that 270

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structure isn't musicality, however essential it may be to musicality. I should think that if a tone-row yields a musical structure it must be a good row, and that if it doesn't, it isn't. The final question, anyhow for the public, is that of musicality as that public sees it — and, I believe, will continue to see it, for the public doesn't give a damn for structure as such. What they want is an idiom they can understand — the common idiom that we were supposed to talk about today. We've talked about it, in terms of structure, and have hardly got anywhere. Isn't the real question that of musicality, which the public senses, somehow, without ever raising the question of structure? I'll bet Henry will agree. H. I do ask that question, pointedly, when I come to study a piece for performance, for I have my audience — Fred's public —in the back of my mind. Four of us have lately formed a string quartet. I think it's a fairly competent group, but we won't make a bid for public favor until we've played a lot of both the standard and the modern works together. We tackled the Third quartet of Schoenberg last week. It's devilishly ingenious, of course, and we haven't grasped all its ingenuity, but when you learn how to shape the phrases it doesn't sound really atonal. There's a kind of ostinato figure at the beginning, made on only the first five notes of the row. That figure, as you can see, can be heard as being unequivocally in E minor. Whether Schoenberg meant to suggest that key, I don't know, but we all took the figure in that sense, and we came to hear the whole movement as being only a few steps off the plane of tonality. We had to go over it, phrase by phrase, to find the sense of it, but we did find more than the interest of musical structure. /. In other words, you found in it the musicality we're talking about. And if you find it, with that much effort (and the effort will grow less as you go on), and if you still deny that the twelve-tone technique can become a common idiom, haven't you got another think coming? H. Perhaps. I think we should hear from Fred. He's representing the public. F. Well, you asked, a while ago, how common the nineteenth-century idiom was. Obviously, the weightier music in that idiom is still enjoyed by no more than a small fraction of the whole heterogeneous musical public. I suppose I'm a member of that fraction. I heard that Third quartet of Schoenberg's in New York last year, and I found in it something like the attenuated musicality that I think Henry was speaking of. Partly from that hearing, and more from what we've been saying this after271

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noon, I can imagine a common idiom — for a still smaller fraction of the public — growing out of the twelve-tone system. But I can only imagine it — or perhaps I should say I can imagine the fraction of the public that will accept it. The structural hill the listener has to climb is terribly steep, and I'm not sure of how much musical interest he will find when he gets to the top. But I am sure that's the only kind of interest that will make the idiom common. H. Isn't it the same with some of the tonal structuralists — Reger, for example? I worked a long time with an excellent pianist on his Fft minor violin sonata (Op. 84,1 think it is), and we finally gave it up as too laborious to be really interesting as music. Structurally, I suspect it's as interesting, or at any rate as ingenious, as Schoenberg — to an impartial student, if there is one; and I haven't yet found Schoenberg more musical than Reger. F. Exactly! And isn't Henry now raising the very question our hypothesis is trying to answer — a question we've barely touched on this afternoon? All along, in our discussions of it, I have taken this question of extramusical reference as referring to definite, or at least discernible, "concern," as we've called it, for experience you could more or less clearly identify. I even objected that you were going too far when you suggested that musicality might be a quite indefinite but nevertheless real response to hints of experience too obscure to be traced. But it begins to look as if that might be true, and it at least makes an approach to the definition of musicality, which everybody recognizes but nobody can define. /. Some definition! You don't know where the musical response you're talking about begins, what it includes, or where it ends. All you're really imagining is the music itself. Yet you call it an image of nonmusical experience^. I. Do you know the beginning, the middle, or the end of what you call musicality? Somewhere, in what you call a musical awareness, you will postulate an awareness of structure. That you think to be an objective fact that you know. But I suspect that what you know and what you image as structure is music only in its structural aspect — which, when you also postulate musicality, becomes another and a lesser thing. The gratification you get from good music is more than a gratification with structure. Compare the Preludes (and also the Fugues, if you like) in C sharp major and C sharp minor from the first book of the Well-tempered 272

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Clavier. Their structure, I should think, is faultless. But do you get the same gratification from both pieces? The C sharp minor pieces are vastly more intricate and, if you like, more interesting simply as music. But do you really image nothing but music as you hear the two works? Their musicality is indisputable, but you'll have to expand the sense of that word beyond the boundaries of "pure" music if you're going to define it adequately. /. I think I begin to see what you're driving at. Anybody would see a great difference between those two pairs of pieces. The Preludes do belong to the Fugues, stylistically, and they're all in Bach's style. But their character is wholly different, and I see that if I tried to explain that character in terms of style where style is structure only, I couldn't do it. The C sharp major pair is lighter than that of the C sharp minor — anybody could see that — and if you see only musical lightness or heaviness in the music, you can explain it in terms of structure. But there are other kinds of lightness and heaviness — you can describe varieties of human experience, faintly, in those words; and the reference in the music to what you may call lightness and heaviness of experience begins to look important. But even if (as you're suggesting) musicality includes that recognition, you see it only in your own mind, against your background of experience. How are you to know whether it is really there or not — for anybody but yourself? /. Isn't your understanding of any object of experience whatever really yours alone? Is your mental image of any object or event — the chair you're sitting on or the war in Vietnam — merely your factual awareness of it as an object or event? You just said you see it against your own background of experience. Doesn't that background color your whole image of the object? And isn't that background yours alone? You assume, quite rightly, that my background is much like yours. We both live in the same world, and have similar powers of observation. But most of our background has been acquired, not through our own observation but through that of other minds, more keenly observant than our own — observation communicated through I don't know how many media. By far the most important of those media is language, which manages to portray the facts of experience with considerable accuracy. But your background isn't merely an assemblage of observed facts. It's an interpretation of them — of their value for you; and for that value (which is your inference from the facts) language is a much less competent me273

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dium — or idiom, as we've been calling it today — than it is for factual communication. I think you'll have to admit that if music can be understood as a medium of communication it will be judged as a more valuable idiom than if it is understood and felt simply as an art. /. Then the goodness of music lies in its teaching? essentially of Sunday-school lessons? Not for me. F. Do those lessons offend you by their matter or by their manner? /. I never stopped to think. I suppose it's really the manner. I don't like little talk about big ideas. H. Is there any similarity between your dislike of the verbal Sundayschool manner and your dislike of romanticism? /. Maybe. I never thought of that, either. Both of them begin with emotion instead of idea. You don't prove your point by ecstasizing about it. /. You don't, indeed; but neither will you prove it (although you may lay the foundation for it) merely by setting forth an array of facts. You think the facts cohere in support of your point; but they don't cohere of themselves. They're just facts, out there in the world. You make them cohere, in support of your point —quite possibly ignoring facts that don't support it — and when you've proved that point you see it as something far more exciting than a geometrical Q.E.D. For if your point is really important, a host of implications will appear in it — implications you never thought of while you were contemplating your supporting facts —and you'll end by "ecstasizing" about that importance. Your emotion, you are sure, is appropriate to the situation that has aroused it. You can't measure your feeling, but you shouldn't on that account dismiss it as a superficial ecstasy; and all Fred and I have been doing is to try to relate the feeling (you admit your musicality is a feeling) to the experience that aroused it and to which it appears appropriate. You think your feeling of musicality is aroused by and is appropriate to what you called structured delight. I agree. But I think it is at the same time appropriate to something else; and that something, so far as I can see, must be nonmusical experience. /. Then, if you equate musicality with the imagery of nonmusical experience, aren't you contending that music, to be good, must relate directly to nonmusical experience? 7. I didn't dream of equating musicality with nonmusical imagery. I only said that your structured delight, which is by far the greatest of 274

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your or anybody's musical interest, is almost certainly tinged, in any music you recognize as good, with what I am sure is a concomitant awareness of the interest of nonmusical experience. You found that interest — somewhat, I think, to your surprise — in the Bach Preludes and Fugues we talked about a minute ago. Think of the music, now, without that reference — if you can. I think you'll find that it was always there, but that you didn't recognize it. And I believe you'll find the music, seen as music only, considerably less interesting. /. There is more than structured delight; yet, aside from a little sharper definition of the lightness and the heaviness I spoke of, my image of experience is no clearer than before. But even with that vague addition, the music is more interesting than without it. H. Won't the performance that projects that interest be expected to heighten at least the color, if not the definition, of your image? F. And mustn't the idiom we're trying to discover be, for the listener, the vehicle of that imagery as well as of the structured delight? I should think any idiom, to be valid, must yield an endless variety of vehicles, each adapted to the load it is to carry. /. Exactly. And it's precisely the structural range of the twelve-tone technique that should make it the valid structural basis of the new vehicles twentieth-century thought is demanding. Today's ideas aren't those of the nineteenth century, and the musical horse-and-buggy of that era just can't transport them. 7.1 won't attempt a metaphor for the new vehicle you're recommending, but your own words suggest that it is still only a possible vehicle, and that you haven't yet calculated its carrying-capacity. It is logically constructed, but isn't the musicality you demand an important item in the load your vehicle — the common idiom we're looking for — will have to carry? We four are a fair cross-section of the composite musical public: you, John, representing the creator, Henry, the performer, Fred, the listener, and I, perhaps, the critic. Each of us probably expects, or at least would like, the whole musical public to hear music just as we do. They don't. They (like us) hear it as they can, and as they want to hear it. Their understanding of it grows, and in proportion to that growth the musical idiom becomes common. But that idiom is theirs as well as the composer's, and I believe the great composer learns it from them just as truly as they learn it from him. The theoretical validity of the twelvetone technique as a system can perhaps be determined by such specula275

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tions as we've been indulging in; but its practical validity as an idiom can't be determined a priori. That verdict has to come from the public. F. Then what we call greatness in music is a kind of goodness that endures—that persists throughout and overrides changes in public taste such as that for Wagner? Maybe you can't determine by speculation what that sort of goodness is, but couldn't we have one more session on that topic? There's a good deal of evidence — much music which everybody acknowledges to be great — and our speculation can at least begin with that. Henry agreed with alacrity; John, although he didn't say so, was visibly more doubtful; I, who had probably learned more from them than they from me, was eager; and the hour was set.

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I

HAD thought John looked forward to this meeting with a skepticism approaching indifference, but he had evidently been spurred to a livelier interest, for he began: /. You raised a question I had paid hardly any attention to when you asked me to compare those Preludes and Fugues from the Well-tempered Clavier. 1 had to admit, and I won't renege on it today, that there was more in those pieces than the structured delight I had thought was all that was really there. I believe, in fact, I've really begun to glimpse that image of experience that Fred keeps harping on. I went over them rather thoroughly when I got home, and I think I begin to see what you see in the music. But I don't feel sure that it is a "something more" in the music than can be accounted for as structured delight. That it isn't in the structure itself (as I first thought it was) now seems evident. But isn't it in the delight? If you define that word largely enough, won't it account for your image as far as you can account for it? 7. Not, I think, if you insist that your delight is purely musical. Aren't you really contradicting yourself? /. I see that, in a way; but you'll have to admit that your image, as far as you can account for it, is really yours, and yours alone. Fred seemed to be arguing that musicality is experience-imagery, and that music, to be good, must arouse it. I'll admit that I still can't define what I sense as musicality. But neither does he; for to assume that experience-imagery, which can't be alike in any two minds, is the quality of musicality as I think it is sensed in every musical mind — that seems to me to be drawing 277

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about the longest bow that ever was drawn. And, quite frankly, your hypothesis seems to me to do just that. /. Aren't you assuming that our hypothesis postulates a similar image of factual experience — a similar grouping of actually encountered facts — as the basis of the image we're really invoking? I've tried, all along, to insist that what music portrays is not physical experience itself but the concern —the emotional attitude — that physical experience arouses. You found musical lightness and heaviness in those Bach pieces, and glimpsed also a parallel lightness and heaviness of experience in them. I've no idea what particular occasions of experience you were imagining when you admitted that implication. Perhaps there wasn't even one, in sharp focus, but I'm sure there were a thousand on the periphery of your awareness. I also have a thousand such occasions somewhere in my mind, and perhaps only a few of them factually resemble yours. But out of that very diverse store we both agree that experience may be light or heavy, and I'm pretty sure you won't dismiss those two categories as insignificant. /. I won't, of course; but if that's the only precise reference to experience you're finding in music, I should think you needn't ask for more than a slight qualification of the delight in musical substance and structure to account for it. 7. If you ask for no more than the categorical distinction between light and heavy, whether in music or experience, you may possibly find it in what you're including in your image of delight. You could even call the over-all aesthetic delight of comedy or tragedy light or heavy, but I'm sure that general indifference to experience isn't your mental response to drama — or to music. /. I hope it isn't. But when I listen to the Eroica, which is really heavy stuff and which I admire as much as I ever did, although I have to set my mental time clock back in order to hear it — when I do that, I'm still, so far as I can see, listening to music and attending to it as music. F. You aren't (quite rightly) seeing a portrait of Napoleon or, as some say, General Abercrombie, as the hero of the piece. But would the weight of it as music be as heavy as you feel it if, somewhere in the back of your mind, there weren't an intimation of the strength and the indomitableness which are a part, surely, of your image of heroism? /. Perhaps not; but do you, as you listen, pay much attention to your image of heroism? 278

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H. I think Fred has just hit the nail on the head. I don't, as I listen, attempt to erect my vague notions about what heroism is compounded of into an image of that mental attitude. I don't even think of that word or of that attitude. But when the music is over — when I've had the structured delight I get from it — I see that I have somehow realized, as I should never have done without it, what a heroic mind is and how it stands up to the world of experience.* 7. And I think Henry has pretty well driven the nail in to its head. If you, John, compare your response to the Eroica with Fred's and Henry's (and mine, too), do you find it very different? /. There's considerable difference in emphasis and maybe in definition of the heroic idea, but I guess the difference is more in degree than in kind. /. Do you resent, or perhaps merely reject, their emphasis? /. I suppose I should have said, before I came here, that they might emphasize it as much as they pleased, but that I wasn't obliged to follow their lead. But I guess I did follow their lead — or rather that lead — without realizing it, or didn't follow it far enough to realize it. But I see that the lead isn't a fiction, and if you failed to get even what I got without really knowing it, you'd be missing a lot. 7. How good would the music be for you if it offered only structural delight? I've asked you that question before, but it seems to grow more pointed as we go on. /. I guess you have me there. But I might ask, how good would the music be for you if it gave as little of structural delight as it gives of your image? 7. Is that an imaginable condition? The mind that listens to music expects, quite rightly, structural delight as a first essential. Without that, he won't listen at all. Finding it, he will almost as readily perceive the gross distinction between lightness and heaviness, and he may even, as a corollary, begin to think of the music as a vehicle bearing the one burden or the other. That gross distinction, I think, may still be made on the grounds of structure and delight alone; but I believe you'll agree that the next step — that from heaviness in the abstract to heaviness in the concrete — is likely to be taken, whether consciously or not. If it becomes * Henry, I think, is laying a foundation for my contention (which you will find elaborated in the Epilogue) that music, interpreting mental attitudes as it does in the Eroica, may, in Bacon's phrase, "serve for ability."

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conscious — if the heaviness appears concrete — isn't it likely, in an imaginative mind, to become a hint, however vague, of extramusical experience? Did you think of the heaviness of the C sharp minor Fugue as wholly abstract? /. Perhaps because of Henry's reference, the other day, to the Chaconne as full of belief, I found the Fugue, when I went over it, strongly tinged with the tang of religion; and unless there is such a thing as religious structure, I suppose there can be only substance structured appropriately to religion, which isn't the same thing. 7. Did your interest in the muisc grow, somewhat in proportion as that tang of religion become apparent? /. It did; and I played the Fugue better when I tried to put that tang into my playing. 7. You played it more musically? /. I should say so. 7. Didn't that experiment all but establish the reference to experience as a possible and valuable content, in what you call good music? (Structure, of course, is also a content.) /. Your argument is plausible enough, but whether it establishes that reference as essential to good music is a question I'll have to sleep on. If it is essential, you can argue that what I write — both what I finish and •what I throw away — is good or bad in proportion as it relates to nonmusical experience I never even glimpse as I write. I grant that mere ingenuity of structure (which is all I can find in much twelve-tone music) isn't enough to qualify that music as good, and I'm just as impatient with it as is the public that probably doesn't grasp the ingenuity. But to say that only that music is good which makes tangible reference to experience seems to me to go to an opposite extreme that is just as untenable as the worship of structure. H. [To John:] Aren't you setting up a straw man? [To me:] Can't experience be implied in an utterance even though it isn't mentioned or even consciously thought of? Did you say, or mean to say, that music was good precisely in proportion as it relates to experience? 7.1 didn't, and I didn't intend to; yet, I suspect that the proportion of that reference is a rather important question. I have found that relation in the few of John's things I have heard, and I doubt that I should have found the music good if I hadn't sensed that relation. But I was satisfied when I simply found the relation (whose dimension, or whose propor280

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tion to the structure I should be quite unable to measure), and I should have gone to the extreme you spoke of if I had insisted on that measure as a precise measure of goodness. I don't see how you can wholly ignore the measure of reference or the quality of it, if you recognize it as present. Yet you could hardly contend that music was good in proportion to the goodness you recognize in the experience the music relates to. Something in the dimension of your structure — something I don't in the least know how to define — must be accordant with, or perhaps proportionate to, the dimension of goodness in that experience. The goodness that Beethoven speaks of in the Eroica is greater than the goodness in Fur Elise; the difference, I'm sure you'll agree, is one measure of the relative goodness of those two pieces; but they're both good. And whether the reference is to little-girlhood or to heroism, I still believe that sort of reference is essential to good music. H. Then aren't you really aiming at the distinction between good music and great music? Isn't the Eroica. both good and great, whereas Fur Elise is just good? The dimension of the experience really makes the difference, doesn't it? The absolutists of today seem to regard Bach's Art of Fugue as his greatest work. I can't see that. Doesn't the title itself indicate that he was exemplifying the structural process of fugue rather than the communicative process that John finds in the C sharp minor, where, for me, the structure is just as interesting as in the Art, but is subordinated to the communicative purpose? 7. Once more, I think, Henry hits the nail on the head. Always assuming that the structure is adequate (and that's no small assumption), the next question is whether the interest of experience is there. That interest will be differently valued by those who perceive it, and the goodness of the experience will be judged accordingly. Sometimes, however, there is an all but unanimous judgment; and when the world has agreed that a musical work is not only faultless in structure (in its How), and in the adaptation of that structure to its purpose (in its Why), but that the implied experience itself is significant, I think you have great music. And even if, as with the B minor Mass, the experience as projected through the music has for you another complexion of goodness than it had for Bach, that goodness, defined for him in an unquestioned doctrine, survives for us as the more general human impulse to worship that antecedes and probably generates all doctrine. F. Then greatness in music is enduring goodness? 281

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7. / think so. But that's the kind of high generalization you have to be careful of. /. As you now put it, you make your insistence on the moral aspect of music look less repellent. But hasn't goodness itself been extensively redefined in our day? I'm not questioning the goodness — the moral goodness — of the B minor Mass; but isn't it evident that a lot of what was accepted as musical (and also moral) goodness during the nineteenth century has been disqualified? Tchaikovsky's, for example? And aren't you really proposing a new idiom — perhaps even the twelve-tone idiom — as a necessary vehicle for the communication of the new goodness? /. Every era in which a new interpretation of goodness has been accepted has found a corresponding artistic idiom for its expression, and the twentieth century is certainly a new era. The twenty-first will probably be another. A good many eras have contributed enduringly to art. A few have contributed little. If, as we're now saying, the interpretation of goodness in experience has a good deal to do with the goodness of the artistic idiom, you'll have to take both those factors into account before you can forecast the future. The twelve-tone system seems to me to have been constructed as a system, rather than as an idiom. That's a backforemost procedure for the invention of an idiom, which, to become viable, must "have its eye on the object" it is trying to portray, rather than on itself. Will we get anywhere if we try to inquire into it as an idiom? if we try to forecast its future? Our question today is of course the goodness of music. But if goodness in experience has anything to do with the goodness of music, we've got to look at our question in that light. F. It seems to me that the survival of dodecaphony, or atonality of any other sort, depends chiefly on the recognition — which must imply the presence in the idiom — of that value of goodness. And I believe that the general complaint isn't so much that that idiom is hard to understand as that there's nothing more than the interest of structure to understand. There's an endless quantity of that sort of music in the older tonal idiom, and it has been rejected on the same ground. Somebody told me, the other day, of an ironic mechanical genius who had invented a very clever and elaborate machine that ran with impressive smoothness, actuating all sorts of integrated parts, but produced nothing. It just ran. I think that's what much twelve-tone music seems to be, to the average listener. For him, music, to be good, must produce something, and I think we've at 282

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least tentatively determined that what he really wants it to produce is what we've been calling an image of experience. That isn't a good name for it. It's really a portrayal of the excitement — the concern — that experience arouses, and he's likely, when he gets the excitement, to be satisfied with that. Even so, hasn't he perhaps glimpsed the goodness we're talking about, and mayn't he have been actually nourished by it without knowing it? 7. Fred's proposition looks rather naive, but I think there's a good deal in it. Do we really know much about the nourishment we absorb, whether physical or mental? We can analyze and ponder the nourishing substance itself, and even the process by which that substance turns into us. But neither the substance nor the process is the actuality of nourishment — the product of the process. We've been trying, Fred and I, to explore the process, and I think our hypothesis has somewhat clarified our understanding of it. But all the hypothesis talks about is the musical substance itself and the process by which it seems to be turned into nourishment. Seen merely as a process, the hypothesis itself just runs. The alchemy of the transformation is as obscure as ever. And I suspect that that alchemy — along with what we've raised to the conscious level — works just as naively in us as it does in the average listener Fred was talking about. And that's why I think idioms grow out of everyday usages. F. Then you feel that the twelve-tone system, which the other day you said seemed excogitated, isn't rooted in everyday usage? 7. John asked whether Wagner's idiom wasn't excogitated, and we gave him no answer. I do have my doubts of the twelve-tone system, but they're less positive than you think. Neither that nor the more general practice of atonality has been accepted, as Wagner's system was in the fifty years or so after those techniques were promulgated. Yet atonality has gained a lot of ground, and I'm quite sure that such success as it has had comes from its having taken root in daily usage. But that doesn't guarantee that it will thrive. Many of the plants that seem to flourish in that soil are annuals, and I think an analysis of concert programs during the last fifty years would show an alarming frequency of winter-killing. /. How much winter-killing went on in the nineteenth century? and in every other before it? I can see that your perennials grow out of the soil — your "daily usages" — that the million cultivates; but if you left it to the million to do the selecting and the pruning hardy perennials need, you'd not get the gardens you admire. If the million had their careless 283

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way, there'd only be inbreeding — ultimately fatal to the species. Didn't that happen to the sonata form? And — come to think of it — does your hypothesis provide for the cross-fertilization that invigorates the species? /. I started this botanical analogy, and I can't complain if you turn it against me. But analogies usually sprout loose ends that, if you follow them, lead you away from the real question. The past has always got to be fertilized by the present if there's to be any future. But novelty isn't necessarily fertile, and — if our question is that of goodness in music as at least a possible reference to human experience — I think we've still got to inquire into the contemporary contribution to the musical idiom which, if it survives, must somehow make that goodness visible to the million. Our hypothesis, I'm sure, does look with hope for the cross-fertilization you quite rightly demand. H. Nobody can foresee the possibilities of a new idiom, but I should think it wise to account for what seem to be its failures. John, I'm sure, will agree that merely to write competently in the twelve-tone idiom will not ensure what he recognizes as good music. /. Of course not. Why do you ask? H. I want to inquire into the hypothesis for myself — partly to see if I understand it, and partly to see whether, or how far, it can contribute to this notion of goodness we're discussing. The reference to human experience is conveyed, as I understand it, by manipulating representatively the tonal tensions and the rhythms of music — the two real elements of the musical substance which, in themselves, represent nothing. At least, they don't represent any tangible objects of experience. Emotion, however, is elementally a fact of nervous tension and motor impulse. As a response to the impact of experience on a nervous and muscular system, you might even call it a tangible object of that system's experience. Tonality yielded a musical idiom in which that response seems to be portrayed. I should think that portrayal, added to the intrinsic interest of the musical substance, might be reckoned as another and a valuable goodness. I don't find that contemporary music has invented any really revolutionary rhythms, so that perhaps rhythm may still be — and particularly with Alban Berg, is — often clearly representative of motor impulse. But hasn't atonality, while gaining much in the strangeness and newness and color of the tonal substance, really thrown harmony away — obliterated the rather easily intelligible tensions — the familiar sorts of harmonic 284

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cohesion — that not only hold the music together but portray, sometimes very subtly, the nervous tensions of emotion? /. Thrown harmony away? How do you mean that? We've substituted densities for chords, yes. But there are a thousand new densities in our vocabulary — our idiom — for every chord in your old tonal system. Why can't they be heard — or come to be heard — just as your chords are, for their allusiveness to emotion? Isn't there, in the first place, what you might call a musical emotion — an emotion that is directly excited by the musical stuff itself, and has no relation to this emotion of experience you're invoking as a measure of musical goodness? Need music, to be good, really offer or excite any other than musical emotion? I'm not, as I should have before I came here, denying the possible reference to experience outside music; I'll even admit that it's a frequent addition (as in those Bach fugues) to what I thought was only musical interest. But I feel sure that even if the new resources aren't yet manipulated for the rather linguistic purpose of expression, they can be so manipulated. 7. I'm not sure that they can't, but I'm pretty sure that for the most part they aren't, and I think their very multiplicity — which, for the general ear, amounts to indistinguishability — makes them unlikely to be so heard. I've only another analogy to offer, but it seems to me, as I suggested the other day, that the "language" of dodecaphony hasn't any etymology. /. How do you mean that? Music isn't words. How can it have an etymology? /. My answer will probably seem remote, but I think it applies. Etymology is the science of word-derivation, and it appears to be concerned with the form of a word-root as it changes or persists in later languages. But the meaning of that root also persists and changes, and without that meaning the forms would hardly be worth tracing. Etymologia, in Greek, meant, largely, what it does to us — the history of a word; but etymos meant "true," and the truth that word had in it was the real basis of the historical study. We have the English word etymon, meaning a word-root, and implying both form and meaning as it did in Greek. But the Greek word appears to have come from eimi, "to be"; and that implication of being seems to me rather important. /. You're flying too high for me. How can the fact or the implication or even the dim awareness of being — by which I suppose you mean being alive — have anything to do with the etymology of a word? 285

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7. To perceive meaning, whether in the assemblage of things that makes up what you call an experience, or in the words that symbolize that assemblage, is possible only to a being — a human being — isn't it? /.I'll buy that. 7. Then that being's awareness of meaning in experience is also an awareness of being in the mind that perceives it? For that mind can perceive in experience no more than what its being has enabled it to perceive. Aren't all the meanings you find in an experience really only the meanings that experience has for you"? And is that "you" only the cognitive, analytical faculty that perceives the facts of experience and their factual relativity to one another? or is that "you" a being, bigger than its mind, which sees truth not only as a congeries of indubitable facts, but as a synthesis that has meaning for the being as well as for the mind? Doesn't your mind belong to a "you" that is bigger than it? F. I don't believe modern psychology will let you get away with that. 7. I'm sure it won't, although I'm not sure it can penetrate the mystery of being, either. I suspect that the "you" I know, or the "you" you recognize when you look at your self, is bigger than the object — the "you" — that psychology can compile out of the data that are the recognized elements of that science. Structural analysis, accepting as its data only the facts that the intellect can certify, can't wholly account for that "you" — or for the music you love. Your being, while it is manifest in and to your mind or your consciousness, is bigger than your consciousness, just as it was for the Greeks. That's why the Greeks thought their etymon, the truth they found in a word-root, had in it an implication of the being that recognized the truth, and that they recognized in themselves. And I think they had a point, although neither they nor we can prove it. /. Well, until you can prove your point, I suppose you've got to get metaphysical — which means, doesn't it, "beyond the physical." But I still don't see how you can argue that music — the old music — has an etymology, while the new music hasn't. 7. I'll try to stick to physical facts. You'll agree that a word, to convey meaning, must arouse in the mind an image of the thing it symbolizes. When the image it arouses is that of the thing as we know it, we think we have arrived at the truth about that thing. The etymon, then, is such a sign for the thing. Music, of course, doesn't directly symbolize things; but our hypothesis contends that it may portray the way you feel about 286

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things, and you'll agree that your feeling about a thing is a part of your whole image of that thing. Isn't that portrayal, then, an etymon for an aspect of the thing? (since even its physical aspect is only a part of your image of the thing). /. I think your analogy is sound enough; but why shouldn't it hold for twelve-tone music, which has as its primary substance precisely the same twelve scale-tones as your tonal chromatic scale? 7. In the tonal scale those tones are dependent on the tonic, and consequently interdependent. In your twelve-tone scale, they aren't interdependent. Theoretically at least, your scale is a pitch-succession only — twelve independent notes. Practically, you often make them appear interdependent—as having an intrinsic tension-value; but that interdependence, so far as I can find it explained, comes from the interdependence you build into the notes in your row, and isn't based on any prior, aurally recognizable, principle. Being new for each row, the interdependence is too obscure for the general ear to grasp. The tonic, as it is generally apprehended, is not just a feature common to the syntax of all tonal music, and therefore familiar enough to be grasped as a principle of structure. That familiarity seems to rest on the presence, in all musical tone, of the upper partials that give that tone its timbre and also faintly suggest the harmonic relations of consonance and dissonance.* /. I can see that the general ear must have evolved, and must have acquired its perception of tone-quality and tone-relation, in accord with the impact of the upper partials of tone along with its fundamental. But just how sensitive is that "general ear"? Can you really define its percep* We talked for some time about the adjustment of the general ear to the overtone series, but I think I need report only the gist of our conversation. We agreed that that series must have been present, even before human ears evolved, in any tone whatever. Evolving ears, therefore, in that tonal "environment," must have adjusted to that complexity in even the simplest of tones. Our auditory mechanism, then, built itself so as to recognize, generally, the distinction between consonance and dissonance. The Greeks apparently recognized that distinction as practicable only in the successive notes of melody, and their word harmonia (an adjustment — a "fitting together") implied no more than that. But the first steps in harmony as combined tone (the organum of the ninth century) would hardly have been taken if the ear hadn't recognized, through intimations dependent on its structure, the difference between consonance and dissonance. More subtle distinctions in harmony, and a corresponding awareness of dissonance-tension in melody as well, followed as a natural sequel, and are historically traceable. So is the emergence of the tonic as the counterpart of the much less positive modal Final; and the acceptance of the tempered scale, making possible incalculable expansions of the range of tonal tension, is another of those "daily usages," all of which would seem impossible without that primary fact of the structure of the ear.

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tions, any more than you can the more complex sensibilities of the "common man"? Even if you exclude the tone-deaf, will you include the musically underprivileged and uneducated ears —those of that Major, for instance, who Fred told me was the rather unpromising music-appreciator whom you two began by talking about? Mightn't the harmonic tensions in the Beethoven sonata he didn't listen to have become, with listening experience, as intelligible to him as our twelve-tone densities are to me? /. They might have, but that's a pretty big if. Yet I do think his naive comment, "Pritti, ent it?" was a recognition of something more than tonal tension, whereas all you seem to be asking about is that tension as a structural fact. There was for him the glimmer of an etymon — a musical "truth" — in those tensions. I think he caught that glimmer through its appeal to his uneducated, common man's ear which was built (but which he hadn't used) to recognize the tensions that made the glimmer. His word, pretty, was all the word he had for an awareness that was really much more complex. /. And to match that complexity aren't our densities — a hundred times as many as your chords, and always new — much more subtle and adaptable than are your familiar chords and your tonic-bound melodies and your obvious, perfunctory cadences? 7. Your densities may overmatch that complexity numerically; but are they equally subtle in suggestion and, accordingly, equally adaptable? Is an unfamiliar etymon (granting that your density may be one) likely to be suggestive of so elusive an awareness as the tang of an emotion — a tang so appropriate to an experience that it implies that experience? Isn't your delight really in the newness of your densities rather than in their allusiveness — and so much so that you hardly look for allusion? Even so, in asserting that they may be allusive, aren't you admitting that that sort of reference is a part of the goodness of music? /. I do, I suppose, look for newness rather than for allusion; it's quite true that newness isn't in itself allusive, and that the reference to your image will have to be built into the music along with its newness. But you don't answer my question. May not our densities have allusion built into them? F. Is that the real question? Oughtn't you to ask whether the allusion you may build into your densities can be got out of them? gotten by . . . well, by such a listener as I am? 288

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H. Or such a performer (and listener) as I am? For it is a good part of my problem to project that allusion so that the still more general, possibly more intuitive, listener than we are can sense it. If I project newness as newness only (but I'm not saying that newness isn't interesting), I sense one kind of response from my audience. If I project what we've been calling allusion (along with what, for a good many, may have been newness), I sense another kind of response, for allusion may give newness, as much as newness may give allusion. (My audiences may be divided into the two kinds of responders, but I don't think so. The extremists, at either end, are rather few.) There's an undertone in the sheer noise of applause that I think reveals something of what the audience has got, and I've never heard that undertone, even in the response to the greatest performers, unless the allusion we've been talking about was evident. I've even heard it when the performance was technically bad. I once heard Kreisler, after a dangerous plane trip and after learning that a dear violinist-friend of his had just died, play the Beethoven concerto. Half the notes were out of tune, and the sound was really distressing — at first. But in spite of everything, we soon began to see that Beethoven was there. I don't know whether the applause at the end was for Beethoven or for Kreisler, but it had the undertone that welcomes a revelation; and that revelation couldn't have come from anything but the allusive musical idea itself, projected by a hand that fumbled the structure, but also by a mind that grasped all the allusion in it. And there's a profound allusion in that music, even though I can't tell what it alludes to. 7. But you do know, don't you, that its allusion is to you, and to the million whom, as inquirers into the import of experience, you resemble? Could you recognize its goodness if you could find in it no reference to you and to your notions of what goodness is? Not musical goodness merely, but goodness as you define it out of your experience of things that aren't music? And if you call the music great, isn't it because, as Fred said the other day, its goodness endures? We fumbled over this question for some time, coming at last, even over John's reluctance to admit that music could have the moral implications it must have if it reflects human response to experience, to a kind of unanimity. Then, since the questions that still fermented in our minds seemed unanswerable, we adjourned, sine die. 289

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ARTICULARLY as the hour of our discussions recurred, but also quite persistently during the intervening days, I felt a kind of uneasiness, partly over our words for the things we had said, but still more over the things we hadn't said. For our conversational method, sporadic rather than systematic, might well have presented the essential purport of the book in a rather skewed perspective. I shall try, here, to rectify that perspective, both by viewing that purport from a somewhat different angle and thus bringing into sharper focus the conclusions toward which our talks were aimed; and incidentally by indicating some corollaries of those conclusions which we did not even touch upon. This book is intended as a contribution, drawn chiefly from the byways of observation, to what is generally called the appreciation of music. To appreciate is literally "to put a price on," and therefore to value the worth of, a contemplated object. The many current books on music appreciation attempt, in generally similar ways, to value the musical object. They are addressed (as this book is) to the relatively unskilled music-lover, and are therefore chiefly devoted (as this book is not) to the definitive valuation of the more conspicuous features of music: the many high, technical skills exhibited in both musical composition and performance. Added up as the books present them, those skills make a very respectable sum. Yet, to the keen music-lover, that sum appears less than the whole value he has already put, for himself, upon some of his especial fa-

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vorites, and is hoping to find in many others. This augmentation of value — this "something more" — is thus a kind of "unearned increment" whose nature, since the books do not account for it, must evidently be sought for in the byways of musical appreciation. (It was obscure enough to my Friend so that we spoke of it, for some time, merely as "something more.") This book is almost wholly concerned with that increment — with its nature, its source, and its valuation. The nature of the increment at first appears, to the general ear, to be quite simply that of a gratifying intensification of the sensory delight which any hearer expects from music. It is sensed as a peculiar flavor, permeating the musical substance, and enhancing its appeal somewhat as the fragrance of a flower enriches its appeal to the eye. The musical taste buds, not only of the general listener but even of the learned, acclaim this flavor as "musicality," and condemn its absence as a serious fault. This recognition of the nature of the increment, however, is very sketchy, and it leaves its source similarly obscure. The flavor, since it permeates the whole musical substance, must lie somewhere therein; but structural analysis, dissecting that substance down to its two elements, tone and rhythm, and tracing the cohesions and adjustments of those elements which yield the syntax of the musical structure, finds no trace of the increment. For structure adds no flavor to the tonal substance, nor does the intellectual interest of structure heighten the flavor already existent in that substance. Yet, the increment exists. Two possible conclusions about its source seem to emerge: Either the increment must have been imparted from outside (presumably by the performer), or the musical substance itself must possess, in either its structure or its elements, incremental values not recognized by conventional analysis. That the increment is projected by the performer is indubitable, but that it originates with him is improbable. For, unless he is a mere purveyor of flavors (as some performers are), the flavor he imparts to the music is not merely the heightened delight of musical tone, but is appropriate to — and therefore implied in — the composition itself. But, if this is so, the flavor is not the increment. It is only an evidence that the increment exists, and that it apparently emits its own flavor. The increment, then, must be inherent in the musical body; and since it is 291

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projected by a heightening of the flavor of the tonal element, but is not merely that heightened flavor, another than the conventional process of analysis will have to be devised if its nature is to be identified. But again, if that new analysis shows the increment to be an inherent feature of the musical body, or to have been interjected as a positive influence on the design of that body, the increment will have to be regarded as an earned and therefore not an adventitious value. The appreciation of music, then, will have to include the study of it as one of the many obligatory objects of its inquiry. "Studies," as Francis Bacon remarked in beginning his notable Essay, "serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability." He was doubtless not thinking of music; but if our art is as significant as its public supposes, his three categories of value may help to sharpen the focus of our study of its appreciation. That music, almost without study, serves for delight, no one will dispute. If by "ornament" Bacon implies the refinement of native sensibility, there is still no question. But the notion of music as contributing to the ability of its appreciator will raise the critical eyebrow. It is hard to see how music, valued however highly for its sensory delight and its structural ingenuity, has much to offer to the seeker after ability. We usually think of ability as skill, and our musical masterpieces probably exhibit as high a skill as can be attained by any artist. But ability is really a much larger human achievement, to which skills of many sorts must contribute. These skills, to yield ability, must both spring from human understanding and work toward its enlargement; and that, I think, was what Bacon was really proposing as the highest of the ends which studies might serve. He does not, however, intend to denigrate the lesser categories of delight and ornament. Refinement is certainly one outgrowth of human understanding, and art, conducing even hedonistically to refinement, is by no means a meager contribution. But the more significant occasions of human experience demand more than refinement of mind for their understanding, and the so-called representative arts — those which portray significant items or occasions of experience in such fashion that their implications can be understood — have always (until the twentieth century) attempted to project factual experience meaningfully. ("Meaningfully" need not in the least imply "homiletically.") Yet merely factual experience, however realistically portrayed, is not 292

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always meaningful. Much of its real meaning, indeed, has to be sensed rather than intellectually tabulated, and it is the insufficiency of a merely literal portrayal, rather than its literalness, that makes its artistic projection offensive to the able mind.* But when art, by whatever devices, becomes a conveyance of the meaning of experience, its contribution to ability may be as vital as that of the scientist or the philosopher. Music, however, which becomes all but ridiculous when it attempts to portray experience factually, may thus appear to be excluded from sisterhood with the other arts. Neither its tonal substance nor its structure as such bears any immediate relation to the facts of experience, and the refinement of taste which the music-lover acquires through the study of substance and structure gives a very indirect approach to the understanding of general human experience. Musical substance and structure, however, may acquire, or may intrinsically possess, that earned increment of interest which even the uninstructed listener confidently ascribes to it. If, then, that increment, more minutely analyzed, proves to bear intelligible reference to experience, the valuation of it may contribute to that human understanding which ability, at bottom, really is. The existence of the increment as referential was long ago recognized by the musical commonalty in the familiar aphorisms which describe music as the language of the emotions, or as the universal language. Much ridicule has been heaped on those phrases by skeptical critics, who point out that since music has no noun-tones or verb-tones — no "parts of speech" symbolic of the things and acts which are the raw material of experience — it cannot properly be called a language. Moreover, while music immediately excites emotion, that excitement is not the actual emotion of love or awe or courage which the fond music-lover fancies himself to feel as he listens, enraptured, to its dulcet strains. Indeed, the * I suspect that the fairly general aversion to wholly abstract art, whether graphic or musical, arises from the artist's apparent endeavor, either to project the sensed implication of general experience in complete disjunction from its origin in fact (for fact, after all, is the only imaginable source of meaning), or to project the artistic experience itself (the fact of art as art) as the only type of experience worthy of serious artistic attention. The field of "purely" artistic experience is indubitably far narrower than that of general experience. To explore adequately the field of art demands a keener sensibility to artistic substance and structure than is commonly possessed. The abstractionist may thus justly feel his response to be on a higher level than that of the commonalty. But whether it is a richer response is also a justifiable question, to which the answer seems to me self-evident. After all, is not the general aversion to pure abstraction merely the reverse of the aversion to mere literalism? 293

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excitement aroused by music seen thus as substance and structure only cannot be other than a "purely" musical emotion. All this is quite true, but it does not prove that music has no commerce with other than "purely" musical emotion, and to argue that that reference does not exist because music does not portray objective experiential fact is to exhibit a learned indifference to possible musical meaning more obfuscating to complete understanding than is naive musical intuition. For that earned increment, earned by imaginative structural effort, enables music to portray, sometimes with astonishing vividness, the concern that men feel when they confront factual experience which their intelligence recognizes as significant. Indeed, it may portray this concern precisely enough so that the general nature (but not the detail) of the originating factual experience is unmistakable. Nor is musical learning essential to that perception. You doubt it? Let me give you two simple instances. You will instantly distinguish a dirge from a dance. How do you distinguish them? You find the two pieces appropriate to two very different occasions of experience, and without that reference you could not distinguish them as dirge and dance. Perceiving this appropriateness, you —and I —may each imagine an actual occasion which the music seems to illustrate; your image of fact, however, will be yours, and mine will be mine. But while the music does not portray your imagined factual event, it does portray the concern that you, and I, and a million others as well, shall feel as we encounter, imaginatively, such implied occasions. To a third imaginable occasion (say, to your furtive encounter with a yielding companion) this music — whether dirge or dance —would be wholly inappropriate; but, although you can only fictionally compose it, you can imagine what this music would be like. How will your music differ? Both in substance and structure; but both substance and structure must first obey the syntactical principles that conventional analysis describes. The appropriateness, then, will lie in the increment — which you as composer must earn — must somehow inject into that substance. How will you earn it? You may, indeed, deceive yourself and a few others by contriving a musico-structural collage — a pasting onto your music of various noises, in substance quite unmusical but descriptive of a feature or two of the actual scene — the occasion — whose purport you 294

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are trying to celebrate. Your listener may be amused, but he will find no real increment. For you can earn that increment only by manipulating the real substance of music — its tonal and rhythmic elements — in such a way that your musical discourse portrays the concern that men feel for experience. The syntax of your discourse will be a product of tonal tension, high or relaxed, and of rhythmic motion. To manipulate these elements for purely musical intelligibility is thus an ineluctable obligation — patently a How, but also a Why of musical structure. But while the purely musical "body" you thus contrive may indeed be interesting for the brilliance of its tonal garment and the ingenuity of its structure, its activity will be that of a robot. On the other hand, concern — essentially, our increment — is the very complex activity, not of a robot, but of a mind that inhabits a body and activates that body in various fashions appropriate to the attitude of its mind toward confronted experience. That attitude is both intellectual and emotional. Insofar as it is emotional, it consists of a great complex of nervous tensions and of the motor outlets of those tensions, both of them excited by, and thus appropriate to, that mind's understanding, whether profound or shallow, of the experience it confronts. Will you not, then, as you compose your dirge or your dance or your love-scene, model the tonal tensions and the rhythms of your musical body after the pattern of those nervous and muscular behaviors which your mind, on those different occasions of experience, will excite in your human body? And if your portrayal is both musically sound and imaginatively appropriate, shall not I, who feel similar concern for these occasions, recognize your portrayal, and perhaps acclaim it as a contribution to my deeper understanding of them? For your concern may be more penetrating than mine. Is not this appropriateness the increment? Will you not have earned it? And will it not then appear as the ultimate Why of your music? Much more circuitously and in much greater detail, my Friend and I arrived, in our fourth dialogue, at the process of analytical observation I have just sketched, and which seemed to us to account, at least hypothetically, for this musical reference to nonmusical experience.* We * I set it forth, rather elaborately, in Music as Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), and I might have referred him to that book — as I might have referred you to a hundred others in support of my contentions — instead of letting him discover it for himself. I was much gratified to find that it seemed to come out of his own observations, as it had out of my own. 2

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tested it, still sketchily, but in some depth, in as many examples as we could find time to examine, and it seemed to us to account satisfactorily for the intimation of concern and its implied image of experience which I have here spoken of as the increment. Those examples were all drawn from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their structure was thus explicable in terms of the conventional scheme of tonal relations (tonality) that had governed musical composition since the beginning of the seventeenth century. The tonal stresses which, if our hypothesis is sound, operate for the portrayal of characteristic nervous tensions in human minds, were thus familiar to the general ear, and their incremental implication was fairly easy to trace. Harmony, however, to be grasped as a contribution to an earned increment, has to be observed much more minutely than it ordinarily is by the general ear.* Both I and my "composite" Friend (who I hope is in some measure composed of you who read) had grown up with this musical idiom, thought in it, interpreted it readily, and hardly suspected that prejudices in its favor existed in our minds — until the music of the twentieth century jolted us out of our complacency. Two new Friends — doubtless less inclusively composite, but still fairly representative of the confused contemporary scene — were then invited to widen the horizon of our discussions. Whether these two dispelled or deepened our prejudices is a question which you who read can answer better than I who write. (But your own prejudices will probably dictate your answer.) For the twentieth century, along with its two disintegrating world wars and the extended overthrow of monarchical and democratic schemes of government (which schemes had some share in forming my own musical prejudices) has witnessed what is doubtless the most violent revolution in musical history. Science, vastly more generally than in the eighteenth-century "age of reason," has similarly revolutionized contemporary thought, and has dictated a good deal of philosophy, both technical and popular, which, in the former age of reason, was expected ra* Harmony, I suspect, is enjoyed by the majority largely as a flavor — an unearned increment. Chords, that is, are apprehended somewhat as are twelve-tone densities: rather as musical condiments than as functioning for that particularity of suggestion which gives the increment its earned value. The listener must of course first grasp the syntactical cohesion effected by the harmony. Fuller appreciation will follow if its implications are grasped. But to a considerable extent the hearer must earn that increment for himself, and it is with that effort that this study of appreciation is concerned. But he will not be much helped by a performer for whom harmony is only a density.

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ther loftily to interpret and so to supersede ("sit over") science. To interpret the contemporary scene in any of its aspects (for to interpret a movement is in some measure to forecast its future) is thus an effort which even the most enlightened mind would hesitate to attempt. For revolutions, if they are to succeed, must ultimately adjust their proposed activities conformably to the capacities of a very large number of the less enlightened. In the 'twenties, every older principle of musical organization was attacked — sometimes merely because it was old — and was supposedly so far demolished that one very eminent musicologist could assert that "the composer does not make music: music makes itself in the composer" — apparently through the operation of the then rather recently discovered faculty of the subconscious. (That the subconscious and its modus operandi had existed, and had functioned, in the same manner and to the same purpose for untold ages, was quite unobserved. The conscious manipulation of emanations from the subconscious may be possible, but the subconscious will then no longer be subconscious.) A good many of the older principles, although badly shaken, managed to survive these attacks. More, perhaps, are still underground, waiting for a more favorable season in which to floreate; but to many older and perhaps jaundiced eyes the contemporary musical terrain looks as if it had been bombed out. The old tone-series, however — the twelve "tempered" half-steps, five of which had formerly been regarded as "chromatic" (essentially, as auxiliary to the seven tones of the "diatonic" scale) — survived, as a toneseries, intact. Its tonic, indeed (in common parlance, the "keynote"), appeared to have ceased to function, so that music supposedly had become atonal. Throughout its history, however (the tonic became dimly recognized as a tone-center toward the end of the sixteenth century), its gravitational "pull" upon the other notes of the scale had widened, and also loosened; and although its hold has not yet been clearly defined in supposedly atonal music, its influence still seems to be exerted, and even to be — very remotely — the basis of contemporary musical syntax. Harmony, however, whose activity (dissonance) and rest (consonance) not only had aided in shaping clearly the syntax of the older musical structure but had yielded much of the varying tension upon which our hypothesis depended for its suggestion of the musical increment — harmony, in the new music, became quite another feature. Its former 297

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principle of structure — the superposition of 3rds, forming readily recognizable triads, yth-chords, 9th-chords, and so forth — was quite abandoned, and "densities" — sometimes the product of the combination of melodic lines in unrelated keys (polytonality), and sometimes the product of selection from a pre-established, twelve-tone "row" or "basic set" — took their place. The new musical structures, thus based upon tonal cohesions which at first sound like tonal dispersions, strike the unaccustomed ear as projecting sheer tonal chaos. Close attention, however, will often yield a clue to the purpose of the structure, and when that purpose has been grasped, the listener's effort does not seem much different from the effort required to grasp the musical sense of older structures. (This, I suspect, is a sign that the principle of tonality, modified, still operates.) The composer's structural effort, however, usually seems to have required all his creative energy, so that the referential increment which, in the nineteenth-century examples we discussed, seemed to have been earned by conscious endeavor, is here hard to detect. It has a pungent flavor but no discriminable reference, and is thus not an earned increment. Also, whether the structural sense you do perceive is that which the composer intended is another question. The older works were written in an idiom whose basis, tonality, seemed axiomatic; there is as yet no such generally understood contemporary idiom; so that if the newer works project an increment, not merely of structural interest but of reference to nonmusical experience, it is likely to remain undiscovered. I, at least, can find no agents other than tonal tension and rhythm through which an increment that is more than a flavor can be projected; and if their reference is to be grasped, these features of structure must surely become idiomatic — familiar daily usages. John, the twelve-tonalist new friend who joined us late in our discussion, felt sure that that technique was on the high road toward becoming a common idiom.* I am still unconvinced. In spite of the many modifica* John, like Fred and Henry, is a composite character; but one of his originals, highly skilled in that technique and considerably acclaimed, both in America and abroad, once said to me, "I do write in the twelve-tone technique, but it doesn't sound like that." It doesn't, for the most part, even to my recalcitrant ears; and I think it doesn't because he is trying, while pursuing that technique, to offer the listener an earned increment of interest. If John, the composite twelve-tonalist, pursues the same end, he may be right. But my doubts, sketched in the text, are still with me, for John the individual I have sketched is not a representative, as far as I can see, of the more "intellectual" twelve-tone composers. 298

EPILOGUE, OR PREFACE?

tions of the system that have mitigated its earlier rigidity, it still seems to me little more than a system of structure, possessing indubitably but almost exclusively the intellectual interest of structure, and often not only lacking but consciously avoiding that reference to more than purely musical experience which an idiom, usable by the commonalty, must possess. For an idiom — whether that word implies a mere peculiarity of utterance or a comprehensive vehicle of communication — grows out of daily usages. It is perfected, as a vehicle, by able minds, but the less able use it — study it —in order to attain to ability; and unless the reward of their study of a musical vehicle is more than the understanding of structural ingenuity, that vehicle will not become a common idiom. How adequate the idiom — the vehicle — may become is only in part a question of the nature of the vehicle and its process of conveyance. It is also a question of the use to which it may be put: whether for delight and for the ornamentation of daily usages, or for their understanding, which may be a much more than diurnal interest. It seems to me that the densities which have largely superseded the familiarly structured chords of the old idiom offer, in themselves, a considerably thorny delight, and offer it as essentially an ornament of structure. The familiarity of the old chords, heard as merely defeating an ardent expectation of harmonic novelty, might well make for no more than structural monotony. If, however, the whole structure were constructed so as to be heard, not primarily as a tonal structure but as one answer to the larger Why of music, then the piece might be understood, not as a novel adventure in tonal manipulation but as an appeal to the imagination of minds able and eager to interpret human experience. Even the simplest of harmonies, chosen so as to stimulate the exercise of that ability — as one answer to that Why — might then rouse a deeper admiration than does the most brilliant purveyance of delight and ornament.* Classical harmony — one feature of what was certainly a common musical idiom — proved, in the examples my Friend and I examined, to function pointedly toward the portrayal of concern. I cannot tell how far John's densities, impinging on ears better attuned to them than mine, may function toward that end. Henry aroused John's ire by asking whether dodecaphony had not thrown harmony away. John's answer was a claim of infinite variety in his densities as against the tedious same* Cf., for example, bars 5 and 6 of the Adagio of Beethoven's Op. 101, p. 190.

299

THE WHY OF MUSIC

ness of chords all built on the one principle of superposed 3rds. Having somewhat grudgingly admitted that music might serve for the portrayal of concern, he asked why his densities, and with them the general procedures of twelve-tone structure, if they became commonly understood, might not become even more capable of that portrayal. That if is so big that it makes his question unanswerable. The common ear resisted Wagner's harmony as unintelligible — until that ear at last perceived that his music not only obeyed the apparently violated principle of tonality but widened the reference of music to human experience. The theoretical denial, in the 1920'$, of the principle of tonality is itself now fairly generally denied. Contemporary structures, and even the twelve-tone system, appear to be based, essentially, on a much expanded but more obscure scheme of tonality. Those structures, after fifty years, do begin to appeal to the common ear. They are accepted, of course not analytically as structures, but chiefly as projecting new stimulations of tonal interest (not always delightful) and of the concept of design (not always ornamental). That acceptance may be interpretable as the establishment of a common musical idiom. But the increment in most of the music in that idiom appears, even to inquiring ears, to possess no more than a flavor — an unearned increment. In any case, you will search in vain in the pages of music history for a period of fifty years in which so few compositions have been accepted by contemporary ears —and have earned that continued demand for their repetition which makes them enduring masterpieces — as in the half century just past. Those masterpieces possess an earned increment, to me of inestimable value. I believe the public shares my regard for that increment. Neither in the general response to contemporary music at its supposedly highest level, nor in the learned critical analyses of it, do I find that increment recognized as more than an incidental objective of the composers' effort. Nor, when contemporary criticism obliquely glimpses the increment in older music, is there any attempt to account for the process by which it is earned. The explanation of that process arrived at in our conversations, cursory and incomplete as it had to be, may nevertheless serve to indicate the positive existence of the increment, and something of the importance which a more detailed and reasoned exposition would attach to it. The examples we had time to consider are pitifully few for such an exposition, but a hundred similar examples, many of which will suggest themselves 300

EPILOGUE, OR PREFACE?

to you, could have been adduced in support of each of the points we tried to make. Even those few should also suggest — and in some measure answer — the horde of half-formulated questions that arise, now and then, in the mind of any thinking music-lover. For the byways of music appreciation are numberless, and in each of them you can find a Why. The one we have dealt with, however, is big enough to make one wonder how critical inquiry should persistently have relegated it to a byway. The corollaries of our hypothesis which, as I began this Epilogue, I half promised to deal with, are innumerable. I have attempted at least a dozen times to summarize their purport, and have come out with a tedious rewording of the hypothesis itself in which the purport of the corollaries was quite smothered. But on rereading Bacon's Essay, I found that it sharpened the essence, both of the hypothesis and its implications, to a point. I quote these pregnant sentences, italicizing a few phrases to make their point prick more sharply: "To spend too much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded by experience . . . For they teach not their own use; but that [use] is a wisdom without them, [that is, outside or beyond them] and above them, won by observation." The corollaries I can see (and there must be many others) yield but a fraction of the wisdom which, as Bacon says, the student must win by observation. I hope the hypothesis will yield for you a method of observation. In itself, it can do no more. For the true appreciation of music is a do-it-yourself project, impoverished in proportion as it is deputized. Its study, in abstracto, will prove to be sloth, for the study of abstraction teaches only its own use.

301

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Index

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INDEX

NOTE: This Index lists only a fraction of the facts and propositions adduced in support of the central idea of the book: that the ultimate Why of enduring music lies, not in the skills of composition or performance, but in its reference to generally familiar human experience. Its catchwords often seem obscure, but they may guide you to passages you may wish to re-read. Asterisks after a page number indicate that the composition there referred to is illustrated. Abstraction: viewpoints toward in art, u, 254, 29372; in music, 10, n, 12, 62, 71,126 Albani, Madame (Emma Lajeunesse), 121 "An eine Aeolsharfe" (Morike): settings of by Brahms and Wolf, 208214; translation of, 20972 Appassionata sonata (Beethoven), 164, 165,170, 269 Aristotle, 187 Art of Fugue (Bach), 10, 281 Atonality, 255, 258 Auffiihrungspraxis (manner of performance), 117 B minor Mass (Bach): n, 17-30, 72,108, 112,^114-123, 124, 127, 151, 281, 282; Kyrie eleison (both), 11-12, 12, 17, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 36, 41, 43, 48, 49*-54, 55, 60, 63, 65, 66-68, 71, 93, 107-108, 10872, 108-109, 112, 116, 118, 120, 130, 176, 181, 217-218; Christe eleison, 12, 109; Et incarnatus est, 109; Crucifixus, 109,11972,123,124,151; Credo, 109,121, 122-123*, I2 7» Q™ tollis, 112, 114,

ii8*-i2i; Laudamus te, 112, 121; Gloria, 121; Confiteor, 122*; Sanctus, 123; Et in unum Dominum, 123-124; Agnus Dei, 151 Bach, Friedemann, 121 Bach, Johann Sebastian: 7, n, 18, 49, 52, 54, 61, 72, 73, 93, 108, 121, 125-126, 127-128, 130, 137, 143, 162, 203, 275, 277, 281, 285; Art of Fugue, 10, 281; Well-tempered Clavier, 10, n, 12, 14, 15, 17, 24, 25, 29, 43, 108, 120, 127, 151, 272-273, 277, 280, 281; B minor Mass, n, 12,17-30, 72, 108, 109, 112, 114-123, 124, 127, 151, 281, 282; Kyrie eleison (both, from Mass), 11-12,12,17, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 36, 41, 43, 48, 49*-54, 55, 60, 63, 65, 66-68, 71, 93, 107-108, 108-109, 10872, 112, 116, 118, 120, 130, 176, 181, 217-218; style of, 24, 25, 66-68, 72, 93, 94, 108, 112-113, 127, 129, 134, 144, 273; concerto for violin, in E, 54; B flat Partita, 117; Suites, 108; cantatas, 108, 127; concerto for two violins, 181, 194; Chorahorspiele, 203; Jesu meine Freude, 203, 20372, 204; Chaconne, 247, 280

305

THE WHY OF MUSIC

Bacon, Francis, 279/2, 292, 301 Beauty: as interest and delight, 62; as gratification, 63; as ideal order, 64 Beethoven, Ludwig van: 7, 70, 82, 134, 136,146,147-196, 239, 243, 244, 258, 261, 262, 269, 270, 288; style of, 66-68, 76, 79, 83, 94, 112, 147-196 passim; Piano sonatas, 152-158, 163-164, 171; Op. w, No. 3, 154-155*, 155-158; Op. 13 (Pathetique sonata), 35, 155, 163; Op. 22, B flat sonata, 162; Op. 26, 158, 159, 161; Op. 2-], No. 2 (Sonata quasi una fantasia, or Moonlight sonata), 66*-68, 69, 69/2, 70, 79, 152, 153, 163, 170; Op. 27, E flat sonata, 163; Op. 31 sonatas, 70; Op. 53 (Waldstein sonata), 164, 165, 165-171, 172, 173, 174, 180; Op. 54, 164, 165, 171-173; Op. 57 (Appassionata sonata), 164, 165, 170, 269; Op. 78, 164,173-175; Op. yp, 175; Op. 8ia, 164, 175-176; Op. 90, 164,176-179, 180, 181182, 184, 217; Op. 101, 182, 183-194; Violin sonata in C minor, Op. 30, No. 2, 79*-8i, 82*, 84^85, 87-88, 89-92, 139-140, 141,152, 153, 160, 176, 180, 220, 236; Third symphony (Eroica), 10, 156, 157, 169, 278, 279, 27972; Fourth symphony, 182; Fifth symphony, 9-10, 10; Sixth symphony (Pastoral), 10; Ninth symphony, 10; Thirty-two Variations in C minor, 159-160*; Overtures, Egmont and Coriolanus, 220; String quartet, in C sharp minor, 253; Song, Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, 207*-2o8 Bell, Clive, 29 Berceuse (Chopin), iO3*-io5, 105-107, 107, iio-in, 116,151 Berg, Alban: 255, 256, 256-257, 284; violin concerto, 255, 256; Lyric Suite, 269* "Bergidylle" (Heine), 206 Boko, Arrigo, 223 Brahms, Johannes: 203, 251; An erne Aeolsharfe, 208, 2io*-2i2*, 212-213, 214, 214-217; Feldeinsamkeit, 216; Sapphische Ode, 216 Breithaupt, 97 Bricken, Carl, 167 Browning, Robert, 159 Buffon, George-Louis, 12,108, 125 Billow, Karl Eduard von, 171 Byrd, William, 204, 205 Cage, John, 254 306

Calvin, John, effect of tenets of on English music, 202, 204 Chaconne (Bach), 247, 280 Chopin, Francois Frederic: 39, 102, 104; style of, 24, 72-73, 103-107, no; Preludes, 37, 43, 66, 72, 102; No. 23 (in F major), 37, 38^40, 42, 68, 72; No. 20 (in C minor), 37, 38*, 42; Berceuse, io3*-io5, 105-107, 107, no-iii, 116, 151; G minor Ballade, 169 Choralvorspiele (Bach), 203 Church of England, effect of on English music, 204, 204-205 Classicism, in music: 109-110, 128, 129130,130-133, 137-138,143,144,147, 149, 150, 151-152, 161, 179, 182; Beethoven and, 147-164 passim; Goethe on, 150; part of religion in, 204 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 162 Communication, musical: nature of, 4041, 73; hypothesis of process of, 41-42; "object" of, 55 Content, musical: identity of with form, 58-59; denied, 61-62; represented versus presented, 62-63 Couplet, heroic, as model of style, 132 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), song Hark, Hark! The Lark from, 19, 1972, 205 Dante Alighieri, 238 Debussy, Claude: 39, 259; La Fille aux cheveux de lin, 39; Voiles, 259; sixtone scale, 259-260 Density (as twelve-tone chord), 260-261 Depres, Josquin, 143 Descartes, Rene, 72 Discourse, music as, 257 Dodecaphony, 240, 253, 268-269, 282 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 143-144 Dryden, John, 105,129 "Du bist wie eine Blume" (Heine), settings of, 205-206, 20572 Durchkomponiertes Lied, 199, 199/2, 200 Elgar, Sir Edward, 142 Eroica (Beethoven), 10,156,157,169, 278, 279, 2797* Ertmann, Baroness Dorothea, 183-184 Etymology, musical, lo-u, 40, 248-249, 285-286, 28772 Faguet, Emile, 267 Feldeinsamkeit (Brahms), 216 Fille aux cheveux de lin, La (Debussy), 39

INDEX

Form, musical: 56-57, 58-74 passim; as vehicle, 55; confusion of with content, 58-59; as "presented," 62; as referential, 63; as ideal order, 64; extramusical reference of, 85-86 Foster, Stephen, 198 Gesture, as bodily outlet of concern, 23 Gieseking, Walter, 117 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 220 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 206; on classicism, 150; "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," 206-207, 20672-20772 Gray, Thomas, 54,129 Greensleeves, 202 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 45,69 Handel, George Frederic, 127-128, 202 "Hark,Hark! The Lark" (Shakespeare), Liszt's arrangement of Schubert's, 3, 4, 18, i9*-2i, 21, 22, 29, 123 Haydn, Joseph: 70, 128, 129-146, 162; style of, 129-131; Military symphony, y6-^?. Heine, Heinrich: 197,198,199; "Lorelei," 197-198, 199, 202; "Du bist wie eine Blume," 205-206, 205/2; "Bergidylle," 206 Henry IV,Pt.II (Shakespeare), 157 Hubbard, Elbert, 21 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 70 Hypothesis of musical reference: 23-24, 112, 137, 220; stated, 45-48, 221; revised, 115-116; combated, 240-289

Jesu meine Freude (Bach), comments on translation of, 203, 20372, 204 Josef II (Holy Roman Emperor), 142 Jupiter symphony (Mozart), 13872, 141143, 14172,142*, 144-145,151 Krehbiel, Henry Edward, 210-211,214 Kreisler, Fritz, 289 Kiihn, Edmund, 228 La Rochefoucauld, Frangois de, quoted, 71-72, 7272,170 Leading-motive (also leitmotiv}: 20; in Wolf's song, 213; Strauss's use of, 218; Wagner's use of, 218-219, 220, 221-239 passim; definition of, 220-221 Leschetizky, Theodor, 97 Liszt, Franz: 18; arrangement of Hark, Hark! The Lark, 3, 18, i9*-2i, 21, 22, 29 Litanei (Schubert), 199-200 London Philharmonic Orchestra, 136 "Lorelei" (Heine), 197-198,199, 202 Lost Chord, The (Proctor), 202 Lovelace, Richard, 198-199, 201, 202 Lucerne, Lake of, 67 Lyric Suite (Berg), 269*

Mahler, Gustav, 258 Marot, Clement, 202 Matthay, Tobias, 97 Mendelssohn, Felix, 183 Michelangelo, 244 Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare) , 248 Idea, musical: 244-246; as image and Mignon (Thomas), 247 Military symphony (Haydn), 136-137 valuation of experience, 55 Idiom, musical: problem of, 251-252; Milton, John: 54, 72, 123, 199, 200, 201; Paradise Lost, 72,199, 200 contemporary, 254-255; as structural "Model," composer's, 5, 21, 240-241, 247. process versus vehicle, 262 See also Image, musical Image, musical: 108; of nonmusical exMonteverdi, Claudio, 220 perience, 22-23, 26, 27-28,31-44. passim, Moonlight sonata (Beethoven): 66*-68, 55, 181, 217; as portrayal of emotional 69, 6972, 70, 79, 152, 153, 163, 170; as attitude, 27-28; as "presented," 31-44 familiar title, 67, 69, 6972 passim, 62-63; musical form of, 58- Morality in music, 61, 82, 160, 196, 243, 74 passim; in the song, 197-219 243-244, 282 Interest, intellectual, emotion as factor Morike, Eduard: 208, 209, 211, 214, 215, of, 27 217; "An eine Aeolsharfe," settings of Isorhythm, 78-79,154 by Brahms and Wolf, 208-214, 20972 Morley, Thomas, 204 James, Henry, 110 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: 70, 83, 128, James, William, 117 129-146, 158, 159, 161, 162, 175, 220, James-Lange theory of emotion, 115 239, 258; style of, 68, 112, 129-130; Ein Jeans, Sir James, 95 musikalischer Spass, 83; Piano sonata in

307

THE WHY OF MUSIC A, 133, i34*-i35, 158; Fantasia and sonata in C minor, 133, i35*-i36, 143, 153; Symphony in G minor, 138*, 13872, 139-141, 143, 144, 145, 151, 153; Jupiter symphony, 13872, 141-143, 14172, 142*, 144-145, 151; C major string quartet, 143; Don Giovanni, 143-144; string quintets, 145 Musicality, need for definition of, 25, in, 123, 270, 277, 291 Ein musikalischer Spass (Mozart), 83 Napoleon I, and Fifth symphony, 10, 278 Newman, Ernest, 224 "Noble army" (of music lovers), 7, 15, 22, 34, 36,53 "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" (Goethe), setting of by Beethoven, 206207, 20672-20772 Othello (Shakespeare), 223 Ovid, quoted, 65 Paderewski, Ignace, 69 Paradise Lost (Milton): 72,199; quoted, 200 Pater, Walter, quoted, 151 Pathetique sonata (Beethoven), 35, 155, 163 Phrase, musical, dynamic contour of, 92, 95

Pollock, Jackson, 254 Pope, Alexander: 100,129; quoted, 149 Proctor, Adelaide, The Lost Chord, 202 Reformation, Lutheran, effect of on German music, 202-203, 204, 204-205 Reger, Max, 135, 272 Rellstab, and Moonlight sonata, 67,69 Rembrandt, 244 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 88 DasRheingold (Wagner), 221 Rhythm, musical: as structural element, 34; as representative motion-pattern, 44, 45, 48-49 Ring and the Book, The (Browning), 159 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 10 Romanticism: 70, 143-144, 145-146; attempted definition of, 147-148, 250251; in Bach, 181; in Mozart, 135, 143; in Beethoven, 147-196 passim; contemporary attitude toward, 250-251 Rossini, Gioacchino, Stabat mater, 102 Rudolph, Archduke, 175 308

Rufer, Josef, 240 Row, twelve-tone: 240, 254, 255-256, 259-260, 261; as substitute for tonic, 259,266-268, 269-270 Saint-Saens, Camille, 144 Saintsbury, George, 143 Salomon, Johann Peter, 136 Sapphische Ode (Brahms), 216 Schoenberg, Arnold: 255, 265, 266, 269270; use of Sprechstimme, 229; Third string quartet, 269, 271-272 Schubert, Franz Peter: 18, 20, 22, 135, 196, 216; Hark, Hark! The Lark, 3, 4, 19*, 123; Wiegenlied, 105*-107; "Unfinished" symphony, 172; Litanei, 199200; Der Wanderer, 199-200; Winterreise cycle, 202 Schumann, Robert: 143, 179, 183, 196, 251; violin sonata in A minor, 77; songs of, 206 Schiitz, Heinrich, 128 Serial technique, see Twelve-tone scale Shakespeare, William: 18, 19, 205, 244; song from Cymbeline, 19, 1972, 205; Hamlet, 45, 69; Henry IV, Pt. II, 157; roles in plays of, 170; Othello, 223; Midsummer Night's Dream, 248 Six-tone scale, 259-261 Southey, Robert, 201 Sprechstimme, Schoenberg's use of, 229 Stabat mater (Rossini), 102 Strauss, Richard, 218, 258 Stravinsky, Igor, 255 Study of Wagner (Newman), 224 Style, musical: 24-25; of performance, 95-98, 99-113 passim; and taste, 99, 101; definition of, 102; contribution of to musical image, 108; kinds of, 112; images as part of, 124 Svengali, 104 SivaneeRiver (Foster), 198, 202 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyitch: 282; song of, 208 Theme, musical: genesis of, 75; tonerow as, 268-270 "To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars" (Lovelace), 198-199,19872-19972, 201 Tone, musical: 12, 40; extramusical suggestion in, n, 33-34, 36; structure in, 14; tension in, as contribution to image, 35-36,48-49, 71, 89. See also Hypothesis Tovey, Donald Francis, 155

INDEX

Walter, Bruno, 253 Der Wanderer (Schubert), 199-200 Weber, Franz Anton von, 135,182 Webern, Anton von, 255 Weelkes, Thomas, 204 Well-tempered Clavier (Bach): 10, n, 12, 14, 24, 108, 127, 272-273, 277; Prelude in E flat minor, 12, 15, 17, 24, 25, "Unfinished"symphony (Schubert), 172 29, 43, 120, 151; Prelude and Fugue in F minor, 24, 93, 112, 116; Fugue in E Verlaine, Paul, quoted, 201 major, 127; Prelude and Fugue in C Vitry, Philipe de, 78 sharp major, 272; Prelude and Fugue Voiles (Debussy), 259 in C sharp minor, 273, 280, 281 Wagner, Richard: 218,220, 234, 239, 258, Wiegenlied (Schubert), 105*-107 264-265, 276, 283;style of, 213,221-239 Winterreise cycle (Schubert), 202 passim, 265; Tristan, 218, 222-239; Das Wolf, Hugo: 206; An erne Aeolsharfe, Rheingold, 221 208, 210,211*, 212-213*, 2I 4~ 2I 5*» 2J6217 Waldstein sonata (Beethoven), 164, 165, 165-171, 172, 173, 174, 180 Wordsworth, William, 105

Tristan (Wagner), 218,222-239 Twelve-tone scale: 240, 253, 260-261, 268-269, 282; logic of, 254-255; as possibly analogous to whole-tone scale, 259-261 Two-movement sonata, 170-171

309