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During the last twenty or thirty years there has been an enormous increase in the United States of what may be called “institutional” music. We have built opera houses, we have formed many new orchestras, and we have established the teaching of music in nearly all our public and private schools and colleges, so that a casual person observing all this, hearing from boastful lips how many millions per annum we spend on music, and adding up the various columns into one grand total, might arrive at the conclusion that we are really a musical people.

But one who looks beneath the surface—who reflects that the thing we believe, and the thing we love, that we do—would have to do a sum in subtraction also; would have to ask what music there is in our own households. He would find that in our cities and towns only an infinitesimal percentage of the inhabitants sing together for the pleasure of doing so, and that the task of keeping choral societies together is as difficult as ever; that the music we take no part in, but merely listen to, is the music that flourishes; that our operatic singers, the most highly paid in the world, come to us annually from abroad and sing to us in languages that we cannot understand; that, in short, while music flourishes, much of it is bought and little of it is home-made. The deduction is obvious. This institutional music is a sort of largess of our prosperity. We are rich enough to buy the best the world affords. We institute music in our public schools and display our interest in it once a year—at graduation time. We see that our children take “music lessons” and judge the result likewise by their capacity to play us occasionally a very nice little piece. Men, in particular,—all potential singers, and very much needing to sing,—look upon it as a slightly effeminate or scarcely natural and manly thing to do. Music is, in short, too much our diversion, and too little our salvation.

And to form a correct estimate of the value of our musical activities we should need also to consider the quality of the music we hear; and this, in relation to the sums we have been doing, might make complete havoc of our figures, because it would change their basic significance. For if it is bad music, the more we hear of it the worse off we are. If a city spends thirty thousand dollars a year on bad public-school music, it is a loser to the extent of some sixty thousand dollars. If your child is painfully acquiring a mechanical dexterity (or acquiring a painful mechanical dexterity) in pianoforte playing and is learning almost nothing about music, you lose twice what you pay and your child pays twice for her suffering. What is called “being musical” cannot be passed on to some one else or to something else; you cannot be musical vicariously—through another person, through so many thousand dollars, through civic pride, through any other of the many means we employ. Being musical does not necessarily lie in performing music; it is rather a state of being which every individual who can hear is entitled by nature to attain to in a greater or less degree.

Such are the musical conditions confronting us, and such are the possibilities open to us. My purpose is, therefore, to suggest ways of improving this situation, and of realizing these possibilities; and, as a necessary basis for any such suggestions, to consider first the nature of music itself. Is it merely a titillation of the ear? Are Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert merely purveyors of sweetmeats? Does music consist in an astonishing dexterity in performance? Is it, as Whitman says, “what awakes in you when you are reminded by the instruments”? Or has it a life of its own, self-contained, self-expressive, and complete? These questions need to be asked—and answered—before we can formulate any method of improving our musical situation.

They are not asked. We blindly follow conventional practices; we make little effort to fathom the many delightful problems which every hearing of music presents to us; we submit to being baffled every time we hear an orchestra play; we take no forward step on the road to understanding. Beethoven was a heart, a mind, a will, and an imagination; we, in listening, absorb his emotion and hardly anything else. His grotesque outbursts make us uncomfortable, as would a solecism of behavior. His strange, bizarre, uncouth, and extraordinary themes, every one of which fits perfectly into his plan, leave us wondering what he intends. His sentiment, which is always relative to his humor or his roughness, we understand only by itself.

Our children, after years of conventional music study, are finally taken to hear an orchestral concert. A great man is to speak to them. He does not use words. What he has to say issues forth in a myriad of sounds, now soft, now loud, now fast, now slow. This that the child hears is what is called music, seemingly a mere succession of sounds, really a vision of what a great man has seen of all those inner things of life which only he can truly see. These sounds are formed into a perfect order. Their very soul may hide in the peculiar tone of the oboe or horn; they change their significance a dozen times in as many moments; slender filaments of them run through and through as in a fairy web. The child gapes. “Is this music?” it says; “I thought music was the black and white keys, or holding my hand right, or scales, or the key of F or G, or sonatinas, or something.” No one has ever told her what music really is. She has only her delicate, tender, childlike feelings as a guide What she has been doing may have been as little like music as grammar is like literature.

Both the child and the adult must be brought into contact with music; with rhythmic movement in all its delightful diversity; with great musical themes and the uses to which they are put by composers; with musical forms by means of which pieces of music are made coherent; with harmonies in their primary states, or blended into a thousand hues. They must learn to listen, so that, as the music unfolds, there takes place within them an unfolding which is the exact answer to the processes going on in the music. All this cannot be brought about save by intention.

It is the purpose of this book, then, to lead the reader by what capacity he possesses to such an understanding of the art of music as shall make every part of it intelligible to him. And since some readers may have little knowledge of music, this book also attempts to set forth the common grounds upon which all art rests, and to tempt those who are interested in the other arts to become inquisitive about music. Curiosity is a necessary element in human intelligence.

MUSIC AND LIFE

MUSIC AND LIFE