How to Appreciate Music Part 2

is a good example, the theme, the melody, stands out from the accompaniment, which is subordinate. Counterpoint, on the other hand, rests on the combination of several themes, each of equal importance.

This is the reason why, when there is a fugue or other complicated contrapuntal work on the program of a pianoforte recital, the average listener is apt to find it dry and uninteresting. His ear readily can distinguish the themes of a sonata, which usually are heard one at a time and stand out clearly from the accompaniment, but it has not been trained to unravel the themes of the fugue as they travel along together. Counterpoint, the term being derived from the Latin _contra punctum_, which means point against point or note against note, when complicated, as in a fugue, is about the most elaborate kind of music there is, and a person who is unable to grasp a fugue may console himself with the thought that, excepting for the elect, it is a pretty stiff dose to swallow at the very beginning of a recital.

There are, however, simpler pieces of counterpoint than a fugue.

Sometimes, as in the charming little "Gavotte" by Padre Martini, which now and then figures among the lighter numbers on the programs of historical recitals, the contrapuntist combines a theme with itself, or, rather, "imitates" it, which is a simple form of the canon.

Another form of canon is the round of which "Three Blind Mice" is a familiar example. How many people, when singing this, have realized that they were being initiated into that mysterious thing known as counterpoint? A comparatively simple form of counterpoint is well ill.u.s.trated by a dapper little piece in Bach's "Two-Part Inventions,"

in which the spirited theme given out by the right hand answers itself a bar later in the left, an "imitation" which crops out again and again in the piece and gives it somewhat the character of a canon.

[Music ill.u.s.tration]

For any one who wishes to become acquainted with Bach there is nothing better than these "Two-Part Inventions," especially the fascinating little piece from which I have just quoted, compact, buoyant and gay, even "pert," as I once heard a young girl characterize it; a perfect example of old Father Bach in moments of relaxation when he has laid aside his periwig and is amusing himself at his clavichord.

What a Fugue Is.

Bach's fugues, and especially his "Well-Tempered Clavichord,"

forty-eight preludes and fugues in all the keys, form the climax of contrapuntal music. Goethe once said that "the history of the world is a mighty fugue in which the voice of nation after nation becomes audible." This is a freely poetic definition of that highly complicated musical form, the fugue. Let me attempt to ill.u.s.trate it in a different way.

Imagine that a composer who is an adept in counterpoint places four pianists at different pianofortes, and that he gives a different theme to each of them, or a theme to one and modified versions of it to the others. He starts the first pianist, after a few bars nods to the second to join in with his theme, and so on successively with the other two. It might be supposed that when the second player joins in, the two themes sounding together would make discord, which would be aggravated by the addition of the third and fourth. But, instead, they have been so conceived by the contrapuntist that they sound well together as they chase and answer each other, or run counter to and parallel and enter into many different combinations, sometimes flowing along smoothly, at other times surging and striving, yet always, in the case of a truly great fugue, borne along by a momentum as inexorable as the march of Fate. Of course, it must not be supposed, because I have called four pianists into action in order to emphasize how distinct are these themes, which yet, when united, are found to blend together, that several players are required for the performance of a complicated piece of counterpoint like a fugue. What is demanded of the player is entire independence of the fingers, so that he can clearly differentiate between the themes and enable the hearer to distinguish them apart, even in their most complicated combinations.

An edition of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavichord" by Bernardus Boekelman prints the themes in different colors, so that they are easy to trace through all their interweaving, and is interesting to study from.

The Fugue and the Virtuoso.

In his book, "Beethoven and His Forerunners," Daniel Gregory Mason devotes a paragraph toward dispelling the mystery regarding the fugue that prevails with the public, and points out that "the actual formal rules, despite the awe they have immemorially aroused in the popular mind, are few and simple. After the first announcement of the subject by a single voice, it is answered by a second voice, at an interval of a fifth above; then again stated by a third voice, and answered by a fourth. This process goes on until each voice has had a chance to enunciate the motif, after which the conversation goes on more freely; the subject is announced in divers keys, by divers voices; episodes, in a congruous style, vary the monotony; at last the subject is emphatically a.s.serted by the various voices in quick succession (_stretto_), and with some little display or grandiloquence the piece comes to an end."

Further along in the same book Mr. Mason has a page of apostrophe to the Bach fugues. When he characterizes them as "the first great independent monuments of pure music," and refers to their "consummate beauty of structure," he pays them an eminently just tribute. But when he speaks of the "profundity, poignancy and variety of feeling they express," I am inclined to quote his own qualifying sentence from the next page of his book: "It is true, nevertheless, not only that the fugue form makes the severest demands on the attention and intelligence of the listener, but also that, because of the ecclesiastical origin and polyphonic style, it is incapable of the kind of highly personal, secular expression that it was in the spirit of the seventeenth century to demand." The same is even more true of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The progress of music toward individual freedom of expression on the part of the composer, and equally so on the part of the interpreter, has been steady, and when, through the very perfection which Bach imparted to counterpoint, it ceased to attract composers as a means of expression because he had accomplished so much there was nothing more left for them to do along the same lines, the progress I have indicated received a great lift and stimulus.

What Counterpoint Lacks.

The lack of highly personal expression in contrapuntal compositions explains why most concert-goers find them less attractive than modern music. The "D Minor Toccata and Fugue" or the "Chromatic Fantasie and Fugue" by Bach, even in the arrangements of Tausig and Liszt, on the program of a pianoforte recital, are tolerated because of the modern pieces that come later. Nine out of ten persons in the house would rather omit them. Why deny so obvious a fact, especially when it is easy enough to explain? To follow a contrapuntal composition intelligently requires a highly trained ear. Moreover, in such a work as a Bach fugue the individuality of the player is of less importance than in modern music. Yet a virtuoso's individuality is the very thing that distinguishes him from other virtuosos and attracts the public to his concerts, while those of other players may be poorly attended. I firmly believe in personality of the virtuoso or singer or orchestral conductor, for in it lies the secret of individual interpretation, the reason why the performance of one person is fascinating or thrilling and that of another not. Modern music affords the player full scope to interpret it according to his own mood and fancy, to color it with his own personality, whereas contrapuntal music exists largely for itself alone. It is music for music's sake, not for the sake of interpreting some mood, some feeling, or of painting in tone colors something quite outside of music. The player of counterpoint is restricted in his power of expression by the very formulas of the science or art of the contrapuntist. We may marvel that Bach was able to move so freely within its restricted forms. But I think it true that it is far more interesting for a person even of only moderate proficiency as a player to work out, however awkwardly, a Bach fugue for himself on the pianoforte than to hear it played by some one else, however great; for, cheap and easy as it is to protest in high-sounding phrases about the duty of the interpreter to subordinate himself to the composer, and against what I am about to say, I nevertheless make bold to affirm that it is the province of the virtuoso to express himself, his own personality, his moods, his temperament, his subjective or even his subconscious self, through music; and in music that is purely contrapuntal there is a barrier to this individual power of expression.

The Mission of the Player.

We often hear it said of the greatest contemporary pianist that he is a great Chopin player, but not a great Bach player. He could not be, and at the same time be the greatest living virtuoso. It is the worshiper of tradition, the reserved, continent, scholarly player, the player who converts a Chopin nocturne into an icicle and a Schubert impromptu into a s...o...b..ll, who revels in counterpoint--the player who always is slavishly subordinating himself to what he is pleased to call the "composer's intentions" and forgets that the truly great virtuoso creates when he interprets. Some times the virtuoso may go too far and depart too much from the character of the piece he is playing, subjecting it more than is permissible to his temporary mood; but it is better for art to err on the side of originality, provided it is not bizarre or freakish, than on the side of subserviency to tradition.

While I have no desire, in writing as above, to exalt unduly the virtuoso, the interpreter of music, at the expense of the composer, I must insist that the great player also is creative, in the sense that every time he plays a work he creates it over again from his own point of view, and thus has at least a share in its parentage. Indeed, it seems more difficult to attain exalted rank as a virtuoso than to gain immortality as a composer. The world has produced two epoch-making virtuosos--Paganini on the violin, Liszt on the piano. Within about the same period covered by the careers of these two there have been half a dozen or even more composers, each of whom marks an epoch in some phase of the art. "The interpretive artist," says Henry G.

Hanchett in his "Art of the Musician," "deserves a place no whit beneath that of the composer. No two composers have influenced musical progress in America more strongly than have Anton Rubinstein by his _playing_, and Theodore Thomas, who was not a composer."

Music as a Science.

But, to return to Bach and the other contrapuntists, music owes them an immense debt on the technical side. And right here, so universal are the deductions that can be drawn from the program of a pianoforte recital, it should be pointed out that music differs from other arts in having for its basis a profound and complicated science, a science that concerns itself with the relations of the notes of the musical scale to each other. Upon this science are based alike the "c.o.o.n song"

and the Wagner music-drama. What is true of "Tristan" is true also of "Bedelia." Each makes its draft upon the science of music; the music-drama, of course, in a far greater degree than the song. This science has its textbooks with their theorems and problems, like any other science, and theoretical musicians have produced learned and useful works on the subject which the great ma.s.s of laymen, many virtuosos, and indeed the average professional musician, may never have heard of, let alone have read. For a person not intuitively predisposed toward the subject would find the science of music as difficult to master as integral calculus; nor, in order to appreciate music, or even to interpret it, is it necessary to be versed in this science. A virtuoso can play a chord of the ninth, the listener can be thrilled by the virtuoso's playing of the chord of the ninth, without either of them knowing that there is such a thing as the chord of the ninth.

Science versus Feeling.

In fact, the person who is so well versed in the science of music that he can mentally a.n.a.lyze a composition while listening to it is apt to be so absorbed in the mere process of technical a.n.a.lysis that he misses its esthetic, its emotional significance. Thus a person may be very musical without being musical at all. He may have profound knowledge of music as a science and remain untouched by music as an art, just as a physicist may be an authority on the laws of light and color, yet stand unmoved before a great painting. With some people music is all science, with others all art, and I think the latter have the better of it. A musical genius is equipped both ways. The great composer employs the science of music as an aid in giving expression to his creative impulse. He makes science of service to the cause of art. Otherwise, while he might produce something that was absolutely correct, it would make no artistic appeal whatsoever. Thousands of symphonies have been composed, performed and forgotten. They were "well made," constructed with scientific accuracy from beginning to end, but had no value as art; and music is a profound science applied to the production of a great art.

The composer, then, masters the science of music and bends it to his genius. If he is a great genius, he soon will discover that certain rules which his predecessors regarded as hard and fast, as inviolable, can be violated with impunity. He will discover new tone combinations, and thus enrich the science and make it serve the purposes of the art with greater efficiency than before he came upon the scene. And always the composers who have grown gray under the old system, the system upon which the new genius is grafting his new ideas, and the theorists and critics, who are slaves of tradition, will throw up their hands in horror and cry out that he is despoiling the art and robbing it of all that is sacred and beautiful, whereas he is adding to its scope and potency. Did not even so broad-minded a composer as Schumann say, "The trouble with Wagner is that he is not a musician"? So far was Wagner ahead of his time! While the great composer nearly always begins where his predecessors left off, he is sure to outstrip them later on. Even so rugged a genius as Beethoven is somewhat under Mozart's influence in his first works, and Wagner's "Rienzi" is distinctly Meyerbeerian.

But genius soon learns to soar with its own wings and to look down with indifference upon the little men who are discharging their shafts of envy, malice and ignorance.

That "Ear for Music."

And while I am on the subject of the scientific musician _versus_ the music lover, the pedant _versus_ the innovator, I might as well refer to those people who have in a remarkable degree what is popularly known as "an ear for music," and who are able to remember and to play "by ear" anything they hear played or sung, even if it is for the first time. This ear for music, again, is something quite different from scientific knowledge of music or from the emotional sensitiveness which makes the music-lover. It is a purely physical endowment, and may--in fact, usually does--exist without a corresponding degree of real feeling for music. It is, of course, a highly valuable adjunct to a genuine musical genius like a Mozart or a Schubert and to a genuine virtuoso. It is related of Von Bulow that his ear for music and his memory were so prodigious that once, while traveling in the cars, he read over the printed pages of a new composition, and on arriving at his destination, played it, from memory, at his concert. William Mason, who studied with Liszt, witnessed his master perform a similar feat. The average untrained person with a musical ear, however, instead of being a genius, is apt to become a nuisance, playing all kinds of cheap music in and out of season--a sort of peripatetic pianola, without the advantage of being under control. Such persons, moreover, usually are born without a soft pedal.

Bach and the Weather Bureau.

This digression, which I have made in order to discuss the difference between music as a science and music as an art, a distinction which, I have pointed out, often is so marked that a person may be thoroughly equipped on the scientific side of music without being sensitive to its beauty as an art, seemed to me necessary at this stage. I am reminded by it of the distinction which Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his "Nature and Elements of Poetry," so wittily draws between the indications of a storm as described by a poet and by the official prognostications of the Weather Bureau. Mr. Stedman quotes two stanzas:

"When descends on the Atlantic the gigantic Storm-wind of the Equinox, Landward in his wrath he scourges the toiling surges, Laden with seaweed from the rocks."

And this stanza by a later balladist:

"The East Wind gathered, all unknown, A thick sea-cloud his course before; He left by night the frozen zone, And smote the cliffs of Labrador; He lashed the coasts on either hand, And betwixt the Cape and Newfoundland, Into the bay his armies pour."

All this impersonation and fancy is translated by the Weather Bureau into something like the following:

"An area of extreme low pressure is rapidly moving up the Atlantic Coast, with wind and rain. Storm-center now off Charleston, S. C.

Wind N. E.; velocity, 54. Barometer, 29.6. The disturbance will reach New York on Wednesday, and proceed eastward to the Banks and Bay of St. Lawrence. Danger signals ordered for all North Atlantic ports."

Far be it from me to imply that contrapuntal music in general or Bach in particular represents the Weather Bureau. None the less is it true that Bach appeals more strongly to the scientific musician than to the music-lover who seeks in music a secondary meaning--love, pa.s.sion, grief; the mood awakened by the contemplation of a forest landscape with its murmuring foliage, a boundless prairie, or the unquiet sea.

The technical indebtedness of modern music to Bach is so immense, and the artistic probity of the man himself was so wonderful, for he worked calmly on, in spite of what was worse than opposition--neglect--that I think the tendency on the part of Bach enthusiasts, while not overrating the importance of the influence he has had during the past fifty years or more, is to underrate others as compared with him. When critics declare that one virtuoso or another is not a great Bach player, are they not ignoring what is a simple fact--that no player can make the same appeal through Bach that it is possible for him to make through modern music, and that, as a rule, when a virtuoso, however good a musician he may be, places Bach on his program, he does so not from predilection, but as a tribute to one of the greatest names in musical history? It seems to me that the extreme Bach enthusiasts can be divided into two cla.s.ses--musicians who are able to appreciate what he did for music on its technical side, and people who want to create the impression that they know more than they really do.

The Bacon, Not the Shakespeare, of Music.

Bach's greatest importance to music lies in his having treated it in the abstract and for itself alone, so that when he penned a work he did this not to bring home to the listener the significance of a certain mood or situation, but from pure delight in following out a musical problem to its most extreme development. Algebra makes mighty interesting study, but furnishes rather a poor subject for dramatic reading. This simile must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, and merely as ill.u.s.trating in a general way my contention that Bach's great service to music was technical and intellectual. He was the Bacon, not the Shakespeare, of music, and the contrapuntal structure that he reared is to the art what the Baconian theorem is to logic. We can imagine the roamer in the field of higher mathematics suddenly becoming excited as he sees the end of the path leading to the solution of some complicated problem in full view. Thus there may be moments when even the cube root becomes emotional, the logarithmic theory a dissipation, and differential calculus an orgy. So, too, Bach put an enthusiasm into his work that often threatens to sweep the student off his intellectuals and make him regard a fugue as a scientifically constructed fairyland. Moreover, there are Bach pieces in which the counterpoint supports the purest kind of melody, like the air for the G string which Thomas arranged for his orchestra with all the strings, save the double ba.s.ses, in unison, and played with an effect that never failed to secure a repeat and sometimes a double encore.

What Wagner Learned from Bach.

If we bear in mind that counterpoint is the artistic combination of several themes, each of equal or nearly equal importance, and that Bach was the greatest master of the contrapuntal school and forms its climax, we can, with a little thought, appreciate what his service has been to modern music. When Wagner devised his system of leading motives it was not for the purpose of employing them singly, like labels tacked onto each character, thing or symbol in the drama, but of combining them, welding them together, when occasion arose, in order to give musical significance and expression to each and every dramatic situation as the story unfolded itself. A shining example of this is found in that wonderful last scene of "Die Walkure," the so-called Magic Fire Scene. _Wotan_ has said farewell to _Brunnhilde_; has thrown her into a profound slumber upon the rock; has surrounded her with a circle of magic flame which none but a hero may penetrate to awaken and win her. How is this scene treated in the score? In the higher register of the orchestra crackles and sparkles the Magic Fire Motive, the Slumber Motive gently rising and falling with the flames; while the superb Siegfried Motive (signifying that the yet unborn _Siegfried_ is the hero destined to break through the fiery circle) resounds in the bra.s.s, and there also is a suggestion of the tender strains with which _Wotan_ bade _Brunnhilde_ farewell. The welding together of these four motives into one glorious whole of the highest dramatic significance is Wagnerian counterpoint--science employed in the service of art and with thrilling effect. Another pa.s.sage from Wagner, the closing episode in the "Meistersinger" Vorspiel, often is quoted to show Wagner's skill in the use of counterpoint, although he employs it so spontaneously that few people stop to consider how scientific his musical structure is. W. J. Henderson, in his capital book, "The Orchestra and Orchestral Music," relates that on one occasion a professional musician was engaged in a discussion of Wagner in the corridor of the Metropolitan Opera House, while inside the orchestra was playing this "Meistersinger" Vorspiel.

"It is a pity," said this wise man, in a condescending manner, "but Wagner knows absolutely nothing about counterpoint."

At that very instant the orchestra was singing five different melodies at once; and, as Anton Seidl was the conductor, they were all audible.

Wagner scores, in fact, teem with counterpoint, but counterpoint that palpitates, that thrills with emotion. Note that Mr. Henderson speaks of melodies. Wagner's leading motives are melodies, sometimes very brief, but always expressive, and not, like the themes of the old contrapuntists, conceived mainly for the sake of being combined scientifically with other themes equally adaptable to that purpose.

Counterpoint may be, and usually is, something very dry and formal.

But from the crucible of the master magician, Richard Wagner, it flows a glowing, throbbing, pulsating stream of most precious metal.

The Language of an Epoch.