Music of

How far symbolism may lie pushed in music is seen in the attempts to pin down the phrase to precise meanings. It is true that there is a key symbolism, that not by chance have the great composers selected certain keys—keys that. in Wordsworth's happy expression. are inevitable. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is inconceivable in C sharp minor or E flat minor. C minor is a por tion of its life. Berlioz has compiled a table of key characteristics and a certain theorist does not hesitate to call F major rugged; B major, energetic; E major, radiant, warm, joyous; A major, frank, sonorous: D major, gay. brilliant, alert ; and so on through the list. Here again temperament counts. all else is purely arbitrary. Music has the power of evoking moods, that is a common experience; and it has on the formal side analogies to architecture, for it is struc tural, it is arehiteetonic. and its subject is imi tative of no known model. This has led Walter Pater to asseverate that all the arts in common aspire "toward music, music heing the typical or ideally consummate art, the object of the great forward—of all art, of all that is artistic or partakes of artistic quali ties." It is "the blending of the animative thought and embodying vehicle." the absorption of the matter into the form of which music is the one perfect example among the arts, that at tracted Pater. "All art constantly aspires to ward the condition of music," he wrote, and made of sensual presentation, emotional suggestion, and technical perfection the archetype for all the arts. The danger of this view lies in the slighting of music's tremendous evocation of our subliminal depths, of spiritual shades. These cannot be exorcised by technical loveliness or richness of emotional eloquence. Beethoven has taught us in his symphonies that from tone may be wrung almost an ethical meaning. The Platonic theory of an ideal type for all the arts could not have failed to impress Pater. But it stops at the outer porches of the ear, the tone which should pene trate to the inner sanctuary losing on the way sonic of its grosser connotations. His doctrine is that art is always striving to be independent of mere intelligence, that the vaguer the subject the greater the impact of the thrill upon our souls. Gustave Flaubert, who is the creator of both the realistic and the symbolistic school, had some such idea ; for lie wished his prose to be as independent as music, to float in mid-air by rea son of its euphony and rhythm. And there can he no doubt that it is the perfect balance found in Beethoven's phrases, both the meaning and the music. that makes of them the greater type for all future symphonists. Poetry is the usual standard for painter, poet, sculptor, and com poser, and, as John Addington Symonds shows. this is as much of a heresy as Pater's. F. W. H. :Myers writes: "The range of human thoughts and emotions greatly transcends the range of such symbols as man has invented to express them; and it becomes, therefore, the business of art to use these symbols in a double way. They must be used for the direct representation of thought and feeling, but they must also he combined by so subtle an imagination as to suggest much which there is no means of directly expressing. This power gives birth to the art of the musician, whose symbols are hardly imitative at all, but express emotions which, till music suggests them. have been not only unknown, but unimaginable." To each art its particular province. There is music in Milton; Wagner is a great painter; Bach an architect; and through the marmoreal prose of Flaubert rings the sound of the sculp tor's chisel. But this 'reaching forward' is, as Symonds says. "at its best a way of expressing our sense of something subjective in the styles of artists or of epochs. not of something in the arts themselves." The subjectivity of a critic prompts him to select a particular art as the type for all. Wagner, in a superb effort, attempted to house all the arts within the walls of a mighty synthesis. Music, however, won the victory; it is Wagner the composer who will live. not Wag ner• the dramatic poet or Wagner the scene paint er. '1'11c• iutellec•tualists are quite as wrong in their endeavor to force upon music the (ace of preacher or philosopher. By reason of its limi tations, music is not well adapted for the ex pression of an intellectual content. It gives us the maximum of sensuous effect, though we do not agree with Symonds, that in it is the 110111 11111111 appeal to the intelligence. If this were so, l;ac•h, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Wagner, Eichard Strauss would not he in the same• eate gory with Dante, Miehelangelo. Milton, Shake speare, Shelley, Swinburne, and ltodin. Ilesides, has nit Speneer said, "The emotions are the mas ters, the intellect is the servant"? Great intel lectuality, great emotional temperaments go to the making of great composers as veil as of great architects, poets, dramatists, painters, and sculptors. Architecture is not emotional like music•, lint it is more concrete, it arouses the sense of the sublime—which music does, too, un der certain conditions. Sculpture is impressive in its symbolism of the human form and its evoeation of harmonious lines: of all the arts it is the most unlike music. Painting, with its illusions of life on a fiat superfieies, has certain affinities with 1111150', While music and poetry have several qualities in common—the subtleties of 50111111 and the power of emit humus narration— though here music speaks a longue not to be trans lated into word.. It gives the sense of situation, not action, the prism of the arts, as Symonds phra,l, it, "each distinet, but homogeneous. and tinctured at their edges with hues borrowed from the sister arts. 'Their differenees derive from the several vehicles thi.y are bound to employ. Their unity is the spiritual substance which they express in common. Abstract beauty is one and indivisible. But the concrete shapes whieh mani fest this beauty decompose it, just as the prism analyzes white light into colors." We have rapidly surveyed music on its aeons Heal. psychological, null hv.thei1cn1 sides ; there re mains the evolutionary. From a mere (Ty ill the submerged, prehistoric world it has passed into the daily life of man. a magnifieent in work in which the spiritual and the sensuous are har moniously blended or struggle for precedence. presentative art, it has nevertheless been made representative in the sienilxhic pare] h.] of iChn WIlgiler and 14111'1'5. FlalliShillg the lid' potter for ballet., music is the handmaid of religion, and by some authorities is considered to have therapeutic. powers. In history it has figured n healer of sick souls, and t1-day in its loftier manifestations it is a balm and a stimulant to the weary in mind and body. And in the last analysis is not music an aural mode of not ion ? Evol.rTioN. The hisfory of musical art is an etriirt to record, to systematize and bring into general harmony a vast mass of 11011e1("ody in material, vontliet ing facts. many laeulur and irreeoneilable traits \Odell try the temper of the most ardent historian. Evolution there has been, and, despite pessimistie doubts. genuine progress: butt it Is an evolution that often curves in upon itself, its line of progress is more fancied than real. To draw a straight line from the earliest musical lispings to the omnipotent utter ances of Beethoven, is the ideal of the critic; but the task is a difficult one. Musical history is a history of suppressions, evasions, and empirical classifications. Like the evolutionary processes in the physical world, progress is often seemingly crab-wise. If science aims at discovering law and reason ill nature, a notation of the actual, the art of music furnishes an example of purely arbitrary progress. The artist does nut create ill the abstract, but in the concrete, so that two art products are independent and never alike. To I explain one by the other is at once the cardinal fault of criticism) and its excuse for existence. Palestrina and Wagner are poles asunder, and it is a bold man who claims precedence for either. And yet, nothing of Palestrina's has been lost; his harmonic seeds are conic to a flowering. Has Wagner surpassed Gluck in certain elementary qualities? Who since the death of Beethoven has symplomized so marvelously? Has the rush and sweep of the Handelian chorus over been re- . peated, or who can equal Bach in polyphonic , mastery? Music is the youngest of the arts, but it behooves us to ask if the nineteenth century is literally its seminal epoch. So there have been

factitious groupings, vague theorizing by some compilers of musical history, who• be it said with emphasis, have made much of tantalizing. incom plete records. To lie sure, schools usually fol lowed the strong men, and there is a chain of development during the past few hundred years, enough to furnish credible criticism. Before that the roots are in the darkness of the mother churches, or the 111141i:twat twilight of the clois ters. There has been much sublime guessing to build up a fabric capable of withstanding ad verse comment. Ilut it has been accomplished, and in Naumann, Ambros, Wallaschek, Row botham, (;rove, Rockstro, Parry, Henderson, Finek, Apthorp, Hale, Krehbiel, Ekon, Ernest Newman, Hadot\•, and others we may catch glimpses of a baffling whole. One fact is un alterably demonstrated by the researches of these scholars: that so far from music being, a uni versal language, it is more subject to geographical limitations than is speech. It is a veritable tower of Babel in its multitudinous dialects, its jargons and eloquence. The divine stammering of the men who made eeclesiastical music is offset by the heathenish rhythmic howlings 1f the Bush men; and the melancholy monotony of the Chi nese pentatonic scale is drowned by the full or chestra of Tschaikowsky. Men of many climes may converse by mute signs, but set them all to music-making, each after their and the re sult will be anarchy. It is one of the pleasing fancies of the poet. this eatholicity of music. ]act s• however, contradict the idea ; just as surely as they deny the assumption that vocal musie, i.e. words with sow* is superior to I absolute music• i.e. music that is self-suffieient, ' that needs no illustration, no libretto to explain its existenee. Absolute music then is the highest reach of the art, the most dignified and satisfy ing. No doubt the human larynx is the most perfect of instruments, and the sound it produces tonehes the heart. for it is human. But poetry pure 811(1 music absolute cannot be blended with 0111 a loss to both. Vocal tones preceded instru mental ones: indeed, school asserts that sing ing en Me before speech. Grell and Engel main tarn that speech is but degenerated singing and that music with words is the archetype of the art. Music and articulate speech are far from resting on a common basis, though both begin at the human throat. Half the heresies of music orig inate in this confounding of widely disparate things. It was a stumbling block for Beethoven, Richard Wagner, and for Schumann and Richard Strauss. Even among the savages the break is clear between impassioned speech and song.

Rowbotham ingeniously groups prehistoric music under the drum, pipe, and lyre types; in struments of percussion, wind, and string. Man drummed and thrummed before he piped, and lie piped before he plucked, and he probably yowled to the moon before the rhythmic noises of nature, dripping of waters, sounds of wood and wind, stimulated his phono-motor centres to imitation. (See MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS). The rhythmic chantings were part of a ritual, the soul of the savage worshiped its fetish ; the begin nings of religion and art are identical. These manifestations belong properly to culture study. (See FoLK-Mustc; see also the Mnsie of Ara bia, China, Egypt, India. Japan, Turkey, Russia, Scandinavia, of the Magyars, Celts, Negroes, North American Indians, and Hebrews. under ARABIAN MUSIC; CHINESE MUSIC, etc.) The earliest musical system of which we possess any authentic record was invented by the Greeks or rather absorbed from Phcenician and Egyptian systems. The Hebrews also borrowed their forms from other nations. The invention of the lyre is attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth in the pretty fables. The Greek play is the prototype of modern opera. (See OPERA.) It was sung, though the music has not been vouchsafed ths. Two thousand years ago Athens thrilled at the A nti gonr of Sophocles, yet. not a note of it has been preserved. The Greeks, sensitive to all the arts, made music part of their daily lives. Its inllu ence upon them, as described by poets, must have been extraordinary. Yet in the three hypothetical Ilymns of Apollo, Nemesis. and Cnilliope, and the first Pythian Ode to Pindar, we find little that would touch modern nerves. Theoretical writ ings of Pythagoras. Aristoxenns, Euclid, and others have come down to Ile and show that the Greek knew the perfect intervals of the natural scale—the octave, fourth, fifth, and greater tone. But their system is a highly artificial, needlessly complicated one, and finally blossomed into the modes : Dorian, Ionian, Phrygian, Jie1ian, Lydian, Mixolydian, etc. (See CREEK MODES.) The Romans derived their musical knowledge from the Greeks, but did not pursue its study seriously. The early Christians who found in the Imperial city a harbor of refuge brought with them new forms, echoes of the liturgy heard in the Temple of Jerusalem. Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, made about the year A.D. 3S4 a general collection of these melodies and at the same time laid down a code of tech nical laws. Two centuries later Saint Gregory the Great is said to have made a second col lection (c.590 A.D.) and based it on a more comprehensive system. The four modes scales bequeathed by Ambrose were increased to nine. The combined melodies received in early tunas the names of rontus playas, plain chant: the older being known as the Ambrosian Chant (q.v.) —still sung in Milan—the later one as the Gre gorian Chant (q.v.). (See PLAIN CHANT.) From these liturgical chants has sprung the noble music of the Roman Catholic Church. Gevaert doubts with historic accuracy the historic basis of the Gregorian chants; believing that the Christian Church derived its modal scales and its melodies, not from the old Hebraic psalmody, but from the secular Kithara song of the Roman Empire, which comes from the Greek. These psalm tunes, whatever their origin, are the oldest ecclesiastical music we possess. Later music was treated as arithmetic by Boetius and the art became a mere mathematical exercise. In the latter half of the ninth century Hucbald, a monk of Saint Amand in Flanders, proposed a new division of tetra chords, and attempted the arrangement of vocal music in parts, and invented a new system of notation. Semiography or sign writing was the method of notation that superseded the nota tion of Gregory. Figures called Neunne (see NEUMES) were placed over the words to which the tunes were sung. Though the ascent and descent of the melody were not at first shown, Huth:,ld remedied that by a series of horizontal lines arranged like the modern stave. The Musiea Enchiriadis, which was until lately ascribed to him, contains information about notation and the Organum or Diaphony, which was the first form of harmony, consisting chiefly of consecu tive octaves, fifths, or fourths added to the plain song of the church. (See HARMONY.) Guido of Arezzo (c.1000-c.1050), another monk, distrib uted the twenty notes then used into groups of six, called hexa chords. He invented solmi zation (q.v.), which is the naming of the notes of each hexachord by the syllables Ut, Re, Ali, Fa, Sol, La ; the origin of these syllables being a verse of a hymn to Saint .fidin, each hemistieh of which began with one of them, and was sung to phrases a note higher each time. Ut was supplanted by Do, and Si was added to com plete the necessary seven notes of tire octave. (See SCALE.) Franco of Cologne made the first recorded attempt to measure the relative length of notes in his `cantos mensurabilis' or 'measured song.' Four standards of length were adopted: (I) maxima, or duplex to is (2) longn (3) brevis; (4) semil»-eris. A time signature was put at tire beginning of the music. which showed whether each long note was to be equal to two or three shorter ones. (See MENSURABLE MUSIC.) Dia phony merged into diseant ; the former doub ling, the melody at tire fifth or fourth. the latter varying the monotony of the organism by the addition of ornamental notes, passing notes. This diseant was usually extemporaneous, though com posers soon employed it, when it was called 'con trapunctus a penna,' in contradistinction to 'con trapunctus a mente.' Counterpoint, or note against note, was born; motets were sung. rough attempts at part-singing lent it at least a begin ning. See COUNTERPOINT.