Red/Why Music Is Unpopular

by Carl Van Vechten

Why Music Is Unpopular

Music criticism usually divides itself automatically into two classes. In the one, the critic, whose emotions have ostensibly been aroused by poems in tone, tries to render to the reader the intensity of his feelings by quoting from the word poets. The first line of Endymion and passages from Shakespeare fall athwart his pages. Scarcely a musical note but has its literary echo. The music of Maurice Ravel reminds this unimaginative scribe of verses from Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue; snippets and snatches from Keats and Wordsworth serve admirably to evoke the spirit of almost any composer; I have found Walt Whitman linked with Edward MacDowell; Milton and Handel are occasionally made to seem to speak the same language; Byron and Tchaikovsky are asked to walk hand in hand. If you have never heard Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, it may afford you some small consolation to find it tied up in the reviewer's mind with something like this:

"Come and trip it as you go
On the light fantastic toe."

It is quite likely, indeed, that an audience of silly maiden ladies in the middle west, unaccomplished in the skill of tones, hearing little music, applauds delightedly this soft sobbery. Two often apposite lines, however, I have never come upon in music criticism. This, from W. B. Yeats's King and No King, would certainly fit many a singer: "Would it were anything but merely voice!" and sometimes, after a few days of shameless concert-going with a friend from out of town, I feel tempted to reassure him, Calibanwise: "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises."

Our second critic approaches his task with more sobriety of expression. He believes it to be his bounden, and unenlivening, duty to avoid florid language in his dismal effort to impress his readers with the sublime seriousness of the art he so laboriously strives to hold within academically prescribed limits. His erudite style bristles with adverbial clauses, with technical conjurations, abjurations, and apostrophes. He summons the eleven dull devils of dusty knowledge to his aid in his consistent endeavour to be accurate and just. He never deals in metaphor, never in simile; no figures of speech whatever sully the dead drab of his columns; he would consider them, if he thought about the matter at all, cheapening influences, encroaching on the drowsy preserves of his somnolent profession. With as pedantic a gesture as he can command, and his talents in this direction are considerable, he lays out his weights and measures, always qualifying, almost always. Buts, ifs, and in spite ofs cumber his operose paragraphs. No music is perfect; none is imperfect. With this axiom, liberally disregarded by more lively writers, for a text, he proceeds to tell us that the allegro of the new fantasia is admirable in form, but that the themes, perhaps, do not justify such elaborate treatment. He emphasizes history; he leans on handbooks; musty facts are dragged in palestrically for their own sake alone. His manner is formidable, exegetical, eupeptic, a dynamic, asthenic. He clings to cliché: "The composition smells of the midnight oil," etc., etc.

These two varieties of critics are only too actually with us on every side, not only in New York and Boston, but in London, Paris, and Berlin as well. They always have been and they always will be with us. They are one of the principal causes for the profound and unfortunate indifference, nay contempt, with which music (as an art) is regarded by the man who may take an enormous amount of pleasure out of reading books or looking at pictures. Instead of awakening an interest in the greatest and most mysterious of the arts, these obstinate fellows have acted as direct agents in the perpetuation of the bugaboos and voodoos of the academy, freely offering incense and the freshly slain sacrifices of baby composers to the false gods of their fathers. Often, indeed, their crime is feticide. Far from urging the layman to enter the sacred temples, rather they frighten him away. "Come and listen" is a phrase that is never on their lips, never flows from their pens. On the contrary, they write: "Turn about. I have spent my whole life, and I am an old man, trying to learn what you never can hope to know. Any pleasure you may derive from listening to music is a false pleasure, because it is not based on knowledge. Pleasure, indeed, is forbidden; the initiated do not enjoy themselves. Retreat, young man; go back to your books and pictures; the gods of music desire none such as you to draw near to their altars." Instead, indeed, of sending the reader to the nearest concert hall, they have made him take an oath that never, if he knows it, will he voluntarily set foot in such a place. I am presupposing readers! The truth is that these men, after a time, are not even read, save by sopranos and fiddlers, and their early readers, sceptical thereafter regarding all literature devoted to a discussion of music, never again will peruse a line of what they have been led to consider, through these unfortunate examples, as hopeless drivel. Thereby they shut themselves off, unwittingly, not only from further communion with music itself, but also from intimacy with one of the most delightful sidetracks of the art of letters, for it cannot be denied that Berlioz and Ernest Newman and Ethel Smyth would amuse and interest even a tone-deaf Methodist hardware importer.

For there are other kinds of music critics, besides the two varieties which I have described. There is, for instance, the man who writes with a flourish, indulges in "fine writing" and what is "precious," and vocalizes with adjectives. You may not agree with his hyperbolical statement that Grieg and MacDowell were the foremost musicians of the nineteenth century, but you are interested in it because he means it and because he is not afraid to say so emphatically. "Perhaps," on occasion you whisper to yourself chasteningly, "he is right. It may even be possible that Mendelssohn was greater than Beethoven."

Another reviewer slashes violently into some school or other; he drives his sword sharply into the heart of your pet theory, while valiantly defending as good a one of his own; he dips his pen in gall and guides it over paper soaked in wormwood. He despises the new music, any new music, and he consumes nine thousand words in explaining why; he loathes the opera, and he throws all the weight of his influential opinion against it. This man is readable and interesting. His views assume importance even to the reader who does not agree with them, because they arouse curiosity. "Can the music of Schoenberg be as bad as all that?" you question yourself, and then decide, "I must hear it and form my own opinion."

A third writer mingles anecdote with more pregnant matter; nothing is too trivial for his purpose, nothing too serious. He is accurate without being pedantic; he paints the human side of the art. He draws us nearer to compositions by discussing the composers. When he writes of a singer it is not as though he were describing a vocal machine, emitting perfect and imperfect notes; he pictures a human being applying herself to her task; his account is vivid, humorous, sometimes a trifle malicious. He enlivens us and he awakens our interest. This is not altogether a matter of style; it is also a matter of feeling. The style is perhaps the man.

There are but two rules for the critic to follow: have something to say and say it as well as you know how; say it with charm or say it with force, but say it naturally; do not be afraid to say today what you may regret tomorrow; and, above all, do not befuddle and befog the mind of your reader by dragging in Shelley, Francis Thompson, William Blake, and Verlaine. If you can actually suggest ideas to him by quoting from the poets, then by all means quote freely, but do not try to kindle in him the sensation caused by a hearing of César Franck's D minor Symphony by printing copious excerpts from the published works of Swinburne and Mallarmé. Music criticism has two purposes, beyond the obvious and essential one that it provides a bad livelihood for the critic: the first, and perhaps the most important, is to entertain the reader, because criticism, like any other form of literature, should stand by itself and not lean too heavily on the matter of which it treats; the second is to interest the reader in music, or in books about music, or even in musicians. Criticism can be informing without being pedantic; it can prod the pachydermatous hide of a conservative old fogy concert-goer without deviating from the facts. Above all else criticism should be an expression of personal feeling. Otherwise it has no value. "Whoever has been through the experience of discussing criticism with a thorough, perfect, and entire Ass," writes Bernard Shaw, "has been told that criticism should above all things be free from personal feeling."

On one occasion I experienced an irrepressible desire to rail against the intellectual snobbery which persuaded flaccid minds that the string quartet was the noblest musical art form and that the organizations which devoted themselves to this fetish were archangelic interpreters of a heavenly song. I might have said: "The string quartet is an overrated art form. Certainly, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms have poured some of their finest inspiration into this mould, some of their most musical feeling, and yet the nature of this music is such that its interpreters derive more pleasure from its performance than its auditors." It is possible that these sentences might have been read, and if so, understood . . . and forgotten. If every time I expressed a personal feeling, and all my feelings and tastes are intensely personal, I followed with something like this, "it seems to me," or "this may or may not be true," or "according to my taste," or "Mr. Thing does not agree with me," my utterances would lose whatever charm or force they possess, and they would be so clogged with extraneous qualifications that no one would think of reading them. "It is the fault of our rhetoric," Emerson once wrote, "that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other." What I did say about string quartets provoked attention.^[1] Philip Hale remarked that the older lions roared and shook their manes because I had spoken disrespectfully of chamber music, which thus suffered along with the equator. Perhaps. However, a certain salutary disrespect for the snobbery of string quartet fanatics survived . . . also along with the equator.

It is not necessary, gracious reader, that you should agree with the critic. You will satisfy no longing in the heart of the animal if you do agree with him, unless he be made of base metal. It will require only a little reading on your part to convince you that the critics themselves, especially the best and most interesting critics, do not agree. There exist no standards, it would seem, by which music can be assessed and judged with any degree of finality. Lawrence Gilman gives us plenty of evidence on this point,^[2] if any were needed. He reminds us that John F. Runciman viewed Parsifal with a contemptuous eye, calling the music "decrepit stuff," "the last sad quaverings of a beloved friend," while Ernest Newman describes it as "in many ways the most wonderful and impressive thing ever done in music." Vernon Blackburn regarded Elgar's Dream of Gerontius as the finest musical work since Wagner, but George Moore dismisses it briefly as "holy water in a German beer-barrel." H. E. Krehbiel considers Pelléas et Mélisande a score of which "nine-tenths is dreary monotony," whereas Louis Laloy is stirred to reverence by contemplation of its beauty. Jean Marnold and H. T. Finck do not agree about Carmen, and W. J. Henderson and James Huneker hold opposing opinions regarding the merits of Strauss's Don Quixote.

There are critics who accept Wagner whole: Rienzi, Lohengrin, Ring, and Parsifal; others find nothing to enjoy or praise in certain of his works and even discover tiresome passages in Die Walküre. Some critics profess to admire folksongs and folksong influences; others do not. Many otherwise estimable men have been found who are willing to subscribe to an everlasting veneration for the music of Liszt, a fancy, even, for the compositions of Rubinstein. I have read in several newspapers and at least one magazine that Horatio Parker's Mona was a valuable contribution to our national art. It is possible. When we are informed that Percy Grainger is a greater composer than Debussy we may be interested, if we are interested in the manner of the telling, but we are not obliged to accept the statement as literally true.

To be sure, the acknowledgment is pretty general that Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart were great composers, but some critics insist that the musicians who imitate the forms and styles of these masters today are great composers, a point of view which always awakens the murderous instinct within me, as it should be apparent to the veriest dolt that an artist in some way must reflect the spirit of his own epoch. Besides what one man has done naturally, another copies servilely and without reason. Bach employed the fugue because it was the natural form into which his ideas came to him. Subsequent composers, for the greater part, have used the fugue as an end in itself.

There are a few delightful writers about music, and you will find that all of them, in one way or another, bear out the point of my remarks. There are too many others who are hedging the most universal of the arts away from the people to whom it belongs, protecting it with their damp vapourings, their vapid technicalities, their worship of Clio, their stringent analyses, or, worse than anything else, their extensive explanations.^[3] Let each judge for himself, and let every one be encouraged to judge. Let more think about music; to make that possible, curiosity must be stimulated, so that there may be a more general desire to hear music, especially new music. Books are on every hand; if one does not visit galleries, at least one cannot escape reproductions of good pictures in our periodicals and in the Sunday supplements of the newspapers, but to hear music (I am speaking, of course, of so-called "art music") it is necessary to visit certain halls on certain days. This requires encouragement because it also requires patience. Why, I have waited more than twelve years to hear Vincent d'Indy's Istar only to discover that I have heard it too late. The conductors of our concerts make these matters difficult; do not let our critics make them more so.

In the stricter interests of accuracy this paper, of course, should have been christened Some remarks on one of the reasons for the comparative unpopularity of music as an art form, an exact description of its contents, but if I had called it that do you think you would have read it?

March 1, 1917.

1. The curious may discover what I did say by reading a paper entitled, Music for Museums. Initially printed in a now defunct periodical of some parts, called Rogue (May 15, 1915), this paper later became the only section I can recall with any patience of a vile book (my first), Music After the Great War; G. Schirmer; 1915. I dare say some edition is still in print.
2. In a paper called, Taste in Music, which appeared in The Musical Quarterly, January, 1917.
3. Le critique sceptique, toujours en defiance meme contre sa propre sensibilité, est mené par la peur d'être dupe; il adopte volontiers le ton de l'ironie ou même celui du badinage. Il craint l'enthousiasme comme une maladie et se tire de toutes les difficultés au moyen d'un sourire et parfois d'une grimace." Remy de Gourmont: Promenades Littéraires; I, 70.