By Eli Siegel
This introduction to Eli Siegel’s lecture is from a commentary by Ellen Reiss in the issues of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known in which the lecture was published.
WE ARE PROUD to publish Animate and Inanimate Are in Music and Conscience, a 1966 lecture by Eli Siegel that is a critical masterpiece. It is a deep, surprising, powerful illustration (with humor too, and charm) of the principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” In that principle, stated by Eli Siegel, is to be found the criterion for beauty, sought by critics for centuries. And it is the means of understanding also this huge thing not understood before: what art has to do with every person simply as person—tossing in a bed, angry at a job, worried about money, laughing at a joke, in a classroom, in love, in confusion.
The central opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of in this lecture are Animate and Inanimate. He speaks of how they are present in the technique of music, and in music as sheer pleasure. Then, these opposites are ours. They can be ours terrifyingly; because animate comes from the Latin animare, to give life—and every person feels he or she is not alive enough. All over America now there are people who laughed animatedly at parties or in their offices and later felt empty inside, and numb to things. Millions of people have gone from a true exuberance, the aliveness of being swept by music, of delightedly breathing in fresh air or seeing a blue sky—to feeling there was something deeply wooden in them, unresponsive, inert.
People have not known what it is that makes a person more alive, and what it is that makes a person less. We need tremendously to know the answer—and it is in Aesthetic Realism.
Eli Siegel is the person in the history of thought who has identified the thing within every person which is most against our own lives, against our being all we can be, against the vitality of our minds. That deadening thing is Contempt, which he has described in this principle: “There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.” The feeling that we will be more by lessening what is not ourselves is the beginning of every cruelty that has ever occurred on this earth. But our contempt is also that which makes us less alive: less able to have emotion about things, less responsive, hollower, deader.
The Desire in Behalf of Life
Mr. Siegel has also identified the thing in every self that is most in behalf of life. It is the desire to like the world—to be vibrantly fair to what is not ourselves. This is the deepest desire we have. It is equivalent to our life’s purpose, and is at war every day with our desire for contempt.
I am grateful without end to say: the beautiful study of Aesthetic Realism enables the desire to like the world to win! And so it makes people feel more alive, be more alive. I love Mr. Siegel for this magnificent, solid fact—real in the years and hours of my own life!
I am honored to present seven questions here that can have a person see more clearly the tendencies toward animate and inanimate in oneself—what makes us more alive and what makes us less.
1. A baby is being born right now in Oklahoma. Do the parents of little Darren hope he will be able to smile at an Oklahoma sky, welcome light from the sun, respond happily to the voices of other people, welcome words and make them a part of him, show pleasure at music, run gladly across Oklahoma grass because he feels it to be a deep friend to him? Do Darren’s parents see such things as these—instances of his liking the world—as standing for how alive he is? If they couldn’t occur, would the parents feel there was a terrible curtailing of their child’s very life?
2. If Darren, 28 years from now, feels he is too good to be affected by another person—that the feelings of a co-worker of his, Mark, are unimportant—is that like being numb to the sunlight and Oklahoma sky? As he asks to be unaffected, is he asking for the depths of him to be dead?
3. Who is more alive: 1) a person who can look at an object, maybe the bare branch of a winter tree, and be interested in it, feel that in its humble bareness yet proud diagonal lift it is beautiful?; or 2) a person who looks at the branch yet doesn’t really notice it, and moves on?
How Do We See Truth?
4. Is there any relation between how much we care for truth and how alive we are?
5. Were we born to meet the things of the world with accuracy and justice? And is our desire to change facts to suit ourselves, to do whatever we please with the world in our minds, to make truth subservient to our ego and our notion of comfort, the same really as killing the basis of ourselves? Is our desire to feel superior to truth or evade truth the same as making ourselves deeply dead?
6. Tennyson, in “The Lady of Shalott,” describes a person who felt she would take care of her life and individuality by keeping things and people at a distance, viewing them only indirectly, through a mirror:
And moving through a mirror clear,
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near,
Winding down to Camelot;
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.
In turning what was not herself into “shadows,” was she really making herself unalive? Are you in any way like the Lady of Shalott, whom Tennyson tells of so musically? Do you make people and things flatter, dimmer, more distant than they are, instead of wanting to see them fully, vividly, with all their dimensions?
Eli Siegel has explained that the world is the other half of yourself. If you take the life out of other things, as a means of being superior and safe, are you taking the life out of yourself? Is that why you can feel bored, dull, empty, locked in yourself?
7. Another poem of Tennyson, “Ulysses,” is about the desire to be fully alive. Ulysses’ way of seeing is the opposite of the Lady of Shalott’s. Ulysses says, “I will drink / Life to the lees.” When he states in proud iambic pentameter, “I am a part of all that I have met,” and describes himself as “yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought”—is he illustrating this great statement from Mr. Siegel’s essay “Art As Life”: “A thing’s being related gives it life”?
Because Eli Siegel himself used his life and mind to be fair to the whole world, he was the most alive of persons, and, like Tennyson and Bach, is immortal.
Animate and Inanimate Are in Music and Conscience
By Eli Siegel
I FOUND THAT the depths of Aesthetic Realism could be shown in a rather new way through music. And strangely enough, the most modern things in music, the most difficult things, are the most useful there. The fight between structure and emotion, between emotion and music almost as solid geometry, does go on. And there are terms that concern conscience—the earlier term polyphony, the new one polytonality, also atonality. And I hope to show that looking at these things is a way of seeing conscience too.
The fight between the diatonic scale as perpendicular and the chromatic as horizontal, is one way of putting it. And the fight between the two kinds of polytonality—across and in depth—which is present in music now, concerns this matter of conscience. These things are not easy to see.
My purpose is to show that Aesthetic Realism is true; that there’s a theory of the world that is in action now, and it is in action in the various arts. It would be well for persons to look at the particulars and use that to see whether Aesthetic Realism is true.
I’m using a book called An Anthology of Musical Criticism, compiled by Norman Demuth (London, 1947). A problem goes on from Monteverde to Alban Berg. I think this book makes it clear that it does. It takes new technical forms, and at the same time says more about conscience.
So we begin with a person born three years after Shakespeare, in 1567: Monteverde, Claudio—who is one of the most talked of composers now, and also is in more homes than he ever thought he’d reach. This is Hubert Parry on Monteverde:
Monteverde belonged to that strongly defined order of composers who are not so much impelled by the mere delight of music itself as by the opportunities it offers to interpret vividly emotions, moods, human feelings….They…do not supply us with inspiring examples of absolute music: but they delve into human life and feeling.
These words about Monteverde illustrate, somewhat justify, the title I felt was just for this talk, Animate and Inanimate Are in Music and Conscience.
The Bad Inanimate
The relation of animate and inanimate is of things. One of the beliefs of Aesthetic Realism is that every person, in being himself and trying to be not interested in other things, is accepting the inanimate in a bad sense. That is the true death instinct, not the one that Freud wrote about. The protection of oneself, the going towards the inanimate and the hidden, is something present. The other thing, the meeting of what is not oneself in a live fashion (that is how it can be said quickly), has much meaning too.
One of the things that art does, along with making the universe and individual one, is to make that which can be called the inanimate and the animate one. To an individual, the rest of the world is somewhat inanimate. He cannot give it the warmth that he gives himself; he cannot give it the life.
For example, I thought of discussing a play of Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie. The girl in the play, after all, is given to these glass animals, and the symbolism of glass is all over the place. But glass is inanimate; and the fact that people have thought they were made of glass is something to see.
Music does concern the inanimate. When we look at notes and see how cold they are as they are printed, and then think of the melody they make for—“Tales from the Vienna Woods” looks awfully cold as music: it’s structure. And then, it can set people, with much feeling, moving about the dance floor.
Conscience and Applause
Well, there’s Monteverde. And the first thing that we have to see, whether it’s Italy in the 17th century or elsewhere, is that every person wants to get applause. Applause can be called a substitute conscience. For people to applaud you is a way of saying that something is for you, and even if your conscience is troublesome, the applause of people will make up for it.
We can be pretty sure that Monteverde wanted applause. He wanted his own applause, he wanted the applause of his contemporaries, including that of nobles, and he wanted somewhere the applause which he has got, the applause of posterity. Monteverde here is like two other Italians whose names begin with M: Machiavelli, who came earlier, and Manzoni, who came later. (There’s also Maffei, who wrote a play on the same subject as Voltaire, Merope.) So Monteverde was after something, and he is one of the people of the 17th century, late 16th century, who are alive.
Parry speaks of “composers who are not so much impelled by the mere delight of music itself as by the opportunities it offers to interpret vividly emotions, moods, human feelings.” It is interesting to see where music as “delight” is the same as absolute music—that is, music that is not program music. Parry says if you’re interested in music itself as delight you don’t want music to interpret human problems, but Monteverde was not interested only in music as delight: he felt that music should interpret human problems.
We can see that problem in Verdi. And one of the reasons opera is so popular is that as somebody sings with passion, there’s a feeling that loudness has become graceful. A contralto has to make more noise than a receptionist. She’s passionate. And if a singer is Lucia, she talks about love, it’s very personal, but it brings the house down. Her last surmise reaches the ceiling. Well, we have this feeling in Monteverde. The opera about Nero (The Coronation of Poppea), can make for a good deal of loudness.
About Something
Parry says Monteverde is among “the musicians who instinctively feel music’s sphere is in the scheme of things. They…delve into human life and feeling.” This is music, then, which is about something. And what I have quoted says something about everything. Everything is what it is, and everything is about something. The talk which we used to hear, “This music isn’t about anything—it is what it is,” is less now. It’s less said about poetry too. People don’t say so much, “This poem is what it is.”
In opera we have the most concern with human feeling. There is Mozart, and he’s interested in how people felt; he’s graceful about it. There’s Wagner, and his people in the Nibelungen Ring, in Tannhäuser, in Lohengrin, are very concerned.
Monteverde, then, is interested in people. However, he is important in structure. He is noted for his madrigals, which are a way of having a number of people behave. They may not by themselves, but in taking part in madrigals they go well with each other.
The problem here—and Monteverde had it—is how to be fair to the inanimate world and also fair to how he felt. This thing which is in art is a large matter in conscience.
Brilliance and Depth
I go now to a person who is almost comic in the thoroughness with which he belongs to the Structure world. He is perhaps the best known of teachers of piano: Karl Czerny (1791-1857). He is Mr. Piano Instructor; the best in Vienna came his way. He was a pupil of Beethoven, and Liszt was a pupil of his. He saw the keyboard as the same as a church—it became holy to him.
He wrote books on piano playing. One work is on how to get speed, velocity; another is on how to be clever, virtuosity. These textbooks went all over the world. After a while, Czerny thought because he was such a good teacher he should write music. He didn’t do so well there.
So why should that mechanism, the piano, make for so much emotion? It’s a matter of physics, multiple physics.
Czerny corresponds to something in art, somebody who is cool, knows technique, is dazzlingly academic, and doesn’t have what human beings are looking for. He represents the going for the inanimate as brilliant. The work I am using quotes this on Czerny, from a journal, Harmonicon, edited by William Ayrton; the year is 1823:
The “Fantasia” is the production of a young Hungarian…reported to be one of the most brilliant pianoforte players in Europe. We cannot say much in favour of this specimen of his composition….[It] is destitute of both taste and sentiment: it has an assemblage of difficult passages that have no motive, but to show the agility of human fingers.
So cleverness here is chided as against feeling. Cleverness is man when cold and brilliant, and also wily.
Czerny had that quality which I disliked, say, in the jazz field, in Fats Waller. I did hear him in person a couple of times, and he just wanted to show what he could do with that piano. And it is better to play it deeply than to play it so brilliantly. There can be depth and brilliance, but very often one chooses brilliance as against depth.
This 1823 reviewer says musicians ought to “address themselves to the hearts of their auditors.” The same objection was going on about painting: persons were depicting history, but with no feeling. Somebody was defying the Romans in a painting, and people weren’t too moved. There was a call for feeling, and all through the 19th century there was an attempt at feeling. Landseer with his dogs did as well as anybody.
Here, we come to today. Alban Berg, from what I know of him, when he was asked, What are you getting at in Wozzeck and in Lulu?, would say, Mostly I want to disgust people’s consciences; I want to make them so sick of themselves that they might become better. There is a quality of nausea in both Schoenberg and in Wozzeck. Nausea, managed well, can be quite useful. The dissonances go towards nausea, and the dissonant principle, with nausea in the depths of dissonance, has been more around.
So, what does music try to “address”? The heart is still present. And it is said in this book that the purpose of polytonality, polyphony, atonality is still to engage the heart of someone—the composer—and therefore to affect the heart of someone. The word virtuoso has come to be somewhat derogatory. It means a person given to cleverness. And Czerny has something of the ridiculous to him. Meantime, what he could do with the piano keys and how he understood them is something to be known.
Listening Right
There are a few ever so gigantically clever people in the 19th century. Two who were contemporary are Verdi and Wagner; and they both are like Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Dickens: they are terrific energies.
Wagner caused a commotion, and he had a bad time of it in England. What Wagner was doing is still not seen. The thing that it’s hard to say of Monteverde is said of both Verdi and Wagner: they are theatrical in a good sense. Wagner saw music as part of a show, a theatrical show; and Verdi did too; and Mozart somewhat less.
In the matter of conscience we have the question of listening right. A person who has an insufficient conscience is one who doesn’t listen. The word Listen! is used to arouse conscience. There was a good deal of not hearing of Wagner, and others, including Beethoven. Somebody has the nerve to say, “If Herr Beethoven would leave out the first third of this symphony, we might like it”: that’s the way they talked. Criticisms that are patronizing of Beethoven are in the book I am using. And occasionally there’s just repulsion.
There are two persons who have come together in this book in relation to Wagner. One is John Ruskin; the other is Samuel Butler. This is Ruskin in a letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, June 30, 1882, concerning Wagner’s Die Meistersinger:
Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, that thing last night beat—as far as the story and acting went: and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest—as far as the sound went.
When someone responds to a work this way, he ought to be concerned. Wagner can still be questioned; there are some persons who still don’t like him. There’s W.J. Turner, who just said he was a fraud. He says, “The ‘Ring’ is as hollow as ‘Tannhauser’ which is emptiness itself. I suspect even the Venusberg to be a fraud.” That’s 1933.
How we respond to things is our lives. If we respond ill, our lives that much are not what they should be. And a question of conscience is, In what way do we know that we respond ill; and how do we feel about it; what do we do about it? That Ruskin was tormented by himself is quite clear, with all the seeming assurance. But this is not about Ruskin.
The two criticisms of Die Meistersinger are in the field of art criticism generally, and they’re mentioned in my Preface to Martha Baird’s Nice Deity. That is, a poem can be too hard-working, bombastic, turgid, vituperative, obstreperous, insensate, crude. Also, a poem can be too tame, tepid, restrained, cautious, academic, well-managed, feelingless. It’s a matter of too much coolness or too much heat.
At the beginning, Ruskin says Die Meistersinger is just too much in the field of heat, or energy, crudity: “Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering…” There was a great deal of bawling in the Wagnerian operas, there is no doubt. When Siegfried saw something, he announced it to everybody; and when Hans Sachs says something, he says it so everybody can hear it. And to hear German loud is something! This was not for Ruskin.
Then, here is the emptiness, the tepidity, the fog quality: “and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless,…that eternity of nothing was the deadliest.” Yet Ruskin, in his prose, is like Wagner. If Ruskin was really feeling good and he started a sentence at 8, he’d go on until at least 8:15. He wrote the longest sentences.
Ruskin’s criticism continues, “I never was so relieved…by the stopping of any sound—not excepting railway whistles….” Since then, music has looked very respectfully at railway whistles. There’s not a sound in the kitchen, not a sound in a factory, that hasn’t been thought of by some composer. Also, all the birds have been covered, including the strange ones—not just the song birds.
“As for the great Lied, I never made out where it began, or where it ended.” It is felt now that Ruskin was unfair. And if he was unfair, then he had a right to have his conscience perturbed.
When We Dislike Something
The music of Wagner came to England, and he wasn’t liked. Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh, I recommend as the worst music critic who ever lived. He had one criterion: was the music like Handel? We know that he was grouchy and had ill temper, and also there was something very likable about him. But he and his friend Henry Festing Jones would go to concerts in order to think that all the other concert-goers were foolish. There’s not a composer whom Butler says anything good of, but on Wagner he is with Ruskin.
When we dislike something, is our conscience concerned? It is. The artist has a conscience, but the listener has a conscience too. This is Butler:
Then I heard an extract from “Parsifal” which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes. Yet next morning in The Times I saw this able, heartless failure…without one spark of either true pathos or true humour, called “the crowning achievement of dramatic music.”
(This is later; at the beginning there wasn’t much praising of Wagner in England.) “I am glad that such people should call Handel a thieving plagiarist.” And that is the Handel motif. It happens that Wagner did try to get the joyousness of things into his operas, but he is most successfully religious. “If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes”: Butler didn’t like human beings to seem uncomfortable.
Butler was not the Savonarola type. He wasn’t given to grand musings; he didn’t see the beginning of the world, and as far as he was concerned, the sky ended where the city roof did. He is not a visionary, and he is somewhat unfair to the religious person in The Way of All Flesh. He does have the great quality of seeing what is close.
Wagner went after everything, and he was poking around the borders of his mind and the borders of the world. This wouldn’t go with Butler—but hardly anything went. So Samuel Butler has something to worry about.
What Is in a Good Conscience
Brahms died in 1897. And what is in a good conscience is in Hubert Parry’s words in a lecture of 1897 about him. This is as good prose as any in the book I am using. The runner-up is Peter Warlock, or Philip Heseltine, on the work of Delius. The effortlessness, the indiscernibility of Delius was never expressed better: it seems just like some violet that didn’t quite make it; some arbutus that, well, failed to come forth while other arbutuses were seen. But what I’m trying to get from this book are exemplifications of conscience shown in music and by music. Parry talks of the work of Brahms, and a conscience adequately satisfied is here. Whether the conscience of Brahms was adequately satisfied is another matter, but Parry makes it seem so. Part of having a good conscience is to do one’s work in the best way and respect the work that one does. This is Hubert Parry on Brahms:
The mortal part of him lies fitly in close proximity to the resting-places of Beethoven and Schubert in the cemetery at Vienna. And what comfort have we? Truly, the comfort of heroic work heroically done—a noble life lived out in untainted devotion to generous ideals. The knowledge that here was a man who formed the most exalted ideals of art, and carried them out unflinchingly; who…never belied himself by putting trumpery catch-phrases into his work to…gain a little cheap popularity.
Brahms is the uninterrupted artist. He is a little like William Blake. Blake wrote strange things, but there is nothing in his life that seems to question the main thing in it. Brahms didn’t go mad, as Schumann did. He wasn’t too much distressed by bar girls in Vienna, as Schubert was. He didn’t have to write unfinished symphonies and stay in taverns until one o’clock, making up new songs and singing them right away. He doesn’t have the grimness of Beethoven; and also isn’t surrounded by mystical family trouble, as Bach was.
There’s something straight-line in Brahms. He stays in Vienna; he writes his work; he’s criticized, of course; he’s a little afraid of Hanslick—but everything goes pretty well. When we think of his trying to do the best he could and asking questions for a true reason—he’s the opposite of Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer would go behind the stage and get tips—how was it doing? He was so anxious, and if there was anything he could do that could get the public he would get it in. Another person, the other Giacomo, was questioned too, towards the end of the century: Puccini. Puccini was too bent on pleasing the Italian and later the American public.
The character of composers is something to see. But Brahms does very well in this prose of Parry. However, I think there were questions in Brahms that Parry omits.
Melody and Turmoil
The most undoubted melodist of the large composers, the person who could tell Victor Herbert that you could have melody and still say something, is Tchaikovsky. But Tchaikovsky’s life was of two kinds, as most composers’ lives were, including Mozart’s: melody within, turmoil without; or turmoil within and melody without—the within and without are hard to see.
And if any person ever moaned about his conscience, it was Tchaikovsky. He was anything but the Sleeping Princess.
In an article by Constant Lambert, Tchaikovsky is dealt with, and we have conscience as about something that is the same thing as mental health: how the things in you are related. Ever so many statements here show they can be together but not well related:
Half the time he is trying to tell a story about himself, half the time he is trying to remember what various professors had told him to do….His first movements…hover uneasily…between personal romanticism and scholastic formality….He is far happier in his slow movements and scherzos where his lyrical talent is less hampered by technical considerations. Yet for all their faults, his symphonies still maintain their hold over the public and one must certainly admit that the public is right….The capacity to hit people below the belt is one that the most intellectual musician must envy.
So Tchaikovsky has, in Russia and in the musical field, the problem that everyone has: of intellect and emotion; as Monteverde had, as all the medieval writers did. And if we don’t try to make a one of these, our conscience that much complains. This can be shown.
Personal and Impersonal
Tchaikovsky could say, “My feelings take me away from my work,” or, “My work leaves me without love.” In both instances he was right. It was a fight between von Meck and the structure of the universe, or something of the sort; and it is to be found in composers—there is something personal which is not at one with what they see as their work. We can presume that the life of Monteverde was quite serene, and that is fortunate; but the anguish of Monteverde, I’m sure, was there.
Tchaikovsky is a technician and, like the Strausses, he also affects people, as Lambert puts it, “below the belt.” It means he really gets ’em. Swan Lake does what a Strauss waltz does.
“Half the time he is trying to tell a story about himself, half the time he is trying to remember what various professors had told him to do.” This is dependence and independence. He’s trying to express himself, and also he wants to show how much he knows.
“His first movements…hover uneasily…between personal romanticism and scholastic formality.” The not doing so well with these two things in their many forms is what conscience complains about. Conscience is saying, “The opposites are here; they could be better related!” Here, they are called “personal romanticism and scholastic formality.”
“Not until his last symphony, the Pathetic, did he begin the experiments he should have started years before.” The place of the Pathétique is still a question. There has been a tendency to feel that both Brahms and Tchaikovsky worshipped the Goddess of Tears too utterly.
“He is far happier in his slow movements and scherzos where his lyrical talent is less hampered by technical considerations.” This fight between “lyrical talent” and “technical considerations” we find in all the arts. We can have conscience trouble because we let our feelings get away with themselves, we weren’t careful enough; and we can have conscience trouble because we were so contriving, so arranging. And conscience in both instances is rightly troubled.
Liked by the Public
“Yet for all their faults, his symphonies still maintain their hold over the public and one must certainly admit that the public is right.” Critics have had a trouble about how much to respect the public, and occasionally one does as Lambert does: “the public is right.”
“The capacity to hit people below the belt is one that the most intellectual musician must envy.” Right after Ravel made such a big success with the Bolero, all his friends began saying “Does your conscience trouble you, monsieur? You must have done something awful, with the public liking your Bolero! ” It is the one thing of his that the public has been hit by. Also, a complaint that was made about Dvořák was that he lost his Czech quality and went over to the Americans; but that isn’t said now.
Mahler: Awesome and Frail
Then we have the controversial person who is as loud as Wagner and just as ominously mystical—more so: Mahler. The letters of Mahler and even things he wrote in his compositions show Mahler was a wonderful example of, well, awesomeness and frailty.
This is how Mahler seems to be to Henry Boys: “His commanding personality left few people who came into contact with it neither hot nor cold.” Wagner, it is said, tended to make everybody who ever worked for him afraid of him, and here he is like Toscanini. There are stories of how Toscanini would drive a musician home in tears to his wife. Mahler, however, was less sure of himself than Toscanini, all in all. Boys continues:
Mahler’s music often gives the impression that he is compelling the listener to feel things to the same intense degree as Mahler felt them himself….Those who…do not want the revelation Mahler seeks to give, will feel that they are being bullied.
Mahler has that quality of wanting the audience to become new people, and Mahler is going to do it for them. There’s a touch even of bullying in Tchaikovsky, with that cannon. And there was a feeling when Beethoven got in the chorus that he was going to try to have people come to him through the voice. Mahler is still being studied, and he hasn’t been placed. It’s good to say that no composer is wholly placed. There are unseen rooms in every one of them.
The criticism of the Germans in the English journals was, they were diffuse: Beethoven was diffuse, Brahms was diffuse, Schumann was diffuse, everyone. Mahler definitely is diffuse. The English got the idea you listen to music for fifteen minutes and then you talk about what’s going on.
“His commanding personality”—the relation of personality to work is to be seen. Quite clearly, Mahler’s personality is in his work. But his work is not his personality.
Conflicts in Music
There are ever so many conflicts in music, and sometimes they take an outward form. The Russian composers, like the Russian novelists, had a question of Russia and the West. The Russians wanted to be international, and at the same time they wanted to be for their land. The problem of Sibelius, though, was nothing of the kind. He had to introduce Finland to the rest of the world, and that’s what he did, while the Russians felt they had a large country and shouldn’t have to do any introducing. But they also wanted to praise Russia.
This is Constant Lambert on the Sibelius symphonies: “They address an international audience and are free from the conflict between local colour and construction which is to be observed in the Russian school.”
Pride and Humility
There’s Gustav Holst. In order to get away from his questions about himself, he wrote about the spheres, which is pretty good. This is Edwin Evans on Holst, from The Dominant, an English musical journal:
Precisely because Holst knows his purpose so well he is a severe judge of the degree in which he has achieved it. Concerning a recent work, of which little has been heard, he confessed to me that he had been in some doubt whether it was music or not, and was gradually inclining to the latter view. But I have preserved a card which came with a newly printed score, “Hope you will like it, I’m afraid I do.”
The way the feeling of success and failure is in the human being, the way independence and dependence are, or pride and humility, is a questioning and a testing of conscience every moment of life. They have to be in the best relation or, whether we see it or not, we are ill at ease.
Holst was aware that these were in him, and he was more conscious than most composers. And to study the demurs about self of artists, the doubts, the misgivings, is something—also, their being sure they produced their greatest work. Evans says Holst is “not the man who is sometimes querulously dissatisfied with his work because it does not fulfil an aspiration which is probably nebulous to himself.”
If you compare Holst to Mahler, you can see a difference. The motto of Mahler was “More! Go further! There are higher mountains, Gustav, than you have yet come to!”; while Holst says, “Remember, Holst, my boy, you have only ten fingers.”
Evans says Holst’s “calm sense of values” is “associated with an outward manner suggesting diffidence to the point of timidity.” A person who is pleased with how he sees himself, because he doesn’t seem to be pushing, can give the effect of timidity, if the situation is honest. Well, the relation of diffidence or confidence puts conscience in motion.
Questions in Musical History
With Holst, we’re getting to those questions which are ever so deep: What can music do? What are sameness and difference in music? What are depth and surface in music? How many things can be in one sound? As soon as there was a chord, people were told they could hear more than one sound at once. As soon as there was a bass added to the treble, they could hear more than one sound. As soon as more instruments were played than one, more voices heard than one, there was a feeling you could hear more than one sound. How much can be one is a problem. It’s present when there’s music heard in different keys at once; and polytonality is defined as the sound simultaneously in different keys.
The attempt to have music that doesn’t have any center at all is a little like what’s going on in the drama. The Peter Weiss play [Marat/Sade] is like that: you don’t have what Sarcey was after, the scene that sums it all up. This quality of not having a key or a tonic, a thing which gives a center to the music, is part of what is going on elsewhere in the arts. There’s a feeling that there’s enough drama in things as such, and we don’t need the artist with his ruler to point it out.
Music: Pain and Pleasure
The person in this book who is most surprising in terms of conscience is Arnold Bax. I’m quite sure that no one here is enthusiastic about any work of Bax; but what is said about him shows what can happen to a person. The thing said about Bax is like a famous passage about music in Boswell’s Johnson. It’s one of the funniest things too: Boswell says that music affects him, sometimes in a very short while, by putting him into dejection and then arousing him. It seems that the deepest effect of music is the opposites. There’s a certain relation of sadness and exuberance which is hard for people to realize.
This is Boswell talking to Johnson about music:
I told him that it affected me to such a degree, as often to agitate my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears; and of daring resolutions, so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest part of the battle. “Sir” (said he) “I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool.”
Now, this has a relation—these two things—to the moderns: Krenek, Webern, Berg, Schoenberg, Hindemith, and so on. This is L. Henderson-Williams on Bax, in the journal Sackbut, March 1931:
[The motet] moves on a broad and even road of no arresting quality. Suddenly…we are aware that something new has entered….It becomes of increasing significance; it dominates. An elemental weight of evil…issues from the music and beats almost unbearably upon our hearts….Slowly the tide recedes….The spirit that sometimes possesses Bax…has just carried us, too, beyond our little, predetermined limitations.
However this may be, it is a scratching into one’s mind, digging into one’s mind, and showing that something else is there than what seems to be there. It reminds one of thoughts of sleepwalking. And music is about that, because we do have two ways of seeing what sound is about—what’s real. What modern music is dealing with more consciously is somewhat in this passage about Bax.
Junction, Separation, Evil
A person who stands for modern music in a way that has affected people is Alban Berg. And the matter of separation and junction is in a statement about him by Erwin Stein in the Chesterian, October 1922. The diatonic is more separate; the chromatic is more joined. The going for atonality at the same time as polytonality is a desire to have difference or separation at one with junction. Stein says:
Contrasts…are here given a new function: the fact that they appear simultaneously—that is to say polyphonically—or nearly so, imparts a variety and an extent to the expression.
This means that something looking like sameness makes for variety.
Berg says, “You know, you think this, but you also think that, and I’m going to put it into the scales. You think this is what you feel—but look, this is another note! You don’t know what’s going on in this chord—just as in yourself.”
There is a note of jeering in the dissonance. There’s also a note of saying, “You can’t do anything about it, so take it easy. Evil was around long before you were born, so enjoy this looking like melody which isn’t.” What is being said is, “Subtly come to know what evil is in you. And these notes should help. Don’t be so excited about yourself, for one thing.”
This is in Wozzeck and it’s in Lulu. I hope to talk more about it. The unconscious is busy now, and it is showing itself in the arts. It’s showing itself in music.
The Melody of Conscience
I read now a passage by Percy Scholes, from a book of 1924, Crotchets. He’s asking, What’s going to happen when polytonality becomes all it can be, and atonality is accepted—what’s the composer going to do? And Scholes says feeling, or the heart, is still the big thing. He is discussing a writing in a French journal by Milhaud, “Polytonalité et Atonalité,” Revue Musicale:
The factor which will determine the Polytonic or Atonic character of a work will be…the essential melody which will come from the “heart” alone of the musician….The whole life of a work will depend upon nothing else than the melodic invention of its composer, and Polytonality and Atonality will do nothing more than furnish him with a vaster field…wherewith to employ his sensibility, his imagination, and his fancy.
This may not seem so but is, in an indirect way, a saying that feeling is the same as the world as inanimate. Scholes I don’t think is very much given to the relation of Nothing to the Real, or the self to what is not alive, but that is what he’s writing about.
The harmony in which we were brought up was for the most part diatonic, that is to say, the notes making up a chord, or the “parts” woven together into a contrapuntal fabric, all belonged to a definite (major or minor) key, and of keys there were twenty-four….Necessarily, however, the music passed, from time to time, from one key into another.
This has the feeling that if there were 24 keys (and they are mysterious, those keys), they were separate; and then, the 24 said something about each other. So let us hail, with decorum, the existence of the 24 keys while elections went on and wars were being fought and people were leaving one land to go to another. The 24 keys, we may presume, existed in the 10th century.
The admission that succession of key, or “modulation,” was acceptable inevitably implied, says Milhaud, that, at some later stage, superposition of key (“Polytonality”) would also be found equally acceptable.
Which gives us this: suppose you hear at the same time something played in this key, and something played in another key; just as you hear two notes in a chord, you hear two keys, or three keys, because polytonality I suppose wouldn’t stop if it didn’t have all 24.
In a way, this is vertical, insofar as it’s depth: you hear one sound imposed on another, and another imposed on the second; you hear them all at once, but you also know they’re three levels. And as you hear these levels vertically, you also go horizontally. So, what has that got to do with conscience?
Conscience does want to be, as I said in Self and World, vertical, the utmost in verticality—which means the utmost in depth—and the utmost in horizontality. Depth is important. The criticism we have of people in various fields is, they are superficial.
Music, then, is a trying to get to the width and depth of a person, or the horizontality and verticality of reality and of a person. And within this horizontality and verticality is the fact that as soon as a person, who is vertical, seems horizontal, he seems to be like all other things, and therefore inanimate in a sense. He seems to be welcoming something against his individuality, and that is why in music people have felt they got out of themselves—as Pepys felt in his famous passage about the wind music of The Virgin Martyr.
I am saying, then, that the matter of conscience is described in music; music is also concerned with it. Composers have certainly shown how much they were concerned with it, both as people ordinarily and as people trying to get to things in music, or composing. Also, performers have been. Opera singers, from Malibran on, or concert singers, have been greatly disturbed by themselves.
Music and conscience, in fact, can be made equivalent. Music is the melody of conscience, and also the sound monition that is in conscience. Music is melodious, even as it says, “This is not present.”
And so I have used some composers and various things in the history of music in behalf of this title: Animate and Inanimate Are in Music and Conscience.