Nationalism in music was a product of the nineteenth century. Its origins were partly political; in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for instance, native composers revolted against the Germanic culture imported by the occupying Austrians. They wished to create a national music of their own, based on their folk-songs and using their own language. The melodies and rhythms of native folk-songs influenced even the symphonic works of Smetana and Dvorak in Czechoslovakia, and even a cosmopolitan composer like Liszt was very much affected by the music of his native Hungary. In other countries, too, music began to grow more nationalistic in revolt against the cosmopolitan culture which usually flourished at the courts; thus in Russia the nationalist school under Balakirev wrote Russian music based on Russian and even Caucasian folk-songs in order to replace the French and Italian influences in music favoured by the Imperial Court. Similarly, in Norway a nationalist school grew up with Grieg at its head which spoke in a different voice from the German music which was then prevalent. In England where … German influences were dominant throughout the nineteenth century, the nationalist tide did not begin to flow until the beginning of the twentieth century, and the leading figures in this movement were
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two very dissimilar composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, who nevertheless shared common aims.
Both Vaughan Williams and Holst were certain that it was English folk-song which had liberated music in England from the German tradition and given it a voice of its own. Vaughan Williams once wrote: ‘My intercourse with Cecil Sharp (the pioneer collector of British folk-songs) crystallised and confirmed what I already vaguely felt about folksong and its relationship to the composer’s art. With him you had to be either pro-folk-song or anti-folk-song, and I came down heavily on the folk-song side’. This was the basis of his famous article, published in 1912; ‘Who wants the British composer?’ And Imogen Holst declared of her father: ‘The other important event (of 1905) was the revival of folk-song. Folk-songs finally brushed all trace of Wagner from his work. He had the deepest admiration for Cecil Sharp and felt that when the time came for the English musical history of the twentieth century to be written, Cecil Sharp’s name would stand out above all others’. Frank Howes, in his book The English Musical Renaissance, points out that ‘other influences besides folk-song operated in the formation of both men’s respective styles. In the case of Vaughan Williams, one was the hymn tunes he examined for his edition of the English hymnal. In that of Holst it was Weelkes and Purcell, which he made his various choirs sing. Both were touched by the new interest in plainsong, and both found in Bach an antidote to too much Beethoven and Wagner’. Both were interested in writing for amateurs, including choral societies and brass bands, and in musical education - they possessed a social as well as an artistic conscience.
Ralph Vaughan Williams came of mixed Welsh and English blood. His father was born into a legal family from Wales; his grandfather was a judge who settled with his family at Leith Hill, near Dorking. The house next door belonged to the Wedgwood family, descendants of the famous potter, who had also intermarried with the Darwins
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(Charles Darwin was Vaughan Williams’s great uncle). The two households soon developed a close friendship, and in 1868 Arthur Vaughan Williams married Margaret Wedgwood. Arthur was a clergyman, and had the living of Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. He had three children; Ralph, the third, was born at Down Ampney on 12 October 1872. Arthur died only two and a half years later and Margaret brought her family back to her parents’ house in Leith Hill. Here Vaughan Williams was brought up and was given music lessons by his aunt. He learnt first the piano and then the violin. He went to Charterhouse in 1887 where he played the viola in the school orchestra and sang in the school choir. In the summer of 1890 he was able to go to Munich to hear Wagner’s operas for the first time. In the same year he entered the Royal College of Music, where he remained for two years, and in 1892 went up to Trinity College, Cambridge.
At Cambridge his official subject was history, but he continued his lessons at the Royal College of Music. During this period he met a number of men with whom he formed lifelong friendships: the philosopher G. E. Moore, the historian G. M. Trevelyan and H. P. Allen, later Sir Hugh Allen, director of the Royal College of Music.
Although an allowance from his family made it unnecessary for him to earn his living, he took an organist’s post at Lambeth in London. He had become engaged to Adeline Fisher; they were married in October 1897 and went to Berlin. Here Vaughan Williams studied with Max Bruch, returning in April of the following year to London and his organist’s position in Lambeth, which left him time to write music of his own, including a setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. Some of his song settings, among them Linden Lea, which was to become well-known, stem from this period. Though he had not yet achieved a really mature style in these, it was clear that he was reacting against German influences, which he found actually repugnant; apart from folk song, the chief influence on his music was
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that of the Elizabethan composers, Purcell and even mediaeval music at times. He also admired Parry for his mastery of choral technique. It was at this period that he began to think about composing a large choral work with the sea as its subject. This was eventually to become the Sea Symphony.
It was a period when great interest was shown in collecting folk music, and Bartók and Kodály were beginning their collections of Hungarian folk-songs. 1903 saw the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s collection of English folksongs, in which he collaborated with Cecil Sharp.
In 1905 he began the first of his mature works, a setting of Walt Whitman’s poem Toward the Unknown Region. He still felt that he was not sufficiently equipped as a composer, and he travelled to Paris to study with Ravel. Ravel helped him to refine his style, concentrating on lessons in orchestration. Vaughan Williams wrote of this experience: ‘As far as I know my own faults he hit them all exactly and is telling me to do exactly what I half felt in my mind I ought to do’. Ravel took a keen interest in the English composer, and the two remained friends for many years.
The time spent with Ravel must have given Vaughan Williams the confidence he needed to complete larger, orchestral works. The Sea Symphony was first performed at the Leeds Festival in October 1910, and made a tremendous impression. It is a setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra of several poems about the sea by Walt Whitman, in four movements resembling those of the classical symphony, though the form of each movement is often dictated by the structure of the words. It is a powerful work which also contains many beautiful lyrical moments, though the finale is perhaps too extended to balance the rest. It was then that Vaughan Williams met Isadora Duncan and began work on a choral ballet based on The Bacchae for her. And always much concerned with the richness of English folk culture, he gave a lecture early in 1912 in which he set forward his ideas on English folk music: ‘The evolution of the English
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folk-song by itself has ceased but its spirit can continue to grow and flourish at the hand of our native composers ... we have made the mistake in England of trying to take over “ready-made” a foreign culture, a culture which is the result of generations of patient development, and of attempting to fit on to it our own incompatible conditions. This is merely to reap where we have not sown and the result must be failure’.
His London Symphony was first performed on 27 March 1914 in a concert of modem orchestral music conducted by Geoffrey Toye at the Queen’s Hall. ‘A better title’, wrote Vaughan Williams, ‘would perhaps be Symphony by a Londoner, that is to say, the life of London (including possibly its various sights and sounds) has suggested to the composer an attempt at musical expression, but it would be no help to the hearer to describe these in words’. And in fact the music does contain various London sounds such as the Westminster chimes, a theme derived from the street-cry ‘sweet lavender’, the sound of a mouth-organ and the jingle of hansom bells; but these are all worked into a true symphonic structure in four movements, and only appear incidentally. Although the piece enjoyed great success, the composer was unable to find an English publisher, so he sent his only score to Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig.
As soon as war broke out, Vaughan Williams enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, although he was over forty. In June 1916 his unit left for France, where they were stationed at Ĕcoives. It was here that the ideas for A Pastoral Symphony had their origin; the long trumpet cadenza in the second movement owed its inspiration to a bugler who used to practise in the evening. In the autumn the unit embarked for Salonika; Vaughan Williams remained with it till early 1917, when someone in authority arranged for him to be sent back to England to train for a commission. He said: ‘My only regret at leaving is that I shall cease to be a man and become an officer’.
Peace brought with it a new period of success. On re-
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turning to London, he was invited to teach at the Royal College of Music. He was made an honorary Doctor of Music at Oxford, and his Sea Symphony was performed on that occasion in celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre. The unaccompanied Mass in G Minor belongs to that period. Of the latter he said: ‘There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good mass’.
During the next six years he completed many works and was working on his opera based on Falstaff, Sir John in Love. In 1929 he wrote a Fantasia for cello and orchestra for Pablo Casals, as well as a concerto for two violins. By now Vaughan Williams’s mature style had been fully developed. One could describe it as a mixture of modal harmonies and melodies derived from folk song with poly tonal counterpoint and a fondness for moving in block chords. This style was characteristic of him for the rest of his life, though certain of his later works show a rather more austere character.
As early as 1927 he had begun work on the ballet Job. The scenario had been provided by Geoffrey Keynes, and the work had originally been intended for Diaghilev who, however, thought the idea ‘too English’, as it was based on Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job. With no immediate prospects of a stage production Vaughan Williams designed the work as an orchestral suite, in somewhat expanded form, for the Norwich Festival. Meanwhile, however, the Camargo Society had become interested in it after Ninette de Valois and Lilian Baylis had seen the model sets and designs, and the ballet was first performed by the Camargo Society in July 1931 at the Cambridge Theatre.
In the winter of 1931-2 Vaughan Williams began a new symphony, his fourth. It was first performed on 10 April 1935 by Adrian Boult and the BBC Orchestra; it was a more powerful and violent work than anything he had written before, and remains one of his most original pieces. It is very much more chromatic and dissonant than his usual pastoral style and has a mood of bitterness which is
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absent from most of his other works. […]
Shortly after the first performance he was offered the Order of Merit; although he had previously refused all honours, he was prepared to accept this. During the summer he was engaged on three major works, the Five Tudor Portraits for chorus and orchestra to texts by John Skelton, the fifteenth-century poet, a comic opera The Poisoned Kiss, and another choral work, Dona Nobis Pacem. The text of this last work was a setting of three poems by Walt Whitman, and this certainly was a clear presentiment of the coming world war. […]
About this time he received some suggestions for ballet scenarios, one based on Spenser’s Epithalamion from Ursula Wood. After a long correspondence they met for the first time in early 1938. They soon became friends, and she was in fact later to become his second wife.
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[…] In 1940 Vaughan Williams undertook composing for a new medium, films. At the suggestion of his former pupil, Muir Mathieson, Director of Music at London Films, he wrote the music for his first film, The Forty-Ninth Parallel. This was shown with great success in 1941, and as a result he was asked to write music for two further films, Coastal Command and The People’s Land.
From this time dates a long and interesting letter to a friend who had sought advice on a possible musical career for his son. This letter, contained in Ursula Vaughan Williams’s biography of her husband, gave the advice that a young composer should take part in as much practical music-making as possible, study the great masters, and work at home, going abroad only when mature. Vaughan Williams, always reacting against any form of pomposity, calmly answered Walford Davies, who said that he had written his Solemn Melody on his knees, ‘I write my music on my bottom’.
The fifth symphony, more pastoral in style than its predecessor, had been completed and Vaughan Williams con-
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ducted its first performance at a Promenade Concert on 24 June 1943.
Advanced age did not diminish the composer’s energies. In 1944 he provided incidental music for Richard II for the BBC, and wrote an oboe concerto for Leon Goossens. After the war ended, he began his sixth symphony. Early in 1948 its first performance was given at a Royal Philharmonic concert; like the fourth symphony, it is a powerful and dramatic work, and many people felt that it was not only inspired by the war, but also that the quiet and sinister last movement represented earth after total destruction by atomic bombs. Vaughan Williams, however, said that the last movement was based on Prospero’s speech from The Tempest: ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself ... shall dissolve and ... leave not a wrack behind’.
In May 1951 Adeline died. After her death, Vaughan Williams asked Ursula Wood to help him with his domestic affairs. In the summer of 1952 they spent a holiday in France together. Early the next year they married.
Though Vaughan Williams was close to eighty, his creative energies did not flag; he wrote a Romance for harmonica and orchestra for Larry Adler, and a seventh symphony, the Sinfonia Antartica, partly based on his music for the film Scott of the Antarctic. In the summer of 1955, after a holiday in Greece, he gave a lecture in Cork, in which he attempted to prove that almost all the good Irish (not Gaelic) folk-songs were really derived from England; his audience was naturally somewhat outraged. The eighth symphony, on which Vaughan Williams had been working for some time, had its first performance at Manchester under Barbirolli in May 1956; the score is notable for its inclusion of a number of tuned gongs. He had already started on a ninth symphony, and continued to work on it while on a summer holiday in Majorca. In 1957, while on holiday in Austria, he heard a Hugel horn for the first time and decided to incorporate it in his new ninth symphony. He lived
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through a major operation, and his eighty-fifth birthday, in October, was celebrated with a concert of his works at the Festival Hall.
After a short holiday in Dorset in 1958 Vaughan Williams returned to London, and here, on 26 August 1958, he died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis.
By basing his melodic and harmonic style on English folksong, Vaughan Williams was able to free English music from German influences; certain traces of a French style appeared instead, however, especially in his more lyrical works such as the Pastoral and fifth symphonies. […]
Vaughan Williams’s principal collaborator in the English folk-song school was Gustav Holst, born at Cheltenham on 21 September 1874. His great-grandfather was a Swedish musician who taught the harp to the Imperial Family at St Petersburg and left Russia with his wife and his small son early in the nineteenth century because of his political views. Later the son settled in Cheltenham. Both Holst’s grandfather and father were musicians. His mother was English, and died when Holst was only eight. He was looked after by his father’s sister, Nina, who was a keen musician.
Holst started early to play both violin and piano, and at the age of thirteen he had set the poem Horatius for chorus and orchestra. Later, when he was seventeen, he was given some counterpoint training at Oxford. Having tried unsuccessfully to win scholarships at various London colleges of music, he returned to Cheltenham, where he obtained an organist’s job at a village in the Cotswolds. He was given the conductorship of a local choral society, and wrote an operetta, Lansdowne Castle, which was produced in 1893 in Cheltenham with great success. As a result, his father borrowed a hundred pounds from one of his relations and sent Holst to the Royal College of Music.
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[…] In the autumn of 1895, just after his twenty-first birthday, he met Vaughan Williams for the first time; they soon became friends and got into the habit of playing each other their works. Holst was writing an opera called The Revoke. He became interested in socialism and ran the Hammersmith Socialist Club, attending Bernard Shaw’s lectures at Kelmscott House.
In 1897 he was asked to conduct the Socialist Choir, and there he met his future wife, Isobel Harrison, who sang in the choir as a soprano. He earned a living as organist in several churches in London, and continued to play the trombone in various theatre orchestras. In the autumn of 1898, however, the Carl Rosa Opera company offered him an appointment as first trombone and repetiteur. […]
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Holst married Isobel Harrison in the summer of 1902, and coming into a small legacy on the death of his father, he and his wife were at last able to afford a honeymoon: in the spring of 1903 they went to Berlin.
On returning to England, Holst decided to give up trombone playing and to devote his life to composition. His first efforts were a good many songs, invariably rejected by publishers. But he was soon able to begin his career as a teacher and in 1905 was appointed Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, a post which he held until his death. He began to be interested in English folk-song and wrote his Country Song and Marching Song for orchestra, as well as sketching his Somerset Rhapsody. The influence of folk-song in these early works is fairly slight though they do contain some modal elements. […]
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[…] In the summer of 1913 the new music wing at St Paul’s was opened, and Holst was given a large sound-proof room to work in. Working mostly on Sundays, he wrote the St Paul’s Suite for the school orchestra as a token of his gratitude. His earlier interest in Hinduism gradually gave way to one in astrology, and this became the point of departure for his new work, The Planets. He had just finished the sketch of Mars, the bringer of war, when war in fact broke out, in 1914; Holst at once tried to enlist, but was turned down because of his neuritis and weak sight.
The Planets is a large-scale suite for full orchestra which contains a great variety of styles, ranging from the savagery of Mars, the delicacy of Venus, the scherzo-like character of Mercury and the mysticism of Uranus to the remoteness of Neptune. This variety however does not mean that the composer’s personality is lost: there is always an astringency and power in his handling of his material. The Planets has remained Holst’s best-known work.
In the summer of 1917 he set the Hymn of Jesus, from the Apocrypha, and for this purpose he taught himself Greek so as to be able to understand the original. Long wanting to take a more active part in war work, he was at last offered the job of musical organizer to the YMCA among the troops in the Near East.
Returning from the Near East and back at St Paul’s, he began setting Walt Whitman’s Ode to Death for chorus and orchestra, struggling at the same time to write the libretto of his opera The Perfect Fool. Meanwhile The Hymn of Jesus had been published in the Carnegie Collection of British Music, and Holst conducted its first public performance at the Queen’s Hall in March 1920. This had an overwhelming reception - Holst was becoming successful at last. But Holst was never very good at public relations and simply did not know how to deal with press photographers or
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journalists, as well as consistently refusing to accept any honours, degrees or titles.
[...]. Now living alone at Thaxted, looked after by a manservant, he wrote his Choral Symphony, settings of poems by Keats. Admittedly it is difficult to make a setting of the Ode on a Grecian Urn which can add much to the poetry of the words, and the last movement, Bards of passion and of
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mirths is rather on the long side, but the first movement’s Bacchanal in 7/8 time and the Scherzo, Fancy and Folly’s Song are both delightful and exciting, and it seems a pity that this work is performed so rarely nowadays.
About the same time he began a new short opera At the Boar’s Head, an interlude based on the Falstaff scenes from Henry V; it was built to a great extent on Morris and country dance tunes which happened to fit Shakespeare’s words.
[…] Holst was a close friend of Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy, and was now inspired by the latter’s Return of the Native to write an orchestral piece, Egdon Heath, one of his most interesting and remarkable works. The music catches the austere and remote quality of Hardy’s description of the scene, and a good deal of it is more experimental harmonically than anything Holst had written before - so much so that listeners to its first performance failed to understand it, and its true stature has only been appreciated in recent years.
During the summer he was unwell and at the end of the year he decided to stop work and have three months’ holiday in Italy. On returning to England he was as active as ever. In 1930 he finished a Concerto for Two Violins for the sisters Jelly d’Aranyi and Adila Fachiri. The concerto was played at a Philharmonic concert at the Queen’s Hall in April, and on the same occasion Holst was presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society. He was working on his Choral Fantasia, in homage to Robert Bridges, as well as on Hammersmith, a Prelude and Scherzo originally commissioned by the BBC Military Band, and afterwards rewritten for orchestra. His sixth and last opera, The Tale of the Wandering Scholar, with a libretto by
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Clifford Bax, was written in 1930.
[…] In May 1934 he was operated on; the operation was successful but his heart could not stand the strain, and he died on 25 May.
Holst was a composer of a remarkably original turn of mind, and he absorbed many influences. English folk-song was by no means the only one, and to some extent he was an eclectic. He made a notable contribution to English music although this is only just beginning to be appreciated today. In many ways he was in advance of his time, and the austerity of many of his works is more in keeping with modern music than with the somewhat lusher and more romantic style of his contemporaries.
Three other English composers of this generation deserve to be mentioned; although they were not so directly affected by English folk-song as Vaughan Williams and Holst, they definitely represent a nationalist school in that they wished to eradicate German influences from English music, however much they admired the German classics themselves.
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The eldest of these was Frank Bridge (1879-1941), whose contribution was mainly in the field of chamber music, although he also wrote a small number of orchestral works. Beginning as a romantic, his style became increasingly ‘modern’ during the 1930s, especially in such works as his Divertimenti for wind quartet and his later chamber music, which show an experimental use of harmony. He is also remembered for his teaching of Benjamin Britten.
John Ireland (1879-1962) is also chiefly remembered for his chamber music and songs, though he wrote an important piano concerto which still remains in the repertoire. His other works show a genuinely individual gift, and his settings of the poems of Hardy and Housman are extremely subtle. He had an extraordinary ability to reproduce the atmosphere of a poem in music by apparently simple means: he did not aim at bold effects, but his settings show a far more real understanding of his chosen poets than the more superficial ones of his contemporaries like Arthur Somervell, for instance. His music shows some influence of his French contemporaries, particularly Debussy, but he worked out an individual style which combines both English and French elements.
Arnold Bax (1883-1953) was very much a romantic: apart from his music he also attached himself to the ‘Celtic twilight’ school of literature, whose protagonists were Synge and Yeats, and he wrote prose under the name of Dermot O’Byrne. He is chiefly remembered for his seven symphonies, highly romantic and passionate and based partly on folk elements, but characterized by a certain turgid texture which has prevented them from becoming popular. He was a brilliant musician who could read any score at sight, and this possibly tempted him into over-writing. As a person, he was extremely quick-witted and astringent, in complete contrast to the romanticism of his music.
An interesting survivor from this period is Havergal Brian; he was born in 1877 and is still alive at the time of writing. Between the ages of seventy-eight and ninety-
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three he wrote no less than twenty-two symphonies, in addition to the ten which he composed earlier. Though stemming from the romantic style, his music is very much more austere and ‘modern’ than that of his contemporaries; many of his symphonies are one-movement works of fairly short duration, and he has added an entirely original element to English music. His principal virtue in his later works is compression and reduction of the music to its bare essentials; in achieving this he got away both from his romantic background and the folk-song school of his youth. His music is often harsh and violent in a manner which is well attuned to the present day.
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Showing posts with label Ralph Vaughan Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ralph Vaughan Williams. Show all posts
Saturday, 31 October 2009
The English Nationalist School of Music
From Humphrey Searle and Robert Layton, Twentieth Century Composers: Britain, Scandinavia and the Netherland (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1972)
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Ralph Vaughan Williams: ‘Should Music be National?’
This essay, first published in 1934 as chapter one of ‘National Music,’ was based on a lecture Vaughan Williams gave at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. I was astonished to find it does not appear anywhere online so share it here:
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Should Music be National?
Whistler used to say that it was as ridiculous to talk about national art as national chemistry. In saying this he failed to see the difference between art and science.
Science is the pure pursuit of knowledge and thus knows no boundaries. Art, and especially the art of music, uses knowledge as a means to the evocation of personal experience in terms which will be intelligible to and command the sympathy of others. These others must clearly be primarily those who by race, tradition, and cultural experience are the nearest to him; in fact those of his own nation, or other kind of homogeneous community. In the sister arts of painting and poetry this factor of nationality is more obvious, due in poetry to the Tower of Babel and in painting to the fact that the painter naturally tends to build his visual imagination on what he normally sees around him. But unfortunately for the art of music some misguided thinker, probably first cousin to the man who invented the unfortunate phrase ‘a good European’, has described music as ‘the universal language’. It is not even true that music has an universal vocabulary, but even if it were so it is the use of the vocabulary that counts and no one supposes that French and English are the same language because they happen to use twenty-five out of twenty-six of the letters of their alphabet in common. In the same way, in spite of the fact that they have a musical alphabet in common, nobody could mistake Wagner for Verdi or Debussy for Richard Strauss. And, similarly, in spite of wide divergencies of personal style, there is a common factor in the music say of Schumann and Weber.
And this common factor is nationality. As Hubert Parry said in his inaugural address to the Folk Song Society of England, ‘True Style comes not from the individual but from the products of crowds of fellow-workers who sift and try and try again till they have found the thing that suits their native taste .... Style is ultimately national.’
I am speaking, for the moment, not of the appeal of a work of art, but of its origin. Some music may appeal only in its immediate surroundings; some may be national in its influence and some may transcend these bounds and be world-wide in its acceptance. But we may be quite sure that the composer who tries to be cosmopolitan from the outset will fail, not only with the world at large, but with his own people as well. Was anyone ever more local, or even parochial, than Shakespeare? Even when he follows the fashion and gives his characters Italian names they betray their origin at once by their language and their sentiments.
Possibly you may think this an unfair example, because a poet has not the common vocabulary of the musician, so let me take another example.
One of the three great composers of the world (personally I believe the greatest) was John Sebastian Bach. Here, you may say, is the universal musician if ever there was one; yet no one could be more local, in his origin, his life work, and his fame for nearly a hundred years after his death, than Bach. He was to outward appearance no more than one of a fraternity of town organists and ‘town pipers’ whose business it was to provide the necessary music for the great occasions in church and city. He never left his native country, seldom even his own city of Leipzig. ‘World Movements’ in art were then unheard of; moreover, it was the tradition of his own country which inspired him. True, he studied eagerly all the music of foreign composers that came his way in order to improve his craft. But is not the work of Bach built up on two great foundations, the organ music of his Teutonic predecessors and the popular hymn-tunes of his own people? Who has heard nowadays of the cosmopolitan hero Marchand, except as being the man who ran away from the Court of Dresden to avoid comparison with the local organist Bach?
In what I have up to now said I shall perhaps not have been clear unless I dispose at once of two fallacies. The first of these is that the artist invents for himself alone. No man lives or moves or could do so, even if he wanted to, for himself alone. The actual process of artistic invention, whether it be by voice, verse, or brush, presupposes an audience; someone to hear, read, or see. Of course the sincere artist cannot deliberately compose what he dislikes. But artistic inspiration is like Dryden’s angel which must be brought down from heaven to earth. A work of art is like a theophany which takes different forms to different beholders. In other words, a composer wishes to make himself intelligible. This surely is the prime motive of the act of artistic invention and to be intelligible he must clothe his inspiration in such forms as the circumstances of time, place, and subject dictate.
This should come unself-consciously to the artist, but if he consciously tries to express himself in a way which is contrary to his surroundings, and therefore to his own nature, he is evidently being, though perhaps he does not know it, insincere. It is surely as bad to be self-consciously cosmopolitan as self-consciously national.
The other fallacy is that the genius springs from nowhere, defies all rules, acknowledges no musical ancestry and is beholden to no tradition. The first thing we have to realize is that the great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to the smaller men. We can trace the musical genealogy of Beethoven, starting right back from Philipp Emanuel Bach, through Haydn and Mozart, with even such smaller fry as Cimarosa and Cherubini to lay the foundations of the edifice. Is not the mighty river of Wagner but a confluence of the smaller streams, Weber, Marschner, and Liszt?
I would define genius as the right man in the right place at the right time. We know, of course, too many instances of the time being ripe and the place being vacant and no man to fill it. But we shall never know of the numbers of ‘mute and inglorious Miltons’ who failed because the place and time were not ready for them. Was not Purcell a genius born before his time? Was not Sullivan a jewel in the wrong setting?
I read the other day in a notice by a responsible music critic that ‘it only takes one man to write a symphony’. Surely this is an entire misconception. A great work of art can only be born under the right surroundings and in the right atmosphere. Bach himself, if I may again quote him as an example, was only able to produce his fugues, his Passions, his cantatas, because there had preceded him generations of smaller composers, specimens of the despised class of ‘local musicians’ who had no other ambition than to provide worthily and with dignity the music required of them: craftsmen perhaps rather than conscious artists. Thus there spread among the quiet and unambitious people of northern Germany a habit, so to speak, of music, the desire to make it part of their daily life, and it was into this atmosphere that John Sebastian Bach was born.
The ideal thing, of course, would be for the whole community to take to music as it takes to language from its youth up, naturally, without conscious thought or specialized training; so that, just as the necessity for expressing our material wants leads us when quite young to perfect our technique of speaking so our spiritual wants should lead us to perfect our technique of emotional expression and above all that of music. But this is an age of specialization and delegation. We employ specialists to do more and more for us instead of doing it ourselves. We even get other people to play our games for us and look on shivering at a football match, instead of getting out of it for ourselves the healthy exercise and excitement which should surely be its only object.
Specialization may be all very well in purely material things. For example, we cannot make good cigars in England and it is quite right therefore that we should leave the production of that luxury to others and occupy ourselves in making somcthing which our circumstances and climate permit of. The most rabid chauvinist has never suggested that Englishmen should be forced to smoke impossible cigars merely because they are made at home. We say quite rightly that those who want that luxury and can afford it must get it from abroad.
Now there are some people who apply this ‘cigar’ theory to the arts and especially to music; to music especially, because music is not one of the ‘naturally protected’ industries like the sister arts of painting and poetry. The ‘cigar’ theory of music is then this - I am speaking of course of my own country England, but I believe it exists equally virulently in yours: that music is not an industry which flourishes naturally in our climate; that, therefore, those who want it and can afford it must hire it from abroad. This idea has been prevalent among us for generations. It began in England, I think, in the early eighteenth ccntury when the political power got into the hands of the entirely uncultured landed gentry and the practice of art was considered unworthy of a gentleman, from which it followed that you had to hire a ‘damned foreigner’ to do it for you if you wanted it, from which in its turn followed the corollary that the type of music which the foreigner brought with him was the only type worth having and that the very different type of music which was being made at home must necessarily be wrong. These ideas were fostered by the fact that we had a foreign court at St. James’s who apparently did not share the English snobbery about home-made art and so brought the music made in their own homes to England with them. So, the official music, whether it took the form of Mr. Handel to compose an oratorio, or an oboe player in a regimental band, was imported from Germany. This snobbery is equally virulent to this day. The musician indeed is not despised, but it is equally felt that music cannot be something which is native to us and when imported from abroad it must of necessity be better.
Let me take an analogy from architecture. When a stranger arrives in New York he finds imitations of Florentine palaces, replicas of Gothic cathedrals, suggestions of Greek temples, buildings put up before America began to realize that she had an artistic consciousness of her own.
All these things the visitor dismiss as without interest and turns to her railway stations, her offices and shops; buildings dictated by the necessity of the case, a truly national style of architecture evolved from national surroundings. Should it not be the same with music?
As long as a country is content to take its music passively there can be no really artistic vitality in the nation. I can only speak from the experience of my own country. In England we are too apt to think of music in terms of the cosmopolitan celebrities of the Queen’s Hall and Covent Garden Opera. These are, so to speak, the crest of the wave, but behind that crest must be the driving force which makes the body of the wave. It is below the surface that we must look for the power which occasionally throws up a Schnabel, a Sibelius, or a Toscanini. What makes me hope for the musical future of any country is not the distinguished names which appear on the front page of the newspapers, but the music that is going on at home, in the schools, and in the local choral societies.
Can we expect garden flowers to grow in soil so barren that the wild flowers cannot exist there? Perhaps one day the supply of international artists will fail us and we shall turn in vain to our own country to supply their places. Will there be any source to supply it from? You remember the story of the nouveau riche who bought a plot of land and built a stately home on it, but he found that no amount of money could provide him straightaway with the spreading cedars and immemorial elms and velvet lawns which should be the accompaniment of such a home. Such things can only grow in a soil prepared by years of humble toil.
Hubert Parry in his book, The Evolution of the Art of Music, has shown how music like everything else in the world is subject to the laws of evolution, that there is no difference in kind but only in degree between Beethoven and the humblest singer of a folk-song. The principles of artistic beauty, of the relationships of design and expression, are neither trade secrets nor esoteric mysteries revealed to the few; indeed if these principles are to have any meaning to us they must be founded on what is natural to the human being. Perfection of form is equally possible in the most primitive music and in the most elaborate.
The principles which govern the composition of music are, we find, not arbitrary rules, nor as some people apparently think, barriers put up by mediocre practitioners to prevent the young genius from entering the academic grove; they are not the tricks of the trade or even the mysteries of the craft, they are founded on the very nature of human beings. Take, for example, the principle of repetition as a factor of design: either the cumulative effect of mere reiteration, such as we get in the Trio of the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or in a cruder form in Ravelvs Bolero; or the constant repetition of a ground bass as in Bach’s organ Passacaglia or the finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Travellers tell us that the primitive savage as soon as he gets as far as inventing some little rhythmical or melodic pattern will repeat inventing some little rhythmical or melodic pattern will repeat it endlessly. In all these cases we have illustrations of the fundamental principle of emphasis by repetition.
After a time the savage will get tired of his little musical phrase and will invent another and often this new phrase will be at a new pitch so as to bring into play as many new notes as possible. Why? Because his throat muscles and his perceptive faculties are wearied by the constant repetition.
Is not this exactly the principle of the second subject of the classical sonata, which is in a key which brings into play as many new sounds as possible? Then we have the principle of symmetry also found in primitive music when the singer, having got tired in turn with his new phrase, harks back to the old one.
And so I could go on showing you how Beethoven is but a later stage in the development of those principles which actuated the primitive Teuton when he desired to make himself artistically intelligible.
The greatest artist belongs inevitably to his country as much as the humblest singer in a remote village - they and all those who come between them are links in the same chain, manifestations on their different levels of the same desire for artistic expression, and, moreover, the same nature of artistic expression.
I am quite prepared for the objection that nationalism limits the scope of art, that what we want is the best, from wherever it comes. My objectors will probably quote Tennyson and tell me that ‘We needs must love the highest when we see it’ and that we should educate the young to appreciate this mysterious ‘highest’ from the beginning. Or perhaps they will tell me with Rossini that they know only two kinds of music, good and bad. So perhaps we had better digress here for a few moments and try to find out what good music is, and whether there is such a thing as absolute good music; or even if there is such an absolute good, whether it must not take different forms for different hearers. Myself, I doubt if there is this absolute standard of goodness. I think it will vary with the occasion on which it is performed, with the period at which it was composed and with the nationality of those that listen to it. Let us take examples of each of these - firstly, with regard to the occasion. The Venusberg music from Tannhauser is good music when it comes at the right dramatic moment in the opera, but it is bad music when it is played on an organ in church. I am sorry to have to tell you that this is not an imaginary experience. A waltz of Johann Strauss is good music in its proper place as an accompaniment to dancing and festivity, but it would be bad music if it were interpolated in the middle of the St. Matthew Passion. And may we not even say that Bach’s B minor Mass would be bad music if it were played in a restaurant as an accompaniment to eating and drinking?
Secondly, does not the standard of goodness vary with time? What was good for the fifteenth century is not necessarily good for the twentieth. Surely each new generation requires something different to satisfy its different ideals. Of course there is some music that seems to defy the ravages of time and to speak a new message to each successive generation. But even the greatest music is not eternal. We can still appreciate Bach and Handel or even Palestrina, but Dufay and Dunstable have little more than an historical interest for us now. But they were great men in their day and perhaps the time will come when Bach, Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner will drop out and have no message left for us. Sometimes of course the clock goes round full circle and the twentieth century comprehends what had ceased to have any meaning for the nineteenth. This is the case with the modem revival of Bach after nearly one hundred and fifty years of neglect, or the modem appreciation of Elizabethan madrigals. There may be many composers who have something genuine to say to us for a short time and for that short time their music may surely be classed as good. We all know that when an idiom is new we cannot detect the difference between the really original mind and the mere imitator. But when the idiom passes into the realm of everyday commonplace then and then only we can tell the true from the false. For example, any student at a music school can now reproduce the tricks of Debussy’s style, and therefore it is now, and only now, that we can discover whether Debussy had something genuine to say or whether when the secret of his style becomes common property the message of which that style was the vehicle will disappear.
Then there is the question of place. Is music that is good music for one country or one community necessarily good music for another? It is true that the great monuments of music, the Missa . Papae Marcelli, or the St. Matthew Passion, or the Ninth Symphony, or Die Meistersinger, have a world wide appeal, but first they must appeal to the people, and in the circumstances where they were created. It is because Palestrina and Verdi are essentially Italian and because Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner are essentially German that their message transcends their frontiers. And even so, the St. Matthew Passion, much as it is loved and admired in other countries, must mean much more to the German, who recognizes in it the consummation of all that he learnt from childhood in the great traditional chorales which are his special inheritance. Beethoven has an universal meaning, but to the German, who finds in it that same spirit exemplified in its more homely form in those Volkslieder which he learnt in his childhood, he must also have a specialized meaning.
Every composer cannot expect to have a world-wide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people and many young composers make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local. Is it not reasonable to suppose that those who share our life, our history, our customs, our climate, even our food, should have some secret to impart to us which the foreign composer, though he be perhaps more imaginative, more powerful, more technically equipped, is not able to give us? This is the secret of the national composer, the secret to which he only has the key, which no foreigner can share with him and which he alone is able to tell to his fellow countrymen. But is he prepared with his secret? Must he not limit himself to a certain extent so as to give his message its full force? For after all it is the millstream forcing its way through narrow channels which gathers strength to turn the water-wheel. As long as composers persist in serving up at second-hand the externals of the music of other nations, they must not be surprised if audiences prefer the real Brahms, the real Wagner, the real Debussy, or the real Stravinsky to their pale reflections.
What a composer has to do is to find out the real message he has to convey to the community and say it directly and without equivocation. I know there is a temptation each time a new star appears on the musical horizon to say, ‘What a fine fellow this is, let us try and do something like this at home,’ quite forgetting that the result will not sound at all the same when transplanted from its natural soil. It is all very well to catch at the prophet’s robe, but the mantle of Elijah is apt, like all second-hand clothing, to prove the worst of misfits. How is the composer to fmd himself? How is he to stimulate his imagination in a way that will lead him to voicing himself and his fellows? I think that composers are much too fond of going to concerts - I am speaking now, of course of the technically equipped composer. At the concert we hear the finished product. What the artist should be concerned with is the raw material. Have we not all about us forms of musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art? Have we not all around us occasions crying out for music? Do not all our great pageants of human beings require music for their full expression? We must cultivate a sense of musical citizenship. Why should not the musician be the servant of the state and build national monuments like the painter, the writer, or the architect?
Come muse, migrate from Greece and Iouia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, placard ‘removed’ and ‘to let’ on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate and on Mount Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere,
A wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.
Art for art’s sake has never flourished among the English-speaking nations. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with our music. The composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community. If we seek for art we shall not find it. There are very few great composers, but there can be many sincere composers. There is nothing in the world worse than sham good music. There is no form of insincerity more subtle than that which is coupled with great earnestness of purpose and determination to do only the best and the highest, the unconscious insincerity which leads us to build up great designs which we cannot fill and to simulate emotions which we can only experience vicariously. But, you may say, are we to learn nothing from the great masters? Where are our models to come from? Of course we can learn everything from the great masters and one of the great things we can learn from them is their sureness of purpose. When we are sure of our purpose we can safely follow the advice of St. Paul ‘to prove all things and to hold to that which is good’. But it is dangerous to go about ‘proving all things’ until you have made up your mind what is good for you.
First, then, see your direction clear and then by all means go to Paris, or Berlin, or Peking if you like and study and learn everything that will help you to carry out that purpose.
We have in England today a certain number of composers who have achieved fame. In the older generation Elgar and Parry, among those of middle age Holst and Bax, and of the quite young Walton and Lambert. All these served their apprenticeship at home. There are several others who thought that their own country was not good enough for them and went off in the early stages to become little Germans or little Frenchmen. Their names I will not give to you because they are unknown even to their fellow countrymen.
I am told that when grape vines were first cultivated in California the vineyard masters used to try the experiment of importing plants from France or Italy and setting them in their own soil. The result was that the grapes acquired a peculiar individual flavour, so strong was the influence of the soil in which they were planted. I think I need hardly draw the moral of this, namely, that if the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil and that soil has anything individual to give you, you may still gain the whole world and not lose your own souls.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Should Music be National?
Whistler used to say that it was as ridiculous to talk about national art as national chemistry. In saying this he failed to see the difference between art and science.
Science is the pure pursuit of knowledge and thus knows no boundaries. Art, and especially the art of music, uses knowledge as a means to the evocation of personal experience in terms which will be intelligible to and command the sympathy of others. These others must clearly be primarily those who by race, tradition, and cultural experience are the nearest to him; in fact those of his own nation, or other kind of homogeneous community. In the sister arts of painting and poetry this factor of nationality is more obvious, due in poetry to the Tower of Babel and in painting to the fact that the painter naturally tends to build his visual imagination on what he normally sees around him. But unfortunately for the art of music some misguided thinker, probably first cousin to the man who invented the unfortunate phrase ‘a good European’, has described music as ‘the universal language’. It is not even true that music has an universal vocabulary, but even if it were so it is the use of the vocabulary that counts and no one supposes that French and English are the same language because they happen to use twenty-five out of twenty-six of the letters of their alphabet in common. In the same way, in spite of the fact that they have a musical alphabet in common, nobody could mistake Wagner for Verdi or Debussy for Richard Strauss. And, similarly, in spite of wide divergencies of personal style, there is a common factor in the music say of Schumann and Weber.
And this common factor is nationality. As Hubert Parry said in his inaugural address to the Folk Song Society of England, ‘True Style comes not from the individual but from the products of crowds of fellow-workers who sift and try and try again till they have found the thing that suits their native taste .... Style is ultimately national.’
I am speaking, for the moment, not of the appeal of a work of art, but of its origin. Some music may appeal only in its immediate surroundings; some may be national in its influence and some may transcend these bounds and be world-wide in its acceptance. But we may be quite sure that the composer who tries to be cosmopolitan from the outset will fail, not only with the world at large, but with his own people as well. Was anyone ever more local, or even parochial, than Shakespeare? Even when he follows the fashion and gives his characters Italian names they betray their origin at once by their language and their sentiments.
Possibly you may think this an unfair example, because a poet has not the common vocabulary of the musician, so let me take another example.
One of the three great composers of the world (personally I believe the greatest) was John Sebastian Bach. Here, you may say, is the universal musician if ever there was one; yet no one could be more local, in his origin, his life work, and his fame for nearly a hundred years after his death, than Bach. He was to outward appearance no more than one of a fraternity of town organists and ‘town pipers’ whose business it was to provide the necessary music for the great occasions in church and city. He never left his native country, seldom even his own city of Leipzig. ‘World Movements’ in art were then unheard of; moreover, it was the tradition of his own country which inspired him. True, he studied eagerly all the music of foreign composers that came his way in order to improve his craft. But is not the work of Bach built up on two great foundations, the organ music of his Teutonic predecessors and the popular hymn-tunes of his own people? Who has heard nowadays of the cosmopolitan hero Marchand, except as being the man who ran away from the Court of Dresden to avoid comparison with the local organist Bach?
In what I have up to now said I shall perhaps not have been clear unless I dispose at once of two fallacies. The first of these is that the artist invents for himself alone. No man lives or moves or could do so, even if he wanted to, for himself alone. The actual process of artistic invention, whether it be by voice, verse, or brush, presupposes an audience; someone to hear, read, or see. Of course the sincere artist cannot deliberately compose what he dislikes. But artistic inspiration is like Dryden’s angel which must be brought down from heaven to earth. A work of art is like a theophany which takes different forms to different beholders. In other words, a composer wishes to make himself intelligible. This surely is the prime motive of the act of artistic invention and to be intelligible he must clothe his inspiration in such forms as the circumstances of time, place, and subject dictate.
This should come unself-consciously to the artist, but if he consciously tries to express himself in a way which is contrary to his surroundings, and therefore to his own nature, he is evidently being, though perhaps he does not know it, insincere. It is surely as bad to be self-consciously cosmopolitan as self-consciously national.
The other fallacy is that the genius springs from nowhere, defies all rules, acknowledges no musical ancestry and is beholden to no tradition. The first thing we have to realize is that the great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to the smaller men. We can trace the musical genealogy of Beethoven, starting right back from Philipp Emanuel Bach, through Haydn and Mozart, with even such smaller fry as Cimarosa and Cherubini to lay the foundations of the edifice. Is not the mighty river of Wagner but a confluence of the smaller streams, Weber, Marschner, and Liszt?
I would define genius as the right man in the right place at the right time. We know, of course, too many instances of the time being ripe and the place being vacant and no man to fill it. But we shall never know of the numbers of ‘mute and inglorious Miltons’ who failed because the place and time were not ready for them. Was not Purcell a genius born before his time? Was not Sullivan a jewel in the wrong setting?
I read the other day in a notice by a responsible music critic that ‘it only takes one man to write a symphony’. Surely this is an entire misconception. A great work of art can only be born under the right surroundings and in the right atmosphere. Bach himself, if I may again quote him as an example, was only able to produce his fugues, his Passions, his cantatas, because there had preceded him generations of smaller composers, specimens of the despised class of ‘local musicians’ who had no other ambition than to provide worthily and with dignity the music required of them: craftsmen perhaps rather than conscious artists. Thus there spread among the quiet and unambitious people of northern Germany a habit, so to speak, of music, the desire to make it part of their daily life, and it was into this atmosphere that John Sebastian Bach was born.
The ideal thing, of course, would be for the whole community to take to music as it takes to language from its youth up, naturally, without conscious thought or specialized training; so that, just as the necessity for expressing our material wants leads us when quite young to perfect our technique of speaking so our spiritual wants should lead us to perfect our technique of emotional expression and above all that of music. But this is an age of specialization and delegation. We employ specialists to do more and more for us instead of doing it ourselves. We even get other people to play our games for us and look on shivering at a football match, instead of getting out of it for ourselves the healthy exercise and excitement which should surely be its only object.
Specialization may be all very well in purely material things. For example, we cannot make good cigars in England and it is quite right therefore that we should leave the production of that luxury to others and occupy ourselves in making somcthing which our circumstances and climate permit of. The most rabid chauvinist has never suggested that Englishmen should be forced to smoke impossible cigars merely because they are made at home. We say quite rightly that those who want that luxury and can afford it must get it from abroad.
Now there are some people who apply this ‘cigar’ theory to the arts and especially to music; to music especially, because music is not one of the ‘naturally protected’ industries like the sister arts of painting and poetry. The ‘cigar’ theory of music is then this - I am speaking of course of my own country England, but I believe it exists equally virulently in yours: that music is not an industry which flourishes naturally in our climate; that, therefore, those who want it and can afford it must hire it from abroad. This idea has been prevalent among us for generations. It began in England, I think, in the early eighteenth ccntury when the political power got into the hands of the entirely uncultured landed gentry and the practice of art was considered unworthy of a gentleman, from which it followed that you had to hire a ‘damned foreigner’ to do it for you if you wanted it, from which in its turn followed the corollary that the type of music which the foreigner brought with him was the only type worth having and that the very different type of music which was being made at home must necessarily be wrong. These ideas were fostered by the fact that we had a foreign court at St. James’s who apparently did not share the English snobbery about home-made art and so brought the music made in their own homes to England with them. So, the official music, whether it took the form of Mr. Handel to compose an oratorio, or an oboe player in a regimental band, was imported from Germany. This snobbery is equally virulent to this day. The musician indeed is not despised, but it is equally felt that music cannot be something which is native to us and when imported from abroad it must of necessity be better.
Let me take an analogy from architecture. When a stranger arrives in New York he finds imitations of Florentine palaces, replicas of Gothic cathedrals, suggestions of Greek temples, buildings put up before America began to realize that she had an artistic consciousness of her own.
All these things the visitor dismiss as without interest and turns to her railway stations, her offices and shops; buildings dictated by the necessity of the case, a truly national style of architecture evolved from national surroundings. Should it not be the same with music?
As long as a country is content to take its music passively there can be no really artistic vitality in the nation. I can only speak from the experience of my own country. In England we are too apt to think of music in terms of the cosmopolitan celebrities of the Queen’s Hall and Covent Garden Opera. These are, so to speak, the crest of the wave, but behind that crest must be the driving force which makes the body of the wave. It is below the surface that we must look for the power which occasionally throws up a Schnabel, a Sibelius, or a Toscanini. What makes me hope for the musical future of any country is not the distinguished names which appear on the front page of the newspapers, but the music that is going on at home, in the schools, and in the local choral societies.
Can we expect garden flowers to grow in soil so barren that the wild flowers cannot exist there? Perhaps one day the supply of international artists will fail us and we shall turn in vain to our own country to supply their places. Will there be any source to supply it from? You remember the story of the nouveau riche who bought a plot of land and built a stately home on it, but he found that no amount of money could provide him straightaway with the spreading cedars and immemorial elms and velvet lawns which should be the accompaniment of such a home. Such things can only grow in a soil prepared by years of humble toil.
Hubert Parry in his book, The Evolution of the Art of Music, has shown how music like everything else in the world is subject to the laws of evolution, that there is no difference in kind but only in degree between Beethoven and the humblest singer of a folk-song. The principles of artistic beauty, of the relationships of design and expression, are neither trade secrets nor esoteric mysteries revealed to the few; indeed if these principles are to have any meaning to us they must be founded on what is natural to the human being. Perfection of form is equally possible in the most primitive music and in the most elaborate.
The principles which govern the composition of music are, we find, not arbitrary rules, nor as some people apparently think, barriers put up by mediocre practitioners to prevent the young genius from entering the academic grove; they are not the tricks of the trade or even the mysteries of the craft, they are founded on the very nature of human beings. Take, for example, the principle of repetition as a factor of design: either the cumulative effect of mere reiteration, such as we get in the Trio of the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or in a cruder form in Ravelvs Bolero; or the constant repetition of a ground bass as in Bach’s organ Passacaglia or the finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Travellers tell us that the primitive savage as soon as he gets as far as inventing some little rhythmical or melodic pattern will repeat inventing some little rhythmical or melodic pattern will repeat it endlessly. In all these cases we have illustrations of the fundamental principle of emphasis by repetition.
After a time the savage will get tired of his little musical phrase and will invent another and often this new phrase will be at a new pitch so as to bring into play as many new notes as possible. Why? Because his throat muscles and his perceptive faculties are wearied by the constant repetition.
Is not this exactly the principle of the second subject of the classical sonata, which is in a key which brings into play as many new sounds as possible? Then we have the principle of symmetry also found in primitive music when the singer, having got tired in turn with his new phrase, harks back to the old one.
And so I could go on showing you how Beethoven is but a later stage in the development of those principles which actuated the primitive Teuton when he desired to make himself artistically intelligible.
The greatest artist belongs inevitably to his country as much as the humblest singer in a remote village - they and all those who come between them are links in the same chain, manifestations on their different levels of the same desire for artistic expression, and, moreover, the same nature of artistic expression.
I am quite prepared for the objection that nationalism limits the scope of art, that what we want is the best, from wherever it comes. My objectors will probably quote Tennyson and tell me that ‘We needs must love the highest when we see it’ and that we should educate the young to appreciate this mysterious ‘highest’ from the beginning. Or perhaps they will tell me with Rossini that they know only two kinds of music, good and bad. So perhaps we had better digress here for a few moments and try to find out what good music is, and whether there is such a thing as absolute good music; or even if there is such an absolute good, whether it must not take different forms for different hearers. Myself, I doubt if there is this absolute standard of goodness. I think it will vary with the occasion on which it is performed, with the period at which it was composed and with the nationality of those that listen to it. Let us take examples of each of these - firstly, with regard to the occasion. The Venusberg music from Tannhauser is good music when it comes at the right dramatic moment in the opera, but it is bad music when it is played on an organ in church. I am sorry to have to tell you that this is not an imaginary experience. A waltz of Johann Strauss is good music in its proper place as an accompaniment to dancing and festivity, but it would be bad music if it were interpolated in the middle of the St. Matthew Passion. And may we not even say that Bach’s B minor Mass would be bad music if it were played in a restaurant as an accompaniment to eating and drinking?
Secondly, does not the standard of goodness vary with time? What was good for the fifteenth century is not necessarily good for the twentieth. Surely each new generation requires something different to satisfy its different ideals. Of course there is some music that seems to defy the ravages of time and to speak a new message to each successive generation. But even the greatest music is not eternal. We can still appreciate Bach and Handel or even Palestrina, but Dufay and Dunstable have little more than an historical interest for us now. But they were great men in their day and perhaps the time will come when Bach, Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner will drop out and have no message left for us. Sometimes of course the clock goes round full circle and the twentieth century comprehends what had ceased to have any meaning for the nineteenth. This is the case with the modem revival of Bach after nearly one hundred and fifty years of neglect, or the modem appreciation of Elizabethan madrigals. There may be many composers who have something genuine to say to us for a short time and for that short time their music may surely be classed as good. We all know that when an idiom is new we cannot detect the difference between the really original mind and the mere imitator. But when the idiom passes into the realm of everyday commonplace then and then only we can tell the true from the false. For example, any student at a music school can now reproduce the tricks of Debussy’s style, and therefore it is now, and only now, that we can discover whether Debussy had something genuine to say or whether when the secret of his style becomes common property the message of which that style was the vehicle will disappear.
Then there is the question of place. Is music that is good music for one country or one community necessarily good music for another? It is true that the great monuments of music, the Missa . Papae Marcelli, or the St. Matthew Passion, or the Ninth Symphony, or Die Meistersinger, have a world wide appeal, but first they must appeal to the people, and in the circumstances where they were created. It is because Palestrina and Verdi are essentially Italian and because Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner are essentially German that their message transcends their frontiers. And even so, the St. Matthew Passion, much as it is loved and admired in other countries, must mean much more to the German, who recognizes in it the consummation of all that he learnt from childhood in the great traditional chorales which are his special inheritance. Beethoven has an universal meaning, but to the German, who finds in it that same spirit exemplified in its more homely form in those Volkslieder which he learnt in his childhood, he must also have a specialized meaning.
Every composer cannot expect to have a world-wide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people and many young composers make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local. Is it not reasonable to suppose that those who share our life, our history, our customs, our climate, even our food, should have some secret to impart to us which the foreign composer, though he be perhaps more imaginative, more powerful, more technically equipped, is not able to give us? This is the secret of the national composer, the secret to which he only has the key, which no foreigner can share with him and which he alone is able to tell to his fellow countrymen. But is he prepared with his secret? Must he not limit himself to a certain extent so as to give his message its full force? For after all it is the millstream forcing its way through narrow channels which gathers strength to turn the water-wheel. As long as composers persist in serving up at second-hand the externals of the music of other nations, they must not be surprised if audiences prefer the real Brahms, the real Wagner, the real Debussy, or the real Stravinsky to their pale reflections.
What a composer has to do is to find out the real message he has to convey to the community and say it directly and without equivocation. I know there is a temptation each time a new star appears on the musical horizon to say, ‘What a fine fellow this is, let us try and do something like this at home,’ quite forgetting that the result will not sound at all the same when transplanted from its natural soil. It is all very well to catch at the prophet’s robe, but the mantle of Elijah is apt, like all second-hand clothing, to prove the worst of misfits. How is the composer to fmd himself? How is he to stimulate his imagination in a way that will lead him to voicing himself and his fellows? I think that composers are much too fond of going to concerts - I am speaking now, of course of the technically equipped composer. At the concert we hear the finished product. What the artist should be concerned with is the raw material. Have we not all about us forms of musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art? Have we not all around us occasions crying out for music? Do not all our great pageants of human beings require music for their full expression? We must cultivate a sense of musical citizenship. Why should not the musician be the servant of the state and build national monuments like the painter, the writer, or the architect?
Come muse, migrate from Greece and Iouia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, placard ‘removed’ and ‘to let’ on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate and on Mount Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere,
A wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.
Art for art’s sake has never flourished among the English-speaking nations. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with our music. The composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community. If we seek for art we shall not find it. There are very few great composers, but there can be many sincere composers. There is nothing in the world worse than sham good music. There is no form of insincerity more subtle than that which is coupled with great earnestness of purpose and determination to do only the best and the highest, the unconscious insincerity which leads us to build up great designs which we cannot fill and to simulate emotions which we can only experience vicariously. But, you may say, are we to learn nothing from the great masters? Where are our models to come from? Of course we can learn everything from the great masters and one of the great things we can learn from them is their sureness of purpose. When we are sure of our purpose we can safely follow the advice of St. Paul ‘to prove all things and to hold to that which is good’. But it is dangerous to go about ‘proving all things’ until you have made up your mind what is good for you.
First, then, see your direction clear and then by all means go to Paris, or Berlin, or Peking if you like and study and learn everything that will help you to carry out that purpose.
We have in England today a certain number of composers who have achieved fame. In the older generation Elgar and Parry, among those of middle age Holst and Bax, and of the quite young Walton and Lambert. All these served their apprenticeship at home. There are several others who thought that their own country was not good enough for them and went off in the early stages to become little Germans or little Frenchmen. Their names I will not give to you because they are unknown even to their fellow countrymen.
I am told that when grape vines were first cultivated in California the vineyard masters used to try the experiment of importing plants from France or Italy and setting them in their own soil. The result was that the grapes acquired a peculiar individual flavour, so strong was the influence of the soil in which they were planted. I think I need hardly draw the moral of this, namely, that if the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil and that soil has anything individual to give you, you may still gain the whole world and not lose your own souls.
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