Part 6 (1/2)

THE AESTHETICS OF MUSIC

In this and the following chapters which treat of the arts, I plan to make a concrete application of the aesthetic theory thus far developed.

I want to show how the general principles which we have tried to establish can be used to explain the facts of our artistic experience.

In doing this I shall hope to achieve a double purpose: first, to verify anew our theory of art, and second, to deepen and enlighten appreciation.

I begin with music because, as we shall see, there is a musical factor in all the arts, an understanding of which at the beginning will enable us to proceed much more easily in our survey of them. I shall confine myself to an elementary a.n.a.lysis; for a more detailed study would take us beyond the bounds of general aesthetics and would require a knowledge of the special technique of the arts which we cannot presuppose.

Moreover, we shall not concern ourselves with the origin or history of the arts further than is needful for an understanding of their general character. We are investigating the theory, not the history, of taste, and are more interested in the present developed aesthetic consciousness than in its rudimentary forms.

As we appreciate it to-day, music lends itself readily to our definition of art. It is a personal expression--who, when listening to music which he enjoys, does not feel himself poured forth in the tones? It is social and public--what brings us together under the sway of a common emotion more effectively than concert or opera? It is a fixed and permanent expression, for we can renew it so long as men preserve the score where it is written; and, finally, it is free--who can find any practical or moral or scientific purpose in an etude of Chopin or a symphony of Mozart? Music is the most signal example of a mode of expression that has attained to a complete and pure aesthetic character, an unmixed beauty. Yet this was not true of music in its earlier forms, and a long process of development was necessary before freedom was realized. For we must look for the beginning of music in any and all sounds through which primitive men sought to express and communicate themselves. These were, first of all, the cries of the human voice, expressive of fear and need and joy--at once direct outpourings of basic emotions and signals to one's fellows, to help, to satisfy, and to sympathize. In the voice nature provided man with a direct and immediate instrument for the expression and communication of himself through sound. Then, perhaps by accident, man discovered that he could make sounds in other ways, through materials separate from his body, and so he constructed drums and cymbals and gongs; and by means of these, too, he communicated his needs and stimulated himself to rage and excitement--and his enemy to fear--in war dance and battle rush.

And in doing this he was imitating nature, whose noises, exciting and terrifying, he had long known: the clap of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of the waves, the crackling of burning wood, the crash of fallen and breaking things.

Out of unbeautiful noise sprang beautiful music. Men discovered that through the voice they could make not only expressive noises, but also pleasant tones; they found, perhaps by accident, that they could do much the same thing with reeds and strings; they observed that when they beat their drums at regular intervals to mark the motion of the dance, they not only danced together more easily, but also experienced joy in the very sounds they made; or that when they threshed the corn with rhythmic strokes or rowed a boat in rhythmic unison, their task was lightened and their wearied attention distracted to the pleasure of their noise. Hence at their dances of love or war or religion, they sang instead of shouted; and their instruments of irregular and expressive noise became instruments of rhythmical and melodious tones.

Eventually, having experienced the pleasure there is in tones and rhythmical sounds, they made them for their own sake, apart from any connection with tribal festivals, and the free art of music was born.

And yet, as we shall see, the significance of music depends largely upon the fact that tones are akin to noises; music could not take such a hold of the emotions of men did they not overhear in the tones the meaningful and poignant noises of voice and nature; to understand music, we must think of it against its background of expressive noise.

In music we still seem to hear a voice that breaks the silence and speaks, the thunder that terrifies.

The material of music consists of tones, the conscious counterparts of periodic, longitudinal vibrations of the air. Tones differ among themselves in many attributes, of which the following are of chief importance for music: pitch, determined by rate of vibration, through which tones differ as higher and lower; color, determined by the complexity of the vibration wave, the presence of overtones of different pitch along with the fundamental tone in the total sound; intensity, dependent upon the amplitude of the vibration, through which tones of the same pitch differ as soft or loud; and finally, quality, that specific character of a tone, by reason of which middle C, for example, is more like the C of the octave below or above than like its nearer neighbors, B or D, whence the series of tones, although in pitch linear and one-dimensional, is in quality periodic, returning again and again upon itself, as we go up or down the scale. [Footnote: ”See Geza Revesz: _Tonpsychologie_.”]

The number of qualities in use in music--twelve in our scale of equal temperament--is, of course, not all there are in the world of tones; they are a human and arbitrary selection, governed by technical and historical motives, into which we shall not enter. Peoples with a different culture have made a different selection. But we are not concerned with the music of angels or of orientals, but with our own.

With these twelve, with their possible variations in pitch, loudness, and tone-color, the musician has a rich and adequate material.

All the elements of an aesthetic experience are present in striking simplicity even in the single musical tone. There is the sensuous medium, the sound; there is a life expressed, a feeling aroused in us, yet so completely objectified in the sound that it seems to belong to the latter on equal terms with color or quality or loudness; there is a unity and variety and orderly structure in the dominance of the fundamental among the overtones and the fusion of all in the total clang. Thus every note is a complete little aesthetic organism. Yet the beauty of single tones is very slight,--less, I think, than that of single colors; they need the contrast or the agreement in consonance with other tones in order to awaken much feeling; they must be members of a wider whole; observe how, when sounded after other tones, they become enriched through the contrasting or consonant memory of those tones. Nevertheless, the single tone has its feeling, however slight, and to understand this is to go a long way toward understanding the more complex structures of music.

In the first place, tones, unlike noises, are all pleasant. Although we cannot be sure why this is true, there can be little doubt, I think, that the regularity of the vibrations of the former, in contrast with the irregularity of the latter, is largely responsible. The clang, with its ordered complexity, is a stimulus that incites the sense organ and connected motor tracts to a unified and definite response, unlike noise, which creates confusion. The pleasure in the single tone is similar, in its causes, to the pleasure in the consonance of two tones.

As we should expect from this a.n.a.logy, the pleasure is greater in rich tones, which contain many partials, than in thin tones, which are relatively uninteresting. But the feeling of tones is something more than mere pleasantness; it is also a mood. Now this mood of tones is partly due to a.s.sociations,--some superficial in character, like the pastoral quality of flute tones or the martial character of bugle tones, others more fundamental; but it has also a still deeper-lying root. For a sound stimulus awakens not only a sensory process in the ear, the correlative of which is a sensation, but also incipient motor reactions, which, if carried out, would be an emotion, but which, being too slight and diffuse, produce only what we call a mood. Every sensation has a meaning for the organism in an environment where it has constantly to be on its guard for danger or a.s.sistance; every sensation is therefore connected with the mechanism of reaction, with its attendant emotions. In ordinary experience, there are objects present to which the organism may actually respond, but in the aesthetic experience there are no real objects towards which a significant reaction can take place; in music, the source of the sound is obviously of no practical importance, while in such arts as painting and sculpture where interesting objects are represented, the objects themselves are absent; hence the reaction is never carried out, but remains incipient, a vague feeling which, finding no object upon which it may work itself off, is suffused upon the sensation. These sense feelings are the subtle, but basal, material of all beauty.

The variety of moods expressed in tones is almost endless. When we experience them, they come to us as the inner life of the total concrete tones, but they depend actually upon the working together of all the tonal attributes,--color, quality, pitch, and loudness. There is the subtle intimacy of violin tones compared with the clear arresting ring of the trumpet; the emotional differences between qualities like C and G, too delicate for expression in words; the piercing excitement of the high, bright tones, compared with the earnest depth of the low, dull tones; the almost terrifying effect of loud tones compared with the soothing influence of soft tones.

The precise psychophysical mechanism through which the different moods are aroused is for the most part hidden from us; yet in certain particulars we can form some idea of it. For example, the richness of feeling in the tones of certain instruments as compared with others is doubtless due to the fact that through the presence of more overtones and the admixture of noise, the reaction is more complex; the tense excitement of high and loud tones, as compared with the soft and low, is probably connected with the fact that their higher vibration rate and greater amplitude of vibration produce a more marked effect, a more pervasive disturbance,--the organism does not right itself and recover so rapidly and easily. These direct and native elements of feeling are then broadened out and intensified through other elements that come in by way of a.s.sociation. For example, in order to sing high tones, a greater tension and exertion of the vocal chords is needed than for low tones; loud tones suggest loud noises, which, as in breaking and cras.h.i.+ng and thundering, are inevitably a.s.sociated with fear; the loud is also the near and present and threatening, the low is distant and safe. Although each tone, as separate and individual, possesses its own feeling in its own right, the tonal effects are immensely accentuated by contrast with one another,--the high against the low, the poor against the rich, the loud against the soft--and through the summation, by means of repet.i.tion, of the influences of many tones of like character; the full meaning of music depends upon the relations of tones, especially the temporal relations.

This fact was fully recognized by Aristotle, who raised the question why tones are so much more expressive than colors. Music is almost the sole important art that relies on the expressiveness of the sense material alone, independent of any element of meaning. To be sure, the beauty of oriental rugs depends entirely on their color and line harmonies; for the meanings which the patterns have for their oriental makers is generally unknown to us of the western world; yet what we feel when we contemplate them cannot compare in volume and intensity with what we experience when we listen to music. And Aristotle correctly a.s.signed one of the chief reasons for the superior significance of music--its temporal character. A color or line scheme may express a momentary mood, with perhaps just the most rudimentary movement as we go from the dark to the bright colors, or as we follow the motion of the lines as they curve or converge; yet it cannot express an action or process that begins, proceeds, continues, ends. When we look at the colors or lines of a painting or rug, we feel intensely, but there is no development or process of feeling; if the mind moves, it moves inevitably not with, but away from, what it sees. But tones are given to us in succession; we are forced to move with them; hence they come to express for us, in ways which we shall try to a.n.a.lyze, the changing and developing process of the inner life.

In its temporal aspect, music has two chief characteristics, rhythm and melody. In our music these are inseparable; yet they can be separated for the purposes of a.n.a.lysis; and a rhythmical roll of drumbeats or a careless succession of tones harmonically related proves that each may produce an aesthetic effect without the other. We shall consider melody first.

A mere succession of tones, however pleasing separately, does not make a melody; for melody depends on a definite scale and on certain relations between the tones of the scale. These relations ill.u.s.trate the three modes of aesthetic unity. First, there is harmony. Tones are harmonically related when they belong to the leading chords of the key. The tones of such chords, when sounded together, are consonant.

Now harmony, which is an aesthetic feeling, although not identical with consonance, which is a purely sensory relation between tones, depends nevertheless upon consonance. In order to understand harmony, we must therefore first understand consonance, and, in order to do this, we must begin by describing the experience and then look for its possible causes. [Footnote: Consult the discussions in Karl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie; Carl Emil Seash.o.r.e, The Psychology of Musical Talent, chap. VII.] As for the first, consonant tones, when sounded together, seem to fit one another, almost to fuse, despite the fact that the different tones are distinguishable in the whole. This fitting together, in turn, seems to depend on a resemblance or partial ident.i.ty between them. For example, the most consonant tones are a note and its octave, which are, perhaps, actually identical in quality; but lesser intervals are also alike, as for example a note and its fifth, which are more readily mistaken for one another than two dissonant tones, say a note and its seventh. As for the explanation of consonance, we know that consonant tones have identical partial tones and are caused by vibration rates that stand to one another in simple ratios. Thus in a clang composed of a tone and its fifth, the first partial of the fifth is the second partial of the prime, and the vibration ratios are as two to three. The bearing of this second fact on the question of partial ident.i.ty will become clear if we consider the concrete case of a tone produced by 24 vibrations per second, whose fifth would then be produced by 36 vibrations per second, and then consider the same tone and its dissonant second, the ratio of whose vibrations is 24 to 27; in the former case, there is a common part of 6 vibrations, a fourth of the total number of the first tone; in the latter, only 3, an eighth. That ident.i.ty of partial tones is not a sufficient explanation of consonance--as Helmholtz thought it to be--is proved by the fact that simple tones, which have no partials, may still be consonant.

Nevertheless, an ident.i.ty of partials does undoubtedly contribute to the consonance of the complex tones used in our music; ultimately, however, the final reason for consonance must be sought in some underlying ident.i.ty within the tones themselves, an ident.i.ty that seems to be given psychologically in their resemblance, and with which physically the simplicity of their vibration ratios probably has something to do. And that in music the feeling of harmony should depend upon partial ident.i.ty is what we should expect from our previous study of harmony in general. [Footnote: See page 87.]

The second of the tonal relations upon which melody depends is contrast.

First, there is the contrast between the high and the low; even when notes are harmonically related, as a note and its fifth, they are in contrast, in so far as the one is measurably higher and more distant than the other. Of equal importance is the rivalry between the fundamental tones in the leading harmonic chords; for example, the rivalry between the tonic and the dominant. For each of these claims to be the center of the melodic progression, and draws to itself all the tones which belong to its chord. Dissonance is a cause of rivalry; for a dissonant tone is one that will not fit into a given harmony; yet since it is still a part of the melody, must have its home somewhere, and belongs therefore in another harmony, which, through this tone, is set up in rivalry with the prevailing one. A tone that did not belong to any harmony would not be a dissonance, but a discord,--a tone without meaning musically. Dissonances, like other contrasts, enrich the melody by establis.h.i.+ng rival harmonies; discords destroy melodies. Just as the drama has little significance without conflict, so melodies are uninteresting without dissonances.

Were it not for the third of the tonal relations, melodies would lack unity and system and go to pieces under the stress of rival forces.

This third relation may be call finality; [Footnote: The explanation of this is obscure; there is no unanimity among the specialists in musical theory.] it belongs among relations we have called evolutionary.

By it is meant the fact that certain tones demand and naturally lead into other tones, in which they seem to find their completion or fulfillment. For example, the tones of a chord demand the fundamental tone of the chord; dissonances must be ”resolved,”--must be followed by other tones of their own harmony; the diatonic tones over and above the tonic--the ”upleader” and ”downleader”--naturally lead into the tonic; and all the tones demand, either immediately or through the mediation of other tones, the tonic of the scale to which they belong.

This principle of finality, which, in the cla.s.sic music, is the basis of what is called ”tonality,” by establis.h.i.+ng the tonic as the center of reference and point of completion of all tones, gives to melody its dramatic unity. Through it, by creating the tonic chord as fundamental, the rivalry between the tonic, dominant, and subdominant is overcome, and all dissonances finally resolved into unity. Definite scales and tonal laws and schemes of composition are of the utmost importance for musical composition; there are, of course, many of these besides the cla.s.sical, and they are all partly conventional; but that does not matter so long as, by being well known, they enable the melody to move along definite lines, arousing and fulfilling definite expectations.

Those forms of modernist music that dispense with scales altogether, in which therefore there are no fixed _points de repere_ like the tonic or dominant of the older music, can express chance momentary moods by means of rich and strange colors, but not an orderly and purposeful experience.