To the observant, the present is a time of shaken foundations, a time of much actual overthrow4, and even a time of planning that broader and deeper bases shall well sustain the super-imposed new. Amidst an upheaval5 of things social, political, scientific, ethical6 and ?sthetic; an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily sourced in the sub-strata of the world of causes; Art, for instance, is unavoidably disturbed throughout its various provinces.
Only the over-sanguine will assume that the better must needs rise from upheaval and overthrow. Therefore let us look but for the reasonable, for does not many a desolated7 province of this material world belie8 the theory of uninterrupted advance?
Appearances indicate that the art of music is entering upon a period the most momentous9 of its existence, a period of transition more radical10 than when it was emerging from the Greek modes; a period perhaps of storm and stress, of morbid11 and eccentric individualism; a period like that which almost overwhelmed literature in the early days of Goethe and Schiller; or, perhaps, a period of real progress; but, in either event, a period from which it will come forth12 an art far different from that of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner.
Because progressive, the human mind will not regard its greatest work with a complacency inimical to further effort. Ever it fashions and re-fashions, achieving yesterday, failing to-day, and then more than retrieving13 on some fortunate morrow. Strange doings and sayings are rife14 in the musical world of the present. Denying the validity of fixed15 key, Claude Debussy begins and ends his tone creations anywhere within the limit of the chromatic16 scale. Max Reger teaches the intimate fellowship of the entire twenty-four keys, while Richard Strauss has well-nigh outgrown17 the twelve semitones of our time-honored gamut18 which must be enlarged if it would meet the needs of his successors. It is the opinion of many that, in this event, the art of music will be merged19 in what we shall here call the art of sound. Concerning this realistic art, this art to be, let us explain briefly20 that, whereas the word sound signifies all that the ear cognizes, whether as euphony21, cacophony22 or mere23 noise, yet, for sound to attain24 to the status of an art, art must endow with definite and adequate purpose not only euphony, but also every other sound, including mere noise.
While Strauss with almost audacious boldness is leading toward the enharmonic possibilities of an augmented25 scale, the more conservative but no less ingenious Reger is looking back to his beloved Bach, and showing what, through a greatly extended key relationship, that master might have accomplished26 with the good old semitones. Eschewing27 programme music, and all else demanding literary elucidation28, Reger will, to the tone-poems of his rival, offset29 a fugue or a sonata30 ultra enough for any save the disciples31 of Strauss and Debussy.
Like Strauss, Debussy is in no wise to be ignored, but always and wholly to be reckoned with in an estimate of advanced methods. Paradoxical at first thought is the fact that Debussy, whose measures abound32 in unresolved discords33 of ultra-modern origin, should found his music not uniformly on the major and the minor34 scales, but, by preference, largely on the old church modes. This reversion to the medi?val indicates a period of crisis wherein the beam fluctuates between the extremes of old and new tonal methods. Dispensing35 with the size and blare of the modern orchestra, and shunning36, as if an obsession37, the Wagnerian models, Debussy will not for one brief moment permit in the lyric38 drama such outbursts of vocal39 melody as crown the climaxes41 of ?Lohengrin,? and the passionate42 love scenes of ?Tannh?user.? And this for the specific reason that ?Melody is almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotional life. Melody is suitable only for the song which confirms a fixed sentiment.?
While Strauss is held to be the lineal successor of Liszt, he is in fact a compound of various modern tendencies. In him we find the philosophy of Nietzsche, the impressionism of Manet, and the realism of which De Maupassant and Zola and Whitman and the youthful Swinburne were exponents43; a realism which, because it over-emphasizes the erotic, the pathological, and the ugly, misinterprets man and nature, and so betrays the characteristics of decadent44 art.
What would have been the attitude of Wagner toward Strauss may be inferred from his caustic45 attacks on Berlioz whose music he called foolish and eccentric; and yet, as a producer of novel effects he himself was much indebted to the French composer, and, in turn, was no small factor in the formation of one whom Strauss' disciples deem the greater Richard. Notwithstanding which, we affirm that Strauss is more closely related to Liszt whose talents, both in pianoforte and orchestral composition, tended to virtuoso46 display more than to the utterance47 of original and lofty ideas.
Prior to the advent48 of Wagner, the musical composer deemed it necessary always to appeal to the sense of the beautiful. Whatever his theme, his music, ever conforming to the established laws of harmony, must not be repugnant to that ?sthetic sense. At times he no doubt overstepped his self-imposed limit, but, somehow, the ear of the listener has accustomed itself to the innovation, and with the result that not a few wholly doubt the existence of a line of cleavage between the ugly and the beautiful. However, a sane49 philosophy will demonstrate that beauty and ugliness are as unlike as are good and evil.
Neither the painter nor the sculptor50 restricts himself to pleasing subjects; the grotesque51 and the horrible have been deemed not unworthy the brush and the chisel53 of artists indubitably great, and it can be argued that to music should be accorded an expression free and faithful as that allowed to painting and the plastic arts. On the other hand, popular opinion has ever been, and perhaps ever will be, that what is actually ugly is not music. To this opinion the modern reply is that the word music carries with it far too restricted a meaning; the office of the tonal art, like that of all other arts, is to express not the half but the whole of life; in fact, the universal duality in nature and in man.
With deep philosophic54 and artistic55 insight, Wagner elaborated an art destined, as he believed, to supersede56 Italian Opera. Despite his harsh but convincing strictures, and despite the theories and practice of Debussy who holds that in the Music Drama the vocal parts, lest they hinder the dramatic action, should be reduced to a rhythmic57 chant devoid58 of melody, Italian Opera survives; from temporary eclipse it is emerging bright as before. In the life labors59 of the great reformer, we are beginning to see simply a new school supplementing the old. We are beginning to see that the denouncer of Donizetti and Rossini and Verdi and Bellini and the rest, was himself not quite faultless in practice, however correct in theory. Musicians of eminence60 now admit that the incongruities61 of Italian Opera are offset by the over-long and the slow-moving in the Wagnerian Music Drama. Naturally the world refuses to forget ?Lucia? and ?Il Barbiere? and ?Rigoletto? and ?Norma,? and in fact any work whereinto the muse62 of Italy has poured her quenchless63 fire.
Granting that the faulty and inadequate64 Greek modes had so cramped65 and chilled musical expression that, in their abandonment, little of value was lost to the musicians of past centuries, what shall be said of our modern musical heritage, the gift of the last two hundred years, and which the universal adoption66 of a new and enlarged musical scale would render obsolete67? Will not that spirit of love and loyalty68 which defends the cause of Italian Opera, make determined69 stand against the novel system? From the twelve notes of the chromatic scale the great German masters have evoked70 the superlatively beautiful. Shaping their imaginings to lofty ideals, they have in fact epitomized the larger, better part of man and nature, as understood by the German mind. Admitting this, can the cultured musician bring himself to ignore the past of German art? for this he must needs do under an exclusively modern regime. No! a thousand times no! That for music a different scale can be no more than supplementary71 is indicated by the history of all other ?sthetic arts. Their every worthy52 type endures; not any one has quite eclipsed another.
The two leading races, once peopling the southmost peninsulas of Europe, were extinct centuries ago, but their daily tongues survive, dead languages never while endures the world, for they bring to all enlightened peoples the period and climax40 of the orator72, the meter of the tragic73 dramatist, and the notes of the Homeric and the Virgilian muse, fresh and unrivalled as when Greece and Italy first lent ear.
There have been schools of architecture, both Pagan and Christian74, schools of sculpture from Phidias onward75; schools of modern painting since the mature work of Giotto; and the wise ages, far from selecting and excluding, have preserved them all.
To men of creative genius were granted glimpses of Truth; each from his own angle beheld76 the ineffable77 vision. Through the sundered78 veils of illusion, as through the storm's momentary79 rift80, the permitted artist beheld his own ruling star, sometimes a royal sun, sometimes a subordinate planet, but always one without which the hierarchy81 of heaven were incomplete.
That neither the school of Wagner nor that of Strauss will supersede existing national schools is assured for the additional reason that these are the outcome of national ideals. In every race of civilization the man of creative genius proves his people to be possessed82 of ideals of art peculiarly their own. There results for example the Slavic, the Scandinavian, the English, the German, the Spanish, the French, the Italian ideals, and, lofty in possibilities, that of the amalgamating83 race destined to fill this ample western land of ours.
The ideals of tonal art! Surely the Wagnerian and the Straussian models cannot include them all! Varied84 as the geography of the globe, as the configurations85 of its surface, those national ideals are sombre with the solitude86 of barren steppes; they are gloomy with the twilight87 of deep-indenting fjords; they are rich with the ancient, the medi?val, the modern, of a land of memories gathered since the coming of Arthur. Otherwhere they are fraught88 with the romance of Rhenish castles where Minnesingers and Meistersingers have proved the magic power of song; or else they bring the southern night of castinets and tripping feet, and the moonlit wonder of Moorish89 Alhambra. How well those ideals have embodied90 the gay and the graceful91, also the volatile92 as the vintage of vine-clad Champagne93! And how fitly are they born by Adriatic and Mediterranean94 shores where the ardent95 day-beam warms the heart to love's emotion; and, in days to come, shall they not suggest the amplitude96 of snowy mountain chains, the undulating sweep of prairies, the breezy expanse of vast inland seas, and the eternal dash and roar of ocean on our eastern and our western coasts?
These, and countless97 other ideals sourced in the world's composite life, have given rise to a necessarily varied art whose inner unity98 must remain undiscovered till mankind becomes one great family, bound by a community of ideals and interests in the millennial99 dawn of a yet-unrisen day.
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1
destined
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| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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citadel
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| n.城堡；堡垒；避难所 | |
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relinquish
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| v.放弃，撤回，让与，放手 | |
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overthrow
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| v.推翻，打倒，颠覆；n.推翻，瓦解，颠覆 | |
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upheaval
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| n.胀起，(地壳)的隆起；剧变，动乱 | |
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ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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desolated
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| adj.荒凉的，荒废的 | |
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belie
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| v.掩饰，证明为假 | |
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momentous
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| adj.重要的，重大的 | |
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radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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retrieving
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| n.检索（过程），取还v.取回( retrieve的现在分词 )；恢复；寻回；检索（储存的信息） | |
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rife
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| adj.(指坏事情)充斥的，流行的，普遍的 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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chromatic
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| adj.色彩的，颜色的 | |
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outgrown
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| 长[发展] 得超过（某物）的范围( outgrow的过去分词 )； 长[发展]得不能再要（某物）； 长得比…快； 生长速度超过 | |
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gamut
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| n.全音阶，(一领域的)全部知识 | |
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merged
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| （使）混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 )； 相融； 融入； 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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euphony
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| n.悦耳的语音 | |
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cacophony
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| n.刺耳的声音 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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Augmented
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| adj.增音的 动词augment的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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eschewing
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| v.（尤指为道德或实际理由而）习惯性避开，回避( eschew的现在分词 ) | |
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elucidation
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| n.说明，阐明 | |
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offset
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| n.分支，补偿；v.抵消，补偿 | |
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sonata
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| n.奏鸣曲 | |
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disciples
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| n.信徒( disciple的名词复数 )；门徒；耶稣的信徒；（尤指）耶稣十二门徒之一 | |
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abound
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| vi.大量存在；(in，with)充满，富于 | |
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discords
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| 不和（discord的复数形式） | |
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minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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dispensing
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| v.分配( dispense的现在分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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shunning
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| v.避开，回避，避免( shun的现在分词 ) | |
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obsession
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| n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感) | |
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lyric
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| n.抒情诗，歌词；adj.抒情的 | |
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vocal
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| adj.直言不讳的；嗓音的；n.[pl.]声乐节目 | |
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40
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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climaxes
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| n.顶点( climax的名词复数 )；极点；高潮；性高潮 | |
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42
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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exponents
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| n.倡导者( exponent的名词复数 )；说明者；指数；能手 | |
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44
decadent
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| adj.颓废的，衰落的，堕落的 | |
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caustic
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| adj.刻薄的，腐蚀性的 | |
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virtuoso
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| n.精于某种艺术或乐器的专家，行家里手 | |
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utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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advent
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| n.(重要事件等的)到来，来临 | |
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49
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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50
sculptor
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| n.雕刻家，雕刻家 | |
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51
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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52
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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53
chisel
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| n.凿子；v.用凿子刻，雕，凿 | |
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54
philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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56
supersede
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| v.替代；充任 | |
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57
rhythmic
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| adj.有节奏的，有韵律的 | |
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58
devoid
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| adj.全无的，缺乏的 | |
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59
labors
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| v.努力争取(for)( labor的第三人称单数 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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eminence
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| n.卓越，显赫；高地，高处；名家 | |
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incongruities
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| n.不协调( incongruity的名词复数 )；不一致；不适合；不协调的东西 | |
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muse
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| n.缪斯（希腊神话中的女神），创作灵感 | |
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63
quenchless
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| 不可熄灭的 | |
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inadequate
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| adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的 | |
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cramped
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| a.狭窄的 | |
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adoption
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| n.采用，采纳，通过；收养 | |
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obsolete
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| adj.已废弃的，过时的 | |
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loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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evoked
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| [医]诱发的 | |
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supplementary
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| adj.补充的，附加的 | |
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orator
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| n.演说者，演讲者，雄辩家 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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ineffable
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| adj.无法表达的，不可言喻的 | |
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sundered
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| v.隔开，分开( sunder的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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rift
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| n.裂口，隙缝，切口；v.裂开，割开，渗入 | |
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81
hierarchy
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| n.等级制度；统治集团，领导层 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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83
amalgamating
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| v.（使）（金属）汞齐化( amalgamate的现在分词 )；（使）合并；联合；结合 | |
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84
varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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85
configurations
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| n.[化学]结构( configuration的名词复数 )；构造；（计算机的）配置；构形（原子在分子中的相对空间位置） | |
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86
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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88
fraught
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| adj.充满…的，伴有(危险等)的；忧虑的 | |
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moorish
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| adj.沼地的，荒野的，生[住]在沼地的 | |
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embodied
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| v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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91
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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volatile
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| adj.反复无常的，挥发性的，稍纵即逝的，脾气火爆的；n.挥发性物质 | |
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93
champagne
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| n.香槟酒；微黄色 | |
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94
Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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96
amplitude
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| n.广大；充足；振幅 | |
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97
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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99
millennial
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| 一千年的，千福年的 | |
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