Studies in Musical History

An excerpt from the beginning of CHAPTER I. A STANDARD OF MUSIC:

THROUGHOUT the vast fields of art or science there is no department which possesses so remarkable a combination for refining and instructing as that of music. The word standard draws the clear-cut line between the work of the conscientious student and that of the time-server. In every department, whether it be that of medicine, painting, law, literature, sculpture or mathematics, a high standard of excellence is demanded, and in most cases satisfactorily accorded. Nowhere should this requisite obtain with the same inexorable severity as in music. One great difficulty in the way of a popular and correct conception of music, is that we are not wont to regard it as we do anything else, but put it aside with the feeling that it is so much a part of another world from ours, that it would be impossible ever to get en rapport with it. On the contrary the tone realm is only one of the great parts which make up the great whole in nature's intellectual laboratory. A good composition has as clearly defined a plot as any work of fiction; it is as logical in its development as the profoundest treatise; its rhythms are as varied and rich in their meanings as the most complex of modern poems. Its proportions must be -as perfect and its shading as delicate as the most carefully designed work of the painter's art. Always, however, with this exception, that while the painter, sculptor, or author at best only reproduces objects and characters from real life, the musician, from the unseen, unknown, unseeable, unknowable, evolves combinations of sound for which there is no counterpart, unless it be the unseeable and unknowable, which, in a man's nature, is hidden inscrutably from himself.

I have spoken thus of the character and principles of music in order the more clearly to demonstrate the absolute necessity for a fixed standard in this, as in any other department of art or science. If we admit that one composition is superior to another, we, by that admission, acknowledge the possibility of an unlimited number of degrees of merit, and come again to the original necessity—a standard.

True, the composition of a high order is frequently, in the popular vernacular, too scientific, too hard to understand. There is a demand for something simpler, not thereby meaning a fresh and childlike simplicity such as is found in " Volklieder," but rather a demand for a certain kind of maudlin sentimentality, such as the popular ballad, at once the cause and effect of such unwholesome and unpleasant emanations. This, the result of an ignorance of music, vaunted as though it were a virtue; or a yet more deplorable kind of ignorance, which supposes its possessor not only a musician, but a critic of no mean capacity. Without doubt there is a distinct tendency in a musical utterance to morality or to immorality, as may be expressed in more familiar or definite forms. Here, as elsewhere, the standard of right and wrong must be fixed. And now we are confronted by two questions which must have suggested themselves from the start: What shall the standard be, and who shall enforce it?

First, as to the standard. Adhering to the principal parallels in substance and degree in all departments of thought, I find nothing which more fully illustrates the world of music than the world of literature. Only a few examples may be cited, but they are so mutually reciprocal in their plan and mode of thought, their orbit is so essentially one, that the most incredulous must admit that I am advancing something more than an hypothesis....