Little White Lies Baker Brianna download

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-baker-
brianna-61565668

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Little White Lies Stevie Macfarlane

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-stevie-
macfarlane-50657428

Little White Lies Cole Riley

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-cole-riley-46374690

Little White Lies T Dagnone

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-t-dagnone-48664478

Little White Lies Jennifer Lynn Barnes

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-jennifer-lynn-
barnes-49848358
Little White Lies Brianna Baker

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-brianna-baker-38324620

Little White Lies Jennifer Lynn Barnes

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-jennifer-lynn-
barnes-38507982

Little White Lies Burkhart Jessica

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-burkhart-
jessica-8250640

Little White Lies Ace Atkins Atkins Ace Parker Robert B

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-ace-atkins-atkins-ace-
parker-robert-b-9609732

Little White Lies Canterwood Crest 06 Jessica Burkhart

https://ebookbell.com/product/little-white-lies-canterwood-
crest-06-jessica-burkhart-47516956
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Contemporary
Composers
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Contemporary Composers

Author: Daniel Gregory Mason

Release date: February 18, 2018 [eBook #56593]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Andrés V. Galia, Sarah Pridy, Astronomer, Jude

Eylander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTEMPORARY

COMPOSERS ***
CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO
Vincent d'Indy
 CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS
BY

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

AUTHOR OF "BEETHOVEN AND HIS FORERUNNERS,"
"THE ROMANTIC COMPOSERS," "FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS," ETC.

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 Copyright, 1918,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1918.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 PREFACE

"We live," wrote Stevenson to Will H. Low in 1884, "in a rum age of
music without airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty,
American wood-engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-
point etchings that ought to have been mezzo-tints.... So long as an
artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an
etcher's needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is
well; and plaudits shower along with roses. But any plain man who
tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace
figure.... He will have his reward, but he will never be thought a
person of parts."
What would Stevenson say, I wonder, could he witness the condition
to which this confusion of aims, rapidly spreading since he wrote,
has now reduced all the arts, and perhaps especially music?
"Painting with a flute" hardly sounds fantastic any longer, now that
symphonies have given place to symphonic "poems," orchestral
"sketches," and tone "pictures," and program music has taken the
place of supremacy in the art of tones that magazine illustration
occupies among graphic arts. Anyone who tries nowadays to write
mere music—expressive of emotion through beauty—is more than
ever "a commonplace person." The "persons of parts" are those who
give it the quaint local color of folk-songs, like Mr. Percy Grainger; or
who make of it an agreeable accessory of dance or stage picture,
like Ravel and Strawinsky, or of colored lights and perfumes, like
Scriabine; or who spin it into mathematical formulæ as a spider
spins web, like Reger; or who use it as a vehicle for a priori
intellectual theories, like Schoenberg, or as noise for a nerve
stimulant, like Mr. Leo Ornstein.
The reader will look in vain for these names, in recent years on
everyone's lips, in the table of contents of this book on
"Contemporary Composers." In the work of most of them there is,
indeed, much of charm or interest, of vividness, perhaps of
permanent power. But the time when critical appraisal of them can
be anything like final has not yet arrived; and meanwhile there is in
their centrifugal tendencies, I believe, a real menace to the best
interests of music. One and all, they look away from that inner
emotion "to which alone," as Wagner said, "can music give a voice,
and music only." They all represent in one way or another that
trivializing of the great art, that degradation of it to sensationalism,
luxury, or mere illustration, some of the historic causes of which I
have tried to suggest in the introduction. No sincere lover of music
can regard with anything but the gravest apprehensions such
tendencies toward decadence.
Fortunately these are, however, powerfully counteracted, even now,
by more constructive forces, carrying forward the evolution of music
in and for itself which was the main concern of the great elder
masters who regarded it as a supreme emotional language—Bach,
Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Franck. It is the representatives of this
sounder tradition (despite the programmism of Strauss and the
sybaritism of Debussy) that I have selected for discussion here. They
have also the further advantage of having been long enough before
the public to have vindicated already their claims to permanent place
in musical history.
The present volume, it may be added, completes the series of
studies of great creative musicians from Palestrina to the present
day begun in "Beethoven and His Forerunners," "The Romantic
Composers," and "From Grieg to Brahms." For permission to reprint
the essays it contains, acknowledgment is made to the editors of the
Musical Quarterly, the Outlook, and the New Music Review.
D. G. M.
New York,
January 26, 1918.
 CONTENTS

PAGE
Introduction: Democracy
I. 3
and Music
II. Richard Strauss 43
III. Sir Edward Elgar 93
IV. Claude Debussy 133
V. Vincent d'Indy 153
VI. Music in America 229
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Vincent d'Indy Frontispiece

FACING PAGE
Richard Strauss 45
Sir Edward Elgar 95
Claude Debussy 135
Vincent d'Indy as a
155
Young Man
 I
INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC
 I

INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AND MUSIC

Lovers and critics of modern music who are at the same time
interested students of the social changes which have preceded and
accompanied its growth must often ask themselves whether there is
any deep connection of cause and effect between the two sets of
phenomena, or whether they merely happened to take place at the
same time. Have the important social transformations of the
nineteenth century reached so far in their influence as to the music
of our time? Has sociology any light to throw upon musical art? The
question raises a problem as difficult as it is fascinating; and the
suggestions which follow are to be taken as guesses and hints,
intended to provoke fertile thought, rather than as constituting in
any sense a finished theory.

I
The change in the nature of the musical public that has taken place
during the nineteenth century has been gradual but far-reaching.
The essence of it is expressed by saying that at the end of the
eighteenth century music was in the hands of the nobility and
gentry, and that at the beginning of the twentieth it is in those of all
the people. Under feudal conditions it was organized by the
patronage system according to the tastes of the aristocratic few. The
thirty most fruitful years of Haydn's life were spent in the employ of
Prince Esterhazy; Mozart, a skilled pianist as well as composer, was
less dependent on his patron, but his life was probably shortened by
the hardships he had to face after he had broken with him;
Beethoven, staunch democrat though he was, realized what he owed
his four patrons, Archduke Rudolph, and Princes Lobkowitz, Kinsky,
and Lichnowsky, and wrote, after the death of some of them had
reduced the value of his annuity: "In order to gain time for a great
composition, I must always previously scrawl away a good deal for
the sake of money.... If my salary were not so far reduced as not to
be a salary at all, I should write nothing but symphonies ... and
church music, or at most quartets." No doubt the patronage system
had its faults and abuses, which have been quite adequately
discussed by critics; the fact remains that under it was done the
supreme creative work of the golden age of music. Greater than any
of its material advantages was the spiritual homogeneity of the
group who practised it. By excluding the lower classes, however
unjustly, they achieved, though artificially, a unity of feeling that
could not then have been achieved otherwise; and as art is in
essence an emotional reaction this unity of feeling provided a soil in
which its seeds could grow.
But with the French Revolution and the passing of feudalism this old
order perished. The proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity,
paving the way for individualistic competition, introduced the epoch
of industrialism and capitalism, in which art, like everything else, was
taken out of the hands of a privileged class, and made theoretically
accessible to all. As the appreciation of art requires, however, mental
and emotional experience, discipline, and refining, a process which
takes time, what actually happened was that those gradually
emerging from poverty through industrialism—the workers
themselves and their children and grandchildren—availed themselves
much more slowly and timidly of these spiritual privileges than of the
material ones. There remained over from the feudal world a nucleus
of cultivated people, sufficiently homogeneous in feeling to retain a
standard of taste, sufficiently numerous to exert an influence on
production: these were the guardians of the better traditions. They
were gradually but steadily interpenetrated and overrun by the
emergents, at first in a minority but rapidly becoming the majority,
and remaining, of course, unavoidably far more backward in artistic
feeling than in economic independence and social ambition. Thus
was introduced a formidable cleavage in the musical public, the
majority breaking off sharply by their childlike crudity from the more
disciplined minority.
The situation was further complicated by the presence of a third
class, the idle rich, becoming more numerous under capitalism. It
may be doubted whether their attitude towards art was qualitatively
different in any important respect from that of the frivolous nobility
under feudalism. Both groups regarded music either with complete
indifference or else as an amusement, a plaything, a fad; both
exercised an influence which through its essential artificiality was
potentially perhaps even more baleful than that of the honest crudity
of what we have called the emergent class, though actually less
disastrous because they were a small minority instead of the
majority. But the contribution of this group to the confusion and
disorganization characteristic of art under democracy was greater
than that of the feudal nobles, because their relation to society as a
whole counted more. When they were placed by the emergence of
the democratic majority in a vigorous opposition of attitude to the
bulk of the people their influence no longer remained largely
negative, but made positively for cleavage and disunion. Thus the
unity of social emotion on which art so largely depends for a healthy
universality was still further disrupted.
We find, then, under democracy, not a fairly homogeneous musical
public with emotionally a single point of view, such as existed under
feudalism, but a division into a well-meaning but crude majority and
two minorities, one cultivated, the other frivolous: all three, but
especially the two extremes, held apart by profound differences of
feeling. Despite the inevitability and the desirability of
democratization as the only path away from slavery, such a
disorganization, even if temporary, must evidently, while it lasts,
work serious injuries to art. It is worth while to try, taking frankly at
first the attitude of the devil's advocate, to trace a few of the more
striking of these injuries as they show themselves in contemporary
music.

II
Of the "emergents" who constitute the most novel element in the
contemporary situation, the well-meaning but crude listeners who
form a numerically overwhelming majority of our concert-goers, the
effect may be described, in most general terms, as being to put a
premium on all that is easily grasped, obvious, primitive, at the
expense of the subtler, more highly organized effects of art—on
sensation as against thought, on facile sentiment as against deep
feeling, on extrinsic association as against intrinsic beauty. Mentally,
emotionally, and æsthetically children, they naturally demand the
childlike, if not the childish.
There seems to be something far deeper than accident in the
coincidence of the rise about 1830, that is, about a generation after
the French Revolution, under Berlioz and Liszt, of that program
music which is generally acknowledged to be peculiarly characteristic
of our period, with the invasion of concert-halls by masses of these
childlike listeners, as eager for the stories that music might be made
to suggest as they were unprepared to appreciate its more intrinsic
beauties. They were drawn by the "program" before they grew up
with the "music." Lacking the concentration needed to hold all but
the simplest melodies together in their minds, pathetically incapable
of the far greater range and precision of attention required to hear
synthetically a complex work like an overture or a symphony, they
were puzzled or bored by Beethoven, and in their helplessness to
follow a musical thread could only grope in the dark until they found
a dramatic one. Such a clue in the labyrinth was the "program."
They hailed it with the delight of the comparatively unmusical person
in opera, who considers it the highest type of music because it
supplies him with the largest apparatus of non-musical
commentaries (scenery, gestures, words) on the music he cannot
understand. Program music, a sort of idealized opera with scenery
and actors left to the imagination, fulfilled the same indispensable
service for the novice in the concert-room.
The immense popularity of the program idea, from that day to this,
is evidence of its complete fitness to the needs of its audience. It
says to them, in effect: "You have little 'ear' for music, and take no
more joy in the highly organized melodies of a Beethoven symphony
or a Bach fugue, with their infinite subtlety of tonal and rhythmic
relationships, than in the most trivial tunes. Never mind: I will give
you two or three short motives, clearly labeled, that you cannot help
recognizing. This one will mean 'love,' that 'jealousy,' that 'death,'
and so on.... You are not fascinated by, because you are unable to
follow, the creative imagination by which such masters as these
build whole worlds of musical beauty out of a few simple themes—
an imagination as truly creative as that which carried Newton from
the falling apple to the law of gravitation, or directed the infinite
patient delving in detail of a Pasteur or a Darwin. Never mind.
Remember the story, and you will know that during the love scene
the composer must be developing the 'love' motive.... You are even
more indifferent to the broader balance of part with part, the
symmetry and coöperation of all in the whole, harder to grasp just
as the concinnity of a Greek temple as a whole is harder to feel than
the charm of a bit of sculpture here or the texture of the marble
there. Never mind. I will give you a structure in sections, like a sky-
scraper. Section will follow section as event follows event in the
plot.... In short, the story shall be 'All you know, and all you need to
know.' It shall be a straw that will keep you from drowning as the
inundation of the music passes over you, and that will save you the
trouble of learning to swim."
Of course, this does not mean that music of a high order cannot be
associated with a program, or that the two cannot be not only
coexistent but fruitfully coöperative. They are so in many a
representative modern work—in Strauss's "Death and
Transfiguration," for instance, or d'lndy's "Istar," or Dukas's
"L'Apprenti Sorcier," or Rachmaninoff's "Island of the Dead." What is
meant is that the program idea derives both its popularity and its
peculiar menace in large measure from the stress it places on the
appeal to something outside music—to association, that is—at the
expense of the appeal to music itself, and thus from the official
sanction it seems to give to what is essentially an unmusical
conception of music. The program school of composers is the first
school that has not merely tolerated but encouraged, elaborated,
and rationalized the conviction of the unmusical that music is to be
valued chiefly not for itself, but for something else. How dangerous
such a compromise with the majority may be, both to public taste
and to the composer, is startlingly, not to say tragically, illustrated by
the steady tendency of the greatest master of the school, Richard
Strauss, to become more and more trivially "realistic" with each new
work, and by the complaisance of the public in paying him vast sums
of money for thus progressively corrupting it. In every one of his
symphonic poems, from the exuberant "Don Juan" (1888) to the
surprisingly banal "Alpensymphonie" (1915), glorious pages of music
have alternated with silly tricks of imitation, as for instance the
splendid development of the husband theme in the "Symphonia
Domestica" with the bawling of the baby; but in the latest we have
the maximum of imitation and the minimum of music. Apart from
their gorgeous orchestral dress its themes are with few exceptions
commonplace, dull, and pretentious. Except in one or two passages
they are not imaginatively or significantly developed. On the other
hand there is no end of "tone-painting," much of it a revamping of
the distant-hunting-horns, rustling-leaves, and warbling-bird-calls
which have been timeworn theatrical properties of music ever since
Raff's "Im Walde" and Wagner's "Waldweben"; some of it more
original, like the pictures of sunrise and sunset with which the work
begins and ends. In these associatively vivid but musically
amorphous passages melody, harmony, rhythm, key disappear in a
strange opaque cloud of tone, realistically representing night—the
kind of night to which the German wit compared Hegel's Absolute
—"in which all cows are black." The same childish realism which
made Wagner show us his dragon on the stage instead of in our own
imaginations introduces a wind-machine in the storm and sheep
bells in the mountain pasture. In all this we see an artist who was
once capable of writing the introduction and coda of "Death and
Transfiguration" taking his art into the nursery to play games with.
But the effect of music on childlike audiences, indisposed to active
mental effort and all for taking music passively like a kind of tonal
Turkish bath, reaches its logical extreme not in the program music of
which Strauss is the most famous exponent, but in that superficially
different but fundamentally related movement known as
impressionism, which is led by the other most discussed composer of
our day, Debussy. Strikingly contrasted as are these two leaders of
contemporary music in temperament, in artistic aims, in technical
methods, their æsthetic theories are at one in the slight demands
they make on the attention of an inevitably inattentive public. Both
encourage the listener to look away from the music itself to
something that it suggests to him. But impressionism goes further
than programmism. May not those people, it says, who find organic
melody, development, and form fatiguing, and to whom you give a
program to help them out—may they not find the program fatiguing,
too? May not its being prescribed offend their sense of "freedom"?
Why exact of them the effort to follow even the story? Better to give
them simply a title, as vague and elusive as possible, and foster the
mood of day-dreaming thus suggested by avoiding all definite
melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic features in the music, while
enhancing its purely sensuous charm to the utmost degree possible.
Such, carried out with extraordinary talent, is the artistic creed of
Debussy. Just as programmism appeals from music to association,
impressionism appeals to sentiment, to fancy, and to the
phantasmagoric reveries upon which they are ever so ready to
embark.
It is noteworthy, moreover, that both programmism and
impressionism, however systematically they may minimize their
demands on the intelligence of their audience, do not abate, but
rather tend constantly to increase, their ministration to its sense.
Indeed, they systematically maximize their sensuous appeal; and
though their characteristic methods of making this appeal differ as
widely as their general attitudes, that of programmism being
extensive and that of impressionism intensive, the insistence of both
on sensuous rather than on intellectual or emotional values is surely
one of the most indicative, and it may be added one of the most
disquieting, symptoms of the condition of modern music.
The method of the program school in general, and of Strauss in
particular, is extensive in that it aims at boundless piling up of
means, a formidable accumulation of sonorities for the besieging of
the ear. Its motto is that attributed to the German by the witty
Frenchman: "Plenty of it." Berlioz, the pioneer of the movement,
with his "mammoth orchestras," and his prescription, in his requiem,
of four separate brass bands, one at each corner of the church, and
eight pairs of kettle-drums in addition to bass drum, gong, and
cymbals; Mahler, commencing a symphony with a solo melody for
eight horns; Strauss, with his twelve horns behind the scenes in the
"Alpensymphonie," to say nothing of wind-machine, thunder-
machine, sheep bells, and a whole regiment of more usual
instruments—all these disciples of the extensive or quantitative
method aim to dazzle, stun, bewilder, and overwhelm. They can be
recognized by their abuse of the brass and percussion groups, their
childlike faith that if a noise is only loud enough it becomes noble.
They have a tendency, too, to mass whole groups of instruments on
a single "part," as Tschaikowsky, for instance, so often does with his
strings, whatever the sacrifice of interesting detail, for the sake of
brilliance and éclat. To some extent, of course, all this is justified,
even necessitated, by the vast size of modern concert-halls; but a
candid observer can hardly deny that it is systematically overdone in
the interests of sensationalism. The same tendency is observable
also in other than orchestral music. The piano, treated with such
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com