THE RELATION OF ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC KATHERINE RUTH HEYMAN (LIBRARY") UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO THE RELATION OF ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC BY KATHERINE RUTH HEYMAN BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY Publishers Copyright, 1921 BY SMALL, MAYNARD f COMPANY INCORPORATED To the Spirit of*Art AND ALL PURE CHANNELS THROUGH WHOM IT FLOWS; NAMING BY NAME PREFACE IN a Foreword I have always found the gist of the matter : what an author fears he has not made plain. This series of lectures, the outcome of one Confer- ence compiled from stray notes for a San Francisco club in 1916, is by virtue of scores of subsequent presentations so generally understandable that contrary to the custom of writers I shrink from the responsibility that my plain speaking entails. It is at the request of the publishers that these lectures are given to the larger audience known as the public, and my hope is that to each reader the book may serve only as a point of departure for the individual thought and research still too rare amongst musi- cians in my country. A Club will never take the place of a library, nor will a meeting serve the pur- pose of meditation. I acknowledge with gratitude my obligation to Sasaki Shigetz, Takuma Kuroda, J. Landseer Mac- kenzie, Emily Adams Goan and Sidney Howard, and to the devoted heart of Marie Planner in her indispensable cooperation. Here, too, I would thank Paul Dougherty, the painter, for the encouragement given me at the out- set of my researches when he said,f " But any man who sees anything at all, knows that what he sees is n't all there is of iti" * In music, to find the rest of it, one draws near to the Source of Life itself. '; KATHERINE RUTH WILLOUGHBY HEYMAN. CONTENTS PAGE THE MODES i DEBUSSY 24 RHYTHM 46 PARALLELS BETWEEN ULTRAMODERN POETRY AND ULTRAMODERN Music . 70 SCRIABIN no The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music THE MODES LUJRENCE BINYON, in the "Flight of the Dragon," * writes : " In the dance the body becomes a work of art, a plastic ideal, infinitely ex- pressive of emotion and of thought; and in every art the material taken up, just in so far as the artist is successful, is merged into idea." Before this he says, "The walls, the roof, the pillars of a great cathedral are in the mind of the architect no mere mass of stones, but so many coordinated energies, each exerting force in relation to each other, like the tense limbs of a body possessed by a single mood of rapt exaltation." To merge stone into idea may to the layman seem something of a task; but transmutation of music into its original substance is more readily conceivable. The closest rapport that can be es- tablished between our earthly art forms and the supersensuous verities is through the concept of relation and correspondence. Relation: this to that. Correspondence: 2 this with that. Ancient music took cognizance of these factors instead of * Laurence Binyon, " The Flight of the Dragon," an Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan. Pub- lished by John Murray, London. * Correspondence is a sort of proportion showing the unity of all things in their original essence. 2 THE RELATION OF attempting the mimetic or the descriptive. If it seems harder for architects to build of mind-stuff because stiff, unyielding matter is present to their senses, do the facts not imply that to the great builders, as to the Buddhists, matter was but a sense perception and a symbol ? Goethe says, Alles Vergangliche 1st nur ein Gleichbild. 1 For cathedrals are replete with examples of super- physical correspondences. Among these may be cited a chapel in Westminster Abbey conceived with reference to the numerical significance of the word petros, and Glastonbury Abbey, the oldest church in England (vetusta ecclesia), of which the chapel was built according to squares of 888 inches to typify the numerical value of the word "Jesus." Then if you care to look at a sketch of the Milan Cathedral reproduced in " The Canon " 2 you will see the beautiful symmetry of this edifice above and below the ground. In study and meditation on these matters it became clear to me that, using the same twelve semi- tones as (relative) material out of which all Occi- dental music has been constructed for thousands of years, if the ancients laid such great stress upon different formulas of tones for different occasions, and the powerful churches laid so great stress upon special music for special occasions, the reason must lie within the fundamental arrangements of this 1 W. F. Cobb, D.D., Rector of St. Ethelburga's in the City of London. " Mysticism and the Creed," preface, p. xv. 1 " The Canon." Anon. Published by Elkin Matthews, London. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 3 material. The difference is all in the placement of the semitone. It is to show something of these various arrangements and their connotations that these researches are submitted. Our " major " l scale has held popular sway, with his sad little half-caste wife, the " minor," until the Western world has forgotten all their dignified and pious relatives. We have been content with semblances instead of verities during the past two hundred and fifty years, and the result in the tech- nique of composition has been continual revision of rules made by pedants and broken by artists. For whom have these rules been made? They are dis- regarded every time the Creative Spirit takes com- mand. Is it not time we discovered some basic truth in music on which we can build ? The church is commonly said to have retarded the development of the art of music: the church forbade the use of certain factors that are now beginning to be revealed as erroneous, and held to certain factors that we begin to see are vital. 2 Among these I might refer to the intervals of the third and the fourth. The fourth has sounded ugly to us for several hundred 1 " Not indeed that all musical systems are founded on the same elementary relations. But universally recognized as be- longing to this class are the relations between any sound and its eighth above and below, either being regarded as a tonic; the relation between a sound and its fourth above, the latter being regarded as tonic ; the relation between a note and its fifth above, the former being regarded as tonic. But the re- lation of the Major third which plays such a prominent part in modern music has no place as an elementary relation in the system of Ancient Greece." Maurice Emmanuel, " Histoire de la Langue Musicale, Avertissement," p. vi. 2 Pierre Aubry, " Trouveres et Troubadours." The Grego- rian Age finds itself the inspiring genius of twentieth-century music. 4 THE RELATION OF years. A'ristoxenus 1 writes of the fourth as a funda- mental relation, and I find in my experiments that it has the relation in the chromatique scale that the fixed signs have in the Zodiac. The third, on the contrary, which has become pleasing to the ear of the Western world, connotes if my experiments are true the element of Fire to an extent which may be Responsible for disaster through that ele- ment. The Greek arrangements of the tones within the octave were called the Modes, and you can find them for yourselves readily by using just the white keys of the piano and making an octave, C to C (our Major) ; D to D, the Phrygian; and E to E, the Dorian mode. The others can easily be added, for the principle is the same. 2 The semitone will come respectively at the end of each tetrachord or half of the octave, in the middle of each and at the beginning of each. In our twentieth-century music the modes are largely used, but generally as a man- ner only a new language in which to say the same old things. For we have as yet no Canon of Musical Art, as the Chinese have in painting, their Six Canons, 3 and potencies are ignored. 1 Re The Fourth, in which the higher note is tonic : " This melodic interval . . . may be regarded as the fundamental sound relation of Greek music." "Aristoxenus," by Macran. a Bourgault Ducoudray, " Melodies Populaires de Grece et d'Orient." See preface, La Formation des Gammes Dia- toniques. * Petrucci (" La Philosophic de la Nature dans 1'Art de I'Extreme-Orient," p. 89). i. La consonnance de 1'esprit en- gendre le mouvement [de la vie]. 2. La loi des os au moyen du pinceau. 3. La forme representee dans la conformite avec les etres. 4. Selon la similitude [des objets] distribuer la couleur. 5. Disposer les lignes et leur attribuer leur place hierarchique. 6. Propager les formes en les faisant passer dans le dessin. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 5 Combarieu attributes the deformation of ethni- cal value of the modes to ignorance and haste. It is obvious, then, that to preserve the value to humanity of musical creation, there must be leaders who do not hurry. The deeper inner senses work in silence. Frederick Bligh Bond, 1 in "The Gate of Remembrance," speaks of pictures spontaneously apparent to the student when in a state of mental passivity after intellectual effort in the particular direction needed. The italics are in the original. Some inner sense of ours, as yet unnamed, veri- fies true and spontaneous concepts when we are sufficiently moved to lose account of sense impres- sions. Wagner writes in his essay on Religion and Art: 2 "In solemn hours, when all the world's appearances dissolve away as in a prophet's dream, we seem already to partake of redemption in ad- vance." And he says elsewhere, "The soul of mankind arises from the abyss of semblances" The Chinese music was in ancient times conceived according to a given tone, supplemented by other tones according to planetary influences. Ambros, the musical historian, accredits the origin of Chinese music to Fuh-Si, but I understand that Fuh-Si was a dynasty of sages and not a man; and that all Chinese culture had its origin in Fuh-Si! Chinese music is metaphysical in its quality. Each tone has a colour, a cosmic aspect, a human correspondence, a gesture, a number, an element, a trigram and a relative phase of consciousness. This matter be- comes very intricate and I will only reproduce 1 Frederick Bligh Bond, " The Gate of Remembrance." ? " Religion and Art." Prose Works, trans, by Ellis. 6 THE RELATION OF enough to serve as a point of departure for the devout explorer. This working out is from Eking (Japanese Ekki), a philosophical medium employed by the Zen sect of the Buddhists. Among the Greek modes the Dorian appealed to me by its quality, not merely because the Hindus were said to use it for their tender songs and the Greeks considered it the mode par excellence ; neither because it had been preserved in the music of various ancient established churches and in the folk song of Celtic and Slavonic countries. These facts, to be sure, would be sufficient to engage the attention and fix it upon the Dorian mode; but the quality that I felt in it was underneath and behind these facts as a truth shines faintly through an ancient myth. The Japanese philosopher, Sasaki Shigetz, has furnished me with an explanation of my re- sponse to the Dorian mode. That mode lies from E to E on the white keys of the piano, and A is the tonic. It is one of the modes which, having their two halves alike in shape, have their scale tone on their dominant. In other words, the fourth note is the tonic. 1 1 At the back of all systems that I have investigated I find the interval of the Fourth to be fundamental. The old Greek arrangement of two tetrachords, E F A, B C E, was called the scale of Olympus, and those notes represent according to Plutarch the numbers 6, 8, 9, 12; proportions which, to the Greeks, symbolized perfection. " The theory of ancient music seems constructed from a study of harmonic relations existing between the parts of the universe; and the musical canon was also probably based upon certain symmetrical consonances discovered in the pro- portions of the planets and the intervals between their or- bits." " The Canon." Anon. Published by Elkin Matthews, London. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 7 The tone E is mana-consciousness. Its corre- spondence among the elements is the Air. That consciousness is half human, half of the earth. It is the state of semiconscious infancy. In the adult it is that state of semiconsciousness which is mani- fest in moods. By a semitone E slides into F, the passions ; as B, the dream, slides by a semitone into C, which is intuition. I give this as an explanation from Oriental sources of the presence of the semi- tones in our diatonic scale. To revert to E, in its relation to the sky it is the wind; relating to the earth it is a tree ; relating to man it is a mood. It refers to the ear and to sound; therefore with ref- erence to Art it is Music. The corresponding colour is green (chrome green). In taste, the near- est approach to its correspondence is the flavour of chicken liver. The gesture corresponding to E is from right to left. It is perhaps such connotations in the world of sense that induced Scriabin to write to Briant- chaninoff after the outbreak of the great war, and just before his death, with regard to world con- ditions at that moment : " At such a time one wants to cry aloud to all who are capable of new concep- tions, scientists, and artists, who have hitherto held aloof from the common life, but who, in fact, are unconsciously creating history. The time has come to summon them to the construction of new forms, and the solution of new synthetic problems. These problems are not yet fully recognized, but are dimly perceptible in the quest of complex experiences, in tendencies such as those manifested by artists to reunite arts which have hitherto been differentiated, 8 THE RELATION OF to federate provinces heretofore entirely foreign to one another. The public is particularly aroused by the performance of productions which have philo- sophic ideas as a basis, and combine the elements of various arts. Personally I was distinctly con- scious of this at the fine rendering of Prometheus at the Queen's Hall, London. As I now reflect on the meaning of the war, I am inclined to attribute the public enthusiasm, which touched me so greatly at the time, not so much to the musical side of the work as to its combination of music and mysti- cism." * Students of Scriabin will recall the words of Dr. Eaglefield Hull in speaking of the Mystery, Scriabin's unfinished work at the time of his death : " This work promised music on higher planes than those hitherto reached, the opening of new worlds of beauty by the creation of a synthesis of the acoustic, the optical, the choreographic, and the plastic arts united into one whole by a central mystic and religious idea." Perhaps it is a childish fear on my part of being left alone in this room that has made me drag Scriabin in by the hand. But fortified by his sympathetic presence I have courage to show you more of my Dorian treasures with the light of Ekki shining upon them. The analogues just presented are of the tone E pure and simple, not affected by the shade of any other tone; for we are regarding it as the initial note or scale tone of a mode. But when we cognize A, the tonic in this (Dorian) scale, it must be in the E shade; and its analysis in that connection would 1 Dr. A. Eaglefield Hull, " Scriabin," p. 70. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 9 be as follows: A in the E shade represents pure Spiritual Power not in the least degree material. In man it is the reflection of the Divine Will ; with reference to the sky it is lightning; with reference to the seasons, it is Spring; of day it is Dawn the return, the resurrection ; of the human body it is the left foot ; referring 1 to the face it is the jaw, because it is a power that crushes. In the words of my authority : "This power comes from the sky in the Autumn and reappears from the earth in the Spring. That time they shake and the very fine power shakes and cracks; and breaks the seed and brings it up to the surface of the earth and opens the flowers of the trees and the grasses. But at the beginning of the year the power is very feeble and increases in February and is com- plete in March (Chinese weather). Then purple turns to green and this power vibrates the green leaves in the air as it shook the seeds in the ground. It remains in the sky till September and makes the great storms." In colour this A is the blue-purple of an electric spark. With reference to art it is sheer power; not intellect, not any wisdom, but monistic power. Therefore the art typified by the tone A would be athletics. According to my own experiments the scale tone and tonic of the Dorian mode represent Saturn and the Sun, Leo and Capricorn, the triangle and the hexagon ; and the scale tone is representative of St. Mark. I must confess that most of the books on musical history have only stimulated me to fresh research, to controvert the shallow and bigoted opinions they present. I think it was Ezra Pound 10 THE RELATION OF who remarked trenchantly that the first requisite of art was a lack of dullness. Is there anything as dull as a book on Musical History? It is from other studies that I have learned most about the essence of music: quaint books on the human race in other phases of expression and aspiration; books on ethnology, architecture, transcendentalism and literature. The Greek modes have been in disuse in Euro- pean music really only since the Reformation, and the music of Celtic and Slavonic peoples has never quite forsaken them. 1 2 3 The deformed Lydian mode, which we call the Major scale, has in other European countries for a quarter of a millennium borne the burden of all emotions. Please do not 1 Irish Folk Songs, harmonized by Hughes. 3 Breton Folk Songs, harmonized by Bourgault Ducoudray. 1 " There is not a country in Western Europe that can boast such great antiquity for its music as can Ireland," main- tains Fiske O'Hara. The popular Irish tenor is an enthusiast on the subject of Celtic music and literature, and has made a deeper study of it than most singers. " The melodies we admire so much today can often be traced back to an eastern or oriental origin," he says. " It is a far cry from the present time back to the days of St. Ambrose, in the fourth century, but we have to go back there to get at the root of the question, if indeed we may stop there. Some of our historians trace the Irish harp back to the Egyptians, from whom the early Milesian adventurers ob- tained it. The date of their arrival in Ireland is estimated at about 2,000 B.C. " In the middle of the fourth century, St. Ambrose went to Syria and Palestine and collected a number of the traditional Hebrew melodies, to which he adapted the early Christian hymns. He also brought back with him a system of musical notation, consisting of four scales, which have since been known as the Ambrosian Modes. These were brought to Ireland by the ecclesiastics under St. Patrick. Most of the early Irish melodies were composed on these scales." Detroit Free Press, ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 11 think me altogether profane when I speak of our limited material. It is hard, I know, to dissociate a melody from its accustomed reactions on our own nerve centers. Yet I do not think we can, for ex- ample, better express, three such varied sentiments than by these modifications of identical material. 1 Moderato Remove the words from our songs and intrinsi- cally what is the content? Is it life or is it death we are singing of? Is it winter or summer we are * Father W. J. Finn, conductor of the Paulist Choristers of Chicago, said, " The Agnus Dei in the St. Cecelia Mass is noble and exalting sung with the words and its proper ex- pression. But strip it of its text and what meaning remains? " He adds : " Hear Caruso sing Percy Kahn's setting of the Ave Maria and Caruso's interpretation is spiritual ; but take away the text and Kahn's Ave Maria will be a good substitute for Canio's Lament." In this connection I would refer you to " Musical Accom- paniment of Moving Pictures," by E. Lang and G. West, pub- lished by Boston Music Co. The chapter on Special Effects and How to Produce Them throws new light on the lack of valid emotional significance in our nineteenth-century music. 12 THE RELATION OF singing in? Is it a warlike band or a dreaming child that we are singing to ? Who knows, from our music? And the composer, in despair, writes Espressivo. Music has fallen upon evil days in the dark ages since her divorce from religion. May I be forgiven for recalling to your mind, in the event of your having recently thought only in the idiom of our customary European music, a few of the old Greek modes with their names? I will use C as the scale tone of each, to present the various qualities of the modes more distinctly. There are too many with their fourfold uses to dilate upon exhaustively, but I can refer you with confidence to the preface in the book by Bourgault Ducoudray, " Melodies Popu- laires de Grece et d'Orient." DORIAN: Tonic PHRYGIAN: S LYDIAN: ^ HYPODORIAN: -(5 1 - i 1 ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 13 HYPOPHRYGIAN: 3=fc i CHROMATIQUE-ORIENTALE : Now there were some hybrids in use in olden times as well as the pure modes, and under the alias of the minor scale one of them has long been in our midst. If you look at the harmonic minor scale, dividing it in the middle, you will see that it is a combination of a Phrygian lower tetrachord with an upper tetrachord Chromatique-Orientale. The Chromatique-Orientale is a very interesting mode. While I was studying these matters in Lon- don I had a Greek magazine published in Constan- tinople called Mowucfj. In that magazine there was a fragment of Ancient Greek music in this mode translated by Pachtikos into modern notation. The mode dates from what we would call almost pre- historic times. I cannot find its Oriental origin, for while it is common in modern Russian music, some Jewish students tell me it is like the music in the Synagogue. M. Saint-Saens told me that he had heard it in Egypt, and a Greek writer for whom I played my song " Mystic Shadow," written in the mode Chromatique-Orientale, mistook it for 14 THE RELATION OF the popular song " Galaxide," named after a coast town in Greece. 1 MYSTIC SHADOW. Composed London, 1912. To show you the "virtue" or power of these modes let me take a familiar four-bar phrase using C as the scale tone and beginning the tune on the third from the tonic in every one of the modes. i vn vi v m iv DORIAN SS^=^E^^=|-^f-H III IV PHRYGIAN 1 See " Musical Scales of the Hindus," by Sourinda Mohun Tagore (Calcutta, I. C. Bose & Co.). Of the Sampurna That, or Scales of 7 notes, the ninth Scale is the Chromatique- Orientale. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 15 CHROMATIQUE-ORIENTALE HYPO-CHROMATIQUE-ORIENTALE ARCHAIC USE OF OUR "'MINOR" In using these modes for your own amusement or instruction the best results are obtained by first considering each mode as you would C Major in the beginning of the first year of harmony. Then when you really write naturally in a mode, its quality is most pronounced and most interesting if you use the pure material without any accidentals. Ravel in his Greek songs has made good use of the modes, but never in so convincing a way as Grovlez. Grovlez is, I understand, a product of the Scola Cantorum in Paris, of which Vincent d'Indy is the head; and the most charming use of the Dorian mode in any piano composition that I know, exists in the little Sarabande in a slender volume by Gabriel Grovlez. 1 Incidentally, the Chanson du Chasseur in this same volume is written in the Lydian mode in A with D for the tonic. The effect is that of D Major with G* in it, which of course would not be D Major at all ; and the thing could no more have been written from such a confused basis of thought 1 "Almanach aux Images," by Gabriel Grovlez. 16 THE RELATION OF than could the Scriabin Prelude, Opus 51, marked Lugubre, beginning have been written in A minor as musicians have in- sisted. The essential features of A minor are lack- ing. This Prelude is written in a hybrid scale on E, as consistent a mode as our ordinary mongrel of Phrygian and Chromatique-Orientale. The only difference is that Scriabin used here a Dorian lower tetrachord instead of a Phrygian m instead and has founded the scale on its dominant in ancient fashion, making the fourth the tonic. For you have only to read the " Evolution of Form in Music" by Margaret Glyn or the preface to Bourgault Ducou- dray's book of Greek folk songs to perceive the normality of this separation of scale tone from tonic. One great error in German and English instruc- tion in counterpoint is the lack of recognition of ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 17 this duality. 1 As in perfect rhythm the accent is independent of the beat, the scale tone and tonic in a perfectly conceived mode have their individual enti- ties which may or may not be identical. One of our losses during the recent centuries of music came through the identification of scale tone with tonic, destroying the virtue of the mode, just as by com- mon acceptance due to vulgarization of rhythmic concepts, thesis and accent have become synonymous, destroying the virtue of the rhythm. As Doctor Hull points out in his book on " Modern Harmony," many of the great composers of the recent era have at moments overstepped the proscribed boundaries of the major and minor scales and wandered into the preserves of this neighbouring kingdom of the modes. The Chopin Fantasie opens not in F minor but in the Dorian mode in C that has F for its tonic, and the Liszt Sonata opens with a phrase in that same mode repeated in the Chromatique-Orientale. It is a poignant use of this material that Liszt dis- plays. The exotic note of mystery with which he 1 The so-called " Tonics " and " Dominants " appertaining to the ancient church use are here shown for the sake of completeness, although the modern composer is entirely un- affected by them. This indifference leaves the Aeolian ident- ical with the Hypodorian, the Hypomixolydian with the Dorian, the Hypoaeolian with the Phrygian, while the Hypo- lydian coincides with our major scale. Hull, " Modern Har- mony," p. 25. Compare Bourgault Ducoudray. 18 THE RELATION OF opens the Sonata is repeated just before the Fugue and reappears at the close of this eloquent work. But Liszt was close to the church which conserves the Mysteries for us, and perhaps it would not be idle to give his B minor Sonata the subtitle of " The Earth-life Dream." There is no reason, of course, why a mode should lend itself immediately to our service, or be spon- taneously as flexible to our hand as an accustomed tonality. An Asiatic would not be able to employ the major scale with little love and great success. The novel chords and sequences arising out of a given mode must appear as normal, as inevitable to us as the VI, II, V, I of our customary scale, before that mode has become our language in which we can speak without premeditation. If you do not realize what this shifting of unconscious anticipation means, try to transpose at sight my simple little Russian Cradle Song, 1 in which there is just one accidental before the last refrain, or my Dorian Lullaby, 2 which has none at all. Arthur Farwell was kindled by my enthusiasm for the modes to make an interesting Phrygian ex- periment in " The Evergreen Tree." 3 Charles Griffes discerned in the Chromatique- Orientale the charm that led me to introduce it to him, and this gifted artist, whose loss is a blow to American music, made his first use of the scale Chromatique-Orientale in "The Kairn of Korid- 1 "Russian Cradle Song" (Arthur P. Schmidt, Boston). "Dorian Lullaby" (Boston Music Co.). 8 Percy Mackaye and Arthur Farwell, " The Evergreen Tree," A Christmas Community Masque of the Tree of Light. The John Church Co. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 19 wen," a Dance Drama which was presented at the Neighbourhood Playhouse in 1917. His har- monization of old Chinese songs (published by Schirmer) made of five, six, and seven-tone scales, is scholarly and beautiful, and does certainly present "a lack of dullness." Even more than that, it re- veals an immersion of himself in the mode chosen. Surely, certain composers of the black-walnut period have used the modes, but from without rather than within the realm of their spontaneous creating. They used the modes, that is all. Brahms used them, but he assimilated them, as Bantock does. He used them by taking them into himself, which is Analysis, instead of going out into them, which is Sympathy. 1 The Dial, some time ago, made a dis- criminating criticism of a book in saying, " It sug- gests the book of a writer who has attempted to immerse himself in the subject but has not absorbed its implications." There is an axiom, " Generation from generation is never fecund." The meaning is this: Creation was complete in the beginning. Formation, or gen- eration, has continuously taken place since the be- ginning, but nothing more has been created. Now in the microcosm as in the macrocosm, there is the World of Formation and there is the World of Creation. Whether you wish to regard the World of Formation as a mere sense perception is your own privilege to decide ; 2 but a word, a thought, a person even, generated, has of necessity to be reborn, or enter the World of Creation, before power is 1 G. R. S. Mead, " Quests Old and New." * Cobb, " Mysticism and the Creed," p. 140, par. 2. 20 acquired, before it becomes fecund. The stolen thought, the borrowed word, the Tomlinson of a man, is only generation from generation. There is not that force of Nature in it which makes things move. Of our American music Ernest Newman writes in the Manchester Guardian: " For so original a nation in many matters the Americans are curi- ously imitative in music. Their MacDowell and Loeffler and Parker and Hadley and all the rest of them that are known over here are second-hand talents; almost everything they have to say has already been said in some form or another by some one else ... it comes to us only as the reflection in a mirror, a distillation of some one else's brew." The whole-tone scale is an important factor in the music of the early twentieth century, but so far as I know, it is negligible as an element in archaic music. Comment of mine added to the writings of Clutsam, 1 Hull, 2 and Lenormand 3 on this scale would be little short of impertinence, for the only original offering I have to make in connection with the whole-tone scale is its supermundane correspondences. Since this working-out is only empirical, I will merely say that the strongest correspondences I find here are Earth and Air. The fundamental tonal arrangements in ultra- modern music that have a specific relation to archaic music are the Greek modes, the Scriabin scales, and 1 "The Whole-tone Scale and its Practical Use." The Musical Times, Nov. I, 1910. Vol. 51, p. 702. * A. Eaglefield Hull, "Modern Harmony" (Augener). Chap. V. 1 Lenormand, "A Study of Modern Harmony." (Boston Music Co.). Chap. X. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 21 the duodecuple scale. Now the duodecuple, or scale of twelve equal divisions within the octave without a tonic or center of repose, is found in aboriginal music, notably that of the American Indians. For many years music of the Indians of the West had been transcribed by ear. Then the Hemenway Southwestern Expedition made more scientific at- tempts at recording this music, and the phonograph revealed grave inaccuracies in aural records previ- ously made. Benjamin Ives Oilman writes of a Hopi Snake-song, 1 " The singer delivers the melody with the lithe security with which he handles the snake in whose honour it is chanted. Armour for defense and a scale for guidance would alike be gratuitous hindrances." This duodecuple scale is used by Stravinski, Schon- berg, and Ornstein with good effect. Many moderns attempt its use, but freedom from a subconscious sense of tonality is as rare and difficult of attainment as freedom from a subconscious sense of authority. With some success the Dalcroze school in its im- provisations makes use of the duodecuple scale. Emancipation from a tonic center is doubtless a con- notation in the art-world of the change of ideals in the political and religious worlds. 2 As in Hindu music 3 there were many deities and many scales, 4 1 A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology, Vol. V. Houphton Mifflin, 1908. * Walter Morse Rummel, " Hesternae Rosae," Serta II. Preface. 3 Shahinda, " Indian Music." Wm. Marchant & Co., The Goupil Gallery, 5 Regent St., London. Preface by F. Gilbert Webb. " The music of all countries is ever the echo of the idiosyncrasies and mental states of its producers." 4 Rajah Comm. Sourindro Mohun Tagore, " Musical Scales of the Hindus." 22 THE RELATION OF each under its own ruling spirit, so in less eastern lands there was the rule of the planets with Tonic and Dominant or King and Priest. Then in place of Modality, which involved these two under plane- tary influences, came the new order under Protes- tantism, its very ignorance possibly under divine guidance leading toward a purer monism or unity. Thus came Tonality the King, a powerfully mag- netized center; then equal freedom of the twelve tones without domination, analogous perhaps on the positive and negative planes to Democracy and Anarchy. // " Armour for defense and a scale for guidance " are really " alike gratuitous hindrances," then the scheme may be justified, and with it who knows but that we are even now entering upon a new era? I would not say, however, that our ultramodern music is the last word in music. I would rather suggest that with the achievement of a general understanding of the cloistered mysteries that in- spired its source, we shall have completed what I would call the Grecian cycle. Then we can begin to think about ultramodern music. Let us conclude with a word from that delightful book by Claude Bragdon, " Projective Ornament " : "The new beauty which corresponds to the new knowledge, is the beauty of principles; not the world-aspect, but the world-order"; and a parallel thought in the works of one Fu-Hsi about four thousand years ago : " Three represents heaven, two the earth. The harmony of these is the World- order, of which the image is Music." ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 23 REFERENCES Laurence Binyon, " The Flight of the Dragon." W. F. Cobb, D.D., " Mysticism and The Creed." Anon., " The Canon." Published by Elkin Matthews. Macran, " Aristoxenus." Bourgault Ducoudray, " Melodies Populaires de Grece." Petrucci, " La Philosophic de la nature dans 1'Art de rExtreme-Orient." Frederick Bligh Bond, " The Gate of Remembrance." Combarieu. Wagner, "Religion and Art" (Prose Works). Hull, " Scriabin." Hughes, " Irish Folk Songs." Bourgault Ducoudray, " Breton Folk Songs." Fiske O'Hara. Heyman, " Dorian Lullaby " ; " Russian Cradle Song." Griffes, " Chinese Songs." Hull, " Modern Harmony." Sourindra Mohun Tagore, "Musical Scales of the Hindus." Kawczynski. G. H. Clutsam, " The Whole-tone Scale." Lenormand, " A Study of Modern Harmony." A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology, Vol. V. Walter Morse Rummel, " Hesternae Rosae." Shahinda, " Indian Music." Claude Bragdon, " Projective Ornament" 24 THE RELATION OF DEBUSSY THE home is the source of the musical life of a country, as I hope to explain to you in this chapter on Claude Debussy. Claude Debussy shared honours with Richard Strauss. He is a contemporary of Richard Strauss. At the beginning of this century Richard Strauss was a sensation from Germany. He discovered something. One of our critical poets has observed that as a scientist does not lay claim to his title until he has discovered something, neither should the artist consider himself an artist before he has made a discovery. In the nineteenth century Wagner had been a sensation from Germany. He also had discovered something. It was high time for France to find within her borders a peer of the greatest German musicians. In science France has always had much to offer. In literature she has never been sterile. But music had gone along in Germanic lines since the early nineteenth century. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms perhaps because of the Stich- und-Druch, the lithography and printing enterprises of Germany that served to popularize her music throughout the world, perhaps because of the Ger- man pianos that excelled the French Erard and Pleyel, perhaps because in English-speaking coun- tries our mediums of circulation of music were named Breitkopf und Hartel, Angener, Schmidt, ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 25 Schubert, Schirmer, Litolff, Peters, Fischer. The piano had long been the advertising medium of national music. The piano was the household pet. Mechanical pianos have now put the worthless piano teacher out of business. The rank and file would rather turn on the victrola and play a rag, the domestic national music, than turn on the embar- rassed and red- faced schoolgirl to play what a pupil of a pupil of a teacher in Germany had taught her. The automatic instrument has established a standard of technical perfection in the rendition of the classics for household entertainment that is not attainable by the novice. It has given us a respite from bad teaching and bad art while we take our breath for the art to come. And in the respite the spell of Germanic music is broken. The first French exponent of piano literature in our time was Pugno. I doubt that even he could have excited much comment had it not been for his association with the violinist Ysaye. We were too accustomed to the German virtuosi. The cre- ative interpretations of Ysaye changed our ideal of violin playing, and in the first years of this century Thibaut came to ratify our newly formed con- cept. Fickle as we are, the virtuosity of the Rus- sian school has now claimed our attention, but in the meantime the Joachim superstition disappeared. The German vocal tradition by its very virtue had become national and limited. I mean, the songs were beautiful, the songs of Schumann, Schubert and Brahms, largely because of the gift those great liederwriters had of fitting the vowel and consonant to the tone and pitch. German lieder are untrans- 26 THE RELATION OF latable. Hear Die Beiden Grenadiere in French and you will be convinced if you have doubted this. It needs the real understanding of any language to present its songs. Each language has its own nuance and its own quantity. Then, too, the general subject of German songs is Love-and-death, and each national approach to this theme is individual. France had a pretty, light sort of salon music for the voice, Massenet, Reynaldo Hahn and others, that were rather like Louis Seize furniture an anachronism in the nineteenth century. It may have been on account of the paucity of native impulse toward musical creativeness that the French govern- ment in the early 70' s sent out Bourgault Ducoudray to the Near East to bring home discoveries that would inspire young artists. In making the gesture away from Wagner, France had first the aid of Cesar Franck, the Belgian composer who was for many years organist of the Madeleine. He employed modes and rhythms that had been conserved in the church. His pupil Vincent d'Indy followed in his footsteps, and a disciple of d'Indy named Gabriel Grovlez has carried on the tradition of his master and grandmaster. You re- member undoubtedly that it was the idea of Cesar Franck to get away from the intense emotionalism of Wagner which had exerted such a powerful in- fluence upon France. Those who have followed in the footsteps of Cesar Franck may sound thin to us. They do not set our emotions tingling, they do not stir us, they do not even worry us. Cesar Franck had a mystical quality which was individual. That part of his gift and of his theory he could not im- ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 27 part. His songs are not too interesting, but where he has the resources of the orchestra he exemplifies with great sincerity his anti-Wagnerian doctrines. He aspired to a spiritual antithesis to Wagner's emotionalism, and his impulse was undoubtedly in the direction of the future of music. Appreciation of Franck was not a political anti- Wagnerian motive such as that which has fostered recognition of Debussy. His music was scholastic, monastic, but it was not strong enough. Its genius was exclusively Roman Catholic, while Richard Wagner used his emotional power for inclusively religious ends; and Richard Strauss permitted his emotionalism derived from Wagner to be an end in itself. There we have the musical status of the two countries in 1900, the beginning of our century, with Eulenspiegel rampant. Now in 1902 they had in France the first per- formance of Debussy's Pelleas. Previously his Noc- turnes had been played by Chevillard * and the String Quartette by La Societe Nationale. 2 Twenty years earlier Debussy was receiving three medals for theory, two for piano, the first prize for accompanying at the Conservatoire, and receiving honours for counter- point and fugue at the age of twenty. About that time he went to Russia. He frequented cabarets, he met the Russian gypsies, he became familiar with Moscow. Arenski had made a success with his piano Concerto and was developing rhythms. Scriabin was a child of ten, already writing like Chopin. In Russia Debussy saw the score of Boris, 1 Concerts Chevillard, Paris, 1900. * Societe Nationale, 1893, by the Ysaye Quartette. 28 THE RELATION OF which was then unknown. It is no wonder that he was much influenced by this visit to Russia. He had always hated the restrictions of the har- mony book, in which he was perhaps not different from other young students, but the Prix de Rome and his travels gave him authority which many another young composer might covet, to ignore the sacred canons of a harmony book that is re- vised from time to time out of sheer respect for the genius who dares to contravene its laws. The critics of France rejoiced in the harmonic eman- cipation of Claude Debussy. One of them writes: " We celebrated the cure of certain infected chords that had never been allowed to appear in so- ciety without first being subjected to humiliating ' preparations ' and were bound to accept inflexible 'resolutions.' With apparent nonchalance this friend of poets and painters turned the geography of music upside down." After the Russian visit it was written of him in a French magazine : " The Germanic charm was broken against this living, free, picturesque music. A second journey to Bay- reuth turned him forever from the idol that had so harmed the music of France." This was written by Mallarme. But then they go on, these critics, writing be- tween 1910 and 1913, may I show you what I have found in French magazines of those years? " He is a profound image of modernity ; he is modernity. One might almost say that today De- bussy is all there is of music (toute la musique}. Music is Debussy ! " It is no wonder that Vuillermoz wrote in Le ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 29 Grand Revue in 1913 that if Mozart could give us his opinion, the fate of a composer at the begin- ning of the twentieth century would look much more desirable to him than that of a contemporary of Marie Antoinette. Now let us try to penetrate the secret of Debussy's charm. Laloy writes of him explaining the charm thus : " The notes and the lines are exalted to the point of being mingled in the original emotion. These (referring to the second book of Preludes) have a clear form, which nevertheless only follows the line of the thought. It is as if the thought were born musi- cal, or rather music itself. Chopin showed the way. It was given to Debussy to find the goal." So we have a composer whose thought creates its own forms! Laloy continues, anticipating Mr. Cyril Scott: "Tonality is the basis of classicism. The Symphony is a tonal edifice erected according to fixed laws. Everything conspires to affirm the tonality." We all know so many bars in the "tonic," so many bars of the "dominant," "de- velopment," " recapitulation," all revolving round the fixed center. A change of location of that center we call a change of tonality, while it is really, with our equal temperament, merely a change of pitch. Tonality, in exotic music, is fundamental arrangement of tones; a matter of proportion. Laloy continues : " In Asia there is an infinite num- ber of tonalities. Thus Europe, enclosed in a uni- tonal system, has surrendered to the impetuous invasion of Oriental scales that have come as re- generative agencies. The first to use them were the Russians, since their folklore was Slavonic, almost 30 THE RELATION OF Oriental. But the honour of extending this new in- spiration right across Europe belongs to Debussy. He introduced the Orient into music. With him classicism is dead form." This contrast drawn by Laloy between the "classic" and the "Oriental" is novel and important. If I am to take your hands and help you find the needle Claude Debussy in the haystack of modern music, it might be well first to locate the haystack. I think it is not starred as a noteworthy object on tours through colleges or conservatories of music. But it is very noteworthy. It is a larger haystack than perhaps you know. On one side modern music touches antiquity, on another pos- terity; a third side is bounded by the physical or scientific and the fourth by the superphysical or religious. Such is our Haystack of Modern Music. Let me explain. As for antiquity : To music in all ancient civilizations a divine origin is attributed. In Finland music is supposed to have come through the God Wainominen; and in India Sarasvahta the spouse of Brahma placed the Vina or sacred instru- ment in the hands of Nared. The world-wide concept of the divinity of this art appears to be due to the superphysical or magical powers ascribed to music. It is in vocational, perhaps e vocational. This is the corner of the haystack where the side called antiquity meets the side called the super- physical. Now about the middle of the sixteenth century the modes or tonal arrangements different from the patterns of our major and minor scales came into disuse for secular music in Europe. They were conserved in certain places, namely, the Greek ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 31 and Roman Catholic churches and the folk-song of Slavonic and Celtic countries, so we have them now to use as the warp of our new musical fabric to- gether with the threads of our new scholarship spun during these three hundred years. For during this length of time, being practically limited to the major and minor scale arrangements, we have given our- selves to their development. Both melody and harmony arise from the mode used. Melody and harmony are two of the four factors of music. The other two are rhythm and timbre. As for timbre, you may call it quality or colour if you like. As a usable factor, it is a char- acteristic of Occidental music. Oriental music has monotony of colour because quality as a calculated factor in musical effect is a matter either of key- relationship, or of overtones due to polyphony and sympathetic vibration. And only in Western music is there either modulation from one key to another or the symphonic development called polyphony. 1 Unless one links Russia with the Oriental world, it is obviously unfair to credit Debussy with having brought the Orient into European music. France is a better center of distribution for ideas than Rus- sia, both on account of the language in which its periodicals are printed and because of the social and 1 " The sarangi player follows the voice, but during pauses and sometimes while the song continues, he indulges in florid passage of his own. . . . The heterophony of the Greeks, which is dimly suggested by the sarangi player's methods, was an anticipation of the great system of counterpoint and its offshoot harmony which have been developed to the highest pitch by the musicians of Europe." The Ragas of Hindu- stan, published by the Philharmonic Society of Western India. Poona, 32 THE RELATION OF commercial intercourse between its capital and the capitals of other countries. Debussy did not ante- date "the Five" who gave Russian music its place in the world today. 1 So far, then, his fame rests not on having intro- duced but on popularizing the forgotten modes, and on flying in the face of harmony books. But new basic arrangements of tones necessitate transgres- sion of laws made for the major and minor modes. Resolutions of the I3th are different, cadences are different, because tonics and scale tones are differ- ent. We no longer find VI, II, V, I agreeable and soporific as that well-worn cadence is in the routine- taught music. It is amazing that Debussy with his sense of the novel did not go further. In 1898, twenty-three years ago, he wrote the Chansons de Bilitis, referred to by Chenneviere as delicate and voluptuous visions of the radiant decadence of Greece. There is no emotion in this sort of music. The cri de cceur that goes with the crise de nerfs died out with Strauss in Germany and Tschaikowski in Russia. Emotion in art has become either attenuated to a mental extract or exalted to a mystic ecstasy the first in France, the second in Russia ; and as an exquisite attenuation of French sentiment, let me commend to you these four songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louys that Debussy set to music. In these songs he has not abolished the major and minor modes. He follows the vowel colour in the poem with subtlety and he uses many enharmonic devices, like his celebrated contemporaries; but the 1 Borodin, Cui, Balakireff, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 33 content of his art at that time was truly revealed in one of the French eulogies : " Voluptuous, cor- poreal, naturalistic that is the Debussy art. He sings beauty concrete, the soul of the universe." That was the spirit of his country in those fin de siecle days. Here is another discourse upon his art by one of his reviewers : " Most of us are not pre- pared to receive this ideal communion with so deli- cate a soul and such high sensibilities. We are not used to these agglomerations of sound. We shrug the shoulders. Oh, essence of laziness! A quoi bon? Oh, words thrice cowardly ! Debussy has re- juvenated music. He has transformed the funda- ment (tonality), the inspiration, the form. With one stroke of his genius he has accomplished this metamorphosis." But let us not forget that it was in the early 70' s that Bourgault Ducoudray pub- lished his " Chansons de Grece et d'Orient," " hop- ing to extend the horizon of tonality," he said, "among the musicians of Europe." And pedagogi- cally his work is being carried on now by his disciple Maurice Emmanuel and by the school of Jaques Dalcroze. Debussy's gift to Tonality was rather La gamme par tons the whole-tone scale which, it is said, he heard sung by the Javanese at the Paris Exposi- tion in 1896. Our one mode, the major, had been dressed up in greater and greater variety of clothes (called accidentals and modulations) until beyond what Richard Strauss gave her, there seemed nothing more her frame could carry; so quite naturally there has been a reversion to Simplicity. Modern 34 THE RELATION OF music looks complicated only when we suspect it of being the old music more thickly disguised. Now from the superphysical side of our haystack we see powerful correspondences with tonal ar- rangements in Egyptian and Greek music. These have been revived in this twentieth century, but not so much by Debussy as by the Russians. Debussy has used the ancient modes for colour. And in colour he excels. His whole-tone scale, however, is the one that lends most characteristic colour to his music. n m iv v vi vii The triads made in that scale are always aug- mented. I mean the triad is always half a tone bigger than the major chord. Now in this music founded on the whole-tone scale, if you hear it without an understanding of the material it is made of, you have much the same feeling as when in the streets of Paris the only word you understand is the one that sounds like English. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 35 In 1904 Debussy became known in the pianistic world through his first "modern" pieces, 1 and in 1910 he published the first book of Preludes. Russia had its great composers and its great pianists and its great publishers, but Russia was remote from the thought of Europe. The one great piano teacher outside of Russia was Leschetitzki in Vienna, whose repertoire fatigued us, although his genius for dis- covering technical means of presenting it, dominated us. Another excellent man was Matthay in Lon- don. Godowski and Sauer had original ways of manipulating the piano keyboard ; but the discerning musicians went to Paris. Blanche Selva, the cele- brated pupil of d'Indy, had already given six recitals in a week in London, showing us new resources of the instrument. When I said to her : " But it does n't sound like a piano," she answered with some sur- prise, " But that is the aim of all of us, is it not?" Paris was not far from London, and the London recital programs came to include numbers by Claude Debussy. In 1913 appeared his second volume of Preludes. All this music had to be rendered with a new use of our human mechanism if we wished to make it sound as it sounded in Paris ; because the old, clear, pianistic resonance precluded the sympathetic vibrations necessary to produce the overtones re- quired for the beauty of the harmonies that the whole-tone scale had generated. So the honour is really due to Debussy for imbuing piano-playing with a certain distinctive charm. There were artists and there were amateurs who had instinctively used 1 Laloy, " Claude Debussy." 86 THE RELATION OF that charm in their rendering of Chopin, of Liszt and even of Schumann; but in Debussy's music it was indispensable. The Delphic Dancers and the Sacred Procession, published in 1910, are said to have been inspired by Greek bas-reliefs. There is internal evidence to bear out the statement. These compositions are un- fortunately rarely heard. It is easy to imagine here the influence of Debussy's friend Erik Satie, for there is a smooth chordal sequence moving in stately fashion that is more like the " Sonneries de la Rose-Croix" than like the free fancy of Debussy. In writing of Debussy, Lawrence Oilman has remarked that while certain of the roots of his music strike deep into the fertile soil of Wagner, yet the product is altogether his own. The things he learned from Wagner aside from " potency of dissonant combinations, of chromatic relations, of structural flexibility," are voices resolving anywhere and unlawfully frequent modulations. In " Clair de Lune " you will find a pretty souvenir left by the Rhine Maidens. This composition is an excellent example of Debussy's piano art : subtle, sensuous, lacking in real fervour, lacking in rhythmic inven- tion, lacking in harmonic fertility, when you take into consideration the free range that he allowed himself, but withal beautifully proportioned, and exercising his peculiar fascination. Now suppose we examine certain specimens of his vocal art. He won the Prix de Rome nearly forty years ago with his opera, " L' Enfant Prodigue." He was young, still battling the dried-up pedants who ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 37 deplored his modern tendencies while awarding him the prize. That opera is the only composition of his that I know in which there is real emotion and no element of what we call decadence. It is totally different in character from his opera " Pelleas et Melisande," finished twenty years later, in which there is wonderful subtlety induced by the words; for Maeterlinck's book has power. On the road toward the music of the future Debussy is a land- mark ; but we must work with him intelligently. He is a man to appreciate with discrimination rather than to adore. It might be of interest to you to compare the air of " Lia " from L'Enfant Prodigue with the ex- cerpt " La Lettre " from the opera Pelleas. These two will mark for you most readily the course of his muse's flight. The intermediate period between these two pro- ductions is highly interesting in revealing the in- fluences that made Debussy's art what we find it at various stages. The melodic inspiration is not re- markable, and the rhythmic figures are few. For example, the same rhythmic pattern of a tremolo of a third in sixteenth notes is used in " II pleure dans mon coeur" and in the Prelude of the early group of pieces called " Pour le Piano " composi- tions separated by many years. It is the crafts- manship, the French finesse, which we might well emulate. Instead of a mass of sound such as his foreign contemporaries used, Debussy chose "sub- tlety of harmonic fluidity with translucent orches- tration," as Lawrence Oilman says in felicitous phrase. 38 THE RELATION OF In this, passage from the air of " Lia " si les jours suivaient les jours, you will see a bit of the Magic Fire music by Wag- ner and an unconscious citation from the G minor concerto of Saint-Saens; but these are used deli- cately, for his memory had as light a touch as his imagination. Again, in some of his songs we hear an echo of Reynaldo Hahn and of Massenet. He belongs to an artificial civilization where city dwellers sing the joys of the gason fleuri that they never see, and ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 39 virtuous sopranos confide in French to an audience of rich acquaintances the personal experiences that they never had in English. Massenet's " Thais," in its celebrated Interlude called " Meditation," is close kindred to the ending of " Les Cloches " by Debussy, written in 1891. Their mode of expression at that period was more French than individual. You will also find in "Green," written by Debussy in 1913, over twenty years later, almost a replica of the last vocal phrase in the Reynaldo Hahn song, " L'heure Exquise." This illustration is a variant of it : m It is a cliche a formula usual in French song, and in the following guise is a common ending in American songs : 2CS3Z C31 J IrvS " v n * ? * \AJ V '4- 4 l 1 9 . 3 -g-: M\* hi t Q F* ' l-t |J, V k |_ i 3 ' \-s SfS, 7 A II The French idiom, however stereotyped, is employed more exquisitely than our own; but Debussy was not sufficiently original to be free from it. 1 1 Even as the section P/MJ animt of Hahn's song " Pay- sage Triste " might be a variation on the theme " Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre," the end of " Romance " by Debussy is 40 THE RELATION OF Consider the words of French songs songs by Hahn or by Debussy or Faure. You will find such men as Verlaine, Baudelaire, Charles Due d'Orleans, and Pierre Louys to be the inspiration of modern French song. Poetry, not for its intellectual concepts but for the music indwelling between the little letters as the mind attends, will make the songs of a people. The thought of the community makes the words in the people's hearts. The language of a country makes its song writing. Its song writing develops into its operas. Maeterlinck's mind was trained in scholastic, classical and mystical tradition, and he wrote the book of " Pelleas and Melisande." Its beauty and literary quality found their response in the heart of Debussy, and the opera was born. Musically one of the strongest characteristics of this opera is that it is written entirely as a recitative. The words make the rhythm; not only the little rhythmic patterns, but the flow. Other men in France had written whole songs in recitative, but Pelleas is the only opera ever written entirely in this form. If in Debussy's Clair de Lune you hear a reminder of the Rhine maidens, he may owe a debt of gratitude for Pelleas to Wagner's pioneer work in breaking a path for opera in free form. Why do we talk of Free Form? Has any historic artist ever used the forms of his predecessors as they came to his hand? I wonder if the spirit of art is ever obliging enough to conform to a previ- ously made mould without being coerced by a pre- near kindred to the end of " Sourdine " by Hahn. As Hahn drew from folk-song, Debussy drew from Hahn. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 41 conceived idea of limitation on the part of the artist. We speculate sometimes as to the enduring quality of Claude Debussy. Laloy may help us to formulate an opinion. " Do you really believe in the immo- bility of works of art? Those that seem everlasting, are they not just dried flowers of an herbarium? Have they not been subjected to a sort of steriliza- tion to brave the test of the centuries, and do you not think that their real perfume as living flowers is practically unknown to us? There is a mys- terious instant when creation realization of art responds exactly to the aspirations of a people or a time." Laloy goes on to say : " For the first time per- haps, in its hunt for genius, man has discovered one in full vigour of his youth and captured him alive. For the first time poor humanity that always gets up too late! has lost nothing of that elfin moment when the sun rises. Let the conscience of our time be at rest : it has not committed the sin of waiting too long to thank the gods for Claude Debussy." It would perhaps be ungracious to call to mind those whom the world has acclaimed in their little hour. Let us hear what else this eulogist in an excellent French magazine has to say of the musical hero of the day : " He came at the precise moment when the evolution of painting and of literary schools ren- dered intelligible to the French sensibilities his subtle discourse." Ah, that is just the point! If the creative artist be not in his time in advance of the sensibilities of his people, they will all too soon be in advance of him. The artist must carry the torch. 42 THE RELATION OF There is musical content and there is musical manner. The content varies but little throughout the centuries, save when a new era sets in ; but man- ner changes with the decade. Salon music, music that is very lovely but in essence neither high nor deep, meets in all periods with instant approval but is of brief duration in the minds of men. If in such compositions as La Puerta del Vino and Mandoline Debussy had possessed a wider vision, it would have lent variety to the rhythms employed. 1 The stringed instruments have always been entertaining as a sub- ject of imitation by the piano. The vocal line is not especially distinguished in Mandoline, and as a composition it is not better than the Moszkowski Guitarre if you judge them by the historic esti- mate, as Matthew Arnold would say, taking into consideration the twenty years intervening. In that Prelude from the second volume, called La Puerta del Vino, Debussy gives us a Habanera that is charm- ing because of its enharmonic changes, its pianistic devices for tone colour, its persistent guitar accom- paniment. It is an instance of the witchery that is due to his skill. But in the matter of rhythm the Russians have outdone the French. Ravel has used accents with inspired irregularity, but what I would like to call harmonies of rhythm belong rather to Stravinski and Scriabin. Believe me, I am not de- crying Debussy, neither do I wish to detract from his just fame ; but the haystack of modern music is large, and in finding Debussy as we set out to do, we must inevitably come across many other glisten- 1 Cf. Ravel, Alborado del Grazioso. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 43 ing needles. Debussy is not, after all, "toute la musique," as one reviewer claims. In a memorable lecture by Annie Besant in Lon- don there occurred the observation that the prophet who told the world what it already knew, in more beautiful language than it was accustomed to, was crowned with laurels; while the prophet who told the world what it did not know, was stoned. A lesser mystic and a less eloquent speaker, though a remarkable person, Cyril Scott, in his book, "The Philosophy of Modernism in Music," has referred to the instant appeal made by mediocrity. It is true that mediocrity does not offend. It is something that we understand. If it be agreeably presented, we are flattered at having understood something beautiful. Whereas genius, or the result of re- ceptivity to the creative rather than the generative spirit, often repels us because our pride is hurt at finding ourselves unequal to the task of instant com- prehension. It would be assuming too much to accuse Debussy of mediocrity as a creative artist. Nevertheless, in the life pathos of Moussorgski and the spiritual exaltation of Scriabin, both of whom are on principle bare of ornamentation, almost bleak in their austerity, something was created in music. Debussy invented a new and charming man- ner, eminently French, in which he told us what we had known before. We had only to accustom our- selves to his language. He did not speak as a prophet. In the transition from the nineteenth to the twen- tieth century, Debussy represents mentally the end of the earlier period and technically the beginning 44 THE RELATION OF of the new. He had not the frank realism of his Germanic rival Strauss, nor was he an emancipated spirit like his Russian contemporary Scriabin. He had not the depth of feeling of Moussorgski in songs, or the fundamental novelty and mystical quality of Scriabin or Stravinski. He is the mental sensualist that France was at the end of the cen- tury. But Laloy says still more, and here we can agree with him heartily: "With Debussy, Spring came into the music of France. All the doors of harmony opened into gardens. It was an enchant- ment. Music had acquired a new smile, she had discovered the Fountain of Youth." Without melodic invention, devoid of rhythmic novelty, and with no great dramatic sense, Debussy was the means of opening our hearts to those others who have since come and those who may come ; for he told the news with a simplicity that could be understood. Seed from everywhere in Europe was blown across the garden of his mind. And over the flowers that have sprung up there, lies the white mist of Dawn: THE DAWN OF A NEW BEAUTY IN MUSIC. It is not to his discredit that he did not make the Dawn, as some of his overenthusiastic literary friends have claimed. It is greatly to his credit that he did not face the Sunset, either as a youth, when there was a prize to be won, or later when, as Yeats has said, one is more concerned with the fruits than the flowers. Debussy had a great gift and responsibility in his sense of emancipation for music, which, had he been born ten years later, he might more completely have ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 45 fulfilled. He had the requisite scholarship. He seems to me a la fin des fins, a spirit freed, that chooses only to linger in moonlit courtyards enjoy- ing vicariously the scenes of lovers' meetings: an aesthetic soul content with shadows, not bravely ad- vancing like Scriabin, nor returning like Moussorg- ski to view sorrow with compassion. Being exploited by publishers and teachers, De- bussy is given an importance in the modern musical world that might well be diffused. Ravel is his superior in ensemble writing; the Russians excel him in poignancy of expression in their songs. The young Englishmen have more vigour. The ten Sonatas of Scriabin cause one to wonder what great or deep impression was left by Debussy on the highway of pianoforte literature. The orchestral works of Delius, the operas of Moussorgski, the Symphonies of Scriabin, may perhaps be greater monuments to the creative genius of our time than the largest forms of composition that Debussy has left. His lasting value will, it seems to me, lie in the fact of his being a pioneer in the household trail leading away from the German music previ- ously exploited ; and the creative imagination of the English-speaking countries, at least, will take the path that he has indicated rather than the one pre- viously well traveled, because of the unconscious memory of sister's singing and the grand piano at home. 46 THE RELATION OF RHYTHM RIYTHM is in the year and its seasons recur- rently flowing. Time is their marking off into days and hours. Calendars change, but the silent procession of the seasons goes on, regardless of man's reckoning. Was ever the Equinox changed by Gregory or Julian ? Does Spring hop into Sum- mer on a given day with an "accent"? Let flow our music as the seasons flow. You feel that you want an "accent" on the first beat? Very well, what kind? What is the "first beat"? Perhaps one might call it an appearance. Let us say the dancer leaps from off-stage and lands on the scene upon that first beat. Does he stand there, or land there with a bang ? He appears in an unbroken flight from non-appearance there could not be a cut in the rhythm or the time before his landing. And the end of that leap is a beginning. This involves elasticity, a rebound to the next thing and the next and the next. That continuous motion is a manifestation of Rhythm. It is not monotonous or fatiguing to muscle or to sense, because it is re- silient: alternate expansion and contraction, alter- nate action and passivity. Yet it is not fifty per cent action and fifty per cent passivity; rather would I say it is ninety-nine per cent the passive alertness of the wild animal, and one per cent lithe spring. The spring must be to passive alertness again. ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 47 Then, suppose you are a dancer already on the scene, a musician in the midst of the composition. Your accent on the first beat may not be the end of a leap, in that case. Try an agogic accent a pathetic accent a quantitative accent, at the top or the bottom or the middle of things. You have run up wait a bit; you have gone down stop to turn round ; you have come to a middle give us an instant's time to realize it is the middle. The Rus- sian opera accents its star by isolation; from the topmost balcony the star is visible. That is because a little space is left all round the star. It is a beautiful form of accentuation. It is like a deep breath on the first day of Spring. The great cosmic stream as it courses through the arts is called Rhythm. The channels by means of which it flows we call rhythms, and the meas- urement of those moulds that take the flow we call meter. In one brief lecture there must of necessity be a very limited survey of these, and my only wish is to lead you to discover metrical forms for your- selves. Let them not become stagnant basins, but remain open conduits for the unbroken flow of Rhythm. To measure Rhythm by its mould would be to confound the life of a man with his stature. I understand, not from books but from what is called direct instruction, given to one of my friends, that Rhythm is not mathematical any more than all law is mathematical, but is manifested on the earth plane as mathematical in order to be conceivable. Vibration, I am told, is only another earth-explana- tion and not Rhythm itself, for Rhythm is a Law. Let us begin then by conceiving Rhythm as a 48 THE RELATION OF law a law of motion. We might assume that the movement is spiral, because we know from experi- ence that we return, not to the same spot, but to one analogous. It seems to me always that I return lifted above the spot that the present one resembles ; that I am not in the old place but can look down upon it and relate it to the enriched experience of the present. This movement, which may be at its center merely static or potential energy, manifests to us as vibration; simple, and by degrees infinitely complex; and the greatest complexity here (corre- sponding to our number 7, the largest integral unit) is, I am told, the i or beginning on the next plane of consciousness. That subtle motion of our being represented by the number 7 produces a sensitized condition which we know as perfect love in its highest aspect. This has little, I suppose, of what is called practical value for music students ; but be- fore leaving this phase of the subject let me show you what was written by the scientist, mystic and musician, Alexander Scriabin, at the outbreak of the war in Europe : "The history of races is the expression at the periphery of the development of a central idea, which comes to the meditating prophet and is felt by the creative artist, but is completely hidden from the masses. The development of this idea is dependent upon the Rhythm of the individual attainments, and the periodic accumulation of creative energy acting at the periphery, produces the upheavals whereby the evolutionary movement of races is accomplished. These upheavals (cataclysms, catastrophes, wars, revolutions, etc.), in shaking the souls of men, open ULTRAMODERN TO ARCHAIC MUSIC 49 them to the reception of the idea hidden behind the outward happenings." The " Rhythm of individual attainment " is some- thing to be pondered by the individual. To cast aside the superficial activities of the mind which make him appear to the seeing observer like a little cork bobbing about on top of the water, this is the first thing. In the repose and peace of his own soul each individual must find his essential being, his enduring and individual self ; and this will swing into its own harmonious rhythm in the great cosmic movement, affecting necessarily all lesser and tran- sitory matters. In each art Rhythm presents a different mani- festation. May I show you two charts, two studies in Rhythm of design made by a student under Mr. George Hamilton at the Detroit School of Design? Remember, Rhythm is to our sense a progress. You musicians have, I hope, during the past few minutes been released from the idea that Rhythm is the recurrent metrical beat, so many to a minute. Our measurement of time must be all wrong; it doesn't match the facts of nature. This morning the sun rose at seven by your watch. Your watch keeps perfect time. But does the sun rise at seven by your watch tomorrow ? Not at all ; it has made an accellerando and rises at six fifty-six. What! is the sun irregular ? Ah, no ! it has a Rhythm through the years; and on its own good day it rises again when your watch marks seven. The watch had no life; it was but a puppet that had to stand in one spot and jerk its little arms until the planets came home from their long journey. Poor little clock, 50 THE RELATION OF made by man! Would you have your music com- port with the clock, or be one with the motion of the stars? This first chart is an exposition of Rhythm in several aspects relative to design, Rhythm of value, of direction, of measure, of interval, of form. In this connection we are using eight line elements and dealing with them rhythmically. When we em- ploy these line elements for Rhythm of measure, then Rhythm is designedly lacking in value, direction, interval and form. We have isolated the one factor of measure in which to demonstrate Rhythm. So in isolating value (intensity), that alone of all the possibilities for Rhythm in the pattern will be em- ployed rhythmically. So with each of the five. In the small design at the side of the chart, Rhythm is used in all, in value, in direction, measure, inter- val and form. All these factors working together without a picture in mind, serve of themselves to suggest a pictorial design. (Chart I.) In the second chart, which uses beside these factors another element called hidden balance or occult balance, those same line elements with which we began have evolved into a design that we would say had beauty. (Chart 2.) In a third chart, an evolution of the previous ones, the flowing rhythms of various factors in de- sign served to produce a real picture; for through the activity of the imagination Rhythm called into being forms that were harmonious. It would have been a very difficult thing to draw those several forms in the picture without their clashing rhythmi- cally. As it is, the shallow curve of the arm in DC U z s