TIIE ETUDE FEBRUARY 1920 Page 91 Music After the War A Critical Estimate of What Kind of Music We May Now Expect After the Greatest Upheaval in History "THE music of the world flies away from us as we watch the burning out of the sun. Like bird after bird, its newness flies from us, and its separate resting-house here and there of places of the days. The years do act-ually seem to steal fr<im it an absolute quality which it onc e possessed."—VERNON BLACKBURN. Somewhere in his critical writings on art, the great Leo Tolstoi said that people are taught to write ex-tensive dissertations—such as would resemble the work of a celebrated author—on a subject about which they have not much to say. It is the same in music; when an acknowledged master of composition reveals beau-ties never dreamt of before, beauties of color produc-tions of rhythm, melodic scales, harmonic surprises and what not, he is pounced upon by innumerable compos-ers and would-be's, plodders tremendously circum-scribed in their conception of art who present us with hysterical imitations of such men as Debussy, DTndy, Rimsky-Korsakoff or even Richard Strauss, the one who particularly delights in implied discords and un-sightly enlargements of Wagner. Many of these composers, as we learn to know them, seem to be possessed with but one principal idea, a fear that some one may supplant them; an abundance of good musical thoughts may be with them, but to pre-sent these in a proper, worthy fashion is quite a dif-ferent matter. W e know that each turn of a musical phrase is con-trolled by a series of new ideas which must be either intentional or justifiable. There is something pecu-liarly deceptive in this pursuit of a musical thought that comes and goes at most inopportune moments; its development may last for years, but if properly caught and given to the world, uninfluenced by the work of others, the artist presents a sincere reproduction of his vision transformed into audible or visible reality, a work of superior merit. More than that: if the work gives evidence of intense mental concentration on the ideal, and is free from tricks and deceit, it not only impresses us with its originality, but also presents its maker as a mighty prophet of truth. Limitations of Other Days In days that are past, the confined symphonic form rendered it practically impossible for a composer to move outside of the narrow, structural limitations, and any such deviations would have been unintelligible to an ordinary hearer; but the auditors of yore advanced in musical understanding, and with the advent of new composers who were fearless in giving forth original ideas, patrons of art became duly acquainted with the structural design of Beethoven, each of whose sympho-nies, by the way, is absolutely dissimilar from the other; with the lyrism of Mendelssohn, with Schumann, Ber-lioz.' Liszt, Dvorak and Tschaikowsky. Wagner, at first, was unintelligible to all but a very few, and his orchestration was not enjoyed. Although certain piano sonatas of Beethoven have fallen away from repertoires (such as the first and second symphonies) he introduced bold innovations in music and worked on lines afterward adopted by Cesar Franck. This brings us close to the musical conceptions of Glazounoff, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Bala-kireff, Scriabine, Stravinsky, and their confreres, the French masters of modern composition, who have given us something more to think about and to relish. With these outpourings a direct appeal to our emo-tional nature has come and an impatience of technical restraint, as for example in Ariane et Barbe Bleu, by Dukas; Salome, by Schmitt, or Istar, by D'Indy; all these and a number of other works, orchestral, oper-atic, etc., are modern, but they are not the musical type that we may expect now, after the war. Surveying the musical field we can readily see the desire of many to get away from old ideas, genius By JAROSLAW DE ZIELINSKI [EDITOR'S NOTE.—Jaroslaw de Zielinski, Pole by birth, American by adoption and veteran of the Union Army in our Civil War, has retained a keen and illuminating interest in the most modern tendencies of music. The opinions he advances are here presented as those of a scholarly musician, but as in all other cases in which THE ETUDE endeavors to give all phases of a subject, these must be taken as Mr. Zielinski's individual views. THE ETUDE could not offer a confident prediction of what the music of to-morrow might be. It is hardly conceivable that the great war has not left a permanent psychic stamp upon the "world soul" which must be noticed in the music creations to come.] claiming precedence over antiquated forms and limited brain conception. Wagner gave some evidence of courage and vitality in 1849, prompted in his sincerity by a love for his country. In the present case one ruler undertook to change the map of the world, but it happened that he stumbled against things that he did not foresee. Chopin's revolutionary etude there-fore is not such an extraordinary phenomenon after all! The most advanced and outspoken composers, the Russians, some French, an Englishman or two, have come to enlarge the emotional range of music, to add a new utterance; but w e have found out by listening to others that repetitions, forced polyphony, blazing or-chestration, and other tricks of Wagner, as for exam-ple the sedulous employment of the Dim. 7th, have been done to death by hundreds of imitators the error of whose ways offers no attraction. Substance and Structure Quite a while ago it came to pass with would-be and real critics that Brahms, long before he passed away had ceased to be sympathetic though the learned ones have allowed that his music is amenable to intel-lectual control; but mastery of structure in its scho-lastic aspect is not the outpouring of an inspired mind. W e have taken exception to Wagner for too much polyphony but the trend of music in the primitive stage of our new era will undergo many changes bringing about harmonies resultant from complex melodic lines of polyphony, to which we are drifting gradually, the leading part always dominating. Th? unrelated chords have already come to stay while dissonances will help to secure polophonic effects. Most modern composers have aimed to abolish what served as useful guides to leaders of the past, and the best of them are departing from those ways, for they have ceased to be slaves of a system that throttled all ambition. The school of composition that will infuse art with new blood, new vitality, is already here and we will find it among its founders, Balakireff, Borodine, Cui, Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff whose divergence in style and moods reflects the sensitive and impres-sionable character of their people. A large number of imitators has already come into existence, but per-functory workmanship interests no longer an audience that has drunk in the unlooked-for startling exposi-tions of melodic and harmonic progressions of Bora-dine and his confreres, of Cesar Franck, Maurice Ravel, DTndy, Charles Szymanowski the Pole, Jean Sibelius the Finnish landscape painter, Ricardo Zan-donai, the two Andalusians Manuel de Falla and Joaquin Turina. The art of yesterday has gone to wrack and ruin, and the tendencies of what is coming will be healthier, fewer leit-motifs and more moods and feelings. The nationalist revival of Russian music has enlarged the emotional range of the intelligent student and his influence will be left to the future to decide. As Her-bert Spencer said upon a time, "Progress is not an accident, but a necessity." There exist no more influences of masters, or disci-ples to learn the ways of a certain school; masters, yes; there are musicians whom one would honor with such a title; disciples, pupils, even if they exist no longer, it is because there are no more leaders of schools or musicians who could be such. It is the same in literature, painting, sculpture, in fact in all the arts. Why ? To-day all musicians and artists are very individualistic. Their keenest anxiety is to avoid most carefully in their work all appearance of imitation. Admirers of great works have multiplied, and as two great works, particularly of opposite tendencies, can be admired at the same time, we have the admirer rather than the disciple. Nor are there any chiefs of schools using the word "school" in its broad and general sense who could influence the work of musicians of the generation fol-lowing them. The head of a school has a style of his own—not merely a few exceptional procedures—he is a complete law unto himself. The musician (or con-temporary artist) who has gained publicity, has but one ambition, and that is to produce individual works, works that have been brought up to date as much as possible. He could not find any more the time for devoting himself to forming disciples, or in elaborat-ing a grammar that would make it possible to form disciples. In the future there are to be no more heads of schools, no more disciples; nothing but admirers! There are critics and musicians who, wedded to the outpourings of the so-called German School, have taken exception to the French master who has exerted the strongest influence of his day developing most beautiful, sonorous and harmonic effects. Rob it of rhythm, melody, emotion or expression, there will remain but little charm in its diffused harmony, subtle mannerism, very susceptible to please delicate ears. Strange, is it not, that such procedure gives birth to perverted ideas, a sensation, rather than a picture that would aim, by such means, to replace music of the past. Robbed of its freedom and confident rise towards light which is defined by clearness, symmetry, rhythm and succession of sound musical ideas, we obtain a view of pure and perfect music of classic art, more like Franck's Symphony in D Minor, the 3d in C Minor for orchestra and piano by Saens, Lalo's, one of the most personal and perfect composers among us; also the Symphony for Orchestra and Piano by DTndy. Is Musical Germany Decadent ? Germany's musical progress to-day gives us some-thing to think about. Since the death of Richard Wagner we are dosed with repetitions of Beyreuth when Brahms and Berlioz are not imitated. Richard Strauss himself, notwithstanding the power of his symphonic works, the undisputable value of Salome and Electra, notwithstanding his prodigious orchestral skill, shows no semblance of genius; he is a personifi-cation of modern Germany in its essence and its ex-pression—perhaps its symbol. Richard Wagner was the musician of a rising Germany whose labors and patience led upward. Richard Strauss is, in spite of all his gifts, but a musician of German decadence, com-poser of false ability leaning only on the power of the orchestra and exaggerated sensations. He is in reality the best that Germany of to-day could put forward. His genius is an illusion and is wanting those intel-lectual virtues that assure success and justify it in the eyes of all. This opinion is based on what Mr. Wil-liam Ritter, who used to be one of the strongest apolo-gists of Strauss and Mailer, said in the "Mercure de France," of March, 1905. The temple of musical Germany has been for the last twenty years not at Bonn, Weimar, Munich or Bayreuth, but at Essen. The efforts of German or-chestration were directed in the sense of quantity and not toward the discovery of new instrumental re-sources, in their most valuable expression, such as Salome or Elcktra by Strauss or the Seventh Sym-phony by Mahler. W e have admirable and prodigious composers in other lands including America, where heretofore we were possessed by germanic conception from which
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