The Degradation of Music
Claflin, Avery
346 THE COMMONWEAL February 3, 1926 THE DEGRADATION OF MUSIC By AVERY CLAFLIN IS MUSIC down and out? This question is a difficult one for the musician to answer satisfactorily. His...
...How it attained its highest potential the scientist admits he cannot explain...
...Even aside from the musical content of his work, its strict structural conception, filled out with impeccable technique, attains an elevation and detachment from human passions unsurpassed in any art...
...Although material is lacking to fill the immense gaps between these high spots, it is evident that the forms of polyphony and strict counterpoint were gradually being evolved by experiment...
...With intimate acquaintance comes satiety...
...Still, freedom is in illusory boon...
...To the student of natural science this is no problem at all, for nature's energy is constantly falling from a higher to a lower level...
...The next step was to combine the two preceding ones...
...And certainly, no one more than Palestrina merits recognition for having preserved it to generations where its existence is becoming legendary...
...Apart from a small group in Paris, few admire him and it is inconceivable he will ever receive the general attention his work merits...
...What would have happened," asked W. S. Rockstro, the English musical archaeologist, "had the polyphonic school been cultivated in the seventeenth century with the zeal that was brought to bear upon it in the sixteenth...
...The first step is to ascertain, what, in music, is comparable to an inflected language...
...This resulted in music's first illegitimacy—the opera, and its first vice—virtuosity...
...It marks the final advance so far as the technical manipulation of notes is concerned...
...The question typifies the woe of one, who, confronted with a remorseless example of degradation, tries to explain it as the whimsical trick of an evil genius, rather than the inexorable trend of human affairs...
...In other words, our temporal kingdom is tending, as inevitably as the Wagner trilogy, toward an immense ash pile...
...In my estimation this achievement is the crowning glory of all music...
...Consider Erik Satie, most of whose work is of eighteenth-century-like clarity and restraint...
...This we tacitly accept as proven, unless so stubborn as to inquire why, after so many years of development, Aristotle is not taught in our primary schools...
...This condition was fulfilled by the introduction of part-music...
...The best authority places this at 1226...
...This at once limits the receptors to those of similar emotional constitution...
...Emotional content becomes carnal to a degree never before sought...
...This term defines a form of communication whose practical existence commenced when it supplanted signs, gestures, and mimicry as a method of transmitting thoughts or emotions...
...But even these are interested only so long as their knowledge is incomplete...
...On the other hand, the actual beginning of part-music lies shrouded in the middle-ages...
...Thus, Bach may represent the culmination of the art, or Beethoven, or Wagner, or Stravinsky, or Irving Berlin—and the climax of musical history placed accordingly...
...Some may choose the time of Hucbald (840-930) a Flemish monk in whose writings is found a description of crude partmusic...
...For a time his influence on the group of Six was considerable, but gradually they have all drifted back to the demands of the twentieth century...
...No essentially new discovery appeared to change the course of music...
...Does it not, then, seem plausible that the near future will see a sharp decline of chamber and symphonic music, and a new development in combined forms ? Abstractly speaking, these are abominations...
...It is one with the transcendent thrill of the philosopher observing the symmetry of things, and the fervor of the saint in face of the Creator's perfect wisdom...
...The first to feel this poverty was Beethoven who soon began taking all sorts of liberties with the sonata...
...Every new complication or lascivity, after overcoming the first public inertia, is welcomed hilariously...
...The next century beheld the career of mighty Palestrina (1526-1594) and with him the mature development of polyphony...
...And even others, with the first composer whose work bears the stamp of true musical genius, Josquin Depres (1445-1521...
...This form has the advantage of symmetry and ease of comprehension, but the repetitions and insignificant jingles between are boresome to a degree unknown in the earlier masters...
...Now the contemporary field is surfeited with music for instrumental combinations which does not get across as such, but which might do very well as setting for something else...
...But the degradation has been carefully observed and propounded in Kelvin's second law of thermo-dynamics...
...This states that while the amount of energy in the universe may remain constant, the higher powers tend always to fall lower...
...Likewise, the splendors of plain-song are so inextricably bound up with the liturgy that they really occupy a place apart...
...The primitive devices of diaphony, descant, and organum go back a thousand years more or less...
...But all the old ones were specialized in and complicated to the extreme—forms chopped into amorphism...
...With Depres, technique was actually subordinated to artistic production...
...This seems unanswerable—so conclusive, in fact, that one is tempted to apply it to the course of man's various pursuits...
...Where the former was composed of simultaneous melodies woven compactly together, the latter consisted of only one, supported by numerous crosssections of polyphony containing no particular melodic interest (harmony...
...He rarely generalizes on whether human energy follows the course of nature's energy, but lets it be assumed that man in his various occupations shows, if not constant, at least cyclical progress...
...In the century after Beethoven the depreciation is obvious...
...Of course, hundreds of people educate themselves back to Beethoven, scores return to Bach, and perhaps a handful attains Palestrina...
...So far as the orchestra is concerned, Virgil Thomson has already remarked that we are principally interested in it as a vehicle for the conductor's antics...
...And the monodists soon found that their single line of melody could be of sustaining interest only when combined with other material or used as a vehicle for an acrobat...
...or monuments superior to the pyramids and obelisks erected in our public squares...
...As our interest is drawn toward the unknown, the principal attraction will always remain the immediate future...
...In his opinion, "history began with admitting as its starting point that the speechless animal who raised himself to the use of an inflected language must have made an effort greater and longer than the effort required for him, after perfecting his tongue, to vulgarize and degrade it...
...But, for the historian tracing the course of music, neither fictitious aspirations nor individual works of art are of so much significance as the sequence of formulae...
...Still others may begin with the earliest masters, Dunstable, Binchois, and Dufay, whose activity commenced about 1420...
...the full capabilities of musical instruments utilized to cover up poverty of idea...
...By similar reasoning music must have become autonomous when it succeeded in conveying emotions independent of other mediums...
...Shoddy workmanship is accepted as music, which in a former time would have been considered as so much garbage...
...But there is no cause to shed tears over the constant decline of music, thanks to the fortuitous circumstance that the receptive taste has degraded likewise...
...counterpoint and rhythm muddied...
...Not a common experience, indeed, but even the most sceptical will have difficulty in naming a quality which has done as much to ennoble mankind...
...But the selection of an arbitrary date is a matter of personal opinion...
...Others may prefer to start with that lovely English round of mysterious origin, "Sumer is icumen in...
...If, then, Adams's reasoning were applied to music, it would maintain that music began with admitting as its starting point, that the singing man who raised himself to the use of rhythmic part-music, must have made an effort greater and longer than the effort required of him, after perfecting his medium, to vulgarize and degrade it...
...The direction of this trend depends upon what attitude is taken toward the enigma of whether man's evolution is for better or worse—whether it is ascent or degradation...
...It is regrettable, indeed, that it should so often be misunderstood or belittled on the ground that the intent of art is emotional and that Palestrina's impersonality is an inferior agent to this end...
...If music is to continue as an art at all, it must be in conjunction with factors of contemporary vitality...
...and the emotionalisms of each decade scrupulously adhered to...
...Obviously enough, the sixteenth-century Masses and motets have not the same appeal as the Eroica or February 3, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 347 Tristan, but they are not emotionless...
...Such a definition eliminates from consideration the singing and playing of the Greeks, which was only an intensifying adjunct of poetry...
...It makes little difference, however—so long as the ecart between composer and public is not great, music will sail prosperously along its course to the rubbish heap...
...His individual prejudices are certain to resolve it in terms of personal idolatry...
...The intense desire to have jazz introduced into polite musical society is prompted by the wish to revel in vulgar emotions without loss of dignity...
...Of course, the one line of melody could be developed freely...
...The chief one was to make it a personal matter and to reflect his own emotional states...
...In order to get anything at all out of it, composers must resort more to distortion, such as an exaggerated emotionalism, or a grueling mechanicality, or a whimsical abstraction...
...This technical diversity amounted to a watering of the art...
...to the development of music, for instance...
...For music has followed a more or less definite trend, quite distinct from the irresponsible factor of genius...
...But any system founded upon the quality of this or that composer's production is bound to be, on the whole, unsatisfactory...
...Or sometimes the receptive element leads, as in the jazz movement...
...In other words, when it was contrived to sing two or more melodies at the same time, an interest sprang up intrinsic solely to the music, which was lacking in even the finest of unisonous inventions...
...All this could only terminate, as it has done, in a dadaism of atonality...
...With atonality, music has reached a stage of low energy, of infinitesimals...
...These, as will be seen, consist of successive degradations either through specialization, the acquisition of extraneous material, the debasement of emotional expression, or laisser-aller down to tricks of mechanics...
...Reassuring it would indeed be to find the process of degradation reversible...
...The response to Palestrina is the sensation emanating from the contemplation of perfection...
...But practically, what else is there...
...The restless energy of Bach could only be appreciated in small quantities...
...The concentrated sublimity of Palestrina was put into a baser solution more palatable to mankind in general, and more pliable to the limitations of genius...
...Let it redound to his credit that Henry Adams faced the problem squarely...
...Such an outlook is more than the historian of mankind dares face...
...Now appear a counterpoint of chords and a harmony of keys, harmony so full as to be distinguished more by the silent notes than by the sounded ones...
...It was well enough for H. von Bulow to talk about the "painful sublimity" and "soulful accents" of the Opus 106, Adagio, but today's generation finds the rich gobs of sentimentality which Beethoven exuded rather too nauseating for intimate acquaintance...
...So the sonata form of Haydn arose, making it possible to spread a few ideas thinly, filling up the holes, as Sir Hubert Parry said, with ua lot of scurrying about...
...or whether the personal energy of the late Herr Stinnes was greater than that of George Washington, or Charles Martel, or Alexander of Macedon...
...Thus on the heels of the polyphonic system came the monodic, best remembered by Monteverde...
...But science does not believe it so, and music seems to concur...
...Pure music has ceased to be a lively art...
...Then it became necessary to weaken it still further...
...Polyody it is sometimes called...
...On the other hand, music lends itself to distortion readily only when in combination with other elements, as in the ballet, pantomine, or vaudeville...
...The difference between Sebastian Bach and Stravinsky is one of degree, not of process...
...Satie's example is likely to remain unique...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 13
