Is There a "Modern Music"?

How Artistic Experiments in Music Have Caused the "Modernists" to Fall Into Disrepute

ERNEST NEWMAN

WE have heard so much about "modern music" during the last ten or fifteen years that we may be forgiven for having believed for a time in the existence of it. Latterly, however, some of us have come to doubt that existence: we know now of several modern musics, but no "modern music." Sometimes it is called "ultra-modern" music, but that is a foolish term to employ, because the world moves so rapidly that what is ultramodern today is quite old-fashioned the day after to-morrow. In the last edition of Grove's Dictionary, published only a few years ago, Strauss is charged with the grave crime of being ultra-modern; and we can all of us remember the time when Debussy was regarded as hyper-ultra-modern: yet nowadays poor Strauss and Debussy are regarded by les jeunes of Germany and France as being coeval with the maiden aunts of les jeunes, and of about as much importance as those estimable but rather futile ladies. So let us avoid the word ultra-modern and speak only of modern music, using the term to indicate-not merely the music of our own day, for that is of various sorts, but the music of our own day that is supposed to be especially representative of the day, Strauss, Elgar, Delius, Puccini and Debussy, to say nothing of ancients like Wagner and Brahms, being looked upon as representative only of a vanished and somewhat feeble-minded past.

I WANT to know, then, where and what this "modern" music is. The question may seem queer to some people, but I mean it quite seriously. During the war years and in the first years of the Peace we were led to believe by a particular school of writers in each country that the old world of music was dead, and that a new one, having more or less decently interred its venerable predecessor, had now entered into the latter's musical inheritance. Some of the older composers, we were given to understand, were not at all bad fellows in their limited way, but painfully primitive as regards ideas, vocabulary and technique. Their emotion was facile, their mental outlook narrow, their language and their methods almost too ridiculously scholastic. Les jeunes were going to alter all this; no more romanticism, no more scholasticism, but a new and of course much saner because more realistic outlook upon life, expressed in a musical language of a directness and a concision that would make the old fogies look like ten cents.

We must not laugh at the notion itself, for no one who is anxious to see, before he dies, the next great development in music can feel anything but sympathetic towards these aspirations. It was not the wish to rebuild the musical world nearer to the modern heart's desire that was absurd, but the manner in which the rebuilding was gone about in some quarters, and the belief that it could be done in less time than it takes to put up a cigarette factory. Most ridiculous of all was a certain type of journalist that the new movement brought to the front. The old music meant, as far as nine-tenths of it were concerned, German music; and since the war had made Germany unpopular in most European countries except Turkey, it seemed an easy way to notoriety to protest oneself violently antiTeutonic in music, and to pose as a leader sounding the tocsin of "national" revolt in every country against the over-long hegemony of the Germans. It all looked so simple in those excited days. The national cat, it was confidently assumed, was going to jump in a certain direction. What could be cuter, then, than to place yourself just where you thought it was going to land, and claim most of the credit for having made it jump? The pathetically innocent assumption was that the musical world was now divided into two broad classes—the "conservatives," who, poor cretins, had grown so used to thinking in a certain way in music that the little grey matter that remained to them could not adapt itself to any other way, and the "progressives," dashing fellows with a Sister Anne-like gift of looking into futurity and seeing round corners, superintellectual Atlases on whose shoulders was laid the onerous but flattering burden of the new world.

In those early days the problem of newworld-building in music looked, as I have said, delightfully simple. On the one side were supposed to be all the mentally arthritic old duffers; on the other side all the sprightly young geniuses and their alert journalistic fuglemen. There were certain composers as to whose plenary inspiration it was high treason at that time to express a doubt; breathe so much as a hint that Schonberg's Three Piano Pieces or Five Orchestral Pieces or Stravinsky's Pribaoutki were not exactly masterpieces of the first order, and you were treated to the spectacle of a musical critic defending its young.

IT was useless for any one in another camp to try to make distinctions—to suggest, for example, that Petrouchka was a work of genius and the Sacre a work with a fair percentage of genius among its talent and its commonplace, while the Three Pieces for String Quartet were muddled failures. To talk like that was merely to get yourself written down as a "conservative" or "reactionary." For the "progressives" there were no such distinctions; they were wild clansmen, and you either had to accept without demur the chiefs and the customs of the clan or be treated as an enemy of the clan. When you tried to point out to these enthusiasts that it takes an exceptional sort of mind to write notable music, you were told that while perhaps not every young composer even among the progressives was a master, it was only by "encouraging" the young modern composer en masse that the great man could be brought into being. Formerly we had been under the delusion that the great man was one lucky throw of nature's out of ten million, and that his coming depended on the chance meeting of some man and some maiden twenty or thirty years before. It now appeared that the way to produce a swan was by getting together a vast number of geese and encouraging them all to quack their loudest. Not that any of us ever tried to discourage these musical geese from quacking. For one thing, we could not have done so no matter how hard we tried; for another, we thought it wiser, on merely hygienic grounds, to encourage them to write their music, for we felt that they would be better when they had got it out of their system. But this bland tolerance on our part was not enough: we were called upon not merely to endure, the music of these little people but to praise it. The young composer everywhere complained that not enough fuss was being made of him in official press quarters. I remember one bright young English composer, in an after-dinner speech, contrasting the relative indifference shown to him and his like in his own country with the commendable procedure of some central European country in which the young composers' heads supplied the design for the postage stamps. Deluded young man! I thought to myself; as if we could have got the head of a young English composer of that day on anything the size of a postagestamp!

IN those first post-war days the Daviddites were a noble band leagued in a common defence against the Philistines. But anyone with a knowledge of the history of the art, or of politics, for that matter, could have seen even then that this unity would not last long. The necessities and the dangers of war unite us in the face of the enemy: but once the war, or the first shock of it, is over, the natural differences of human nature begin to make themselves felt. There was a time in Germany when Wagner and Lizst and Schumann were regarded as being in the one camp—that of the "New German School"; but it was not long before the Wagner-Liszt forces coalesced in one direction and the Schumann-BrahmsJoachim forces in the opposite direction. It was inevitable, then, that as the first danger passed away the modern holy brotherhood should begin to break up. It soon became apparent that there was no such thing as modern music, but, as I have already put it, only modern musics—that is to say, the new composers and their partisans began to form themselves into schools, and for each of these schools, of course, all of the other schools were quite wrong.

The facile distinction between a group of reactionaries on the one side and a group of progressives on the other now began to break down. Each school of progressives was certain that the truth was with it and it alone. Malipiero, who was by way of being a bit of a progressive himself, upset the Schönbergians by saying what the "reactionaries" had been saying all along—that much of Schonberg was only the old commonplace newly sophisticated: Malipiero showed that one of the Three Piano Pieces, for instance, when the natural harmonies of the melody were substituted for the tortured ones that Schonberg has applied to it, was merely a Mendelssohn Song Without Words. As time went on it became less and less possible to regard the "modern movement" as a uniform march of progressives in the same direction. Some ranged themselves under the banner of one chief, some under another. Some swore by atonality, some by polytonality, others by some other "ality" or "ism" that they could not quite define, though they were sure it was the only "ality" or "ism" that mattered. Schonberg does not see eye to eye with Stravinsky, while Stravinsky has just told an interviewer that Schonberg's music "means nothing" to him.

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Everywhere, in fact, the "movement" as a movement is rapidly breaking up. The public has steadily refused to follow any of these new leaders in their latest developments, for the simple reason that it feels instinctively that none of this new music, however interesting it may be in some ways, especially the technical and the theoretical, is great music; it is surely a significant fact that not a single work of Schonberg's is in the general repertory of the world, that nothing that Stravinsky has written since 1914 has become part of the repertory, and that the music-lover generally has quietly taken the measure of the Casellas, the Malipieros and all the rest of the "progressives" of a few years ago, and decided that the measure is not a very big one. Several of the composers who a few years ago were half-"conservative," half-"progressive," are beginning to say openly that so far as aesthetic as distinct from theoretic values are concerned the supposed revolution has brought forth practically nothing that really matters: only the other day Florent Schmitt pronounced upon Schonberg the verdict that has long been in the minds of thousands of less official judges,—that virtually Schonberg's only interest is as "a laboratory product." No one who is sensitive to the currents of the time can fail to perceive that the revolution of the last fifteen years has amounted aesthetically to next to nothing; "modern" music is falling into deeper disrepute with the public every day. The world is all the better for the turmoil that it made for a time: music had become too easy-going, too complacent, and was badly in need of a violent shaking. It has had it, and the field is now clear for the next great man. We all hope to live to see him, all hope to be able some day to sing our grateful "Nunc dimittisbut where in all the world is there a sign of him at present? One thing only is certain as the result of the recent upset,—that the vitamins the new music needs cannot be mad? by laboratory chemistry.