THE "NEW THOUGHT" COMPOSERS

W. J. Henderson

THIS globe is an uneasy footstool and those who are put upon it by the capricious hand of destiny have no sinecure. The hot pursuit of luxury, the less eager chase of glory, the processional dance upon the uncertain heels of fashion, these are elements in a whirligig of existence which shakes the breath out of the hardiest and stretches the weaker prone upon the ground. Even art must prance in the arena; and whereas most of us cherish the delusion that she is a divine goddess, treading undisturbed her majestic way across the field of lucent stars, she is no better than an Easter damosel walking subordinate in the avenue parade.

So at any rate might one easily conclude from lengthened observation of doings in the intangible realm of music. Whether thrilled like John Stuart Mill by fear that the possible combinations of tones were exhausted, or fired with a passionate desire to educe a new method for portrayal of emotions (the emotions themselves being also of a strange character) the new thought composers, with their wreck of melodies and their crash of chords, have deeply troubled the race of listeners. No more is there peace or comfort. No more is there refuge in silence or sleep. Even the indolent is pestered by the questioning of the alert, and the air throbs with Kipling's ancient query, "But is it art?"

Ferrucio Busoni, the distinguished pianist, imprisoned the spirit of the new thinkers in a phrase when he spoke of "lust of liberation." To break away from the old formulae, to seek new laws of development, to find hitherto undiscovered chariot lanes through the sunlit ether, this is the first purpose of the new supermen. Mr. Busoni may be permitted to speak again for them in a passage from his "New Aesthetic of Music."

"MUSIC was born free and to win freedom is its destiny. It will become the most complete of all reflexes of Nature by reason of its untrammeled immateriality. Even the poetic word ranks lower in point of incorporealness. It can gather together and disperse, can be motionless in repose or wildest tempestuosity; it has the extremest heights perceptible to man—what other art has these?— and its emotion seizes the human heart with that intensity which is independent of the 'idea.'"

The new thought composers emphasize especially the freedom and independence of music. To be sure they have not accepted all of Mr. Busoni's doctrines, for he tosses program music aside as valueless and even hostile in the development of a rarified and idealistic musical art. Without doubt the business of utilizing music to illustrate literature or life, and even to tell stories, explain motives and expatiate on philosophies, will not cease. But meanwhile it is in the domain of absolute music, which is music unassociated with text or representative scheme, that the cultivation of methods new and complicated must be carried on. Music must work out her own salvation or ruin within her own territory. This is imperative because in this beautiful art of tones the substance and the form are always one. In painting and in literature the thought maybe entirely apart from the form, but in any extended musical work the thought shapes the form.

THIS fortunately enables us to discern clearly wherein the novelty of the method of the new thought composers exists. It is not easy to explain it to the layman, but an attempt, however feeble, must be made. In all modern music melodies are indissolubly bound to the harmonies underlying them. We cannot conceive melody apart from harmony, as any one can prove for himself by intentionally playing some familiar tune with wrong harmony. The commonest harmonic successions of to-day are the outcome of centuries of development, and their foundation is the scale. Our modern major and minor scales have assumed the supreme positions in music because out of them has been developed the entire series of chord relations underlying all our melodies from Bach to Puccini. The major scale, which is our simplest, is our most important, because those harmonics which are fundamental are derived from the relations of its chief factors. Out of this scale arc made the melodies and harmonies of "God Save the King," "The Old Folks at Home," Schubert's "Die Forellen," the ode to joy in Beethoven's ninth symphony, the Walhalla theme in Wagner's tetralogy.

The chromatic scale, which gathers in every tone and half tone in the entire gamut of modern music, is not a fundamental scale. It is without key or tonality, such as we recognize in the scale of (' or (1. The employment of its characteristic melodic progressions or harmonic successions has heretofore always been regarded as exceptional, that is, an excursion beyond the simple fundamentals for the sake of variety, contrast or dramatic expression.

The new thought composers have apparently arrived at the conclusion that the road to freedom and independence lies in a world where the old conditions are reversed. What were once the exceptional things of music are to be the fundamentals, and the old fundamentals, the simple major and minor thoughts, are to be used chiefly for variety and contrast. They will occur from time to time as passing incidents in the chromatic and dissonant plot.

This explanation, if it bean explanation, is purely technical, because the thing accomplished is wholly that. To write of it in figurative or imaginative manner would mean nothing whatever. The result aimed at by tilt' new men may be likened to what might be brought about by painters determining that hereafter the fundamental tones in landscapes should not be the green of trees and grass and the blue of skies, but the passing notes of the shadows or even the accidentals of the plodding peasant's red cloak and yellow basket.

THE foremost representative of the new thought in music is Arnold Schoenberg, of Vienna, thirty-nine years old. Fourteen years ago he had completed ambitious compositions, but was yet unknown. Richard Strauss saw some of his manuscript music and was lost in admiration. Some one praised Strauss for writing appallingly complicated scores. The wizard of Munich shook his head. "There is a Vienna man," he said, "who has to have score paper made to order. Even I can make nothing of his work." This Schoenberg, "like a pale Pierrot, short, bald, with a restless nervous look and abrupt manners," as Kurt Schindler has happily described him, is also a painter, and he creates strange, elusive faces, which gaze into the beyond, monstrous beasts born in fabulous jungles and grim shadows without names.

Schoenberg cares nothing for popularity. He writes as he dreams, out of the seething vortex of post-impressionism, into which he has transported music. His quartet in D minor, an early work, which was performed in New York last winter by the Flonzaley Quartet, publishes most of the musician's characteristics of thought and his technical methods most completely. He has done more daring things in later works, but they have not yet been heard here.

One finds that Schoenberg is above all things a thinker of merciless logic. He has no respect for the divinity of the sensuous charm of music. He devises his instrumental parts melodically after the manner of Bach, but he brings to their creation all the peculiarities of modern harmony. He develops his parts with the most rigorous fidelity, and if discords shocking to the yet unaccustomed ear occur in the progress of these simultaneously heard melodic parts, that does not trouble him.

But let us confess that these new harmonies astonish rather than hurt the ear. The quartet lasts fifty minutes without a break and its relentless march of development makes stern demands upon the listener. But before the work has reached its half way point the candid hearer is conquered by the spell of its resistless progress, its strange, wide reaches of reflection, its boldly projected gaze into the future, its scattered pages of high light, in which ineffable musical beauty, weird and exotic though it be, shines resplendent.

FLORENT SCHMITT, born in the province of Lorraine in 1871, and now living in Paris, is another of the apostles of the new thought, whose music has made a deep impression here. The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave us his "Tragedie de Salome" and the Friends of Music introduced his quintet in B minor. The former of these revealed the composer as a musician possessing perfect command of the principles of musical form, and of the devices of modern instrumentation. The materials of the new melodic school and the inexorable methods of its musical development are employed by Schmitt with a skill which is best characterized by the awkward word virtuosity. Sinuous melodic thoughts, moving in apparently elusive chromatics, his themes are nevertheless firm and tangible, while his polyphony is heavy with tropical richness of exotic chords and modulations.

The quintet is one of the most remarkable pieces of contemporaneous chamber music. It deserves to be placed close to the unique quartet of Schoenberg. The creation of an austere thinker, who makes no concessions, but demands that the hearer shall follow him into the remote chambers of his thought, the work repays the fatigue of following it through its formidable length. If Schmitt, like Schoenberg, gives us the impression of one composing by the light of the midnight oil, and creating out of the depths of intense introspection, he nevertheless gives us noble visions of a beauty profoundly intellectual, chaste, aloof from the tremors of the flesh and near to the shrine of the spirit.

FERVENT, solitary, self-centered spirits these two, taking no thought of the morrow. Strange, too, is their inability to perceive their own strangeness; at least such is the case with Schoenberg. One of his pupils in composition told me that on showing to the master some piece of work following the teacher's own devious path, he was greeted with a stern rebuke: "What is this you have written ? Crazy music!"

SOMETHING of pathos is to be found in ^ the fact that this new school touches its boundaries in two composers, one an old and neglected man, the other little more than a child. Ernest Fanelli, buried fathoms under the ocean of Paris life, was writing things of high import fifteen or twenty years ago. Driven to earn a living by copying, he went to show Gabriel Pierne, a distinguished composer, some specimens of his penmanship and lo! Pierne discovered that the specimen was the beginning of a composition which stirred his pulses. "Who wrote this?" he demanded. "I did," humbly replied the old man. And then Pierne opened the gates. Fanelli's "Thebes" was played and the world learned that an unknown man had anticipated Debussy in some of the things which had most astonished the dwellers in the nether glooms of music.

BUT before Fanelli was dragged out of the depths a little boy in Vienna had claimed a seat among these progressives. His name is Erich Korngold and he is the son of the music critic of the Neue Freie Presse. His ability to arrange musical tones in strange forms revealed itself before he was twelve years of age, and at thirteen he had brought compositions before the public.

A little later he advanced from the piano to the orchestra, and at the age of sixteen he was putting forth music which seemed to have come from the cell of an aged and embittered recluse. This boy wrote dances, but they were the dances of evil-minded witches, or perhaps of unheard of savage tribes preparing for fearful rites.

He made a pantomime about a snow man and all Vienna sat up and wondered that a little boy could so mangle and tangle a theme intended to represent his hero. Fie composed a trio and the Margulies organization produced it in New York, whereupon all the inner brotherhood shook heads and pondered deeply; for this trio was inscrutable, intangible, and exceeding bitter to the taste. Yet every one believed that it disclosed a talent, and one commentator declared it to be his belief that it was only another demonstration of a boy's fondness for disorder and general rebellion against the Must. At some future time Korngold will perhaps penetrate to the eternal foundations of things and like Schoenberg stand unshakable upon the rock of law.

There are or were others of this new army of adventurers into the harmonic jungle—Alexander Zemlinsky, brother-in-law of Schoenberg, Erich Wolff, untimely called away from a world he promised to enrich, Posa, perhaps even Enescou, and in later days the stern bard of the pine-clad north. Jan Sibelius. But this last followed rather than led, even as the infant prodigy Korngold did; while Schoenberg lives in a strange fantasy land of his own, a land created out of a deep-seated desire and fashioned in the smoke of the lamp. And there are Russians, Scriabine and Stravinsky, who do weird things yet unknown here.

When we have heard much of this new thought music, we are ready to believe that this school of composers never raves across the fields bareheaded in the whirling storms, as Beethoven did, drinking in the fiercest draughts of tempestuous inspiration. No, they crouch and huddle around their slim winter fires and croon their weird songs in the midst of flickering lights and eerie shadows.

Pale spirits of dead philosophers, wrestling still with dialectics, hover about them. Their music shivers and strains in alternate moods, but all is of the intensest meditative kind, the product of minds bent in upon themselves and seeking to create out of their own seed. Cerebral, analytic; coldly prepared and determined to astonish, this music is none the less an art. It seems unlikely to be lasting; but it is surely building a strong bridge across chasms into new territory.