The Great Dulness of Musicians

Where the Responsibility for the Condition of the Concert-Rooms Should Be Placed

PAUL ROSENFELD

No, TO, in the ultimate analysis, it is not the public that is responsible for the condition of the concert-room in America. True it is, that life lived in accord with the conventions creates an atmosphere hostile either to the production or the performance of works of art. The use to which music is put by a society that cannot turn into act the impulses received from it, of course slackens every pulse in the performer. The man to whom the communication of perceptions of beauty is life cannot retain his edge among people who wish primarily to be amused, among people who ask of art that it pervert itself and help make their timorous lives liveable. It is as if a thousand little devils were ready with hammers to wound his sensitive quick every instant he unguarded it and laid it bare. An entire habit of life, subtly and yet overwhelmingly effective, is present to make it difficult, impossible for him to feel. Everything is done to strengthen in him the impulse not to feel, to strengthen in him the willingness to mechanize himself, to transform himself into a machine for giving pretty sensations to the audience. Art comes to be seen not as an expression of emotion, as an expression of human grandeur and tragedy, but as a pastime, a game for titillating and entrancing a great many tired and well-fed people.

And still, pernicious as is the influence of the outer life upon the atmosphere of the concert-room, it is not that outer influence alone which creates the grayness and depressingness of the entire concert-atmosphere in America. For, in coming to war upon the principle of life contained in music itself, the habit of our society finds an ally already installed in the temple itself. And that ally is no other than the performing musician himself. It is no other than the virtuoso, the interpretative artist upon whom the composer leans for the realization of his intentions. The entire impulse to pervert and negate the uses of art, communicated by the people who come into the concert-hall, is already present, entrenched in the spirits of pianists, singers, and all the other members of the performing confraternity. Were it not there, it is even possible that the atmosphere would not have reached the unusually sorry thickness to which it has developed.

The Dullest of Artists

BUT, most unfortunately for ourselves, most unfortunately for composers, most unfortunately for the musicians who are drawn into the mess as America becomes more and more the artistic market-place, it is there. It is there, ready to lend itself to the purposes of the great conventional demon from without, to make of the concert-room a center of aborted and useless activity, to bring into play untold wealth in money and human energy, and yet produce nothing in a crowded season but a handful of memorable performances. Fiddling, singing, drumming going on day after day through eight months, two times a day at three different concert halls, and out of it all a few hours that shine like jewels in a dustheap. For musicians, in particular musicians of the performing brotherhoods, are undoubtedly the dullest of artists.

A terrible accusation! A terrible accusation indeed in the ears of anyone who has had much personal intercourse with "artists." There are times, for instance, when it seems to the unprejudiced observer that nothing in the world could be as insipid as a painter. To be able to hear the inner voice, and then to turn on everyone else who has the power to hear it; to feel the beauty of life and then to set out deliberately to knife everyone else who sees it; to know in oneself the struggle against the public and then to behave toward one's own co-workers as the public never behaves; to play along in the patroness, art-gallery, museum political game—faugh, what a sort of life! Small wonder that Leo Stein evolved a theory that the artist to-day is an. intellectual nonentity, that the men who in the time of the Renaissance became artists went into the arts because the tools of science were insufficiently developed to give them opportunity of satisfying them, and that, had they been born to-day, they would have turned immediately to physics and medicine and engineering! It's not the public that alone perverts art. It's the painters that are the chief traitors. It's the workers who sell themselves out to the callous public. They have two gifts; that of seeing, and that of making it impossible to see. And the two negate each other.

The Literary Peanut

THEN, again, there are hours when one awakes with a cold shudder to the grotesqueness of writers. One need have cherished no illusions concerning the dignity of the profession of letters to be shocked by the mentality of your poets and prosemen. One need only have retained some faith in the power of human reason. It is rare indeed that one encounters an author whose critical good will is not purchaseable, and who is not blandly and completely ignorant of the fact. For example. Day before yesterday A told you that B was "like a land eaten by locusts, like a droughty region ravaged by the pest". He dissected for you B's poetry, which he showed you incontrovertibly to be lacking in form, and dismissed as negligible certain surface-qualities. You, who are an admirer of B, were deeply troubled, went home, reread B's last volume, and wondered why what seemed to you so lovely should, measured by the high critical standards of a trained literary mind, be seen as deficient in value. It must be that you are not a firstclass person, was the answer from within, and bed appeared the only place that could make up to you for the impossibility of this world. Yesterday, in a moment of confidence, A told you bitterly the story of how C had showed his, A's, last novel to B, and had been told that the book was unreadable. Sudden start in your mind. Is it possible that A was influenced by B's opinion of him?" But no, A had proven to you by the laws of literature that B's poetry didn't have any form, and laws are real and solid things. But, to-day, A in high mood shows you a letter which he has just received from B. B has written to inform A, it seems, that he has just seen the latter's volume of critical essays, and that he finds them the greatest volume of critical essays published since Aristotle. A, after carefully putting B's letter away in a leather folder in which important correspondence is kept, then begins informing you that B's most recently published poems are' the greatest that have appeared in this country since Walt Whitman; that B himself is a lovely and real person, a much finer poet than, for instance, D. Later, A lets slip the statement that he has proof of D's duplicity. It seems that C showed A's novel to D, and that D said that it wasn't a great novel, which "shows that D has some resistance against A, probably as the result of suppressed desires." And A ends by telling you that he has a good mind to write a critical article on the condition of poetry in the United States, with clear indications of the men he considers really important.

And yet, if one were to come forward and inform A that one considered him a dishonest man, a man who had his price and didn't know it, one would probably be given to understand in a voice full of injured innocency that one was maliciously deforming A's intentions, that A had the welfare of literature at heart as has no other person in the States, that he was as far above playing ward politics as the sun is above the earth, and that one was probably a disappointed person and therefore eager to pull the successful A down. And all the authors who are doing the same sort of thing would loudly agree, and remain unconscious of themselves.

The Inferiority of Musicians

AND yet, these men, painters and poets, seem very intellectual giants by the side of your average musician. There are moments when the musician, the virtuoso, seems made of a stuff poorer than' that which goes to the shaping of any of the artists, the actor, perhaps, alone, excepted. Plato knew it, long ago, this human inferiority of the musician. In the Symposium there is a passage that runs: "But Orpheus, the son of Oeagrus, did the gods send back from Hades with his object unaccomplished, by showing him the phantom merely of his wife, for whom he went, and not restoring her real self; because he appeared to act the coward, as being a harper, and not daring, like Alcestis, to die for Love, but continuing to go alive to Hades. Hence, on this very account, did the gods impose on him a punishment, and caused his death to take place at the hands of women."

And the modern Frenchman who said of the clanging tribe: "Ce sont des gens qui sentent et qui ne pensent pas" was only continuing the age-long attempt to explain the curious fact that human beings who could learn to perform competently upon a musical instrument could remain at the same time so benighted. It is indeed a wondrous thing that so many beings who can perform with great facility on violins and pianos can yet remain as ignorant of the realities of life, as deeply immersed in dreams, as children proverbially are said to remain. It is out of experience that music is made; it is what happens in the mind of the composer that is transformed into tone; and yet the men who occupy themselves with the transmission of these experiences become musical composers, conductors and pianists to the interpretation of Beethoven; how the inner reality of symphonies and sonatas languishes because the interpreter has not found in himself the experience that alone can help him illuminate the content of the work before him! They do not know what it is to create, half these performers! The source of intellectual curiosity seems to be choked in the most of them. There is no sense that the world is a different place than that which their illusions picture it, no desire to escape beyond the walls of their little selves, and see themselves from without. In the field to which their own desires have led them, they are incurious, quite content to tread the same track which they have been treading all their lives, to play the same pieces year in, year out, to spend their days developing greater facility in scale-playing and octave-running. In the symphony-concerts, always the same symphonies. In the recital hall, always the same numbers. Scarce ever a timid foray into the unknown regions of music, into the work of Bach, for example. Composers have heard, in their imaginations, voices singing certain tones in a certain unusual fashion. But among singers, never a sustained effort to realize these intimations, to develop a technique adequate to the needs of expressions. Always the complaints that Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, treated the voice instrumentally, were unfamiliar with its limitations; that modern music does not "develop great vocal artists." Never, for a moment, the sense that there is some defect in their own imaginations.

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After all, is not the musical performer tarred eternally by the practice of composers, the practice they make of writing every few bars the word "espressivo" between the staves? For, if art is not expressive, it is nothing at all. And yet the composer is continually obliged to remind the player into whose hands he entrusts his work that the business in which he is embarked is that of expression. A more complete and flooring condemnation could scarcely be encountered. It leaves nothing to be said.

Why it is that musicians are so little intellectual, that it is not easy to say. There are some who pretend that the core of the matter lies in the fact that the musician has remained something of an acrobat. The painter, the writer, it is alleged, do their work; then step away from the accomplished thing, and let others stand before it. They have the opportunity of impersonalizing their craft, of removing their personal presence from the work, of making the communication purely a psychic matter, the soul of man addressing the soul of man. But the musician stands in his personal self before the audience; he cannot permit his work to stand for itself. The condemnation or the acceptance of what he does, more than in the case of the poet or the painter, is directed more centrally at himself. It is he who is being applauded, as much as is the composition he has been performing. In consequence, he never transcends the purely personal approach to art; never does he graduate into the regions where the dispassionate reason rules.

Others pretend that it is the fact that the musician is working with an already completed experience, a composition, that permits him to perform without in turn experiencing. For, even though he cannot really perform a work without bringing some of the same experience to it that made the composer originally put it onto paper, he can still, as do most musicians, execute the notes before him merely as a pleasing tinkle, a play of pricking sonorities, or go through the motions of the music almost mechanically. In this way, the musician lives as lazy humanity likes to live, apparently active and really insensitive, and spared the pain of feeling deeply.

It makes little difference, however, what the core of the trouble is. What alone remains important is the fact that through the resultant dulness, we who need music in order to live are deprived almost of a thing that is like bread to us. And how change the condition? Ah, in a despotism, that might be possible. An œdile, an arbiter elegantiarus, appointed by the despot, and given power of life and death over the music-making tribe, might force a little action. But, alas, we are not yet so advanced. All that there is left us to do is to try what we can on our own pianos.