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Roger Sessions on Music
Collected Essays
By Edward T. Cone PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10074-6
CHAPTER 1
The Composer and His Message [1939]
Originally delivered as one of the Spencer Trask Lectures at Princeton University in the Fall of 1939. T he series, entitled "The Intent of the Artist," also included lectures by Sherwood Anderson, William Lescaze, and Thornton Wilder.
THE fact that a composer, in speaking of music, speaks primarily or indeed exclusively as a practitioner, may easily seem too obvious to mention. It is a fact, however, that the critic, the historian, even the musical theorist are familiar figures on the American scene. With inevitably varying degrees of success, they fill the role of articulate mediators between the public at large and the wares offered it by a multitude of purveyors. In a very real sense, they form the conscious ideas of the public regarding music, and determine, or at least influence profoundly, the character of American musical life.
The composer, on the other hand, is a shadowy and often inarticulate figure whose activities and whose processes of thought remain mysterious and almost legendary. He speaks very rarely, except to his colleagues, about his art; when he does so, he frequently either, through lack of initiative, adopts the language and tone of the critic or the musico-literary rhapsodist, or speaks in terms accessible only to those versed in the technical mysteries. It is indeed difficult to avoid these extremes, since music, although at least as popular, and — as I shall try to show later — still more primitive in its sources than the other arts, is by its very nature less obviously connected with the everyday experience of the layman, hence less easy of access. Even if the layman is so exceptional as never to have tried to express himself accurately and vividly in words, or experimented in at least the rudiments of design, modelling, or construction, these activities, closely bound up as they are with visible and conscious experience, are easily apprehended by him.
It is not however my object at this point to draw a distinction between the composer and his fellow artists in other fields, but rather to call attention to the fact that his activities, precisely like theirs, belong in the sphere of action and not of thought. He is, like them, a doer and a maker, not a thinker. He is therefore sharply differentiated in his approach to his art from the critic, historian, or musical theorist. In saying this I am not, of course, drawing attention to a purely professional distinction. Many composers have been active as critics and theorists, and in fact it is to composers that we owe a tremendous proportion of what has been most illuminating and most enduring in these fields. The composer's point of departure, however, is entirely different from — perhaps is even opposed to — that of the scientific scholar or thinker. It is based not on careful analysis, weighing, and comparison of facts, but at best on an insight, born of intense and active experience, into the nature of the materials and the creative processes of his art.
The insight of which I have spoken springs, however, from a very personal experience and may as a result be easily subject to the limitations of personality. A musical composition is a deed, and as such, the result of intense and single-minded conviction. Consequently the composer's judgments are often distinguished by intensity rather than breadth of vision; they are intuitions, rather than opinions, and derive their vitality as well as their evidential value from the very fact that they are born of intensely felt experience of artistic materials and impulses, just as the value of the critic's judgments derives from the fact that they are, presumably, the reasoned products of an observation which has objectivity as one of its aims.
The composer is therefore, in his nature as such, a man of faith and conviction, in distinction to the critic or theorist, who is essentially, and in the original sense of the word, a skeptic. It is true that such distinctions can never be absolute; not only do pure types scarcely ever exist, but it is certainly not desirable that they should. A critic can scarcely form valid judgments in the absence of intense experience of the works with which he has to deal; he cannot form any judgments whatever in the absence of the values which result from the very faith which the artist embodies in his work. Conversely, the personality of the mature artist — and an artist cannot achieve real stature without maturity — is formed, like that of any other mature being, partly through reflection on both what he sees around him and what he has experienced within himself. It is for this reason that, contrary to an of t-quoted opinion, first-class artists are so often first-class critics, and that first-class critics are necessarily those who share the essential nature of the creative artist to an extent sufficient to enable them to understand him.
The composer, then, like his fellow artists, is essentially a doer, a shaper of materials. What are these materials, what is their essential nature and what are the shapes that result? What, finally, are the psychological processes that go into their making?
I do not, of course, intend to explore here the physical nature of sound, the mysteries of the musical ear, or the subtleties of musical language. These are matters with which only the teacher and the student need concern themselves, and in which we have ample evidence that slight knowledge is dangerous. I propose rather to make certain observations regarding the materials of music in their psychological essence; to give a few suggestions regarding what these materials mean to the composer and, by inference, also to his most enlightened audience. It is hardly necessary for me to point out that such a picture as can be given within the limits of a short essay can be scarcely more than a rough and incomplete sketch, which demands infinite qualification and nuance if it is to become even coherent.
What, then, is the essential element in music which differentiates it from the other "fine arts"? I do not wish to raise here questions which belong properly to the philosopher. I have sometimes wondered, however, whether the various human products generally grouped together under the term "fine arts" have as much in common as this classification would seem to indicate. What has the impulse of the painter or the architect really in common with that of the composer? and is literature, which seems on the surface, by virtue of its vast range, to include so much from all of the other arts, not in reality something essentially different from any of them? At all events, for the purposes of clear definition, I would like to dwell on their differences and to ignore for the moment the prevalent assumption of a common basis.
It seems to me that the essential medium of music, the basis of its expressive powers and the element which gives it its unique quality among the arts, is time, made living for us through its expressive essence, movement.
Music is apprehended through the ear; the visual arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture, through the eye. Is there not, more than a difference in function, a genuine and essential contrast in content, between what the eye sees and what the ear hears? I am speaking, of course, not in terms of science, but of ordinary experience. The visual arts govern a world of space, and it seems to me that perhaps the profoundest sensation which we derive from space is not so much that of extension as of permanence. On the most primitive level we feel space to be something permanent, fundamentally unchangeable; when movement is apprehended through the eye it takes place, so to speak, within a static framework, and the psychological impact of this framework is much more powerful than that of the vibrations which occur within its limits. For our experience the visual arts are undifferentiated in time. When we cease to look at a painting or a statue, it nevertheless continues to exist; it undergoes no perceptible change while we are looking at it, and we find it unchanged when we return to it after absence. We may contemplate it as long as we like, and though continued or repeated contemplation will make us familiar with more and more of its details or characteristics, these features have been present from the start, even to our eyes; it is our consciousness, following its own laws and not those of the object itself, which has developed. And when through these or other visual arts movement is suggested, it is through energy implied but not expressed.
Literature, to be sure, takes place in time, and in poetry and the drama time is, to a certain extent as in music, controlled. But even in poetry time is only a part, and a relatively small part, of the total expression; to a far greater extent than in music it is variable according to the will of the interpreter; its subtle rhythms, moreover, are subject to the laws of speech and of concrete literary sense. The real medium of literature is language, as shaped by the literary imagination. One of the expressive elements of language is rhythm, which is employed by the poet as an active, controlled medium in order to heighten its effect. I venture to say, however, that only in rare and fleeting instances does movement assume the whole or even the principal expressive burden.
In speaking of musical movement, on the other hand, we do not refer to rhythm alone, but rather to music as a complete and essentially indivisible whole. In this connection it is relevant to compare our ordinary experience of sound, the medium of musical movement, with the experience of space as I have described it above. If our visual experience is primarily of the permanent and static, sound, as we are ordinarily aware of it, is essentially of limited duration, fleeting and elusive — and the very essence of our adjustment to it is closely bound up with this fact. We cannot escape from it without fleeing its presence; and if it assumes anything like unchanging permanence this is such an exceptional occurrence that either we become quickly unaware of it, or it becomes intolerable. Sound for us, in other words, is naturally and inextricably associated with our sensation of time.
Time becomes real to us primarily through movement, which I have called its expressive essence; and it is easy to trace our primary musical responses to the most primitive movement of our being — to those movements which are indeed at the very basis of animate existence. The feeling for tempo, so of ten derived from the dance, has in reality a much more primitive basis in the involuntary movements of the nervous system and the body in the beating of the heart, and more consciously in breathing, later in walking. Accelerated movement is, from these very obvious causes, inevitably associated with excitement, retarded movement with a lessening of dynamic tension. The experience of meter has the most obvious and essential of its origins in the movements of breathing, with its alternation of upward and downward movements. The sense of effort, preparation, suspense, which is the psychological equivalent of the upbeat, finds its prototype in the act of inhalation, and the sense of weight, release, and finality produced by the downbeat corresponds most intimately to the act of exhalation. "In the beginning was rhythm," remarked Hans von Bülow; another distinguished musician remarked later that life begins, according to this above analogy, with an up-beat, the first breath of the newborn child corresponding to the preparatory anacrusis of a musical statement, and ends, like the most natural and satisfying rhythm, with a down-beat.
The other primary elements of music — melody and rhythm — derive from more complicated but only slightly less essential muscular movements, which, it has been fairly well demonstrated, are reproduced in miniature by the human nervous system in response to musical impressions. If we instinctively respond to a rising melodic pitch by a feeling of increased tension and hence of heightened expression, or a falling pitch by the opposite sensation; if an increase in intensity of sound intensifies our dynamic response to the music, and vice versa, it is because we have already in our vocal experiences — the earliest and most primitive as well as later and more complicated ones — lived intimately through exactly the same effects. A raising of pitch or an increase in volume is the result of an intensification of effort, energy, and emotional power in the crying child just as truly as in the highly evolved artistry of a Fedor Chaliapin or a Marian Anderson.
Similarly, our feeling for rhythm, in the stricter sense, derives from the subtle and more expressive nervous and muscular movements, such as occur in speech, song, gesture, and the dance. A melodic phrase, for instance, is analogous psychologically to a vocal phrase, even though, because of its range, its length, or its specific technical demands, it may be realizable only on instruments; it must be thought, by the interpreter as well as the listener, "in one breath" — that is to say, with a psychological energy and control, precisely analogous to that with which the singer or orator husbands his vocal resources and controls his breathing, according to the expressive curve of melody or rhetorical declamation. The association between music and dancing is probably even older than that between music and words, and needs no further illustration here; the point I wish to make is that the basic elements of our musical sense, of musical expression, hence of music itself, have their sources in the most primitive regions of our being. In this sense music is the oldest, just as in a quite other sense it is the youngest, of the arts; the primary sensations on which it is based antedate in human experience those of visual perception and, to a still greater extent, those of language.
On a still less primitive level than melody or rhythm as such, we meet with the one basic element of music which is not derived directly from movement. This element, harmony, has its origins in the nature of musical sound itself rather than in the impulses of the human organism. Already in speaking of musical sound we have moved far from the primitive elements to which I have drawn attention; we have in fact taken note of a stage in the process of their organization. When the ear has learned to discriminate between musical "tone" and undifferentiated sound, it has already achieved a high degree of refinement and begun to shape its raw materials into something approaching a controlled medium of expression. The musical tone, however, is not a simple sound but a complex of sounds. It is this fact which, apprehended by the musical ear at an advanced stage in its development, leads to the elaboration of an always more complex set of relationships between sounds, and thereby opens up still further and more decisive possibilities of organization. Speaking for the moment in historical terms, it was only about 1600 that the harmonic sense reached maturity: it was at approximately the same period that music loosed itself from exclusive association with words and gesture, and achieved complete autonomy. From the purely technical standpoint, it was the development of the harmonic sense which made this possible. For this enriched the composer's vocabulary by revealing to him new possibilities in the combination of sounds; through these possibilities, derived from the physical nature of the tone itself, it provided him with a point of departure which enabled the ear to find its way through the intricacies of a much vaster tonal design than had ever been dreamed of before. In other words, it added incalculable resources to musical expression, by making possible an infinitely more complex, more supple, and more finely differentiated musical movement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Roger Sessions on Music by Edward T. Cone. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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