Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
and other relations; in Part III A returns
MUSICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
""THE twentieth century will witness in
* America an unparallelled extension of
musical enlightenment. With a steady in-
crease of orchestral, choral and solo per-
formances of the greatest music by trav-
eling orchestras and artists of world-re-
nowned excellence, and resulting growth
of local musical organizations and so-
cieties of many sorts: with an enormous
increase of manufacture of musical instru-
ments and the publications of good music
of all types and eras; with hundreds
of thousands of more or less serious
students of music; and with the intro-
duction into the homes of the nation of
marvelous automatic devices of American
invention for rendering the greatest mu-
sic familiar as household words, inde-
pendently of the agency of laboriously
acquired technique, public musical taste
and appreciation cannot fail to become ex-
traordinarily improved; and with the im-
provement of public taste all music from
the simplest to the most complex will have
to reach a certain standard of quality in
order to enjoy any sort of popularity. It
has already become hard for anyone but a
composer of talent and training to secure
a commission to write the music for even
the lightest of operettas, and good com-
posers are more in demand than ever be-
fore to supply incidental music for the
theatre.
History shows that just as new com-
munities gradually take their social tone
from older, wealthier and more cultured
centers of population, so, too, popular
music ever tends to assimilate elements
from those types of music which in the
evolution of art have become establised as
highest and best.
For these, and other reasons, it appears
that while the distinction between popular
and classic music will always continue to
exist as long as differences in point of indi-
vidual and local culture remain, neverthe-
less the relations between the two types of
music will necessarily be closer in the twen-
tieth century than ever before.
Both " popular " and " classic " music, so
called, may be either good or bad. Confin-
ing our attention to what is good we may
understand by popular music that which is
simpler, both in form and contents, and
hence less artistic; while by classic music
we may understand all music of subtler
meaning and more developed form, and
therefore more artistic in construction.
The material at the disposal of the com-
poser of music, is melody, harmony,
LEIPSIC
rhythm, and tone-color, or the different
quality which given tone receives when
produced by the different species of the
human voice or by different kinds of mu-
sical instruments.
A simple melody, air or tune with a
very limited harmonic vocabulary and
still further fewer rhythms, may suffice
to constitute a good piece of popular
music. The masterpieces of the greatest
musical composers, from Bach to Wag-
ner, are full of such short pieces of pop-
ular music. As in poetry so in music,
there is no such thing as a long poem
or a long piece of music. All large poems
or musical works are composite. That is
to say, their component parts consist of a
number of short poems or "pieces," each
of which is separately "posed" so as to
produce the desired effect, and all "com-
posed" or strung together, on the thread
of a story, a plot or a scheme of form and
development. The popular composer in
music is content with posing single tones
in relation to a background of simple har-
mony, all of which he composes to the
form of a more or less simple melody.
The composer of classic music repeats the
same process with each melody or shorter
theme, but furthermore proceeds to com-
pose a number of such isolated melodies
into co ordinate groups, known as larger
musical forms, supplying such connecting
links as may be required to bring the sepa-
rate melodies into some sort of coherent
and intelligent succession. Thus, in the
aria of the Italian opera there is always a
melody which may be designated A, fol-
lowed by another melody B, after which,
with a more or less literal repetition of
melody A, the form is complete. In the
rondo form the first melody, A, may recur
any number of times, from five to the
limit of human endurance, with different
contrasting melodies between its repetition,
thus, A, B, A, C, A, D, etc.
In the sonata form the order of succes-
sion is A, B, C, A, B, C; then follows a de-
velopment (like the conflict of motives in
characters in working out the plot of a
novel). This development consists of frag-
mentary reminiscences and novel combina-
tions of A, B, C; the form closes with A,
B, C, heard again once instead of twice, as
at the beginning of the form.
The form of the fugue is tri-partite. In
Part I a single theme A is heard from
each of the different voices represented,
all in the " k e y " of the composition; in
Part II theme A wanders into other keys
After this brief survey of the outlines of
musical construction the relations of popu-
lar music to classic, and of both kinds of
music to listeners in general, become ob-
vious.
A concert is like an exhibition of cut
flowers, in which the only relations be-
tween what is presented are those of more
or less judicious and effective contrast.
An Italian opera, or a light operetta, is a
sort of conceit, in which the semblance is
introduced by the element of dramatic
continuity. • In a symphony, a sonata, a
fugue and a Wagner music drama, the
separate melodies are interrelated like
flowers in a horticultural garden, where
all are rooted in a common soil, and where
every flower appears as a part of a plant
of which it is the most beautiful and im-
portant part, the flowers of a plant being
at once the culmination of its vital forces
and the source of further growths.
To persons at a certain stage of musical
culture and receptivity the musical cut
flowers of the concert, the "opera," the
"operetta" and the popular air, yield more
pleasure than the development music of
Bach, Beethoven or Wagner; just as to
many lovers of poetry Dodd's "Beauties
of Shakespeare" afford more pleasure than
the plays whence they are taken.
All knowledge however, musical knowl-
edge not excepted, is a knowledge of rela-
tions, simply because the universe itself
is a complexity of inter-related co-exigen-
cies. In the absence of the requisite
amount of musical culture, the mental ef-
fort involved in grasping the relations of
the different parts of a work of musical art
is so great as to be destructive to all direct
and immediate pleasure in the music it-
self. Hence, to the musically uncultured
all artistic music is artificial in the bad
sense of the word. Thus the relations be-
tween popular and classic music depend
largely upon popular musical culture.
Finally, two facts stand out with great
clearness before the minds of all who are
conversant with what is going on in Amer-
ican musical life: First, Americans are a
highly musical people, and, second, as in
respect to other factors of civilization, so
in regard to music Americans will never
be satisfied with less than the best that the
world affords, and nothing will divert them
from the search for and the assiduous culti-
vation of the best.
Albert Ross Parsons.
j*
Why not a Verdi cycle at the Metro-
politan in honor of the great composer ?
First American Tour 1901—March and April
PHILHARMONIC
HANS WINDERSTEIN, conductor
ASSISTING ARTIST, J O S E P H
Knabe Piano Used.
I to the original key.
ORCHESTRA
VON SLIV1NSKI, THE EMINENT PIANIST.
Concert Direction : MRS. NORM A KNUPFEL 138 Fifth Avenue.