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THE
"NATIONAL SPIRIT" IN MUSIC.
The Fallacy of Dwelling Upon National Char-
acteristics in Commenting Upon the Work of
Various Composers Set Forth by British
Writer—Some Interesting Examples.
We have heard a goad deal during the last few
years of the "national spirit" in music and the ne-
cessity of founding a "national English (or Amer-
ican) school" upon the native folk-song. Only in
this way, we are told, can English (or American)
music hope to rise as a whole to the level of that
of France and Germany. The people who talk in.
this way have apparently never stopped to examine
very closely the meanings of the terms they are
using.
When we find one of them, for example, telling
us that "when every English child is, as a matter
of course, made acquainted with the folk-song of
his own country, then, from whatever class the
musician of the future may spring, he will speak in
the national musical idiom," we are constrained to
ask: What is the "national musical idiom"? It
is a high-sounding (term, and an easy one to make
a certain kind of merely verbal reasonance with;
but can anyone show us that it has any meaning
whatever in terms of concrete fact?
MUSIC TRADE
55
REVIEW
"typical" Frenchman or German were either not
French or German at all, or only partially so?
The greatest "Frenchman" of modern times—Na-
poleon—was a pure Italian, without a drop of
Fiench blood in his veins. The greatest "English"
general—Wellington—was an Irishman, as Lord
Roberts is. The greatest modern "English" novel-
ist—George Meredith—was a Welshman.
Cesar
Franck—a '•French" composer—was a Belgian.
Offenbach, who wrote the "typical" French comic
operas, was a German Jew. Or IOOK at some of the
great names of "German" music. Beethoven was
half Dutch, Liszt a pure Hungarian Joachim a
Hungarian Jew, Mahler a Bohemian Jew, Mendels-
sohn a German Jew, Nikisch a Hungarian, Richter
half Hungarian, Weingartner a Dalmatian. Yet
all these people are supposed, in some mysterious
way, to express a "national idiom" in their com-
positions or their performances!
Is not, in fact, all this talk of "national" music
a little wild? Is there such a thing as "the" Eng-
lishman, "the" German, or "the" Frenchman? It
is a form of language, it is true, that we all use at
times, but merely by way of a kind of shorthand', a
swift generalization that can do little harm so
long as we remember that it is no more than that,
says Ernest Newman, in the English Review.
We have only to look without our own borders,
or at our own artistic and literary specimens of
The truth seems to be, as Mill and Huxley long
every mental and moral history, to see that the
ago pointed out, that of all ways of accounting for
so-called English race puts forth specimens of every
the differences between the arts and customs and
mental and moral type—stable and unstable, ascetic
constitutions of nations that of attributing them
and voluptuous, intellectual and sensuous, reckless
all to "race" is the most superficial. The lax habit
and careful, extravagant and' precise—that could
of mind that allows people to be satisfied with
these pseudo-explanations almost invariably decoys be raked together from all countries on earth.
"The" Englishman is a fiction. And when we speak
them into a maze of self-contradiction.
Is it not the mere beginning of reason in the of other nations as capable of being summed up
under a single formula of this kind, it is only
matter to give up the notion that all the inhabitants
because we have not sufficient acquaintance with
of a nation are tarred with the same brush, or
them to see them in detail. Were it not so we
even that the "characteristic" work of the nation
should not commit the gross error of speaking
is being done by people indubitably of one presup-
of "the" Russian school of music, as if that vast
posed racial "type"? Would it not sober the "na-
empire with its multiplicity of languages and of
tionalists" to learn how many men who stand' as the
human types, had but one mind and one purpose.
As Melchior de Vogue once pointed out, we can
never see an unfamiliar land in such detail as a
familiar one; a Russian landscape has a uniformity
of outline and of tint for the Western eye that it
never has for the eye of a Russian.
- If the Bismarck build, with its physical massive-
ness, its heavy, square jaw, is to be taken as "typi-
cal" of the German, what are we to make of the
gaunt and lanky and nervous Richard Strauss?
As there is no such thing as "the" Englishman
to-day—'Only Englishmen of the most diverse phys-
ical and mental types, passions, appetites, ideas—
how can any one composer hope to express the
"national" mind in music? Suppose a composer
never to have heard a folk-song in his life, how
much worse off would he be? The enthusiasts
who assert that there is some peculiar efficacy in'
the folk-song should be able to tell us precisely how
A BLIND STUDENT COMPOSER.
Francis V. Brady, Cleveland's blind bard, who
four years ago, while attending higlh school, com-
posed "I'm Going Back t o Cleveland" and "The
Mollicoddle Man," is held in high esteem by his
fellow students. The revenue from the sales of
those songs helped Brady through Oberlin Col-
lege. Studies compelled him to neglect the muse
until recently. He has just produced an exquisite
song entitled "Pipe Dreams," which is having an
extensive sale, and which he expects will aid him
through Western Reserve Law School. The omni-
present girl, an armchair and the pipe are threaded
into tune pleasingly in this latest of his works.
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