Corbet Stewart Alphons Silbermann - The Sociology of Music

AT THE PRESENT TIME, when a great amount of music is being both composed and heard, a great deal is also being written about music. Eager attempts are being made both by those who are qualified for the task and those who are not, by scientists and men of letters alike, to bring closer to mankind an art which is naturally close anyway; and on all sides people are trying to construct systems which shall bring us to the roots of music. Such attempts are by no means new. The nature of music has been discussed wherever and whenever music has been composed, and discussion, attempting to adapt itself to the needs of the time, swung for many centuries between the extremes of pure musical theory and philosophical and ethical reflection. Only when the invention and continuing improvement of the printing-press made it possible for enormous amounts of music to be published did it happily become necessary for scholars to preserve every composition as a precious cultural heritage.

It was at this time that the broad lines of musical evolution were laid down. It became necessary to study musicians individually, and from this necessity a vast biographical literature has arisen, as a result of which the kind of treatment once reserved for the great and in most cases dead masters is today given even the youngest composers. Thus the pendulum of musical literature has swung from pure theory through the philosophico-ethical position to the inquisitive, sensation-mongering writings, thanks to which music has almost become a literary vice. These attempts at the popularization of musicwhich are for the most part the result of purely commercial considerationsshould not however be rejected out of hand, for they do have the effect of increasing the ordinary man's knowledge of music; a fact which should surely be welcome to all those who are in any way connected with the subject.

Yet there is no denying that a great many serious musicians are disturbed by this popularization, and will therefore repudiate attempts to publicize themselves in monographs, biographies, encyclopaedias, magazine articles or on the sleeves of gramophone records. They are not, however, in a position to call a halt to the ever-increasing spread of information which our age seems to demand under the guise of the furtherance of musical knowledge. Not only do we wish to know whether J. S. Bach wrote with a straight or a curved pen; we also demand exact information as to when, where and why Mr. X., the contemporary composer, had the notion of composing his Op. 47 in Iceland instead of in Southern Italy. By all means let this demand be satisfied; but let us hope that we are not led into the activity which the painter Kokoschka describes as hysterical trading in art, an activity which causes such confusionthe natural result of hysteriathat both internal and external balance is lost. External balance is lost when, for instance, five different biographers inform the reader that only in, say, Palestrina, in Vivaldi, Ravel, Schnberg or Hindemith are the primal elements of music to be found; or when readers are told that it is impossible to appreciate Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms without a prior knowledge of Heinrich Schtz and his St. Matthew Passion. Furthermore, many biographies of composers are so stuffed with details of their passions and their woes that their subjects become enwrapped in a thick romantic mist which not even the dryest musical analysis can penetrate. As a result of all this, the music lover stands bewildered before a closed door, reproaching himself with his own unmusicality: and will therefore either reject all musical literature out of hand or will seek aid from facile cataloguings and classifications which will at least enable him to distinguish between classical and impressionist composers.

and that musicianscomposers, listeners, performers and musicologists alikewill begin to lose courage and come to regard their activities as futile.

What then does the musician do? He looks back. Taking the music that already exists and holding fast to the past glories of culture, he begins solidly to reinforce these with all the means at his disposal. He constructs a system which shall be the foundation of his work. He then builds the walls out of aesthetic phraseology and finally tops the whole with a roof of such complex and well-nigh incomprehensible musical jargon, that no drop of the refreshing rain of sense will be able to penetrate this enclosed musical fortress. Thus an ersatz culture is created, a synthetic product which is doomed to a slow death of undernourishment. Thousands of these musical fortresses have been built in recent centuries, and each one contains a small amount of music which will be of interest to both the professional musician and the layman. But only when one possesses a special key can one gain access; and the forging of such a key involves such a tumult of ideas, approaches, systems and methods, that one begins to tremble at the thought of one's own ignorance.