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I III IJ 111' K, IM, 1,1't), ,1 ' I'-t, lii 1 ni37 Pfip Q^atnell Htniaetaitg SItbratg 3tl|a(a, Nem ^orb BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 MSIC ... »_ ..£•""«" University Ubrary ML 60.M39A6 3 1924 022 170 405 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022170405 EDWARD J. DE COPPET THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC SERIES VOLUME IV MUSIC AS A HUMANITY AND OTHER ESSAYS BY DANIEL GREGORY MASON NEV^^ YORK THE H. W. GRAY COMPANY SOLE AGKNTS FOR MOVELLO AMD COMPANY, Ltd. 1921 Copyright, 192 i BY THE H. W. GRAY CO. 3i^a-fe /Ter/ -tG^v Q/, '/) PREFACE These essays, published in various magazines during recent years, are here reprinted with but slight changes. In some cases, as in the accounts of the first three festivals of chamber music at Pittsfield, it seemed desirable to preserve first impressions just as they were received and expressed at the time, since whatever value the papers may have will be largely historical. The same thing is true of "A Society for Publication," "A Practical Suggestion, " and "Music Patronage as an Art." The essays in the third division, "Of .^Esthetics and Psy- chology," have been suggested, all but two, by books or articles which date them with some exactitude. Thus that on Vernon Lee has been reprinted substantially as it appeared in 1906. The idea of "A Note on Tonal Chiaroscuro" is due to a conversation with Mr. Leopold Stokowski, whose conducting is so beautiful in its adjustment of values. "An International Language," written for the American Association for International Conciliation before the war (June, 1913), retains now, it is hoped, any value it may have had then. The need for international sympathy is greater than ever, and it is now clearer than it was in 191 3 that the way to political cooperation must be slowly and patiently opened up by art, literature, and other super- national interests, among which music has an important place. Acknowledgment of courteous permission to reprint is hereby made to the American- Association for International Conciliation, Arts and Decoration, the Atlantic Monthly, the Columbia University Quarterly, the Harvard Musical Review, the Musical Quarterly (Schir- mer), the New Music Review, the New Republic, and the Outlook. D. G. M. Norfolk, Connecticut, September 21, igso. CONTENTS OF UNIVERSITIES AND THE PUBLIC TASTE PAGE Music as a Humanity . .• 5 The College Man and Music . • . 13 Harvard the Pioneer . .18 The Quantitative Standard ..... 22 Domesticating Music . .... 28 An International Language ...... 33 OF FESTIVALS AND PATRONS The Berkshire Festivals, 1918-1920 41 Music Patronage as an Art 59 An Ideal Patron 63 A Practical Suggestion 71 A Society for Publication 76 OF ESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY Vernon Lee on Musical .^Esthetics . 81 Bertrand Russell on Music and Mathematics 91 Vincent d'Indy on Composition . 95 A Note on Tonal Chiaroscuro . 102 Psychoanalysis and the American Composer 108 Dissonance and Evil "5 MUSIC AS A HUMANITY AND OTHER ESSAYS OF UNIVERSITIES AND THE PUBLIC TASTE MUSIC AS A HUMANITY o. r had now learned by; experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided.- , . The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primaiy importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.—^John Stuart Mill, Autolsiography. I am heartily in favor of an education which will enable the great majority to have a better understanding and control of their own environment. But so long as our world remains so far from our heart's desire, any philosophy or education which does not also enable one to build a haven whence he can for a time escape from the suffocating cruelties of every-day life, is needlessly cruel.—Morris R. Cohen, in The New Republic. Pbr thousaipds of generations war has been the normal state of man's existence, yet alongside war has flourished art, reflectiflg 'man's myriad aspirations and longings, . ever unifying human life, through the common factor of impersonal emotion '. passing from heart to heart. Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freetiom which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, to help others.—J6hn Galsworthy, A Sheaf. When John Stuart Mill, in his early manhood, had that first realization of the insufficiency of narrow utilitarianism which he has recorded in a memorable passage of liis Autobiography, modern industrialism was just beginning. With every year that has elapsed since he wrote, the need for such a "cultivation of the feelings" as he championed, the difficulty of maintaining such a "due balance among ' the faculties, ' has increased pari passu with the spread of the industrial system. Specialization has become ever narrower, ever more inten- sive. All appetites, impulses, and faculties not directly subservient to the wage-earning work of the individual have tended to be starved or crowded out. Life, for millions whose waking hours consist chiefly of the endless mechanical repetition of insignificant acts, has becoifie intolerably monotonous. Only in scanty leisure can they get any of that general human experience, that miscellaneous free activity, on which mental and moral health depend; and usually even then they are too exhausted to make their diversions truly "re-creative," and seek either sensational excitement (feverish fiction, melodrama, 5 6 Music as a Humanity ragtime music) or dissipating day-dreaming (sentimental novels and the "movies") rather than those arts which enlarge sympathy and restore balance. Psychology has recently formulated in sci- entific terms the disastrous effects, long ago foreseen by men of genius like, Ruskin and Morris, of such an aborting of human nature ; such formulations have gained wide currency at the very time that the great war has given an example unparalleled for vividness and horror of what human instincts will do when denied wholesome expression ; and it is to be hoped that we are entering on an era when science will be applied to men as well as to things, and the evils of blind industrialism arrested. But it will take a long while before, even with the best fortune for such reforms, the world can become a truly humane place to live in; and meanwhile, as in the past, one of the greatest reconcilers, appealing to some temperaments even more immediately than philosophy and religion, will be art, with its vicarious satisfaction of instincts that the world denies, its realization of perfection here and now, its rainbow of utter beauty leaping from the blackest skies. Regarded from this standpoint music has a potency for solace, for at once arousing and harmonizing emotion, that is hardly paralleled by that of the other arts, and that gives it a place in our emotional and spiritual life, and hence in education, literally unique. Poetry shares with it the power to initiate through sympathy strong, though vicari- ous, emotional experiences ; but poetry necessarily reaches the emotional life indirectly, through the path of intellectual concepts formulated in words. Music, on the contrary, strikes directly a level far deeper than that of the intellect, the level of fundamental emotional attitudes, more rather than less vivid in that they cannot be expressed in words. Poetry may disengage the feeling of sorrow or joy as a reaction to what it tells; but music tells nothing—it is joy or sorrow, or a thousand other things with less definite names. Thus it releases and assuages impulses that can find no outlet in more intellectualized expression or in action, and so purges and refreshes the soul. It is the uniqueness of this process that makes music at once so precious to those who react to it and so impossible to describe intelli- gibly to others. More nonsense has been written about it than about any other art—and that is saying a good deal. Fortunately minute psychological analysis of the ways in which it affects us is neither indispensable nor even particularly useful to a treatment aimed simply at making accessible to those not yet very familiar with it its greatest gift, spiritual refreshment. By listeners of the intelligence of college ! Music as a Humanity 7 students what seems most needed, aside from certain warnings against popular misconceptions, is plentiful presentation of fine examples, well performed and sympathetically analyzed, detailed study of the styles of various composers and schools, and stimulus to discriminate between the best and what is in any way inferior, and to build up gradually from such discriminations the habit we call good taste. Of popular misconceptions that need to be taken some account of from the start, the most persistent seems to be that which attrib- utes to every musical composition a "program." The difficulty above touched upon, of explaining the true nature of the musical appeal, so much deeper than the evocation of a fanciful series of events or images; the actual frequency of programs in modern works of the realistic school of Berlioz, Liszt, and Strauss (though not in neo-classic and romantic works); the numerical preponderance in audiences of those who can enjoy following a story or indulging a mood over those who can perceive the specific beauty and feel the specific appeal of music—all these conditions encourage the fallacy that music is neces- sarily programmistic—deals, that is, with series of impressions that can be programmed in words.

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