In the discussions of "American music" that go on perennially in our newspapers and journals, now waxing in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm, now waning as popular attention is turned to something else, in war time much stimulated by an enhanced consciousness of nationality (unless indeed they are totally elbowed aside to make room for more immediate subjects), a sharp cleavage will usually be observed between those whose interest is primarily in the music for itself, wherever it comes from, and those in whom artistic considerations give way before patriotic ardor, and propaganda usurp the place of discrimination. One group, in uttering the challenging phrase, "American music," places the stress instinctively on the noun and regards the adjective as only qualification; the other, in its preoccupation with "American," seems to take "music" rather for granted. Unfortunately the former group constitutes so small a minority, and expresses itself so soberly, that its wholesome insistence on the quality of the article itself is likely to be quite drowned out by the bawling of the advertisers, with their insistent slogan "Made in America." All the advantages of numbers, organization, and easy appeal to the man in the street are theirs. Even if we ignore those venal music journals which make a system of exploiting the patriotism of the undiscriminating for purely pecuniary purposes, there remain enough enthusiasts and propagandists, indisposed or unable to appraise quality for themselves, to create by their "booming" methods a formidable confusion in our standards of taste. Inasmuch, therefore, as we are condemned, for our sins, to be not only producers but consumers of this "American music," it behooves us to make careful inspection of the claims for it so extravagantly put forth, and to assure ourselves that we are getting something besides labels for our money.

What, then, is the precise value we ought justly to ascribe to that word "American" as applied to music, and wherein have those we may call champions of the adjective been inclined to exaggerate it? If we analyze their attitude, we shall find them the prey of two fallacies which constantly falsify their conclusions, and make them dangerous guides for those who have at heart the real interests of music in America. The first of these fallacies is that which confuses quantity with quality, and supposes that artistic excellence can be decided by vote of the majority. The second is that which identifies racial character with local idioms and tricks of speech rather than with a certain emotional and spiritual temper. Both lead straight to the oft-repeated conclusion that "ragtime" is the necessary basis of our native musical art.

Listen, for example, to one of the most persistent, courageous, and often interesting advocates of ragtime, Mr. H. K. Moderwell. "I can't help feeling," says Mr. Moderwell,[59] "that a person who doesn't open his heart to ragtime somehow isn't human. Nine out of ten musicians, if caught unawares, will like this music until they remember that they shouldn't. What does this mean? Does it mean that ragtime is 'all very well in its place'? Rather that these musicians don't consider that place theirs. But that place, remember, is in the affections of some 10,000,000 or more Americans. Conservative estimates show that there are at least 50,000,000 copies of popular music sold in this country yearly and a goodly portion of it is in ragtime.... You may take it as certain that if many millions of people persist in liking something that has not been recognized by the schools, there is vitality in that thing." No doubt there is, just as by the same argument there is vitality in chewing gum and the comic supplements. The question is, of course, what sort of vitality? Yet if you raise this question of quality, you are immediately charged with being a "highbrow," "a person," in Professor Brander Matthews's already classic definition, "educated beyond his intelligence,"—a charge from which any sane man naturally shrinks. "The best American music is that which the greatest number of Americans like; the greatest number of Americans like ragtime; therefore ragtime is the best American music." This is a specious syllogism, which you may oppose only at the risk of being thought a highbrow and a snob.

Suppose, for instance, that you really do not happen to care for chewing gum, that just as a matter of fact, of personal taste, and not through any principles or sense of superiority to your fellows you prefer other forms of nutriment or exercise. You confess this peculiarity. Can you not hear the reproachful reply? "I can't help feeling that a person who doesn't open his heart to chewing gum somehow isn't human. Nine out of ten travelers on the subway, if caught unawares [with gum disguised as bonbons, let us say] will like it until they remember that they shouldn't. What does this mean? Does it mean that chewing gum is 'all very well in its place'? Rather that these punctilious people don't consider that place theirs. But that place, remember, is in the affections of some 10,000,000 or more Americans. The annual output of the chief chewing gum manufacturers"—etc., etc. Thus are you voted down if you happen to be in the minority. It does you no good to protest that you are really quite sincere and without desire to Épater le bourgeois; that you can't help preferring Mr. Howells's novels to Mr. Robert W. Chambers's, Mr. Ben Foster's landscapes to Mr. Christy's magazine girls, Mr. Irwin's "Nautical Lays of a Landsman" to the comic supplements, and MacDowell's "To a Wild Rose" to "Everybody's Doing It." If you stray from the herd you must be sick. If you vote for the losers you must be a snob.

Such charges are the more dangerous in that they sometimes contain a half-truth. There is a kind of person, the simon-pure snob, who casts his vote for the loser just because he is a loser, because he is unpopular, who prides himself on his "exclusiveness," "excluding himself," as Thoreau penetratively says, "from all that is worth while." His is a sort of inverted numericalism, based on quantity just as essentially as the crude gospel of the "10,000,000 or more Americans," but on quantity negative and vanishing towards the zero of perfect distinction. It is from his kind that are recruited the faddists, those who "dote on Debussy," the devotees of folk-songs not for their human beauty but as curious specimens, those who invent all sorts of queer connections between music and painting or poetry, and indeed seem to find in it anything and everything but simple human feeling. It is not from these that we shall get any help towards the truth about ragtime. Indeed, they seem because of their unsympathetic attitude toward the spirit of music—its emotional expression—and their preoccupation with the letter of it, to be especially susceptible to the second fallacy of which we spoke—that of identifying racial quality with mere idiom rather than with fundamental temper.

Mr. Moderwell shall be spokesman of this view also. "You can't tell an American composer's 'art-song,'" he says, "from any mediocre art-song the world over.... You can distinguish American ragtime from the popular music of any nation and any age." Let us agree heartily that the mediocre "art-song" (horrid name for a desolating thing) is probably no better and no worse in our own than in other countries. Does this not seem an insufficient warrant for the excellence of types of art that can be more easily told apart? For purposes of labeling specimens earmarks are an advantage, but hardly for appraising modes of expression. If the important matter in American music is not its expression of the American temper, but the peculiar technical feature, the special kind of syncopation we call the "rag rhythm," then the important matter in Hungarian music is not its fire but its "sharp fourth step." Beethoven ceases to be Teutonic when he uses Irish cadences in his Seventh Symphony, and Chopin is Polish only in his mazurkas and polonaises. Of course this will not do; and Mr. Moderwell, to do him justice, after remarking that "ragtime is not merely syncopation—it is a certain sort of syncopation," adds "But of course this definition is not enough. Ragtime has its flavor that no definition can imprison." Our ultimate question is, then, not how many people like ragtime, or how few like it, or how easily can its idiom be told from other idioms, but how expressive is it of the American temper, how full an artistic utterance can it give of the best and widest American natures? This is a question not of quantity but of quality: of the quality of ragtime, the quality of America, and the adequacy of the one to the other.

II

Suppose, bearing in mind Mr. Moderwell's warning against snobbery, that "A Russian folk-song was no less scorned in the court of Catherine the Great than a ragtime song in our music studios to-day," we examine in some detail a typical example of ragtime such as "The Memphis Blues," of which he assures us that "In sheer melodic beauty, in the vividness of its characterization, in the deftness of its polyphony and structure, this song deserves to rank among the best of our time."[60] Here are the opening strains of it.

Folks, I've just been down, down to Memphis town,
Oh, that melody, sure appealed to me,

That's where the people smile, smile on you all the while
Just like a mountain stream ripling on it seemed

[Listen]

Approaching them with the eager expectation that such praise naturally arouses, can we, as candid lovers of music, find anything but bitter disappointment in their trivial, poverty-stricken, threadbare conventionality? How many thousand times have we heard that speciously cajoling descent of the first three notes, that originally piquant but now indescribably boresome oscillation from the tonic chord in the third measure? These are the common snippets and tag-ends of harmony, kicked about the very gutters, ground out by every hurdy-gurdy, familiarity with which breeds not affection but contempt. Their very surface cleverness, as of meaningless ornament, is a part of their offense. Russian folk-song indeed! Compare them with the simple but noble tonic, dominant and sub-dominant, of the "Volga Boat Song" and their shoddiness stands self-revealed. And the melody? Bits and snippets again, quite without character if it were not for the rhythm, and acquiring no momentum save in the lines "I went out a-dancin'," etc., where they build up well, but to a complete anticlimax in the return of the obvious opening strain.

As for the rag rhythm itself, the sole distinctive feature of this music, it has undoubtedly something of real piquancy. The trick, it will be noted, is a syncopation of half-beats, arranged so as to pull bodily forward certain comparatively strong accents, those at the middle of the measures[61]—a scheme to which words as well as melody conform. The left hand meanwhile gives the regular metrical division of the measure, and a writer in the London Times, defining ragtime as "a strongly syncopated melody superimposed on a strictly regular accompaniment," points out that "it is the combination of these two rhythms that gives 'ragtime' its character."[62] This is perhaps not strictly true, since in some of the most effective bits of ragtime the metrical pulsation may give way momentarily to the syncopation, and everyone remembers those delightful times of complete silence in which the pulse is kept going mentally, to be finally confirmed by a crashing cadence. But it is usually the case that both time schemes, metrical and rhythmical, are maintained together. For this very reason we must question the contention of the champions of ragtime that its type of syncopation is capable of great variety, a contention in support of which some of them have even challenged comparison of it with the rhythmic vigors of Beethoven and Schumann.[63]

The subtlety of syncopation as an artistic device results from its simultaneous maintenance of two time-patterns, the rhythmic and the metrical, in such a relation that the second and subordinate one, though never lost sight of, is never obtruded. The quasi-mechanical pulse of the meter is the indispensable background against which only can the freer oscillations of the rhythm outline themselves. The moment the sense of it is lost, as it is sometimes lost in those over-bold passages of Schumann where a displacement is too emphatically made or too long continued, the charm disappears. In the following from his "Faschingsschwank," for instance, the interest of the rhythmic accent on beat "three" lasts only so long as we oppose to it mentally a regular metric accent on "one."

[Listen]

In the continuation of the passage, for which the reader is referred to the original, our minds are apt to "slip a stitch," so to speak, letting "three" and "one" coalesce. The moment this happens the passage becomes commonplace. But suppose, on the other hand, in the effort to maintain our sense of the meter, we strike the bass notes on each "one." Now equally, or indeed more than before, the charm is fled, and the passage rendered stale and unprofitable, through the actual presentation to the ear of so mechanical a reiteration. In short, the metrical scheme has to be mentally maintained, but actually, so far as possible, eliminated. Looking back, in the light of these considerations, at "The Memphis Blues," we shall realize that whatever the pleasing eccentricity of the rhythm, so relentless a meter as we here find thumped out by the left hand cannot but quickly grow tiresome, as indeed it will be felt to be after a few repetitions.

Reference to another well-known theme of Schumann will reveal a further weakness of ragtime. The second theme of the finale of his Concerto for piano runs as follows:

[Listen]

Here the indescribably delightful effect is evidently due not only to the purely rhythmic syncopation, but also to the fact that on the silent strong beat of every second measure harmony and melody as well as rhythm are so to speak "tied up," or suspended, in such a way that the syncopation is at the very heart of the whole musical conception, and cannot be omitted without annihilating the music. Beside such essential syncopation as this the mere pulling forward of certain notes, as in "The Memphis Blues," is seen to be superficial, an arbitrary dislocation which may disguise but cannot correct the triteness of the real melodic line. In fact, we seem here to have tracked ragtime to its lair and discovered what it really is. It is no creative process, like the syncopation of the masters, by which are struck forth new, vigorous, and self-sufficing forms. It is a rule of thumb for putting a "kink" into a tune that without such specious rehabilitation would be unbearable. It is not a new flavor, but a kind of curry or catsup strong enough to make the stale old dishes palatable to unfastidious appetites. Significant is it that, as the writer in the Times remarks, "In American slang to 'rag' a melody is to syncopate a normally regular time." The "rag" idiom can thus be put on and off like a mask; and in recent years we have seen thus grotesquely disguised, as the Mendelssohn Wedding March, for instance, in "No Wedding Bells for Me," many familiar melodies. To these it can give no new musical lineaments, but only distort the old ones as with St. Vitus' dance.

Thus the technical limitations of ragtime which we have tried to analyze are seen to be in the last analysis the results and indices of a more fundamental shortcoming—an emotional superficiality and triviality peculiar to it. Ragtime is the musical expression of an attitude toward life only too familiar to us all, an attitude shallow, restless, avid of excitement, incapable of sustained attention, skimming the surface of everything, finding nowhere satisfaction, realization, or repose. It is a meaningless stir-about, a commotion without purpose, an epilepsy simulating controlled muscular action. It is the musical counterpart of the sterile cleverness we find in so much of our contemporary conversation, as well as in our theater and our books. No candid observer could deny the prominence in our American life of this restlessness of which ragtime is one expression. It is undoubtedly what most strikes superficial observation. The question is whether it is really representative of the American temper as a whole, or is prominent only as the froth is prominent on a glass of beer. Mr. Moderwell thinks the former: "I like to think," he says, "that ragtime is the perfect expression of the American city, with its restless bustle and motion, its multitude of unrelated details, and its underlying rhythmic progress toward a vague somewhere." "As you walk up and down the streets of an American city you feel in its jerk and rattle a personality different from that of any European capital.... This is American. Ragtime, I believe, expresses it. It is to-day the one true American music."

To such an idolatry of precisely the most hideous, inhuman, and disheartening features in our national and musical life a lover of music and a lover of America can only reply that, first, it is possible that America lies less on the surface than we think, possible that it is no more adequately represented by Broadway than France is represented by the Parisian boulevards, or England by the London music halls; but that, second, if indeed the land of Lincoln and of Emerson has degenerated until nothing remains of it but "jerk and rattle," then we at least are free to repudiate the false patriotism of "My country, right or wrong," to insist that better than bad music is no music, and to let our beloved art subside finally under the clangor of subway gongs and automobile horns, dead but not dishonored.

III

That type of musical Æsthetic which insists much on the importance of the racial and national differences dividing human kind into groups, and of the special features, technical and expressive, characterizing the music of these various groups, is constantly challenging our American music to disavow what it calls a featureless cosmopolitanism, and to achieve individuality by idealizing some primitive popular strain, whether of the Indians, of the negroes, of the British colonizers, or of our contemporary "ragtime." In so doing it usually accepts uncritically certain assumptions. It is apt to assume, for instance, that interpretative truth is assured by geographical propinquity. The chant of the Indian "expresses" the modern American because the habitat of both is west of the Atlantic Ocean. It often assumes that characteristic turns of idiom, such as certain modal intervals or rhythmic figures, are of intrinsic value as making music "distinctive." You can make a tune "American" by "ragging" its rhythm, as you make a story American by inserting "I guess" or "I reckon" at frequent intervals. It often mistakes the conception of the average for that of the ideal type, and supposes that the man in the street represents the best taste of America. Above all, it condemns any attempt at universalizing artistic utterance as "featureless cosmopolitanism" or "flabby eclecticism," and suggests that the musician who speaks, not a dialect but a language understood over the civilized world (as Tschaikowsky did, for example, to the disgust of the Russian nationalists), has "lost contact," as the phrase goes, "with the soil." In the interest of clear thinking all these assumptions stand in need of criticism.

It is hardly possible even to state the first without recognizing the large measure of absurdity it contains. That the crude war-dances and chants of the red aborigines of this continent should be in any way representative of so mixed a people, compounded of so many European strains, as we who have exterminated and displaced them, is a thought more worthy of savages who believe that the strength of their enemy passes into them when they eat him than of our vaunted intelligence, fortified by ethnological science. We should hardly entertain it if we were not misled by the interest that attaches to anything unusual or outlandish, and tempted by certain idiomatic peculiarities of these monotonous strains to exploit their "local color." This may very well be done now and then for an artistic holiday, as MacDowell has done it in his Indian Suite; but if a folk-music is to enter vitally into art it must bring with it something more than quaintness or distinctive idioms, it must be genuinely expressive of the temperament of the people using it; and of the complex American temper Indian music can never be thus representative.

Somewhat similar considerations apply to the British folk-songs which, introduced by our pioneering grandfathers, have in remote regions like the Kentucky mountains survived uncontaminated by modernisms, and have recently been rediscovered and widely acclaimed. Here again the piquancy of unfamiliar idiom and a simplicity that falls agreeably on over-stimulated ears has aroused an enthusiasm that overshoots its mark. By all means let us enjoy these fresh songs, and even embody them in our music if we find it an interesting experiment. But can we expect that they will have any far-reaching interpretative value for us, that they will express our national temper? That they are not even native to the soil is a minor objection to them, for we are importations ourselves. But that they are, with all their charm, British through and through, makes it unlikely that they can adequately reflect a nation which, though partly British, is also partly almost everything else.

The case of ragtime is rather more subtle. Here is a music, local and piquantly idiomatic, and undeniably representative of a certain aspect of American character—our restlessness, our insatiable nervous activity, our thoughtless superficial "optimism," our fondness for "hustling," our carelessness of whither, how, or why we are moving if only we can "keep on the move." If this were all of us, if the first impression which foreigners get of us, summed up for them oftentimes in our inimitably characteristic "Step lively, please," were also the last, and there was nothing more solid, sweet, or wise in America than this galvanic twitching, then indeed ragtime would be our perfect music. But every true American knows that, on the contrary, this is not our virtue but our vice, not our strength but our weakness, and that such a picture of us as it presents is not a portrait but a caricature. And similarly, as soon as we examine ragtime at all critically we discover its essential triviality. Its melodies are commonplace, its harmonies cheap, shoddy, and sentimental. Even its rhythm, as we have seen, is a clever formula rather than a creative form, a trick for giving ordinary movement a specious air of animation. It is, in fact, as the writer in the London Times points out, "a debased imitation of genuine negro song, just as the popular Gaiety favorites of the late eighties, 'Enniscorthy' and 'Ballyhooley,' were debased imitations of a certain class of Irish folk-song." A few lines later this same writer falls into the pitfall always yawning for the theorist about ragtime, asks if the American composer will arrive who can extract gold from this ore, states coolly that "Ragtime represents the American nation," and of course ends up with an edifying reference to an art "really vital because it has its roots in its own soil." Does he consider that "Ballyhooley" "represents the Irish nation"? Would he advise Sir Charles Stanford to write a symphony upon it? Only an American journalist could be more naÏve, and here is one that is. "The important point," he says, "is that ragtime, whether it be adjudged good or bad, is original with Americans—it is their own creation."[64] This beggars comment.

IV

So far our results are mainly negative. We have discovered fallacies in several assumptions too commonly and easily made. We have set a lower estimate on purely geographical considerations than is often set. We have tried to distinguish between what in a popular strain is merely quaint or piquant because of peculiarities of idiom, and what is more profoundly true in expression to a national or racial temper; and while admitting the superficial charm of such idioms and of the "distinctiveness" to which they minister, we have insisted on the far deeper import of interpretative truth. We have glanced at the danger of confounding appeal to the majority with appeal to good taste, which is always outvoted, or of supposing that "originality" is of any importance in comparison with merit. From these criticisms certain positive principles thus tend to emerge. It becomes evident that there is a certain gradation of values in the qualities which a folk-music may possess. Distinctiveness of idiom is a merit, but a less vital one than interpretative power; higher than either is beauty, suitability to enter into music that may bear comparison with the best music of the world. Is there any body of folk-song available to Americans that possesses any or all of these merits in a higher degree than the types we have examined?

We seem to discover such a richer vein in the songs of the negroes—not the debased forms found in ragtime and the "coon-songs" of the minstrel shows, but the genuine old plantation tunes, the "spirituals" and "shouts" of the slaves. In idiomatic individuality, to begin with, both of harmonic interval and rhythmic figure, these songs will compare favorably with those of any European nation. With many of these they share, indeed, odd modal intervals of great antiquity, such as the lowered seventh scale-step in major and the raised sixth-step in minor. Like Scottish tunes they make frequent use of the incomplete or pentatonic scale, omitting the fourth and seventh steps. A peculiarity in which they are almost unique is a curious oscillation between a major key and its relative minor, especially at cadences, so that one gets a haunting sense of uncertainty that enhances tenfold their plaintiveness. In "The Angels Done Changed My Name" (Figure XXXIV), are exemplified the lowered seventh step—at "I went to pray"—and the pentatonic scale; in "You May Bury Me in the East" the raised sixth step—to the word "trumpet"—and the major-minor cadence. The last line begins unmistakably in E flat, and ends equally unmistakably in C minor, and gets from that veering in the wind, so to speak, a peculiar flavor which we should recognize anywhere as "Negro." It is noteworthy that both these songs have to be harmonized strongly and simply with the staple triads—it is impossible to harmonize them otherwise. In other words they are the product and expression of a primitive but pure and strong tonal sense, refreshingly free from the effeminate chromatic harmonies—the "barber-shop chords"—of ragtime. The one compares with the other as the fervent childish poetry of the lines here, "Thank God the angels done changed my name," or "I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning" compares with the slangy doggerel of the cabarets.[65]

[Listen]

I went to the hillside, I went to pray, I
know the angels done changed my name, Done
changed my name for the coming day, Thank
God the angels done changed my name.

[Listen]

You may bury me in the East, You may
bury me in the West, But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that
morning. In that morning, my Lord
How I long to go for, For to hear the trumpet sound, In that morning.

It is often stated that the chief rhythmic characteristic of the negro music is the so-called "Scotch jerk," the jump away from the normally accented note to another, thrice exemplified in the third line of "The Angels Done Changed My Name," and imitated in ragtime. A more typical instance of it is "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" (Figure XXXV), which also further illustrates major-minor idiom in its constant see-saw between G minor and B-flat major. It is pointed out that the slaves had a strong sense of time, that the overwhelming majority of their songs are in duple or march time, with very few in the more graceful but less vehement triple measure, and that in their "shouts" or religious dances they rocked themselves into paroxysms of rhythmic excitement, one group clapping the meter while the others sang and scuffled with a "jerking, twitching motion which agitated the entire shouter and soon brought out streams of perspiration."[66] No doubt the jerk evidences their love of strong accentuation; but it must be noted that accentuation is a purely local thing, affects the meter rather than the rhythm, and may be assumed and put off by a tune (as in the "ragging" of a standard melody) without changing its essential curve.

[Listen]

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel D'liver
Daniel, d'liver Daniel, Didn't my Lord deliver
Daniel, And why not a ev'ry man?

[Listen]

Oh, yes, I'm going up, going up,
going all the way, Lord, going up,
going up, to see the heavenly land.

Far more significant, therefore, than their half-barbaric fondness for the jerk is the grasp shown by negroes over the larger and nobler reaches of rhythm, their feeling for the phrase as a whole and ability to impress upon it a firm and yet varied profile. The second half of "You May Bury Me in the East," with its bold festooning of outline, even more strikingly the tune "Going Up," with its piquant silences and its even-paced insistence on "going all the way, Lord," show a unity in their variety, a certain "all-of-a-piece-ness," compared with which even "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" seems scrappy, and the ordinary ragtime effusion pitifully poverty-stricken. There is plenty of internal evidence, too, that these happy results are attributable to genuine musical imagination, and not to luck in the servile following of felicitous word-patterns. Indeed, the frequency with which unimportant words are accented and important ones slurred over shows that, as is so often the case with great melodists like Schubert, the words were regarded more or less as convenient pegs to hang the melodies on, and the specifically musical faculty did not easily brook interference. "The negroes keep exquisite time," writes one of the editors of "Slave Songs in the United States," the best of the collections, "and do not suffer themselves to be daunted by any obstacle in the words. The most obstinate hymns they will force to do duty with any tune they please, and will dash heroically through a trochaic tune at the head of a column of iambs with wonderful skill." The sense of independent tone-pattern, which when possessed by individual geniuses in supreme degree gives us the immortal melodies of a Beethoven or a Brahms, waxes and wanes in these childlike tunes, sometimes falling back into platitude, but sometimes advancing to a real distinction and beauty.

Whether this beauty is of the kind we have desiderated as the highest quality folk-song can have, rendering it "suitable to enter into music that may bear comparison with the best music of the world," is a further question, and one which brings us at length to the highly controversial matter of the kind of treatment that the composer should give folk-material in incorporating it into his more finished art. The variations of taste concerned here are so subtle that probably unanimity of judgement, even if it be desirable, will never be attained. Yet it is certain that treatment of some sort there must be. The mere collecting, collating, and setting forth of folk-songs, attractively arranged for instruments or even orchestrated, such as we have seen much of from all countries in recent years, is no more musical art than a pile of bricks is a building, or a series of anecdotes literature. So far as it tends to content the public with such potpourris, the fad for folk-song is positively injurious to taste, in something the same way that our modern floods of petty journalism are injurious to the capacity for sustained reading. Moreover, even on their own level such medleys are apt to be unsatisfactory; for the tunes themselves are so definite, brief, and complete, and the transitional passages between them are therefore so obtrusively transitional, that the net effect is that of the ill-baked bread pudding from which we eat nothing but the raisins. Mr. Coleridge-Taylor's "Twenty-Four Negro Melodies," despite incidental attractions, are on the whole an example of this bad model.

Far worse, however, are those "improvements" of folk-song which consist in a general prettifying of its homely simplicity with all the refinements and luxuries of sophisticated musical technique—as if a country maiden should conceal her healthy color under layers of rouge. Strange that composers skilful enough to use them should not recognize the inappropriateness of Wagnerian chromatics and Debussyan whole-tone scale harmonies, to say nothing of all sorts of rich dissonantal trappings, to tunes as diatonic as "God Save the King" and as square cut as the "Hymn of Joy." One would think that the sense of humor, which revels in incongruity in music as in other things, would keep them from doing it and us from taking it so seriously. It would be invidious to name examples, but they can be discovered by the discerning; for not even the negro complexion is proof against this brand of talcum powder.

The kind of change that is both legitimate and necessary may perhaps be best suggested by another example, "Deep River." Here we have, in the first phrase, that free and firm molding of rhythmic pattern which is often so surprising in these songs, so that we might look far in the best composers without finding its peer in deliberate, calm beauty. But just as our hearts are responding to the wave of emotion thus generated it strikes, so to speak, a dead wall, falls shattered, and has to begin over again, without being able to recover the lost momentum. The imagination is vital as far as it goes, but its span is short, it lacks sustained power and cumulative force. What is needed in the composer who would deal with such material, then, in addition to a tact that enters into its spirit, is a synthetic imagination capable of rounding out its incompleteness, of tracing the whole of the curve it suggests, of developing into full life what it presents only as a germ.

[Listen]

Deep river, my home is over Jordan,
Deep river, Lord I want to cross over in to camp ground.

How difficult such a truly creative treatment is, only those fully know who have tried it; how rare, musical literature testifies. To add a measure to a folk-song is almost like adding a cubit to one's stature, and for the same reason—that addition is not what is requisite, but organic growth. That it is possible we see in Brahms's masterly treatment of German student songs in his "Academic Festival Overture"; that it can be applied to negro melodies we have been shown especially by DvorÁk. In his "New World" symphony and his "American" Quartet and Quintet he assimilated a peculiar idiom so perfectly that there is not a note, even in the highly complex harmonies toward the end of the symphony, that does not take its place in the scheme unobtrusively. While the harmonic idiom preponderantly of simple triads dictated by the material is maintained with an unerring sense of style, these commonest of all chords are so deftly managed that they never become commonplace. The twin pitfalls of platitude and sophistication are avoided with equal success. The same felicity is attained in the construction. However brief the themes, they do not sound trivial or unconvincing, because we feel they have reached their natural growth. Above all, the same sympathy and power that are shown in these technical matters so control the conception as a whole that these works form a true idealization of negro feeling, in its moods both of half-barbaric dance and of naÏvely pathetic sentiment.

DvorÁk's example suffices by itself, then, to show that the negro music, in the hands of a master, is capable of two of the three qualities we demanded of any folk-song—idiomatic distinctiveness and capacity for organized beauty. Does he also demonstrate in it the third—adequacy to interpret the American temper? Something closely kindred to that temper and easily endeared to it there certainly is in the restless rhythmic energy, the unceasing motion and quick changes of these scherzos, the vigor and dispatch of these allegro movements. Like similar syncopations and other rhythmic peculiarities that we find in those of our composers who have more than their share of our national nervous energy, such as Chadwick and Whiting, the negro rhythms have a crispness and buoyancy that is somehow appropriate to our clear skies and self-helpful society. They give at least a far fairer portrait of us than the caricature of ragtime. In its more sentimental moods, too, negro music has an unsophistication, an unreserved naÏvetÉ, that reminds us of similar traits in the traditional conception of our fellow countrymen. It thus seems to express more of our national temperament, and to leave less of it unexpressed than would on the whole any other body of folk-song.

Yet the very attempt to formulate these considerations forces us to realize how hopelessly inadequate they are as an account of the possibilities of America in music. The picture they give of the national type may do something like justice to it as it existed in earlier times and simpler surroundings, as it appears, for instance, in the pages of Mark Twain or Bret Harte, and as it is symbolised in the person of Uncle Sam; but the modern American is a being quite other, far more complex, far more cosmopolitan, the American not of nineteenth century New England but of the twentieth century "melting pot." He is wholly incommensurate not only with negro music or any folk music, but with even individual composers like DvorÁk in whom emotion far outruns intellectual subtlety. No folk music, let us repeat, no individual composer, no school of composers, can "express" America. The age of such simplicities is past, if it ever existed. Whether we like it or not, we have to take our age and our country as they are; they are an age of rapidly accelerating intercommunication of all peoples and a country in which the internationalism that thus slowly results is being hastened by actual admixture on a heretofore unprecedented scale. Such a condition doubtless has its bad as well as its good aspects; but if those who bemoan our "featureless cosmopolitanism" and advocate an impossible parochialism as the only remedy would try rather to see how a wider outlook and a larger sympathy may deepen our art and make it more truly human by laying less stress on local, national, or even racial types, and more on the untrammeled expression of the greatest possible variety of individuals, music would fare better. "National literature:" wrote Goethe to Eckerman in 1827, "the term has no longer much meaning to-day; the time for universal literature is come, and each ought to work to hasten its advent." Signs are not wanting that the condition thus discerned by the wisest men a century ago is now gradually getting itself acknowledged in general practice.

V

If we accept, in the light of the foregoing considerations, the ideal of enlightened eclecticism, not only for our own music here in America but measurably for all modern music, since it is all subject to the internationalization so characteristic of our time, the chief undertaking that remains to us will be an attempt to define the position of the American composer in relation to such eclecticism, the advantages and disadvantages of his situation, the pitfalls he must avoid, and the opportunities he should embrace. From this point of view it will be seen that the enthusiasts of nationalism, in advising our composer to confine himself to Indian, Negro, or ragtime material, in adjuring him not to listen to the siren voice of Europe, are not merely misleading but cheating him. They are asking him to throw away his birthright of wide cosmopolitan influence for a mess of purely parochial pottage. They are bewailing the lack in America of just those geographical and racial boundary lines that split up Europe into a series of more or less petty and hostile camps. They are inviting us to descend from the point of vantage good fortune has given us, a little removed both in space and in time from the thick of the battle.

For it is indeed the peculiar good fortune of the young American composer that he finds spread out before him, as the models through the study of which he is to acquire an important part of his technical equipment and of his general attitude towards art, the masterpieces of the various European countries, among which he may pick and choose as his individual taste directs, and without being hampered by those annoying racial and national jealousies from which the most intelligent European cannot quite free himself. What he may acquire of the special virtue of each school—the delicacy and distinction of the French, the solid structural power of the German, the suave and rich coloring of the Russian, the austere dignity of the English—is limited, not by the accident of birth, but only by his own assimilative power. No element in his complex nature need be starved for want of its proper food. He is placed in the midst of the stream of world influences to make of himself what he will and can.

Is it not inconceivable that one thus privileged to speak, within the measure of his ability, a world language should ever content himself with a Negro or Indian dialect? It would be so perhaps did we not consider that, in order to speak the world language of cosmopolitan music as it exists to-day, one must spend years in laborious discipline and in obscurity, while any tyro can make a certain effect and gain a certain prominence by stammering in an idiom strongly enough tinctured with local color. Vanity is the immemorial enemy of art; if the itch to be conspicuous once infect him, the artist forgets all those subtle adaptations, those difficult reconcilements, which were formerly his passion, and makes a crude effect that appeals much more to the primitive minds of the masses. And this he may do quite unconsciously and in the sincere belief that he is pursuing the highest ideals. In the presence of the immediate good, of recognition and acclaim, it is pitifully easy to forget the remote better, the broader, finer, subtler beauty that is not yet understood.

But if the picturesque, the quaint, the piquant, is by nature more quick to appeal than the beautiful, it is also more short-lived. For this reason those writers in all ages and countries who depend largely on local color are promptly acclaimed and soon forgotten, while those who aim at the more universal human qualities win gradually a place that proves permanent. Bret Harte was doubtless considered more "American" by his own generation than Emerson. Shakespeare is far less English than Defoe, Dante is not so notably Italian, or Goethe so notably German, as are many lesser men. Or, to come back to music, where are now the Russian "nationalists" who excluded Tschaikowsky the "cosmopolite" from their magic circle? For a while we listened to their melancholy Russian cadences with fascinated interest, in spite of their crude harmonization, their incoherent form, their lack of instinct for style, because we were pleased with the novelty. Now the novelty has worn off, and for human nature's daily food we find Tschaikowsky, who made the most of his opportunities, rose above a narrow exclusiveness, and assimilated power wherever he found it, far preferable.

The true difficulty of the American composer's position, then, is to be found, not in the poverty of the native folk-song, but in the confusing variety of the foreign influences in which he is so rich. He has suffered and is still suffering from an embarrassment of riches, from a mental indigestion. His cosmopolitanism is indeed too often "featureless," and his readiness to be influenced an evidence of weakness rather than strength, a flat rather than a broad eclecticism. His technique is miscellaneous, his style without distinction, his art as a whole lacks individuality. This featurelessness is the typical defect of American compositions of the present generation, perhaps—typical in spite of some notable exceptions. The technical deficiencies of our pioneer forefathers are more and more becoming things of the past; free intercourse with Europe and the wholesale importation of skilled European musicians have refined away the crudities with surprising rapidity; there are among us to-day musical workmen whose skill in symphony, chamber music, and opera will compare favorably with that of Europeans. Where we still fail is in that subtle, indefinable, and indispensable touch of personal distinction which may be recognized in artists so diverse, both individually and racially, as Strauss, d'Indy, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Paderewski, Sibelius, Elgar. What is the secret of this distinction?

We may get a clue to the right answer by considering a peculiar case, an exceptional case, among ourselves—the exception that proves the rule—the case of MacDowell. The supreme place he undoubtedly holds among our composers is due precisely to this quality of personal distinction, of individuality, to the fact that his music, in spite of the pronounced Grieg and Raff elements in it, does not sound quite like that of any one else. Technically MacDowell has grave deficiencies; his harmonic system is singularly limited, mannered, and monotonous; his polyphony is weak; his "drawing," as a painter would say, is often halting and awkward. His range of expression, moreover, is not wide, and within it he frequently cloys by an over-sweet sentimentalism. But MacDowell is sincere, and he is always himself. There are no unfused elements in his style, no outstanding features, that we feel to have been borrowed and not assimilated. His style is very narrow, but it is his own. And the result is that, although we shall soon forget some of our composers who are far cleverer than he, we shall not forget MacDowell.

The enemies of eclecticism have thus expressed a half-truth, we begin to see, when they call it flabby. Only too easily does it become so. As dangerous as it is desirable, it will contribute to the formation of an artist only when it is controlled by an instinctive sense of how much one can assimilate, and the courage to reject the rest. And here we come to one of those peculiar difficulties of the position in which the American composer finds himself. It is hard for him, recognizing, as his natural alertness of perception and his detached point of view enable him to do, the merits of many different European aims and methods, and, mainly sensitive as he must be to his own shortcomings in respect to any of them—it is hard for him to distinguish between those that he can possibly assimilate to his own uses and those that must remain alien to him; and it is doubly hard to let the latter alone, voluntarily restricting his field in order that he may be the master of it. Yet these selections, these sacrifices, are at the very foundation of artistic personality. It is no more possible for a human being to be, let us say, at once as subtle as Debussy and as gorgeous as Strauss than it is to be in two places at once. Which will you do without? But the young American composer is at once too timid and too ambitious to do without anything; in the attempt to be everywhere at the same time he cuts himself up into little pieces that end by being nowhere.

The frank and courageous acceptance of limitations is, in truth, the first step toward artistic individuality; a man can never be an individual, as the very derivation of the word may remind him, so long as he remains divided, spread out very wide and very thin, unwilling to take sides, but only when he concentrates himself, is loyal to one cause, grows out from one nucleus. What this nucleus shall be, indeed, differs according to circumstances. For the European musician it is to some extent decided beforehand, by the conditions of birth, of national and racial allegiance. The American, as we said, to begin with is freer in this respect; but we may now add that he is no less bound to find a cause, a unifying center, if he would get beyond mere clever imitation and become a genuine person. He must love his cause so singly that he will cleave to it, and forsake all else. Now what is this cause for the American composer but the utmost musical beauty that he, as an individual man with his own qualities and defects, is capable of understanding and striving towards? And what is the "all else" that he must forsake, save those types of musical beauty which, whatever may be their intrinsic worth, do not come home to him, do not arouse a sympathetic vibration in him, leave him cold? He must take sides. He must be, not a philosopher, but a partisan. He must have good hearty enthusiasms, and good hearty prejudices. Only so can he be an individual.

It matters not one jot, provided this course of personal loyalty to a cause be steadfastly pursued, what the special characteristics of style of the music may be to which one gives one's devotion. Let A give his life to studying the delicate color scheme of the French "ultra-moderns"; let B find his joy in a polyphony based on Bach's; let C develop lovingly the cadences or rhythms of Negro and Indian tunes; all three will be good musicians, all three good Americans—for, after all, American music is only music. The man who is neither good musician nor good American is the botcher, the dilettante, the clever amateur—he who is too lazy to learn his business, too pretentious to limit his claims, too busy talking about art to study it. Such babblers have always been, and always will be, naturally, far more numerous than the efficient workers; and they will doubtless continue to fill the newspapers and magazines with their silly superficialities, and do their utmost to confuse the public into forgetting that sincerity and skill are the only things that can ever be justly demanded of an artist.

VI

In demanding skill and sincerity of our composers, however, we are requiring of them, as a little analysis will suffice to show, labors and sacrifices of which only the rarest natures are capable; and it may well be that the unsatisfactory character of composition in America is due far more to the rarity of men able or willing to undertake such labors and endure such sacrifices than to the difficulties of the Æsthetic problems we have so far been considering. Let us, then, in closing, try to suggest answers to the purely practical questions: Is there anything about our social and economic system that lays especial burdens on creative artists? If there is, is there any hope of correcting it? Whether it may be corrected or not, may our composers, through candid recognition of it, be saved from dissipation of energy and helped to concentrate their efforts on objects most likely to be achieved, and most worth achieving? We shall answer all these questions affirmatively.

First we must note that the amount and intensity of mental application involved in composition is something of which the layman has little idea. The technique to be mastered by the composer is singularly difficult; the tonal material he works in is subtle and intangible; its relationships, harmonic, rhythmic, melodic, polyphonic, which he must learn not only to understand but to manipulate, are of an indescribable complexity; and he achieves command of all these fundamental or grammatical means of his art only to face the far subtler distinctions of structure and style on a wise apprehension of which depends his artistic individuality. Moreover, if he would take advantage of the wide and unbiased view of European music which we have seen to be a special privilege of the intelligent American, he must do far more than hear or read the chief works of many masters; he must know them in and out, must learn to breathe the peculiar atmosphere of each,—must, in short, live with them. And more than that, for after analysis comes synthesis, after assimilation, creation; and as the one requires laborious, minute, detailed study, the other requires a wide margin of leisure in which the mind can forget all these details, empty itself of all irrelevance, and prepare to receive whatever thoughts may visit it. Here is more time needed, in great spaces. This is a full and varied way of living, indeed, that we are sketching; and we have not yet made out how the artist is to live at all. How is he to get money to support himself?

Not, certainly, from his compositions. They will do well if they bring him enough to pay for ink and paper; they will surely not pay for their own copying. "A man," says Mr. Graham Wallas,[67] "who gives the best strength of each day to dreaming about the nature of God or the State, or the shape of the earth, or the relation of the sides of a triangle to its hypotenuse, produces nothing which at the end of the day he can easily sell. Since the actual process of inference is unconscious, and his voluntary control over it indirect and uncertain, he is not even sure that he will produce any result at all, whether salable or unsalable, by months of effort. How then shall he live?" If this is the situation of the creative thinker in science, what shall we say of that of the creative thinker in art? As we have seen in discussing the relations of democracy and music, the class which in the eighteenth century bought the wares of the composer finds its analogue, under our capitalistic industrial system, in the frivolous plutocracy, who demand of music curiosities, novelties, and entertainment. The vast mass of listeners emerging from below, on the other hand, of crude and childlike taste, prefer stories (program music), day-dreaming, and sensationalism to beauty. Confronted by these two classes, the composer will find his sincerity likely to cost him dear. If he is really sincere, if he is trying to write music that presents the kind of beauty that he hears, and that no one else has heard in just that way before, he will find himself enjoying it in a minority of one. Yet the alternative, to prostitute himself and "give the public what it wants," is even worse; and when the public says to him, in the words of Mozart's publisher, "Write in a more easy, popular style, or I will not print a note or give you a kreuzer," his answer can be no other than Mozart's: "Then, my good sir, I have only to resign myself and die of hunger."

Or rather, and here is the special irony of the situation, his alternative is not a literal physical hunger, but that subtler hunger that follows the denial of the imperious instinct to create beauty; he has not to starve his body of bread, but his soul of music. For while society withholds with one hand, so to speak, any payment for the best work he can do, because it is too good, because it requires too long to be understood, it freely offers him with the other a bare livelihood, if not more, for work of secondary value—teaching, performance, exposition, anything but creation. It constantly pulls, pushes, cajoles, persuades, coaxes, browbeats him from the superior to the inferior activity. It so fills his days with the one that even if at long intervals an opportunity for the other presents itself he has hardly the spirit to seize it. It deadens him with detail, drugs him with drudgery, cages him until he forgets how to sing. Where, as in America, there exists a very "high standard of living," as it is quaintly called, meaning that many and costly material wants have to be met before spiritual needs can be considered, the labor imposed by such a struggle may be overwhelming. And it is superimposed, we must remember, on the other labor, the creative one, described above. The same nerves, body, and brain, in the same twenty-four hours each day, must sustain the two labors, one to earn a livelihood, the other to make use of it. No wonder few can endure it; no wonder most give it up in despair or dull indifference, and content themselves with the livelihood without taking the trouble to live.

Not only, moreover, are the broad facts of economics, under a capitalistic-industrial system, thus flatly inimical to creative work, but in a plutocratic civilization like ours the more subtle forces of public opinion are perhaps even more fatal to it, because more pervasive and intangible. In Europe the impecunious artist is accepted with tolerance, even with a touch of respect, and suffered to live undisturbed in his Bohemia and to pursue his dreams. To us, who still as a people recognize no measure of achievement but income, and who accept without a murmur the domination of mass-convention in most matters of opinion, he is something worse than an interesting eccentric or even a harmless crank; he is something of a sybarite and a skulker; he is one who "doesn't play the game." Therefore he need look to us for understanding or sympathy no more than for more material rewards. If he wishes to be approved of, let him do something useful—that is, something that pays.

When we realize the penalties that are thus piled upon the head of the artist whose only offense is that he wishes to give something to society of which it does not yet recognize the value, our wonder that there is so little American composition of the first quality changes to surprise that there is any. We begin to suspect—as Ruskin did at forty, and devoted the rest of his life to demonstrating the truth of his suspicion—that the decadence of art we witness all around us is only a symptom of a deeper disease, and that, as William Morris expressed it, "Slavery lies between us and art."[68] Capitalistic industrialism, as Matthew Arnold saw, "materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class"; and under such conditions vital art can have no secure or assured life. It may well be, therefore, that art can only in the long run be saved, like society itself, by the fairer, freer, humaner system that socialism promises. It cannot but thrill all true lovers of art to find its claims, with those of a liberalized society, being championed to-day, no longer merely by individual thinkers like Ruskin and Morris, but by great representative bodies like the British Labor Party. "Society, like the individual," says a draft report of this party[69] "does not live by bread alone—does not exist only for perpetual wealth production. The Labour Party will insist on greatly increased public provision being made for scientific investigation and original research, in every branch of knowledge, not to say also for the promotion of music, literature, and fine art, which have been under capitalism so greatly neglected, and upon which, so the Labour Party holds, any real development of civilization fundamentally depends."

Finally, however, inspiring as are the hopes these words suggest, the American composer need not await their realization before putting forth those individual efforts without the aid of which, after all, they can never attain it. Music, like society, has reached its present state only through the struggles, against immense odds, of its martyrs and its heroes: not only of Bach, of Mozart, of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, of Brahms, but of countless others who have wrought and suffered in obscurity and with a consecration of their more limited powers to the great cause of beauty. And if American life lays almost crushing burdens on artistic initiative, there is also in the best American tradition a courage, an independence, a certain nonchalant and plucky self-reliance that ought to carry an artist far on the solitary path he has to travel. It ought to keep him from turning back, though it could not guard him against wandering and getting lost. All that can help him there is clearsightedness, a realistic and unsentimental view of the society in which he lives and the terms on which he lives in it. He must discharge the work he does for a livelihood as conscientiously as he can, but meanwhile not forget to live also. He must not make the tragic mistake, the unpardonable sin of the artist, described by Thoreau: "To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known only to ourselves, far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of our freedom to make that known." He must cut down his material requirements to the minimum and honor his own poverty. He must learn to find his satisfaction in the work itself, and not expect recognition, which is bound to be late (even later in America than elsewhere), and likely to be mistaken. Above all, he must not pity himself or grow embittered, for in the possession of a lifelong enthusiasm, an ideal that he can always work towards and will never reach, he has the best gift that life has to offer.

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