Orgy by Air

THERE are people, sometimes annoying to our sterner intellectual moods, who use a great many general terms and catch phrases without assuming the least responsibility for their meaning; others, hardly less annoying, continually press us to define any word more ambitious than the common name of a common thing, and will not let us talk of society, state, religion, or justice without demanding an analysis of each.

I am sure that a considerable number of people will at once have a sense of what I mean when I speak of modern music. Not those intransigent people who use the phrase solely as a term of opprobrium and horror, who cannot tolerate any music after Brahms; anyone who does not regard Stravinsky and Sibelius as among the greatest of our contemporaries is hereby solemnly warned away from the group I should like to address. I have in mind a largely inarticulate but faithful company of concertgoers who in recent years have been subjected to increasing familiarity with a species of composition that by force of experience has come to assume an illdefined but definitely felt shape and character in their minds. We who belong to this company cannot give an account of modern music in musical terms; we are restricted to the common language of literary description. We speak not as critics or scholars, but as listeners interested enough in what they undergo to attempt an unpretentious psychological record of their experiences.

The kind of composition we think of as modern may be a symphony or a quartet, but more probably it will be a tone poem, or a ballet score. A ‘programme’ may be attached to it, but whatever the composer may have used as the source of his inspiration, or whatever scene he invites us to contemplate as the music evolves, the mere sounds of themselves will intrinsically give off suggestions of their own; and it is these that we should like to describe if we can, for they after all constitute the music.

The first phase of a composition of the sort I have in mind has, it may be said, nothing to do with music as music, with the art as art; and it is a mere flippancy to mention it at all. But art is not insulated from trivial circumstance, or divorced from the accidents of life. After all, music is only a small part of the total experience of going to a concert. This experience definitely begins with the rumble of the subway, the lurch of the surface car, or the mounting debt indicated by the taximeter. It goes on with the bustle and expectancy of watching players drift in and take their places on the stage, hearing the instruments go through their random and discordant preliminaries, waiting for the conductor to make his entrance.

The first overt sign that a new composition is to be played, other than the information in the programme book, is the influx on the stage of large reënforcements of players. They are all armed with the more bizarre and formidable weapons of auditory assault. The xylophone, left discreetly covered with green felt during the polite Mozart or Haydn with which the programme begins, is exposed naked to the eye, its polished nickel underpinnings glittering malignantly in the light. The menial appointed to play it makes a few preliminary glissandos, a dull hollow brilliance of tone hovering in suggestion between the ring of metal and the clipper-clap of wood. Impeccably clad but relentless-looking virtuosos of the trumpet, with their long, barbaric tubes of brass held under their arms like half-drawn swords ready for an instant quarrel of honor, crowd in to be ready for the next emergence of the conductor. Three or four competent and athletic knights of the tambourine, castanets, and cymbals take their places on the elevated back row of the orchestra; snare drums and bass drums are lightly thudded, ready for the attack.

The stage of a sudden looks very crowded, and the possibilities of noise implicit in the augmented field batteries of the musical art dawn upon the imagination with a thrill of something like terror. The listener braces himself to put up with the worst that he can hear, and to come through as little scathed as possible. Some of the possibilities of surprise are lost; the show is a giveaway, for one can see the full extent of the ordeal prepared for him. But if the composer cannot hope to work a surprise on the audience, he loses none of the force of suspense. He can still keep his listeners wondering when the full potentiality of din will have been extracted, when the exploitation of sheer noise wall have reached its peak, the ultimate beyond which it cannot go and remain perceptible to human sense organs.

Sometimes the composer begins at once with a vigorous fanfare, and lets his hearers have immediately a taste of the volume of sound which he has at his command. But more often the first purely musical phase of the composition may be described as wistfully sensuous. It begins with slight scamperings of the flute to unexpected terminal points on the scale; acid and dissatisfied breathings of muted trumpets; tremblings of the strings. Common chords are suggested only to be glided away from in favor of chords which are rapidly becoming no less common. Little starts of melody and fits of tunefulness are allowed to begin, then hastily withdrawn when they seem on the point of perhaps undistinguished but respectable careers. The psychological suggestion is of a dreamy and self-indulgent young man, with large hazel eyes and down on his chin, disturbed by faint amatory impulses which he mistakes for tragic passion, and frustrated by immaturity and want of robustness, which he mistakes for the hostile disposition of the universe, forever bent on bringing the hero, the artist, and the lover to inexorable defeat. During this phase curious properties of sound are exploited, which no doubt the musician could describe in auditory terms, but which the untechnical listener can only describe in the language of his humble psychology.

The luscious and the honeyed in orchestral tones are intermixed with the faintly painful; little discords and minor barbarities of noise are played on much as a boy with a loose tooth wiggles it and works it with his tongue, extracting little shoots of ecstatic pain, frightening for the horrible abysms they suggest, but all the while comfortably under control. One can always stop wiggling the loose tooth, or perhaps it will come out and can be put in a box on the cupboard shelf; but the listener is not always sure that the composer has his impulses under control, that he will not keep right on going after the ambiguously painful in the realm of sound has been exploited long enough. Faint lewdnesses, for which the young man with down on his chin applauds himself as an abandoned rake, are also suggested by this phase of the music. Subdued blats of the trumpets, fat and oily workings of the bass clarinet or bassoon, are useful for this purpose. The imagination is encouraged to play with visions of houris, peris, nymphs, satyrs, and other emblems of the sensual. But the suggestions of this first phase are never very decisive; they play about in an ambiguous realm, content with the wistfully defeated in place of the tragic, and the feebly indulgent in place of the joyous.

The most characteristic phase of modern music, of course, is the orgiastic. The young man with the downy chin, one is aware, is suddenly becoming a different creature. Can it be? The thought is incredible; but listen, it must be so! These rattlings of the snare drum, these quickenings of pace throughout the whole orchestra, these agitations, syncopations, stabs of silver tone from the triangle, glissandos of harp and xylophone, are transforming the decadent and sophisticated youth into a ruthless barbarian, thumping his feet and waving his arms in some primitive dance of obscene or cruel rites. Music, we see, has charms to make the soothed breast savage. The noise is on us now, and no escaping. We are going to get it, and get it hard. The fact that it is applied with sophisticated ingenuity leads us to marvel but not to approve. Two or three batteries of drums are going full tilt. The competent technician of the cymbals looks excited. With precise motions, instinct with the arcana and mystery of his craft, he seizes a drumstick and beats a shimmering tattoo of sound on the suspended circumference of brass. The molecules of the tortured metal vibrate and scream to a climax that strikes the tympanum of the ear like the crack of a whip. A solid thump on the bass drum splashes a large blob of voluminous noise through the hall; it quivers physically up and down the solar plexus. The party is getting rough. Pretty soon we’ll be breaking furniture.

The trouble is that orgies are a good deal alike. Once the furniture begins to go you can’t tell this week’s party from last week’s. Chair legs all break in much the same way. And even the best musical idea (we somehow feel that this is not one of the best) ceases to gain in point and impressiveness after it has been repeated a certain number of times in mounting degrees of crescendo. We get it, we get it; now please be a little quieter. Well, all right; we can live through one more still louder demonstration, but you really must stop sometime!

We are relieved, on the whole, when the orgiastic phase comes to an end; even glad to welcome a few reminiscences of the young man with the downy chin, perspiring still from his effort to be a savage, but less disturbing in his natural character of an effete young artist or frustrated lover of inconclusive visions. Of course, we may be put through the orgy again before the piece is over. Two modes of conclusion are possible: we may fade out quietly with the young man in a languorous and defeated dream, or we may be worked up a second time, and even more excruciatingly, to the pinnacle of dissonance raised to the nth power of fortissimo. We hope that the quieter termination may be granted us; but we will hold out to the bitter end, for we do not believe in closing the ears of the understanding to what our contemporaries have to compose for us.