Terpander; or, Music and the future — Reading Companion

TERPANDER _or_ MUSIC AND THE FUTURE

New York E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue

Published, 1927 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_All ancient writers who mention the progressive state of music in Greece, are unanimous in celebrating the talents of TERPANDER. Several writers tell us that he added three strings to the lyre, which before his time had but four. Plutarch, in his “Laconic Institutions,” informs us that Terpander was fined by the Ephori for his innovations. However, in his Dialogue on Music, he likewise tells us that the same musician appeased a sedition at Sparta, among the same people, by the persuasive strains which he sung and played to them upon that occasion. There seems no other way of reconciling these two accounts, than by supposing that he had, by degrees, refined the public taste, or depraved his own to the level of his hearers._――BURNEY.

In the early years of the present century a certain learned and cultivated musician, then about eighty years of age, was heard to say, as he came out from a concert at which works by Debussy had been played: “Well, if this is the ‘music of the future,’ I’m very glad I shan’t live to hear it!” Debussy has passed over to the classics since then, but there are still plenty of music-lovers, many of them, too, not more than middle-aged at the most, who feel apprehensive about the future of music. Wherever they turn, there seems to be complete chaos. The music of the present day is for them an unending succession of hideous noises. There are some who, remembering that in their own lifetime they have passed through periods when even Brahms and Wagner, Richard Strauss and César Franck seemed unintelligible, are yet resolved not to be baffled by Schönberg and Stravinsky. They study contemporary music with perhaps little pleasure, but with passionate interest and curiosity. Yet they are inevitably conscious of difficulties which do not appear to have confronted them before. They can see in the music of the early twentieth century some clear continuance of the classical tradition; in the later music they can find nothing that gives them even a faint hope of being able to understand it――some day if not now. They find themselves in the position of a man who sets out to learn a language which has no connection with the Indo-European stock. It is bad enough to have to master a new alphabet; one may possibly, by dint of strenuous effort, commit to memory a vocabulary of words which bear not the remotest resemblance to any in French or German, Latin or Greek; but when it comes to tackling an entirely strange system of syntax for the expression of unfamiliar ideas, the mind revolts and the student asks whether all this jargon can really have any significance at all. And the student of modern music is made still more sceptical by the fact that the musicians whom he respects among the apparent initiates are seldom in any agreement as to which of the various conflicting systems of music is to be regarded as the expression of the true faith. Can you tell me, he asks, often with genuine humility, of one living composer whom you wholeheartedly accept as a great creative genius, in the way in which you once accepted Beethoven, or Brahms, or Wagner, as the case might be? The hardened critic hesitates, names tentatively this or that musician――No, replies the other firmly; there seems to be no one whom you can name without some qualification. And to scepticism he adds fear. The new music, he begins to feel, requires not merely a new and unaccustomed intellectual effort: it demands a new outlook on life altogether. It may affect and disturb fundamental principles such as most people prefer to leave untouched. It may be in truth what the old fogeys of the past have always said of it: it may be “positively dangerous.”