Part I of this essay dealt with the relations of human musical experience to the changes of consciousness initiated by actions of the Hierarchies in allowing the cosmic intelligence to enter the human domain. In particular, as we moved towards the consciousness soul era, the experience of the God-filled fifth was lost and the empty space was filled with the major or minor third, and the system of tuning changed from the Pythagorean, based on acoustically correct fifths, to the mean-tone, based on acoustically correct major thirds.
Part II considered some of the musical manifestations of the transition to the consciousness soul era and ended with an account of Thomas Morley’s forward-looking transformation of the Italian madrigal.
Part III makes no more attempt at a full report than either of the preceding sections. It is aimed rather at giving an impression of the musician’s situation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the light of more recent events in esoteric history.
(xvi)
After Baroque – a Few Notes
It seems that there have always been many musicians who were content to go on doing the things that they were taught as young people and experienced around them. This is not a criticism. Such people are always needed and many of them do what they do extremely well. There have also always been people – a smaller number – who are driven to push the boundaries. Two of their compulsions tend to produce a form of large-scale historical oscillation. There is the desire on the part of composers from Léonin and Pérotin in the twelfth century to Schoenberg, Boulez, Messiaen, in the twentieth, to build large and complex structures. And there is the feeling, shared by all the composers generally regarded as ‘great’, that you can’t simply go on doing the same thing, no matter how good it is and how much people like it. It may seem that if what you are doing is good, doing the same thing more intensely, in greater quantity or at greater length will be better, but there comes a time when the power and complexity of the work can’t be ratcheted up any further. Many people saw a line of “progress” from the insignificant Mannheimers, through the amiable Haydn, the childlike Mozart and the mighty Beethoven, to the all-encompassing Wagner. The power of each composer’s work increases throughout his lifetime and then leapfrogs to the next in the line of succession. So goes the inevitable stream of evolution, ever onward and upward, under the benevolent eye of J. S. Bach, who arrived early for the show and took the best seat while no one else was looking. This is the myth of progress. It has been applied to all worthwhile human pursuits – medicine, science, democratic institutions and so on – and hardly anyone believes in it any more. What actually happens with music is that impulses that lead to periods of great musical health and well-being, such as the classical period and the golden age of polyphony, eventually become exhausted. Composers of the next generation, through no fault of their own, have to choose between making something worthwhile out of further explorations of well known territory and finding a new direction and mode of travel. Sometimes this results in an attempted restoration of simplicity, such as happened around 1600, when early baroque composers began to dismiss the polyphonic style, and around 1730, when many people began to find later baroque music too serious and elaborate, and embraced the light prettiness of the galant. It is noticeable, however, that whatever the nature of the revolution, the composers whose music has survived generally can’t resist the lure of complexity, and it is soon back in full force.
It is clear that a ‘great’ composer doesn’t simply take over where a previous ‘great’ composer left off. The trade has to be learnt. Haydn’s early compositions are musical and enjoyable but it wasn’t until he reached the age of forty that he created music worthily representative of his mature style, reaching a point where he was no longer limited by technical considerations and was free to launch out in whatever direction he wished. It is arguable that something similar happened to Beethoven when he was in his mid-thirties, and even then the idea, which we often used to hear, that he “continued and improved the work of Haydn and Mozart” is manifest rubbish. Oddly enough, the people who expressed this opinion also regarded Beethoven as a great revolutionary, to which the only possible response is, “Huh?” Having adopted certain techniques of composition developed by his great predecessors, he had not only to achieve fluency in them but also to adapt them to fit his own evolving needs and intentions. The early romantics – Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann – did not abandon classical techniques but developed and used them with new intentions and a new sensibility, so that the change in the flavor of the music was much more deep-seated than that which had taken place between Haydn and Beethoven. Wagner’s supporters claimed Beethoven’s mantle for him, but, even supposing this claim to have been justified, it was a long time before he reached a level of competence at which it could be made. His early operas are quite crude and even with Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, products of his mid-thirties, there are still plenty of bumps in the road. By the time he reached Die Walküre at the age of 43 he was in the somewhat the same situation as Haydn at a similar age; his technique and intentions might still change, but not in the sense of improvement. People who were inclined to listen to his ideology rather than his music saw him as the culminating figure in the history of music and didn’t seem to worry about what comes after a culmination. Others thought that his great musical genius had been subverted by a megalomaniac tendency and an overwhelming need for self-justification, and some believed that rather than providing us with the great entrance hall into the “music of the future”, Wagner’s works constituted a dead end.
That the ‘dead end’ interpretation has, to a large extent, been the verdict of history doesn’t mean anything bad about Wagner’s music, although it does suggest that his view of the music of the past, the present and the future needs some revision. Composers who rejected Wagner in principle sometimes had a hard time shaking off his influence, but they did feel that it was necessary to try. The view from a dead end may be entrancing, but if you want to travel further you have to go back a bit before proceeding. In any case, it’s clear that even without Wagner’s work it was inevitable that by about 1900 some composers would feel that the resources of the traditional tonal system were exhausted and that a radical change was needed. At that time we entered a confusing period in which attempts to throw out everything connected with traditional ideas of melody and harmony vied with efforts to maintain continuity by doing something different with old techniques. The so-called nationalist movement, involving Grieg, Smetana, Dvořak and the Russian masters of the late nineteenth century, produced wonderful music with distinctive flavors without venturing beyond the existing system of tonality. Debussy, who appears to have loved and hated Wagner’s works in approximately equal measure, had struggled to rid himself of their influence and shown that there are ways of using triadic harmony other than those prescribed in the textbooks of the time. In the following generations a more thoroughgoing exploration into national roots, most prominently by Bartok and Vaughan Williams, led to genuinely new insights, modifying the use of traditional harmony without completely ousting it. For many years it was believed, although not by everyone, that the great breakthrough came when Arnold Schoenberg got tired of writing big, and sometimes enormous, works in the late-post-romantic tradition and developed the twelve-tone system. Some of us, finding that Verklärte Nacht and Gurrelieder strain our collective patience more than anything by Bruckner or Mahler, have concluded that Schoenberg stopped writing this kind of stuff because he wasn’t very good at it. Schoenberg’s pupil, Anton Webern, however, interpreted musical history in such a way as to show that there was a stream of evolution which led inevitably to the twelve-tone method of his master.1 In Webern’s view, Schoenberg’s method was the ultimate expression of the tendency for music to move up the harmonic series until the half-step became the basic intervallic unit and the octave contained twelve tones with no class distinctions allowed. To at least one reader Webern’s book seems to be an even more advanced case of special pleading than anything by Wagner, but it does have the advantage that, like its author’s music, it is very brief. Meanwhile Stravinsky was also engaged in historical self-justification, and he was by no means the last.
The committed Darwinian might see all this diverse activity as a prime example of adaptive radiation – “the evolution of a relatively unspecialized species into several related species characterized by different specializations that fit them for life in various environments.”2 Others might see a series of desperate attempts to find something new in a world that seemed already to have been completely mapped.
(xvii)
The River and Reality
The fact of the matter is that in trying to account for the changes that have taken place in music since recorded history began we have an over-abundance of influences to reckon with. It has been strongly argued that the systems of musical tones that gave us the earliest Eastern Mediterranean chants, plainsong, organum, the mediaeval motet and all that followed, right down to minimalism and rock, contained in their very substance all that was necessary for their own transformation and eventual destruction and that once the process got going, the course that it followed was, in broad outline, inevitable in the same sense as the downward progress of a river under the influence of gravity, no external direction being needed. In its early stages the river is narrow and carves a deep channel, but as it approaches the lowlands the stream gradually broadens and when it crosses the plains it forms meanders, marshes and innumerable inconsequential runnels inhabited by strange birds with long curved beaks and piping cries that are reminiscent of the sounds of certain period orchestras. It would be easy to spend a few more paragraphs knocking in all the nails of this analogy and figuring out what the strange birds represent, but since the analogy is a false one I won’t bother. The temptation to depict certain minimalists as wading birds enjoying the last stages of the evolutionary river before it loses its identity entirely, and their “scrannel piping” as an indication that Lycidas3 is indeed dead, is hard to resist, but only as a jeu d’esprit. If you really want birds you can listen to Rautavaara’s haunting Cantus Arcticus, a concerto for birds and orchestra.4 Plausibility is no guarantee of truth.
Only a very narrow view of music history would encourage us to try to base a theory of musical evolution entirely on the nature of the musical substance – the overtones, the possible scales, the available intervals with their subtle differences, and so on. The people who make living music out of these materials usually have little or no interest in such matters and take the system as they find it. No matter how strongly we want to build an over-arching concept from such ideas as the inevitable journey up the harmonic series and the progressive acceptance of more dissonant harmonies, we cannot help but include strong spiritual, psychological and social elements in our accounts. On the simplest level we acknowledge a change of outlook between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and an increasing desire to explore. It may be, however, that we accept these things too easily and simply. The more we find out about the late Middle Ages, the less likely we are to believe in the kind of dramatic change from the Age of Authority to the Age of Exploration that elementary school children are still apt to learn about. We need to avoid the pitfalls that people encounter when they try to superimpose simplified anthroposophical knowledge on exoteric history. In the twentieth century a tremendous amount was learnt about musical practice – the actual ways in which the musical substance was put to use – in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque, and even in the nineteenth century.
Historical research has given us a clear picture of the progressive employment of a greater and greater proportion of all the available resources of the tonal system. If it seems occasionally that the knowledge of music history built up by generations of distinguished and devoted musicologists, many of whom have been fine musicians in their own right, contradicts Rudolf Steiner’s esoterically informed view of history, it may well be because we have misunderstood or oversimplified Steiner.
(xviii)
Where it comes from
It would be natural to expect that the music produced by human beings would not be as beautiful as that produced by the Gods. When I first became involved in anthroposophy I was assured that our slide into scientific materialism had produced art whose main characteristic was ugliness. Steiner referred to most of the music of the nineteenth century as “unmusical”. I found this rather confusing since I had observed that a great deal of beautiful music was still being composed in the mid-twentieth century. Tinctoris, as already noted, had found himself in a similar position five hundred years previously, but he went a little further in his analysis of the situation than I did.
“I cannot pass over in silence the opinions of many philosophers, among them Plato and Pythagoras and their successors Cicero, Macrobius, Boethius, and our Isidore,5 that the spheres of the stars revolve under the guidance of harmonic modulation, that is, by the consonance of various concords. But when, as Boethius relates, some declare that Saturn moves with the deepest sound and that, as we pass by stages through the remaining planets, the moon moves with the highest, while others, conversely, ascribe the deepest sound to the moon and the highest to the sphere of the fixed stars, I put faith in neither opinion. Rather I unshakeably credit Aristotle and his commentator6, along with our more recent philosophers, who most manifestly prove that in the heavens there is neither actual nor potential sound. For this reason it will never be possible to persuade me that musical concords, which cannot be produced without sound, can result from the motion of the heavenly bodies.
“Concords of sounds and melodies, from whose sweetness, as Lactantius says, the pleasure of the ear is derived, are produced, then, not by heavenly bodies, but by earthly instruments with the co-operation of nature.”
I quote these words not with approval or disapproval but simply to illustrate the change in people’s relationship to music. But although this view of music as a natural phenomenon rather than a gift from the Gods may have become the majority opinion, many people have continued to ascribe a supernatural or at least mysterious origin to music, right up to the present day.
A hundred years after Tinctoris, William Byrd remarked that when he pondered the words that he was to set the music came to him as if from God. Three centuries after Byrd, Edward Elgar said that there was music in the air and that you could just take as much as you needed. When a melody came to Tchaikovsky it usually arrived complete with harmony and orchestration. He didn’t say where it came from. Poets and storytellers receive couplets or whole stanzas and vivid pictures. C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories came not from a desire for a Christian allegory but from a great golden lion that bounded into his imagination. Two of the four stanzas of the last poem of A Shropshire Lad came to A. E. Housman whole. We call this phenomenon inspiration, as if we breathed these gifts in. Critics sometimes talk as if they were able to tell where inspiration ends and technique takes over, but no one has ever claimed to be able to tell which stanzas are which in the Housman poem. In the twentieth century the subconscious generally replaced the spiritual world as the ostensible source of such gifts. According to John Sparrow, in the introduction to the Penguin Poets edition7, Housman’s “gifts of mind and sensibility were absorbed in other tasks, and he applied them to poetry, not in order to create it, but in order to complete and perfect poems already composed by means of a subconscious process dominated by his susceptibility to verbal music.” Now that the thoroughly modern militants have declared that consciousness does not exist we have to wonder whether the subconscious is still there, which is a pity, since the subconscious could be interpreted as the workplace of the angels, or at least as a sort of melting pot for our finer thoughts and feelings as well as those of less repute. It would be awful to have to accompany the great melody at the start of Elgar’s First Symphony with the thought that what we are listening to is just electrochemistry and that the same applies to our deeply emotional reaction to it. To anyone who believes not only in consciousness, subconsciousness, God, angels and the presence of Christ in the human soul, but also in the necessity for a properly functioning human electrochemical system, the appearance of wonderful works of art and, indeed, of anything that makes any kind of sense at all, is an even greater and deeper mystery than it was to the people of the Middle Ages. But it is a mystery that appeals both to reason and to something more profound than reason – our feeling for the rightness of things. This last item is very easy to scoff at; perhaps my feeling of rightness is just another name for my grandmother’s morality, just as, in some people’s opinion, perfect pitch is the pitch of your grandmother’s piano. This is something that you have to ponder for yourself. I believe that whatever sense of rightness I have comes from the same place as the music I compose, but that as a modern human being living in the consciousness soul age I can’t just leave it at that. Rather than simply accepting what I am given, I have to work it over and give it the stamp of my own individuality. The student of the Scholia Enchiriadis was expected to follow the rules and had very few options. Even in the sixteenth century a student could produce very respectable vocal music by simply following the rules of part writing and spacing. But he wouldn’t become a Byrd or a Victoria. Now we have to take our material, whatever it is, and crunch it, rather as economists crunch numbers and builders crunch materials in order to make pourable concrete. It may still come from the Gods8, but the Gods are not going to tell us how to use it.
This, in a nutshell, is the story of music and everything else in transition from ancient times to the present day. It is the over-arching concept, the “single lofty point of view” that has eluded historians of all kinds including that great student of music histories, Warren Dwight Allen.9 We must not, however, fall into the error of self-congratulation. Knowledge of Rudolf Steiner’s descriptions of the evolution of consciousness does not leave us with any less work to do and allows us as many opportunities of floundering in the morass of actual historical process as someone who has never heard of Rudolf Steiner. One of the most helpful thoughts to have been recorded by Allen is the idea that music is an activity, not an organism or a gift from the Gods. It is something that people do. This may not have been true in the past, but it is true now.
We have passed from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century without so much as a mention of the great early Renaissance composers such as Ockeghem and Josquin, and ignoring the baroque masters, Monteverdi, Bach and Handel. I have two excuses. One is that I haven’t really been trying to tell a story, but only trying to give the flavor of the transition from the intellectual soul age to the consciousness soul age; the other is that this article is too long already and I haven’t finished yet.
(xix)
The End of an Era
In speaking about the music of the fourteenth century, I commented that “composers and their music were on their way to the kind of artistic autonomy that was achieved in the eighteenth century, and flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries… It is lamentable but inevitable that music’s hard-won autonomy should be gravely threatened in the twenty-first century.”
Lovers of J. S. Bach’s music will be familiar with the solo soprano cantata Mein Herze Schwimmt im Blut. “My heart is bathed in blood, because the multitude of my sins makes me, in God’s holy eyes, seem to be a monster, and my conscience suffers agony because these sins are nothing to me but hellish tormentors… Oh, unspeakable anguish, my heart is so parched that no comfort can fructify it, and I must hide in shame before the One before whom the very angels hide their faces.” This kind of stuff is easy enough to write, but Bach took it with deep seriousness and produced one of his most searingly intense compositions. “My heart is now a fount of tears, my eyes hot springs.” This is very likely to be the experience of the listener as well as that of the penitent.
The invisible anguish of the soul is palpably conveyed by the music, but it seems now that there is some anxiety about whether the listeners will get it. In a recent performance the singer appeared in the guise of a patient in intensive care, festooned with IV’s and other medical contraptions, using physical pain to represent soul agony. Was this really something that most members of the audience needed, or was it merely an aberration on the part of the director? Artistic directors of musical events seem generally to have become an aberrant breed, and I am not the only one to have found many of their efforts misguided. But there is the legitimate question: are people on the whole so impervious to music that in order to get their attention you have to hit them over the head with something really shocking? And if this seems to be an extreme form of the question, we can simply ask if the time has come when music can no longer be experienced as a complete, autonomous art demanding the undivided attention and participation of the listener. The population has always included plenty of people who were musically impenetrable and it would be understandable if the number of such armor-plated souls had increased in proportion to the sensory overload of modern civilization. In this connection I’d like to draw attention to some remarks made by Rudolf Steiner on the subject of tone eurythmy.
“For in eurythmy music is made visible; and one must have a sense for the place in man’s being where music has its true source if its fundamental nature is to be made visible.”
“Tone eurythmy makes visible what in music is invisible and audible.”
This is not what the ballet purports to do. Unlike eurythmy, the dance does not represent the music or translate what is audible into what is visible. It uses it as a suitable rhythmic, atmospheric and suggestive background for a story or a picture.
Steiner emphasized that at the time – March, 1924 – when he made these remarks, tone eurythmy was in its infancy, so presumably he was speaking of his intentions rather than of what had already been accomplished. He also said that it was inevitable that eurythmy would come into the world at this time, and the question I have asked myself is why this would happen after several centuries in which music had become an experience complete in itself. Surely the most wonderful thing about music is that it goes straight into the soul without verbal explanation or visual imagery. What happens, however, if it can’t get in? Can visual aid really help?
The answer is a conditional “yes”, but first it must be understood that people for whom the musical experience is so powerful that it overwhelms the other senses and is already visible to the inner eye, not as pictures but as music, may well find tone eurythmy superfluous. Like many of my most musical acquaintances, I find that any kind of visual accompaniment, whether it is dance, color slides, hospital procedures, antics by the musicians on stage, or tone eurythmy, simply gets in the way of the music. This is not the same thing as saying that we dislike or disapprove of the proceedings – such things can be very entertaining but we find that they simply don’t take hold of the soul the way the way the purely musical does.
There is nothing inherently wrong with entertainment; one of the worst sins a work of art can commit is to be dull, and I question whether any artistic performance can be entertaining if it has no deeper implications whatever. Hamlet, for example, is far more entertaining than The Importance of Being Earnest, and Oscar Wilde’s light-hearted frolic is far more entertaining than the average soap opera. Hamlet, however, is not merely entertaining. It does something to the configuration of your soul. Steiner actually bewailed the fact that people frequently “found tone eurythmy more pleasing than speech eurythmy and comparatively easy to understand.” Speech eurythmy was more highly developed and was linked to a medium – the spoken word – which demanded some attention for its understanding, whereas most people are not used to the idea of giving music that degree of attention. Tone eurythmy was experienced more as a congenial diversion; this is very likely to be the case if your capacity to respond to music is limited. Music that can’t get through to your soul is merely a pleasant undemanding background, unless the composer tries to insist, in which case you may regard it as a thundering nuisance.
Steiner believed that opposition to tone eurythmy signified a refusal “to allow the complete revelation of the human being”, and linked this opposition to the materialism with which, as he said, we are all infected. What makes this position problematical in relation to a great deal of the music composed in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that there was an increasingly conscious effort by composers to write music which in itself already gives a complete revelation of the human being. The orchestra of the classic-romantic period is, as Steiner remarked, a picture of the human being. Mozart’s music, in the words of Friedrich Blume10, runs the whole gamut of human emotion. Haydn brought drama and humor into his music in ways for which there is no earlier parallel. In their different ways Classical and early romantic composers probed the deep recesses of the human soul. Many nineteenth century compositions appear to tell stories and paint pictures.11 Mahler believed that a symphony could present a whole world of experience – autobiographical, religious and philosophical – and Bruno Walter believed that Bruckner had found God. Rudolf Steiner made it clear that he didn’t approve of representational music, but when I say that composers tried to give a complete revelation of the human being I am not referring to representational music. The music is not there to paint pictures of primeval forests or mediaeval knights, but to be taken in, experienced, savored. It changes you when you allow it into your soul. To add any kind of visual accompaniment to Mozart’s G minor symphony, Beethoven’s Seventh, or Mahler’s Ninth would be at best impertinent and at worst disastrous. Wagner wanted his operas to unite the music, the drama and the spectacle in a significant whole, so he called them “music dramas”, echoing the early Italian opera composers who used the term dramma per musica. He thought that one of the defects of earlier operas was the domination of the music over the drama. It is clear, however, that he underestimated the power of his own music, as Herbert von Karajan tacitly acknowledged when he performed the Ring cycle in practically complete darkness. Tchaikovsky, having attended a performance of Die Walküre in Vienna, made the point a little more forcefully: “There is no question that Wagner is a marvelous symphonist… You have probably heard of the renowned Ride of the Valkyries? What a huge and wonderful panorama! How we actually seem to see those fierce heroines soar on their magic horses through thunder and lightning! In the concert hall this selection makes an extraordinary impression. On the stage, however, in view of the cardboard rocks, the canvas clouds, and the awkward soldiers running about in the back… the music loses all its expressive power. In this the stage does not enhance the effect but acts as a wet blanket.” [My italics]
*
Why was all this music so powerful and why is it losing its grip on the population? It may be that since the early twentieth century our relationship to music has changed with our changing relationship to the spiritual world. In several lectures given in 1910, Steiner spoke about the Kali Yuga, the period of spiritual darkness described in ancient Indian philosophy and related it to the coming of Christ.
“At the beginning of Kali-Yuga there were still many who could either see or recollect the divine-spiritual world, but for normal humanity the time set in when they could only see the physical world of nature. That was the descent of man to Kali-Yuga. It was the time of deepest descent. Into that had to come the impulse for re-ascent. That is why this impulse, the Christ-Impulse, had to come during the Kali-Yuga, in the “dark” age.”12
This period is said to have lasted from 3101 BC until 1899 AD and it is clear that although the human race was under siege, the blockade was not total. Communication with the spiritual world did not cease altogether and there were still great initiates and lesser mortals whose spiritual intimations were received with varying degrees of consciousness. One of the functions of the age of musical autonomy, which lasted from some time in the later Middle Ages until some time in the twentieth century, was to keep communication open with the spiritual world for people who might otherwise have lost it altogether. Steiner explains the relationship between the musical intervals and clairvoyance as follows:
“The fourth is a real perceiving, but a perceiving from the other side. It would be as if the eye, in perceiving itself, had to look back on itself. This is the experience of the fourth gained from the soul. The interval of the fifth is a real experience of imagination. He who can experience fifths correctly is in a position to know subjectively what imagination is like. One who experiences sixths knows what inspiration is. Finally, one who experiences sevenths – if he survives the experience – knows what intuition is.”13
Imagination, inspiration and intuition are the three successive soul capacities through which the human being attains knowledge of the spiritual world. Experiencing the fifth, the sixth and the seventh puts the human soul into the configurations that go with clairvoyant imagination, inspiration and intuition. “That is why… in the older mystery schools and remaining mystery traditions clairvoyant cognition is also called a musical cognition… a cognition living in the musical element.” What composers from Machaut in the fourteenth century to those in the twentieth who maintained any significant contact with traditional tonality have done is to unite the experience of the upper intervals – fourth to seventh – with that of the lower ones, particularly the major and minor thirds, making an indivisible bond between soul and spirit. This may seem to be an enormous over-simplification of seven hundred years of musical history and in many ways it is. In this period there have been both radical changes and gradual transformations of style and technique, but the effect has always been that the music that we value most highly speaks to the intelligent, feeling soul and brings intimations of the spirit.
*
It is in the nature of music to keep us in touch with the spirit, and from my own humble experience I know that the intense concentration that is needed for the process of composition puts the mind into a heightened state of awareness in which musical relationships are visible and almost tangible. Things begin to click into place in the most amazing way, almost as if someone is doing it for you. In an earlier essay I tried, without much success, to characterize what we mean when we talk about “great composers” and concluded that the best thing to do would be to drop the phrase from our musical vocabulary. But you don’t have to be a “great” composer to experience musical substance in this way and pass something on to your listeners – just sincere and competent. If I now suggest that the “great” composers have been able go a stage further, I am neither suggesting this as a criterion for “greatness” nor hinting that they were or are initiates in the modern sense in which Steiner uses the word. If I am right, the real difference not only between Mozart and Salieri but also between Byrd and Yonge, Bach and Telemann, Haydn and Stamitz, Beethoven and Clementi, Brahms and Goldmark, Mussorgsky and Cui, and Shostakovich and Khrennikov, is that the former member of each pair so often takes us out of ourselves and places us in new worlds of experience that are indescribable in ordinary language. The music doesn’t have to be deeply tragic or trail clouds of incense – it is the way the composer works with the musical substance that creates the magic and the only way you can tell if it works is by listening. After listening you may or may not be able to understand how the composer did it, but that really isn’t important unless you have a professional interest.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was a consummate explorer of strange musical landscapes, said, “…The object of an art is to gain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual… The human, visible, audible and intelligible media which artists of all kinds use are symbols not of other visible and audible things but of what lies beyond sense and knowledge.”14
“The ordinary man expects from a serious composer serious music and will not be frightened of a little uplift. What the ordinary man expects from the composer is not cleverness or persiflage or an assumed vulgarity. He can get real vulgarity enough in his daily life, but he wants something that will open to him the ‘magic casements’.”15
Rudolf Steiner, as noted above, gave us some precise knowledge of these “magic casements.” Composers and performers have helped us ordinary mortals to see through them at a time when such vision was extraordinarily difficult. But in the twentieth century the human condition is changing again and it is not only a matter of the strengthening of the Christ impulse through the reappearance of Christ in the etheric early in the twentieth century.16 Lucifer and Ahriman have their own plans for the future of mankind and we have no wish either to be automatically good and spiritual or to be totally isolated within our own consciousness.17 It cannot be merely coincidental that the Kali Yuga ended just at the time when the exploration of the tonal resources that had enabled these composers to work their miracles was nearing completion and that tone eurythmy appeared at the same time as atonal music. Over the past one hundred years our relationship to music has been changing along with our relationship to the spiritual world and to explore the nature and consequences of these changes will be a major undertaking for someone. My feeling is that, whether we like it or not, we have seen the end of the great period of musical autonomy, when composers from Bach to Bruckner stormed the heavens for us because we were unable to reach them on our own. But now, although the path to a new clairvoyance is open, it is beset by toll-collectors and armed guards in the shape of the minions of Lucifer and Ahriman. For both good and bad reasons, people no longer hear the music in the old way and so they need visual representations or interpretations of it. This why I remarked earlier that today’s composers are the inheritors of a diminished kingdom. Some of us don’t like it but it looks as if we’ll have to put up with it.
© 2010 Keith Francis
Keith Francis was educated at the Crypt School, Gloucester, England and at the University of Cambridge. He worked as an engineer at the Bristol Aircraft Company before returning to the Crypt School as a teacher of physics and mathematics. In 1964-65 he studied at the Waldorf Institute of Adelphi University, Garden City, New York and later joined the faculty of the Rudolf Steiner School in Manhattan, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. Since then he has written several novels, a memoir of his experience as a Waldorf teacher, a somewhat controversial assessment of the work of Francis Bacon and a history of atomic science. He is also the founder and director of the Fifteenth Street Singers, a group attached to the New York City Branch of the Anthroposophical Society.
1 See Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music, tr. Leo Black; Theodore Presser, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1963
2 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
3 Milton, Lycidas
4 An excellent recording is available on Naxos 8.554147.
5 Presumably Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (570-636), who wrote voluminously on everything he could think of, and possessed, according to C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image, a very mediocre intelligence.
6 St. Thomas Aquinas.
7 Penguin Books, London, 1956.
8 “Gods” is shorthand for “higher spiritual beings”, the beings of the kind that appeared to people in the days of involuntary clairvoyance and were accepted as gods.
9 Warren Dwight Allen, Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music, 1600-1960, Dover Books on Music, 1960.
10 The Mozart Companion, Norton, New York, 1969
11 The idea of using music to represent a sequence of events is not the exclusive property of the nineteenth century romantics. The musical depiction of warfare was quite popular long before Beethoven’s Battle Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture appeared. Telemann gave some quite vivid impressions of the adventures of Don Quixote and the antics of crickets and frogs.
12 The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness, Lecture 3, Berlin, 2nd February, 1910.
13 Rudolf Steiner, Cologne, 1906: Reprinted in The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, The Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1983.
14 From The Letter and the Spirit in Music and Letters, 1920.
15 From National Music, lectures given at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. It should be noted that at that time, man still embraced woman. The “magic casements” come from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
16 Steiner describes this in The Event of Christ’s Appearance in the Etheric World: Preparation for this Event through the Development of Etheric Vision, given in 1910. Another form of this lecture appears in The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric.
