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1	1	Music is a cry of the s~~oul.~~	I am very glad to see that the <i>Sackbut</i> is taking a strong line of opposition to the present
2	2	It is a r~~eve~~lation,	widespread cult of charlatanism and humbug in music.
3		a thing to be reverenced...
4		an initiation into the mysteries
5		of the human soul.
6	3
7	4	This is an age of anar~~chy~~ in art:	The time has come when every musician of serious aims should declare, in the interest of the
8	5	there is no authority, no standard,	public, what is his attitude towards the current attempts on the part of Russian impresarios,
9	6	no sense of proportion.	Parisian decadents and their press-agents, to degrade his art to the level of a side-show at a fair.
10		Anybody can do anything
11		and call it "art"
12		in the certain expectation
13		of making a crowd of idiots
14		stand and stare at him
15		in gaping astonishment and admiration.
16	7
17	8	Great m~~en m~~ust be denied	The musical public—especially in England—is very innocent and trusting in the face of loud-mouthed
18	9	~~(-v~~ement is founded on denial—	quacks who employ every device of street-corner oratory in order to palm off their shoddy wares;
19	10	denial of har~~mon~~y, of coherence,	and therefore I consider that every serious musician owes it to the public to raise his voice in
20	11	of intellectual ~~luc~~idity	warning and protest when he sees them being taken in and imposed upon by a clever gang of
21	12	~~and~~ s~~piritua~~l content	self-seeking mountebanks.
22		—denial of music, in fact)
23		and great achievements scoffed at
24		in order that the little ones
25		become conspicuous.
26	13
27	14	Ge~~nius~~ is not a mushroom growth.	There is room in the world for all kinds of music to suit all tastes, and there is no reason why
28	15	Inspiration does not come	the devotees of Dada should not enjoy the musically imbecile productions of their own little circle
29	16	without hard work	as much as the patrons of the musical comedy enjoy <i>their</i> particular fare. But when I see the
30	17	any more than a cro~~p o~~f corn.	prophets of the latest clique doing their utmost to pervert the taste of the public and to implant
31	18	There is no short cut to glory.	a false set of values in the rising generation of music-lovers by sneering at the great masters of
	19		the past, in the hope of attracting greater attention to the <i>petits maitres</i> of the
	20		present—then I say it is time to speak openly and protest.
	21
	22		In the end, of course, all art finds its own level and takes its due place in the estimation of the
	23		world; and everything that is shallow, catchpenny, sensational and insincere sinks into oblivion
	24		from which no propaganda can rescue it. But why, in the meanwhile, should a whole generation be
	25		confused and contaminated by the specious claptrap and humbug of a crew of little men who have
	26		deliberately set out to make the worse appear the better cause? Genius is not a mushroom growth.
	27		Inspiration does not come without hard work any more than a crop of corn. There is no short cut to
	28		glory. No great work of art has ever come into the world save as the fruit of years of earnest,
	29		unremitting endeavour on the part of its creator; and no great artist ever blasphemed his
	30		ancestors.
	31
	32		Music is a cry of the soul. It is a revelation, a thing to be reverenced. Performances of a great
	33		musical work are for us what the rites and festivals of religion were to the ancients—an initiation
	34		into the mysteries of the human soul. <i>A man who walked into church without his trousers would be
	35		promptly turned out: and anyone who meddles with art in a similar spirit of disrespect should be
	36		treated in the same way.</i>
	37
	38		How does music stand to-day? Is the world full of men of as much importance as Bach and Beethoven,
	39		Chopin and Wagner? If we are to believe some of the composers themselves, or rather, their
	40		trumpeters and tub-thumpers, we have amongst us not the equals but the superiors, the
	41		<i>superseders</i> even, of the old masters. After a thousand years of evolution, music is just
	42		beginning to become articulate! Already some music-publishers have put up electrical sky-signs
	43		and others have had recourse to their literary equivalent. The average man of the present day is
	44		so accustomed to have his mind made up for him by advertisements, posters and illuminated signs
	45		at every street-corner, that he comes to believe implicitly anything he reads often enough on the
	46		hoardings. If this is the case with patent medicines, it is also the case with art, and we find
	47		that propaganda and advertisement carry all before them.
	48
	49		This is an age of anarchy in art: there is no authority, no standard, no sense of proportion.
	50		Anybody can do anything and call it "art" in the certain expectation of making a crowd of idiots
	51		stand and stare at him in gaping astonishment and admiration.
	52
	53		Imagine a wonderful cathedral which has stood for centuries as a monument of an age of intense
	54		faith and devotion to high ideals: now there comes along a little Johnny and sticks a
	55		bowler-hat* on the top of the spire, proclaiming his exploit as the crowning
	56		achievement of art. "See," he says, "there's something higher than your old cathedral"—forgetting
	57		that his addition will only be seen when a searchlight is thrown on it.
	58
	59		Great men must be denied and great achievements scoffed at in order that the little ones become
	60		conspicuous. There must be a complete transvaluation of values. Art has been "serious" too long:
	61		now let us play the fool, in season and out of season, let us deny everything, turn all our
	62		values upside down.
	63
	64		On this principle, a beautiful face is no longer as "interesting" as a grimace; but the interest
	65		of a grimace is <i>purely negative</i>; it depends entirely on its relation to the natural face.
	66		It is only the incongruity of the grimace with the normal features of human kind that causes
	67		merriment—the exaggeration of certain traits to the exclusion of others—a false perspective, a
	68		wrong proportion. The musical concomitant of a grimace is necessarily negative: it is only a
	69		pretentious development of the time-honoured tradition of the bang on the big drum when the
	70		clown falls down.
	71
	72		Music does not exist for the purpose of emphasizing or exaggerating something which happens outside
	73		its own sphere. Musical expression only begins to be significant where words and actions reach
	74		their uttermost limit of expression. Music should be concerned with the emotions, not with external
	75		events. To make music imitate some other thing is as futile as to try and make it say
	76		<i>Good morning</i> or <i>It's a fine day</i>. It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise
	77		that is worth expressing in music. . . . There is a certain section of the reading public consisting
	78		of people who join a circulating library and always demand "the latest" novels or other books. This
	79		section, needless to say, has no literary pretensions whatever. There is a corresponding section of
	80		the musical public which always demands "the latest" rather than "the best": but its aesthetic
	81		pretensions are as great as its lack of taste and musical understanding. For the "latest fiction"
	82		public, Shakespeare is out of date and unreadable: for its musical counterpart, Bach is a fossil and
	83		Beethoven a mummy. But whereas no student of literature would take the "latest fiction" crowd
	84		seriously, the corresponding gang in music—by means of assiduous advertisement and propaganda—has
	85		become a real danger to the ever-growing section of the public which demands "music" rather
	86		indiscriminately, as a necessary part of a cultured education, and accepts unquestioningly whatever
	87		is recommended by critics who have no qualifications with which to recommend themselves. Only carry
	88		on the advertisement campaign long enough and vigorously enough and you will hypnotize people into
	89		believing that black is white and that there is no more excellent music in the world than the
	90		creaking of cart-wheels and the cries of cats.
	91
	92		Music that needs "explanation," that requires bolstering up with propaganda, always arouses the
	93		suspicion that if left to stand on its own merits it would very quickly collapse and be no more
	94		heard of. The present Franco-Russian movement in music is entirely founded on denial—denial of
	95		harmony, of coherence, of intellectual lucidity and spiritual content—denial of music, in fact.
	96
	97		Of course I shall be told that people said exactly the same thing about Wagner, and that after
	98		thirty years of active musical life I am not sufficiently cultured and that my sensibility is not
	99		yet sufficiently developed to appreciate the subtleties and novelties of the latest clique of
	100		composers. Exactly the same defence might be put up in favour of the jumlings of a child of four
	101		at the piano.
	102
	103		I do not agree with the Editor when he writes of Ernest Newman's "sordid self-interest" in musical
	104		criticism, and implies, in the paragraph which follows, that the writings of Edwin Evans, the
	105		"prophet" of the <i>petits maitres</i>, are inspired by a loftier motive. Evans is a clever
	106		journalist who, like all journalists, is out to make as much as he can by his pen. He is not an
	107		artist, nor has he ever exhibited the smallest claim to be regarded seriously as a musician. A
	108		capable journalist makes it his business to be well-informed on as many topics as possible and to
	109		be able to write equally convincingly about music or the stock exchange or anything else. Give him
	110		any subject you like and he will turn out his article. Since musical criticism has become pretty
	111		generally discredited in England through having been entrusted for years to men who are neither
	112		competent as musicians nor as journalists, anyone who wants to make money in this, as in every
	113		other, branch of journalism must get a few "sensational scoops"; notions which none of the others
	114		have yet tumbled to; he must have his special "stunt" and keep it well to the fore. Such critics
	115		follow the trend of contemporary music very closely: their finger is on the pulse of the musical
	116		public and they diagnose its weaknesses and its diseases before it is aware of them itself—and then
	117		they proceed to exploit them for all they are worth.
	118
	119		The chief reason for the degeneration of present-day music lies in the fact that people want to get
	120		physical sensations from music more than anything else. Emotion is out of date and intellect a
	121		bore. Appreciation of art which has been born of profound thought and intensity of experience
	122		necessitates an intellectual effort too exhausting for most people of the present day. They want to
	123		be amused: they would rather feel music with their bodies than understand it through their
	124		emotions. It seems as though a tarantula has bitten them—hence the dancing craze: Dixie, Dalcroze,
	125		Duncan and Diaghilev—they are all manifestations of the same thing. In an age of neurasthenics,
	126		music, like everything else, must be a stimulant, must be an alcoholic, aphrodisiac, or it is no
	127		good. We do not hear the word "vitality" at every turn except from people who are aware that
	128		vitality is the one thing they are most in need of, the one thing they must at all costs get
	129		supplied to them from outside.* But let them at any rate see clearly what kind of a
	130		cesspool they will go dancing into if they follow the line of this latest fad.
	131
	132		There is no longer any respect for music as such. It can only be tolerated, it seems, as an
	133		accompaniment to something else—a dinner or a dance or what not. An impresario, shrewd enough to
	134		see what the public wants and to give it to them at the right time, comes along with a
	135		resuscitation of the old Italian ballet from St. Petersburg, proclaiming a <i>new</i> form of
	136		art compared with which all past achievements are as nothing. Led by the nose, the public and,
	137		worse still, many of the young musicians flock around him, and the critics cannot find enough
	138		adjectives of adulation for his shows.
	139
	140		A ballet is all very well in its proper place, as a pleasant after-dinner entertainment; but we
	141		don't want ballets to everything, and to proclaim the ballet as a form of great art—<i>the</i> art
	142		form of the future, in fact—is sheer bunkum. But the English public seems to have an insatiable
	143		appetite for ballets, and the demand for such works having speedily exhausted the slender stock of
	144		living composers' ideas, the scores of long-dead musicians are pressed into service. No one is
	145		immune. Bach fugues are employed as exercises in muscular mathematics and Beethoven sonatas
	146		"interpreted" (! ! !) by every hysterical, nymphomaniacal old woman who can gull the public into
	147		seeing "a revival of the Greek spirit" or some other high-falutin' vision in the writhings and
	148		contortions of her limbs.
	149
	150		What is the effect on young people who may perhaps hear some great work for the first time in such
	151		an environment? The music will inevitably become associated in their minds with hopping and
	152		prancing and jigging, and in the end they will themselves be unable to hear it without twitching
	153		and fidgeting.
	154
	155		There seems to be a very prevalent belief that any Tom, Dick or Harry has the right to tamper with
	156		a work of art, even to the extent of altering it beyond recognition and forcing it to serve a
	157		purpose its composer never dreamed of.
	158
	159		In this direction irresponsible "editors," "adapters," and "transcribers" are as much to blame as
	160		the dancing cranks. It is time a law was passed to keep good music from violation.
	161
	162		By all means become dancing dervishes if you want to, and dance in a delirious <i>cortege</i> right
	163		into the lunatic asylum: but don't try to justify your procedure in the name of art, nor degrade
	164		the works of great artists in doing so. Above all, don't spoil works of art for other people who
	165		may not want to dance in the same direction. We do <i>not</i> all go the same way home.
	166
	167		Let us try to preserve a little clearness of vision so that we may see things in their proper
	168		perspective.
	169
	170		The art of marionettes is good enough for some people, but let us not confuse little painted
	171		puppets with great men.