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MUSICAL COURIER
God, to Thee, Rock of Ages, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, Abide With Me, etc. Add to this a live, progressive, and God-like ministry and you will have a church whose mission is not a failure, and where men and women will come to drink in that larger life, eternal in the heavens.
Why object to classic church music? Is it because most trained or professional singers are believed to be worldly? How do you know it? Is the banker, merchant, or professional man any better because he gives to the church when he is not a member, than the׳ professional singer or organist who gives his service very often for small pay ?
Why oppose the introduction of paid singers into our churches, provided they are men and women of Christian principles or of good moral character? Your answer is, “I am opposed to paying persons (or professionals, you can put it) for singing God’s praise.” You forget that these persons have devoted years to this accomplishment, which has cost them time and .money. Suppose they are professionals: they adopt this mode of earning their living, just the same as a mechanic, lawyer, minister, or physician. You might as well say, because the minister preaches the word of God, he should do it gratis.
The rendition of the oratorios of the masters and the classic music of our modern writers are bringing mankind to a closer union with God, as revealed by these works of sacred melody. The Protestant Episcopal Church, because of the character of its service, demands that class of music, which at once becomes soul-inspiring. The chant, te-deum, and offertory require more than the simple melody. The language, which is grand and beautiful, embodying all the Christian’s heart desires, is wafted to the soul of the listener by the sacred melodies of the ancient authors.
The writer gives many figures to prove that music is being more and more appreciated in our churches, and gives credit especially to the Episcopal and Catholic churches for maintaining the highest ideals as regards the sort of music that should be sung. He has a good deal to say in opposition to modern gospel songs and revival hymns and blames them for the present corrupt taste in church music. That may be so, but it is also no doubt true that these tunes served their purpose. With the general advance of culture they are dying out of their own accord.
But it is sure that the writer is correct in his argument that church music should be paid music, and that the hymns and anthems sung, the music played, should be genuinely religious, serious, devotional.
F. P.
ture—piano, violin, viola, cello, flute, piccolo, clarinet and bass clarinet.
The effect of these remarkable songs has been variously described in the whole adjectival range from hideous to beautiful. But apparently arch-enemy and devoted disciple unite in the impression that whether demoniac or heavenly they are inspired. From Huneker they evoked a kind of shuddering awe, which conceded the conciseness of treatment, the courage, and the contrapuntal genius of the composer, but compelled him to the utterance of such phrases as “decomposition of tones,” “exquisitely horrible,” “the work of a man who can portray in tone sheer ugliness with such crystal clearness.”
While the Pierrot Lunaire is not the last gesture of the composer, there is a general feeling that so far it is his most significant one. Recent years have brought forth a Glückliche Hand, Erwartung and Jacobsleiter, orchestral works with the combination of Sprechstimme in solo and in chorus. In these he is reported to have created a newer musical idiom which deliberately avoids every trace of the past.
An interesting parallel has been drawn by Cecil Gray, an English admirer of Schönberg, between the composer and the poet William Blake. There is a similarity, he points out, in energy, disdain of sensuous beauty, ascetic and passionate and highly imaginative qualities, and an unconquerably pedantic strain. In Schönberg’s progress he likens Pierrot Lunaire to Blake’s Book of Job, while the latter’s Glückliche Hand goes hand in hand with the intricate and over-stylized Prophetic Books.
“Pierrot Lunaire,” says Mr. Gray, “plays the most important part in the harlequinade at the end of the romantic drama in which the romantic spirit satirizes itself, parodies its own heroic attitudes, mocks at its own image reflected in the glass and scoffs derisively at its own achievement in a last paroxysm of supreme disillusion.”
“Schönberg,” he says, “is the last of the passing race of heroic pioneers, explorers, navigators, the inspired creator of Pierrot Lunaire.”
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CLASSIC CHURCH MUSIC
My advice to every reader who is interested in church music, every reader who is a church singer, organist or choir director or who ever expects to be in any way associated with the music of the church, is to get a copy of a pamphlet entitled Defense of Classic Church Music by Richard L. Cannon, published by the Methodist Book Concern, Cincinnati, to read it, and to pass it around among those influential people who are interested in the financial support of the music of the church.
This pamphlet is a good, honest, fervent and convincing plea for real music in the churches—in all churches— and the writer evidently does not believe in amateur music or have much faith in underpaid organists and choirs. I entirely agree with him, and I am also in entire accord with his plea for a better class of music in some of the Protestant churches. A few passages from his pamphlet may be quoted by way of illustrating the vigor of his style and his good common sense:
Sacred music is the . ladder of hope upon which our thoughts ascend and will aid us in painting the picture of the life beyond.
The disposition of our churches to curtail 'the usefulness of the choir, limits its power for good and to finally dispense with its services altogether when expenses are to be reduced, should be strongly condemned. When the music committee of any church desires to cut down the appropriation, let the choirmaster call their attention to these words of Martin Luther: “I have always loved music, and I would not give away for a great deal the little I know. I am not at my ease with those that have a contempt for music. Music is a discipline—it makes men sweeter, more virtuous, and wiser. One can be sure of finding the germs of a goodly number of virtues in the heart of those who have a taste for music, but those who have no taste for it I value as a stick or .stone. I pretend, and declare it without shame, that, after theology, there is no art comparable to music. When natural music is perfected by art, we see as far as we are able the great and perfect wisdom of God in his fine work of music.”
Have the best trained choir your money will command. Give to your congregations the harmonies of the old masters, and let the people join in singing, amid the peals of the organ, those grand old hymns, Nearer, My
February 1, 1923
SCHOENBERG AND HIS MOON-MAD PIERROT
The following article on the forthcoming production of Schônberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is contributed by the International Composers’ Guild. The Musical Courier assumes no responsibility for the evident enthusiasm of the writer. The work may be as good as some people seem to think; it may be as bad as others seem to think. It is certainly interesting, and those who are interested will find a complete discussion of the subject in the Musical Courier of July 7, 1921.
“What kind of music is this,” exclaimed James Huneker ten years ago, on hearing a Berlin performance of Arnold Schônberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, “music that can paint a crystal sigh, the blackness of prehistoric night, the abysm of a morbid soul, the man in the moon, the faint sweet odors of an impossible fairyland and the strut of the dandy from Bergamo?”
Echoes of this frank bewilderment may find their way here when for the first time an American audience hears this celebrated melodrama which is to be given its première at the concert of the International Composers’ Guild at the Klaw Theater, February 4. For comparatively little of Schônberg’s great output has been heard here—a few early piano pieces, a sextet, five orchestral pieces and the Pelleas. He has a sort of widespread notoriety as a modern musicial ogre, but of his powers there have been few demonstrations, and his maturer work in unknown.
This Viennese is a unique figure, standing somewhat apart from the old and the new order, baffling the critics who would fix his niche, by his profound mastery of the devices of the past, his inexhaustible invention, and his passion for freedom. In the Pierrot Lunaire there seems to be a consensus of opinion, one can discern these seemingly contradictory elements of his genius in their most characteristic form, and feel the coming abandonment out of which he has created the newer music that has startled Europe during the last decade.
Born in Vienna, 1874, Schônberg is said to be entirely self-taught. He made his own intensive studies of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Later Brahms took precedence over these masters. While still a comparatively unknown composer, he acquired fame as a great teacher. In 1901 he repaired to Berlin where he had his earliest opportunity to conduct. Here he aroused the interest of Richard Strauss, while Gustav Mahler had already looked with encouragement at the work of the young man. Returning to Vienna a few years later he resumed his teaching, but concentrated with increasing fervor on his compositions.
Little by little, and against steady and angry opposition, his fame as an iconoclast in the world of music spread beyond Vienna. During the last decade he has made occasional concert tours, conducting principally his Pierrot, which has been heard in practically every important city in Europe, and has been the center of more hot controversy than any recent modern work. In Vienna he is revered by a circle of young disciples, who have united in publishing a eulogy of their master. Schônberg has frequently been compared with Wagner for the intensity of the enmity and adulation he stirs in people, the hypnotic quality of his personality.
To realize the significance of Pierrot, it is important to glance, if ever so briefly, at the works which have preceded it. Beginning with several groups of piano pieces, independent of the songs which he wrote for them, Schônberg in his early twenties experimented with the semi-tonal inflections of conventional harmony, creating therewith the mood pictures now so thoroughly familiar to concert audiences everywhere.
Still in the early flush of his inspiration, he wrote his sextet, the Verklaerte Nacht, his tone poem Pelleas and Mellisande, which was contemporaneous with Debussy’s opera, and his Gurrelieder, a remarkable work for solos, chorus and orchestra, inspired by the poem of Jens Peter Jacobsen, which exploits Schônberg’s predelection for wide intervals and broad melodic line. Completed when he was only twenty-six, it is considered by some authorities to be a landmark in the record of German music. These are the outstanding products of Schônberg’s “Wagnerian period,” in which he exhausted the principles of polyphonic text from the point to which the great German had developed them in Parsifal and the Meistersinger.
Following these experiments came a reversion to classical models, in which the development of logical thematic material and an absorption in counterpoint are most marked. The Kammer-symphonie, new piano pieces, and many lieder were the product of this stage of rigorous and self-imposed discipline, compositions in which there is a curious juxtaposition of revolutionary ideas with formalities.
Having by this time accomplished a pioneer work with the chamber orchestra for solo instruments—developing in the process a newer and subtler use of tone-color, Schônberg then, with a mounting impatience for the old forms, increasingly apparent in his later work, proceeded to abandon the older tonality, and retaining the principle of thematic recurrence, created his Pierrot Lunaire.
This is a melodrama, which consists of a series of twenty-one mood pictures inspired by the poems of Albert Giraud which were translated and adapted in German by Otto Ehrich Hartleben. They treat of moonlight, columbine, night, the maiden, the gihbet, the madonna—lyrics of madness, of morbid pensiveness, ־of shrieking whiîns and delicate, decadent sentiment. There is a gory mist over this Pierrot, which lifts for brief glimpses of simple beauty,, of homesickness, and the freshness of a flower.
To convey the atmosphere of these curious poems, Schônberg has employed a favorite device, the Sprech-stimme, a difficult method of delivery, neither speech, nor song, nor chanting, a vocal process for which he has scored his intervals exactly as they would be written for singing. During the last decade, men and women both have interpreted the role.
Sometimes merging into the background, at others completely engulfing the voice, and then again in individual combat with it, eight instruments combine to paint the pic-
Photo © Underwood & Underwood
PADEREWSKI PHOTOGRAPHED AT DAYTON, OHIO, WHILE ON TOUR. This photograph is said to he the first taken of Ignaoe Jan Paderewski, world-famous pianist and former Polish premier, while on his present tour of America, although attempts have been made to get pictures in practically every city he has visited. This one is a flashlight made just as the famous pianist was returning to his private car in the railway yards at Dayton, 0., at ten minutes before midnight, from a concert, January gg, 19ZS. The photographer succeeded only after a seventeen hour vigil.