Recent Developments in European Thought eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 337 pages of information about Recent Developments in European Thought.

Recent Developments in European Thought eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 337 pages of information about Recent Developments in European Thought.
music and has, however fruitless it may have been elsewhere, made the services in Westminster Cathedral, under Dr. Terry’s direction, a Mecca for musicians of all faiths who are interested in the great sixteenth-century masterpieces.  There are also the aristocratically Catholic composers of latter-day France, centring round Vincent d’Indy and the Schola Cantorum and looking back for inspiration to Cesar Franck.  And again, in the English communion, there is the marked High-Church movement for the encouragement of dignified music, a movement that has had great influence in the purification of popular taste.  And the pivot round which all this turns is the dogmatic faith that definitely Christian expression in music is the property, the exclusive property, of those who by temperament and conviction are Christians.  The attitude, like the conditions which have brought it about, is, I think, new:  but some of its adherents go surely too far when they urge that those whose minds work otherwise cannot really appreciate this music at its due worth.  Cesar Franck, that simple-minded childlike genius, once pronounced Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft ’very amusing’—­a surely unique criticism—­simply, it would seem, because it was eccentric enough not to take Catholicism as a primary postulate:  I do not myself happen to have any information about Kant’s musicianship—­perhaps, like too many great thinkers, he knew little about music and cared less—­but I think we may venture to say, in the abstract, that his philosophy would have made him fairer to Franck than Franck was to him.

And thus perhaps we may conclude that recent musical development has kept pace with religious development in concentrating more and more on individual sincerity, whether on the one side or the other, and abandoning the old easy-going haphazard routine.  But, in reaction from the extreme right and the extreme left of the movement, we have also the sincere dislikers of stark thinking, whom their opponents call by dignified names of abuse, such as pragmatists or undenominationalists:  and here again music keeps pace with religion.  It is not the old routine again (though perhaps in practice it may at times come rather perilously near it); it is the more or less conscious adoption of a compromise.  We can see its musical working best of all in the recent history of church music in England; it is true that the great mass of the younger musicians, here as in all other countries, stand outside these developments, and look both for ideals and practice elsewhere, but the developments have none the less been very significant.  There have been three stages.  A couple of generations ago there was no conflict and no call for compromise.  The ecclesiastical musician of the time was expected, whether as composer, as organist, or as administrator, to do his best according to his lights:  it was his accepted business, as presumably knowing more about the matter than the artistic

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Recent Developments in European Thought from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.