w.
H. Auden
SOME REFLECTIONS ON
MUSIC AND OPERA
What is music about? What, as Plato would say, does it
'imitate'? Choice. A succession of two musical notes is an act of
choice; the first causes the second not in the scientific sense of making
it occur necessarily, but in the historical sense of provoking it, of pro–
viding it with a motive for occurring. A successful melody
is
a self–
determined history; it is freely what it intends to be, yet
is
a mean–
ingful whole not an arbitrary succession of notes.
•
Music as an art, i.e. music that has come to a conscious realiza–
tion of its true nature, is confined to Western civilization alone and
only to the last four or five hundred years at that. The music of all
other cultures and epochs bears the same relation to Western music
that magical verbal formulae bear to the art of poetry. A primitive
magic spell may be poetry but it does not know that it is, nor intend
to be. So, in
all
but Western music, history is only implicit; what it
thinks it is doing is furnishing verses or movements with a repetitive
accompaniment. Only in the West has chant become song.
•
Lacking a historical consciousness, the Greek theories of music
tried to relate it to Pure Being, but the becoming implicit in music
betrays itself in their theories of harmony in which mathematics
becomes numerology and one chord is intrinsically 'better' than an–
other.
Western music declared its consciousness of itself when it adopted
time-signatures, barring and the metronome beat. Without a strictly
natural or cyclical time, purified from every trace of historical
singularity, as a framework within which to occur, the irreversible
historicity of the notes themselves would be impossible.
