The Music of Hindostan c5.2

c5.2

Another difficulty in hearing music consists not in the departure from the old-established methods so much as in the substitution of new and strange conventions and associations. Cosmopolitan as the music of Europe is, we still feel the distinction of nationality. In a song by a foreign composer, whether the words are translations from his language or are originals in our own, we are conscious of passages in the music itself which to us, do not seem, to be quite the natural expression of the sentiment of the song. A German hardly seems to get at the conciseness nor a Frenchman at the dignity of what we feel. And it is a true instinct which leads singers to employ the language of the foreign composer rather than a translation, even when it is by Paul England at his best, or than the original English, even when the words are by Scott or Burns. Again, it is difficult for us to seize the point of thought of a Moussorgsky or a Ravel, not merely because they are new, but because they select and develop special aspects of our common heritage of European music. We might summarize such distinctions by saying that music which is to move the listener must be for a German solid and profound, for a Frenchman pungent and antithetical, for a Russian poignant and elemental, while we ourselves find our account best perhaps in humour verging on irony. At the same time the modifications of the general trend of European musical thought, as it is taken up into this or that national mind are slight, and the differences of idiom hardly more than dialectical; we are still travelling in the mother country, but, for the moment, in an unfamiliar part of it. But when we look beyond the ‘intense cultivation’ of Western democracies, away from the spirit of competition, the method of science, and the claims of ‘efficiency’, to the calm of the East, where a man’s life is his own or at most his family’s concern, rather than the State’s, where there is time to live it, where truth is found neither in analysis nor compromise, and spiritual food is not contained in tabloids, we do not know what to make of music which is dilatory without being sentimental and utters passion without vehemence.