MALIPIERO, G. FRANCESCO The History of Music and the Music of History 1-18 MANSFIELD, ORLANDO A. The Word Music: Its Derivation, Interpretation 538-544 I' JANUARY, 1923 THE HISTORY OF MUSIC AND THE MUSIC OF HISTORY By G. FRANCESCO MALIPIERO NO. 1 F you take, or borrow, the lantern of Diogenes, it will be quite possible to find one or two human beings who have had the superhuman courage to read the four volumes of the history of music by Ambros, or the five volumes of Fétis's history, or the "General History of the Science and Practice of Music" by John Hawkins, or Burney's "General History of Music," or the three volumes of the "Storia della Musica" by Padre Martini, or Combarieu's "Histoire de la Musique." To know by heart a few names of Chinese or Indian instruments, without ever having heard or seen them; to be aware of the existence of exotic music, while ignoring its actual sound unless it be in a Europeanized and fragmentary form, does not imply a knowledge of all the secrets of the history of music. Better by far to study the centuries nearer to our own and know them more accurately, not only because of their genuine artistic interest, but also because the music of to-day tends to renew the association with the music of those past centuries, an association which the nineteenth century had severed. Of all the above-named authors, it is only the Englishmen (Hawkins and Burney) and the Frenchman (Combarieu) who, by a strange fate, succeeded in bringing down to their own times their survey of the history of music. Ambros and Fétis in their work reached only the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Padre Martini, who was the most backward of all (he only succeeded in encompassing the music of the days of the Greeks), has nevertheless left us quite unintentionally a most vivid fragment of history in his "Esemplare, ossia saggio fondamentale pratico 1 di contrappunto," wherein he passes in review, analyses and discusses our choral music from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth. This unique work has not lost an atom of its value as criticism and can also still be a valuable guide to the study of counterpoint. Although Music has more devotees than the other arts, its history is the least known of any. We have mainly a collection of anecdotes concerning musicians who are famous and a few extravagant notices circulated for the use of dilettanti. Nearly all the existing Histories of Music are composed of biographical and bibliographical documents (often difficult to verify) and of technical observations which, though nearly always springing from the same point of view, profess to be "discoveries," while as often as not they are merely observations of quite incidental interest. The dubiety to be found in histories treating of music of the remotest antiquity increases even more with the consideration of the musical life of days relatively near to our own. The easy assurance of historians, who certainly do not lack good faith, is not sufficient to solve the many doubts and problems which arise as one reads "non-musical" writings, dealing with the contemporary intellectual life of the centuries during which music so frequently played an important part. For instance, Benvenuto Cellini, in the beginning of his autobiography, tells us how his father "had no greater wish regarding himself than that he should become a great player of music," and that, while still of tender years, "clasping the neck of his bearer, he had to be carried, to play the soprano flute at sight, in company of other musicians in front of the palace of the Signoria, and it was a clerk of the Signoria who held him in his arms." Possibly the elder Cellini hoped to have fathered an infant prodigy! The reply this father made to Pier Soderini, the Magnificent, who advised him to instruct Benvenuto in other arts, while yet teaching him to play, was as follows: I will not have him study other arts but playing and composing music, because in this profession, if God grants him life, I hope to see him the first among all men. There is no history of music that will explain to us how, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a father like Benvenuto's, who certainly did not belong to the uneducated classes, could believe it possible to force his son into being a great musician. |