TENDENCIES IN MODERN MUSICAL COMPO- 

 SITION 



By George M. Chadwick 



The relation of the past and present in music, the tendencies in modern 

 music as they point toward the future of music, are subjects as difficult to 

 understand and define as to foretell the future of poetry by tracing it back 

 to the Iliad and then accepting Macaulay's view that "as civilization ad- 

 vances, poetry almost necessarily declines." It would be interesting to 

 trace upon the chart of history those social and political conditions where- 

 in poetry and music were the spontaneous expression of individual and 

 national feeling. However different the medium of expression, there is 

 this in common between poetry and music, that each not only reveals the 

 mood of the age in which it is produced, it also reacts upon that mood; 

 and hence, if we are rightly to judge the tendencies in modern music, we 

 must understand the mood of the present, and ask and answer as best we 

 can : Is this reactive force that of great genius or merely of exceptional 

 talent ? The question of the relative merits of genius can be discussed 

 with perfect safety, because all have a right to an opinion and, according 

 to some popular views on liberty, each one's opinion is as good as any 

 other's. But the subject of the mood or conditions of the day must be 

 approached with great caution, for there is so much that is out of tune 

 with art in an age when great value is placed upon phenomena addressed 

 to the physical eye, and the opinions of the majority are more respected 

 than those of the wiser and sadder minority. Not materialism, but 

 rather that mood which encourages and respects materialism, is the crush- 

 ing force against which man's finer nature is powerless to contend. The 

 creative genius will ever be both independent of and yet dependent on 

 the mood of his time : Independent, in that he is isolated and in a sense 

 unconscious of those demands which most men recognize; dependent, so 

 far as he is dictated by the demands of the public, and in a yet more 

 vital sense by the effect on him of those influences which either tend to 

 encourage or else almost utterly to destroy his creative activity. 



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