The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

But the dramatic conventions of the Elizabethan stage per­mitted and encouraged the introduction of songs and instru­mental music into the spoken drama. Audiences liked to hear them, and the dramatist was expected to provide them. The average playgoer, no doubt, simply wanted a pretty song as part of the entertainment and did not bother about its dramatic relevance to the play as a whole. But a dramatist who took his art seriously had to say, either, "Musical num­bers in a spoken play are irrelevant episodes and I refuse to put them in just to please the public," or, "I must conceive my play in such a manner that musical numbers, vocal or in­strumental, can occur in it, not as episodes, but as essential elements in its structure."

If Shakespeare took this second line, it should be possible, on examining the occasions where he makes use of music, to find answers to the following questions:

O Why is this piece of music placed just where it is and not somewhere else?

In the case of a song, why are the mood and the words of this song what they are? Why this song instead of another?

Why is it this character who sings and not another? Does the song reveal something about his character which could not be revealed as well in any other way?

What effect does this music have upon those who listen to it? Is it possible to say that, had the music been omitted, the behavior of the characters or the feelings of the audience would be different from what they are?

II

When we now speak of music as an art, we mean that the elements of tone and rhythm are used to create a struc­ture of sounds which are to be listened to for their own sake. If it be asked what such music is "about," I do not think it too controversial to say that it presents a virtual image of our experience of living as temporal, with its double aspect of recurrence and becoming. To "get" such an image, the listener must for the time being banish from his mind all immediate desires and practical concerns and only think what he hears.

But rhythm and tone can also be used to achieve non- musical ends. For example, any form of physical movement, whether in work or play, which involves accurate repetition is made easier by sounded rhythmical beats, and the psycho­logical effect of singing, whether in unison or in harmony, upon a group is one of reducing the sense of diversity and strengthening the sense of unity so that, on all occasions where such a unity of feeling is desired or desirable, music has an important function.

If the true concord of well-tuned sounds By unions marred do offend thine ear, They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear. Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, Strikes each in each by mutual ordering; Resembling sire and child and happy mother, Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing; Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one, Sings this to thee, "Thou single wilt prove none."

(Sonnet VIII.)

The oddest example of music with an extramusical purpose is the lullaby. The immediate effect of the rocking rhythm and the melody is to fix the baby's attention upon an or­dered pattern so that it forgets the distractions of arbitrary noises, but its final intention is to make the baby fall asleep, that is to say, to hear nothing at all.

Sounds, instrumental or vocal, which are used for social purposes, may of course have a musical value as well but this is usually secondary to their function. If one takes, say, a sea-shanty out of its proper context and listens to it on the gramophone as one might listen to a lied by Schubert, one is very soon bored. The beauty of sound which it may have been felt to possess when accompanied by the sensation of muscular movement and visual images of sea and sky cannot survive without them.

The great peculiarity of music as an art is that the sounds which comprise its medium can be produced in two ways, by playing on specially constructed instruments and by using the human vocal cords in a special way. Men use their vocal cords for speech, that is, to communicate with each other, but also, under certain conditions, a man may feel, as we say, "like singing." This impulse has little, if anything, to do with communication or with other people. Under the pressure of a certain mood, a man may feel the need to ex­press that mood to himself by using his vocal cords in an exceptional way. If he should sing some actual song he has learned, he chooses it for its general fitness to his mood, not for its unique qualities.

None of the other arts seem suited to this immediate self- expression. A few poets may compose verses in their bath— I have never heard of anyone trying to paint in his bath—but almost everyone, at some time or other, has sung in his bath.