No More Learning

I give after Miss Farr's settings three others, two taken down by Mr.
Arnold Dolmetsch from myself, and one from a fine scholar in poetry,
who hates all music but that of poetry, and knows of no instrument that
does not fill him with rage and misery. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, when he
took up the subject at my persuasion, wrote down the recitation of
another lyric poet, who like myself knows nothing of music, and found
little tunes that delighted him; and Mr. George Russell ('A. E. ') writes
all his lyrics, a musician tells me, to two little tunes which sound
like old Arabic music. I do not mean that there is only one way of
reciting a poem that is correct, for different tunes will fit different
speakers or different moods of the same speaker, but as a rule the more
the music of the verse becomes a movement of the stanza as a whole,
at the same time detaching itself from the sense as in much of Mr.
Swinburne's poetry, the less does the poet vary in his recitation. I
mean in the way he recites when alone, or unconscious of an audience,
for before an audience he will remember the imperfection of his ear in
note and tone, and cling to daily speech, or something like it.

Sometimes one composes to a remembered air. I wrote and I still speak
the verses that begin 'Autumn is over the long leaves that love us' to
some traditional air, though I could not tell that air or any other on
another's lips, and _The Ballad of Father Gilligan_ to a modification
of the air _A Fine Old English Gentleman_. When, however, the rhythm is
more personal than it is in these simple verses, the tune will always
be original and personal, alike in the poet and in the reader who has
the right ear; and these tunes will now and again have great beauty.


NOTE BY FLORENCE FARR.

I made an interesting discovery after I had been elaborating the art
of speaking to the psaltery for some time.
I had tried to make it
more beautiful than the speaking by priests at High Mass, the singing
of recitative in opera and the speaking through music of actors in
melodrama. My discovery was that those who had invented these arts
had all said about them exactly what Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and Mr. W.
B. Yeats said about my art. Anyone can prove this for himself who
will go to a library and read the authorities that describe how early
liturgical chant, plain-song and jubilations or melismata were adapted
from the ancient traditional music; or if they read the history of the
beginning of opera and the 'nuove musiche' by Caccini, or study the
music of Monteverde and Carissimi, who flourished at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, they will find these masters speak of doing
all they can to give an added beauty to the words of the poet, often
using simple vowel sounds when a purely vocal effect was to be made
whether of joy or sorrow. There is no more beautiful sound than the
alternation of carolling or keening and a voice speaking in regulated
declamation. The very act of alternation has a peculiar charm.

Now to read these records of music of the eighth and seventeenth
centuries one would think that the Church and the opera were united in
the desire to make beautiful speech more beautiful, but I need not say
if we put such a hope to the test we discover it is groundless. There
is no ecstasy in the delivery of ritual, and recitative is certainly
not treated by opera-singers in a way that makes us wish to imitate
them.

When beginners attempt to speak to musical notes they fall naturally
into the intoning as heard throughout our lands in our various
religious rituals. It is not until they have been forced to use their
imaginations and express the inmost meaning of the words, not until
their thought imposes itself upon all listeners and each word invokes a
special mode of beauty, that the method rises once more from the dead
and becomes a living art.

It is the belief in the power of words and the delight in the purity of
sound that will make the arts of plain-chant and recitative the great
arts they are described as being by those who first practised them.




_THE WIND BLOWS OUT OF THE GATES OF THE DAY. _[A]

FLORENCE FARR.