What's in a Name
Have you ever stopped to consider how much difference the name of a musical composition makes? If you have had long experience in making programs and watching the reaction of audiences to them, you must surely have noticed that the name of a musical composition may either arouse the interest of your audience or it may leave it in a perfectly neutral frame of mind. In other words, that the names of musical compositions may be divided into two distinct classes; those which appeal to the imagination and those which do not. Of course there are many titles which lie in no man's land, —such as Reverie, Melody, Nocturne for instance ; but for practical purposes we must class these titles among those which do not appeal definitely to the imagination. They are too indefinite.
No doubt many composers purposely choose titles which shall not appeal to the imagination. They desire to hold their works in the realm of so-called "absolute music." They wish to make an appeal to their audiences directly through the ear. It is perhaps a high and laudable ambition, but it leaves out of consideration the common average person who holds no prepossession in favor of music for itself. If one is able to write so portentous a composition as the Ninth Symphony certainly no title can do much to add to or detract from the work, but, gem as it is, how much wiser for MacDowell to have called To a Wild Rose what he did than to have named it Prelude in A.
With the great majority of human beings the eye is a much more developed avenue to the brain than the ear. Most of us appreciate and gratefully make use of a nail on which to hang our aural impressions. How many hearers have gone home from an evening of violin music carrying a more definite and lasting impression of Saint-Saens' little morceau, Le Cygne, from the Carnival des Animaux, than of half a dozen other concertos, preludes, melodies, minuets, impromptus, etc.?
Suppose Paderewski were to say to an audience, "We will take a vote as to whether I shall play Beethoven's Sonata Op. 27 No. 2 or the Moonlight Sonata," what would be the result? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" does not apply to musical compositions. The average hearer appreciates a definite program with his music. This is the reason for the tremendous appeal of opera. The music is "about" something. It is attempting to describe places, things, persons, or states of mind.
There are two kinds of music which do not belong to this class. First, purely physical music which makes its direct appeal to the senses. This includes dance music, music used for therapeutic purposes, and, I regret to say, almost all instrumental church music heard nowadays. The other type of non-descriptive music is purely intellectual music, including most fugues, sonatas and chamber music. This category, however, does not include all concertos and symphonies. Many such works are pure program music with the name omitted or undiscovered. Sometimes a name is supplied later by some one other than the composer. Most of us have been acquainted with the titles supplied to Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. These titles have often been condemned by critics and superficial archeologists as spurious, but they are correct in principle, for they call attention to the fact that each song, while it may be without words, is not without thought or subject, and that each one has a subject—a definite subject—all its own. Mendelssohn may not himself have discovered or determined what these subjects were, or he may have withheld the names on purpose to make listeners think, but it does not matter. The titles ot compositions are never final; they are supposed to be in opera, but there will always be some one to turn the most ardent operatic love song into an Ave Maria. Music is a subjective matter at best. To one born on the Wyoming prairie, who had never left his native state, a symphony entitled The Sea might mean something very different from what it would mean to a man who had crossed the Atlantic forty times in stormy February. The man from Wyoming would be justified in renaming the piece for himself. He might call it The Cyclone, Forest Fire, The Stampede of the Herd. Music, as I have said before, is a subjective affair; each listener must, perforce, interpret what he hears in the light of his own past experience.