"Music Was Born Free"
Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), made his name as a child piano prodigy. Yet he is as well known to us today for his work in teaching, conducting, and philosophy. Born in Italy, he spent his adult life in Germany (1894-1924). There, as a conductor he introduced Germany to the works of Debussy, as well as other contemporary composers such as Faure, Sibelius and Bartok. His house in Berlin was a gathering place for young artists, where every night there were impassioned debates about music and art. Busoni felt that music as an art was stalled in its progress. He felt that the rules of tonality and the orchestral instruments had played themselves out. As the universe was being reconceived through scientific research, Busoni brought the same urge to reconsider music to his writings. His most famous essay was Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1906). Here are some excerpts:

"Architecture, sculpture, poetry and painting are old and mature arts; their conceptions are established and their objects assured; they have found the way through uncounted centuries, and, like the planets, describe their regular orbits.

"Music, compared with them, is a child that has learned to walk, but must still be led. It is a virgin art, without experience in life and suffering...

"Music as an art, our so-called occidental music, is hardly four hundred years old; its state is one of development, perhaps the very first stage of a development beyond present conception, and we--we talk of "classics" and "hallowed traditions"! And we have talked of them for a long time!

"We have formulated rules, stated principles, laid down laws;--we apply laws made for maturity to a child that knows nothing of responsibility!

"Young as it is, this child, we already recognize that it possesses one radiant attribute which signalizes it beyond all its elder sisters. And the lawgivers will not see this marvelous attribute, lest their laws should be thrown to the winds. This child--it floats on air! It touches not the earth with its feet. It knows no law of gravitation. It is well nigh incorporeal. Its material is transparent. It is sonorous air. It is almost Nature herself. It is--free.

"But freedom is something that mankind have never wholly comprehended, never realized to the full. They can neither recognize nor acknowledge it...

"Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny. It will become the most complete of all reflexes of Nature by reason of its untrammeled immateriality. Even the poetic word ranks lower in point of incorporealness. It can gather together and disperse, can be motionless repose or wildest tempestuosity; it has the extremest heights perceptible to man--what other art has these?--and its emotion seizes the human heart with that intensity which is independent of the 'idea.'...

"Therefore, representation and description are not the nature of music; herewith we declare the invalidity of program-music, and arrive at the question: What are the aims of music?

"Form, in itself, is the opposite pole of absolute music, on which was bestowed the divine prerogative of buoyancy, of freedom from the limitations of matter...

"Per contra, 'absolute music' is something very sober, which reminds one of music-desks in orderly rows, of the relation of tonic to Dominant, of Developments and Codas...

"This sort of music ought rather to be called the 'architectonic,' or 'symmetric,' or 'sectional,' and derives from the circumstance that certain composers poured their spirit and their emotion into just this mould as lying nearest them or their time. Our lawgivers have identified the spirit and emotion, the individuality of these composers and their time, with 'symmetric' music, and finally, being powerless to recreate either the spirit, or the emotion, or the time, have retained the Form as a symbol, and made it into a fetish, a religion.

"It is not singular, to demand of a composer originality in all things, and to forbid it as regards form? No wonder that, once he becomes original, he is accused of 'formlessness.'...

"Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen seizes it, the idea loses its original form. ...

"The function of the creative artist consists in making laws, not in following laws ready made. He who follows such laws, ceases to be a creator.

"Creative power may be the more readily recognized, the more it shakes itself loose from tradition. But an intentional avoidance of the rules cannot masquerade as creative power, and still less engender it.

"The true creator strives, in reality, after perfection only. And through bringing this into harmony with his own individuality, a new law arises without premeditation.

"So narrow has our tonal range become, so stereotyped its form of expression, that nowadays there is not one familiar motive that cannot be fitted with some other familiar motive so that the two may be played simultaneously.

"What we now call our Tonal system is nothing more than a set of 'signs'; an ingenious device to grasp somewhat of that eternal harmony; a meagre pocket-edition of that encyclopedic work; artificial light instead of the sun.

"And so, in music, the signs have assumed greater consequence than that which they ought to stand for, and can only suggest...

"We have divided the octave into twelve equidistant degrees, because we had to manage somehow, and have constructed our instruments in such as way that we can never et in above or below or between them. Keyboard instruments, in particular, have so thoroughly schooled our ears that we are no longer capable of hearing anything else--incapable of hearing except through this impure medium. Yet Nature created an infinite gradation--infinite! who still knows it nowadays?...

"We teach four-and-twenty keys, twelve times the two Series of Seven; but, in point of fact, we have at our command only two, the major key and the minor key. The rest are merely transpositions.

"We are tyrannized by Major and Minor--by the bifurcated garment. "I have made an attempt to exhaust the possibilities of the arrangement of degrees within the seven-tone scale; and succeeded, by raising and lowering the intervals, in establishing one hundred and thirteen different scales..."

Busoni's book was first published in 1906 in Italian, and it became required reading for all musical intelligentsia of the time. He was greatly inspired by the Telharmonium, with its ability to produce new scales and tones. It inspired him to write:

"Suddenly, one day, it seemed clear to me that full flowering of music is frustrated by our instruments ...In their range, their tone, what they can render, our instruments are chained fast and their hundred chains must also bind the composer."

Busoni was not, however, so completely radical that he felt the past was invalid or should be abandoned. His favorite composer was Mozart. His pupil, Edgard Varèse, recalled

"He deplored that his own keyboard instrument had conditioned our ears to accept only an infinitesimal part of the infinite graduations of sounds of nature. However, when I said that I was through with tonality, his quick response was: You are denying yourself a very beautiful thing."

Sources:
http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/busoni.html