|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 90
The other sensuous influence of sound is one of the most
powerful elements of music, and all musical utterance
is involved with and inseparable from it. It consists of
repetition, recurrence, periodicity.
Now this repetition may be one of rhythm, tone tint, texture,
or colour, a repetition of figure or of pitch. We know that
savages, in their incantation ceremonies, keep up a continuous
drum beating or chant which, gradually increasing in violence,
drives the hearers into such a state of frenzy that physical
pain seems no longer to exist for them.
The value of the recurring rhythms and phrases of the march is
well recognized in the army. A body of men will instinctively
move in cadence with such music. The ever recurring lilt of a
waltz rhythm will set the feet moving unconsciously, and as the
energy of the repetition increases and decreases, so will the
involuntary accompanying physical sympathy increase or decrease.
Berlioz jokingly tells a story of a ballet dancer who objected
to the high pitch in which the orchestra played, and insisted
that the music be transposed to a lower key. Cradle songs are
fashioned on the same principle.
This sensuous sympathy with recurring sounds, rhythm, and pitch
has something in common with hypnotism, and leads up to what
I have called suggestion in music.
This same element in a modified form is made use of in poetry,
for instance, in Poe's "Raven,"
Quoth the raven, nevermore,
and the repetition of colour in the same author's "Scarlet
Death." It is the mainspring (I will not call it the vital
spark) of many so-called popular songs, the recipe for which
is exceedingly simple. A strongly marked rhythmic figure is
selected, and incessantly repeated until the hearer's body
beats time to it. The well-known tunes "There'll Be a Hot
Time," etc., and "Ta-ra-ra, Boom-de-ay" are good examples of
this kind of music.
There are two kinds of suggestion in music: one has been called
tone-painting, the other almost evades analysis.
The term tone-painting is somewhat unsatisfactory, and reminds
one of the French critic who spoke of a poem as "beautiful
painted music." I believe that music can suggest forcibly
certain things and ideas as well as vague emotions encased in
the so-called "form" and "science" of music.
If we wish to begin with the most primitive form of suggestion
in music, we shall find it in the direct imitation of sounds
in nature. We remember that Helmholtz, Hanslick, and their
followers denied to music the power to suggest things in
nature; but it was somewhat grudgingly admitted that music
might express the emotions caused by them. In the face of this,
to quote a well-known instance, we have the "Pastoral" symphony
of Beethoven, with the thrush, cuckoo, and thunderstorm. The
birds and the storm are very plainly indicated; but it is not
possible for the music to be an expression of the emotions
caused by them, for the very simple reason that no emotions
are caused by the cuckoo and thrush, and those caused by
thunderstorms range all the way from depression and fear to
exhilaration, according to the personality of individuals.
That music may imitate any rhythmic sounds or melodic figure
occurring in nature, hardly needs affirmation. Such devices may
be accepted almost as quotations, and not be further considered
here. The songs of birds, the sound made by galloping horses'
feet, the moaning of the wind, etc., are all things which
are part and parcel of the musical vocabulary, intelligible
alike to people of every nationality. I need hardly say that
increasing intensity of sound will suggest vehemence, approach,
and its visual synonym, growth, as well as that decreasing
intensity will suggest withdrawal, dwindling, and placidity.
The suggestion brought about by pattern is very familiar.
It was one of the first signs of the breaking away from
the conventional trammels of the contrapuntal style of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first madrigal of
Thomas Weelkes (1590) begins with the words, "Sit down," and
the musical pattern falls a fifth. The suggestion was crude,
but it was caused by the same impulse as that which supplied
the material for Wagner's "Waldweben," Mendelssohn's "Lovely
Melusina," and a host of other works.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|