Rene Bache

“ Helmholtz said that the power of music to express emotions depends upon the overtones This has long been recognized as proved beyond question, and it is well understood by musicians today that the low harmonics are those of mournfulness and solemnity, and that the high harmonics are those of joy. Well, then, Professor Gates proposes for the first time to utilize this knowledge by applying it in a practical way for the production of musical effects. The music of the future will be a music of the emotions; it will touch the human heart as no music hitherto has ever done. ”

“ Professor Gate has found that most human voices, even the best, have within them only about one-half of the overtones which are necessary to the emotional quality of music. He has discovered that this condition of affairs may be greatly improved by a certain process of training the emotions of the singer, who, by encouraging the experience of tender emotions, aesthetic emotions, and various other kinds of moral emotions, produces in his or her brain alterations of structure that bring into the voice harmonics which it previously did not possess. ”

“ With its aid a skilled composer will be able to play upon the emotions of a throng of auditors as upon a harp, rousing them to patriotic fervor, drawing from them their tears, or plunging them, if he so chooses, into agonies of despair. ”