Art song

“ It is almost impossible to make them idealize the words through the elocution of singing; and yet in the artistic rendition of a song, a ballad, or a dramatic aria, the words are often of more importance than the music. The singer should study the story of a song by reading it aloud upon the highest plane or level of emotional or dramatic expression. ”

“ Unlike the pedantic, mathematical art that music came to be in the middle ages, plain-song was preëminently a form of emotional expression. Further, it was the expression of emotions most poignant and profound. It came from the hearts of men who were conscious actors in a gigantic drama. ”

“ The terms of painting are color and form, the terms of music are tones. Colors and forms are brought together into harmony and balance that by their juxtaposition they may be made expressive and beautiful. Tones are woven into a pattern according to principles of harmony, melody, and rhythm, and they become music. When technique is turned to such uses, not for the vainglory of a virtuoso, but for the service of the artist in his earnest work of expression, then it identifies itself with art. ”

“ Poetry, painting, and sculpture show us things outside ourselves, joyful or grievous things perhaps, hopeful or desperate or beautiful or ugly things, but still things. But music shows us nothing but the qualities, the disembodied feelings, the passional essences. Let the reader recall for a moment the effects of painting or of poetry, the way in which they present emotion. Is it not always by symbolism, by indirection? Does not the feeling merely exhale from the object instead of constituting the object as it does in music? ”

“ We live in a three dimensional world, and in its length, breadth, and solidity do we disport ourselves. Music also has its three-fold manner of expression, its rhythm, its melody, and now its harmony. The rhythm is for balance, the melody for the outline, while the harmony constitutes the texture. Here again in other directions we may trace the same essentials: there is a texture of colouring, a style in Literature, and an appropriate technique for harmony in every branch of Art, just as there is an harmonic scheme in Music. ”

“ This magical result of appearance can, however, be carried to such a pitch, that in contrast to it the exhibition of content becomes a matter of indifference, and painting tends to pass over, in the mere charm and perfume of its colour tones, and the contrast, fusion, and play of their harmonies, into the art of music, precisely as sculpture, in the elaboration of its reliefs, tends to associate itself with painting. ”

“ PREFACE The source of art is the fountain of Love: the winged spirits, Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry, spring from it hand in hand. With affectionate leave-takings and cries of joy at their liberation, they soar into space, the angel of Music out-winging the rest because of more lambent fibre, but she is no more vital nor pulsating than her sisters. ”

“ There are strains in music which bring a faint shadow of the picture back to me; no art can ever reproduce it. How balmy the faint breath of wind that seems to lift upward the light, gray clouds, to make way for the rosy tints creeping athwart the horizon! ”

“ On the one side we have the claim that music is the all-sufficient law unto itself; that its appeal to sympathy is through the intrinsic sweetness of harmony and tune, and the intellect must be satisfied with what it may accidentally glean in this harvest-field; that, in the rapture experienced in the sensuous apperception of its beauty, lies the highest phase of art-sensibility. ”

“ At its highest degree of ennobling, music ought to become a form, and act on us with the calm power of an antique statue; in its most elevated perfection, the plastic art ought to become music and move us by the immediate action exercised on the mind by the senses; in its most complete development, poetry ought both to stir us powerfully like music and like plastic art to surround us with a peaceful light. ”

“ Yes, in the representative arts emotion is merely adjective; in music alone is it substantive. We see in a portrait a lovely woman; we behold in marble a noble youth; we read in poetry a desperate story; in music, on the contrary, we hear love, nobility, despair. And since this emotional life is the deepest reality we know, since our intuitions constitute in fact the very essence of that world-spirit which is but projected and symbolized in sky, sun, ocean, stars, and earth, music cannot but be a richer record of our ultimate life than those arts which deal with objects and symbols alone. ”

“ Historians exaggerate, perhaps, the function of music in awakening and guiding the exercise of lyrical poetry. The lyric exists, they tell us, as an accompaniment to the lyre; and without the mechanical harmony the spoken song is an artifice. Quite as plausibly might it be avowed that music was but added to verse to concentrate and emphasize its rapture, to add poignancy and volume to its expression. But the truth is that these two arts, though sometimes happily allied, are, and always have been, independent. ”

“ Music, using sound for its material, is a pattern-weaving in tones. The power of music to satisfy and delight resides in the sensuous value of its material and in the character of its pattern as form, the balance and contrast of tonal relations, the folding and unfolding of themes, their development and progress to the final compelling unity-in-variety which constitutes its form and which in its own inherent and self-sufficing way is made the expression of the composer's emotion and musical idea. ”

“ Of the fine arts, therefore, which, employing a material medium for their representations, possess an ideal and symbolical significance, music is the art of the soul, and sculpture is that of corporeal form, and of the manifestation of the true idea of organic beauty. But among the three sister arts, painting is the true spiritual one. ”

“ We shall look relatively in vain for such colors in the music of the ‘poets.’ They are lyricists, they express moods in music and each little piece partakes of the color of the mood which it enfolds—is in general delicate and monochrome. The poets are essentially composers for the pianoforte. They have chosen the instrument suitable for the home and for intimate surroundings, and their choice bars the brilliancy of color from their now exquisite now passionate and profoundly moving art. They are musicians of the spirit and the mood, meditative, genuine, passionate, tearful and gay by turn. ”

“ Painting should be as pure an art as music, and the struggles of all great painters have been toward that goal. Its medium—colour—is as elemental as sound, and when properly presented (with the same scientific exactness as the harmonies of the tone-gamut) it is fully as capable of engendering æsthetic emotion as is music. Our delight in music, no matter how primitive, is not dependent on an imitation of natural sounds. Music’s pleasurable significance is primarily intellectual. ”

“ Here, too, we find a distinction between music and painting. The art of painting is frequently able to produce the most beautiful and artistic effect by its realization in every respect of the actual form, the colour and animation of a particular human being in some definite situation and environment, and its complete reflection of all that it has thus assimilated and received in its bare vitality. The truth of Nature, if presented conformably to artistic truth, is here entirely justified. ”

“ That music, by and of itself, cannot express the intellectual element in the beautiful dream-images of art with precision, is a palpable truth. Yet, by its imperial dominion over the sphere of emotion and sentiment, the connection of the latter with complicated mental phenomena is made to bring into the domain of tone vague and shifting fancies and pictures. ”

“ As we appreciate it to-day, music lends itself readily to our definition of art. It is a personal expression—who, when listening to music which he enjoys, does not feel himself poured forth in the tones? It is social and public—what brings us together under the sway of a common emotion more effectively than concert or opera? ”

“ It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and Painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting—of sound, in music—of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference ”

“ Music has within itself, like architecture, a relation of quantity conformable to the understanding, as the antithesis to emotion and inwardness; and has also as its basis a solid conformity to law on the part of the tones, of their conjunction, and of their succession.
iii. most spiritual mode of representation of the romantic art-type, we must look for it in poetry. Its characteristic peculiarity lies in the power with which it subjects to the mind and to its ideas the sensuous element from which music and painting in their degree began to liberate art. ”

“ In the next movement the soul turns to Art—Art in her myriad phases, radiant in beauty, gleaming with the thousand hues of the palette of romance. The soul wanders through scene after scene of ever-changing delight, each one more enchanting than the last. ”

“ But, as an expression of sentiment, Music still surpasses painting. What it expresses is the soul itself, in its most intimate and profound relations; and this by a sensuous phenomenon, equally invisible, instantaneous, intangible—sound—sonorous vibrations, which resound in the abysses of the soul, and agitate it throughout. ”

“ Mere audible music, certainly, had counted for something in the operations of an art, held at its best (as we know) to be a sort of music made visible. That idle singer, one might fancy, by an art beyond art, had attracted beams and stones into their fit places. And there, sure enough, he still sits, as a final decorative touch, by way of apex on the gable which looks northward, though much weather-worn, and with an ugly gap between the shoulder and the fingers on the harp,* as if, literally, he had cut off his right hand and put it from him:—King David, or an angel? ”

“ Whatever the chosen instrument of an art may be, its appeal to those whose attention it bespeaks must be made through the senses. Music, which works with the vibrations of a material substance, makes this appeal through the ear; painting through the eye; it is of a piece with the complexity of the literary art that it employs both channels,—as it might seem to a careless apprehension, indifferently. ”

“ In the
fusing of melody and words into an utterance of song—at last into a strophe—music worked potently, shaping the composition of the lines, moulding them to rhythm, insisting upon sonorousness in the words, promoting their assonance and at last compelling them to rhyme so as to meet the stress, or mark the ending, of the musical periods. Thus the exigencies of melody helped to evoke the finished verse, while the words reciprocating through their vocal capabilities and through the inspiration of their meaning, aided the evolution of the melodies. ”

“ Thus does it come to pass that music can convey emotional suggestions such as painting and sculpture, for all their imitations of reality, can never match in efficacy; since music conveys the suggestions not of mere objects which may have awakened emotion, but of emotion itself, of the expression thereof in our bodily feelings and movements. ”

“ For the beauty of landscape also, which the art of painting has created and which during the last century has become its favorite theme, the music of color is equally essential. In its highest form, that beauty requires emotional responsiveness combined with the power accurately to observe and reproduce the qualities of things; without observation and reproduction, the feeling is incommunicable; without feeling, the imitation is lifeless. Love of the object, which at once reveals and makes responsive, mediates the highest achievements of the art. ”

“ Music is the formless deep to which the wearied imagination of the Romanticist returns after contemplating itself reflected ad infinitum in its mirror chamber. And the work of art may be likened to one of those carved ivory balls which enclose a whole set of ivory balls, one within the other. ”

“ All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its [Pg 19] high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. ”

“ It has grown clearer to me as the years have passed that, even in poetry, only that music is enduring where the melody is subtly interwoven with passionate truth, and that the highest triumph of mere music, in so far as its effects are applicable to literature, must be won by constant cultivation of the simplest means of expression. ”

“ It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. ”