Musical interpretation

“ Even the universally recognized fitness of the interpretation of a common measure in verse by the corresponding common measure in music depends much more on the power and satisfying completeness of the musical form in itself than on any right relation which obtains between words and music under these conditions. Where the poetry has a more elaborated rhythm there are two extremes, between which the musician’s manner of setting must lie. ”

“ The great variety in the interpretation of musical compositions has often been used as an argument against the existence of emotions in music, but is, as we have seen, the inevitable result of their abstractness. ”

“ Such attention is frequently impossible while singing, because the minds of the singers are intent upon the beauty or difficulty of the purely musical aspects of the composition, and thus the so-called "expression" becomes merely a blind and uninspired obedience to certain marks like piano, forte, and ritardando—the real spirit of interpretation being entirely absent.
DISTRIBUTING AND CARING FOR THE MUSICHave the distribution and care of music so systematized that there will be neither confusion nor waste of time in this part of the rehearsal. ”

“ Moreover, the discipline of music is diffused through all the acts of our life. For when we keep the commandments of God, and observe His law, it is certain that our words and acts are associated by musical rhythm with the virtues of harmony. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The aspect of importance here, in short, is the varied motion of the music simply, the ups and downs of the harmony or melody, the stream of sound through its degrees of opposition, preponderance, emphasis, acuteness or vivacity, the elaboration of a melodic phrase in every respect that is suitable to the means of musical art, the musician-like fusion of all the instruments as one ensemble of tone, or in their succession, alternation, and emphatic display of themselves and each other. ”

“ Contrasts of timbre and tone are at least as various as contrasts of colour: the complexity of musical rhythm is far beyond anything that language can achieve; while, in the devices of harmony, and still more of polyphony and counterpoint, the composer occupies a position which is virtually unique in human experience. ”

“ We referred at some length, in the chapter on "The Dance and Its Development," to this germination of musical thought as of the greatest importance in composition. The reader will readily understand that the highest form of an art like music, in which the element of time enters as a vital matter—in which the message of the composer comes to us in successive sounds—must depend on something more than the beauty of its several and successive melodies. ”

“ But there is, I claim, a deeper interest and a higher pleasure to be derived from seeking, beneath the smoothly flowing harmonies and graceful, rippling embellishment, for the allegorical significance or suggestion mirrored in their clear depths, as scenes and faces are reflected in the tranquil stream, and which are rarely, if ever, wanting in the true art work.
The “theme and variations” in music, which owes its origin to the first crude attempts of early composers to elongate and develop a musical idea into a symmetrical art form, corresponds to a very early phase of another art. ”

“ And if such feeling-tones exist independently from harmony it is evident that they would enter into every melody in addition to the strictly musical feelings of harmony and that they deserve consideration as a factor of music. ”

“ It must be shaped, and strung, and kept carefully in tune; no easy matter in surroundings little suited to delicate instruments and delicate music. Possessing it, we possess, in the only true sense of possession, the whole world. For going along our way, whether rough or even, there are formed within us, singing the beauty and wonder of what is or what should be, mysterious sequences and harmonies of notes, new every time, answering to the primæval everlasting affinities between ourselves and all things; our souls becoming musical under the touch of the universe. ”

“ No other art is able to inflict such merciless suffering! Under the name of music we are afflicted with every variety of noise, including the hand organ, the bagpipes, the German band, the man who toots the cornet in the street, the harp man, the lady who has seen better days and who sings before our house in the evening, the active piano-organ invented by a heartless genius, the musical box and all its amazing progenies, the gramophone and the pianola. ”

“ If your delineation be authentically musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not.—Musical: how much lies in that! A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious ”

“ To the lawgivers, the signs themselves are the most important matter, and are continually growing in their estimation; the new art of music is derived from the old signs—and these now stand for musical art itself. ”

“ For when the musical meaning is specialized through the emotions that are the burden of the song, it necessarily loses the power which it would otherwise have of expressing one's own inner life—once more, what it gains in definiteness it loses in scope. It no longer possesses the unique function of the musical. ”

“ The second cause for the concreteness of the musical experience I take to be certain emotions and feelings which are aroused by association, not with the rhythmic elements of music alone, but with the tone-color, intensity, and melody also. There is a human quality, a poignancy and intimacy, about much music, which can be understood only through its analogy with the sounds of the human voice. ”

“ Harmony was there; man, classifying and arranging the sounds, created music.
We all know what man has been able to get from it since then.
Man, past master of the musical realm, is to-day still in the infancy of art, from the standpoint of control of light. ”

“ Inasmuch as, therefore, musical expression has for its content the inward life itself, the ideal significance of fact and emotion, and a tone-world which, at least in art, does not proceed to spatial configuration, and in its sensuous existence is wholly evanescent, it follows that music directly penetrates with its movements to the ideal habitat of all the fluctuations of soul-life. ”

“ The Place of Intellect in Music.—When we think of Music we have in mind an organization of musical sounds into something definite, something by design, not by chance, the product of the working of the human mind with musical sounds and their effects upon the human sensibilities. So long as man accepted the various phenomena of musical sounds as isolated facts, there could be no art. ”

“ Well, no one, I think, will question the existence in us, at the present day, of something that may well be called, in general terms, the musical faculty. For the musician as we now know him—and, indeed, have known him for [199] some centuries—music is a means of emotional expression that can function without the aid of poetry or even of speech. ”

“ In the long evolution from the simple to the complex which music shares with everything else we know we may observe two different methods of tone-combination which, working together, have given us the elaborate texture of the modern art. That especially suited to melodic instruments, like those used in the orchestra or the chorus, puts melodies together as an engraver puts together lines, each remaining distinct, standing off clearly from the others, representing a different musical thought, and yet all agreeing, or, as we say, harmonizing. ”

“ With few exceptions music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound. ”

“ In both cases the immediate appeal is to the feelings and the imagination, without recourse to intervening 283 imagery borrowed from external nature. Both embody the cry of one soul to another, and they are not widely divergent in quality or effect. Language at its highest is almost song, and music at its best is idealized declamation. All good poetry must be musical. It should, as we say, sing itself; and all good music must be poetical, conveying a distinctly poetic impression.
To me every poem presupposes a possible musical setting, and every worthy composition, a possible poetic text. ”

“ On the other hand, we have seen that a more moderate party, numbering among its ranks some young Composers of acknowledged merit, is neither prepared to sacrifice dramatic truth to musical symmetry, nor musical symmetry to dramatic truth: but is determined to use Melody, Harmony, and Form, as means of enforcing Expression, Action, and the varied demands of scenic propriety not as hindrances to them ”

“ Their practice, indeed, unanimously confirms the theory of musical effect which has now been briefly sketched, and which may be more briefly summarized before we pass on to deduce from it some general canons of appreciation and criticism.
Music, we have seen, originates in the spontaneous gestures and cries made by primitive man under the sway of emotion, imitated by observers, and arousing in them the same feelings. ”

“ Our rules of harmony and forms of composition are unknown to them; still, their popular legends and traditions clearly [Pg 232] prove that they appreciate the beauty and power of music not less keenly than we do; and they demonstrate the superiority of their scales with the same confidence as any of our theorists are capable of displaying. ”

“ It matters little from what point we view the tendency of musical art as it is disclosed to our vision through its most potent manifestations. We are driven inward upon the central and all-important question, How far can music go in the direction of depicting things which lie outside itself? Is it to convert itself into a language, or shall it sink into a kind of rapt mysticism which shall be accepted in a vague way as a species of philosophic speculation? ”

“ The musician, on the contrary, it is true, does not abstract from all and every content, but finds the same in a text, which he sets to music, or with absolute freedom gives musical utterance to some definite mood in the form of a theme, which he proceeds to elaborate. ”

“ From this double bondage to the rhythmic-melodic powers of human expressive movements and to the thought content of language, musical art finally frees itself. While the musical instrument was at first a means designed to assist man in his endeavour to give direct expression to his emotions, man's activity in the case of 'absolute music' becomes limited to the mastery of the instrument itself. ”

“ It is, of course, obvious that our analysis has confined itself to the barest elements of the musical experience. Our music to-day, with its many-voiced harmonies, with its procession of chords instead of single tones, with its modulation into related keys, has an infinite wealth and complexity defying description. A large part of the astonishing effect of music is derived from the fact that in a brief space we seem to hear and absorb so much: the careers of multitudinous lives compressed into an instant. ”

“ And weave for God the garment thou seest him by”—
so the highest art is that which best embodies the immortal thought of the universe as reflected in the mirror of man’s consciousness; that music, as speaking the most spiritual language of any of the art-family, is burdened with the most pressing responsibility as the interpreter between the finite and the infinite ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even the actual musical formulas, such as the entry of the voices in imitation, produce, in the right place, such a direct and vivid effect that they appear to have been invented for the special case. ”