Pianissimo

“ As his own white plume that high amid death
Thro' the field has shone—yet moves with a breath!
And oh, how the eyes of Beauty glisten.
When Music has reached her inward soul,
Like the silent stars that wink and listen
While Heaven's eternal melodies roll.
So hither I come
From my fairy home,
And if there's a magic in Music's strain,
I swear by the breath
Of that moonlight wreath
Thy Lover shall sigh at thy feet again.
'Tis dawn—at least that earlier dawn
Whose glimpses are again withdrawn, [312]
As if the morn had waked, and then
Shut close her lids of light again. ”

“ Oh, music of the spheres, of which we dream but never hear!—you alone have revealed it, for you alone possess that touching language, at once radiant and heart-thrilling, yet penetrating, like all real beauty, like that divine essence whence you emanate. ”

“ There are hours when he sings with such force that his whole little body catches the key-note and natural rhythm; the melody becomes compounded of his very substance, body of his body and soul of his soul. ”

“ And then mark! how, amid the chorus of a hundred voices and a hundred instruments,--of flutes, and drums, and trumpets,--this universal shout and whirl-wind of the vexed air, you can so clearly distinguish the melancholy vibration of a single string, touched by the finger,--a mournful, sobbing sound! Ah, this is indeed human life! where in the rushing, noisy crowd, and amid sounds of gladness, and a thousand mingling emotions, distinctly audible to the ear of thought, are the pulsations of some melancholy string of the heart, touched by an invisible hand. ”

“ Now breathe the symphony, So gently breathe the tones may vie In softness with the magic notes In visions heard; music that floats So buoyant that it well may seem, With strains ethereal in her dream, One song of such mysterious birth She doubts it comes from heaven or earth. ”

“ The sound grew sweeter as it strengthened, with a queer, inexplicable sweetness unlike any music he had ever heard before, rounder and fuller and more complete than any melody made up of separate notes. Stronger and stronger he felt the certainty that it was the song of some mighty power, humming and throbbing and deepening through the twilight until the whole dim land was one trembling reservoir of sound that filled his entire consciousness with its throbbing, driving out all other thoughts and realizations, until he was no more than a shell that vibrated in answer to the calling. ”

“ It is a strange, delicately complex mood, a mood of life’s sunset hour, colored by the pathetic glories of the dying day, and 151 the depressing, yet tranquilizing shadows of the coming night—a mood well-nigh impossible to express, but perfectly embodied in the music. ”

“ Tho' the flowers have sunk in death;
So, when pleasure's dream is gone,
Its memory lives in Music's breath.
Music, oh how faint, how weak,
Language fades before thy spell!
Why should Feeling ever speak,
When thou canst breathe her soul so well?
Friendship's balmy words may feign,
Love's are even more false than they;
Oh! 'tis only music's strain
Can sweetly soothe, and not betray. ”

“ In Music's breath the power to please,
And if the tears should fill mine eyes,
They can but give my bosom ease.
But hush the notes of Love & Mirth,
Too welcome to my heart before;
For now those airs that breathe of earth
Can charm my pensive soul no more. ”

“ Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear. ”

“ People and things turned with us, surrounding us with a gyre of moving shadows, under a fantastic light formed of crossing reflections, in an atmosphere where one breathed inebriating perfumes, and where every atom vibrated to the ever more bewildering sound of music. ”

“ It is a kind of magnetic attraction of the senses, a nervous shock such as sensitive natures feel in case of sudden emotion—say, at an unexpected chord in music, a too pungent odor, a glorious sunset, a glance into space from the top of a high precipice. ”

“ Sweet, affecting music—not the tone of the piano, nor the peals of the organ—but a melodious air, sung by strong and well-disciplined voices, and accompanied by the flute and viol—such music reaches the fountains of thought and feeling ”

“ 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. ”

“ Imagine, if you can, all the sweetest sounds your soul has ever heard or dreamed of, blended into one 420harmonious whole, swelling louder, clearer, and sweeter, or melting away into the far-off distance, like the gentle fading of a glorious sunset, absorbed by a finer and more ethereal beauty of azure brightness, and you will have a faint conception of the music and the singing of the spheres. ”

“ So I shall ask you to imagine a tone at a high rate of vibration, to see it striking the hearer’s brain at a certain focus, creating there a centre of energy, which tending to crystallization, fixes the thought in the mind. And the more366 permanent duration of pleasant (which are high) thoughts and tones is evident if we glance back over a long period of time and note how the joys stand out and the griefs disappear; so we always forget physical suffering. ”

“ But for the music that visited my garden that night I had the most grateful welcome.
When the chance things are charming they far surpass the calculated, and love itself may be no more than a delightful accident. It was just by chance that somebody in a lighted room, without a thought of audience, went to the piano and remembered that music. ”

“ Let us remember, too, what the scientists tell us, that light and heat radiated from a given center are dissipated in force and intensity in proportion to the square of the distance to be traversed. The same is emphatically true of emotion. If one would stir his audience to a pleasurable excitement, he must himself be shaken as in a tempest; to warm them, he must be at white heat.
Should the question arise, How shall one learn to feel music more deeply and make it more expressive? ”

“ Manifold sweet sounds--all blended into one happy harmony, softened by distance, rendered more melodious to the heart by associations felt but not defined, and made more touching by the soft evening hour--filled the whole air, and spread a calm, bright, contemplative charm over the listening senses. ”

“ When the pendulum pulse in the soft young cheek swings tremulous to and fro
From the pearly pallor of cherry blooms to the rose’s crimson glow,
When a few faint syllables, English-plain, are richer than wisdom’s years,
And one dear voice holds deeper tones than the music of all the spheres. ”

“ That mingled with the splashing noise of founts,
In music such as stirs to passionate thought:
This peerless land was thronged with souls like mine,
Straying from East to South, impelled unseen,
And lost, like mine, in its enchanted vales:—
Souls that conversed apart in pairs, or sang
Low breeze-like airs, more tender than sweet words ”

“ The chief excellence of that measured strain of music called air resides in the beauty of its melody, the symmetry of which lays hold of our affections in a peculiar way. When addressed to the gentler passions, its tender expressions are more intelligible than words, of which few are necessary to assist its meaning ; and the less it is encumbered with them, the more powerful is its charm. ”

“ The golden pipes of the organ are lost in the twilight and the music is over—all the double vision of the third heaven into which he has been caught has vanished away. The form of the thing rightly fits the idea. ”

“ In what part of creation is it that the heart of man may not find music, if he will? Sweet sounds may, indeed, by the ear produce the impression most distinctly; but sights presented to the eye will raise exactly the same sensations in the spirit ”

“ There you have a moonlight night before your eyes, but I speak of the shimmering light, the twinkling stars, the distant sounds of a piano melting into the still and scented air, and the result is abominable. ”

“ Often have I, when passing in the evening a dwelling from which floated out upon the air the notes of tuneful voices, accompanied by the piano-forte or some other instrument, paused to listen, lingering long, the ear so ravished by the sweet sounds as to cause me to stand almost spell-bound, and to remain under music's magic influence even after its charming sounds had died away. ”

“ The slightest sound becomes a crash, and we hear the fall of waters, the roar of cataracts, the blare of trumpets, or brilliant harmonies. I have seen persons, naturally almost insensible to music, lifted by a few musical notes into an ecstasy such as we read of in the lives of saints. ”

“ Nothing but feeling and sentiment could produce them. It was soul breathed forth in sound. I was always alive to the influence of music; indeed, I was susceptible of voluptuous influences of every kind—sounds, colors, shapes, and fragrant odors. ”

“ Within the texture of every poem beats a pulse like the throb of coursing blood in a living body; and this pulse or rhythm is the life of poetic form. Indeed rhythm is the very heart of the universe itself. No manifestation of the active principle in the great frame of things is so intimate or so pervasive. ”

“ How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom,—in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown. Away profane philosopher! seekest thou in nature the cause? ”

“ Hark, now, let every creature hear, The plane of soul is but the ether of the spirit plane vibrating not so fast, and in the slower rhythm of this plane the essences of life are manifest; the perfumes and the odours, the true sensations and the all of love are manifest. ”

“ We read daily that it is reprehensible in this or that singer to indulge in this vibration, while in reality it is the tremolando which is blamed. The vibration of the voice is its inmost life-throb—its pulse—its spring. ”

“ But to create that intensity of feeling, which solely identifies itself with the accordance of musical composition, the corresponding symphony of which awakens from their secluded cells the sweetest and tenderest affections, elucidates emotions of hope, fear, surprise, terror, and joy,—and as the stream of harmony flows along calls forth involuntary exclamations of delight, wonder, and admiration—demands a much more copious extent of subject and execution. ”

“ Souls and planets in a glass;
And within the music hears
All the motions of all spheres,
All the whispers of all feet,
Cries of triumph and retreat,
Songs of systems and of souls,
Circling to their mighty goals. ”

“ On the contrary, they sound in the ear like sweet, harmonious music, and reach the very core of the heart, making it dance in merriment. Although his manner of expression is not much varied, yet it is not dully monotonous. ”

“ I am inclined to compare these two conditions of the brain, to a piano at which some great musician sits, and who as he throws his fingers over the keys recalls some melody which he might harmonize if he use all his power. This comparison may be extended yet further, when we remember that reflection is to ideas, what harmony is to sounds; that certain ideas contain others, as a principle sound contains the others which follow it, etc. ”

“ All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. ”

“ As one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of acts. ”

“ The music is bright, buoyant, joyous as the summer morning, fresh as its breezes, light as its floating clouds, stirring our hearts with the revivifying call of a new day, breathing hope and happiness in every measure, while the airy rippling embellishments remind us of the exuberant song of the skylark, as he rises exultantly to meet the dawn, shaking the dew from his swift wings and pouring out the plenitude of his glad heart upon the awakening earth in a sparkling shower of music, like the bubbling overflow of some sky fountain of pure delight. ”

“ The finest voices are obliged to practise with full breath until they shriek, and the result is mere sobbing, and the heavy drawing of the breath, just at the time when the tone should still be heard. ”

“ Spirit melodies are not material sound waves but spirit pulsations received by the spirits of celestial personalities. There is a vastness of range and a soul of expression, as well as a grandeur of execution, associated with the melody of the spheres, that are wholly beyond human comprehension. I have seen millions of enraptured beings held in sublime ecstasy while the melody of the realm rolled in upon the spirit energy of the celestial circuits. These marvelous melodies can be broadcast to the uttermost parts of a universe. ”