Pre-established harmony

“ Is not this foretold in music, the natural language of these passions, whieh cannot express corruption nor any evil feeling, without ceasing to be music; which has no tone for any bad passion, and translates into harmony and beauty whatever it expresses? The blending of all these passions harmoniously into one becomes the central love, the deepest and most undivided life of man. ”

“ Has love ceased to moan over the new-made grave, and, looking upward, does it patiently pray for the perpetual springtide wherein no arrow wounds the dove? Human hope and faith should join in nature's grand harmony, and, if on minor key, make music in the heart. ”

“ They said, ‘If we preach wisdom to you, before your mind is disposed towards it, we shall lose our time; but if by harmonious sounds we establish harmony in your mind, you will yield without opposition.’ Let us then, like these philosophers, make men more or less musicians, and they will be disposed to every sort of harmony—for that of colours in a picture, or the order that pervades an architectural pile.
In short, to be alive to the beauties of harmony is to love the order which pervades the system of the Creator. ”

“ With this, then, as the foundation-tone, running through all the spaces and along all the lines of life, the thoughts, desires, words, and acts must all harmonize with love; and if they do not, if they strike a note that is foreign to its key-tone, it breaks the harmony at once, throwing jars and discords into the music. ”

“ Harmony and melody—which have an equal share in the effects produced by sound—find their original type, it may be, in the double nature of the universe, and of human destiny considered socially and individually. Harmony, like the external world and its moving masses, presents us with various parts, linked together and arranged so as to subserve one and the same end. ”

“ Rhythm and harmony may not always present that mysterious appeal to the soul that approves, and proves the worth of all. Yet, withal, I feel that some thoughts and emotions of patriotism, love of home, the song of nature, the mystery of creation, and the impenetrable depths of infinitude, may be found and approved. ”

“ We must conclude therefore, that so long as we remain in the reality of harmony, all will be well, because all is always well in the world of harmony, and the world of harmony is the true world, the only true world—the world in which man was created to always live. ”

“ Are not these yearnings, this sense of incompleteness, prophecies of a future life? Our lives here are not the tones of perfect harmony, but rather like stringed instruments being attuned for celestial melody. ”

“ All of those who were “geniuses,” all who were Idealists, true lovers of their kind, find here (in spirit life) their highest happiness in ministering to others, in moving upon the minds, hearts, spirits of those to whom they are adapted, until they perceive the Soul of Beauty and fashion it into their lives. The “Masters” of art: painters, sculptors, builders, construct their temples and adorn them with lives—the true images of beauty in thought, feeling, aspiration, achievement.
Music is perfect Harmony, of one life with itself and others, of many lives in all their highest purposes. ”

“ Every sentiment, if it is deep enough, becomes religion; for every sentiment seeks and tends to unity, to harmony, to recognition of the one in all. And every sentiment in music is expressed in its purity, and carried up as it were to the blending point of all the emotions in one, which is the radical desire and feeling of the soul, its passion to be one with God. ”

“ Over the same royal road, ideas pass to the world of sense. There they are changed again into facts. Ideas of beauty, distilled in the alembic of the imagination from the seven prismatic colors, are turned into painting, and Raphael’s “Transfiguration” blesses the world. Ideas of harmony, formed by the power of the imagination from the notes of the musical scale, are turned into song, and Handel’s “Messiah” agitates the thoughts and feelings of men with the melody of the skies. ”

“ He extended the old forms, and filled them with melody unrivalled for purity and serenity, based on a far-reaching foundation of modern harmony and tonality, combined with a remarkable power of thematic development. ”

“ Unity is first manifested in the rhythm; then, as the tones consecutively follow each other, the succeeding one always born and growing immediately from the one just expiring, in the consequent melody; and lastly, as the tones progress simultaneously, hand to hand, and heart to heart, with the single line or passion of the melody, conditioned and responding to it in all its varied phases— (the individual and collective, the soul and its surroundings) —the grand diapason of harmony rolls on—and the magic unity of music is complete! ”

“ Those who offer you things written by other people by way of consolation, mistake, it seems to me, the whole lie of the situation. Can you imagine the delight of writing those verses; of feeling the music of them flow into one from some Source Unseen, and through one out into the world? The material out of which the man built up his verses consisted of:—stone walls and iron bars. Whatever the material, the joy of the artist in the act of creating harmony under inspiration is the same. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It will be, perhaps, advisable here to close the above discussion of symmetry with a few general observations upon harmony. The relation of harmony is no longer one to mere quantity, but rather one to essential distinctions of quality, differences of tone, that is to say, which do not persist against each other in their native opposition, but as harmony or music have to be brought into concord. ”

“ The old philosopher we read of might not have been dreaming when he discovered that the order of the sky was like a scroll of written music, and that two stars (which are said to have appeared centuries after his death, in the very places he mentioned) were wanting to complete the harmony. We know how wonderful are the phenomena of color, how strangely like consummate art the strongest dyes are blended in the plumage of birds, and in the cups of flowers; so that, to the practiced eye of the painter, the harmony is inimitably perfect. ”

“ Now, if it is naturally the part of melody to convey sentiment in its stages of simplicity, pronounced determination, or frank expression, yet the subtle use of all the resources of harmony is necessary to render the fine shades of sentiment, because it is in the nature of harmony to provide countless shades—at least if the composer has the ability to use it as some have done. ”

“ Melody and harmony, disconnected from words, are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. ”

“ In other words, harmony possesses merely the essential relations, which establish the law of necessity in the world of tone; but these are not in themselves, any more than beat and rhythm are, actually music: they are rather the substantive basis, the foundation of rule and principle, upon which the soul in its freedom expatiates. ”

“ All that is involved in the fact of redemption just as fragrance is involved and included in the rose, as harmony is expected to be a part of music and rhythm as well as metre a part of verse and song. ”

“ The law of Harmony pervades all nature, and men and women have long since learned to recognize it in many departments of study, inferior in dignity and importance to the topic of this lecture. As you have long studied harmony in its application to music, and colors, I introduce the study of harmony to you to-night, but it is harmony in its relation to Humanity in the law of matrimonial selection. There is harmony and discord in music; there is harmony and discord in the science of colors; and in the grand symphony of Humanity, the law is just as applicable ”

“ Oh, music comes directly from heaven! The harmony of sounds is something of a more intimate, secret, and mysterious nature than the harmony of lines and colours; for what constitutes the beauty, harmony, [414] and attraction of exterior things, is not there alone in appearance, but radiates from the spirit within: therefore it is that the beautiful, emanating from the divine harmony of sound, is more exquisite and more living, because it is the manifestation of the soul and the spirit without encumbrance. ”

“ Who has not heard music, often entirely new compositions, which somehow awakened memories of similar strains, scenes, places, faces, voices, lands, associations, and events, sounding dimly on the strings of memory as the breezes of the harmony floats over them? ”

“ Its individuality vanishes from its own eyes, as it feels the harmony presiding over that immense creation of which it forms but a most insignificant part. In such solemn moments is it that inspired genius chants the glories of creation, and lifts one corner of the veil that hides the resplendent throne of the supreme Creator from the eye of mortals. ”

“ In this kind of music, harmony, the real seat of emotionality in music, is an eloquent factor, and, indeed, there is no greater mystery in the art, which is full of mystery, than the fact that the lowering of the second tone in the chord, which is the starting-point of harmony, should change an expression of satisfaction, energetic action, or jubilation into an accent of pain or sorrow. ”

“ But it is not alone the harmony of music which has such a power over the mind. The harmony of colors, every art and science, has the same power. Even the most common craft, and the most prosaic of all prose, the chase after the dollar, may take possession of a man's soul and prostrate him in adoration before its idol. ”

“ Yet in most cases such a taste in early life is not so much as discovered. For instance, how seldom it is that we meet, even among musical ladies, with any knowledge of harmony!—and this simply because they have never ascertained whether the study of harmony might not be to them a study of absorbing interest. ”

“ The fact that many of the transcriptions of the original harmony have been and are discordant, and that they temporarily obscure, instead of rendering, its sublime grandeur, unity and noble simplicity, appears as the inevitable result of the mental activity, ingenuity and creative imagination to which mankind also owes its intellectual and spiritual progress. ”

“ "It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with your own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven." ”

“ Thus, if humanistic or otherwise archaistic artists do not as is generally believed love beautiful forms, but rather the past and history, it may be said of those others that they do not love pure Art, but the pure and universal content of Art, not this or that particular strife and Harmony (erotic, political, moral, religious, and so on) , but strife and Harmony in idea and eternal. ”

“ That work, in common with all else that is produced in obedience to the impulse which is constantly shaping the beauties of the outer world till they are tuned into harmony with the spirit resident in the breast of the artist, had no need of any spur to production beyond that which is provided by a reverent love and an unceasing devotion, and it survives to prove, if proof were needed, that this boasted attribute of Originality, though it may fitly find a place in the epitaph upon an artist’s tomb, never since the world began formed any part in the impulse that governed the work of his hand. ”

“ Our sense is no longer puzzled by any straggling threads, or loose ends; the exquisite colours, the contrast of light and shade, and the perfect symmetry and harmony of the design, fill the heart of the beholder with wonder and delight, and draw him nearer to the source of those ineffable perfections which are but imperfectly symbolized in the marvels of the visible universe. ”

“ The song shall spread and swell as rivers do, And I will teach our youth with skill to woo This living lyre, to know its secret will; Its fine division of the good and ill.. So shall men call me sire of harmony, And where great Song is, there my life shall be." Thus glorying as a god beneficent, Forth from his solitary joy he went To bless mankind. ”

“ Touching musical harmony, whether by instrument or by voice, it being but of high and low in sounds a due proportionable disposition, such, notwithstanding, is the force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath in that very part of man which is most divine, that some have been thereby induced to think that the soul itself, by nature, is or hath in it harmony. ”

“ But our delight and admiration rise still higher when this harmony is maintained throughout a varied and many-sided composition, containing a wealth of interests and motives appealing to our most opposite sympathies, and stirring the very depths of our being—then it is that we feel the full and immediate inspiration of that Spirit Who looks upon the universe as the artist looks upon his work. ”