Songbook

“ 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; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Throughout the nesting season music fairly pours from his tiny throat; it bubbles up like champagne; it gushes forth in a lyrical torrent and overflows into every nook of the forest, that seems entirely pervaded by his song. While music is everywhere, it apparently comes from no particular point, and, search as you may, the tiny singer still eludes, exasperates, and yet entrances. ”

“ And
therefore, if I wished to collect the ballads of the future, the songs
which will endure into the next century (if there is any song in
the next century) , I should not rake through the contemporary poets, in
the hope of finding gems of lasting brilliance. No. I should go to the
music-halls. I should listen to the sort of thing they sing when the
faded lady with the high bust steps forward and shouts, "Now then, boys,
all together!"
Unless you can write the words "Now then, boys, all together", at the
top of a ballad, it is not really a ballad at all. ”

“ First of all, I will endeavour, by the following explanations, to give you as clear an idea as possible of what thorough-bass or harmony is, and to what purpose it serves.
Music consists of melody and harmony. When, for example, a female sings quite alone, without any accompaniment, her song is pure, simple melody. When another female singer, with a somewhat deeper voice, accompanies the first with a different, but still agreeably sounding melody, this will form music in two parts, which may also be called two-part harmony. ”

“ Thus from the definite number of twenty-four notes, varied in different degrees, by sharps, flats, semi-tones, &c., are produced all that is so magical, enthusiastic, and transporting in the empire of omnipotent music. Like as the alphabetic characters may be varied into myriads of forms suitable to every multifarious species of conversation or composition; in a word, a few musical notes in the hands of a master may be made by his skill to produce, from agreeable interchanges of time, harmony, &c., every variety of musical sentiment which can affect the human soul. ”

“ I am a great believer in the quiet study of a song without the aid of a piano. Not only does this avoid tiring the voice, but it enables the singer to fully grasp all the beauty and the meaning of the words and the music, and so to enter into the spirit of the subject when upon the platform. When on tour I frequently adopt this method of studying. It enables one to be doing something useful when in the train, or elsewhere, when actual practice is undesirable or impracticable. ”

“ This apparent arrest, in the ballad stage, of a story which seemed destined to become an epic, naturally suggests the vexed question of the author ship of the popular ballads. They are in a very real sense the songs of the people; they make no claim to individual authorship; on the contrary, the inference of what may be called community authorship is, in many instances, irresistible. They are the product of a social condition which, so to speak, holds song of this kind in solution; of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are the most natural and familiar forms of expression. ”

“ When they rose to sing, the tune must needs be one which they had often sung together, out of the same book, at the singing-school,—one of those wild, pleading tunes, dear to the heart of New England,—born, if we may credit the report, in the rocky hollows of its mountains, and whose notes have a kind of grand and mournful triumph in their warbling wail, and in which different parts of the harmony, set contrary to all the canons of musical Pharisaism, had still a singular and romantic effect, which a true musical genius would not have failed to recognize. ”

“ I admit at once, as among artists we all have our favourites, so among song-writers the works of some appeal to us more than do others, in that we respond to one or other of them more readily than to the rest. But, at the same time, I would lay special emphasis on the fact that every song, however simple, should be dealt with by the singer like a separate picture in which specially beautiful effects may be produced, according to the quality and variety of tone and colour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every living leaf of mine had melody, and all together made a stream of many-voiced music; whilst around me were countless living trees like myself, who woke at every dawn to a chorus in the morning breeze. But since the axe was laid at our roots, all the music has gone from our branches. We are useful still, they say, in the gallant ship, and our country mentions us with honour even in death; but the music has gone from us with life for ever, and we can only groan and creak in the storms. Life made us musical," said the Oak-beam.
What makes creatures musical? ”

“ Are we sure that nothing lives of the music you mourn? It may live on [Pg 43] the lips of the people, in those Old-World songs whose cause we cannot trace, yet which come sweet and fresh transmitted to every generation. How often we hear some nameless melody echo down a country-side! the singers cannot tell you whence it came; they only know their mothers sang it by their cradles, and they will sing it by their children's. But in the past the song had its birth in genius. ”

“ All the men but one leaned back upon the settles or forward upon the tables, their hands on their tankards, watching the one who sang a ballad—a ballad known to them so well that they seemed not to listen, but simply to let the melody surge about them and provoke what thoughts it would. ”

“ An unusually emotional nature being thus the general characteristic of musical composers, we have in it just the agency required for the development of recitative and song. Intenser feeling producing intenser manifestations, any cause of excitement will call forth from such a nature tones and changes of voice more marked than those called forth from an ordinary nature—will generate just those exaggerations which we have found to distinguish the lower vocal music from emotional speech, and the higher vocal music from the lower. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every student of music knows that a melody is constructed of certain phrases which have identifiable rhythmic and melodic shape. The identity of any tune is established by the repetition of these phrases in a regular order. When the repetitions are arranged on a plan similar to that of a verse of poetry, as in the case of such a tune as "Home, Sweet Home," the form of the music becomes that known as the song form, which lies at the basis of nearly every musical composition not strictly contrapuntal. ”

“ But Music, to enter wholly into our lives, must take those visions of hers which she thus brings with her, and, clothing them in words and actions, speak to us of particular passions and events. Very well! Can the vulgar and the common-place be spoken of in those accents of glory? Can Music tell us of anything other than the wonders and the mysteries of that realm from whence she comes to us with those magic tones of hers? Let the poet equip himself for a bold flight into the land of romance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Music indeed often seems as if it scarcely belonged to this material universe, but was
"A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music, and moonlight, and feeling are one." [7]
There is Music in speech as well as in song. Not merely in the voice of those we love, and the charm of association, but in actual melody ”

“ The romantic and above all the modern lyric, no doubt more exceptionally so in such songs, in which the temper, the emotional mood is predominant, and the function of music is to emphasize and expand this inner beat of soul-life in actual melody—are no doub [Pg 225] t most readily adapted to such melodic fusion. The folk-song is an obvious example which both delights in and demands a musical accompaniment. We shall find in modern times more rarely a composer for the canzonet, elegy, epistle, or even the sonnet. ”

“ But this process of purging and refining the ballad, so that it shall become—like the language, the proverbs, the folklore and nursery tales, and the traditional music of a nation—the reflection of the history and character of the race itself, if it is to be genuine, must go on unconsciously. As soon as the ballad is written down—at least as soon as it is fixed in print—the elements of natural growth it possesses are arrested. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I can plead guilty to having written the words of a dozen songs or so in as many years, but to put two notes of music together is beyond me, and to sing anything in tune would be an impossibility, even if I had the assurance to stand up in public for that purpose. ”

“ In writing a ballad the secrets of success are definiteness of aim, directness of execution, and singleness of idea. The language must be simple, but so vigorous that every word tells; the metre must also be simple, but the versification demands a musical swing, a rush of rhyme, the talent for which is rare. To smell of the lamp is fatal to the ballad ”

“ Five more are basking in the sound as a dog basks in the sun—enjoying it in a sleepy, languid way, but not actively following it at all. For them music is, as a noted critic has said, "a drowsy reverie, relieved by nervous thrills." Then there are one or two to whom the music is bringing pictures or stories: visions of trees, cascades, mountains, and rivers fill their minds, or they dream of princesses in old castles, set free from magic slumber by brave heroes from afar. ”

“ Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear. ”

“ It will now have become clear, what according to the view of music that I have endeavoured to explain, is the task of a song composer. He has far more to do than to express again in tones the feeling of the song. He has to furnish a composition that, in the first place, has life; and, in the domain of art, to have life is to have beauty. ”

“ The foregoing facts sufficiently prove that what we regard as the distinctive traits of song, are simply the traits of emotional speech intensified and systematised. In respect of its general characteristics, we think it has been made clear that vocal music, and by consequence all music, is an idealisation of the natural language of passion. ”