Critical and Historical Essays: Lectures delivered at Columbia UniversityMacDowell, Edward
History
Critical and Historical Essays: Lectures delivered at Columbia University
MacDowell, Edward
Music -- History and criticism
The simplest manifestations of the purely sensuous effect of
sound are to be found in the savage's delight in noise. In
the more civilized state, this becomes the sensation of mere
pleasure in hearing pleasing sounds. It enters into folk song
in the form of the "Scotch snap," which is first cousin to the
Swiss _jodel_, and is undoubtedly the origin of the skips of
the augmented and (to a lesser degree) diminished intervals to
be found in the music of many nations. It consists of the trick
of alternating chest tones with falsetto. It is a kind of quirk
in the voice which pleases children and primitive folk alike,
a simple thing which has puzzled folklorists the world over.
The other sensuous influence of sound is one of the most
powerful elements of music, and all musical utterance
is involved with and inseparable from it. It consists of
repetition, recurrence, periodicity.
Now this repetition may be one of rhythm, tone tint, texture,
or colour, a repetition of figure or of pitch. We know that
savages, in their incantation ceremonies, keep up a continuous
drum beating or chant which, gradually increasing in violence,
drives the hearers into such a state of frenzy that physical
pain seems no longer to exist for them.
The value of the recurring rhythms and phrases of the march is
well recognized in the army. A body of men will instinctively
move in cadence with such music. The ever recurring lilt of a
waltz rhythm will set the feet moving unconsciously, and as the
energy of the repetition increases and decreases, so will the
involuntary accompanying physical sympathy increase or decrease.
Berlioz jokingly tells a story of a ballet dancer who objected
to the high pitch in which the orchestra played, and insisted
that the music be transposed to a lower key. Cradle songs are
fashioned on the same principle.
This sensuous sympathy with recurring sounds, rhythm, and pitch
has something in common with hypnotism, and leads up to what
I have called suggestion in music.
This same element in a modified form is made use of in poetry,
for instance, in Poe's "Raven,"
Quoth the raven, nevermore,
and the repetition of colour in the same author's "Scarlet
Death." It is the mainspring (I will not call it the vital
spark) of many so-called popular songs, the recipe for which
is exceedingly simple. A strongly marked rhythmic figure is
selected, and incessantly repeated until the hearer's body
beats time to it. The well-known tunes "There'll Be a Hot
Time," etc., and "Ta-ra-ra, Boom-de-ay" are good examples of
this kind of music.
There are two kinds of suggestion in music: one has been called
tone-painting, the other almost evades analysis.
The term tone-painting is somewhat unsatisfactory, and reminds
one of the French critic who spoke of a poem as "beautiful
painted music." I believe that music can suggest forcibly
certain things and ideas as well as vague emotions encased in
the so-called "form" and "science" of music.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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