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
If we wish to begin with the most primitive form of suggestion
in music, we shall find it in the direct imitation of sounds
in nature. We remember that Helmholtz, Hanslick, and their
followers denied to music the power to suggest things in
nature; but it was somewhat grudgingly admitted that music
might express the emotions caused by them. In the face of this,
to quote a well-known instance, we have the "Pastoral" symphony
of Beethoven, with the thrush, cuckoo, and thunderstorm. The
birds and the storm are very plainly indicated; but it is not
possible for the music to be an expression of the emotions
caused by them, for the very simple reason that no emotions
are caused by the cuckoo and thrush, and those caused by
thunderstorms range all the way from depression and fear to
exhilaration, according to the personality of individuals.
That music may imitate any rhythmic sounds or melodic figure
occurring in nature, hardly needs affirmation. Such devices may
be accepted almost as quotations, and not be further considered
here. The songs of birds, the sound made by galloping horses'
feet, the moaning of the wind, etc., are all things which
are part and parcel of the musical vocabulary, intelligible
alike to people of every nationality. I need hardly say that
increasing intensity of sound will suggest vehemence, approach,
and its visual synonym, growth, as well as that decreasing
intensity will suggest withdrawal, dwindling, and placidity.
The suggestion brought about by pattern is very familiar.
It was one of the first signs of the breaking away from
the conventional trammels of the contrapuntal style of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first madrigal of
Thomas Weelkes (1590) begins with the words, "Sit down," and
the musical pattern falls a fifth. The suggestion was crude,
but it was caused by the same impulse as that which supplied
the material for Wagner's "Waldweben," Mendelssohn's "Lovely
Melusina," and a host of other works.
The fact that the pattern of a musical phrase can suggest kinds
of motion may seem strange; but could we, for example, imagine
a spinning song with broken arpeggios? Should we see a spear
thrown or an arrow shot on the stage and hear the orchestra
playing a phrase of an undulating pattern, we should at once
realize the contradiction. Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner,
Liszt, and practically everyone who has written a spinning
song, has used the same pattern to suggest the turning of a
wheel. That such widely different men as Wagner and Mendelssohn
should both have adopted the same pattern to suggest undulating
waves is not a mere chance, but clearly shows the potency of
the suggestion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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