From Grieg to Brahms: Studies of Some Modern Composers and Their ArtMason, Daniel Gregory
History
From Grieg to Brahms: Studies of Some Modern Composers and Their Art
Mason, Daniel Gregory
Composers -- Biography; Music -- 19th century -- History and criticism
At this point, however, it is important not to go too fast. These crude
gestures and cries by which primeval man expressed his feelings, though
they were the germs out of which music grew, were as yet no more music,
which is not only expressive sound, but formed, articulate sound, than
an infant's cooings are speech. So far they were mere ebullitions,
purposeless and formless; before they could become communicative they
must become definite, they must take on some organic structure. Now
gestures, bodily movements, are very easily grouped together by means
of accent. Every walker knows that it is difficult not to emphasize
alternate steps, grouping the unaccented with the accented into a
cluster of two. Every waltzer makes a similar grouping of three steps,
one accented, the other two subordinate. Some such system of grouping
is instinctively adopted whenever we have a series of impressions
regularly recurring in time. Let the reader, listening to the ticking
of a watch, note how impossible it is to attend to each tick by itself.
He will inevitably group them in twos; the accent may come on the first
or on the last of the group, but he cannot hear them as exactly equal,
any more than in walking he can put exactly equal stress on each step.
It was this tendency of the mind to group its impressions on a basis
of equal time measurements and unequal accents that led at the dawn of
musical history to meter or rhythm, which is as persistent in music
as it is in poetry. Metrical form was the natural means of giving
definition to bodily movements, and as soon as it was developed enough
to produce regular, easily imitated steps out of the chaotic gestures
of naïve feeling, Dance was born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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