Courts and courtiers -- Fiction; Europe -- History -- Fiction; Short stories, English
Above all, there was a desire abroad to attain the instruments of a
freer and more various sacred music than had been in use hitherto--a
music that might express the whole compass of souls now grown to
manhood. Auxerre, then as afterwards, was famous for its liturgical
music. It was Denys, at last, to whom the thought occurred of combining
in a fuller tide of music all the instruments then in use. Like the
Wine-god of old, he had been a lover and patron especially of the music
of the pipe, in all its varieties. Here, too, there had been evident
those three fashions or "modes":--first, the simple and pastoral, the
homely note of the pipe, like the piping of the wind itself from off
the distant fields; then, the wild, savage din, that had cost so much
to quiet people, and driven excitable people mad. Now he would compose
all this to sweeter purposes; and the building of the first organ
became like the book of his life: it expanded to the full compass of
his nature, in its sorrow and delight. In long, enjoyable days of wind
and sun by the river-side, the seemingly half-witted "brother" sought
and found the needful varieties of reed. The carpenters, under his
instruction, set up the great wooden passages for the thunder; while
the little pipes of pasteboard simulated the sound of the human voice
singing to the victorious notes of the long metal trumpets. At times
this also, as people heard night after night those wandering sounds,
seemed like the work of a madman, though they awoke sometimes in wonder
at snatches of a new, an unmistakable new music. It was the triumph of
all the various modes of the power of the pipe, tamed, ruled, united.
Only, on the painted shutters of the organ-case Apollo with his lyre in
his hand, as lord of the strings, seemed to look askance on the music
of the reed, in all the jealousy with which he put Marsyas to death so
cruelly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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