Composers; Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism
I wonder if all the suggestion music gives us is associative. Sometimes
I think so. Was it Berlioz who remarked that the slightest quickening
of _tempo_ would transform the celebrated air in _Orphée_ from “_J’ai
perdu mon Euridice_” to “_J’ai trouvé mon Euridice_”? Rossini found an
overture which he had formerly used for a tragedy quite suitable for
_Il Barbiere di Siviglia_, and the interchangeable values which Handel
gave to secular and sacred tunes are familiar to all music students.
Are minor keys really sad? Are major keys always suggestive of joy? We
know that this is not true although one will be more sure of a ready
response of tears from a Western audience by resorting to a minor key.
In our music wedding marches are usually in the major and funeral
marches usually in the minor modes. But almost all Eastern music is in
a minor key, love songs and even cradle songs. Recall, or play over on
your piano, the Smyrnan lullaby (made familiar by Mme. Sembrich) which
occurs in the collection of Grecian and oriental melodies edited by
L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray.... Even the composers who do not call their
pieces by name and who scorn the use of a programme, depend for some of
their most powerful effects on emotion created by association ... and
a new composer, be he indefatigable enough, can rouse new associations
in us.... Why if three or four composers would meet together and decide
that the use of a certain group of notes stood for the town pump, in
time it would be quite easy for other composers to use this phrase in
that connection _with no explanation whatever_.
III
“It is a mistake of much popular criticism,” says Walter Pater, in the
first two sentences of his essay on “The School of Giorgione,” “to
regard poetry, music, and painting--all the various products of art--as
but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed
quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical
qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical
words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with
it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a
matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite
principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a
special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of
any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the beginning
of all true æsthetic criticism.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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