Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection In ManEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection In Man
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
From another point of view the motor stimulus of music has been
emphasized by Cyples: "Music connects with the only sense that
can be perfectly manipulated. Its emotional charm has struck men
as a great mystery. There appears to be no doubt whatever that it
gets all the marvelous effects it has beyond the mere pleasing of
the ear, from its random, but multitudinous summonses of the
efferent activity, which at its vague challenges stirs
unceasingly in faintly tumultuous irrelevancy. In this way, music
arouses aimlessly, but splendidly, the sheer, as yet unfulfilled,
potentiality within us." (W. Copies, _The Process of Human
Experience_, p. 743.)
The fundamental element of transformed motion in music has been
well brought out in a suggestive essay by Goblot ("La Musique
Descriptive," _Revue Philosophique_, July, 1901): "Sung or
played, melody figures to the ear a successive design, a moving
arabesque. We talk of _ascending_ and _descending_ the gamut, of
_high_ notes or _low_ notes; the; higher voice of woman is called
_soprano_, or _above_, the deeper voice of man is called _bass_.
_Grave_ tones were so called by the Greeks because they seemed
heavy and to incline downward. Sounds seem to be subject to the
action of gravity; so that some rise and others fall. Baudelaire,
speaking of the prelude to _Lohengrin_, remarks: 'I felt myself
_delivered from the bonds of weight_.' And when Wagner sought to
represent, in the highest regions of celestial space, the
apparition of the angels bearing the Holy Grail to earth, he uses
very high notes, and a kind of chorus played exclusively by the
violins, divided into eight parts, in the highest notes of their
register. The descent to earth of the celestial choir is rendered
by lower and lower notes, the progressive disappearance of which
represents the reascension to the ethereal regions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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