The art of music. Vol. 01 (of 14) : $b The pre-Classic periods
History
The art of music. Vol. 01 (of 14) : $b The pre-Classic periods
Music -- History and criticism; Musicians
of harmonies as representing another key centre, and this made an
orderly succession of key centres the new basis of organization.
Then the human mind grew to be able to discern these principles of
order when composers dispensed with the sounding of the concrete
harmonies and only represented them by ornamental procedures; through
which the trained mind can perceive and infer the groups of harmonic
successions which are implied and recognize the respective keys to
which they belong. Complication yet further expanded the basis of
organization as composers approached what may be called the extreme of
sophistication, which became attainable by a reversion to the linear
system, in which harmony was again suffused by polyphonic methods, and
the individual notes of the ornamental formulas themselves are made to
represent centres of activity and have their own harmonization; which
harmonization subsists in spite of its apparent clashing with the
harmonization of other ornamental notes, which the mind is able to
endure because it intellectually segregates the notes which represent
different systems and allots them to their respective centres and
so keeps them apart from one another. The superimposition of device
upon device is like a perpetual budding from a germ cell, with the
additional analogy to things physical, that each generation is always
consistent in its characteristics and identifiable. The quickness of
the human mind at grasping the especial type of organization which it
has to accept, in order to follow the idea of the composer, is one of
its most extraordinary capacities; as is the development of the art
which enables the adequately equipped composer to be sure that his
most subtle sophistications are sure to meet with understanding from
the auditors who are equally well equipped. When an ignoramus looks
at a full score of any big modern work and sees there the hundreds of
notes that are to be sounded in a few seconds, and sounded also for the
fraction of a second and no more, most of which are not harmony notes
but only suggest them by the way they are grouped, and yet convey to
the qualified auditor a perfect sense of orderliness and coherence, it
will either give him the sense of the amazing development of art and of
human capacity to follow what is offered to it as art, or incredulity,
in accordance with his temperamental bias.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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