The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and ArchitectureBragdon, Claude Fayette
Philosophy
The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture
Bragdon, Claude Fayette
Architecture; Theosophy
though it be, affiliates it with the opposite or time pole. Painting
occupies a middle position, since in it space instead of being
actual has become ideal--three dimensions being expressed through
the mediumship of two--and time enters into it more largely than into
sculpture by reason of the greater ease with which complicated action
can be indicated: a picture being nearly always time arrested in
midcourse as it were--a moment transfixed.
In order to form a just conception of the relation between music and
architecture it is necessary that the two should be conceived of not
as standing at opposite ends of a series represented by a straight
line, but rather in juxtaposition, as in the ancient Egyptian symbol
of a serpent holding its tail in its mouth, the head in this case
corresponding to music, and the tail to architecture; in other words,
though in one sense they are the most-widely separated of the arts, in
another they are the most closely related.
Music being purely in time and architecture being purely in space,
each is, in a manner and to a degree not possible with any of
the other arts, convertible into the other, by reason of the
correspondence subsisting between intervals of time and intervals of
space. A perception of this may have inspired the famous saying
that architecture is _frozen music_, a poetical statement of a
philosophical truth, since that which in music is expressed by means
of harmonious intervals of time and pitch, successively, after the
manner of time, may be translated into corresponding intervals of
architectural void and solid, height and width.
In another sense music and architecture are allied. They alone of
all the arts are purely creative, since in them is presented, not
a likeness of some known idea, but _a thing-in-itself_ brought to
a distinct and complete expression of its nature. Neither a musical
composition nor a work of architecture depends for its effectiveness
upon resemblances to natural sounds in the one case, or to natural
forms in the other. Of none of the other arts is this to such a degree
true: they are not so much creative as re-creative, for in them all
the artist takes his subject ready made from nature and presents it
anew according to the dictates of his genius.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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