The intimate bondage of tone-sequence and rhythm is grounded
in the identity of their inner nature; both are varieties of
the objective conditions of embodied expectation. It is not
of the essence of music to satisfy explicit and conscious
expectation--to satisfy the understanding. It meets on the
contrary a subconscious, automatic need which becomes conscious
only in the moment of its contenting. Every moment of progress
in a beautiful melody is hailed like an instinctive action
performed for the first time. Rhythm is the ideal satisfaction
of attention in general with all its bodily concomitants and
expressions. Tone-sequence is the satisfaction of attention
directed to auditory demands. But the form-quality of rhythm,
the form-quality of tonality, is an all but subconscious
possession. Together, reinforcing each other in melody, they
furnish the ideal arrangement of the most poignant of sense-
stimulations.
VI
It is strange that those who would accept the general facts of
musical logic as outlined above do not perceive that they have
thereby cut away the ground from under the feet of the "natural
language" argument. If the principle of choice in the progress
of a melody is tone-relationship, the principle of choice cannot
also be the cadences of the speaking voice. That musical
intervals often RECALL the speaking voice is another matter, as
we have said, and to this it may be added that they much more
often do not. The question here is only of the primacy of the
principle. Thus it would seem that the facts of musical structure
constitute in themselves a refutation of the view we have disputed.
To say that music arose in "heightened speech" is irrelevant; for
the occasion of an aesthetic phenomenon is never its cause. It
might as well be said that music arose in economic conditions,--
as indeed Grosse, in his "Anfange der Kunst," conclusively shows,
without attempting to make this social occasion intrude into the
nature of the phenomenon. Primitive decorative art arose in the
imitation of the totemic or clan symbols, mostly animal forms;
but we have seen that the aesthetic quality of the decoration is
due to the demands of the eye, and appears fully only in the
comparative degradation of the representative form. In exactly
the same way might we consider the "degradation" of speech
cadences into real music,--supposing this were really the origin
of music. As a matter of fact, however, the best authorities
seem to be agreed that the primitive "dance-song" was rather a
monotonous, meaningless chant, and that the original pitch-
elements were mechanically supplied by the first musical
instruments; these being at first merely for noise, and becoming
truly vibrating, sonorous bodies because they were more easily
struck if they were hard or taut. The musical tones which these
hard vibrating bodies gave out were the first determinations of
pitch, and of the elements of the scale, which correspond to the
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