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قراءة كتاب Music: An Art and a Language

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Music: An Art and a Language

Music: An Art and a Language

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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products of such activity were unfettered by rules, they exercised in process of time much influence upon the development of modern style. Folk-songs are characterized by a freshness and simplicity, a directness of utterance, which are seldom attained by the conscious efforts of genius. "Listen carefully to all folk-songs," says Schumann. "They are a storehouse of beautiful melody, and unfold to the mind the innate character of the different peoples." They are like wild flowers blooming unheeded by the wayside, the product of the race rather than the individual, and for centuries were only slightly known to cultivated musicians. It should be understood that words and music were inextricably bound together and that, with both, dancing was naturally associated; the very essence of a people's life being expressed by this tripartite activity. Tonal variety is a marked feature in folk-songs, many of them being in the old Gregorian modes, while others show a decided inclination to our modern major and minor scales. Great is the historical importance of Folk-music, because in it we see a dawning recognition of the principles of instrumental form, i.e., the need of balanced phrases, caused in the songs by the metrical structure of the words, and in the dances by the symmetrical movements of the body; a recognition above all, of the application of a definite system of tonal-centres, and of repetition after contrast. In fact, as we look back it is evident that the outlines of our most important design, that known as the Sonata Form are—in a rudimentary state—found in folk-music. Folk-melodies and rhythms play a large part in the music of Haydn, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, Tchaikowsky and Dvořák. It seems as if modern composers were doing for music what Luther Burbank has done for plant life; for by grafting modern thought and feeling on to the parent stock of popular music, they have secured a vigor attainable in no other way. Thus some of the noblest melodies of Brahms, Grieg, and Tchaikowsky are actual folk-tunes with slight variation or original melodies conceived in a folk-song spirit.[22]

As music, unlike the other arts, lacks any model in the realm of nature, it has had to work out its own laws, and its spontaneity and directness are the result. It has not become imitative, utilitarian or bound by arbitrary conventions. As Berlioz says in the Grotesques de la Musique: "Music exists by itself; it has no need of poetry, and if every human language were to perish, it would be none the less the most poetic, the grandest and the freest of all the arts." When we reach the centuries in which definite records are available, we find a wealth of folk-songs from the Continental nations: Irish, Scotch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etc.[23] In these we can trace the transition from the old modes to our modern major and minor scales; the principles of tonality and of rudimentary modulation, the dividing of the musical thought into periodic lengths by means of cadential endings, the instinct for contrast and for the unity gained by restatement. No better definition of Folk-songs can be given than that of Parry in his Evolution of the Art of Music where he calls them "the first essays made by man in distributing his notes so as to express his feelings in terms of design." In folk-tunes this design has been dominated by the metrical phraseology of the poetic stanzas with which they were associated; for between the structure of melody and that of poetry there is always a close correspondence. In Folk-songs, therefore, we find a growing instinct for balanced musical expression and, above all, an application of the principle of Restatement after Contrast. The following example drawn from Irish Folk-music[24]—which, for emotional depth, is justly considered the finest in the world—will make the point clear.

THE FLIGHT OF THE EARLS

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The statement is sometimes made that the principles of our modern system of tonality and of modulation are derived from Folk-music. This is only partially true, for pure Folk-songs always developed under the influence of the old medieval modes, long before the establishment of our fixed major and minor scales. Furthermore, as these were single unaccompanied melodies, they showed slight connection with modulation or change of key in the modern sense of the term—which implies a system of harmonization in several voices. It is true that there was an instinctive and growing recognition of the importance of the three chief tonal centres: the Tonic or Keynote, the Dominant (a perfect fifth above) and the Subdominant (a perfect fifth below) and at times the relative minor. All these changes are illustrated in the melody just cited; e.g., in the fourth measure[25] there is an implication of E minor, in measures seven and eight there is a distinct modulation to D major, the Dominant, and in the ninth measure to C major, the Subdominant. This acceptance of other tonal centres—distant a fifth from the main key-note—doubtless arose from their simplicity and naturalness, and was later sanctioned by acoustical law; the interval of a perfect fifth having one of the simplest ratios (2-3), and being familiar to people as the first overtone (after the octave) struck off by any sounding body—such as a bell or an organ pipe. The Venetian composers, notably Willaert, had also quite fully developed this principle of Tonic, Dominant and Subdominant harmony in order to give homogeneity to their antiphonal choruses. Even to-day these tonal centres are still used; for they are elemental, like the primitive colors of the spectroscope. But modulation, in the modern sense of a free shifting of the centre of gravity to any one of the twelve semitones of our chromatic scale, was not developed and accepted until after the acoustical reforms of Rameau, and the system of tuning keyed instruments embodied in that work called the Well-tempered Clavichord of Sebastian Bach. Both these men published their discoveries about the year 1720.

As we have just used the term modal, and since many Folk-songs in the old modes sound peculiar or even wrong (hence the preposterous emendations of modern editors!) because our ears can listen only in terms of the fixed major and minor scales, a few words of explanation concerning the nature of the medieval modes should here be given. Their essential peculiarity is the freer relationship of tones and semitones than is found in the definite pattern of our modern scales. It is of great importance that the music-lover should train himself to think naturally in these modes; for there has been a significant return to their freedom and variety on the part of such modern composers as Brahms, Tchaikowsky, Dvořák, d'Indy, Debussy and others, and some of their most individual

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