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Critical and Historical Essays / Lectures delivered at Columbia University cover

Critical and Historical Essays / Lectures delivered at Columbia University

Chapter 43: E.
By Edward MacDowell
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About This Book

The lectures present a guided survey of music's development from its probable emotional origins through the musical systems and practices of ancient and medieval cultures, examining scales, notation, and the rise of counterpoint. They trace the evolution of instruments and instrumental forms, the transformation of the suite into the sonata, and the growth of piano repertoire and modern orchestration, with separate treatments of folk-song, nationalism, troubadours, opera, and liturgical drama. Interspersed are analyses of prominent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers and considerations of musical declamation, suggestion, and aesthetic principles. The author speaks from the perspective of a practicing composer and educator, aiming to combine technical instruction with historical and critical insight.

In becoming common property, so to speak, this important element of musical utterance has been dragged through the mud; and modern composers, in their efforts to raise it above the commonplace, have gone to the very edge of what is physically bearable in the use of tone colour and combination. While this is but natural, owing to the appropriation of some of the most poetic and suggestive tone colours for ignoble dance tunes and doggerel, it is to my mind a pity, for it is elevating what should be a means of adding power and intensity to musical speech to the importance of musical speech itself. Possibly Strauss's “Thus Spake Zarathustra” may be considered the apotheosis of this power of suggestion in tonal colour, and in it I believe we can see the tendency I allude to. This work stuns by its glorious magnificence of tonal texture; the suggestion, in the opening measures, of the rising sun is a mighty example of the overwhelming power of tone colour. The upward sweep of the music to the highest regions of light has much of splendour about it; and yet I remember once hearing in London, sung in the street at night, a song that seemed to me to contain a truer germ of music.

For want of a better word I will call it ideal suggestion. It has to do with actual musical speech, and is difficult to define. The possession of it makes a man a poet. If we look for analogy, I may quote from Browning and Shakespeare.

For me this defies analysis, and so it is with some things in music, the charm of which cannot be ascribed to physical or mental suggestion, and certainly not to any device of counterpoint or form, in the musical acceptance of the word.

INDEX

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

  • Egypt, 16, 34, 43, 152.
  • Emerson, 16.
  • Embellishments, 238.
  • Enharmonic (Greek), 88.
  • Epitrite, 75.
  • Equal temperament, 187, 241.
  • Euclid, 79.

F.

G.

H.

I.

J.

K.

L.

M.

N.

O.

P.

Q.

  • Quarter-tones, 38, 39.

R.

S.