The Origin and Development of Musical Scales [pp. 324-343]

.1 THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
cise and obvious tone-relations; all contrapuntal composition
necessitates the establishment by calculation of definitely related
points through which the constituent parts or voices shall pass.
It is also urged that melody can preserve no clear connection
with a key-note unless its movements be restricted to tones
perceptibly akin to that primary one.
These considerations, however, are irrelevant and must be
scrupulously excluded. The problem is to discover how the
taste for definite intervals arises in the absence of any conception of harmony or tonality.
Helmholtz lays much emphasis upon the great freedom of
music in comparison with the other fine arts in respect of its
material, and to this peculiarity attributes its tardy development
as a fine art, since uncultured minds find it difficult to deal successfully with a language at once so unique and so perfectly
plastic. Its very pliancy and incorporeity, however, fit it to
picture with remarkable vividness the most delicate gradations
of feeling, and thus in turn to generate similar emotional states
in the hearer. In this power to imitate the flow of emotion
itself instead of the circumstances that evoke emotion, music
stands unrivalled.
This representative duty it usually performs through those
successive variations in pitch which we term "melodic motions."
It is a common tendency to regard the play of feeling as a kind
of ethereal or spiritual motion within us inspired by external
events. The movements of various mobile substances, such as
flame from a wood-fire, smoke from a cigar, or water in its
myriad manifestations as wave and cataract, brook and lake,
serve to reproduce and typify to our minds the simplicity or
involution, the smooth on-going or sudden arrest, the placidity
or. storminess of emotional conditions. In a similar way the
multiform evolutions of melodies seem to us to express and
evoke emotion, but to as much greater a degree than fire or
smoke or water as sound is more immaterial than they, and as its
production and compounding are more immediately under our
control. The immense expansion of music as a fine art in
modern times is largely due to the exactitude and intelligibility
wherewith it can represent the highly complex emotional states
induced by modern life and thought.
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