Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/541

 known, and the intonation is made as perfect as may be, according to the nature of the instruments employed.

The method of tuning the piano-forte may be stigmatized as reducing music to a mere game of permutations and combinations of twelve tones, but no better method is offered by mathematicians and physicists, whose schemes for music prove them more visionary than musicians themselves, who within the limits of their art must be acknowledged to be practical. They are art-workers as a rule, not talkers. Writers on music are generally amateurs, occupied with some one principle, apparently forgetful of the fact that many principles have to be regarded in the production of an art-work—sometimes one, sometimes another having the ascendancy. Therefore, false ideas readily gain currency, for the public can more easily comprehend one or two ideas, put forth with literary skill, than a multiplicity of considerations requiring technical definition, and only correctly estimated by persons practically acquainted with their relative value. Well-written treatises on the plastic arts are frequently found suited to the use of the public, engraved illustrations being more immediately understood than musical quotations, for comparatively few persons can read, and imagine in silence, written harmonies. And, besides, the forms being original, neither geometrical nor taken from nature, no appeal to experience can be made.

Music appears as something quite apart, as though it held aloof from the realities of daily life. Yet, on closer inspection, it is seen to be connected so closely with art and life as to make its classification difficult.

Its rhythmic forms transcend any found in poetry and dancing. Its melodies are not merely grammatically correct constructions, but are felicitous expressions of the highest kind of rhetorical eloquence, which spring up as happy thoughts, and may endure from age to age with wonderful vitality as the national songs of a whole people. It is not merely dramatic, it is preeminently dramatic, many parts being employed not only consecutively but simultaneously. It simulates the gestures indicated in sculptured groups, not as fixed, but in motion, and with such ability as to create in some persons an almost irresistible desire to make corresponding movements. Its forms are original and independent of words, and are not copied like those of painting, which is still dependent on drawing.

It not only resembles Gothic architecture, in the sense of parts depending upon parts for the stability of the whole, so that a cathedral may be aptly spoken of as "petrified music,"; but is more like celestial architecture, in which the base is not an immovable foundation, but moves itself; and, in the due observance of distances (intervals) and speeds (time), the balance is preserved—as, for instance, in the choruses of Bach and Handel.

Its science of acoustics allies it with optics. It can be expressed in