Music - Its Appreciation

By C. Whitaker-Wilson

This early work by C. Whitaker-Wilson is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It details the qualities and varieties of classical music and contains chapters on concertos, the symphony, the overture and much more. This fascinating work is thoroughly recommended for inclusion on the bookshelf of all with an interest in composers and the history of classical music. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jan 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447481706

Book preview

PRELUDE

IT would be interesting to know what sort of music David played on that harp of his. Music is probably older than David who himself dates back something like three thousand years, but what he played would hardly have given you pleasure. Whether Saul’s throwing a javelin at him was criticism or mere unpleasantness is a matter best not gone into, but neither David nor Saul could have appreciated what we now call harmony.

It is doubtful whether anyone in their day could have tolerated the sounding of two notes together. In modern music it takes at least three notes to make a chord, but David would never have attempted to make one; what he played was unaccompanied melody. Harmony was unknown.

So that all early music consisted of a tune of sorts, whether played or sung. The intervals were so wide that we, with our modern ideas of tonality, should have writhed in agony. Had you and I been born in those far-off times we might have thought David a great virtuoso; at any rate, we should have been melody-conscious.

Had we lived in the seventh century A.D. we should still have objected to more than one note being sounded at the same time, but we should have looked upon St. Gregory as a genius; we should have considered his melodies an improvement upon anything we had heard, but we should have had to jump the centuries still further, and have elected to be born in what we now call the Middle Ages, before we could have been sufficiently ultra-modern to have stood up to the bare octave. Our octaves sound like octaves; seventh-century octaves would take some assimilating. Most of them were an octave-and-a-bit.

By Elizabeth’s time there had been considerable advancement; the madrigals of the period prove it. All the same, if you could hear a choir sing them with the intonation of her days it is doubtful whether you would listen for more than a few seconds; yet, sung with our present-day idea of intervals, they can be most attractive. There is always a smell of age about them not hard to account for.

It is a question of intonation because early and mediaeval music was written with a consciousness of an intonation no longer in existence—at least, in England. If still lingers in the East, but we have no interest in it. The piano had not then been thought out; even though there were clavichords, spinets, and (later) harpsichords, the method of tuning them was different from ours.

This may interest you. A note was tuned and given a name. Often it was C because the key represented by that letter had no sharps or flats in it. All the Cs were then tuned. As violin-tuning was known and appreciated, the next step was to imitate it and tune all the Gs because they were a perfect fifth above the Cs. After the Gs, the Ds and As—and so on until the Cs were reached again.

A grand method, one would think; unfortunately it had a weakness. So long as the simple keys were used—those up to three flats or three sharps—instruments so tuned sounded in tune, but as soon as E flat was called D sharp and the key of E major was reached the instruments sounded distinctly out of tune.

The only method of curing the trouble was to tune a second instrument from E. This made the elaborate keys sound in tune but the simple keys were as bad as the elaborate keys had been in the other instrument.

To composers whose minds reached out to all keys this was irksome; something had to be done about it. It had to be done because, otherwise, art could not progress. In each octave there were twelve possible semitones; the only thing to do was to make them equidistant. There is actually more in it than that but, roughly, that is what it amounted to. At all events, once it was appreciated, it revolutionized the art of music. The new system of tuning was known as the equal temperament.

The clavichordists and organists of the period must have been delighted with it—organists especially because they could now improvise in any key their minds suggested; but string, wind, and brass instrument-players, were not so sure. String-players in particular had a complaint: they said it was all very well for organists and clavichordists because their instruments were tuned by someone else. Violinists had not only to tune their own instruments but had to make their own notes; getting used to the new division of the semitones was none too easy. However, it came out all right in the end; the new scale was more satisfactory, and the possibility of using all the keys was attractive.

Though not entirely responsible for the new system, Bach had much to do with its stabilization. At all events, he let off steam by writing the famous Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues for what he justifiably called ‘the well-tuned clavichord’. He wrote two preludes and two fugues in each major and minor key to illustrate the possibilities of the new system of tuning. He made history with those fugues.

So that much was done to music between the days when David gave recitals on his harp after dinner at the palace and those when Bach gave recitals on the organ at his parish church after lunch on Sundays. In every respect music had progressed irregularly, but Bach and Handel took things as they found them in harmony and counterpoint—and stabilized them. Earlier composers had paved the way (and paved it well); but music, as we know and appreciate it, dates from their time—that is to say, from about the year 1700. Between them, these two gave music a mighty push. Many followed them who gave it other pushes.

Men are still pushing at it, even now.

1. THE CLASSICAL COMPOSERS

LOVERS of good music—people who really want to know something about the best of what they hear—-find themselves at a loss unless they have some idea of the order in which the great composers lived and worked. For that reason the first three sections of this small work are devoted to the Classical, the Romantic, and the Modern Composers.

Bach makes a wonderful beginning, but his appearance so early makes him create something like an anti-climax where the others are concerned. Roughly, his writing years—and Handel’s—cover the period between 1700 and 1750. Actually Handel did not die until 1759, but the estimate will do for our present purposes. Incidentally, they were both born in 1685—within a month of one another.

Of the two men, Bach was the more learned; he went deeper than Handel. Most of the choruses in The Messiah prove that Handel understood the art of fugal writing, but when Bach wrote fugues he glorified the art. If you have ever been in a church where an organist (who knows what he is about and has a good instrument to play on) has played the Great G minor Fugue, or the Great D Major (sometimes called The Rolling Fugue), you must realize what it means to be overwhelmed by either.

Bach had to go without much we have in these days. The stringed instruments were more or less as they are now, but the wind instruments were not so advanced. The piano was unknown: the clavichord was all Bach ever saw. As for the organ, it is a wonder he could play some of his own fugues on instruments whose touch was so heavy; most of us find it hard enough to render them on our splendid modern organs whose touch is so light and responsive.

Bach’s sense of melody was superb. To hear so popular a work as the so-called Air on the G-string, played by a great violinist, is an unforgettable experience. To hear his most delicate orchestral suites is to believe you could fit some kind of dance to every movement they contain, while to listen to the Matthew Passion is to picture the whole scene before Pontius Pilate; in the crash of the chord where the chorus roars Crucify! you are positively