Part-Writing: When, and How, to Study It (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Henry Hiles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1330339835 ISBN 13: 9781330339831

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

Synopsis

Excerpt from Part-Writing: When, and How, to Study It

But the most obstinate of the prejudices whereby advance is retarded is that which, while forced to acknowledge the great progress made in the later years in that science which embraces everything belonging tothe analysis and to any kind of association of sounds, would subject that progress to the rule not of the makers of, but the mere theorisers about, music at a time when its construction was a matter of calculation rather than of inspiration, and bore far more resemblance to the working-out of an arithmetical. Sum. Than to any attempt at poetic expression.

And the funniest point of it is that this persistent looking back shows, after all, only a half-hearted, sceptical kind of antiquarianism. No one (however con servative his temperament). Has any hope of bringing back the delight in Greek scales; or of being able to revive Diaphony and the chaste Descant of pastoral simplicity or of renewing the fascination of the Organ/um, of which the only even faintly plausible idea yet propounded is that, at a time when musical knowledge was in the vaguest rudimentary state, people were so enchanted by a discovery of the consonance and reinforcing power of perfect fifths that, like excited children, they literally rolled and revelled and rollicked in long consecutions of them. The timid. Theorist of to-day sighs only for a kind of mediaeval obscurity; longs to return, to a betwixt-and-between sort of age, neither one thing nor another; yearn ing after the worn-out skeleton of an exhausted system. He might, just as well, contend that our choristers ought to be attired in the scarecrow habiliments of the choir-boys of the fifteenth century as that the strains they sing should perpetuate the school of passionless, harmonic angularity which, in days long gone by.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1330339835
• ISBN 13: 9781330339831
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 52