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James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics, 2nd edn (London: Kegan Paul, 1880) ‘On the Nature and Limits of Musical Expression’, pp. 220-46 [228] The links of association now considered appear to invest music with three kinds of representative character. First of all, by the simplest process of association, musical tones seem to typify vocal action itself, viewed as a conscious play of muscular energy. Secondly, by a further process, they revive and render more or less distinctly recognizable to consciousness, varieties of emotional agitation, such as usually vent themselves in like vocal sounds. Finally, by a still longer operation of thought, these re-awakened feelings [229] are projected in fancy behind the musical tones, so that these seem to be the utterances of another soul stirred to emotional movement. Each of these orders of character deserves special description and illustration. The first class of expressive characters may be called the Dynamic attributes of music. This term is sometimes applied to accent, or the emphatic strength of tones, but it seems better fitted to denote all suggestions of force or energy. As Mr. Spencer has shown, the equivalents of vocal energy in music are emphasis, rapidity, distance of pitch from a certain average level, and width of interval. Strong tones, and rapid sequences of tones clearly imply, by suggestion, large amounts of vocal energy. With respect to pitch, it seems probable not only that very high and very deep notes, as remote from the plane of easiest vocal execution, represent large amounts of force, but that height has an additional dynamic value. It is observable that rising intervals in melody usually increase in emphasis, while falling intervals decrease. A descent to the key-note is more restful than an ascent to the same note, and accordingly, the former is commonly written diminuendo while the latter is written crescendo. It seems possible that as the human voice produces its loudest and most distinct sounds at a high pitch, whereas its very low notes are comparatively feeble and unpenetrating as well as indistinct in pitch, the habit of throwing all loud cries, intended for a distant hearer, into a high pitch, may have given rise to special associations between height and intensity of tone. By means, then, of these links of resemblance, music calls up nascent feelings of muscular energy, and so assumes a dynamic aspect. The composer may skilfully combine these musical symbols of vocal energy so as to give to a particular composition a special dynamic character. […] […] [231] In more complex musical structures the suggestions of conscious energy and of grateful movement, fail, in a yet higher degree, to attain the rank of distinct feelings. Yet even here one may observe their subtle influence on our musical perceptions and judgments. For what is the well-known interpretation of music as the play of Nature's forces but the projection of ideas of vocal and other conscious actions behind the tones, which are thus transformed into displays of an objective might? Musical tones are able, no doubt, in dim outline to imitate some few of nature's sounds, such as the voices of wind and water, crash and roar, and other aspects of volume or quantity in sound. Far more powerfully, however, they awaken memories of our own conscious energies. Hence a grand orchestral volume of tone, by stirring myriads of such vague feelings, and at the same time supplying dim ideal shapes for these impulses, readily seems transmuted into the splendid simultaneous rush of nature's energies, whether in chaotic separation or in harmonious order. And thus it 1 becomes possible at times to speak imaginatively of a more definite dynamic character in a piece of music. […] Yet music, while transmitting to the hearer's mind these vague ideas of motor energy, conveys still more copiously ideal shadows of the emotional life which is more or less associated with all muscular activities, when not voluntarily put forth, and which holds such an intimate relation to vocal action as the great instrument of expression. How finely music expounds the emotional experiences of life, appears to be a familiar truth. Yet it is not quite so easy to perceive what are the precise shades of feeling it expresses; and, as we have seen, there is still much discussion as to [232] the limits of this expression. A more adequate understanding of this point may, perhaps, be reached by carefully examining the mental process by means of which music is able to awaken faint pulsations of a past emotion. When a plaintive melody, as, for example, that of Mendelssohn's Suleika in E Minor, or of Schumann's Ich grolle nicht, moves the listener's mind to an exquisite sadness, it effects this, according to the theory of vocal association, by its numerous resemblances — in softness and slowness of tone, in gradual transition, and in strange, half-painful intervals of melody — to those vocal sounds into which a feeling of pensive sadness has, through long experiences, spontaneously uttered itself. Hence, the emotional forms which the several styles of music are fitted to awaken must be those which have a distinctive and characteristic expression. […] [235] It is said that music represents not only feelings but Ideas. No doubt the transition in vocal sound from pure emotional expression to articulate declaration is a very gradual one, and in our ordinary life-intercourse feeling vents itself by affecting intelligible speech. Hence it seems natural that musical composition, built up as it is out of large numbers of distinct tones, rapidly succeeding one another and accompanying one another in simultaneous combinations, should, in vaguely depicting emotion, seem also to describe the many trains of image and thought which accompany, sustain, and determine our emotional states. It is obvious that there is nothing in musical elements beyond the mere aspects of number and rapidity which directly imitates thought. Further, even the thread of resemblance which binds together musical tones and articulate speech is a very slender one; for the distinguishing properties of articulate sounds are strongly opposed to the musical qualities of tone. Yet though in itself feeble, this link of analogy, when united to the powerful influences of emotional suggestion, may be sufficient to generate distinct ideas of language in the hearer's mind. That is to say, a series of tones becomes transformed by the reacting influence of the feeling which it awakens, into a clear, articulate language, which seeks to define, to explain, and to justify the emotion. […] Once more, music seems to take from our inner subjective life, and to body forth in outer symbols, not only feelings and ideas, but also impulses of Will. Whereas the art is primarily lyric, uttering a pure, unconstrained impulse of feeling, it becomes later on dramatic, or rhetorical, declaring earnest resolution, firm purpose, eager questioning, and so on. […] It remains to be seen how these subjective effects of music become transformed by intellectual processes into apparently objective realities. […] 2 [237] Co-ordinations of different rhythmic movements, again, become interpreted either as distinct processes of thought and feeling in one and the same mind, or as passages from the inner lives of different minds. How analogous is the play of two currents of thought and sentiment in one mind to the interchanges of thought between two minds, may be seen in Mr. Tennyson's subtle poem, The Two Voices. Yet it may perhaps be said that when one series of tones is rendered very prominent as the dominant melody, while the others are of the nature of harmonic accompaniments, the hearer is apt to interpret the composition as the outflow of a single emotional nature. Vocal solos, and the simpler melodic passages of instrumental music appear to have this significance, since the slight and subordinate accompaniment naturally suggests the side currents of a dominant feeling. On the other hand, if two or more parts are equally prominent, and the whole movement is more strictly polyphonic in character, the common interpretation is that of different natures in emotional intercourse. Thus, for example, in listening to Mendelssohn's duetto, in the Lieder ohne Worte, one is inclined to think of the two shades of sentiment depicted — half dissonant, but finally blending in perfect unison, and passing into the most delicious repose — as the reciprocal appeal and response of two distinct personalities converging towards complete sympathy. At the same time, this distinction is not a very rigid one, since even a polyphonic [238] plexus of tones, such as one finds in the music of Bach, for example, may be conceived as simultaneous revelations of one emotional mind, while the harmonic surroundings of a dominant melodic movement shape themselves as the responsive and sympathetic voices of a group of minds, acting as a Greek chorus to the dominant mind. […] [238] As a final stage of this mental disposition to refer musical tones to an objective source, I may allude to the recognized habit of regarding music as the audible form of visible movement, and as the ear's symbols for reading the great processes of Material Nature. Musical tones, as we have seen, distantly imitate nature's sounds. Moreover, through the suggestions of our own active energies and their resulting movements, and the well-established parallelism between rhythmic sound and rhythmic motion, sequences of tone may indirectly call up faint images of nature's visible activities, as the [239] blithe flow of brook or the angry rush of cataract. But this is not the whole of the process. Music exerts its deepest and most enduring influence on the emotional regions of our nature, stirring vague impulses of oft-experienced sorrow and joy, terror and relief. And under the sway of these emotional states, ideas tend to transform themselves into appropriate images. Now the most constant intellectual accompaniment of a deep emotion is the thought of its exciting cause, or objective source. Hence, under the influence of an impressive piece of music, the mind is strongly predisposed to look for recognizable causes of its strange agitations; and by this means suggestions of external events, which otherwise would scarcely rise into consciousness as distinct ideas, become intense and luminous images. And thus a composer may to some extent conjoin with the easier task of stirring a certain variety of emotional mood the more difficult task of bodying forth to the consciousness of the listener those great and impressive events of nature — dire storm and hurricane, smiling calm, attack from furious beast or human foe, or deliverance from peril — which through long ages have been the causes of some of the deepest emotional experiences of human nature. And it is this truth which justifies what is good in such attempts as that of Beethoven in his grand, deeply-moving Sinfonie Pstorale to sweep out in vague tonic outline imposing phases of nature. 3 Our examination of the sources of musical expression seems to bring us to the conclusion, that though there are vast numbers of analogies entwining about music and human life and nature, and binding them in mental union, no one order of these is of sufficient distinctness and strength to render music clearly imitative. The emotional suggestions of music, dependent on links of vocal association, are by far the most conspicuous, and yet these, as we have seen, are never sharply defined. […] [240] Yet this very limitation of musical expression, when looked at from another side, may be seen to have been an addition to its power. What is lost in definite transmission of individual emotion is more than made up in vague transmission of vast groups and strata of feeling. A delicate and subtle melody taken from some musical classic does not, it is true, profess to be a very exact paraphrase of one distinct flow of feeling; yet, by its numerous half-hidden affinities with vast series of vocal expressions, it is able to stir deep and complex fountains of emotion, slowly distilled out of wide tracts of experience. […] And if we add to this the plausible hypothesis, that mingling with this residuum of individual experience are countless currents of emotion transmitted by long series of ancestors, the explanation of the effect appears to be complete. Music, it is obvious, though owing much of its power to emotional suggestion, has not been influenced by the needs of expression alone. Like all other arts, it owes its development in a large measure to a desire for pure sensuous pleasure, as well as for the more intellectual delight which is supplied by beauty of form. The attainment of a deep and true expression of human passion has always been a farther aim of music; and the actual progress of the art is the resultant of these different forces. 4