"Harmonical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... produced. A pupil of Sterndale Bennett and Sir George A. Macfarren, she devoted herself wholly to composition, and made it her life-work. Her music is clear and well balanced in form, excellent in thematic material, and endowed with an expressive charm of melodic and harmonic beauty. Among her orchestral works are two symphonies, one in C minor and the other in G; four overtures, "Endymion," "Lalla Rookh," "The Masque of Pandora," and "Jason, or the Argonauts and Sirens;" a concerto for clarinet and orchestra, and an "Introduction and Allegro" for piano and orchestra. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... made a queerer or a better combination. For it was in the Barnard laboratory that I met Prof. Darmstetter; and it was my bearing, my unending practice of the West Point setting-up drill, my Delsarte, my "harmonic poise" and evident health that drew ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... of movements. The dynamic is melodic, harmonic and rhythmic. Gesture is melodic by its forms or its inflections. To understand gesture one must study melody. There is great affinity between the inflections of the voice and gesture. All the inflections of the voice are common to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... even Handel did not hear it all clear and plain at first, but had to build his orchestra into a mental organ for his mind to let itself out by, through the many music holes, lest it should burst with its repressed harmonic delights. He must have felt an agonized need to set the haunting angels of sound in obedient order and range, responsive to the soul of the thing, its one ruling idea! I saw him with his white rapt face, looking like a prophet of the living God sent to speak out ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... should do so, and he had recently caused notices to be issued and posted in all the steamers and hotels, so that there might be no misunderstanding in the matter. After the concert and the conclusion of a most agreeable evening X. was introduced to the Harmonic Club, where he ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... passionate duet between Tell and Walter, which leads to the magnificent trio of the oath ("La gloria inflammi"), and this in turn is followed by the splendid scene of the gathering of the cantons. For melodic and harmonic beauty combined, the spirited treatment of masses, and charm and variety of color, this great scene ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... frequency approaching that of light, and when the light impinges upon it, it can pass through readily. You know that metals transmit light for short distances, but in order that the light pass, the molecules of metal must be set in harmonic vibration at a rate approaching the frequency of light. If we can impress such a vibration on a piece of matter, it will then transmit light very freely. If we impress this vibration on the matter, say the body, electrically, we get the same effect and the body becomes perfectly ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... own sex. The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is to be dreaded. But take a real woman at her best moment,—well dressed enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a show and a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set vibrating the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour memorable? What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... which would lie outside the scope of this narrative. But the principle of the thing was simple enough. It was upon the great scientific doctrine, which we have since seen so completely and brilliantly developed, of the law of harmonic vibrations, extending from atoms and molecules at one end of the series up to the worlds and suns at the other end, that Mr. Edison ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... change all this and open up new fields of usefulness for the organ. He introduced in France keyboards worthy of the name, and he gave to the higher notes, through his invention of harmonic stops, a brilliancy they had lacked. He invented wonderful combinations which allow the organist to change his combinations and to vary the tone, without the aid of an assistant and without leaving the keyboard. Even before his day a scheme had been ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... "Corinthians," and the results are shown in his designs. He might often be seen at the "Craven's Head," in Drury Lane, kept by a host known to his patrons by the familiar title of "Billy Oxberry"; at the Saturday night harmonic meetings held at the "Kean's Head," in Russell Court, Drury Lane; at "The Wrekin," in Broad Court, Long Acre, at that time frequented by gentlemen of the Press; at "The Harp," in Russell Street, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when, in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it turned out otherwise, and we ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... present arrangements of society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled, and adapted to the great wants of all humanity. Our race is one, the interests of all are inseparably united, and harmonic freedom for the perfect growth of every human soul is the great want of our time. It has given me heartfelt satisfaction, dear madam, that you sympathize in my effort to advance the great interests of humanity. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... learning to appreciate music, as music. In instrumental music the development of a musical idea, the creation of musical symmetries, figures, and arabesques, and the legitimate building up of musical climaxes upon purely harmonic and rhythmic grounds are the phases of thought which interested the composer and gave rise to the composition. And while we may not attempt to assign limits to the inspiration and uplifting effects ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... method was the rate at which the disc revolved. The disc turned so slowly that the vibrations, instead of being spread out as a harmonic curve, were closely crowded together. This had two great advantages; the measurements were not so laborious, and the intensity changes were much more definitely seen than in the elongated form of record. Each syllable had an ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... music this four-part song is interesting as giving evidence of the general cultivation in music that must have prevailed among the French people at the time. In the present day we are apt to think of the madrigal or motet writers as a class of specialists working at elaborate harmonic and contrapuntal problems for their own delight, but as having little influence on the national acceptance of music. Nothing could be further from the truth, as far as England, the Netherlands and Italy were concerned; and in France, where the art of the simple tunes of the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... emotions have come back to him; his childhood and its memories have blossomed anew in Robert's heart. And now his mother's shade rises up, bringing with it soothing religious thoughts. It is religion that lives in that beautiful song in E major, with its wonderful harmonic and melodic progression in ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of students. Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the quick. In the matter of writing for more voices than one we have retrograded considerably since the days of Bach. We have, to be sure, built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been invented, or rather re-discovered—for in Bach all were latent—but, confound it, children! these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait for me. Music is, first of all, motion, after that emotion. I like movement, rhythmical ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... dreamed of. Even the German critics of to-day seem dense in their unwillingness to credit Mozart with a purely amiable purpose in quoting the operas of his rivals, Martin and Sarti. The latter showed himself ungrateful for kindnesses received at Mozart's hands by publicly denouncing an harmonic progression in one of the famous six quartets dedicated to Haydn as a barbarism, but there was no ill-will in the use of the air from "I due Litiganti" as supper music for the delectation of the Don. ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... clung to the pines, muting their needles and stilling their branches, had dropped on during the day. Now the night wind which drove the clouds lingered through the pine tops and set them swaying gently in the vast, harmonic rhythm which is like the surging of a distant ocean. The everlasting whisper of the pines, that ancient hushed voice which through the countless centuries has never been still save when briefly silenced by the snow; which had borne its message to Gloria when on that first day she went with Mark King ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... performance, when I tell you that all the persons who sing at the Queen's Chapel, at St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, were all singing together, besides part of the band of the Sacred Harmonic Society, pupils of the Royal Academy of Music, and many other songsters, both ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... symbols. My present purpose is to insist that there is nothing in the play which has no meaning on the natural-psychological plane, and absolutely requires a symbolic interpretation to make it comprehensible. The symbols are harmonic undertones; the psychological melody is clear and consistent without any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to exercise, sometimes ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... judged. We have no more right to weigh these compositions in the scales of our art motifs than we have to weigh Greek rhythm of quantity or Saxon of alliteration against our weights by which we measure rhythm of rhyme and stress. In fact it is impossible for us even to judge concerning the true harmonic effect of these other measures, and it may well be doubted whether the very soul itself of our meter is not empty and tinny as compared with these others—quality ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... portions of what were clearly two independent versions have been found among the remains of Babylonian literature. But whereas in the Old Testament the two versions are presented in combination so as to form a harmonic whole, the two Babylonian versions continued to exist side by side. There is no reason to suppose that the versions were limited to two. In fact, a variant to an important episode in the creation story has been discovered which ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... with the grain of air-bubbles tending outward therefrom—showing, no doubt, if one knew the mechanics of refrigeration, just how the freezing proceeded. Even in so humble a thing as a block of ice are these harmonic and lovely patterns, the seal of Nature's craft, inscrutable, inimitable. I might have made a point of this in talking to that free verse poet. I'm glad I didn't, however: he would have had some ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... knowledge of anatomy is essential. In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat, from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... love-perplexed heart? The more it sounds, the more it refresheth. I see no instruments, nor hands that play; And my deare brothers, durst not be so bold. 'Tis some celestiall rapture of the minde, No earthlie harmonic is of this kinde. Now it doth ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... nature, than has hitherto been awarded them. A high rank must be assigned by the future historians of music to one who distinguished himself in art by a genius for melody so rare, by such graceful and remarkable enlargements of the harmonic tissue; and his triumph will be justly preferred to many of far more extended surface, though the works of such victors may be played and replayed by the greatest number of instruments, and be sung and resung by ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... attained under capitalism. Not till the Socialist state is reached will the Golden Rule, common to all the great religions, be possible as a rule of life. No ethical life is possible except as the outgrowing of just and harmonic economic relations; until it is rooted ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... importance of Chopin's works," writes Mr. W.J. Henderson, "is not too large. It was Chopin who systematized the art of pedalling and showed us how to use both pedals in combination to produce those wonderful effects of color which are so necessary in the performance of his music. ... The harmonic schemes of the simplest of Chopin's works are marvels of originality and musical loveliness, and I make bold to say that his treatment of the passing note did much toward showing later writers how to produce the restless and ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... enjoyed it to such an extent that one day, just after the machine had been wound up ready for action he got to sucking the end of it, and in a moment of inadvertence it slipped, and he swallowed it. The only immediate consequence of the accident was that a harmonic stomach-ache was organized upon the interior of Henry Chubb and he experienced a restlessness which he well knew would defy the soothing tendencies of peppermint and make ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... (without much effort of the imagination we might say that they are the qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality).... Her impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes." Before he became acquainted with the later French idiom Harvey W. Loomis "spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... so difficult for the best of them to conceive music as a natural language of the soul that, when they did not make it an adjunct to painting, they dragged it into the outskirts of science, and reduced it to the level of a problem in harmonic construction. Some who were learned enough took upon themselves to show a thing or two to past musicians. They found fault with Beethoven, and rapped Wagner over the knuckles. They laughed openly at Berlioz and Gluck. Nothing existed for them just then but Johann Sebastian Bach, and Claude Debussy. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass gradually along some great succession of alien chords—common contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to both—on towards the peace, the consummation, of a great major close. Once we have sufficient ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is done purposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirely beyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. There is no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating life, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, that the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... of the play-going community betake themselves to some harmonic meeting. As a matter of curiosity let us follow them ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... The harmonic arrangement is also purposely simple in consideration of the many mothers and kindergartners who cannot ...
— Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten • Emilie Poulsson
... Modern, but similar to the Elizabethan instrument. French name, 'galoubet.' Merely a whistle, cylindrical bore, and 3 holes, two in front, one (for thumb) behind. The scale is produced on the basis of the 1st harmonic—thus 3 holes are sufficient. It was played with left hand only, the tabor being hung to the left wrist, and beaten with a stick in the right hand. Length over all of pipe in picture, 1 ft. 2-1/2 in.; speaking length, 1 ft. 1-1/8 in.; lowest ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... is dead nearly a hundred years, yet remains curiously modern. The Unfinished symphony is full of exquisite color effects—consider, for example, the rustling figure for the strings in the first movement—and as for the C major, it is so stupendous a debauch of melodic and harmonic beauty that one scarcely notices the colors at all. In its slow movement mere loveliness in music probably says all that will ever be said.... But what of old Ludwig? Har, har; here we begin pulling the ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... they should be conceived in a way that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled with far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving contrivance. The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in thought, is the philosophic passion par ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... below, the night air was suddenly full of voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their voices carrying ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse |
