"Harmonic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... different thing from that profound indebtedness which makes a great man attain his truest originality; and Gluck's training practically deprived him of Bach's direct influence, useful as that would have been to the attainment of his aims in harmonic and choral expression. The indirect influence no one could escape, for whatever in modern music is not traceable to Sebastian Bach is traceable to his sons, who were encouraged by their father in the cultivation of those infant art-forms which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... 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 a ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... hospitality is that which welcomes you to the fireside and permits you to look upon the picture of a home-life so little disturbed by your coming that you are at once made to feel yourself a part of the little symphony—the rare bit of color just needed to complete the harmonic combination. With this flattering fact impressed upon your glowing memory you will hardly be able to recall the material adjuncts of the occasion. It is a sign of a gross nature to measure hospitality by the loaves and fishes, forgetting the miracle that goes with them. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... which is, not dual, but indissolubly single. And an utterance is devoid of the quality of style when, although it conveys a meaning to the intellect through the content of the words, it does not reinforce that conveyance of meaning by a cognate and harmonic appeal to the senses through their sound. In the latter case the language produces upon the recipient an effect which is, not ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... 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. Mozart liked the melody, and had written variations ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... her heart. The snow that had, 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 ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... in his hunting story-books, or spending the evening at the club, to making a personal exhibition before a Nimes piano between a pair of home-made candles. These musical parades seemed beneath him. Nevertheless, at whiles, when there was a harmonic party at Bezuquet's, he would drop into the chemist's shop, as if by chance, and, after a deal of pressure, consent to do the grand duo in Robert le Diable with old Madame Bezuquet. Whoso never heard that never heard anything! For my part, even if I lived a hundred years, I should always see ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... musical forms, she has been an industrious student of the best music, so that all her compositions are what is called "well made," correct according to the rules of musical science, yet in melodic and harmonic inspiration characterized by originality and musical inventiveness. She writes with judgment, refinement and taste, avoiding on the one hand the pitfall of pretentiousness, and, on the other, the monotony of platitude found in the works of those who compose in the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... which we shall watch unfolding and increasing, but to which the future was in reality to add nothing essential. The cardinal ideas as to instinct and evolution, the necessity of experimenting in the psychology of animals, and the harmonic laws of the conservation of the individual, are here already expounded in their final and definite form. This fruitful and decisive year brought Fabre a great grief. He lost his son Jules, that one of all his children whom he seems most ardently to ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... 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 foreign ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... instrument upon which a string is stretched with a peg to adjust its tension, is probably that described by Dr. Burney as having been seen by him at Rome on an Egyptian obelisk. In a notice of Claudius Ptolemeus, an Egyptian, who wrote upon harmonic sounds about the middle of the second century, we have an illustration of an instrument of a similar character to that found on the obelisk above noticed.[5] In all probability neither of these contrivances was intended to be used as a musical instrument further than for ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the best known of our American poets. The great poet, whoever he may be, is always reverential. His stanzas are crowned with a sacred seriousness. He gives to life a "grand, true, harmonic interpretation." Longfellow was born on the 27th of February, 1807, at Portland, Maine. In his earlier years he displayed the same gentle, amiable spirit which filled his after-life with ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... as one of the most valuable by-products of The Times article, the announcement that an international Balneo-Musical Congress will be shortly held in the Albert Hall, with a view to discussing the best methods of promoting harmonic hygiene. The arena, we understand, is to be converted into a vast demonstration-tank, in which prominent composers, conductors and singers will appear. Miss CARRIE TUBB has kindly promised to preside. Amongst other ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... Harmonic Meetings at the 'Sol' (B.H.) was the performance of Little Swills, who, after entertaining the company with comic songs, took the 'gruff line' in a concerted piece, and adjured 'his friends to listen, listen, listen to the wa-ter-fall!' Little Swills was also an adept at 'patter and gags.' ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... each. The chemical composition of a body might be noted by its electric resistance and the latter verified by the telephone; that is to say, by the ear. Or, to take a more subtle example. We might make calculations with sounds of which we have studied the harmonic relations as we do nowadays with figures. A sum in rule of three might even be solved sonorously; for, given three sounds, the ear can find a fourth which should have the same relation to the third as the second to the first. Every musical ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... quickly as lightning passes through the foliage of the tree it strikes. Only the lightning stayed. The figure remained caught. The entire Pattern shivered to its outer fringes, then began to glow and shine all over. As the high harmonic crowns the end of a long cadenza on a violin, fulfilling bars of difficult effort, this point of exquisite beauty flashed life into the Pattern of the story, consummating the labour of construction with ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... end of Cheapside, she was hailed out of the glimmering illumination and foggy lamplight by "God Save the Queen," again sung by many hundred voices, accompanied by a band of wind instruments, the performance of the Harmonic Society, and the music was followed all the way by enthusiastic cheering. The Baroness Bunsen remarked of such a scene long afterwards, "I was at a loss to conceive how any woman's sides can 'bear the beating of so strong a throb' as must attend the consciousness ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... of translucent colours in windows cannot be modified by the artist; all his talent consists in profiting by it, according to a given harmonic scheme on a single plane, like a rug, but not according to an effect of aerial perspective. Do what you like, a glass window never does and never can represent anything but a plane surface; its real virtues even exist only on that ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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 ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... time, motion, and inertia. How can one who is ignorant of the existence and characteristics of rotational inertia understand a galvanometer? How can waves be discussed unless in terms of period, amplitude, frequency, and the like, that find definition in simple harmonic motion? How does one visualize the mechanism of a gas, unless by means of such ideas as momentum interchange, energy conservation, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... a new symphony composed by a daring young Frenchman, who had striven to reproduce vices in notes and to summon up visions of things damnable by harmonic progressions which frequently defied the laws of harmony. Levillier gently condemned him for putting a great art to a small ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... analysis. In a musical note the lowest in pitch of these is generally predominant, and the others which are less marked are the octave, the twelfth, the second octave, etc., all harmonies of the fundamental predominant note; any two notes of our scale have many of these harmonic over-tones in common. It seems pretty clear then, that if an animal always wished to sing precisely the same song, he would guide himself by sounding those notes in succession, which possess many over- tones in common—that is, he would choose ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... presiding place of honour. From that conspicuous position one leads the whole table's activities: conversing to the right, laughing to the left, sharply on the lookout for any conversational gap, now and then drawing muted tete-a-tetes into a harmonic unison. She is, as it were, the leader of an orchestra of which the individual diners are the subsidiary instruments. Upon her watchful resourcefulness hangs the success of a dinner-party. But Missy, though a trifle fluttered, had felt no anxiety; she knew so ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... materials. All of the arts, and particularly music and architecture, portray in different manners and degrees the truths of number. Architecture does this in two ways: esoterically as it were in the form of harmonic proportions; and exoterically in the form of symbols which represent numbers and groups of numbers. The fact that a series of threes and a series of fours mutually conjoin in 12, finds an architectural expression in the Tuscan, ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... The harmonic pauses, or those which are peculiar to poetry, are of three kinds: the final pause, which marks the end of each line; the caesural or divisional pause, which commonly divides the line near the middle; ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... founded on a relation to rest—on relative rest. Take a metallic plate, and strew sand on it; sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... idea. Of course, in the evening, when nothing better can be done, there will be harmonic meetings round the camp-fires. But while light lasts, the crack of the rifle and the ping of the bullet will be heard in all directions, vice the pop of champagne corks superseded. And if you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... sound of a voice, we should see stamped on it the conditions of motion upon which its characteristic qualities depended; which is due to the fact that every vocal sound whose vibrations have a complex form can be decomposed into a series of simple notes all belonging to the harmonic series. These harmonics or overtones will be considered later when dealing with the timbre or quality of the ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... 117). These observational curves so obtained have next to be fed into a fearfully complex machine, which it would take a whole lecture to make even partially intelligible, but Fig. 118 shows its aspect. It consists of ten integrating machines in a row, coupled up and working together. This is the "harmonic analyzer," and the result of passing the curve through this machine is to give you all the constituents of which it is built up, viz. the lunar tide, the solar tide, and eight of the sub-tides or disturbances. These ten ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... 680 Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to others note Singing thir great Creator: oft in bands While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk With Heav'nly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joind, thir songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven. Thus talking hand in hand alone they pass'd On to thir blissful Bower; it was a place 690 Chos'n by the sovran Planter, when he fram'd All things to mans delightful use; the roofe Of thickest covert was ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... state of the cause: socialism incessantly denounces the crimes of civilization, verifies daily the powerlessness of political economy to satisfy the harmonic attractions of man, and presents petition after petition; political economy fills its brief with socialistic systems, all of which, one after another, pass away and die, despised by common sense. The persistence of evil nourishes the complaint of the one, while the constant succession ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... minor key by those who wish to uphold the fundamental principle of the key-note being the pivot of reference for all keys, major and minor, is a very simple one. It consists in giving to the third and sixth of the harmonic form of the scale their logical names of maw and taw. The sixth of the ascending scale in the melodic form will of course be the same in the minor as in ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... published any time between April and August, and range your eye down the third or fourth column of the first page—what an endless array of announcements of music, vocal and instrumental! Music for the classicists; music for the crowd; symphonies and sonatas; ballads and polkas; harmonic societies; choral societies; melodists' clubs; glee clubs; madrigal clubs. Here you have the quiet announcement of a quartett-party; next to it, the advertisement of one of the Philharmonic Societies—the giants of the musical world; pianoforte teachers announce one of their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... enjoy it. That little trick was first conceived by the great Tesla during his last fruity years. Research discovered it in his biog—we just made the dream come true. A tiny resonance device you could carry in your belt-bag attunes itself to the natural harmonic of a structure and then increases amplitude by tiny pushes exactly in time. Just like soldiers marching in step can break down a bridge, only this is as if it were being done by one marching ant." He pointed at the naked framework ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... a universal breeze. Therefore you feel no inconvenience. Get up, my child, and waltz an Oriental hesitation down the hall and convince yourself everlastingly that you are in truth only a mysterious unit in a universe of harmonic chords.' ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... Rienzi, in noisy orchestration, big ensembles and thumping rhythms, but, in a far greater degree than in the Dutchman, in the stuff of the music itself. We find no more lumpish harmonies and basses of leaden immovability: the basses stalk about with arrogant independence, and the harmonic progressions, even when most daring and perilous, are superbly poised. The old awkwardnesses, due to the endeavour to copy and to be original at the same time, have disappeared. Wagner wrote Tannhaeuser entirely to express and to please himself: he had given up ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... music is generally Italian in form, especially in the flowing grace of the cantabile passages, and in the working up of the climaxes. But we did not hear one of the stereotyped Italian cadenzas, nor did we fall into old ruts in following the harmonic progressions. The orchestral figures—the framework on which the melodies are supported—are new, ingenious, and beautiful. The duets, quartette, and quintette show great command of resources and the utmost skill in construction; we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... higher character, of a much more earnest 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 passing crowds ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... double panegyric of Justinian and the life of the philosopher Theodotus; the nature of happiness and the duties of government; Homer's catalogue and the four-and-twenty sorts of metre; the astronomical canon of Ptolemy; the changes of the months; the houses of the planets; and the harmonic system of the world. To the literature of Greece he added the use of the Latin tongue; the Roman civilians were deposited in his library and in his mind; and he most assiduously cultivated those arts which opened the road of wealth and preferment. From ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... for a wire a stout bar of metal fixed at one end only. The longitudinal vibrations of this rod contain overtones of a different ratio. The first harmonic is not an octave, but a twelfth. While a tensioned string is divided by nodes into two, three, four, five, six, etc., parts, a rod fixed at one end only is capable of producing only those harmonics which correspond to division into three, five, ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... They never seemed to weary of singing, and we certainly did not of listening to them. The absolute independence of the conventionalities of tune and sentiment, gave them freedom to wander through a kaleideoscopic variety of harmonic effects, as spontaneous and changeful as the song ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military booty, solely among themselves. This ascendancy, by being a Protestant ascendancy, does not better it, from a combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale. By the use that is frequently made of the term, and the policy that is grafted on it, the name Protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... of naked children playing or sleeping. It did me good even to watch the violinists drawing their bows so masterly—every motion a study. I allow'd myself, as I sometimes do, to wander out of myself. The conceit came to me of a copious grove of singing birds, and in their midst a simple harmonic duo, two human souls, steadily ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... seen how important it is that the pressure of the wind in an organ should be steady and uniform. Otherwise the pipes will speak a harmonic instead of the sound intended—as, indeed, ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... that our enthusiasm has got the better of our sober judgment. The second theme, "He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, yet he opened not his mouth," is quite Handel-like in the simplicity and massiveness of its magnificent harmonic progressions. With the scene of the denial, for which we are thus prepared, the dramatic movement becomes exceedingly rapid, and the rendering of the events in the high-priest's hall—Peter's bass recitative ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Schubert, though he 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 whiskers ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... fracture or membrane, 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 tedious reply, convincing ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... with the best of these songs would have a good effect in refining the popular sense of melody, the appreciation of what came last and is highest in music—of harmonic progressions—could best be taught by a similar familiarity with the German four-part chorals. They are the very embodiment of vigorous, soul-stirring harmony, the basis of sacred, as the Volkslied is of secular, music. "Each of our churches," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... to penetrating shrillness. It was always the same tone repeated as if the player dwelt upon it with pleasure. At last an interval followed; it was the chord of the fourth. While the player had before reveled in the sound of the single note, now his voluptuous enjoyment of this harmonic relation was very much more susceptible. His fingers moved by fits and starts, as did his bow. Through the intervening intervals he passed most unevenly, emphasizing and repeating the third. Then ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in terris, nigrisque similimi cygnis, Rare birds upon the earth, and as geason as blacke swans. You shall have also your orient perfumes for your nose, your fragrant waters for your face, wherewith you shall bee all to besprinkled, your musicke againe, and pleasant harmonic, shall sound in your eares, and all to tickle the same with vaine delight. And in the end your cloke shall be brushed, and 'God be ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... the ominous melody the maestro has engrafted on to this profound harmonic composition, worthy to compare with the most elaborate structures of the Germans, but never ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... 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 of great tone-poetry, it is quite ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... in this item, of which she manages to drink a quantity during her song; and, by way of a change at these times, she enters into a monologue or a recitation. Taken and viewed in an artistic light, the audience in their rich gala dresses is a pleasing piece of color and of harmonic contrasts. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... numbers dwells harmony, and therefore it behoves us to identify ourselves with this harmony, because from it is derived the harmonic law which draws men together into companies. Through the revolution of the worlds through space around their suns, from their order, their constancy and their measure, the mind comprehends the progress ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... instruments; the other, one sung by voices. The form of these early sonatas (as they appear in Giovanni Gabrieli's works towards the close of the sixteenth century) was vague; yet, in spite of light imitations, the basis was harmonic, rather than contrapuntal. They were among the first fruits of the Renaissance in Italy. But soon there came about a process of differentiation. Praetorius, in his Syntagma musicum, published at Wolfenbuettel ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... 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, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... resonance that lends interest where there might otherwise seem to be none. There is a certain kind of voice in woman that seems to vibrate in a way especially its own. Whether it be that under certain conditions of the vocal organs harmonic sounds are produced as they may be upon a stringed instrument or upon an organ pipe; or whether, again, the secret lies deeper, depending on the subtile folding and unfolding of new-shaped waves of sound ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... did not set out to make a telephone, Laurie," he answered. "What he was aiming to do was to perfect a harmonic telegraph, a scheme to which he had been devoting a good deal of his time. He and his father had studied carefully the miracle of speech—how the sounds of the human voice were produced and carried to others—and as ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... maintained, that, to an architect, a 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 light ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... advanced. We have extended the limits of musical style. We have adopted in sober earnest methods forecasted at rare intervals in the past by adventurous explorers, and employ musical notes not as elements in any harmonic scheme but purely as points of colour, exactly as if the definite notes were mere clangs of indefinite instruments like cymbals or triangles. Wordless vocal tone, moreover, of several different types, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the elder science, for music has been a science only since the harmonic combinations were discovered, possesses not a more inherent empire over the passions than music, of which Handel is the ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... another book to match yours—or, better still, resume our lessons of twenty years ago, when the master learned so much from the pupil,—discuss pieces in hand, the meaning, value, import, of a large number of ideas, phrases, episodes, rhythms, harmonic progressions, developments, artifices;—I should have to have a good long talk with you, in fact, about minims and crotchets, quavers and semi-quavers,—not forgetting the rests which, if you please, are by no means a trifling chapter ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... on as his fingers snatched at fugitive harmonic experimentings: "It's not all right up town. I wish that you would run up some night. You've not seen Ellenora for months, and perhaps you could induce her to put the brake on." I was puzzled. Putting the brake on a woman is always a risky ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... through dimmed streets humming with the harmonic echoes of the city's never-ending life, faint and delicate. He stopped at Sherry's, and at a small table in the side room sat down with a bottle of ale, a cigarette, and some stationery. When he rose, it was to mail a letter. That done, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... block to him through life. At times his drawing is possessed of a vigor and life which even Ingres never had; at others his work is almost lamentable in its lack of constructive form. In respect to color in its finest, most harmonic qualities, he is the greatest of French painters; and at all times he is master of an intense dramatic force. It was with a masterpiece—"Dante and Virgil"—that he made his first appearance at the Salon in 1822. At ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... person in a hundred who really knows what he sees and hears. Not that these people are not perfectly sincere; something they have undoubtedly taken in; the marvellous euphony and balance of Wagner's orchestra under the conductors we now have, the exquisite grace of the melodic and harmonic structure, and the lyric beauty of so many scenes are apparent to all, and will always awaken the boundless enthusiasm of those who go only to be diverted. But these are only the ornaments of the drama; to understand the drama itself requires a serious effort on the part of the ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... the harmonic material for much of what remains of the composition. At each repetition of the theme, the chord in the fourth measure is augmented by the addition of another interval, until in the end it includes every tone of the chromatic scale save C sharp. This omission is ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... essential nature of habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount of the outward cause is required. The sounds of a violin improve by use in the hands of an able artist, because the fibers of the wood at last contract habits of vibration conformed to harmonic relations. This is what gives such inestimable value to instruments that have belonged to great masters. Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... blue sky. Still, now it has come, you cannot deny that the spring is pretty, or that the fashionable colors which it has introduced are charming. It is said that these are so charming that a woman of the worst taste cannot choose amiss among them. In spite of her taste, her hat comes out a harmonic miracle; her gown, against all her endeavors, flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities of tint with which nature mixes her palette; little notes of chiffon, of tulle, of feather, blow all about her. This is rather ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Pucci had no ear for music, and was laughed at by his brother cardinals when chanting mass in the Sistine Chapel. He thereupon invoked the aid of St. Cecilia, who rewarded the donor of her picture by remedying his harmonic deficiency. ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... regarding Chopin is that his latest works are morbid and unintelligible. The same charge was brought by philistines against the best works of Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner. The fact is that these last works are of an almost matchless harmonic depth and originality, as superior to his earlier works as Wagner's last music dramas are to his first operas. I make this comparison with Wagner advisedly because, although I have the most exalted notions of Wagner's grandeur and importance, ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... 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 ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... 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 ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... Schiller's verses, which are entirely intended for reading. These verses must be treated musically in a certain arbitrary manner, and that arbitrary manner, as it does not bring about a real flow of melody, leads us to harmonic excesses and violent efforts to produce artificial wavelets in the unmelodic fountain. I have experienced all this myself, and in my present state of development have arrived at an entirely different form of treatment. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... with her. "Verdi's bric-a-brac is very banal. Perhaps you prefer Strauss. His dissonances are more harmonic than ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 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
... 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 a hint ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... have to deal with intervals, rather than harmonies, still the harmonic progressions represented by these intervals ...
— A Treatise on Simple Counterpoint in Forty Lessons • Friedrich J. Lehmann
... we produce simple or complex vibratory motions in the air in front of the diaphragm, like those that result from articulate speech, either the fundamental and harmonic sounds of the diaphragm are not produced, or else they play but a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... thicket have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to other's note, Singing their great Creator? Oft in bands, While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk, With heav'nly touch of instrumental sounds, In full harmonic number join'd, their songs Divide the night, and lift ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... should indicate the nature of the accompaniment. To take a simple sentiment and overload it with a modern complex harmonic accompaniment is like going after sparrows with a ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... molecular formative influence might be supposed involved in its frequent transference according to some such dynamic actions as occur in inanimate nature. Thus, ultimately, to the waste within the cell, to the presence of a force retardative of its perpetual harmonic motions, the death of the individual is to be ascribed. Perhaps in protoplasmic waste the existence of a universal death should be recognised. It is here we seem to touch inanimate nature; and we are led back to a former conclusion that the organism in its unconstrained state ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... ancient tunes, he has wisely preferred, in general, the arrangements of the older masters. The critical musician will see, and will not complain, that the original modal structure of the melodies is sometimes affected by the harmonic treatment. ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... lights (appropriately enough) when Beethoven is being murdered—by the most contemptible class of compositions that ever was put upon score-paper, and noised forth from an ill-disciplined band—if these be the means towards improving musical taste, Monsieur Jullien is undoubtedly the harmonic regenerator of this country. He is a great man—great in his own estimation—great to the ends of his moustachios and the tips of his gloves—a great composer, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... attended evensong at the cathedral. I shall not say what I felt when the white-surpliced boy choir entered, winding down those vaulted aisles, or when I heard for the first time that intoned service, with all its 'witchcraft of harmonic sound.' I sat quite by myself in a high carved oak seat, and the hour was passed in a trance of serene delight. I do not have many opinions, it is true, but papa says I am always strong on sentiments; nevertheless, I shall not attempt to tell even what ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to all the world's religions can never be 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 in proper ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... and Godhead, from the things that are seen, finding them all images of thought and vehicles of intelligence, so we have an argument for God more impressive, in one view, because the matter of it is so deep and mysterious, from the fact that a grand, harmonic, soul-interpreting law of music pervades all the objects of the material creation, and that things without life, all metals and woods and valleys and mountains and waters, are tempered with distinctions of sound, and toned to be a language to the feeling of the heart. It is ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... of the headlong clouds Caught up the splendour till the midnight vault Shone like the noon. The fisher knew, that hour, That with vast concourse of the Sons of God That church was thronged; for in it many a head Sun-bright, and hands lifted like hands in prayer, High up he saw: meantime harmonic strain, As though whatever moves in earth or skies, Winds, waters, stars, had joined in one their song, Above him floated like a breeze from God And heaven-born incense. Louder swelled that strain; And still the Bride of God, that ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... finger action to any extent is used. When these foundational points have been acquired, the trill, scales, arpeggios, chords, octaves and double notes follow in due course. At the same time the rhythmic sense is developed, all varieties of touch and dynamics introduced, and harmonic ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... philosophy, he destroys the poem in the process, much as the botanist destroys the flower in analyzing it, or the musical critic the composition in disentangling its interwoven melodies and explaining the mature of its harmonic structure. The analysis, whether of music, art, or poetry, must be followed by a synthesis, which, in the nature of the case, can be accomplished only by the hearer or reader for himself. All that I can do here is to illustrate this revelatory character of poetry ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... to the King's Bench when his case was over, as some fees were to be settled, and some formalities observed, before he could be actually released. The club received him with transport, and held an harmonic meeting that evening in his honour; while Mrs. Micawber and I had a lamb's fry in private, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... 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 his ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... 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, ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... is tedious and unsatisfactory, often indeed misleading, but a single example will perhaps suggest some of the ways in which alliteration, consonance, and assonance are interwoven for harmonic effects that, not being altogether obvious, are felt rather than directly perceived. Similar experiments may be made by the reader with other passages. The opening stanza of Gray's Elegy, quoted on page 55, above, is remarkable for its smooth and quiet flow, symbolic of the atmosphere described by ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... qualities which seem incompatible,—a volcanic imagination, and a dogged pertinacity which the most tedious calculations could not tire,—Kepler conjectured that celestial movements must be connected with each other by simple laws; or, to use his own expression, by harmonic laws. These laws he undertook to discover. A thousand fruitless attempts—the errors of calculation inseparable from a colossal undertaking—did not hinder his resolute advance toward the goal his imagination descried. Twenty-two ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... air or brass, the rate of vibration of the compound is the least common multiple of the two or more rates. In chemical compounds, such as water or alcohol, the rate is that of the highest, the others uniting in harmonic fractions. ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... peeping-place through the curtain of the organ-gallery, was struck motionless by the double operation of curiosity and fear; while the organist, intent only on his performance, and spreading all his fingers to strike a swell of magnificent chords, felt his harmonic spirit ready to desert his body on being answered by the ghastly rattle of empty keys, and in the consequent agitato furioso of the internal movements of his feelings, was preparing to restore harmony by the segue subito of an appoggiatura ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... Fielding's Head, generally occupied this post when not disabled by gout or other illness. His jolly appearance and fine voice may be remembered by some of my male readers: he used to sing profusely in the course of the harmonic meeting, and his songs were of what may be called the British Brandy-and-Water School of Song—such as 'The Good Old English Gentleman,' 'Dear Tom, this Brown Jug,' and so forth—songs in which pathos and hospitality are blended, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Euclid, Book VII. Connected with the theory of proportion was that of means, and Pythagoras was acquainted with three of these, the arithmetic, geometric, and sub-contrary (afterwards called harmonic). In particular Pythagoras is said to have introduced from Babylon into Greece the 'most perfect' ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... modulation of sound already explained, speech first issued from the human breast in harmonious accents and rhythmic form, and these became in their turn the causes and genesis of versification and metre. The classic experiments of Helmholtz show that each note may be regarded as a harmonic whole, owing to the complementary sounds which accompany it in its complete development. With reference to our own race, the genesis of the composition of verse and metre are shown by the researches made by Westphal and others into the metrical system of the Vedic Aryans, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... in this way been awakened. In order to keep me strictly under his calming and friendly influence, he had at the same time given me a sonata to write which, as a proof of my friendship for him, I had to build up on strictly harmonic and thematic lines, for which he recommended me a very early and childlike sonata by Pleyel as ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... 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
... of a page of Cicero. But it was 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 ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... yellow, yellow-eared honey-eaters, blue-bibbed sun-birds, and screeching parrots in accordant colours, assemble joyously, for the aroma, as of burnt honey, spreads far and wide, bidding all, butterflies and jewel-backed beetles which buzz and hum, to the feast, until the aerial anthem is harmonic to the rustle of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... for the development of thought. According to 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
... spheares To recreate a 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 cease: speake, who ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... that is, a melody that appeals to the intelligent music lover as tuneful, pleasing, and intelligible, is one in which, first of all, each successive tone and each successive group of tones stands in a rational harmonic relation to the one before it, and even, usually, to several preceding tones or groups. In other words, the tones are not arranged haphazard, but with reference to their harmonious agreement with each other. For a model of ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... chiefly for selfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Therefore in Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believe this decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richer and more harmonic insight. The passing eclipse of faith in a future life is destined by concentrating attention on the present to develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of this world, unveil all the elements of hell and heaven really existing here, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... echo of the Ninth Vibration and therefore a harmonic of truth. You are awake now. It is the day-time that is the sleep of the soul. You are in the Lower Perception, wherein the truth behind the veil of what men ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... after in the technical press. The apparatus attracted attention, and a set was secured by Prof. Joseph Henry for the Smithsonian Institution. There the famous philosopher showed and explained it to Alexander Graham Bell, when that young and persevering Scotch genius went to get help and data as to harmonic telegraphy, upon which he was working, and as to transmitting vocal sounds. Bell took up immediately and energetically the idea that his two predecessors had dropped—and reached the goal. In 1875 Bell, who as ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... prices obtained at the sale—has confirmed the propriety of my predilection. It brought 5000 francs. In the sale catalogue, is the following observation attached: "On admire dans ce precieux tableau de chevalet la facilite surprenante de pinceau et cette harmonic parfaite de couleur qui faisaient dire au Tiarini, peintre contemporain, "Seigneur Guerchin, vous faites ce que vous voulez, et nous autres ce ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... virtuoso kind; and as they bring in the orchestra sometimes, they give occasionally something classical and great, performed in a masterly manner. Indeed, all the music of New York seems to revolve now round the Ullman-Thalberg centre. They sweep all into their orbit. With the Harmonic Society, they give Sunday oratorios, promising "The Messiah," "Creation," "Elijah," David's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... by being a Protestant ascendency, does not better it from the combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale. If Protestant ascendency means the proscription from citizenship of by far the major part of the people of any country, then Protestant ascendency is a bad thing, and it ought to have no existence. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... which he called sub-contrafagotto in 1867, while Mahillon's was ready in 1868. In the brass contrafagotto the lateral holes are pierced at theoretically correct intervals along the bore, and have a diameter almost equal to the section of the bore at the point where the hole is pierced. The octave harmonic only is obtainable on this instrument owing to the great length of the bore and its large calibre. There are therefore two octave keys which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... interesting treatises on beauty and taste. "Plato represents beauty as the contemplation of the mind. Leibnitz maintained that it consists in perfection. Diderot referred beauty to the idea of relation. Blondel asserted that it was in harmonic proportions. Leigh speaks of it as the music of the age." These definitions do not much assist us. We fall back on our own conceptions or intuitions, as probably did Phidias, although Art in Greece could hardly have attained such perfection without the aid which poetry ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... form a family harmonic trio, a father, son, and grandson, of the surname of Chaloner, and of the several Christian names, Thomas, Jacob, and James. Thomas was an arms-painter in Chester about 1594; he knew the value of learning sufficiently to give ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... to hear somethin' like. The New Jersey Harmonic Society is agoin' to sing 'When first I saw her face in 1616.' I don't like none of your operas. That 'inflammation' may be a big thing,' but give me some ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... and of contemplation of aesthetic results. For even the humblest artist has to think of whatever objects or processes his work aims at representing, conveying or facilitating; and to think also of the objects, marble, wood, paints, voices, and of the processes, drawing, cutting, harmonic combining, by which he attempts to compass one of the above-mentioned results. The artist is not only an aesthetically appreciative person; he is, in his own way, a man of science and a man of practical devices, an expert, a craftsman and an engineer. To produce a work of art is not an interlude ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... you will become what no mortal can ever quite be: a perfectly functioning biological engine. Every sinew, nerve and muscle, every organ and gland, every tissue in your body will be in perfect harmonic balance with every other. Metabolically speaking, your catabolism and anabolism will be in such perfect balance that ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... audience to Minuccio, Who meetly told that love-tale meet to know. The king had features pliant to confess The presence of a manly tenderness,— Son, father, brother, lover, blent in one, In fine harmonic exaltation; The spirit of religious chivalry. He listened, and Minuccio could see The tender, generous admiration spread O'er all his face, and glorify his head With royalty that would have kept its rank, Though his brocaded robes to tatters shrank. He answered ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... song has been sung at the annual dinners of the Gloucestershire Society, from the earliest period of the existence of that institution; and in 1776 there was an Harmonic Society at Cirencester, which always opened its meetings with George Ridler's Oven ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... each other frequently perform the same song, and alternately change it, for hours together. While this harmonic correspondence continues, and the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages chaunt their couplets, the youth of both sexes listen with the greatest attention ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... from it a portion of his evening readings. The intimation drew a good house; and, curious to know what was awaiting me, I paid my shilling, with the others, and got into a corner. First in the entertainment there came a wearisome dissertation on harmonic inflections, double emphasis, the echoing words, and the monotones. But, to borrow from Meg Dods, "Oh, what a style of language!" The elocutionist, evidently an untaught and grossly ignorant man, had not an idea of composition. Syntax, grammar, and good sense, were set at nought ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... in the universe are united in God. God and nature are two magnitudes which are quite alike. The whole sum of harmonic activity which exists together in the divine substance, is in nature the antitype of this substance, united to incalculable degrees, and measures, and steps. If I may be allowed this expressive imagery, nature is an infinitely ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... It seems that these islanders had been accustomed to call themselves, in their own tongue, "rational animals with sentiments of justice and piety,"—all which, be it remembered, is expressed in their wonderful language by a simple harmonic progression of four full chords.[B] But here was a Batrachian,—one of the lower orders of creation, in their view,—from whom the Almighty had withheld the gift of a rational soul, who nevertheless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... is scarcely a single 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Hamilton, courses in musical interpretation have been developed in connection with the courses in practical music. The first-year class, meeting once a week, listens to an anonymous musical selection played by one of its members, and must decide by internal evidence—such as simple cadences, harmonic figuration as applied to the accompaniment and other characteristics—upon the school of the composer, and biographical data. The analysis of the musical selection and the reasons for her decision are set down in her notebook by the listening student. The second-year class concerns itself with ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... real order of these Planets; but a mysterious one, like that of the days of the Week consecrated to them, commencing with Saturday, and retrograding to Sunday. It was dictated, Celsus says, by certain harmonic ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... miles distant. The panorama was certainly on a grand scale, and presented very diversified and picturesque features; but I can by no means agree with Dr. Clarke, who compares it to the Bay of Naples. Not only the rich colours of the Mediterranean are wanting, but those harmonic sweeps and curves of the Italian shores and hills have nothing in common with these rude, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in space, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of art-philosophy to which the word "aesthetics" should be strictly limited, being the inquiry into the nature ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... us everywhere. Resemblances exist in things wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music" by Goethe. "A Gothic church," said Coleridge, "is petrified religion." The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colours. The granite is different 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 ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... afraid Honor's scales that day were anything but a satisfaction to Fraeulein Bernhardt, the piano teacher. Her mind was so abstracted that she kept continually playing wrong fingering, or even an occasional wrong note in the harmonic minors. Her study was little better, and her piece a dead failure. The mistress, with characteristic German patience, set her to work to try to conquer a couple of difficult phrases, through which Honor stumbled again and ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... old comedy are as loosely strung together as those of "Le Nozze di Figaro," and the parallel is carried further by the similarity between the instrumental apparatus of Mozart and Wolf-Ferrari and the dependence of both on melody, rather than orchestral or harmonic device, as the life-blood of the music upon which the comedy floats. It is Mozart's orchestra that the modern composer uses ("the only proper orchestra for comedy," as Berlioz said), eschewing even those "epical ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in the best of spirits. Wounds were not mentioned, so it went without saying that these, owing to the healthy bodies of their owners, were giving no trouble. The only interruption of a non-harmonic nature was when a burly Muskymote dog of Rory's team took it into its head that a little tete-noire dog had received a portion of frozen fish from its master out of all proportion to its inconsiderable size, so, as soon ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... form 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 gesture. The inflections of gesture are oblique ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... deep and well defined, indicates purity and devotion; if well defined from Mount Jupiter only, a jealous and tyrannical disposition is indicated; if it begins at Mount Saturn and is without branches, it is a fatal sign; if short and well defined in the Harmonic type of hand it indicates intense affection when it is reciprocated; if short on the Mercury type of hand, it implies deep interest in intellectual pursuits; it short and deep in the Elementary type of hand, it implies the ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... most beautiful operas. There is no need to go through it closely, as in the case of Tristan. The methods are those of Tristan; we have the themes used as leit-motifs, and also long passages woven out of them and new matter; we have the harmonic freedom of Tristan, the same gorgeous orchestration, and even more than the same marvellous polyphonic writing. But, broadly speaking, the drama counts for comparatively little, and the opera ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... qualifying proviso which alone gave it value as a clue to new truths. According to his statement, a body absorbs all the series of vibrations it is, under any circumstances, capable of emitting, as well as those connected with them by simple harmonic relations. This is far too wide. To render it either true or useful, it had to be reduced to the cautious terms employed by Kirchhoff. Radiation strictly and necessarily corresponds with absorption only ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... very weary, C. persuaded me to accept an invitation to hear the Creation, at Exeter Hall, performed by the London Sacred Harmonic Society. They had kindly reserved a gallery for us, and when we went in Mr. Surman, the founder and for twenty years conductor of the society, presented me with a beautifully ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of these chorus halls about the City of Light grouped in the direction of the Hill of the Phosphori, and the music is quite different in them. There are four principal sorts, the grave, the gay, the romantic and the harmonic. By their interior sympathy the kinds of spirits move to the choruses which afford the music they respond to and it is wonderful ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... his two friends are at the "Planets" harmonic meeting, stating their intention not to return till morning—an useless proclamation, for it is impossible to do otherwise, now—they having been at the Casino, "getting their feet in," for the hop on Friday, as young Brown termed the ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... melody almost audible as music, the mysterious skill by which the words used constantly strike as the INEVITABLE words (and hence, unforgettable), the subtle allusive touches, by which a secondary image is suggested to enrich the leading thought, as the harmonic "partials" give richness to the note struck upon the string; THERE, when we think of the vast fertility in subject and treatment, united with happy selection of motive, the wide range of character, the dramatic force of impersonation, the pathos in every ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the dripping pines. He could hear the rattle of the twigs that met and brushed through the shrill wailing of the wind about the sombre spires that pierced the growing darkness far above him, and the harmonic murmuring that rose and fell in cadence along the dim, vaulted roof. There was, however, nothing else beyond the growl of a rapid somewhere up the valley, and stretching out his arms wearily, he stooped with a little smile that was grim rather than mirthful ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... Hubbard, had daughters who were deaf and dumb, and both engaged Bell's services as teacher. Bell lived in Sanders's home for a considerable period, dividing his time between teaching his little pupil how to talk and puttering away at a proposed invention which he called a "harmonic telegraph." Both Sanders and Hubbard had become greatly interested in this contrivance and backed Bell financially while he worked. It was Bell's idea that, by a system of tuning different telegraphic ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... E2.] are obtained, as stated above, by means of keys in the long joint and bell; the next eight notes (holes and keys) each produce two sounds—the fundamental tone, and, by increased pressure of the breath, its harmonic octave. The remaining notes are obtained by cross fingering and by overblowing the notes of the fundamental scale a twelfth as far as Ab [Notation: A4b.] which forms the normal compass. From A to Eb the vox humana notes are produced by the help of small harmonic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... procure a spinet, and to conceal it in a garret, whither he went to play when all the household was asleep—without any guidance finding out everything for himself, and merely by permitting his little fingers to wander over the keyboard, he produced harmonic combinations; and at seven years of age he discovered that he knew how ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... undulating curve representing wave motion. It is produced by compounding a simple harmonic motion, or a two and fro motion like that of an infinitely long pendulum with a rectilinear motion. Along a horizontal line points may be laid off to represent equal periods of time. Then on each point a perpendicular ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... 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
... terms, diagrams and mathematical statements, all of 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 ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... the creation story have been combined by some editor,[680] so 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 points to ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... actions, unconnected with the interests of life and solely directed towards the invisible world. External objects are also a great help to piety; the soul falls back upon itself, if the fine arts, great monuments, and harmonic strains, do not reanimate that poetical genius, which is ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael |
