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The primal element in music is vibration. Sound-waves in some ordered sequence—silent till they strike our ears—are formed by our ingenuity and sense of order into patterns of beauty. They exist in time, not in space. They are motion. And these vibrations are the very substance of all life; of stars in their courses, of the pulse-beats of the heart, of the mysterious communications from the nerves to the brain, of light, of heat, of color. The plastic arts are static. Painting has the power

“to give

To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time

The appropriate calm of blest eternity.”

Sculpture is motion caught in a moment of perfection. Music is motion always in perfection. This rhythm exists also in literature and the other arts. Poe would be nothing without it; Whitman uses it in long swelling undulations which are sometimes almost indistinguishable; the composition in a great painting is a rhythm; the Apollo Belvedere is all rhythm. But in music rhythm is a physical, moving property; rhythm in being, not rhythm caught in a poise. The possibilities of rhythmic play in music far exceed those in poetry, for in the latter the sense or meaning would be clouded by too much rhythmic complication. It would be impossible to do in poetry, for example, what Beethoven does at the beginning of a movement in one of his string quartettes,[2] where the ’cello, entirely alone, repeats one note fifteen times in two rhythmic groups; there is no melody and no harmony—merely one reiterated rhythmic sound. It is also impossible for poetry to present three or four different rhythms simultaneously, as music often does; nor can poetic rhythms carry across a complete rhythmic disruption whose whole æsthetic sense lies in its relations to a permanent rhythm which it momentarily violates, as is the case in the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In short, rhythm in music has a diversity, a flexibility, and a physical vigor quite unparalleled in any other art.

Melody in music consists in a sequence of single sounds curved to some line of beauty. Whereas rhythm is conceivable without any intellectual quality,—as a purely physical manifestation,—melody implies some sense of design, since it progresses from one point in time to another, and without design would be merely a series of incoherent sounds. In this design rhythm plays a leading part, and the themes having the most perfect balance of rhythms are the most interesting. Examples of diverse but highly coördinated melodies may be found in the slow movement of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata, Opus 13, and in Brahms’s pianoforte quartette, Opus 60, the synthetic quality of which is like that of a finely constructed sentence. Melody, being design, gives conscious evidence of the personality of its creator. Schubert, for example, is like Keats and represents the type of pure lyric utterance. Bach, on the contrary, is essentially a thinker, and his melodies are full of vigorous and diversified rhythms.

Folk-song was the beginning of what we call “melody,” and the best specimens of folk-songs are quite as perfect within their small range as are the greatest works of the masters. Their contour and rhythm are sometimes as delicately balanced as the mechanism of a fine instrument. And when we remember that these melodies were the spontaneous utterance of simple, untutored peoples who, in forming them, depended almost entirely on instinct, we realize how intimate a medium music is for the expression of feeling. People who could neither read nor write and who had little knowledge or experience of artistic objects could, nevertheless, create perfect works of beauty in the medium of sound.

Harmony is an adjunct to the other two elements. It is in music something of what color is in painting. As contrasted with the long line of melody and the regular impulses in time of rhythm, harmony deals in masses. Melody carries the mind from one point to another; harmony strikes simultaneously and produces an immediate sensation. Its effect upon us is probably due to a subtle physical correspondence within ourselves to combinations of sounds that spring direct from nature. The whole history of music shows a gradual assimilation by human beings of new combinations of sounds, and it is probable that only the first chapters of that history have been written.

We have spoken of the synthetic quality of melody, and it is obvious that the larger the scope of music the more important this quality becomes. When a composer creates a sonata or symphony he must so dispose all his material—rhythms, melodies, and harmonies—as to give to the work perfect coherence. A work of art expressed in the element of time needs this synthesis more than one expressed in space. For although there is in music no “subject,” yet beauty is being unfolded and the need of a cumulative and coördinated expression of it is quite as great as it would be were the music “about” something. There are various ways of arranging musical material so as to attain this end. The chief principle of its synthesis is derived from the volatile nature of sound itself. It is this: that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or at least some reminder, of the first. The result of this is that in the early music there was an alternation of one phrase or one tune with another; and this in turn was followed by all sorts of experiments tending to bring about variety in unity. (These simple forms somewhat resemble what is known in poetry as the triolet.) The most common form in music is threefold. It is found in folk-songs, marches, minuets, nocturnes, and so forth, and—expanded to huge proportions—in symphonic movements. In folk-songs this form consists in repeating a first phrase after a second contrasting one. In minuets, nocturnes, romances, and the like, each part is a complete melody in itself. In a symphonic movement the first part—save in such notable exceptions as the first movement of the “Eroica” of Beethoven—contains all the thematic material, the second contains what is called the “development” of the material stated in the first, and the third part restates the first with such changes as shall give it new significance.

It is in this synthetic quality that much of the greatness of symphonic music lies. No other quality, however fine in itself, can take its place. Schumann, for example, created interesting and beautiful themes in profusion, but his compositions in the larger forms lack a complete synthesis. Bach was the greatest master in this respect. So perfect is the ordering of his material that it gives that impression of inevitability which distinguishes all great art everywhere. It is obvious enough that parallels to this form will be found in literature, for it is a part of life and nature. It is youth, manhood, and old age; it is sunrise, noon, and sunset; it is spring, summer, and winter. So it must be; for art is only life in terms of beauty, and human life is only nature expressing itself in terms of man and woman. This then is the thing we call music: rhythm, melody, and harmony arranged into forms of beauty, existing in time. It is without meaning, it is without “subject,” it is without idea. It creates a world of its own, fictitious, fabulous, and irrelevant—a world of sound, evanescent yet indestructible.