"Harmonical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... amongst them were not named so either from the strings or sounds in music; but the universe being divided into three parts, the first portion was of the fixed stars, the second of the planets, the third of those things that are under the concave of the moon; and all these are ordered according to harmonical proportions, and of each portion a Muse takes care; Hypate of the first, Nete of the last, and Mese in the middle, combining as much as possible, and turning about mortal things with the gods and earthly with heavenly. And Plato intimates the same thing under the names ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... even-song 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; ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... arriving at the 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
... 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 ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... 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 asserting their ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... expression in the operatic paraphrase of Victor Hugo's story, and the invitation which that passion extended to the modern musician suddenly emancipated from a lot of cumbersome formularies, and endowed with a mass of new harmonic and instrumental pigments with which to produce the startling contrasts and swift contradictions for which the new field ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 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 ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... plain later) and definitely ratified as a structural principle by the Italian opera composer Alessandro Scarlatti in the well-known Aria da capo. These further applications of the principle of imitation are Transposition, i.e., the repetition of the melodic outline, and often of the whole harmonic fabric, by shifting it up or down the scale; and the Restatement of the original melody after an intervening part in contrast, thus making a piece of music, the formula for which may be indicated by A, B, A. Anyone at all familiar with musical literature must have observed ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... 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 bound ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 silenced by the snow; ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... influence is more than a sufficient answer to mere depreciating criticism. This. however, is not a point which there is any use in pressing. Our present business is to justify the two assertions which we have made. First, that Leibnitz conceived his "Theory of the Harmonic Pre-etablie" from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and, secondly, that this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as is that of Spinoza, and only differs from it ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... 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 ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... night. How often from the steep Of echoing hill or 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 heavenly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joined, their songs Divide the night, and lift ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... should say that the phalanx of noble minds and lofty souls dances the strophe, and the humble multitude the antistrophe. Burdened with painful and disagreeable tasks, but rendered omnipotent by their number and the harmonic arrangement of their functions, the latter execute what the others plan. Guided by them, they owe them nothing; they honor them, however, and lavish upon them ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 tonque; 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 bar of the Praetorian ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... 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
... bright brooks glide on as smoothly as in meadows. There, a torrent rushes over crags, foaming and roaring in an everlasting cascade. Before you may be a hillside, green with luxuriant pasturage, where flocks and herds graze quietly through the day, while the shepherd, with his crook and harmonic pipe, reminds you of classic scenes. Turn aside—and you may look down into cavernous recesses, whose gloomy, depths you cannot measure. Scenes fair and fearful meet in the same horizon. So, in life, the gentle charities, that, like the face of Una, make sunshine ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • 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. But ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution, like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be relaxed. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... babble of many voices in many keys, talk mingling with laughter more or less melodiously subdued, he made his way up the great staircase. As he neared the landing, there sounded the shrill squeak of a violin and a 'cello's deep harmonic growl. His hostess, small, slender, fair, and not yet forty, a jewel-flash upon her throat and in the tiara above her smooth low forehead, took a step forward ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the sage deliberations of the Royal Institution or the London Institution, the Artisan's Association, or the Institution of Arts and Sciences. He belonged, in fact, to none of the numerous societies which swarm in the English capital, from the Harmonic to that of the Entomologists, founded mainly for the purpose ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... 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 when the temperature is the same. In point of fact, Angstrom was ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... be the general 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 don't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... 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 ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... 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 ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... to the associations of ideas arising from ancestral reversions of memory, and from the principles of minimum muscular action and harmonic excitation. Such laws make themselves felt unconsciously from the commencement of life, with greater or less power, dependent on the susceptibility of the nervous system. They go far toward explaining the recurrence and permanence of symbols, whether of sight or sound. Thus I attribute the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Three scales-major, harmonic minor, melodic minor-are the only ones which Occidental music employs, but Indian music outlines 72 THATAS or scales. The musician has a creative scope for endless improvisation around the fixed traditional ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... 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 ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the opposition of one choir against the other, not in multiplicity of voice parts, but in imposing contrasts as of "deep answering unto deep." The development of fundamental chord harmonies was inevitable and from them in the fullness of time was bound to spring the pure harmonic style. Chord successions without any melodic union cannot be long sustained, and the Italians, with the tentative achievements of the frottolists before them, were not long blind to this fact. Leone Battista Alberti, father of Renaissance architecture, in ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... 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 years he devoted to it, and still he was not weary. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The harmonic arrangement is also purposely simple in consideration of the many mothers and kindergartners who cannot devote ...
— Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten • Emilie Poulsson
... 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 ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... deficiency, the ellipsis is the degree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion, regulates the form and features of a perfect woman." Mr. D.R. Hay, in a series of books, professes to have discovered the principles of beauty in the law of harmonic ratio, without, however, "pretending," as he modestly and wisely declares, "to give rules for that kind of beauty which genius alone can produce in high art." The discovery of Mr. Hay is curious and fascinating, and, like the announcement ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... are the qualities which have shaped the composer's musical personality (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 ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... 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. Consider, for instance, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... 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 in 1619, distinguishes between the sonata ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... last will be 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 ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... 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 a mockery ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... 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 ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... 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 inwoven shade Laurel ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... 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 note in use, B flat above treble staff. ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... then to their 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... vastly different affair. Michael had shown both ingenuity and a great sense of harmonic beauty in the arrangement of the very simple little tune that Falbe had made him exercise his ear over, and the half-dozen variations that followed showed a wonderfully mature handling. The air which he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen presence. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... contrivance or 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 ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... 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 receivers to different pitches, several telegraphic messages could be sent simultaneously ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... 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
... of his soul in song first, and then with some sort of musical instrument. And to man it was given, commencing with the early ages, to develop the simple ejaculations or melodies of a praise-giving soul into a beautiful, a noble art, replete at times with harmonic intricacies, and again with melodies grand in their very simplicity; into a beneficent science, divine from its inception, which has ever had as votaries many of earth's greatest minds, and has become a fountain of delight to ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... bric-a-brac is very banal. Perhaps you prefer Strauss. His dissonances are more harmonic ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... termed in the slang of his time "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, Drury Lane, a well known house of call for actors, and appropriately immortalised ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... 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, surrounded by ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... 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 a result of this training Mr. Bell had become an expert teacher of the deaf. ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... enthusiastic moods influenced the Brook Farmers, it seemed to me, often-times unwisely. He saw the full- blown phalanstery coming like a comet and expected every moment. We shortly would be in a blaze of glory! He loved to talk of the good things to be—of social problems worked out by science and by harmonic modes; to flatter himself that without great self-sacrifice, devotion and untiring industry, the world was to be regenerated. It seemed to his mind, that it could be done all at once by organization and enthusiasm, and it was only necessary to create ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... as 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
... Alison, and Stewart, have written 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 and history and philosophy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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 larger forms but lack the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... the hand, before 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 and structural ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... serenading party in the country, while his spouse had run away from town. The rest may be imagined—but, first of all, the lady tried to persuade him that she was there on purpose to meet him, and had chosen this method for an harmonic surprise. So much for this gossip, which amused me when I heard it, and I send it to you, in the hope it may have the like effect. Now we'll return ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Journeyman Mason," and select 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 in every sentence; ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the play-going community betake themselves to some harmonic meeting. As a matter of curiosity let us follow them thither for a ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... matter whether it was a year or a thousand years later. Not being perfectly self-confident in this matter, we always took the opinion of Mr. Y——, who, as I said before, was an experienced architect; and he invariably came to the conclusion that the Brahmanical idols formed a harmonic and genuine part of the whole, pillars, decorations, and the general style of the temple; whereas the statue of Buddha was an additional and discordant patch. Out of thirty or forty caves of Ellora, all filled with idols, there is only one, the one called the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... 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 ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... 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 con foco with the corner ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... 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 how infallibly this ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... rules of counterpoint is called contrapuntal music; that written otherwise is known as free harmonic music. In the one case the composer desired to have a beautiful weaving of the parts—clear as the lines in a line-engraving. In the other, the intention is to get effects from tones united into chords, ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... 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 as Rory's back was ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... on for hours. 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 ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... 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 for ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... 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 his ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... in chords harmonic all the finely fretted dome, Blue, white, purple, gold, and crimson, fringe, melt, ripple ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... evolved for the 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 ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime which he had long been building up. (She had loved, best of all, harmonic combinations of the clock bells.) Every day he would halt in front of the place and wait to hear it strike, and its owner would peer out from behind it and shake a wasted fist and curse him with strange, hoarse foreign oaths, while Willy Woolly tugged at his trouser leg and urged him to ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in the fervent concentration of his thoughts, ... he was about to begin his dictation, ... now ... now! ... and Theos leaned forward nervously, his heart beating with apprehensive expectation ... Hush! ... the delicious, suave melody of his friend's voice penetrated the silence like the sweet harmonic ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and smooth, a woman's voice with the gift of 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 to which our ordinary ears are not used—who ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... source of all human achievement is already a harmonic whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... you may not know what a "node" in music means exactly—some of you may know nothing whatever about it. Simply, it is the fixed point of a sonorous chord, at which it divides itself, when it vibrates by aliquot parts, and produces the harmonic sounds. And do you not see how this struck chord can serve and does serve to illustrate my exposition of the back and belly—more particularly the latter—in their vibrations and their concentration at upper, middle, and lower ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... 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 ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... course, was the beam operating," Zircon interjected. "You didn't hear the beam itself, since that's ultrasonic. But you did hear the mechanical vibration of the brass ball. It had a kind of sub-harmonic ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... 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 ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... uncontrollable and boastful at times, and is always so choleric, that, instead of waiting for the cadenzas to finish, it bursts in, knocks them over as by a blow on the head, roars away on false intervals, and overwhelms every other voice with its own noisy vociferation. The harmonic arrangements are very odd. Each instrument seems to consider itself ill-treated when reduced to an accompaniment or bass, and is constantly endeavoring, however unfitted for it, to get possession of the air,—the melody being, for all Italians, the principal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... 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 aging will ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... distant copse arise, Of softest flute or reeds harmonic join'd, With rapture thrill'd each worldly passion dies, And pleased attention claims the ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Benjamin Cutter. Teaches one to analyze the harmonic structure of both classic and ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... 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
... was plaguing him with the confusion of its beauty. For I suppose 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, ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... sense of hearing is as acute as our own, who yet can by no possibility be made to recognize the slightest relation between the according notes of the simplest melody; and, though they can as readily as others distinguish the individual sounds, even to the degrees of flatness and sharpness, the harmonic agreement is to them as mere noise. Let us suppose ourselves present at a concert, in company with one such person and another who possesses what is called musical sensibility. How are they affected, for instance, by a piece of Mozart's? ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 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 ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... speech should reign here; the languor of feeling grows to ecstasy; that which in the Allegro was expressed by changes of figuration, is now conveyed by means of variously inflected tone. Thus the least change of harmony may call forth a sense of surprise; and again, the most remote harmonic progressions prove ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... architects in Italy. That is to say, he treated the structure as an inert mass, to be made as substantial as possible, and then to be covered with details agreeable to the eye. At the beginning of his career he had a defective sense of the harmonic ratios upon which a really musical building may be constructed out of mere bricks and mortar—such, for example, as the Church of S. Giustina at Padua. He was overweighted with ill-assimilated erudition; and all the less desirable licenses ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... science of 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 and conditions of men, and their duties towards each other. The Bible, the sacred ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... 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 a ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... best known bird among the Australian Shrike-thrushes (q.v.), Colluricincla harmonica, Lath.; called also the Austral Thrush, and Harmonic Thrush by Latham. It is also the C. cinerea of Vigors and Horsfield and the Turdus harmonicus of Latham, and it has received various other scientific and vernacular names; Colonel Legge has now assigned to it the name of Grey Shrike-Thrush. ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... 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 ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... theme 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 sixteen ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... composer who, although he died in 1849 (Schubert died in 1828), is as modern as the masters just named. He was as boldly original as Schubert, and as great a magician in the art of arousing deep emotion by means of novel, unexpected modulations. As an originator of new harmonic progressions he has had only three equals,—Bach, Schubert, and Wagner. Harmonies as ultra-modern as those of Wagner's "Parsifal" may be found in some of the mazurkas of Chopin. He was, as Rubinstein called him, "the soul of the pianoforte." No one before or after him knew how to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the transmission of the 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 ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... whom this burdened, sad creation Sings, now in tones of exultation Abruptly broken, Anon in direst lamentation Obscurely spoken, Possess your souls in hope, the time Is coming when th' harmonic chime Of circling spheres in chant sublime Will lead the music of the seas, And call the echoes of the breeze To one triumphal lay Whose harmony, whose heavenly harmony Sounding for aye In loud and solemn benedicite, Voices the glory of the Central Day, And through ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... that 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
... torch. And music, like ideas, can slay the brain. Wagner borrowed his harmonic fire from the torch of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... other name than the sister of painting, inasmuch as it is subject to the hearing,—a sense inferior to the eye,—and it produces harmony by the unison of its proportioned parts, which are brought into operation at the same moment and are constrained to come to life and die in one or more harmonic times; and time is, as it were, the circumference of the parts which constitute the harmony, in the same way as the outline constitutes the circumference of limbs whence human ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... an especially felicitous union of the aesthetic and emotional elements which constitute the basic qualities of his uniqueness. We recognize these works as being welded into a strange unity, as having a homogeneous texture of ecstasy over them that surpasses any aesthetic surface of harmonic colour, though that harmony also is understood by the deeper welling of imagery from the core of creative exaltation. And I think that this occurs in Lysistrata. The intellectual and spiritual tendrils ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... 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 ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... 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
... 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 church late dark, Glad of her ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... "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 endless complexity ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... 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 call Reality ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... of silvery 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 ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... opera never 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. Mozart ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... employment of 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 Mr. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... 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; and the minor rests, or demi-caesuras, which often ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... 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 appearing out of its own blur and said, "We'll ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... land and tender 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 ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... multitudes, who saluted him as their benefactor, and proclaimed him as their sovereign; he spoke to these beings, the children of his dreams, in a language which he alone comprehended; he built his phalanstere, peopled, organized it; conducted himself the labours of his harmonic groups, founded his towns, his capitals, nay, his capital of the world, which he erected on the Bosphorus, uniting the east and west, the north and south. There he placed with his own hand the laurel, decreed by his million of phalanges, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... 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 with ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... strength and beauty of 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 ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the foundation and the keystone of the marvellous edifice 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 ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... challenge to him. The verse marks one of the highest reaches of a genius honored abroad as a world-great lyrist. It is, perhaps, praise enough, then, to say that Kelley's music flags in no wise behind the divine progress of the words. The lute idea dictates an arpeggiated accompaniment, whose harmonic beauty and courage is beyond description and beyond the grasp of the mind at the first hearing. The bravery of the climax follows the weird and opiate harmonies of the middle part with tremendous effect. The song is, in my fervent belief, a masterwork of absolute ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... and rhythm that were irresistible. He had at his command a vast host of memories—everything from a Hungarian "Czardas" to Grieg. He rippled on fantastically, joining together the seemingly impossible by a series of harmonic transitions entirely his own. His crisp execution was as facile as that of a virtuoso; he did things contrary to even the first principles found in the instruction books of the pianoforte. He rushed from ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... gate, For their defrauded, absent foals they make A moan so loud, that all the guild awake; 250 Sore sighs Sir Gilbert, starting at the bray, From dreams of millions, and three groats to pay. So swells each windpipe; ass intones to ass, Harmonic twang! of leather, horn, and brass; Such as from labouring lungs the enthusiast blows, High sound, attemper'd to the vocal nose, Or such as bellow from the deep divine; There, Webster![323] peal'd ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the ordinary objection to these tunes, that they are stiff and out of date. Now it may be likely enough that they will never be so universally popular in our country as the fine melodies invented on the modern harmonic system, yet the idea that they are not popular in character, and that modern people will not sing them, is a mistake; there is plenty of evidence on this point. Nor must we judge them by the incompetent, and I confess somewhat revolting aspect in which they were offered to us by the Anglo-gregorianists ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... beauty and kindliness, the aesthetic emotion is even intensified by the knowledge of co-existence in others: the delight in each person communicating itself, like a musical third, fifth, or octave, to the similar yet different delight in his neighbour, harmonic enriching ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... to perform this experiment with a coil operated from an alternator of high frequency, as then, owing to the harmonic rise and fall, the streams are very uniform, though they are less abundant then when produced with such a coil as the present. This experiment, however, may be performed with low ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... country, by a very full orchestra (the performance taking place immediately after supper), and a chorus composed of the entire "Sauer Kraut-Verein," the "Wee Gates Association," and choice selections from the "Gyascutus" and "Pike-harmonic" societies. The solos were rendered by Herr Tuden Links, the recitations by Herr Von Hyden Schnapps, both performers being assisted by Messrs. John Smith and Joseph Brown, who held their coats, fanned them, and furnished water during the more ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... of 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 ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... system as mathematics, or numbers. His idea appears to be, that order or harmony of relation is the regulating principle of the whole universe. He drew out a list of ten pairs of antagonistic elements, and in the octave and its different harmonic relations, he believed that he found the ground of the connexion between them. In his system of the universe fire was the important element, occupying both the centre and the remotest point of it; and being the vivifying ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... 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 ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... 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
... again immediately 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 he added the fifth, now with a trembling sound like silent weeping, sustained, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... The harmonic beauties of "'Twas Summer and the Little Birds were Singing in the Trees" are still inexhausted, but it sadly needs a piano accompaniment—with this it would be perfect; and so the whole crowd, including Yvonne, and Celeste, and Marcelle, and the two Frenchmen, and the girl ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... combinations of tones took on definite shapes in her mind. The bass B of the fourth octave appeared to her as a heavily veiled woman; the middle E resembled a young man who was stretching his arms. In chords, harmonies, and harmonic transformations these figures were set in motion, the motion depending on the character of the composition: a procession of mourning figures between clouds and stars; wild animals spurred on by the huntsmen who were riding them; maidens throwing flowers ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... we 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
... 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 |
