The Psychology of Beauty

by Ethel Puffer Howes

Or in Gurney's more eloquent description, "The melody may begin by pressing its way through a sweetly yielding resistance to a gradually foreseen climax; whence again fresh expectation is bred, perhaps for another excursion, as it were, round the same centre but with a bolder and freer sweep,…to a point where again the motive is suspended on another temporary goal; till after a certain number of such involutions and evolutions, and of delicately poised leanings and reluctances and yieldings, the forces so accurately measured just suffice to bring it home, and the sense of potential and coming integration which has underlain all our provisional adjustments of expectation is triumphantly justified."<1>

<1> Op. cit., p. 165.

This should not be taken as a more or less poetical account under the metaphor of motion. These "leanings" are literal in the sense that one note does imply another as its natural complement and satisfaction and we seek to reach or make it. The striving is an intrinsic element, not a by-product for our understanding.

There is another point to note. The "sense of potential and coming integration" is a strong factor of melody. If it cannot be said that the first note implies the last, it is at least true that from point to point the next step is dimly foreseen, and this effect is cumulative. If melody is an ever-hindered striving for the goal, at least the hindrances themselves are stations on the way, each one as overcome adding to the final momentum with which the goal is reached. It is like an accumulation of evidence, a constellation of associations. AB foretells C; but ABCDEF rushes yet more strongly upon G. So it is that the irresistibleness, the "unalterable rightness" of a piece of music increases from beginning to end.

The significance of this essential internal necessity of progression cannot be overestimated. The unalterable rightness of music is founded on natural acoustic laws, and this "rightness" is fundamental. A melody is not right because it is beautiful, it is beautiful because it is right. The natural tendencies point out different paths to the goal; and thus different ways of being beautiful; but the nature of the relation between point and point, the nature of the progression, that is, the nature of melody, is the same.

Up to this point we have consistently abstracted from the element of rhythm in melody. Strictly speaking, however, it is impossible to do so. The individuality of a melody is absolutely dependent on its rhythm, that is, on the relative time-value of its tones. Gurney has devoted some amusing pages to showing the trivial, dragging, lustreless tunes that result from ever so slight a change in the rhythm of noble themes, or even in the distribution of rhythmical elements within the bar. The reason for this is evident. The nature of melody in the sense of sequence consists in the varied answers to the demands of the ear as felt at each successive point. Now it is clear that such "answer" can be emphasized, given indifferently, held in suspense, in short, subjected to all kinds of variation as well by the rhythmical form into which it is cast, as by the different choice of possibilities for the tone itself. The rhythm helps out the melody not only by adding to it an independently pleasing element, but, and this is indeed the essential, by reinforcing the intrinsic relations of the notes themselves. Thus it is in the highest degree true that in melody and rhythm we do not have content and form, but that, strictly speaking, the melody is tone-sequence in rhythm.

The intimate bondage of tone-sequence and rhythm is grounded in the identity of their inner nature; both are varieties of the objective conditions of embodied expectation. It is not of the essence of music to satisfy explicit and conscious expectation—to satisfy the understanding. It meets on the contrary a subconscious, automatic need which becomes conscious only in the moment of its contenting. Every moment of progress in a beautiful melody is hailed like an instinctive action performed for the first time. Rhythm is the ideal satisfaction of attention in general with all its bodily concomitants and expressions. Tone-sequence is the satisfaction of attention directed to auditory demands. But the form-quality of rhythm, the form-quality of tonality, is an all but subconscious possession. Together, reinforcing each other in melody, they furnish the ideal arrangement of the most poignant of sense- stimulations.

VI

It is strange that those who would accept the general facts of musical logic as outlined above do not perceive that they have thereby cut away the ground from under the feet of the "natural language" argument. If the principle of choice in the progress of a melody is tone-relationship, the principle of choice cannot also be the cadences of the speaking voice. That musical intervals often RECALL the speaking voice is another matter, as we have said, and to this it may be added that they much more often do not. The question here is only of the primacy of the principle. Thus it would seem that the facts of musical structure constitute in themselves a refutation of the view we have disputed. To say that music arose in "heightened speech" is irrelevant; for the occasion of an aesthetic phenomenon is never its cause. It might as well be said that music arose in economic conditions,— as indeed Grosse, in his "Anfange der Kunst," conclusively shows, without attempting to make this social occasion intrude into the nature of the phenomenon. Primitive decorative art arose in the imitation of the totemic or clan symbols, mostly animal forms; but we have seen that the aesthetic quality of the decoration is due to the demands of the eye, and appears fully only in the comparative degradation of the representative form. In exactly the same way might we consider the "degradation" of speech cadences into real music,—supposing this were really the origin of music. As a matter of fact, however, the best authorities seem to be agreed that the primitive "dance-song" was rather a monotonous, meaningless chant, and that the original pitch- elements were mechanically supplied by the first musical instruments; these being at first merely for noise, and becoming truly vibrating, sonorous bodies because they were more easily struck if they were hard or taut. The musical tones which these hard vibrating bodies gave out were the first determinations of pitch, and of the elements of the scale, which correspond to the natural partial vibrations of such bodies. "The human voice," Wallaschek<1> tells us, "equally admits of any pentatonic or heptatonic intervals, and very likely we should never have got regular scales if we had depended upon the ear and voice only. The first unique cause to settle the type of a regular scale is the instrument." To this material we have to apply only that "natural persuasion of the ear" which we have already explained, to account for the full development of music.

<1> Primitive Music, 1893, p. 156.