“Sermon Impressions, a great variety. Parties ordering will please state their religious views or the particular branch of the Episcopalian or other denomination to which they belong.” N.B.—Agents and composers wanted.
If our readers think this to be nonsensical trifling, let them read a few of those lucubrations styled “musical criticisms.”
Musical coloring has only been equalled in its fantastic conceptions by the so-called ocular harmony and visual melody imagined by the French Jesuit, Father Castel, who lived about the beginning of the last century. Starting with a fancied principle that colors are reducible to a harmonic scale corresponding to the scale of musical sounds, he had manufactured what he called his universal ribbon, on which were graduated all colors and their most minute shades. Of this ribbon he made a little book, which he ingeniously attached to a harpsichord in such a manner that certain leaves would open at the touch of the different keys, thus presenting to the sight a particular shade of color at the same time that the hearing perceived the musical note. It is said that he spent large sums of money on this hobby. He wished also to have silks and other stuffs woven after this principle and “dans ce goût” of which the sacerdotal vestments ought to be made, so that every feast and season would be not only distinguished by those parti-colored robes, but also, according to his principle of the harmonic proportions of color, that by a scientific arrangement of the colors derived from his graduated ribbon one might, and, as he contended, should, note upon the vestments melodies, and even harmony, so that a chasuble would sing the Gloria in Excelsis or a cope the Antiphons at Vespers! We do not find, however, in his works, any proposal to sing, in colors, either at Mass or Vespers, thunder and lightning, landscapes and sunrises, jigs and waltzes, serenades of love-sick swains, the shrieks and gnashing of teeth of devils and lost souls, as our modern musicians have done with their musical coloring.
Sixthly. One of the chief complaints justly made against church music is its liability to the abuse of bringing certain singers of remarkable talent into an undue and often indecent prominence, and thus ministering rather to personal vanity, to petty jealousies and envies, and to the critical delectation of the audience (?), than to the praise and glory of God. That music can be written so as to preclude such an offensive result we are not prepared to deny; but that there is any reasonable hope that it ever will be we do not believe. The principle upon which choice is made of it in preference to chant, and which has extorted the restricted and evidently unwilling toleration of it, forbids us to entertain such a hope. We fancy that such a chastened style of music, composed so as to meet this requirement, would soon be voted as “confessedly unequal to the task of evoking and expressing the feelings of Christian joy and triumph,” and, with plain chant under the same ban, this world would become indeed a vale of tears and
“... plain of groans,
Whose arid wastes resound with moans
Of weepers over dead men's bones.”
The style inherent in music certainly calls for more or less of personal display, and consequently for some sign of appreciation from the listeners, if it be nothing more than that entranced silence which is often the most flattering applause, especially in church.
A little incident has just occurred in connection with our own church choir—we hardly need say that no women sing in it, or that chant is its accepted melody—which illustrates better than long argument the spirit that Gregorian chant inspires in the hearts of the singers. One of their number, a little chorister, lies sick in a hospital. The members of the chorus have made an offering of all the merit they gain in the sight of God, on account of their singing, for his recovery. We imagine the look of puzzled surprise if such an “act” were proposed to the singers of a musical chorus in one of our ordinary gallery-choirs.
We would furthermore ask whether music for the church could be, or is at all likely to be, composed so as not to betray the hand of the composer and elicit applause for him? Ought the people, or priest either, to suffer the distraction of remarking interiorly, “We have Mgr. Newsham's Mass to-day, but it is not so pleasing as Mr. Richardson's revised Mozart that we had last Sunday. I do hope the organist will soon give us one of those Mechlin prize Masses; but we cannot have that, I suppose, until we get a better tenor, for ours is rather a poor voice, etc., etc., etc.”?