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BURLESQUE IMITATION.

duced (the proper sphere of which would be the comic opera), it is wonderful how even the greatest

exact resemblance of two women scolding. Mr. Glennie plays the tune, which seems to me to be nothing but confusion and barbarism, and to bear no resemblance to anything in art or nature. Lord Monboddo, another adherent to the imitative notion, says the only true music he ever heard is the thing called the Hen's March, which no man who deserves to have ears in his head would allow to be music at all." Into the second of his miscellaneous essays Beattie introduces a discussion of the query, Is music an imitative art? and his negative is a clearly pronounced one.

One of Geoffrey Crayon's earliest skits was at the expense of musical mimetics in their most exaggerated development. Military overtures, for instance, were then in vogue, from which a tolerable idea was to be gathered of martial tactics; the Battle of Prague and Battle of Marengo displays, from which you might become very well experienced in the fire of musketry, the roaring of cannon, the rattling of drums, whistling of fifes, braying of trumpets, groans of the dying, and trampling of cavalry, without ever going to the wars. "But it is more especially in the art of imitating inimitable things, and giving the language of every passion and sentiment of the human mind, so as entirely to do away with the necessity of speech," that a Salmagundi correspondent claims to have particularly excelled the most celebrated musicians of ancient and modern times. He can imitate every single sound, he avers, in the whole compass of nature, and even improve upon it. Especially he plumes himself on having discovered a method of expressing, in the most striking manner, "that undefinable, indescribable silence which accompanies the falling of snow." Both in Germany and Italy, in the seventeenth century, there was a great deal of burlesque imitative music: the cackling of hens all on one note, and ending with

MIMETIC MUSIC.

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genius gives way to the contagion, and follows the herd, for has not Handel now and then ventured

a fifth above, the mewing of rival cats in nice chromatic order, with a staccato of course by way of a spit-the description is from the oft-quoted Quarterly essay—were favourite pastimes of the severest German contrapuntists; and even Marcello, the Pindar of Music, as he was called, has left two elaborate choruses, one for soprani, the other for contr'alti, which baa like sheep and mou like oxen. These, however, were the “avowed absurdities of men who liked occasionally to drop their robes of dignity." Mendelssohn declined to compose for such a descriptive poem as the Nächtliche Heerschau, because he held it to be simply impossible to do so with success. He could, indeed, he tells Frau von Pereira by letter, have composed music for it in the same descriptive style as Neukomm and Fischof; he might have introduced a very novel rolling of drums in the bass, and blasts of trumpets in the treble, and have brought in all sorts of hobgoblins. "But I love my serious elements of sound too well to do anything of the sort; for this kind of thing always appears to me a joke”—and he compares it to the paintings in juvenile spelling-books, where the roofs are coloured bright red, to make the children aware they are intended for roofs.

It is not, maintains the foremost of feminine authorities on the philosophy of music,—it is not from any walk of imitative music, however enchanting, that the highest musical pleasure can be derived ;—it is not in the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth, that the highest musical capacity can be tried. "It is not the dipping passage like a crested wave in 'The floods stood upright as an heap,' or the wandering of the notes in 'All we like sheep have gone astray,' in which Handel's intensest musical instinct is displayed; for beautiful as are these passages, and full of imagery to eye and ear, they

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HANDEL'S TRICKS OF SOUND.

upon similar tricks of sound? In the "Messiah," at the passage, "I will shake the heavens and the earth," he has introduced a sort of musical pun, by repeating the word several times on a centre of musical shakes, "as if," says a critic, “the quavering of the voice could represent the commotions of the world." And in his "Israel in Egypt," he has undertaken to represent, by musical notes, two of the plagues, namely, the buzzing of flies and the hopping of frogs. Well says the accomplished writer of Letters from the Baltic that our hearts sink as we hear how "the children of Israel sighed ! —sighed !—sighed !—by reason of the bondage;" but we care not for the closest imitation of a sob given in the duet of the Gazza Ladra. "Delusion in music, as in painting, is only the delight of the vulgar." But at all times, as we are reminded, the close power of imitation which music affords has been a dangerous rock for the musician. "Haydn in his finest music did not steer clear of it; one

smack of a certain mechanical contrivance; but it is in the simple soothing power of the first four bars of the first song in the 'Messiah,' which descend like heavenly dew upon the heart, telling us that those divine words, 'Comfort ye,' are at hand." This is pronounced to be the indefinable province of "expression," in which the composer has to draw solely upon his own intense sympathies for the outward likeness of a thing which is felt and judged of only in the innermost depths of every heart.

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THE HAILSTONE CHORUS.

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feels that the servile representations of the tiger's leaps, of the stag's branching horns, of the pattering hail, are so many blots on his glorious 'Creation.'' Handel's Hailstone Chorus the same writer accounts the grandest example in the world of the higher order, suggestive, not servile, of mimetic music-beginning as it does with the closest imitation, for there are the "single decided ominous notes, like the first heavy lumps of ice striking the earth in separate shots:" they fall faster, yet still detached, when from a battery which we have felt hanging suspended above our heads, "down comes the deluge of sonorous hail," shattering everything before it; and having thus raised the idea, Handel is admired for his art in sustaining it with such wonderful simplicity of means -the electric shouting of the choruses "Fire! Hailstones!" only in strict unison-the burst of the storm changing only from quavers into semiquavers—the awful crashing of the elements only the common chord of the key, and that the natural key-till we "feel astonished how the mere representation of the rage of the elements should have given occasion for one of the grandest themes that musician ever composed."* In his apostrophe to

* Another example often cited of Handel's imitative powers in music occurs in the accompaniment to "He spake the

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STORM MUSIC.

Music, as mighty in her threefold power, Mr. Disraeli begins with "First, thou canst call up all elemental sounds, and scenes, and subjects, with the definiteness of reality. Strike the lyre! Lo! the voice of the winds-the flash of the lightning—the swell of the wave-the solitude of the valley!" And Lady Eastlake recognizes the conveyance by storms and tempests of a sense of sublimity which, however frequently vulgarized by the mere tricks of performers, must ever make them favourite subjects for audiences and composers. In Beethoven's tempest in the Pastoral Symphony she hails the grandest and most fearful of all storms; but she owns to a lingering fondness for Steibelt's Storm, in spite

word," plainly meant to suggest the buzzing and swarming of flies.

Again, it has been noticed that in his Deborah, not once is an ascending scale given to the words "To swift perdition," -always are we carried down from the upper note on which the phrase commences.

Mr. Dallas shrewdly says that when Haydn stole the melody to which he set the eighth commandment, the force of musical imitation could no further go. If, adds the critic, the same composer attempts to reflect in sound the creation of light, and to indicate by cadence the movements of the flexible tiger; and if Handel in descanting on the plagues of Egypt gives us the buzz of insect life, and indicates by the depth of his notes the depths of the sea, in which the hosts of Pharaoh were drowned; these imitations are alien to the province of art, and, artistically speaking, are art-failures.

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