On the Sensations of Tone (Dover Books on Music)
Language: English
Pages: 608
ISBN: 0486607534
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On the Sensations of Tone
is one of the world's greatest scientific classics. It bridges the gap between the natural sciences and music theory and, nearly a century after its first publication, it is still a standard text for the study of physiological acoustics — the scientific basis of musical theory. It is also a treasury of knowledge for musicians and students of music and a major work in the realm of aesthetics, making important contributions to physics, anatomy, and physiology in its establishment of the physical theory of music. Difficult scientific concepts are explained simply and easily for the general reader.
The first two parts of this book deal with the physics and physiology of music. Part I explains the sensation of sound in general, vibrations, sympathetic resonances, and other phenomena. Part II cover combinational tones and beats, and develops Helmholtz's famous theory explaining why harmonious chords are in the ratios of small whole numbers (a problem unsolved since Pythagoras).
Part III contains the author's theory on the aesthetic relationship of musical tones. After a survey of the different principles of musical styles in history (tonal systems of Pythagoras, the Church, the Chinese, Arabs, Persians, and others), he makes a detailed study of our own tonal system (keys, discords, progression of parts).
Important points in this 576-page work are profusely illustrated with graphs, diagrams, tables, and musical examples. 33 appendices discuss pitch, acoustics, and music, and include a very valuable table and study of the history of pitch in Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
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modern improvements, as may be seen on comparing the older forms of the melodies, and it is usually possible to omit the notes which do not belong to the scale of five tones without impairing the melody. This is not only true of the older melodies, but of more modern popular airs which were composed during the last two centuries, whether by learned or unlearned musicians. Hence the Gaels as well as the Chinese, notwithstanding their acquaintance with the modern tonal system, hold fast by the
generally allow the fifth and sixth partial tone to be audible, but make the higher partials either entirely inaudible or at least very faint, and since, moreover, the seventh partial is dissonant with the fifth, sixth, and eighth, and is not used in the scale, the series of tones available for the closing chord terminates with the Third. Thus we actually find down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, that the final chord has either no Third, or only a major Third, even in tonal modes
| f, have for musical composition the especially important advantage of combining those limiting tones of the key, which separate it from the nearest related keys, and are consequently extremely well suited for marking the key in which the harmony is moving at any given time. If the harmony passed into G major or G minor, f would have to be replaced by . If it passed into F major, d would become d1 and if into F minor d would become and b1 would in the same chords become , Thus— This shews that
doubted that these are the essential foundations of the great breadth and wealth of expression which modern compositions can attain without losing their artistic unity. We then saw that the requirements of harmonic musio reacted in a peculiar manner on the construction of scales; that properly speaking only one of the old tonal modes (our major mode) could be retained unaltered,4 and that the rest after undergoing peculiar modifications were fused into our minor mode, which, though most like the
of five tones may be formed by omission from scales of seven tones, but on the other hand many scales of five tones seem to be entirely independent of tones of seven tones, neither generating them nor being generated by them. Though some of Chinese pentatonic scales, as Nos. 103 and 107, seem to be derived from heptatonic or conversely, yet all the Javese pentatonic scales are thoroughly independent of any heptatonic form. No. 94 and Nos. 97 to 102 could not be expressed as parts of even our