The only man in England who is permitted to write in
a style which is in the main of home growth is the Irish Jew, Sir
Arthur Sullivan. If we may go to a foreign style why may we not go
to one of an earlier period? But surely we may do whatever we like,
and the better we like it the better we shall do it. The great thing
is to make sure that we like the style we choose better than we like
any other, that we engraft on it whatever we hear that we think will
be a good addition, and depart from it wherever we dislike it. If a
man does this he may write in the style of the year one and he will
be no anachronism; the musical critics may call him one but they
cannot make him one.
Chapters in Music
The analogy between literature, painting and music, so close in so
many respects, suggests that the modern custom of making a whole
scene, act or even drama into a single, unbroken movement without
subdivision is like making a book without chapters, or a picture,
like Bernardino Luini's great Lugano fresco in which a long subject
is treated within the compass of a single piece. Better advised, as
it seems to me, Gaudenzio Ferrari broke up a space of the same shape
and size at Varallo into many compartments, each more or less
complete in itself, grouped round a central scene. The subdivision
of books into chapters, each with a more or less emphatic full close
in its own key, is found to be a help as giving the attention halting
places by the way.
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