Daniel Gregory Mason eBooks

The Dance: (Illustrated Edition). E-book. Formato PDF Daniel Gregory Mason   -  Ionlineshopping.Com, 2019  - 

A Comprehensive Library of Information for Music Lovers and Musicians Introduction ‘The gods themselves danced, as the stars dance in the sky,’ is a saying of the ancient Mexicans. ‘To dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world,’ said the ancient Greek philosophers. ‘What do you dance?’ asks the African Bantu of a member of another tribe after his greeting. Livingston said that when an African wild man danced, that was his religion. It is said that the savages do not preach their religion but dance it. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews danced before their Ark of the Covenant. St. Basil describes the angels dancing in Heaven. According to Dante, dancing is the real occupation of the inmates of Heaven, Christ acting as the leader of a celestial ballet. ‘Dancing,’ said Lucian, ‘is as old as love.’ Dance had a sacred and mystic meaning to the early Christians upon whom the Bible had made a deep impression: ‘We have piped unto you and ye have not danced.’ The service of the Greek Church—even to-day—is for the most part only a kind of sacred dance, accompanied by chants and singing. The priest, walking and gesturing with an incense-pan up and down before the numerous ikons, kneeling, bowing to the saints, performing queer cabalistic figures with his hands in the air, and following always a certain rhythm, is essentially a dancer. It is said that dancing of a similar kind was performed in the English cathedrals until the fourteenth century. In France the priests danced in the choir at the Easter Mass up to the seventh century. In Spain similar religious dancing took deepest root and flourished longest. In the Cathedrals of Seville, Toledo, Valencia and Xeres the dancing survives and is the feature at a few special festivals. ‘The American Indian tribes seem to have had their own religious dances, varied and elaborate, often with a richness of meaning which the patient study of the modern investigators has but slowly revealed,’ writes Havelock Ellis. It is a well-known fact that dancing in ancient Egypt and Greece was an art that was practiced in their temples. ‘A good education,’ wrote Plato, ‘consists in knowing how to sing well and how to dance well.’ According to Plutarch, Helen of Sparta was practicing the Dance of Innocence in the Temple of Artemis when she was surprised and carried away by Theseus. We are told by Greek classics that young maidens performed dances before the altars of various goddesses, consisting of ‘grave steps and graceful, modest attitudes belonging to that order of choric movement called emmeleia.’ The ancient Egyptian Astronomic Dance can be considered the sublimest of all dances; here, by regulated figures, steps, and movements, the order and harmonious motion of the celestial bodies was represented to the music of the flute, lyre and syrinx. Plato alludes to this dance as ‘a divine institution.’ Dancing and architecture are the two primary and plastic arts: the one in Time, the other in Space; the one expressing the soul directly through the medium of the human body, the other giving only an outline of the soul through the medium of fossilized forms. The origin of these two arts is earlier than man himself. Both require mathematics, the one rhythmically, the other symmetrically. For dancing the mathematical forms are to be found in music, for architecture, in geometry. ‘The significance of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the fact that it is simply an intimate concrete appeal of that general rhythm which marks all the physical and spiritual manifestations of life,’ writes Havelock Ellis. 

From Grieg to Brahms / Studies of Some Modern Composers and Their Art. E-book. Formato PDF Daniel Gregory Mason   -  Ionlineshopping.Com, 2019  - 

Music may be hard to understand, but musicians are men;» so remarked a friend of mine when I was first planning these essays. The sentence sums up very happily a truth I have constantly had in mind in writing them. As all music, no matter what its complexity on the technical side, is in essence an expression of personal feeling, and as the qualities of a man's personality show themselves not only in his works, but in his acts, his words, his face, his handwriting and carriage even, it has seemed natural and fruitful, in these studies, to seek acquaintance with the musicians through acquaintance with the men. But personal expression depends not alone on the personality of the artist; it depends also on the resources of art, which in turn are the product of a long, slow growth. Accordingly, if we would understand the individual composers, we must have a sense of the scheme into which they fall, the great universal evolution of which they are but incidents. It is for this reason that I have tried, in the introductory essay on The Appreciation of Music, to describe some of the fundamental principles of the art, and to sketch in their light the general movement of musical history, in order to give the reader a perspective sense, a bird's-eye view of the great army of artists in which the supreme masters are but leaders of battalions and regiments. Without this sense it is impossible truly to place or justly to estimate any individual. At the end of the introduction I apply the principles worked out to determining in a general way how the half dozen composers to be studied are related to modern music as a whole. My result is that although they are practically contemporary, they are by no means peers in the scope and significance of their work. If we arrange them in the order of their influence on art, which depends upon their power both to assimilate previous resources and to add new ones, we must pass «from Grieg to Brahms.» The purpose of the last essay in the book, on The Meaning of Music, will be obvious enough. Just as the introductory essay tries to sketch the general musical environment, as determined by basic principles and developed in history, in relation to which alone the individuals discussed can be understood, so the epilogue seeks to suggest that still larger environment of human feeling and activity on which music, like everything else, depends for its vitality. The first essay considers music as a medium for men, the last considers life as a medium for music.

The Romantic Composers. E-book. Formato PDF Daniel Gregory Mason   -  Ionlineshopping.Com, 2018  - 

This book completes the series of studies of composers and of their music, from Palestrina to the present day, which was begun with "From Grieg to Brahms" (1902), and continued in "Beethoven and his Forerunners" (1904). It will be noted that these three volumes should be read in an order different from that of their publication. First should come "Beethoven and his Forerunners," in which are made a general survey of the periods of musical history and the principles of musical style, and special studies of Palestrina, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; then "The Romantic Composers," in which the story is taken up at the death of Beethoven and carried through the period of romanticism, with essays on Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt; and finally "From Grieg to Brahms," comprising studies of the chief modern musicians, including Grieg, Dvorák, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Tschaïkowsky, and Brahms, and two more general papers on "The Appreciation of Music" and "The Meaning of Music." Thus read, the three books should serve as a commentary on the more important individual composers, æsthetic principles, and historical schools in modern instrumental music. From the first I have had in mind the intention of illuminating the musical peculiarities of each composer by constant reference to his personal character and temperament. For this reason, while I have dealt as briefly as possible with colorless biographical facts, I have made free use of characteristic anecdotes, of contemporary descriptions of appearance, manners, etc., and of letters and table-talk where they are available. Music is indeed a unique artistic medium, and no man can express anything in it except through a technical mastery which has little to do with his character. Yet, given the medium, what he does express is bound to be permeated with his peculiar personality; and as the general reader can get a much clearer idea of a human being like himself than he can of so subtle a technique as that of music, it has seemed better to lay stress on that side, even though it is not the only or perhaps even the most important one. With the object of keeping awake, nevertheless, the reader's sense of those technical methods and traditions which so largely determine the nature of all music, I have included in each book some pages dealing with impersonal principles and historical schools. Believing that one has no right to intrude, in such studies as these, one's own prejudices, but should transcend as far as possible one's temperamental limitations, I had hoped to be able to maintain throughout the attitude of the chronicler, and to exclude all special pleading. In the essays on Berlioz and Liszt I have perhaps not achieved this detachment of attitude. Realism is a tendency which seems to me quite mistaken and mischievous in music, and I have attacked it with some warmth. But in view of the great favor that realism enjoys in contemporary composition, the shoals of writers that rally every day to its defence, and the potency of its appeal to the average listener, whose dramatic sense and pictorial imagination are always livelier than his purely musical perception, I do not greatly fear that I shall dangerously disturb any reader's critical equilibrium. These studies are intended simply as guides to the music they discuss. If they lead the reader to the concert-hall, to the piano, to the library of scores; if they help him to hear themes and their development where before he heard only masses of agreeable sound; if they incite him to repeat and analyze his musical experiences, to listen with his mind as well as his ears, to study a symphony as alertly as he would study a painting or an essay,—then only will they have justified their existence. WASHINGTON, CONNECTICUT, October 17, 1906.