Walter Raymond Spalding Quotes

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One of the peculiar characteristics of music is that it is both the most natural and least artificial of the arts, and as well the most complicated and subtle.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The Development, beginning in measure 132, is a striking example of how difficult it was—even for an exponent of freedom in musical expression like Schumann—to break loose from the shackles of arbitrary form.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Another favorite means of arresting the attention was by modulation; not used in a constructive in different keys, but to furnish the ear with a purely sensuous delight, corresponding to that which the eye derives from the kaleidoscopic colors of a sunset.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The significant development of the Harvard Band is chiefly attributable to the artistic skill and enterprise of Leroy Anderson. Anderson has a remarkable inborn sense of rhythm and magnetic authority as a conductor. While in college he was a ranking student in the Department of Music and has no small skill as a composer, as may be seen from his exciting potpourri Wintergreen for President, including tunes by Gershwin and some of his own.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The best eulogy of Schumann is the recognition that many of the tendencies in modern music, which we now take for granted, date from him: the exaltation of freedom and fancy over the mere formal presentation, the union of broad culture with musical technique, and the recognition of music as the art closest in touch with the aspirations of humanity. He was an idealist with such perseverance and clearness of aim that his more characteristic work can never die.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The rhythm of music, akin to the human heart-beat and to the ceaseless change and motion, which is the basic fact in all life, apeals at once to our own physical vitality.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The sensational style of Prometheus is augmented by the use of a color machine which flashes upon a screen hues supposed to supplement the various moods of the music. How many of these experiments will be incorporated into the accepted idiom of music, time alone will tell; but they prove conclusively that modern music is thoroughly awake and is proving true to that spirit of freedom which is the breath of its being.

Walter Raymond Spalding
It may be granted that Debussy's melodic line is very fluid and elastic, like Wagner's "continuous melody," not definitely sectionalized by balanced phrases or set cadences. But it surely has its own right to existence—music being pre-eminently the art of freedom—and let us remember that Nature herself has melting outlines, shadowy vistas and subtle rhythms. Debussy, in fact, is the poet of the "indefinite" and the "suggestive" and his music has had great influence in freeing expression from scholastic bond.

Walter Raymond Spalding
In Schubert we do not look for the development of a complicated plot but give ourselves up unreservedly to the enjoyment of pure melodic line, couched in terms of sensuously delightful tone-color. The transitional passage of the Recapitulation (measures 231–253) illustrates Schubert's fondness for modulation just for its own sake; we care not what the objective point of the music may be—enthralled, as we are, by the magical shifts of scene.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The chief melody, often in the upper voice, seems to float on underlying waves of sound.

Walter Raymond Spalding
A glance at the score shows how sadly the pedagogue might go astray in judgment of the work, without a hearing of it, and furthermore, the imagination of the hearer must be in sympathy with the imagination of the composer, if he would know full enjoyment: for this symphonic poem provokes swooning thoughts, such as come to the partakers of leaves and flowers of hemp; there are the stupefying perfumes of charred frankincense and grated sandal-root.

Walter Raymond Spalding
A knowledge of Bach is the beginning of musical wisdom.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The firmness of structure inherent in the canonic form is perfectly compatible with genuine freedom and poetry of inspiration.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Of all the arts, music makes the most direct appeal to the emotions and to those shadowy, but real portions of our being called the imagination and the soul. Emotion is as indispensible to music as love to religion.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Thus a very etherial, magical quality of tone is produced, especially in the upper ranges of the instrument.

Walter Raymond Spalding
The Introductory chords dissolve the dream which the music has evoked, and we are back once more in the world of reality.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Music requires active coöperation by the hearer.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Listz was undoubtedly encouraged in his revolutionary aims by Wagner's fiery courage.

Walter Raymond Spalding
In general, Chopin's style is homophonic—wondrous lyric melodies which seem to float on waves of richly colored sound. But there is also much subtly used polyphony, i. e., delightful phrases in inner voices and imitative effects between the different parts.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Beginning with Beethoven, however, composers began to exhibit great freedom in the application of Sonata-Form.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Chabrier (1841–1894) is noted for a bold exuberance and vividness of expression, for a sense of humor and for a power of orchestral color and brilliance which have not been duplicated. … Born in the South of France, the hot blood of that magic land seems to throb in his music.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Music is of such power and glory that we should be ready to devote to its study as much time as to a foreign language.

Walter Raymond Spalding
We realize, and with our inborn equipment can appreciate, the moving power of music; but to define, in the usual sense of the term definition, what music really is, will be forever impossible. The fact indeed that music—like love, electricity and other elemental forces—cannot be defined is its special glory. It is a peculiar, mysterious power; quite in a class by itself, although with certain aspects which it shares with the other arts.

Walter Raymond Spalding
It speaks to our feelings and imaginations, as it were by suggestion; reaching for this very reason depths of our being quite beyond the power of mere words.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Schumann claimed that his object in writing music was to influence the imagination of the listeners that they could go on dreaming for themselves.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Next to rhythm, modulation is the most stimulating and enchanting element in music. No composition of any scope can be considered truly great unlesss it abounds in beautiful modulations. Certain composers, to be sure, have in this respect more genius than others—notably Schubert, Chopin, Wagner and Franck whose music seems to waft us along on a magic carpet of delight. But just as Unity depends upon a definite basic tonality, so Variety is gained by this very freedom of modulation. … By the perfect balance in his works of these two related elements a genius may be definitely recognized.

Walter Raymond Spalding
Just as poetry and prose are a series of stanzas or sentence, so a musical composition is a succession of definitely organized portions of thought and emotion, in terms of rhythm and sound. In the heart of a composition, to be sure, we often find a great freedom in the phraseology, comparible to blank verse or to a rhapsodic kind of prose.

Walter Raymond Spalding