Abstract
THIS important work could only have been written by a musician who was acquainted with the history of music, and also had a considerable knowledge of sciences connected with music, such as mathematics, physics in relation to acoustics, physiology, psychology, and aæesthetics. Almost every page shows the versatility of Prof. Combarieu in dealing with the various aspects of the subject, while his power of lucid description is conspicuous. There is also the graceral beauty of style peculiar to a Frenchman, and it has lost little or nothing in translation. The fundamental thesis of the book is that music is the art of thinking in sounds. According to the author, we can never hope to have an adequate conception of music unless we realise that it is a kind of intellectual activity associated with emotional states, but without those concepts that are the material of ordinary intellectual action. The study of acoustics, the study of sensations of tone, as was so fully carried out by Helmholtz in his first work, “Tonempfindungen,” the study even of scales and major modes, are only to be regarded as contributions to a fuller understanding of music, although not a few writers, in dealing with these aspects of the subject, have deluded themselves with the notion that in so doing they were explaining the true nature of music. All this may be readily granted; but in justice to the physiologist and psychologist, on whom Prof. Combarieu now and then comes down heavily, almost with scorn ill-concealed, it must be contended that the foundation of music does consist of sensations, varying in kind and quality. The composer thinks in sounds which are related to each other according to laws well known to the composer, and which he often trans gresses, and the master musical mind has a kind of instinct that perceives more deeply the hidden mean ings of the phenomena of the cosmos and the still more ill-defined region of human thought and feeling.
Music: its Laws and Evolution.
By Prof. Jules Combarieu. International Scientific Series. Pp. viii + 334. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd., 1910.) Price 5s.
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M'KENDRICK, J. Music: its Laws and Evolution . Nature 83, 91 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/083091a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/083091a0