Music Lecture.

Following is Mr. Gilman's summary of his first lecture on music given in Sanders Theatre Friday night.

I PITCH.The basis of music is the sensation of pitch. This is a generic sensation, like color, consisting of many elements which taken together form a continuous series between two extremes. With this continuum the spatial ideas of height and depth have come to be associated, for reasons derived both from the nature of the sensation and the conditions of its production at the two extremes. The sequence of different pitches presents itself to the mind as a movement, and especially through these associations as a movement up or down in space. This is an important source of musical expressiveness. Any single sound having distinct pitch we shall call a Note, without distinct pitch a Noise. The physical cause of a note is a regularly periodic air vibration, irregular vibration causing noise. To this difference in their origin is to be referred the aesthetic superiority of notes to noises. The pitch of a note is higher as the vibration causing it is faster. The lowest pitch is produced by about 16 vibrations per second, the highest by about 40,000. In the next lecture we shall study the forms in which pitch presents itself to the ear in the notes of the voice and instruments.