Mr. Gilman's Lecture on Music.

[Lecturer's Summary.]

Following is an abstract of the seventh lecture in Mr. Gilman's course on the Psychology of Music given at Sever Hall, Wednesday, Feb. 25th at 7.30 p. m. :

It is only in Europe and since the eleventh century that the music of simultaneous notes of different pitch has taken any but very simple forms. The diaphony of Hucbald, seems to have consisted simply in the reduplication at the interval of the fourth or fifth, of the melodies of which music has hitherto consisted. The polyphonic style which was the successor of diaphony involved the simultaneous combination of different melodies; and this in turn gave place at the Reformation to the harmonic style in which a single melody was incorporated into a sequence of chords.

All this music of simultaneous notes at different pitch was composed in the old diatonic scale and addressed to an attitude of listening which on our hypothesis involved the latent anticipation more or less defined, of the sound of a certain one of its steps. This might in different compositions be any one of five or six different notes of the scale. In a music of chords composed under the influence of the feeling of tonality the triad on the tonic becomes the most important of all possible combinations of notes and appears at all points of close in a composition. At points of rest the partial satisfaction of the tonic demand given by the sound of the note A. fifth above (or dominant) suffices. To these two chords, together with that on the subdominant or fifth below the tonic the harmony of simpler compositions is in general confined. That one of the old church tonalities (in C) which could, with slight changes from the Pythagorean model, give major triads on all these three notes met best of all the tonic demand upon harmonic structure and became the Standard Major mode of modern times. The modern minor is a development from two other church tonalities, those in A and in D.

Besides this centralization of harmony upon the tonic note, the grasp of compositions as chord sequences which is characteristic of modern music-listening has led to a demand for relationship by common notes between successive chords and to a greatly extended use of the resolution of discord. These changes are evidence of a capacity for growth in the art to which it seems impossible to set limits.

We here close our discussion of the auditory Psychology of Music to take up in the last lecture the question of the power of textures of tone over the feelings and the imagination.