Music is a language without words.
Martin Luther
The primal organ of utterance of the inner man is music.
Richard Wagner
Virtually all philologists today agree that before there was language, man communicated through musical sounds. What do they mean? Paleontologists, judging by changes which occurred in the shape of the human skull formation with respect for room for modern vocal cords, generally hold that language as we know it was not possible before 250,000 BC. Music, meaning the voice and instruments made from natural objects, is presumed to be much older. In any case, the overtone series, the single natural law of physics upon which all music is based, was present far before man himself. Whatever prior creature had ears to hear, heard sounds organized according to the overtone series.
The musical sounds early man made were, it seems reasonable to suppose, emotional utterances using the five basic vowel sounds – much like what a dog does. This was the very point made by one of the many writers who have speculated on the idea that musical communication came before language, Richard Wagner!
The primal organ of utterance of the inner man, however, is music, as the most spontaneous expression of the inner feeling stimulated from without. A mode of expression similar to that still proper to the beasts was alike first employed by man (and this we can demonstrate at any moment by removing from our language its dumb articulations [consonants] and leaving nothing but the open sounds of the vowels). In these vowels, if we think of them as stripped of their consonants, and picture to ourselves the manifold and vivid play of inner feelings, with all their range of joy and sorrow, we shall obtain an image of man’s first emotional language; a language in which the stirred and high-strung Feeling could certainly express itself through nothing but a combination of ringing tones, which altogether of itself must take the form of Melody. His melody, which was accompanied by appropriate bodily gestures in such a way as the gestures would also appear a simultaneous inner expression, and from these gestures we get rhythm.1
Voltaire, having much the same viewpoint, proposed that it was the addition of gesture to these sounds which created the first step from these sounds toward the earliest language.
May we not, without offending anyone, suppose that the alphabet originated in cries and exclamations? Infants of themselves articulate one sound when an object catches their attention, another when they laugh, and a third when they are whipped, which they ought not to be…. From exclamations formed by vowels as natural to children as croaking is to frogs, the transition to a complete alphabet is not so great as may be thought. A mother must always have said to her child the equivalent of come, go, take, leave, hush!, etc. These words represent nothing; they describe nothing; but a gesture makes them intelligible.2
With the five basic vowel sounds, early man expressed a variety of emotions and emotional reactions to his world. These five basic vowel sounds not only continue today as a fundamental part of every language on earth, but we as individuals also carry significant remnants of early man’s musical communication. When we become excited, the voice rises in pitch. This comes from early man. Every sentence we utter has melodic contour and it is this melodic contour which clarifies the meaning of the sentence. We create emphasis for a specific spoken word by raising the pitch. We call it accent and again it comes to us from the singing of early man, as suggested by Roger Bacon (b. c. 1214):
For accent is a kind of singing; whence it is called accent from “accino,” “accinis” [I sing, thou singest], because every syllable has its own proper sound either raised, lowered, or composite, and all syllables of one word are adapted or sung to one syllable on which rests the principal sound. Thus length and shortness and all other things required in correct pronunciation are reduced to music.3
The communication of emphasis by raising the voice must be very ancient.
Another example of the influence music had on developing languages is the entire realm of meter and governance of time. In his treatise on mathematics, Roger Bacon maintains that the theologian must have training in music in order to understand the Scriptures.4 Aside from the numerous references to music itself in the Old Testament, Bacon points to the many kinds of meters found in the old Hebrew text. Here he notes that while the grammarian may teach the practical rules, only Music gives “the reasons and theories” for these meters. In the same manner, he points to the issue of pronunciation, as the Scripture is filled with “accents, longs, shorts, colons, commas, and period. All these belong causally to music, because of all these matters the musician states the reason, but the grammarian merely the fact.”
Eventually a means of notating music was developed. A Church mathematician known as John (c. 1100 AD), argues for the need for this notation.
Music is one of the seven liberal arts — and a natural one, as are the others. Thus we sometimes see jongleurs and actors who are absolutely illiterate composing pleasant-sounding songs. But just as grammar, dialectic, and the other arts would be considered vague and chaotic if they were not committed to writing and made clear by precepts, so it is with music.5
While he acknowledges the jongleurs managed to compose and perform quite well without theoretical knowledge, he argues that one cannot really be called a musician unless one can read notation and, by implication, understand the theory behind it. One can learn to read music, if one “devotes unremitting labor to it and perseveres without pausing or wearying.” A singer who cannot read music he compares to “a drunken man who does indeed get home but does not in the least know by what path he returns.” Finally, he concludes that the musician who performs without reading or understanding theory is “a beast by definition.”
We have only a dim idea of language before the age of writing, c. 3,000 BC, but it seems reasonable to us to suppose that the further back you go, the closer you get to early man’s musical-emotional utterances. But one wonders what were the intermediate steps on the way to modern language? Perhaps there was a step represented by the Rhapsodist. If only we could hear once again this artist who performed before the advent of the written form of the Greek language. Plato, in Ion, describes his as a kind of musician, performing epic poetry in something in between music and speech, and discusses the emotional impact he had on his listeners. Because of him for two millennia poetry would be sung and not recited. Perhaps a last remnant of this was the “canting” heard by the underworld of London in the 18th century. Thomas Dekker, in an essay of lowlife in London, describes canting as follows:
This word “canting” seems to be derived from the Latin verb (canto) which signifies in English, to sing, or to make a sound with words, that is to say to speake. And very aptly may canting take his “derivatio a cantando,” from singing, because amongst these beggarly consorts that can play upon no better instruments, the language of canting is a kinde of musicke, and he that in such assemblies can cant best, is counted the best Musician.6
Perhaps some clues of intermediate steps might be found in the history of oratory. Numerous early treatises not only speak of relationships with music but emphasize the relationship of movement and emotion. The oratory treatises emphasize the importance of communicating emotion to the listener, something, ironically, early music treatises almost never do.
When written languages first appear they were essentially primitive pictures, that is the symbol for house looked like a house. This was not only natural, but effective for man’s experience corresponded with the written language. Eventually this form of writing became too complicated and so symbolic writing began. In this form of writing a relatively small number of symbols (as in the alphabet) can be combined to form unlimited words. However, the problem this created meant that now man’s experience was no longer is connected to the written form. The letters, “C–A–T,” have nothing about them to resemble a cat. Thus learning a language now became a separate step, as was the experience of Plutarch (46–119 AD).
Upon which that which happened to me, may seem strange, though it be true; for it was not so much by the knowledge of words, that I came to understanding of things, but rather by my experience of things I was enabled to follow the meaning of words.7
Having a language which is by its very nature something separate from the experiential side of ourselves, the real us, causes problems in communication. Already in the 5th century BC, the philosopher Gorgias argued that Reason must be based solely on language because the information gained through the senses cannot be communicated through language.
For how could any one communicate by word of mouth what he has seen? And how could that which has been seen be indicated to a listener if he has not seen it? For just as the sight does not recognize sounds, so the hearing does not hear colors but sounds; and he who speaks, speaks, but does not speak a color or a thing. When, therefore, one has not a thing in the mind, how will he get it there from another person by word or any other token of the thing except by seeing it, if it is a color, or hearing it, if it is a noise? For he who speaks does not speak a noise at all, or a color, but a word; and so it is impossible to conceive a color, but only see it, nor a noise, but only to hear it.8
But, if that is not bad enough, St Basil (4th century AD) reminds us that language fails even to communicate very well our rational left hemisphere of the brain.
Even when I was writing to your Eloquence, I knew well that every theological expression is less than the thought in the mind of the speaker and less than the interpretation desired by him who seeks, because speech is in some way too weak to serve perfectly our thoughts.9
Exactly like early philosophers, we today find ourselves observers of numerous situations in which two people seem to have difficulty communicating through their common language. Why is this? Conceptual information (left hemisphere of the brain) should be perfectly capable of communication through conceptual symbolic language, providing the speaker/writer is capable of using this symbolic language correctly, and the listener/reader has an equal background in the subject and understands the agreed conventional meaning of the symbolic language. But, as Voltaire points out, this “agreed conventional meaning” fails in common usage. Under “Abuse of Words,” in his Philosophical Dictionary, he goes to some lengths to demonstrate that language, and books, “rarely give us any precise ideas” and are often taken by the listener in an incorrect sense. In this regard, he mentions that he finds it curious that “the same word (Adoration) that is used in addressing the Supreme Being is also used in addressing a mistress.”
The problem, as Voltaire indirectly suggests, is that the speaking/writing part of us, the left hemisphere, cannot express non-rational concepts very well, as anyone knows who has ever tried to write a love letter. This is why we have retained, since earliest man, a separate non-rational language, which we call Music. Among the other gifts we possess from early man is a certain amount of genetic, universal musical information and genetic universal forms (and gestures) of the basic emotions. Languages are very recent in the history of man and they exist in the left hemisphere of the brain as dictionaries with agreed upon usages. But these languages carry no feeling. When we speak, feeling is added by the emotional content in the right hemisphere. In other words, feelings are natural. Language is artificial. Voltaire goes further and suggests that feelings are more important even than scientific facts,
What will I gain from knowing the path of light and the gravitation of Saturn? These are sterile truths. One feeling is a thousand times more important.10
The inability of language to convey feeling is why music is so necessary as a special language for feeling. During the long centuries when the Church controlled what could be published in books, little can be found on this subject since the Church had taken a position of trying to eliminate emotion from the life of the Christian. But with the dawn of the Renaissance, so characterized by the return of the importance of feelings, one finds frequent references to the failure of language in describing feeling, together with observations on the importance of music to take over that function. Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377), for example, describes good speech as “moderate, well-chosen, and appropriate, based wholly on Reason.” But, what happens to Reason-dominated speech when Love is present? It can, Machaut observes, force one,
to cut short his words and interrupt them with sighs, drawn from the depths of his being, that render him mute and silent, and he has no choice but to remain speechless.11
His great countryman of the following generation, Froissart (1333–1405), made a similar complaint,
Pleasure sets him on fire so forcefully
And true love has such power over him
That, when he wishes to express his feelings,
He cannot move his mouth or bring forth words.
But what Machaut could not express in words, he found he could express through music.
So I decided that I would compose, according to my feelings towards you and in praise of you, a lai, a “complainte,” or original song; for I did not dare or know how to tell you otherwise how I felt, and it seemed to be better to tell in my new song what was oppressing and wringing my heart than to try by some other method.12
Furthermore, Machaut points out that it is in the music, not the words of the song, that his beloved will discover Truth. And he is correct, for only the left-hemisphere of the brain is capable of lying!
And if it please you, my dear lady, to consider the last little song I sang, of which I composed both words and music, you can easily tell whether I’m lying or speaking the truth.13
In Italy, in Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), we find the identical thought, “listen to the music, not the words” if you want to know the truth!
Love, heed not what my voice sings (the words), but rather how much my heart, your subject, is filled with desire.14
But of all the 16th century writers, the one who felt most strongly that music was a special language of feeling was Martin Luther. In 1538 Luther wrote the preface for a collection of part-songs based on the suffering and death of Jesus. In addition to mentioning the emphasis on music in the Old Testament, together with his own awe of the art, Luther touches on the most fundamental purpose of music, to express feelings.
Here ought one to speak of the use one might make of so great a thing, but even this use is so infinitely manifold that it is beyond the reach of the greatest eloquence of the greatest orators. We are able to adduce only this one point at present, namely, that experience proves that, next to the Word of God, only music deserves being extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart.
Luther expands his testimonial to music’s ability to express feeling in his preface to Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae, published in the same year. He could not be more correct when he says “music is a language [of feelings] without words.” And notice he calls music the “mistress and governess of the emotions which as masters govern men.” There in a sentence is what should be the purpose and curriculum of music education.
Here it must suffice to discuss the benefit of this great art. But even that transcends the greatest eloquence of the most eloquent, because of the infinite variety of its forms and benefits. We can mention only one point (which experience confirms), namely, that next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. She is a mistress and governess of those human emotions which as masters govern men or more often overwhelm them. No greater commendation that this can be found — at least not by us. For whether you wish to comfort the sad, to terrify the happy, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate, or to appease those full of hate — and who could number all these masters of the human heart, namely, the emotions, inclinations, and affections that impel men to evil or good? — what more effective means than music could you find?… Thus it was not without reason that the fathers and prophets wanted nothing else to be associated as closely with the Word of God as music. Therefore, we have so many hymns and Psalms where message and music join to move the listener’s soul, while in other living beings and [sounding] bodies music remains a language without words.
The Baroque Period was obsessed with music’s ability to communicate feeling and from this time forward there is much commentary. Johann Scheibe wrote in 1739,
Music which does not penetrate the heart or the soul … is quite dead, and lacks spirit and vitality.15
A more typical expression of this purpose during the Baroque is given by Georg Muffat, in his Florilegia (1695). He writes that he has given each suite the name of “some state of the affections which I have experienced,” namely, Piety, The Joys of the Hopeful, Gratitude, Impatience, Solicitude, Flatteries, and Constancy.
Johann Mattheson wrote extensively on performance practice and about the “Doctrine of Affections,” a label given to the theory of the expression of feelings through music. In one place he notes that although the emotions are like a bottomless sea, one can write very little about them (in words).16 He also adds that he regrets that some composers fail to express feelings through their music. He finds the reason for this must be in the fact that they do not know their own desires or what they actually wanted to achieve.
The French Baroque philosophers gave considerable thought to, and left important papers on, the power of music to communicate feeling. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1670–1742) viewed everything from the aesthetic perspective of Nature. It is a particularly accurate and important point he makes when he reminds his readers that spoken words are mere symbols of emotion, but carry no actual emotional content in themselves. Sung words, on the other hand, carry the direct emotional meaning of the music. He believed this ancient emotional communication might well be thought of as “the work of nature herself,”
Just as the painter imitates the forms and colors of nature so the musician imitates the tones of the voice — its accents, sighs and inflections. He imitates in short all the sounds that nature herself uses to express the feelings and passions. All these sounds, as we have already shown, have a wonderful power to move us because they are the signs of the passions that are the work of nature herself, from whence they have derived their energy. Spoken words, on the other hand are only arbitrary symbols of the passions. The spoken word only derives its meaning and value from man-made conventions and it has only limited geographical currency.17
Du Bos makes another very important aesthetic point: what matters in music composition is the communication of feeling, “the language of nature and the passions.” The ability to do this he calls “genius.” This is not to be confused with the grammar of music, musical theory or the art of composition.
Just as some people are more attracted to the color of pictures than to the expression of passions, so others are only sensible to the pleasures of melody or even to the richness of harmony, and pay not the slightest attention to whether the melody is an effective imitation, or care whether it is consonant with the words to which it is set. Such people do not require the composer to match his melodic lines to the feelings that the words suggest, but are content that his melodies should be pleasing, and even singular. As far as they are concerned it is enough that the occasional word in a recitative shall be treated expressively. There are far too many musicians who are of this mind, and who act as though music were incapable of anything more….18
Another very important French philosopher, Charles Batteux (1713–1780), left a brilliant discussion of man’s forms of communication. He begins with the definition, “Men have three means of expressing their ideas and their feelings: speech, the tone of the voice, and gesture.”19 In defining how these three differ, he begins with two extraordinary deductions, which have since been confirmed in clinical research: that emotions are genetic and that through music they speak directly to the listener without the aid of Reason, which is to say, the left hemisphere of the brain. When he says “music is a dictionary of plain nature,” we again think of early man.
Speech expresses passion only by means of the ideas to which the feelings are tied, and as though by reflection. Tone and gesture reach the heart directly and without any detour. In a word, speech is a language of institution, which men have formed for communicating their ideas more distinctly: gestures and tones are like the dictionary of plain nature; they contain a language that we all know upon being born and of which we make use to announce everything that is related to our needs and to the conservation of our being: also they are vivid, short, energetic. What better basis for the arts, whose object is to move the soul, than a language all of whose expressions are rather those of humanity itself than those of men!
Batteux next draws an interesting distinction between the purpose of music and poetry,
From which I conclude first: That the principal object of music and of dance should be the imitation of feeling or of passions: instead of which that of poetry is principally the imitation of actions.20
Batteux concludes his discussion with a marvelous testimonial to the fact that the importance of music, the feelings, cannot be communicated in words.
It is true, you may say, that a melodic line can express certain passions: love, for instance, or joy, or sadness. But for every passion that can be identified there are a thousand others that cannot be put into words. That is indeed so, but does it follow that these are pointless? It is enough that they are felt; they do not have to be named. The heart has its own understanding that is independent of words. When it is touched it has understood everything. Moreover, just as there are great things that words cannot reach, so there are subtle things that words cannot capture, above all things that concern the feelings.21
The English philosopher of the Baroque who was most thoughtful on the nature of communication through music was Charles Avison (1709–1770). He mentions something that only a very few prior philosophers had, that it is somehow the nature of music itself that it only communicates positive emotions.
I would appeal to any man, whether ever he found himself urged to acts of selfishness, cruelty, treachery, revenge, or malevolence by the power of musical sounds? Or if he ever found jealousy, suspicion, or ingratitude engendered in his breast, either from harmony or discord? I believe no instance of this nature can be alleged with truth. It must be owned, indeed, that the force of music may urge the passions to an excess, or it may fix them on false and improper objects, and may thus be pernicious in its effects: But still the passions which it raises, though they may be misled or excessive, are of the benevolent and social kind, and in their intent at least are disinterested and noble.22
Avison makes another, and very important, point. What we call today, “text-painting,” is not an example of music communicating feeling. This is more like metaphor and detracts from the genuine expression of emotions which is the nature of music.
We have mentioned above some of the characteristics of the “music” of early man which is with us still in our spoken languages. The English philosopher William Shenstone (1714–1763), a man of perceptive intelligence, was of the opinion that perhaps it is the genetic music in us which determines our preferences in literary authors. After reading his comments, it occurred to us that instead of saying language developed after music, perhaps we should say language is a form of music.
It may in some measure account for the difference of taste in the reading of books, to consider the difference of our ears for music. One is not pleased without a perfect melody of style, be the sense what it will. Another, of no ear for music, gives to sense its full weight without any deduction on account of harshness. Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As proof of this, let us reflect, what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones.23
By the arrival of the 19th century the arguments of these early philosophers were confirmed time and time again. We need not repeat the arguments at length, but for the interest of the reader we shall provide some representative quotations. We begin with the employment of music when language fails.
When Langauge Fails
When one is at a loss what to say or write, well – one tries to help oneself with music.
Franz Liszt
It is a truth forever, that where the speech of man stops short, there Music’s reign begins.
Richard Wagner
Where words fail, music speaks.
Hans Christian Anderson
Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.
Leo Tolstoy
To sing seems a deliverance from bondage. Music expresses that which cannot be said, and which cannot be suppressed.
Victor Hugo
Language is not subtle enough, tender enough to express all we feel, and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translate into music.
Robert Ingersoll
We add now some similar quotations on the general nature of music as a language of feeling.
On Music as a Language of Feeling
Music is to me the perfect expression of the soul.
Robert Schumann
…..
Schubert unburdened his heart on a sheet of music paper, just as others leave the impression of passing moods in their journals. His soul was so steeped in music that he wrote notes where others use words.
The prevailing characteristics of my music are passionate expression, intense ardor, rhythmical animation, and unexpected turns.
Hector Berlioz
Be it laughter or tears, feverish passion or religious ecstasy, nothing, in the category of human feelings, is a stranger to music.
Paul Dukas
Music, in and by itself, should generate a flow of pure emotion without the least tinge of extraneous rationalization.
Max Reger
Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
Maurice Ravel
Music is an outburst of the soul.
Frederick Delius
Music is a distinct language which speaks clearly…
Felix Mendelssohn
…..
People usually complain that music is so ambiguous; that it is so doubtful what they ought to think when they hear it; whereas everyone understands words. With me it is entirely the reverse. And not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words; these, too, seem to me to be so ambiguous, so vague, and so easily misunderstood in comparison with genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by a piece of music which I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.
Music is a means of communicating with people, not an aim in itself.
Modeste Moussorgsky
Music … is a language, but a language of the intangible, a kind of soul-language.
Edward MacDowell
Music is the speech of Passion.
Richard Wagner
…..
Music, who speaks to us solely through quickening into articulate life the most universal concept of the inherently speechless Feeling…
At no time and in no place has music been merely playing with sounds. The vibrations themselves which we perceive as musical sounds are not exclusively material in nature — emotional elements are active in them, lending inner meaning and coherence to the sound phenomenon: only thus can the successive and simultaneous arrangement of notes become a musical language whose eloquence speaks to the human soul.
Bruno Walter
We need also to recommend to the reader Wagner’s essay on Beethoven in which he pays homage to Schopenhauer’s discussion of music as a language of feeling. The key points Schopenhauer makes are:
- His wonder at the fact that music is a language immediately intelligible by everyone.
- Music does this directly with no need of any aid from the intellect.
- Music is an Idea unto itself and is not a part of something else.
- Music cannot strictly be set forth in logical terms (music theory!) and the essence of music cannot be understood through any mere objective knowledge (such as drawing Roman numerals beneath the chords).
This final point that Wagner draws from the philosophy of Schopenhauer is what lies at the heart of the failure of modern American music education.
Finally we have mentioned above several philosophers who went so far as to propose the possibility of using music to replace ordinary international languages. This idea was particularly current in France where Descartes, Chenier, Nodier, Chabanon, De Vismes and J.-J. Rousseau in particular, began to speculate on the possibility of an international language based on music. An article by Voltaire, in his Dictionnaire philosophique will provide the reader with the general line of thought among these various philosophers.
There is no complete language which has the power to express all of our ideas and feelings, whose nuances are very numerous and imperceptible. No one can express precisely the degree of feeling that he feels. One is obliged, in consequence, to use a general name, such as love or hate, for thousands of different kinds of love and hate – everyone would be different. It is the same for pain and pleasure. All languages are imperfect, as we are …
Languages have all been made successively [over time], and by degrees, according to our needs. It is the instinct common to all men which made the first grammar, without being aware of it. The Laplander, the Blacks, as well as the Greeks, needed to be able to express the past, present and future; and they did it, but not because they ever had meetings of logicians to create a language. No one ever created an absolutely regular language …
Of all the languages of Europe, the French language must be the most general, because it is the most proper for conversation: its character is in common with the people who speak it …
The most beautiful language should be the one which can express the weakest and most impetuous movements of the soul. It will be the one which most resembles music.
Notes
- Ellis, The Prose Works of Wagner, II, 224ff ↩︎
- Philosophical Dictionary, The Alphabet. ↩︎
- The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, trans. Burke, I, 259ff ↩︎
- Mathematics, Ibid., I, 259 ↩︎
- John, “On Music,” in Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music, trans. Babb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 51ff ↩︎
- Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-Light (1609), in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, III, 194 ↩︎
- “Life of Demosthenes” ↩︎
- Quoted in Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 167 ↩︎
- Letter to Gregory of Nazianzus ↩︎
- Letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville (February, 1737) ↩︎
- Remede de Fortune, trans. James Wimsatt and William Kibler (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1988), 180 ↩︎
- Remede de Fortune, 368 ↩︎
- L’Ameto ↩︎
- “A Congratulatory Poem [for] Prince Philip, Upon his Happy Return,” in The Collected Works of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 1992), LXXXV, 139 ↩︎
- Poem in honor of the publication of Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), trans., 74 ↩︎
- Der volkommene Capelmeister, Op. cit., I, iii, 83, 88 ↩︎
- Quoted in Peter le Huray and James Day, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, 18 ↩︎
- Ibid., 21ff ↩︎
- Quoted in Ibid., 260 ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid., 50 ↩︎
- Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression [London, 1753] (New York: Broude Reprint, 1967), 2ff. Of course, he had not heard the pop music of our era! ↩︎
- William Shenstone, Men and Manners (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 49 ↩︎
