Dancing, music,
and poetry were primitively so closely allied as to be almost identical;
they were still inseparable among the early Greeks. The refrains in our
English ballads indicate the dancer's part in them. The technical use of
the word "foot" in metrical matters still persists to show that a poem is
fundamentally a dance.
Aristotle seems to have first suggested that rhythm and melodies
are motions, as actions are motions, and therefore signs of
feeling. "All melodies are motions," says Helmholtz. "Graceful
rapidity, gravel procession, quiet advance, wild leaping, all
these different characters of motion and a thousand others can be
represented by successions of tones. And as music expresses these
motions it gives an expression also to those mental conditions
which naturally evoke similar motions, whether of the body and
the voice, or of the thinking and feeling principle itself."
(Helmholtz, _On the Sensations of Tone_, translated by A. J.
Ellis, 1885, p. 250.)
From another point of view the motor stimulus of music has been
emphasized by Cyples: "Music connects with the only sense that
can be perfectly manipulated.
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