He as tains much that is not in accordance with usage. certained the distinctive vocal elements of impassioned utterance, but made no attempt toward a complete grammar of its intonation,-restricting his examples, for the most part, to instances of syllable, word, and phrase, with their wider intervals of inflection and skip. Mandeville discovered the fact of sweeps, contours, or tunes, in speech; but made the vital mistake of regarding them as the servitors of syntax, instead of recognizing in melody the autocrat that plays at will with verbal and grammatical forms, so that at his touch they confirm, magnify, modify, contradict, question, or mock themselves. I hope that I may here have written the chapter on expressive speech melody which Rush only began. In the hope of writing it, I have been studying expressive speech melody for more than thirty years, and the material so gathered, formed the nucleus of the book. If the presentation is substantially true, I have, in part at least, fulfilled the obligation that every man owes to his profession, to leave it somewhat richer than he found it. It would be presumptuous indeed to claim that no mistakes have been made. Such as they are, if any, they will, I trust, be discovered and corrected by some finer ear and better brain. To err is human: 'tis godlike to forgive.' Doctor Rush adopted Sir Joshua Steele's theory of measure and rhythm ('Prosodia Rationalis'), as did the followers of Rush,-Barber, Weaver, Murdoch and Russell, Murdoch, Caldwell, G. L. Raymond, Fulton and Trueblood, and others; and many pages of their books are devoted to the exposition and illustration of that theory. Most of these authors, too, give notated examples of melody, some of them many examples; and for years it has been a great puzzle to me why all those notations, beginning with Rush's own, omit any indication of measure and pause. It is certainly as easy to recognize and score the rhythm as to recognize and set down the inflections and the melody; indeed it is a great deal easier. My own notations may need to be looked at with the eye of charity; but I may be permitted to suggest that they at last 'put two and two together'; that they present in one view inflection and melody, measure and pause; and being by so much the more comprehensive, should be by so much the more helpful to the student than the notations of my fathers and my brethren. It is with hesitation-almost with a feeling of guilt-that I venture to call attention to a curious error in one of Doctor Rush's notations. It occurs on page 302 of the 'Philosophy', and is given to illustrate the use of the falling discrete fifth in emphasis. The notation is thus presented, with diatonic rising concretes throughout:— Yet Bru-tus says, he was am-bi-tious. No reader can follow this notation and produce the effect Doctor Rush had in mind, or any effect but that of flat and futile artificiality; partly because of the interval and inflectional direction of the emphatic syllables, which should be marked with emphatic falling concretes; also, and especially, because the syllable '-bi-' follows a train of syllables, itself and they on substantially the same plane of pitch, so that the discrete fall on '-bitious' becomes an ignominious slump. It is an important part of the principle intended to be illustrated, that the syllable from which the discrete fall is to be made, is set, by its own emphatic discrete rise, above the immediately preceding syllable or syllables; otherwise the discrete fall has no background, no relief, no force. After the discrete fall on 'Brutus', the melody should run on the plane of '-tus' until the next similar occasion is reached; then '-bi-' skips upward from the level of 'am-', and '-tious' skips downward from -bi-.' Doctor Rush's intention is fairly presented in the following notation: Yet Bru- tus says, he was am-bi-tious. We are told that even Homer nods, sometimes. I have chosen to risk the charge of egotism, by speaking nearly always in the first person, and as if addressing the student directly, in the second person; in the hope that it may induce in him a friendly and receptive attitude of mind, and somewhat relieve the text of didactic tediousness. When an indefinite somebody addresses anybody and everybody, but nobody in particular, the message is not likely to awaken the same interest as when one personality speaks frankly to another. Besides, the frequently recurring 'I' is a standing guaranty of responsibility and good faith. To Houghton Mifflin Company, for permission to use extracts from Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, and Aldrich; to J. B. Lippincott Company, for the use of passages from T. Buchanan Read's 'Drifting,' 'The Closing Scene,' and The Wild Wagoner of the Alleghenies'; and to D. Appleton and Company, for leave to quote from 'A Forest Hymn,' 'The Death of the Flowers,' and more liberally from the immortal Thanatopsis,'-my grateful thanks are due. Also, and especially, I owe 'more than all can pay' to my friend John W. Bailey, of Baltimore, for many and helpful criticisms and suggestions. |