River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1889-05-30
SOUNDS or NATURE.
MusIo Whose Interpretation Needs n
Ancient or Secret Art.

Muelc Whose Interpretation Needs NO
Ancient or Secret Art.
The sonata has been called the most
perfect form Of piano music known.
and in that, although Haydn and Mo-
cart exceled, Beethoven is the chief of
all the composers. and all that can be
said by single instrument has been
written for the voice of the piano. But
although it takes a Beethoven to make
the theme and its variations one, and
although it takes the first of mechani-
clans and designers to elaborate the
instrument that is to give them musical
expression, and although it takes pa
thence and skill and talent, and some
times even genius to be able TO use
brain and fingers so as TO interpret the
thought of Beethoven. yet there is an
other music, unwritteu, and &c be
played on no one instrument, and it
takes neither genius. nor mechanism,
nor industry to hear and feel and iu-
terpret these unformulated strains OF
nature-that music which exists every
where throughout creation, which has
its tone in every object, which re-
sounds where the sea touches the shore,
where the snow Sits through the
air, where the voice strikes the hill
side, where the leaves stir against one
another, where the wind wings and the
stars soar through space. To read this
music one needs no ancient or secret
art, no written page. no instrument
nothing but a soul. One can not crit
icise it; one can not say its time is inn
perfect, its measures are incorrect; but
one can watch its themes develop al
most as easily as in the music rendered
by the player where the left had keeps
the time and marks the measure, the
''leader of the orchestra, "as Beethoven
himself said, while the right hand
wanders away at its own sweet will in
all subtle freedom of variation to re-
turn to it again.
One hears the melancholy in the wall
of the rising wind at twilight, when
| the trees murmur together in sadness;
one recognizes it, marks it deepen and
strengthen, diminish and die away;
one hears the JOY of a sea-breeze in
the sunshine singing in over the
crested ridges, and signing itself soft
/ ly away in full contest as it washes up
| the sand; one hears the hum of happi-
ness any summer morning blending in
rich chord with the murmur of bees,
| the futter of idler insect, the soft
rustic of boughs, the singing of the
distant birds; one gets the note of in
| effable sweetness and sadness in the
sound of evening bells strained
through reaches of air and floating
over water. of aerial remoteness and
alien Indifference in the far-off fleeting
of the echo; one gets the voice of con-
quest roaring on its way in the cry Of
the wintry storm; for in every thing,
from the resonance of granite to the
whispering of a breath, the stroke of the
stone-cutter's hammer, the measured
falling of the fail, there is music for
the ear that can hear it; and even
when the tones held in the heart of al
these separate objects of nature are
not music in themselves, and struck
together make not music, but discord,
vet as the sound recodes it filters itsell
to harmony. for the discord dies before
the sound does. and leaves only at last
a sweet sorority swimming and failing
along the air. -Harper's Bazaar.