The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1899-09-05

| xx2xxl IACtA 1S3AS6s AA>
music which comes down to US untoch
ed by the invention of the modern scale
from an antiquity out of which pair
chant is a first step toward modern
harmony. And this Moorish music is
like Moorish architecture an Arabesque
1t avoids definite form just as
the lines in stones avoids definite form
it has the same endlessness, motion
without beginning or end turning upon
itself in kind of infinitely varied mo-
notony. The floriture of the voice are
like those coils which often String
from a central point Of ornament, 10
twist outward, as in particular piece
of very delicate work in the frs. NH
rab in the mosque at Cordova. In both
ensemble Is everything, and everything
is pattern. There is the same avoid
ance of emphasis, the same continuance
on one level; no special part starts out
| for separate notice, as in Gothic archi-
| lecture of Western music. But the
passion of this music is like no other
passion; fierce, immoderate, sustained,
1t is like the crying Of wild beast In
suffering, and it thrills one precisely be-
| Nuu9c ~ SteillS W uS 81 La liolh HuiiAuh-
ity, so inexplicabe so deeply rooted in
the animal of which we are but one
| species.
Moorish music is inarticulate, and so
! it brings wild relief which no articu-
late music could ever bring. 1t is the
! voice of uncivilzed people who have the
desires and sorrows common to every
| living being. and an unconsciousness or
| their meanings. 1t Is sad, not because
of personal sorrow, but because OF Ill
| the sorrow there is, and always has
| been, in the world The eyes OF Span
ish women have something Of the same
fierce melancholy, and with as little
personal meaning. 1t is music which
has not yet lost companionship with the
voice of the wind, the voice Of the sea,
tn voices of the forest. 1t has rever
accepted order and become art; i re-
mains chaotic, elemental, a part Of ma
ture trying to speak
SINGULAR EFFECT ON THE
NERVES.
The monotony of this music "a few
repeated notes only of the guitar ac-
compartment to the voice(gives 1t much
of its singular effect on the nerves. 1t
speaks directly to the spine, sending on
unaccountable shiver through one;
without racking the heart or the brain,
after the manner of most pathos, even
in sound. The words it Is true, are
generally sombre, a desperate cutlery;
but the words of the three or four lines
which go to make up a song are repeat
ed over and over, in varying order, ling
ering out an incalculable time, so that
the bare meaning is changed into some
thing of pattern. like the outlines of
flower in Moorish architecture. Yes,
abstract as their architecture, their rnu-
sic has none of the direct, specifically
human appeal which pathetic Western
music has. These songs are largely
improvisations. and a singer will weave
almost any web of music about almost |
any fragment of verse; whether the
words wall because Spain lost Cuba or |
because a lover has lost his beloved 1t |
is all the same; it all comes from the |
same deep, fiery place in the soil.
Singing and dancing, in Spain, are |
as the right hand and the left; and the |
same airs throbbing on a guitar, guide |
the most characteristic kind of dancing. |
Here the meaning is more explicit; like :
the pantomine of all Eastern dancing, |
like the shapeless jog trot of the Sou
danese which you can see al Earrs |
Court; like the undisguised mimicry OF I
the women in the Rue du Claire at the |
last Paris Exhibition, it is wholly sex
ual But in the dancing inherited
from the Moors. which the gypsies have
perfected in Spain, there is far more
subtlety, delicaey and real art than in
the franker posturing of Egypt and
Arabia. 1t IL the most elaborate dane
ing in the world, and. like the music,
it has an abstract quality which saves
It from ever, for a moment, becoming
vulgar. AS / have watched a Gitana
dancing in Seville, / have thought of
The sacred dances which in most relig-
ons have given a perfectly solemn and
symbolism to the creative for
3es of the world Hieratic, not per-
verse, centred upon the central fact of
existence; moving gravely, without
'rvolity, in sense without passion 50
1eeply is the passion rooted in the
nature of the things, the dance coils
'ound upon itself as the trails of music
md the trails in stone coil round upon
themselves 1t is another secret of the
Moors, and must remain as mysterious
o us as those other secrets, until we
rave come little closer than we have
yet come to the immaterial wisdom Of
he East --Arthur Symons in The Satur-