362 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2nd s. No 97., Nov. 7. '57. 



MUSICAIi NOTES BY DE. GATJNTLETT. 



The Choral Dance in the Lohgesang. — I be- 

 lieve that Mendelssohn wrote his instrumental 

 introduction to this psalm of praise"with the in- 

 tention of portraying the mode of celebration 

 adopted by his forefathers in these exercises 

 of worship, and which his setting of the Forty- 

 second Psalm might possibly have suggested. In 

 the Forty-second Psalm David recalls when he 

 went to the house of God with the voice of song 

 and praise in the crowd of those who dance at the 

 temple of God. Such processions are alluded to 

 in the Sixty-eighth Psalm, which the poet de- 

 scribes as the goings of my God and King in the 

 sanctuary, the singers first, the instrumentalists 

 following, with whom were the damsels with the 

 tambourines. The damsels with the tambourines 

 were no doubt also the dancers ; for it is written 

 when Miriam took her tambourine after the 

 Exodus, all the women followed her with tam- 

 bourines find with dances. Mendelssohn's first 

 movement is illustrative of the processional march, 

 and it opens very grandly with a theme possibly, 

 and very probably, used by Moses, being a union 

 of two of the most ancient chants — the intona- 

 tion of the eighth tone combined with the media- 

 tion of the seventh. The second movement, the 

 serenade or hai-carole, as it has been called, joined 

 to the old LuthersCh cantilina, is clearly illustrative 

 of the dance and the ode or hymn. It can mean 

 nothing else without being a great interruption 

 and offence in the action of this cantata. The 

 slow movement is representative of one of those 

 pauses where all the people knelt down to pray. 



, General Thomjyson and the Scale. — The ener- 

 getic member for Bradford, who is as enthusiastic 

 in music as in most other things, asks, in his work 

 on Just Intonation, or the Abolition of Tempera- 

 ment, this question: "Is there no finding out what 

 are these just sounds by some process of calcula- 

 tion, and writing them down by their measures ? " 

 To which I reply. Nature gives her own simple 

 way, and it is this. Take a string -r- say sixteen 

 feet, sounding the note C — ^ gives the octave ; ^, 

 ^, TfL, the same sound in other octaves ; ^ gives G ; 

 i gives E; ^ gives B flat; t't gives G flat; ^V gives 

 G sharp; ^V gives C sharp ; and ^^ gives the minor 

 third E flat. The higher ratios, ^^, ■^\, ^\, ^V* and 

 ■^ are used in the orchestra, but there are no 

 specific symbols to express them by musical nota- 

 tion. The other sounds, those of action, such as 

 D and B, flow from G ; and those of reaction, such 

 as A, A flat, flow from F. C cannot generate these. 



St. Olave's Organ, Soufhtvark. — General Thomp- 

 son, in his new edition of his Just Intonation, says, 

 "It is a remarkable fact that Tartini's Za (or the 

 ratio of \) can be introduced as a stop in the 



organ," and mentions the organ of St. Olave's as 

 possessing this harmonic. I designed that organ, 

 and it is the first having that sound in the chorus 

 stops, a sound which is tuned as easily as ^ or ^ ; 

 and I had no difficulty with it. Since that period 

 an organ has been put in the Collegiate Institution, 

 Liverpool, with this ratio in the chorus, and it is 

 called "a sharp twentieth;" and I see this strange 

 term is approved by the author of The Organ, 

 its History and Construction. The distinguished 

 Council of this learned body should get this ano- 

 maly removed, and mark the stop by its right 

 ratio. Let C be the key sounding the chorus 

 stop, the \ will be 42. B natural will be 45. A, 

 sharp, the sharp twentieth, will be 44. Fleas are 

 not lobsters, 44 is not 42, and A sharp is no har- 

 monic of C. 



HandeVs new Way of making Music. — Every 

 great composer has his own peculiar way of treat- 

 ing the scale, for it is by his conception of the 

 scale that he makes his form of composition. 

 Mattheson says of Handel that he told him a great 

 secret — an entirely new way — which he could 

 not have learnt from anyone else — a method of 

 combining sounds together, quite unknoivn, and 

 which opened unseen sources of change of hey. I 

 have never seen any remark on this curious anec- 

 dote, and Dr. Burney was not the man to make 

 out the new way alluded to by Mattheson. Ne- 

 vertheless I think I have reduced it to a law, and 

 as examples of the new way refer the reader to 

 the little short choruses in the Israel in Egypt. 

 They in general stand between stolen or borrowed 

 music, as if Handel said, " There, that last chorus 

 is not mine, nor is the one coming mine, but of 

 these few bars between them there shall be no 

 mistake. I am Handel, and this is my music." 



Mozart ending his Chorus out of his Key. — ■ 

 Those who know how to write music contrive to 

 finish with the same sound they commenced with. 

 This is not so easy to do, and many a man begins 

 with one D or C, and ends in another D or C. In 

 England (not in Germany) Mozart has been made 

 to perpetrate this blunder by an ingenious altera- 

 tion of the score invented by Mr. Vincent No- 

 vello. Mozart begins his requiem in D minor with 

 the B flat, which is of course the ^V ^^ ^' ^^^ P''''" 

 rent of D. At the sixth bar froni the end of the 

 first chorus he has modulated into another B flat, 

 the parent of F. Mozart changes here this new 

 B flat by a most happy stroke into the B flat, tlie 

 third of G, so that he returns to the original 

 sound (D) he began with. But Mr. Novello has 

 altered the passage, and made Mozart go to the 

 D which is the ^ of B flat, the parent of F, and 

 thus end out of his key, and also break the old 

 law, " every consonance is perfect in its own te- 



