CHORDS IN THE LIGHT OF THEIR ORIGIN 285 



student's musical understanding. In fulfilment of an 

 inherent law, melody evolved the chord. Nature has 

 bountifully endowed the student with a keen sense of 

 that inner law and of that concomitant harmony 

 always reported by and inseparable from melody. 

 The genesis and development of harmony being due 

 to melody it lies in the nature of things that the study 

 of harmony is the study of the harmony of melody, in 

 a word, of meloharmony. 



At the outset the student's inner consciousness and 

 experience of music assumes but one tangible and 

 graspable form, melody. Nature's gift to the student 

 is an inborn appreciation of melody, the power to 

 follow and remember a melody as a connected whole 

 and therefore the power to turn it over and over in his 

 mind as he selects this or that series of chords and 

 musically reflects upon this or that way of leading the 

 voices. Given a melody to harmonize, the student 

 sets out with the one thing he can mentally grasp; he 

 perfectly comprehends the subject of his work and 

 therefore also its object. Having a tangible subject he 

 has a tangible object ; his melody is his preceptor and 

 guide in his choice of harmonies, explains to him why 

 now a root or fifth or third is doubled, why a bond- 

 tone is now tied and now not tied, why an upleader is 

 sometimes not resolved but led downward and why 

 the downleader is often treated in a like manner; in 

 short, he thinks and hears everything in relation to 

 and from that melody, which is the key to the whole 

 situation. Harmonic numbers over a given melody 

 appeal to the student's musical intelligence and rea- 

 son. Roman numbers under a given bass do not. The 



