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XXXY.—ON MUSICAL SHORTHAND. By G. JOHNSTONE 

 STONEY, M.A., D.Sc, F.R.S., a Yice-President of the R.D.S. 



[Read June 19, 1882.] 



Harmony may be studied either by those who aspire to become 

 successful musical composers, or by those whose more modest aim 

 is to play, to hear, and to enjoy to the utmost the compositions 

 of others. 



Where music is to be made the occupation of life, a few months 

 more or less taken up by the preliminary studies may not much 

 matter ; but there can be no question that among the vast 

 number of others who devote a part of their time to this delightful 

 branch of art a very large number are deterred from attempting 

 to acquire an adequate knowledge of harmony, and consequently 

 are debarred from a great part of the enjoyment they might other- 

 wise have, by the appearance of entanglement which the study in 

 its early stages presents, and by the awkward nomenclature which 

 encumbers the subject and adds unnecessarily to the appearance 

 of obscurity and confusion. 



Now, an attempted aid in such a case may either be merely a 

 new burden on the memory, ijiwhich case it is only mischievous, 

 or it may be like stepping-stones which enable the wayfarer to 

 cross a stream which would otherwise stop his progress, unless he 

 were willing to go a long distance out of his way for a bridge. 



One such aid, the moveable Do, was at an early period advo- 

 cated by a Dublin professor, the late Dr. Smith, Professor of Music 

 in the University of Dublin,* and it has produced marvellous 

 oifects in England and Scotland under the name of the Tonic 

 Sol-fa system of teaching singing ; but it has as yet found little 

 favour with musicians in Ireland. Yet there can be no doubt 

 that the use of such convenient names for the notes of a scale as 

 do, ray, me, fah, so la, te, instead of such awkward words as domi- 



* See his "Treatise on tlie Theory and Practice of Music," 1853, p. 74. 

 SciEN. Pkoc. R.D S , Vol. hi., Pt. vii. 2 G 



