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chord in successive notes from a horn or bugle. Other chords 
are less clear, joyous, self-reliant, inspiring; some are minor 
chords or even discordant ; popularly any chord or passage of 
music not clearly major is loosely called minor. The older 
rules required that the key or tonic of a composition should 
at once be made clear, and that after modulations into other 
keys the piece should end in the original key and in a con- 
ventional way ; the absence of a regular cadence is a striking 
feature of much primitive and of some modern music. All 
these views of beauty, form, and unity belong to the esthetic 
theories of a generation or two ago ; whether the confessedly 
ugly but powerful things, which modern musicians, painters 
and sculptors are furnishing, shall ultimately be accepted 
must be left to the students of esthetics a generation hence. 
In connection with the subject of form and its elementary 
structural material, the scale, it is important for the physicist 
to realize that when Helmholtz wrote his great work, “The 
Sensations of Tone as the Physiological Basis of Music, 
about forty years ago, these views were prevalent; the sonata- 
form still dominated musical thought, and the scale furnished 
by the piano was thought of in diatonic or harmonic terms; 
modern composers have cut loose from most of the classical 
traditions and rules; and how much of Helmholtz’s musical 
discussion is applicable to modern work, probably no one has 
attempted to say; the purely physical investigations of course 
are still valid, though some important additions have been 
made to them by later experimenters. Further, it must not 
be imagined that unity is dependent on a sense of tonality, 
for the Ethos of Greek music, and the Hindu Rags , involve 
other principles of unity not yet made clear; and if tonality 
is to be predicated of, say, Arab music the word must involve 
mainly or wholly melodic relationships, not harmonic. 
The remaining term in the definition is “the expression of 
emotion.” At all periods there have been attempts at realism 
in music, by imitating or suggesting sounds in nature, the 
movements of a horse, birds’ songs, the noise of waves, battle- 
scenes, etc., but these form only a very small part of musical 
literature. There have been frequent attempts, too, to put 
