"Harmonic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... o'clock we attended even-song at the cathedral. I shall not say what I felt when the white-surpliced boy choir entered, winding down those vaulted aisles, or when I heard for the first time that intoned service, with all its "witchcraft of harmonic sound." I sat quite by myself in a high carved-oak seat, and the hour was passed in a trance of serene delight. I do not have many opinions, it is true, but papa says I am always strong on sentiments; nevertheless, I shall not attempt to tell even what I feel in these new and beautiful experiences, ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... complexity that we have advanced. We have extended the limits of musical style. We have adopted in sober earnest methods forecasted at rare intervals in the past by adventurous explorers, and employ musical notes not as elements in any harmonic scheme but purely as points of colour, exactly as if the definite notes were mere clangs of indefinite instruments like cymbals or triangles. Wordless vocal tone, moreover, of several different types, is pressed into the same service. Varied tonal and harmonic colour, and ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Not that these people are not perfectly sincere; something they have undoubtedly taken in; the marvellous euphony and balance of Wagner's orchestra under the conductors we now have, the exquisite grace of the melodic and harmonic structure, and the lyric beauty of so many scenes are apparent to all, and will always awaken the boundless enthusiasm of those who go only to be diverted. But these are only the ornaments of the drama; to understand the drama itself ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... to the King's Bench when his case was over, as some fees were to be settled, and some formalities observed, before he could be actually released. The club received him with transport, and held an harmonic meeting that evening in his honour; while Mrs. Micawber and I had a lamb's fry in private, surrounded by ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... harmonies for these ancient tunes, he has wisely preferred, in general, the arrangements of the older masters. The critical musician will see, and will not complain, that the original modal structure of the melodies is sometimes affected by the harmonic treatment. ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... goin' to hear somethin' like. The New Jersey Harmonic Society is agoin' to sing 'When first I saw her face in 1616.' I don't like none of your operas. That 'inflammation' may be a big thing,' but give me ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... dictation, ... now ... now! ... and Theos leaned forward nervously, his heart beating with apprehensive expectation ... Hush! ... the delicious, suave melody of his friend's voice penetrated the silence like the sweet harmonic of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... undulating curve representing wave motion. It is produced by compounding a simple harmonic motion, or a two and fro motion like that of an infinitely long pendulum with a rectilinear motion. Along a horizontal line points may be laid off to represent equal periods of time. Then on each point a perpendicular must be erected. The length of each must be equal to ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... startlingly brilliant and striking in at least two of its numbers is plain at once, however; and there can be no denying or doubting its great vigor and originality. The scherzo has remarkable ingenuity in its harmonic forms and instrumental combinations; and the andante, amazing in its melodic variety and richness, and reflecting, apparently, many moods of the composer's mind, yet produces a unity of impression which proves the presence ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... Deity; they are daily actions, unconnected with the interests of life and solely directed towards the invisible world. External objects are also a great help to piety; the soul falls back upon itself, if the fine arts, great monuments, and harmonic strains, do not reanimate that poetical genius, which is synonymous ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... could be no severer test than this. The music is generally Italian in form, especially in the flowing grace of the cantabile passages, and in the working up of the climaxes. But we did not hear one of the stereotyped Italian cadenzas, nor did we fall into old ruts in following the harmonic progressions. The orchestral figures—the framework on which the melodies are supported—are new, ingenious, and beautiful. The duets, quartette, and quintette show great command of resources and the utmost skill in construction; we can hardly remember ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... nature of first principles when taken without the connecting links that bind them to the details of experience. To find some of these links let us take up again our old Liberal principles, and see how they look in the light of the organic, or, as we may now call it, the harmonic conception. We shall readily see, to begin with, that the old idea of equality has its place. For the common good includes every individual. It is founded on personality, and postulates free scope for the development ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... for Schubert, though he is dead nearly a hundred years, yet remains curiously modern. The Unfinished symphony is full of exquisite color effects—consider, for example, the rustling figure for the strings in the first movement—and as for the C major, it is so stupendous a debauch of melodic and harmonic beauty that one scarcely notices the colors at all. In its slow movement mere loveliness in music probably says all that will ever be said.... But what of old Ludwig? Har, har; here we begin pulling the whiskers of Baal Himself. Nevertheless, I am vandal enough to wonder, on sad Sunday mornings, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the one string with affection for each rich note in her very touch. The other string tones followed her with exquisite sympathy, for Mrs. Gray was a musician from whom three of her four children had inherited an intense love for harmonic values. ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... Cheapside, she was hailed out of the glimmering illumination and foggy lamplight by "God Save the Queen," again sung by many hundred voices, accompanied by a band of wind instruments, the performance of the Harmonic Society, and the music was followed all the way by enthusiastic cheering. The Baroness Bunsen remarked of such a scene long afterwards, "I was at a loss to conceive how any woman's sides can 'bear the beating of so strong a throb' as must attend the consciousness of being the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or when one of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her is inconceivable to me, would be my death"—we still hear the note of selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" or else an illustration ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... not set out to make a telephone, Laurie," he answered. "What he was aiming to do was to perfect a harmonic telegraph, a scheme to which he had been devoting a good deal of his time. He and his father had studied carefully the miracle of speech—how the sounds of the human voice were produced and carried to ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... the performances of such organizations as "The Sacred Harmonic Society," "The Philharmonic Society," "The Musical Union," and the "Glee and Madrigal Societies," "The Beethoven Society," ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... unconscious, is a very different thing from that profound indebtedness which makes a great man attain his truest originality; and Gluck's training practically deprived him of Bach's direct influence, useful as that would have been to the attainment of his aims in harmonic and choral expression. The indirect influence no one could escape, for whatever in modern music is not traceable to Sebastian Bach is traceable to his sons, who were encouraged by their father in the cultivation of those infant art-forms which were so soon to dazzle ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... each cake, a kind of silvery fracture or membrane, with the grain of air-bubbles tending outward therefrom—showing, no doubt, if one knew the mechanics of refrigeration, just how the freezing proceeded. Even in so humble a thing as a block of ice are these harmonic and lovely patterns, the seal of Nature's craft, inscrutable, inimitable. I might have made a point of this in talking to that free verse poet. I'm glad I didn't, however: he would have had some tedious reply, convincing to himself. That's the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of numbers dwells harmony, and therefore it behoves us to identify ourselves with this harmony, because from it is derived the harmonic law which draws men together into companies. Through the revolution of the worlds through space around their suns, from their order, their constancy and their measure, the mind comprehends the progress and conditions of men, and their duties towards each other. The Bible, the sacred book ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... dreamed of. Even the German critics of to-day seem dense in their unwillingness to credit Mozart with a purely amiable purpose in quoting the operas of his rivals, Martin and Sarti. The latter showed himself ungrateful for kindnesses received at Mozart's hands by publicly denouncing an harmonic progression in one of the famous six quartets dedicated to Haydn as a barbarism, but there was no ill-will in the use of the air from "I due Litiganti" as supper music for the delectation of the Don. Mozart liked the melody, and had written ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... The harmonic constants for these places will be given in a paper on Arctic Tides about to be issued by the Coast ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... themselves. Let them compare, again, the opening sentences of the Four Gospels, or of the Acts of the Apostles, with the words with which Reginald begins this life of St. Godric. "By the touch of the Holy Spirit's finger the chord of the harmonic human heart resounds melodiously. For when the vein of the heart is touched by the grace of the Holy Spirit, forthwith, by the permirific sweetness of the harmony, an exceeding operation of sacred ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... with two qualities which seem incompatible,—a volcanic imagination, and a dogged pertinacity which the most tedious calculations could not tire,—Kepler conjectured that celestial movements must be connected with each other by simple laws; or, to use his own expression, by harmonic laws. These laws he undertook to discover. A thousand fruitless attempts—the errors of calculation inseparable from a colossal undertaking—did not hinder his resolute advance toward the goal his imagination descried. Twenty-two years he devoted to it, and still he was not weary. What are twenty-two ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... take a real woman at her best moment,—well dressed enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a show and a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set vibrating the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour memorable? What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it was a year or a thousand years later. Not being perfectly self-confident in this matter, we always took the opinion of Mr. Y——, who, as I said before, was an experienced architect; and he invariably came to the conclusion that the Brahmanical idols formed a harmonic and genuine part of the whole, pillars, decorations, and the general style of the temple; whereas the statue of Buddha was an additional and discordant patch. Out of thirty or forty caves of Ellora, all filled with idols, there is only one, the one called the Temple of the Tri-Lokas, which ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... which alone gave it value as a clue to new truths. According to his statement, a body absorbs all the series of vibrations it is, under any circumstances, capable of emitting, as well as those connected with them by simple harmonic relations. This is far too wide. To render it either true or useful, it had to be reduced to the cautious terms employed by Kirchhoff. Radiation strictly and necessarily corresponds with absorption only when the temperature is the same. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... I suppose even Handel did not hear it all clear and plain at first, but had to build his orchestra into a mental organ for his mind to let itself out by, through the many music holes, lest it should burst with its repressed harmonic delights. He must have felt an agonized need to set the haunting angels of sound in obedient order and range, responsive to the soul of the thing, its one ruling idea! I saw him with his white rapt face, looking like a prophet of the living God sent to speak out of the heart of the mystery of ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... the best of these songs would have a good effect in refining the popular sense of melody, the appreciation of what came last and is highest in music—of harmonic progressions—could best be taught by a similar familiarity with the German four-part chorals. They are the very embodiment of vigorous, soul-stirring harmony, the basis of sacred, as the Volkslied is of secular, music. "Each ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... freely with the young bloods of his day, termed in the slang of his time "Corinthians," and the results are shown in his designs. He might often be seen at the "Craven's Head," in Drury Lane, kept by a host known to his patrons by the familiar title of "Billy Oxberry"; at the Saturday night harmonic meetings held at the "Kean's Head," in Russell Court, Drury Lane; at "The Wrekin," in Broad Court, Long Acre, at that time frequented by gentlemen of the Press; at "The Harp," in Russell Street, Drury Lane, a ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... perhaps a hundred of these chorus halls about the City of Light grouped in the direction of the Hill of the Phosphori, and the music is quite different in them. There are four principal sorts, the grave, the gay, the romantic and the harmonic. By their interior sympathy the kinds of spirits move to the choruses which afford the music they respond to and it is wonderful how infallibly this ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... from the steep 680 Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to others note Singing thir great Creator: oft in bands While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk With Heav'nly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joind, thir songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven. Thus talking hand in hand alone they pass'd On to thir blissful Bower; it was a place 690 Chos'n by the sovran Planter, when ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... a structural principle by the Italian opera composer Alessandro Scarlatti in the well-known Aria da capo. These further applications of the principle of imitation are Transposition, i.e., the repetition of the melodic outline, and often of the whole harmonic fabric, by shifting it up or down the scale; and the Restatement of the original melody after an intervening part in contrast, thus making a piece of music, the formula for which may be indicated by A, B, A. Anyone at all familiar with musical literature must have observed both of these ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... to the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when, in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it turned out otherwise, and we ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... stumbling block to him through life. At times his drawing is possessed of a vigor and life which even Ingres never had; at others his work is almost lamentable in its lack of constructive form. In respect to color in its finest, most harmonic qualities, he is the greatest of French painters; and at all times he is master of an intense dramatic force. It was with a masterpiece—"Dante and Virgil"—that he made his first appearance at the Salon in 1822. At a bound he ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... times a week at the court, and every fortnight superintended the arrangement of a grand concert for the court parties, which, however, the reigning princess, Elisa Bacciochi Princess of Lucca and Piombino, Napoleon's favourite sister, was not always present at, or did not hear to the close, as the harmonic tones of my violin were apt to grate her nerves, but there never failed to be present another much esteemed lady, who, while I had long admired her, bore (at least so I imagined) a reciprocal feeling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... inherent pleasantnesses, whether in space, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of art-philosophy to which the word "aesthetics" should be strictly limited, being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... mathematical statements, all of which would lie outside the scope of this narrative. But the principle of the thing was simple enough. It was upon the great scientific doctrine, which we have since seen so completely and brilliantly developed, of the law of harmonic vibrations, extending from atoms and molecules at one end of the series up to worlds and suns at the other end, that ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... symbols. My present purpose is to insist that there is nothing in the play which has no meaning on the natural-psychological plane, and absolutely requires a symbolic interpretation to make it comprehensible. The symbols are harmonic undertones; the psychological melody is clear and consistent without any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... successes, our hero preferred by far burying himself in his hunting story-books, or spending the evening at the club, to making a personal exhibition before a Nimes piano between a pair of home-made candles. These musical parades seemed beneath him. Nevertheless, at whiles, when there was a harmonic party at Bezuquet's, he would drop into the chemist's shop, as if by chance, and, after a deal of pressure, consent to do the grand duo in Robert le Diable with old Madame Bezuquet. Whoso never ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... composer's musical personality (without much effort of the imagination we might say that they are the qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality).... Her impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes." Before he became acquainted with the later French idiom Harvey W. Loomis "spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... place of honour. From that conspicuous position one leads the whole table's activities: conversing to the right, laughing to the left, sharply on the lookout for any conversational gap, now and then drawing muted tete-a-tetes into a harmonic unison. She is, as it were, the leader of an orchestra of which the individual diners are the subsidiary instruments. Upon her watchful resourcefulness hangs the success of a dinner-party. But Missy, though a trifle ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the harmonic material for much of what remains of the composition. At each repetition of the theme, the chord in the fourth measure is augmented by the addition of another interval, until in the end it includes every tone of the chromatic scale ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... frame. It is usual to connect some of the parts with two of these cams, one of which controls the up-and-down motion and the other the out-and-in movement. When these two cams work in conjunction, we obtain all the possible degrees of harmonic motion. ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... its memories have blossomed anew in Robert's heart. And now his mother's shade rises up, bringing with it soothing religious thoughts. It is religion that lives in that beautiful song in E major, with its wonderful harmonic and melodic progression in ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly rejecting the other. "On earth peace, good-will to men"—already that line was among the treasures of his intellect, but only, no doubt, because of its rhythm, its sonority. Life, to him, was a half-conscious striving for the harmonic in thought and speech—and through what a tumult of unmelodious circumstance was he beginning ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... heart. The snow that had, clung to the pines, muting their needles and stilling their branches, had dropped on during the day. Now the night wind which drove the clouds lingered through the pine tops and set them swaying gently in the vast, harmonic rhythm which is like the surging of a distant ocean. The everlasting whisper of the pines, that ancient hushed voice which through the countless centuries has never been still save when briefly silenced by the snow; which had borne its message to Gloria when on that first day ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... will be seen how important it is that the pressure of the wind in an organ should be steady and uniform. Otherwise the pipes will speak a harmonic instead of the sound intended—as, indeed, ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... of course, was the beam operating," Zircon interjected. "You didn't hear the beam itself, since that's ultrasonic. But you did hear the mechanical vibration of the brass ball. It had a kind of sub-harmonic ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... and aspirations for God and eternal life, but it lives chiefly for selfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Therefore in Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believe this decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richer and more harmonic insight. The passing eclipse of faith in a future life is destined by concentrating attention on the present to develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of this world, unveil all the elements of hell and heaven really existing here, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Hallelujah chorus, and you may form some idea of the effect of this performance, when I tell you that all the persons who sing at the Queen's Chapel, at St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, were all singing together, besides part of the band of the Sacred Harmonic Society, pupils of the Royal Academy of Music, and many other songsters, ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... and Stewart, have written interesting treatises on beauty and taste. "Plato represents beauty as the contemplation of the mind. Leibnitz maintained that it consists in perfection. Diderot referred beauty to the idea of relation. Blondel asserted that it was in harmonic proportions. Leigh speaks of it as the music of the age." These definitions do not much assist us. We fall back on our own conceptions or intuitions, as probably did Phidias, although Art in Greece could hardly have attained such perfection without the aid ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... The harmonic arrangement is also purposely simple in consideration of the many mothers and kindergartners who cannot devote time to ...
— Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten • Emilie Poulsson
... Isolde" and the whole "Nibelungen-Ring," and it was uttered with a sensuous wealth of sound and a passionate strain of melody that (without special greatness of its own) dazzled and charmed the world in the dramatic setting of mediaeval legend. The new harmonic style of Wagner, there is good reason to suppose, was in reality first conceived by Liszt, whose larger works, written about the middle of the century, have but lately come to light.[A] In correspondence with this moral mutiny was the complete ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... of sincerity. When Haydn read the inscription he immediately proceeded to make use of the words for a four-part canon. It was presumably at this time that he became acquainted with Dr Henry Harington, the musician and author, who had removed to Bath in 1771, where he had founded the Harmonic Society. Haydn dedicated one of his songs to him in return for certain music and verses, which explains the following otherwise cryptic note of Clementi's, published for the first time recently by Mr J. S. Shedlock: "The first ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden |
