Treatise On Musical Intervals Temperament And The Elementary Principles Of Music PDF Download

From the PREFACE. The investigations of which this work contains an account have been published during the last two or three years in various forms. But these forms were suitable for those who were already well acquainted with the subject, and the order of treatment was that which commended itself as correct in a scientific point of view; i.e. the matter being purely deductive, the general theory was stated first, and everything deduced from it. For more general purposes this arrangement does not appear to commend itself; and the general theory has now been relegated to such a position that the rest of the work may be read independently of it. The general treatment is, except in this Chapter (X) and the note to Chapter III, elementary throughout; and repetition is introduced as much as possible instead of reference; so that it may be hoped that the difficulty of the study is much reduced. The arrangement adopted is unsatisfactory from a scientific point of view. But the different parts of the subject are so intertwined, that if the correct order is once forsaken, it is impossible to separate them out into another satisfactory scheme. The relations of technical music and musicians to this subject have until lately been, for the most part, of an almost hostile character. The facts are entirely unknown to musicians in general, and of the theory the wildest ideas have been formed. Of the objects which I place before myself, musicians generally form their own ideas, and stick to them. The 'Musical Standard, ' after the reading of a paper of mine at the Musical Association, solemnly announced that I proved on a huge blackboard that the equal temperament scale was all wrong, when nothing of the kind was even said, much less proved on the blackboard. As emphatically as I disclaim all idea of proving the equal temperament scale wrong by 'black-board' considerations, so emphatically do I protest against the idea that it is my object to abolish the equal temperament. It is not the same thing to say, Let us make something new, to wit B; and, Let us abolish something old, to wit A. The two things, A and B, are not mutually exclusive; and there can be no reason why they should not flourish together. There is no force in the objection to the study of this subject founded on the idea that its tendency is towards the exclusion of the ordinary system. There will always be the proper applications of the one arrangement, and the proper applications of every other, just as there are the proper applications of the different instruments in an orchestra....