ABSTRACT
Stirred by a gust of wind, an Æolian harp sounds a tone-a syllable of musical language. The air is full of music; and now and then happily winged Ariels unchain it for us on their magic trumpets. Then the tempest roars in chromatics; then earth and fire, water and air, shape themselves into four-part harmony. Music and nature run in parallels, never to cross, ever to counterpart. Respighi’s caged nightingale is less winged than Beethoven’s pastoral birds; Strauss’s alpine wind-machine less chilling than Rossini’s breezy scales. Portraiture in music defeats its purpose by exposing the inaptitude of an art to measure up to life, greater as the former may be than the latter, if kept within its own uncurved course.
