Interpretation in Song (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ...but sing them. If you stop to try and equalise your crotchetvalues, before you know where you are the lilt of the song has picked you up and hustled you along like a bottle in a mill-race. Allegretto grazioso. .. poco rit. Blos-som by bloa-som, pe-tal by pe-tal. is a delightful example of the composer's cunning. "Blossom" and "petal" are both trochees; but there is a subtle difference in the time-duration of the first foot of each. The first syllable of "petal" has in speech a tendency to drop from its perch a little quicker than that of "blossom." That tendency the composer has put for you in black and white. He has taken the very bit out of your mouth, for you wanted to do that yourself But because "petal" is a little different from "blossom" it doesn't follow that "blossom" is different from "petal"--comparatively speaking. Breathes there a prig with soul so dead who would speak of "blos-som"? (If the composer had considered him normal, or even sporadic, he might no doubt have provided for him in anticipation with equal ease.) Through the whole song (as in the poem by Alfred Perceval Graves), with all its delightful modern spontaneity, runs a feeling of the classics, a beauty of outline, of Greek art, of the very spirit of the Greek anthology to which the poem owes its being. The word bel canto is applied simply to the style of its technique; the song is an art-song in its truest sense. The modern florid song is practically non-existent. The florid songs of any period are too taken up with their own "floridity" to bother about prosody or metre; the two things are essentially incompatible. In the modern rhythmical song the singer...