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Alexander Scriabin was a composer and victim of the disease, synesthesia, which caused his senses to intermix. An example of this disease is his ability to see colors to correspond to different sounds he heard, causing him to create a "light organ" which was simply lightbulbs lighting up w/different colors, no soud. He said "I am nothing. I am only what I create. The destiny of the universe is clear. I have a will to live. I love life. I am God. I am nothing, I want to be all." |
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All following information is from "Men Women and Pianos" by Arthur Loesser, Simon and Schuster: The Pennsylvania Quakers were convinced even more than the Puritans that music was an unholy vanity and a distraction from busy-ness. Yet they tried to be tolerant and peaceable; and they tended magnanimously to allow the German Lutherans, Anglicans, Catholics, Jews and Deists in their midst to go to hell in their own favorite melodious way. |
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"Mems for Musical Misses" 1851:
Sit in a simple, graceful, unconstrained posture. Never turn up the eyes or swing about the body; the expression you mean to give..will never be understood by those foolish motions which are rarely resorted to but by those who do not really feel what they play...However loud you wish to be, never thump..Aim more at pleasing than astonishing...Be above the vulgar folly of pretending you cannot play for dancing; it proves only that it is disobliging, you are stupid. Never bore people with ugly music merely because it is the work of some famous composer, and do not let the pieces you perform not professedly scientific be too long. |
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Pietism: religous movement that dealt with attitudes and emotions. This cult of "feeling" the propensity to indulge in emotional excesses for their own sake, raged far and wide in German culture. To be moved, if possible to tears, was thought to be among the most valuable of achievements. A high capacity for going on these emotional jags was somehow regarded as proof of a humane disposition, of a deep fineness of sensibility, even by those who could not believe that these outbursts were the direct personal caress of the Almighty. All manner of human events, as well as the contemplation of nature and works of art were thought to be most favorably emphasized when they aroused tears. Heart-rending family "scenes" were deliberately provoked and enjoyed, just as nowadays, for the most part they are carefully avoided. Solemn sounding vows and promises were uttered between parents and children, dramatic reconciliations celebrated between brothers and spouses. Family prayers were an opportunity for the father to balloon himself into an improvisation of edifying sentiments; poetry was read aloud and declaimed with a violent pathos that might seem ridiculous and repulisive today. |
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More tips for musical misses from the 19th century: "When a woman plays the flute, she must purse here lips, and she must do so likewise when she blows into a horn, besides also giving evidence of visceral support for the tone. What encouragement might that not give the lewd-minded among her beholders? When she plays the cello she must spread her legs: perish the thought! When she plays the violon, she must twist her upper torso and strain her neck in an unnatural way, and if she practices much, she may develop an unsightly scar under her jaw. It strikes us as ridiculous when look at a female playing the violon with great sleeves flying to and fro." All these negative suggestions are avoided in the keyboard instrument. "A girl can play a pianoforte with her feet demurely together, her face arranged into a polite smile or a pleasantly earnest concentration. There she could sit, her well-groomed hands striking the light keys with no unseemly vehemence. |
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Yes, pianoforte is the name of that instrument of torture with which society is pained and chastised for all its usurpations. If only the innocent did not have to suffer as well! This eternal piano playing can no longer be endured! -the protests in vain, the articulate antipianists a feeble minority, powerless. Pianos encouraged unmusical persons to poke at it stupidly. It interfered with conversation and mental pleasures; and piano sounds could penetrate the ceilings, floors, and walls of apartments with distressing ease and often allow one girl's diversion to become another man's irritation. |
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Death was a highly fashionable poetic and musical essense in the mid nineteenth century. A large proportion of best-selling songs and verses in those days were about people dying, especially people whose death it was too bad to contemplate, such as children, sweethearts, young sons, and mothers. An average song of the period began by extolling the beloved creature in the first verse, then killing him or her ruthlessly by unspecified disease in the second or third. The cheapest way for an author to arouse "feeling" was to kill.
In ladies' mythology, poets are sweet, gentle creatures, a little like children or canary birds, and it is delightfully heart rending to think of them dying. This was the song "The Dying Poet". On the other hand, The Death of a Salesman, the title of the mid-twentieth century tradedy, would have seemed a grotesquely improper, revoltingly comic title to the world of 1855. |
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