If we wish to begin with the most primitive form of suggestion in music, we shall find it in the direct imitation of sounds in nature.  We remember that Helmholtz, Hanslick, and their followers denied to music the power to suggest things in nature; but it was somewhat grudgingly admitted that music might express the emotions caused by them.  In the face of this, to quote a well-known instance, we have the “Pastoral” symphony of Beethoven, with the thrush, cuckoo, and thunderstorm.  The birds and the storm are very plainly indicated; but it is not possible for the music to be an expression of the emotions caused by them, for the very simple reason that no emotions are caused by the cuckoo and thrush, and those caused by thunderstorms range all the way from depression and fear to exhilaration, according to the personality of individuals.

That music may imitate any rhythmic sounds or melodic figure occurring in nature, hardly needs affirmation.  Such devices may be accepted almost as quotations, and not be further considered here.  The songs of birds, the sound made by galloping horses’ feet, the moaning of the wind, etc., are all things which are part and parcel of the musical vocabulary, intelligible alike to people of every nationality.  I need hardly say that increasing intensity of sound will suggest vehemence, approach, and its visual synonym, growth, as well as that decreasing intensity will suggest withdrawal, dwindling, and placidity.

The suggestion brought about by pattern is very familiar.  It was one of the first signs of the breaking away from the conventional trammels of the contrapuntal style of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  The first madrigal of Thomas Weelkes (1590) begins with the words, “Sit down,” and the musical pattern falls a fifth.  The suggestion was crude, but it was caused by the same impulse as that which supplied the material for Wagner’s “Waldweben,” Mendelssohn’s “Lovely Melusina,” and a host of other works.

The fact that the pattern of a musical phrase can suggest kinds of motion may seem strange; but could we, for example, imagine a spinning song with broken arpeggios?  Should we see a spear thrown or an arrow shot on the stage and hear the orchestra playing a phrase of an undulating pattern, we should at once realize the contradiction.  Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, and practically everyone who has written a spinning song, has used the same pattern to suggest the turning of a wheel.  That such widely different men as Wagner and Mendelssohn should both have adopted the same pattern to suggest undulating waves is not a mere chance, but clearly shows the potency of the suggestion.

The suggestion conveyed by means of pitch is one of the strongest in music.  Vibrations increasing beyond two hundred and fifty trillions a second become luminous.  It is a curious coincidence that our highest vibrating musical sounds bring with them a well-defined suggestion of light, and that as the pitch is lowered we get the impression of ever increasing obscurity.  To illustrate this, I have but to refer you to the Prelude to “Lohengrin.”  Had we no inkling as to its meaning, we should still receive the suggestion of glittering shapes in the blue ether.