[Sidenote:  Major and minor.]

[Music illustration:  Hur-rah!  A-las!]

[Sidenote:  Music and movement.]

How near a large number of suggestions, which are based wholly upon experience or association of ideas, lie to the popular fancy, might be illustrated by scores of examples.  Thoughts of religious functions arise in us the moment we hear the trombones intone a solemn phrase in full harmony; an oboe melody in sixth-eighth time over a drone bass brings up a pastoral picture of a shepherd playing upon his pipe; trumpets and drums suggest war, and so on.  The delineation of movement is easier to the musician than it is to the poet.  Handel, who has conveyed the sensation of a “darkness which might be felt,” in a chorus of his “Israel in Egypt,” by means which appeal solely to the imagination stirred by feelings, has in the same work pictured the plague of frogs with a frank naivete which almost upsets our seriousness of demeanor, by suggesting the characteristic movement of the creatures in the instrumental accompaniment to the arioso, “Their land brought forth frogs,” which begins thus: 

[Sidenote:  Handel’s frogs.]

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote:  The movement of water.]

We find the gentle flux and reflux of water as if it were lapping a rocky shore in the exquisite figure out of which Mendelssohn constructed his “Hebrides” overture: 

[Music illustration]

and in fancy we ride on mighty surges when we listen to the principal subject of Rubinstein’s “Ocean” symphony: 

[Music illustration]

In none of these instances can the composer be said to be imitative.  Music cannot copy water, but it can do what water does, and so suggest water.

[Sidenote:  High and low.]

Some of the most common devices of composers are based on conceptions that are wholly arbitrary.  A musical tone cannot have position in space such as is indicated by high or low, yet so familiar is the association of acuteness of pitch with height, and gravity of pitch with depth, that composers continually delineate high things with acute tones and low things with grave tones, as witness Handel in one of the choruses of “The Messiah:” 

[Music illustration:  Glo-ry to God in the high-est, and peace on earth.]

[Sidenote:  Ascent, descent, and distance delineated.]

Similarly, too, does Beethoven describe the ascent into heaven and the descent into hell in the Credo of his mass in D. Beethoven’s music, indeed, is full of tone-painting, and because it exemplifies a double device I make room for one more illustration.  It is from the cantata “Becalmed at Sea, and a Prosperous Voyage,” and in it the composer pictures the immensity of the sea by a sudden, extraordinary spreading out of his harmonies, which is musical, and dwelling a long time on the word “distance” (Weite) which is rhetorical: