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. 1915 edition. Excerpt: .1 Sir George Grove, Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Also Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies.

It may be a mere whisper of repetition, so delicate that the ear is hardly conscious of it at all, or it may persist through many bars, as in the passage whose beginning has just been given. Repetition, carried to excess, becomes monotonous. Is monotony unpleasant? Not always; now and then it is exactly the effect which a musician desires to produce. An example of it is found in the first movement of the Sixth (or Pastoral Symphony. The " constant sounds of nature, the monotony of rustling leaves and swaying trees and running brooks and blowing wind," are here suggested to the mind (not, in the strict sense, imitated directly, though in the Symphony there are some examples of deliberate imitation); and the resultant effect is one of " monotony which is never monotonous." The " forest murmurs " in Wagners Siegfried and Siegfried Idyll are much like Beethovens movement. In the second movement of the Second Symphony there are also " endless repetitions." " But who," asks Grove, " ever wished them curtailed? " Still, monotony is usually disagreeable, and the musician must seek to avoid it.

" La nature est bonne a imiter, mais non pas jusqua 1ennui."1 The musician, therefore, introduces changes of various kinds. The principle of contrast.--In other words, to make repetition aesthetically impressive it must be heightened by the exactly opposite principle of contrast, and here again the change may be delicate, hardly recognizable at all, or obvious, perhaps even violent and overwhelming. 1 DAlembert, quoted by Grove, p. 196. Nowhere is the real greatness of a musician better seen than in his control over the resources of contrast. It is easy to.