Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the
subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, on the other hand, our
great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our
brass bands and military music. The earlier symphonies, since they were
essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed
instruments, now seem like darkened pictures. Yet the symphonies have
certainly remained unchanged; only our ear has grown dull so far as
comprehension of the tone-color of the string quartet is concerned. The
same full orchestra, which in those works sounded so overpoweringly
imposing seventy years ago, now sounds to us simply powerful. In such
symphonies, in order to sharpen our ears, which have become dulled in
this respect, we have arrived at the strange necessity of doubling the
parts of the stringed instruments in a simple wind instrument
_ensemble_, so as to attain the same effect which old masters attained
with a simple distribution of the string parts.
The characterization of musical keys is very strange. In different ages
an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite
color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth
century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous
key--indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far
as to call it _tonum voluptuosum_. We, on the contrary, consider G-major
particularly modest, naive, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even
trivial.
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