Mr. Gilman's Lecture on Music.

Following is an abstract of Mr. Gilman's fourth lecture on Scale in the course on the Psychology of Music, given in Sever 11 last evening:

Having examined the sensation with which music deals, or pitch; the forms in which it is presented to us, or notes; and the facts of relation in pitch or interval, we pass to the study of the works themselves of which music consists.

The structural characteristic first to be noticed in them is that the changes of pitch they exhibit are not contiguous but discrete: a musical composition consists of a mass of different notes, the closest together of which in pitch are still distinctly separate. In the vocal production of tone this character of discontinuity is the result of a constraint exercised upon the organs of voice; in the case of most instruments of music nothing else is possible. The hypothesis that the suggestion for an art of discontinuous pitch came from the notes of sounding bodies is a theory of the instrumental origin of the art of music.

All the different tones used in a piece of music taken together embody a certain set of intervals arranged in a certain order from low to high. The fact of scale-structure in music is a second fundamental characteristic and consists in the tendency of different compositions to embody the same order of intervals. Such a generic interval order is called a scale.

In general different pieces of music played on the same instrument will all embody its interval order, and it is to this fact that we may attribute the entire subjection of the art of music to generic interval, orders or scales. But in the forms they have taken we may perhaps find evidence of an independent tendency in vocal music to exhibit scale-structure.

If we conceive that such vocal scales have been modified by the conditions of independent instrumental performance and by mechanical considerations of instrumental construction and use we have means of explaining most of the various varieties of scale at present known. The scale of seven steps, tones and semitones, to the octave, known since classic times as the Diatonic, has been the basis of nearly all European music.

The development in modern music of a third structural characteristic, that of Tonality, has led to modifications in this interval-order to which reference will be made in the next lecture.