1933 Cedrus Yearbook

CHAPTER TWO Literature and Music ERASMUS Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch scholar of the Renaissance, was one of the promoters of Humanism in Western Europe and England. The great service he rendered was in fighting the battle of sound learning and plain common sense against unenlightenment, and in emphasizing the sovereign place of reason as the ultimate guide in all questions, re ligious and political not excepted. This portrait of Erasmus is by the famous German masterof the early sixteenth century, Hans Hobein. USIC, as we understand it, expresses itself in the inter-action of three elements —rhythm, melody and harmony. The first two are obviously as ancient as human con- scousness itself. Without the third, a musical art of permanent value and intelligibility has not been known to attain independent existence. With harmony, music assumes the existence of a kind of space in three dimensions, none of which can subsist without at least implying the others. When we hear an unaccompanied melody we cannot help interpreting it in the light of its most probable harmonies. Thus, when it does not imply consistent harmonies it seems to us quaint and strange; because, unless it is very remote from our harmonic conception, it at least implies at any given moment some simple har- mony which in the next moment it contradicts. Music is a mode of motion and is usually thought of as a pleasure-evoking emotion, which has become aesthetic. It is purely human, hence, the cound once set in motion, we are at liberty to dream, to thrill, to weep,to sigh, with all the moods ind uced by the director. Music is the youngest of the arts, but it has advanced into popularity far more rapid- ly than many of the older arts. Much of the musical development of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was centered in Paris. The troubadours,the jongleurs,and the minne- singers, who cultivated poetry and music, played no small part in the advancement of the art. Page Fifteen