One may hear half a dozen
bars before a stroke reveals, as by a flash of lightning, the artistic
purpose with which the parts are moving, and the enormous heat and
energy that move them. When strength and sinew are wanted in the
themes, they are there, and contrapuntal adaptability is there; but they
are real living themes, not ossified or petrified formulas. Themes,
part-writing and harmony are closely bound up in one another, and
harmony is not the least important. Purcell liked daring harmonies, and
they arise organically out of the firm march of individual parts.
Excepting sometimes for a special purpose, he does not dump them down as
accompaniment to an upper part. The "false relations" and "harsh
progressions" of which the theorists prate do not exist for an
unprejudiced ear. In writing the flattened leading note in one part
against the sharpened in another he was merely following the
polyphonists, and it sounds as well--nay, as beautiful--as any other
discord, or the same discord on another degree of the scale.[2] This
discord and his other favourites are beautiful in Purcell, and his
determination to let them arise in an apparently unavoidable way from
the collisions of parts, each going its defined road to its goal, must
have determined the character of his part-writing.
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