Music
An obvious characteristic of the music is the downward scale of four notes in the bass (B♭, A, G, F), which is a repeated accompaniment (ostinato) through the whole of the introduction before the first words are recited. The work is written in a triple metre. The opening tune is confident and waltz-like, and the accents of the scale motif, like a repeated peal of church bells, never coincide with the natural waltz rhythm: it is the three-pulse of the waltz against the four of the bell motif. When the bell motif is not in the bass it is found elsewhere, high up, having changed places with a brilliant passage of triplets now in the bass. When the music does stop, it is a call for attention to the spoken poem.
Elgar's vigorous waltz-like tune is memorable, is in effect a song without words; and his orchestration perfectly appropriate. Both words and music are powerful, and the work succeeds remarkably by their contrast and support of each other.
Read more about this topic: Carillon (Elgar)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.”
—André Malraux (19011976)
“O I shall hear skull skull,
Hear your lame music,
Believe music rejects undertaking,
Limps back.”
—Owen Dodson (b. 1914)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergottes] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (18711922)