Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

FLANNAN ISLANDS. 205
and thus, that alone is dwelt on, of which the impression
is pleasing, or consonant to harmonic experience and
habits ; while it is also well known, that some tones have
the power of entirely suppressing- others, or of modifying
them in such a manner as to produce true harmonies,
which, if heard, they would have disturbed. The great
proportion of discords to be found in these feathery con-
certs, does not, therefore, prevent the agreeable effects
which I have here been describing. On the contrary,
they are thus increased ; and the music, indeed, assumes
hence a far more scientific character, and one which
would be far better appreciated by a modern thorough-
bred musician than by an ordinary hearer. Notwithstand-
ing popular opinion and ancient rules, our late German
composers have shown, by the increase and the variety of
their discords, that very few concords are required to pro-
duce agreeable effects : still less that they are required to
produce striking ones, but rather the very reverse ; and
that the ear may be educated to take delight in that
which once appeared intolerable. Indeed Nature herself
seems to have proved that it is she who has laid this foun-
dation of delight, in the examples she has produced of
children, whose faculties, otherwise undeveloped, have
displayed this sensibility to the beauty of those harmo-
nious combinations which have commonly been called
discords. My squalling performers of the Flannan isles
seem to have been taught by nature that which has re-
quired a succession of Haydns, Mozarts, and Beethovens,
to bring to its present state of what must not yet be
called perfection ; and she might long ago have taught
us, had we been able or willing to learn, that chords re-
quire no preparation, that discords may be suspended, or
introduced, or united, or multiplied, in a thousand ways
once thought impossible, and that even the chord of the