Some convictions Edward Cone raises about music

• There have been successful attempts of a completely saturated form arising from an unpromising hypothesis

• Cone applies 3 principles to music: polar tension, the fusion by mutual analogy and of saturation. The first two must be stressed at the outset.

• The unity of a musical composition must be perceptible within the medium; it must be heard

• The apparent simple surface of some music may in fact conceal great richness. (e.g. a Bach Prelude)

• Since music is a temporal art, certain possibilities are open to it that are unavailable to painting.

• We hear words and music together as forming some sort of unity. Music and words appear to be, not parallel structures but 2 aspects of a single organism. For this reason the text and setting of the best songs give the illusion of being “twinborn” even when not actually so. Words and music properly combined produce no conflict of attention in the listener.

• Romantic melodrama (opera) attempted in a thorough-going was to create a musical accompaniment expressively paralleling the text; but turned out to be only program music with the program read aloud.

• The unresolved tension between word and tone makes it impossible for the listener to attend to both. There are exceptions but it requires careful musical and dramatic preparation. Cone gives the opera Fidelio by Beethoven and Der Freischutz by Carl Von Weber as examples.

• It is thus not simply the combination of elements that gives opera its peculiar fascination; it is the fusion produced by the mutual analogy of the words and music—a union further enriched and clarified by the visual action.

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