MUSICAL PHENOMENA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 149, 10 March 1876, Page 14

MUSICAL PHENOMENA.

The strangest phenomena of all connected with musical perturbation are to be found in alliance with memory ; but musical sound is only one of many mediums which connect us vividly with the past. Sconts hare a remarkable power of recalling past events. "Who has not got memories connected with attar of roses or the perfume of violets ? The pecidiar combination of odors to be met with only in a steamboat cabin ivill recall to some many a disastrous passage across the British Channel. To a Londoner, tie smell of a tan-yard or tallow manufactory will certainly be associated with those lines of railway running out of London over the roofs of serried houses overlooking certain odorous yards — instantly he may remember his holding his nose, or seizing the window-strap to pull up the window of the railway carriage. The odor of tar calls up many a watering-place in summer ; we are on the pier in an instant, with some little child, perchance now grown up or dead ; the fishing-smack lies alongside lazily, smoke issuing from a pot at the stern ; a sailor sits with a pipe in his mouth, throwing vegetable parings into the black kettle for the nondescript midday meal ; the hot sea beneath a blazing sun lies almost stagnant, waiting for the turn of the tide ; the white cliffs glimmer along the coast — and all this flashes for a rnomeut before the mind's eye as we chance to pass over a piece of asphalt pavement only laid down, and smelling faintly of pitch. The sight of a faded flower pressed in a book brings back, with a little shock of feeling, the hand that gathered it, or the distant hills upon which it once bloomed years ago. The touch of satin or velvet, or fine hah*, is abo capable of reviving the recollections of scenes, and places, and persons. But for freshne.-s, and suddenness, and power over memory, all the senses must yield to the sense of hearing. Memory is the great perturber of musical meaning. When memory is concerned, music is no longer itself; it ceases to have any proper plane of feeling ; it surrenders itself wholly, with all its rights, to memory, to be the patient, stern, and terrible exponent of the recording angel. What is it ? Only a few trivial bars of an old piano-forte piece — " Murmures dv Rhone," or " Pluie des Perlcs." The drawingroom window is open, the children are playing on the lawn, the warm morning air is charged with the scent of lilac blossoms. Then a ring at the bell, the confusion in the hall, the girl at the piano stops, the door opens, and one is lifted in dying or dead. Years, years ago ! but passing through the streets, a bar or two of the " Murmures dv .Rhone" brings the whole scene up before the girl, now no longer a girl, but a middle-aged woman, looking back to one fatal summer morning. The enthusiastic old men, who invariably turned up in force whenever poor Madame Grisi was advertised to sing in her last days, seemed always deeply affected. Yet it could hardly be at what they actually heard — no, the few notes recalled the most superb soprano of the oge in her best days ; recalled, also, the scenes of youth for ever faded out, and the lights of youth quenched in the gray mists of the dull, declining years. It was worth any money to hear even the hollow echo of a voice which had power to bring back, if only for a moment, the ." tender grace of a day that was dead."