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06 National Music of the World. |
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till at last the excitement produced by that weak old mendicant from his miserable chattel of an instrument, amounted to an experience as peculiar as it is pleasant to recall.
As another element in Spanish dance music, the castanet is not to be overlooked, as working in magic combination with those queer, poignant guitar sounds; enabling the dancer to be in part his own orchestra, and to excite himself, as did the faun of antique mythology, by the sound of the pipes into which he breathed as he leaped among the vines. But the castanet is obviously a condiment to the dance, more complete and comfortable than the faun's reeds, seeing that motion must shorten the breath. To the guitar and castanet is, in some districts of Spain, added a clarinet of a coarse sort —not, of course, undertaken by the dancer.
The entire exhibition bears a generically different character from those of music and dancing belonging to any other country.14 In the Spanish measures
11 And yet there are coincidences not to be overlooked. The dances of the north in ' tempo alia Polacca,' of which notice will appear in a later page, with the freaks and whimsies not so much allowed to as expected from the leader of the band, have a certain affinity in their licence to the achievements of the Madrid guitar player, and in their humour to that which he called up. |
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