Harnessed: How Language And Music Mimicked Nature And Transformed Ape To Man - Plot & Excerpts
We should now have something in musical literature to parallel Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Whenever a musical theme haunted us, but refused to identify itself no matter how much we scraped our memory, all we should have to do would be to look up the tune in Barlow and Morgenstern, where those ingenious dictionary-makers would assemble some ten thousand musical themes, with a notation-index or theme-finder, to locate the name of the composition from which the haunting fragment came, and the name of the composer. – John Erskine, 1948, in the preface to Barlow and Morgenstern’s A Dictionary of Musical Themes. In the 1940s it must have been laborious to construct a dictionary of musical themes, but that’s what Barlow and Morgenstern went ahead and did. It is unclear whether anyone ever actually used it to identify the tunes that were haunting them, and, at any rate, it is obsolete today, given that our iPhones can tell us the name and composer of a song if you merely let it listen to a few bars.
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