The Music of Hindostan c16.1

c16.1

THAT principle of balance by which the several parts of a song, whether it lasts half a minute or half an hour, stand out from one another in strong contrast and yet help, each of them in its way, to build up the general sense of unity—that ordered disposition of its component parts by which music travels to an inevitable climax, neither postponing it nor anticipating it, and thence to a close—that variety which gives flesh and blood to the bare bones of structure—all this is ‘Form’. Form is, however, rather an instinct than a principle, and it is dangerous to follow it too much into detail, because a composer may at any moment wrap his principle in new detail and justify it by success, and then analysis is apt to boggle.