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The difference in these voices made it impossible to sing melodies of wide range in unison, and so the basses and tenors sang in consecutive fifths. When women took up the chanting, they sang either in fifths or in fourths. These harmonies appealed to them, and so continued in use even when there was no exigency on account of restricted range.
Having learned that there were many fine basses to be fished in a stream some twenty miles off, I started on horseback, with the view of passing the night there. I took with me a buffalo-hide, a blanket, and a tin cup, and two hours before sunset I arrived at the spot.
There is a kind of sonorous terror, increased by the insistent, regular notes of the brass, the spirited pace of the motive of strings, the barbaric ring we often hear in Slav music. At the height the savage yields to a more human vein of joyousness, though at the end it rushes the more wildly into a series of shrieks of trebles with tramping of basses.
Even when he avoided that failing, his music is often uncouth and ponderous, while on its surface lies a superfluous, highly-coloured froth. The basses move with leaden-footed reluctance; the melodies consist largely of ineffective arpeggios on long-drawn chords; the embroidery seems greatly in excess of modest needs.
Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let down from the ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its facets a sudden gaiety over the theatre; then the musicians came in one after the other; and first there was the protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing.
We were in the middle of it, and seemed to be looking up through a great cone of light millions and millions of miles into the sky. Then we saw it farther off and the pillars of fire stalked up and down the face of heaven like one of Handel's great basses.
In excellent accord these tenors and basses, so blameless in their living, lifted up their voices and sang they "would that the wavelets of ocean were wavelets of sparkling champagne!" It was a blithe and rippling morceau if one could forget the well-nigh cosmic depravity of it; but Miss Caroline, it appeared, was not able to forget.
Besides this, I have had the getting up and management of our choir. We practise three or four times a week; we chant the Venite, Glorias, and Te Deums, and sing one hymn. I have two basses, two tenors, one alto, and lots of girls, and the singing certainly is better than you would hear in nine country places out of ten.
Tenors were scarce, there being only one at present a young Englishman who had come out to learn farming at Sandy McQuarry's, and who suffered from chronic huskiness. Each of the sopranos had an attendant swain in the basses. That was a necessity to any smallest hope of enjoyment when the choir went abroad.
The opening andante in triple time for the five violoncelli and double basses at once carries the hearer to the regions of the upper Alps, where amid the eternal snows Nature sleeps in a peaceful dream. We perceive the coming of the sunlight, and the hazy atmosphere clearing away before the newborn day. In the next movement the solitude is all dispelled.
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