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One can play these octaves slowly, using weight, or faster with crisp, staccato touch. I play diatonic or chromatic octave scales, with four repetitions or more, on each note using fourth finger for black keys. "I sit low at the piano, as I get better results in this way; though it is somewhat more difficult to obtain them. I confess it is easier to sit high and bear down on the hands.
We have too much of what Cobbett would call the "dead-weight" in us to become adopted by Apollo as the "children of song;" but what with the school of music in Tenterden-street, and numberless juvenile prodigies, we may indulge the expectation of rising in the diatonic scale, and that too at no very distant period.
Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, and after them the modern Germans and their followers, found in a scale of semitones a limited avenue of escape from the confinement of the modern diatonic modes, and bequeathed to contemporary music an inheritance of ungoverned chromaticism which still clogs its progress and obstructs its independence.
In the latter it is plain, diatonic and immensely in the best sense effective; in Rienzi, in spite of the vigour of its presentation, the effect is weakened by the way in which it is bent away to a chromatic something which is neither frankly Italian nor honestly German. Again, he composed with an audience in his mind's eye that could only take in one melody or theme at a time.
In the diatonic, there are two consecutive tones, and the third interval of a semitone completes the tetrachord. Hence, in the three classes, the tetrachords are equally composed of two tones and a semitone, but when they are regarded separately according to the terms of each class, they differ in the arrangement of their intervals.
Like some rare human favourite of nature, scattered at intervals along the line of a thousand years, who has been gifted so variously as to seem "Not one, but all mankind's epitome," Ceylon, in order that she might become capable of products without end, has been made an abstract of the whole earth, and fitted up as a panorganon for modulating through the whole diatonic scale of climates.
Primitive scales are highly complex, and involve intervals not appreciable by us as melody; with time they gradually become simpler; and in the diatonic scale, especially in its most modern developments, where the distinction between major and minor tends to become effaced, we seem to have reached the limit, and the scale is reduced to the simplest possible numerical relations.
It comprises a whole diatonic series of notes, and modes may be selected therefrom. But it is to Rome that we owe the seed of our modern methods of treatment.
Crossjay's voice ran up and down a diatonic scale with here and there a query in semitone and a laugh on a ringing note. She wondered what he could have to talk of so incessantly, and imagined all the dialogue. He prattled of his yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, which did not imply past and future, but his vivid present. She felt like one vainly trying to fly in hearing him; she felt old.
Even in the earlier of the orchestral works, "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine" both written in Germany in the days when the genius of Wagner was an ambient and inescapable flame the writing is comparatively free from chromatic effects. On the other hand, he is far less audaciously diatonic than Richard Strauss. His style is, in fact, a subtle blend of opposing tendencies.
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