What Makes Things Musical?

What Makes Things Musical?

"What Makes Things Musical?" is a short allegorical prose poem by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, structured as a sequence of personified voices from nature and human life, each answering the recurring question of the title in turn. The piece unfolds as a call-and-response catechism: the refrain "What Makes Things Musical?" (or "What Makes Creatures Musical?") introduces each new speaker, who offers a single-word answer and then elaborates it through vivid, sensory description. The Forest answers "The Sun," contrasting its silent, fearful stillness at night—when even a footstep or a bird's chirp seems swallowed by an oppressive quiet—with the joyful transformation at dawn, when light stirs the trees to quiver, wakes the birds to sing in responsive choruses, and prompts the wind to "tune" the branches like an orchestra, with oaks and beeches providing treble and pines a deep bass, insects humming beneath it all. The Sea answers "Storms," describing its ordinary state as a quiet, murmuring companion to beaches and boats, but declaring that its true "voice" and "battle-music" emerge only in tempest, when it thunders through caverns, hurls itself against rocks, and roars in counterpoint with the shrieking wind. The Stream answers "Action," recounting its long, monotonous captivity in a silent mountain basin, fed only by occasional rain and snowmelt, visited by nothing louder than an eagle's cry. Once it overflows its rocky cradle and is set free to run downhill, it becomes musical—dancing, tinkling over stones like bells, fluting among the cresses, and crashing joyously over rocks and into pools. The Harp-strings answer "Suffering," recalling their origin as dull, voiceless ore buried in the dark earth. Only through repeated ordeal—smelting in fierce furnaces, hammering, stretching on the rack, and being drawn tight across a wooden frame—do they become capable of producing rich chords and melodies under a musician's hand. The Rocks answer "Union," noting that individually, as bare crags or scattered boulders, they were mute, even while everything that grew from or around them (trees, streams, grasses) sang. Only when gathered together by a human hand—arranged side by side, as in some struck instrument or cairn of stones—do they answer one another in melodious tones and combine into chords. The Oak-beam, now built into the timber of a ship, answers "Life," speaking of its loss rather than its possession: as a living tree it rustled with the music of countless leaves and stood among a forest chorus, but once felled by the axe, all music departed, leaving it merely useful and honored, yet reduced to groaning and creaking in storms. The Children answer "Joy," their spontaneous laughter as they run through the fields said to gather up and echo the finest musical qualities of the natural world—the ripple of waves, the tinkle of brooks, the morning song of birds. Finally, the Thrush and the Mother both answer "Love"—the bird warbling to his mate, the mother singing lullabies to her child—and all the Creatures join in affirming that Love is the deepest and unifying source of music underlying every other cause named: storms and sunshine, suffering and joy, action, union, and life itself. The piece closes on a devotional, ascending note, moving from earthly nature to a vision of "the multitude before the throne," redeemed souls who, having passed through tribulation, conflict, darkness, and isolation, are gathered together in the light to sing a "new song," ending in the affirmation "for GOD is LOVE." Thematically, the work is a Victorian devotional allegory that uses natural imagery to argue that music—and by extension beauty, meaning, and voice—arises not from ease or stillness but from transformation: illumination breaking upon darkness, conflict, purposeful motion, refining suffering, communal gathering, and vital animation. Each personified element must undergo change, ordeal, or connection before it can "sing." The progression moves from inanimate and natural phenomena (sun, storm, stream) through crafted and shaped materials (harp-strings, gathered rocks, dead wood) to living creatures (children, birds, mothers), building toward the theological climax that identifies Love as the unifying principle behind all the preceding forces, and ultimately roots that Love in the divine, framing the entire natural and human capacity for music as a reflection of God's own nature. The structure is catechetical and cumulative, using repetition and escalating scope—from forest to sea to stream to metal to stone to timber to human joy to human/divine love—to build toward its closing spiritual affirmation.

By Elizabeth Rundle Charles · First published 1861 · Genre: Allegory, Fable, Philosophical Fiction · 1,875 words

First lines

WHAT MAKES THINGS MUSICAL?

"THE SUN! " said the Forest. "In the night I am still and voiceless. A / weight of silence lies upon my heart. If you pass through me, the sound / of your own footstep echoes fearfully, like the footfall of a ghost. If / you speak to break the spell, the silence closes in on your words, like / the ocean on a pebble you throw into it. The wind sighs far-off among / the branches, as if he were hushing his breath to listen. If a little / bird chirps uneasily in its nest, it is silenced before you can find / out whence the sound came.

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What Makes Things Musical? is listed on Textopian as an essay by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, dated 1861 CE.

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music theory · musicology · aesthetics · philosophy of music · 19th century · British literature · music criticism · harmony · composition · musical appreciation · art theory · melody

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