In expressing the
man of the nineteenth century, he discarded the old major-minor system
that had dominated Europe so long. That system was the outcome of a
conception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder of
nature, placed him in a category of his own, and pretended that he was
both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the
consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the
bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice.
They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the
average female voice, and the difference between the average soprano and
alto. It is upon those intervals that the C-major scale and its
twenty-three dependents are based. But with the coming of a conception
that no longer separated man from the rest of creation, and placed him
in it as a small part of it, brother to the animals and plants, to
everything that breathes, the old scale could no longer completely
express him. The modulations of the noises of wind and water, the
infinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on the
planisphere, seemed to ask him to include them, to become conscious of
them and reproduce them. He required other more subtle scales. And with
Wagner the monarchy of the C-major scale is at an end.
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