Hughes
Here we see why music, as a science, takes the priority of painting; for if music is good, it is perfected by natural laws which cause its tones to melt into each other in the most delicate gradations, while the painter who endeavours to represent the exquisite variations of tints and lights in the living landscape is dependent entirely upon his own resources. The early writers on music were philosophers and mathematicians on the broad basis of general science, not on that of music only. Mathematicians, for the most part, have only studied the subject of musical sounds up to a certain point, and have then left it. The musician must take the chromatic scale—not as it exists in Nature, for that offered by the mathematician, without the ordinary compensations of conventional theory, is of no use to the practical musician. [Harmonies of Tones and Colours, The Method of Development or Creation of Harmonies2, page 16]
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