<h2><SPAN name="I" id="I"></SPAN>I</h2>
<h2><i>Introduction</i></h2>
<div class="sidenote"><i>The book's appeal.</i></div>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">his</span> book has a purpose, which is as simple as it is plain; and an
unpretentious scope. It does not aim to edify either the musical
professor or the musical scholar. It comes into the presence of the
musical student with all becoming modesty. Its business is with those
who love music and present themselves for its gracious ministrations
in Concert-Room and Opera House, but have not studied it as professors
and scholars are supposed to study. It is not for the careless unless
they be willing to inquire whether it might not be well to yield the
common conception of entertainment in favor of the higher enjoyment
which springs from serious contemplation of beautiful things; but if
they are willing so to inquire, they<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></SPAN></span> shall be accounted the class
that the author is most anxious to reach. The reasons which prompted
its writing and the laying out of its plan will presently appear. For
the frankness of his disclosure the author might be willing to
apologize were his reverence for music less and his consideration for
popular affectations more; but because he is convinced that a love for
music carries with it that which, so it be but awakened, shall
speedily grow into an honest desire to know more about the beloved
object, he is willing to seem unamiable to the amateur while arguing
the need of even so mild a stimulant as his book, and ingenuous,
mayhap even childish, to the professional musician while trying to
point a way in which better appreciation may be sought.</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Talent in listening.</i></div>
<p>The capacity properly to listen to music is better proof of musical
talent in the listener than skill to play upon an instrument or
ability to sing acceptably when unaccompanied by that capacity. It
makes more for that gentleness and refinement of emotion, thought, and
action which, in the highest sense<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></SPAN></span> of the term, it is the province of
music to promote. And it is a much rarer accomplishment. I cannot
conceive anything more pitiful than the spectacle of men and women
perched on a fair observation point exclaiming rapturously at the
loveliness of mead and valley, their eyes melting involuntarily in
tenderness at the sight of moss-carpeted slopes and rocks and peaceful
wood, or dilating in reverent wonder at mountain magnificence, and
then learning from their exclamations that, as a matter of fact, they
are unable to distinguish between rock and tree, field and forest,
earth and sky; between the dark-browns of the storm-scarred rock, the
greens of the foliage, and the blues of the sky.</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Ill equipped listeners.</i></div>
<p>Yet in the realm of another sense, in the contemplation of beauties
more ethereal and evanescent than those of nature, such is the
experience which in my capacity as a writer for newspapers I have made
for many years. A party of people blind to form and color cannot be
said to be well equipped for a Swiss journey, though loaded down<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></SPAN></span> with
alpenstocks and Baedekers; yet the spectacle of such a party on the
top of the Rigi is no more pitiful and anomalous than that presented
by the majority of the hearers in our concert-rooms. They are there to
adventure a journey into a realm whose beauties do not disclose
themselves to the senses alone, but whose perception requires a
co-operation of all the finer faculties; yet of this they seem to know
nothing, and even of that sense to which the first appeal is made it
may be said with profound truth that "hearing they hear not, neither
do they understand."</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Popular ignorance of music.</i></div>
<p>Of all the arts, music is practised most and thought about least. Why
this should be the case may be explained on several grounds. A sweet
mystery enshrouds the nature of music. Its material part is subtle and
elusive. To master it on its technical side alone costs a vast
expenditure of time, patience, and industry. But since it is, in one
manifestation or another, the most popular of the arts, and one the
enjoyment of which is conditioned in a peculiar degree on love, it
remains passing<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></SPAN></span> strange that the indifference touching its nature and
elements, and the character of the phenomena which produce it, or are
produced by it, is so general. I do not recall that anybody has ever
tried to ground this popular ignorance touching an art of which, by
right of birth, everybody is a critic. The unamiable nature of the
task, of which I am keenly conscious, has probably been a bar to such
an undertaking. But a frank diagnosis must precede the discovery of a
cure for every disease, and I have undertaken to point out a way in
which this grievous ailment in the social body may at least be
lessened.</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Paucity of intelligent comment.</i></div>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Want of a model.</i></div>
<p>It is not an exaggeration to say that one might listen for a lifetime
to the polite conversation of our drawing-rooms (and I do not mean by
this to refer to the United States alone) without hearing a symphony
talked about in terms indicative of more than the most superficial
knowledge of the outward form, that is, the dimensions and apparatus,
of such a composition. No other art provides an exact analogy for this
phenomenon. Everybody can say something contain<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></SPAN></span>ing a degree of
appositeness about a poem, novel, painting, statue, or building. If he
can do no more he can go as far as Landseer's rural critic who
objected to one of the artist's paintings on the ground that not one
of the three pigs eating from a trough had a foot in it. It is the
absence of the standard of judgment employed in this criticism which
makes significant talk about music so difficult. Nature failed to
provide a model for this ethereal art. There is nothing in the natural
world with which the simple man may compare it.</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Simple terms confounded.</i></div>
<p>It is not alone a knowledge of the constituent factors of a symphony,
or the difference between a sonata and a suite, a march and a mazurka,
that is rare. Unless you chance to be listening to the conversation of
musicians (in which term I wish to include amateurs who are what the
word amateur implies, and whose knowledge stands in some respectable
relation to their love), you will find, so frequently that I have not
the heart to attempt an estimate of the proportion, that the most
common words<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></SPAN></span> in the terminology of the art are misapplied. Such
familiar things as harmony and melody, time and tune, are continually
confounded. Let us call a distinguished witness into the box; the
instance is not new, but it will serve. What does Tennyson mean when
he says:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"All night have the roses heard<br/></span>
<span class="i2">The flute, violin, bassoon;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd<br/></span>
<span class="i2">To the dancers dancing in tune?"</span></div>
</div>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Tune and time.</i></div>
<p>Unless the dancers who wearied Maud were provided with even a more
extraordinary instrumental outfit than the Old Lady of Banbury Cross,
how could they have danced "in tune?"</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Blunders of poets and essayists.</i></div>
<p>Musical study of a sort being almost as general as study of the "three
Rs," it must be said that the gross forms of ignorance are utterly
inexcusable. But if this is obvious, it is even more obvious that
there is something radically wrong with the prevalent systems of
musical instruction. It is because of a plentiful lack of knowledge
that so much that is written on music is with<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></SPAN></span>out meaning, and that
the most foolish kind of rhapsody, so it show a collocation of fine
words, is permitted to masquerade as musical criticism and even
analysis. People like to read about music, and the books of a certain
English clergyman have had a sale of stupendous magnitude
notwithstanding they are full of absurdities. The clergyman has a
multitudinous companionship, moreover, among novelists, essayists, and
poets whose safety lies in more or less fantastic generalization when
they come to talk about music. How they flounder when they come to
detail! It was Charles Lamb who said, in his "Chapter on Ears," that
in voices he could not distinguish a soprano from a tenor, and could
only contrive to guess at the thorough-bass from its being
"supereminently harsh and disagreeable;" yet dear old Elia may be
forgiven, since his confounding the bass voice with a system of
musical short-hand is so delightful a proof of the ignorance he was
confessing.</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Literary realism and musical terminology.</i></div>
<p>But what shall the troubled critics say to Tennyson's orchestra
consisting<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></SPAN></span> of a flute, violin, and bassoon? Or to Coleridge's "<i>loud</i>
bassoon," which made the wedding-guest to beat his breast? Or to Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's pianist who played "with an airy and bird-like
touch?" Or to our own clever painter-novelist who, in "Snubbin'
through Jersey," has Brushes bring out his violoncello and play "the
symphonies of Beethoven" to entertain his fellow canal-boat
passengers? The tendency toward realism, or "veritism," as it is
called, has brought out a rich crop of blunders. It will not do to
have a character in a story simply sing or play something; we must
have the names of composers and compositions. The genial gentleman who
enriched musical literature with arrangements of Beethoven's
symphonies for violoncello without accompaniment has since
supplemented this feat by creating a German fiddler who, when he
thinks himself unnoticed, plays a sonata for violin and contralto
voice; Professor Brander Matthews permits one of his heroines to sing
Schumann's "Warum?" and one of his heroes plays "The Moonlight
Concer<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></SPAN></span>to;" one of Ouida's romantic creatures spends hours at an organ
"playing the grand old masses of Mendelssohn;" in "Moths" the tenor
never wearies of singing certain "exquisite airs of Palestrina," which
recalls the fact that an indignant correspondent of a St. Louis
newspaper, protesting against the Teutonism and heaviness of an
orchestra conductor's programmes, demanded some of the "lighter" works
of "Berlioz and Palestrina."</p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>A popular need.</i></div>
<p>Alas! these things and the many others equally amusing which Mr. G.
Sutherland Edwards long ago catalogued in an essay on "The Literary
Maltreatment of Music" are but evidences that even cultured folk have
not yet learned to talk correctly about the art which is practised
most widely. There is a greater need than pianoforte teachers and
singing teachers, and that is a numerous company of writers and
talkers who shall teach the people how to listen to music so that it
shall not pass through their heads like a vast tonal phantasmagoria,
but provide the varied and noble delights contemplated by the
composers.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></SPAN></span></p>
<div class="sidenote"><i>A warning against writers.</i></div>
<div class="sidenote"><i>Pedants and rhapsodists.</i></div>
<p>Ungracious as it might appear, it may yet not be amiss, therefore, at
the very outset of an inquiry into the proper way in which to listen
to music, to utter a warning against much that is written on the art.
As a rule it will be found that writers on music are divided into two
classes, and that neither of these classes can do much good. Too often
they are either pedants or rhapsodists. This division is wholly
natural. Music has many sides and is a science as well as an art. Its
scientific side is that on which the pedant generally approaches it.
He is concerned with forms and rules, with externals, to the
forgetting of that which is inexpressibly nobler and higher. But the
pedants are not harmful, because they are not interesting; strictly
speaking, they do not write for the public at all, but only for their
professional colleagues. The harmful men are the foolish rhapsodists
who take advantage of the fact that the language of music is
indeterminate and evanescent to talk about the art in such a way as to
present themselves as persons of exquisite sensibilities rather<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></SPAN></span> than
to direct attention to the real nature and beauty of music itself. To
them I shall recur in a later <SPAN href="#IX">chapter</SPAN> devoted to musical criticism,
and haply point out the difference between good and bad critics and
commentators from the view-point of popular need and popular
opportunity.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p style="text-align: center">
<ANTIMG src="images/deco03.png" alt="Decoration" width-obs="300" height-obs="75" /></p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></SPAN></span></p>
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