How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. | Page 4

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.
[Sidenote: Paucity of intelligent comment.]
[Sidenote: Want of a model.]
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 containing 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.
[Sidenote: Simple terms confounded.]
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 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:
"All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has
the casement jessamine stirr'd To the dancers dancing in tune?"
[Sidenote: Tune and time.]
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?"
[Sidenote: Blunders of poets and essayists.]
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 without 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.
[Sidenote: Literary realism and musical terminology.]
But what shall the troubled critics say to Tennyson's orchestra
consisting of a flute, violin, and bassoon? Or to Coleridge's "loud

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