How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. | Page 5

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 Concerto;" 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."
[Sidenote: A popular need.]
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.
[Sidenote: A warning against writers.]
[Sidenote: Pedants and rhapsodists.]

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 than to direct attention to the real nature and beauty
of music itself. To them I shall recur in a later chapter 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.

II
Recognition of Musical Elements
[Sidenote: The nature of music.]
Music is dual in its nature; it is material as well as spiritual. Its material
side we apprehend through the sense of hearing, and comprehend
through the intellect; its spiritual side reaches us through the fancy (or
imagination, so it be music of the highest class), and the emotional part
of us. If the scope and capacity of the art, and the evolutionary
processes which its history discloses (a record of which is preserved in
its nomenclature), are to be understood, it is essential that this duality
be kept in view. There is something so potent and elemental in the
appeal which music makes that it is possible to derive pleasure from

even an unwilling hearing or a hearing unaccompanied by effort at
analysis; but real appreciation of its beauty, which means recognition
of the qualities which put it in the realm of art, is conditioned upon
intelligent hearing. The higher the intelligence, the keener will be the
enjoyment, if the former be directed to the spiritual side as well as the
material.
[Sidenote: Necessity of intelligent hearing.]
So far as music is merely agreeably co-ordinated sounds, it may be
reduced to mathematics and its practice to handicraft. But recognition
of design is a condition precedent to the awakening of the fancy or the
imagination, and to achieve such recognition there must be intelligent
hearing in the first instance. For the purposes of this study, design may
be held to be Form in its primary stages, the recognition of which is
possible to every listener who is fond of music; it is not necessary that
he be learned in the science. He need only be willing to let an
intellectual process, which will bring its own reward, accompany the
physical process of hearing.
[Sidenote: Tones and