Читать книгу Music and Life: A study of the relations between ourselves and music онлайн

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Our children, after years of conventional music study, are finally taken to hear an orchestral concert. A great man is to speak to them. He does not use words. What he has to say issues forth in a myriad of sounds, now soft, now loud, now fast, now slow. This that the child hears is what is called music, seemingly a mere succession of sounds, really a vision of what a great man has seen of all those inner things of life which only he can truly see. These sounds are formed into a perfect order. Their very soul may hide in the peculiar tone of the oboe or horn; they change their significance a dozen times in as many moments; slender filaments of them run through and through as in a fairy web. The child gapes. “Is this music?” it says; “I thought music was the black and white keys, or holding my hand right, or scales, or the key of F or G, or sonatinas, or something.” No one has ever told her what music really is. She has only her delicate, tender, childlike feelings as a guide What she has been doing may have been as little like music as grammar is like literature.