Evening star., 1938-07-04
THIS AND THAT
Bv CHARLES +. TRACEWELL.

6elloWlng on q nnal note may make
the famous tenor" even more famous,
with the unthinking, but those who real
ly love music, and understand that to
be good music it must be natural at the
same time 1t is artificial, want none of it.
The reason that bird songs though
beautiful, find little place, an amazingly
little place, in mans musical compost
tions, Is becaue they are too natural for
music. Music even of savages, is arti-
f1cial, in the good sense. 1t is too bad
that the word has gathered around it
ideas of falsity. There is good artifice
as well as bad. When We listen to a
great orchestra play that noble COM
position by the English composer
vaughan Williams. his Fantasia on a
Theme by Thomas Tallis," we are lis
tening to highly contrived and arti-
nclal work, just as the symphonies of
beethoven are planned. plotted, built up.
1t was only when Beethoven walked into
the fields, and thereafter wrote his
PASTORAL symphony. that he composed
the least effective of his nine works in
this form. Bird songs do not belong in
mans music, except they get in by
chance resemblance. Put them there,
and they are out of place.
1t is in the artifice of music, the plan
nlng and the plotting that the listener
may have such understanding of music
as is possible. The real soul of music
Is something else, and is outside and
ABOVE the intellectual factors thereof.
/ The music student studies counterpoint
etc, in order to make his music arti-
nclal, 1edolent of man, in the good
sense, and it is this side of music, and
thlS side only, that we can understand" :"
Inc perpetual plant of the person ig-
norant OF the technique of music is that
ne cannot understand" it, He feels
That II he could understand it, in the
same way he understands that plus 2
makes 4, he would be able to find a new
enjoyment in music.
But he wouldn't. That is the mu-
slclan business, to understand what
ne is writing; that is where the arti-
nclallty OF music comes in. The listener
may know something of melodic line,
something OF construction, and if he
ooes, ne Is SO much to the good, but his
real enjoyment of music does not come
from such things at all, but solely from
MS ears his comprehension of sounds,
and the subtle emotional effects they
have upon him.
therefore, any one, however unlet-
tered. II he listens to music with open
ears mind and heart will get" all that
Is to be gotten from the greatest compo.
sitions.
The catbird will show you a natural
musician, one who stands right up and
sings, no monkey business about him.
He also will show any one who is hot
and bothered because he thinks he can
not understand music, that the only
understanding necessary is to under
stand just where catbird music and the
mans symphony music join.
This merging point of the purely ma
ural and the purely artificial is not
hard to find, if one will listen with all
his heart and all his ears and keep his
mind open. The last is the most diff
cult. Many person has sat at SYM
phony concert, bewailing the fact, as he
supposed, that he could not make heads
or tails out of the sounds. mostly because
ne felt there was something about it he
could not understand
Music has two faces, the intellectual
and the emotional. BY the time the
listener hears it,. the intellectual side of
1t is out of the way. It has been done
1t is a fact accomplished
Now all one has to do is to listen, lust
as one would to catbird on a branch.