These three fatal faults must be avoided, or conquered, by the person
who would interpret music.
V
How to Listen to Music
Listening is an art. It requires close and accurate attention, sympathy,
imagination and genuine culture. Listening to music is an art of high
degree. Many derive exquisite enjoyment from it, for music is potent and
universal in its appeal. To listen intelligently to music is an
accomplishment few have acquired.
A great painting presents itself as a completed whole before the
observer's eye. It holds on the canvas the fixed place given it by the
master from whose genius it proceeded. No intermediary force is needed
to come between it and the impression it makes on the beholder. Music,
on the contrary, must be aroused from the written, or printed page to
living tone by the hand or voice of the interpreter, and but a fragment
at a time can be made perceptible to the listener's ear. Like a
panorama, it comes and goes before the imagination, its kaleidoscopic
tints and forms now sharply contrasted, now almost imperceptibly
graduated one into the other, but all shaping themselves into a logical
union, stamped with the design of a creative mind.
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