The reason why music is so much more difficult to write about than any
other art, is because music is the one absolutely disembodied art, when
it is heard, and no more than a proposition of Euclid, when it is
written. It is wholly useless, to the student no less than to the
general reader, to write about music in the style of the programmes for
which we pay sixpence at the concerts. "Repeated by flute and oboe, with
accompaniment for clarionet (in triplets) and strings _pizzicato_, and
then worked up by the full orchestra, this melody is eventually allotted
to the 'cellos, its accompaniment now taking the form of chromatic
passages," and so forth. Not less useless is it to write a rhapsody
which has nothing to do with the notes, and to present this as an
interpretation of what the notes have said in an unknown language. Yet
what method is there besides these two methods? None, indeed, that can
ever be wholly satisfactory; at the best, no more than a compromise.
In writing about poetry, while precisely that quality which makes it
poetry must always evade expression, there yet remain the whole definite
meaning of the words, and the whole easily explicable technique of the
verse, which can be made clear to every reader. In painting, you have
the subject of the picture, and you have the colour, handling, and the
like, which can be expressed hardly less precisely in words. But music
has no subject, outside itself; no meaning, outside its meaning as
music; and, to understand anything of what is meant by its technique, a
certain definite technical knowledge is necessary in the reader. What
subterfuges are required, in order to give the vaguest suggestion of
what a piece of music is like, and how little has been said, after all,
beyond generalisations, which would apply equally to half a dozen
different pieces! The composer himself, if you ask him, will tell you
that you may be quite correct in what you say, but that he has no
opinion in the matter.
Music has indeed a language, but it is a language in which birds and
other angels may talk, but out of which we cannot translate their
meaning. Emotion itself, how changed becomes even emotion when we
transport it into a new world, in which only sound has feeling! But I am
speaking as if it had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born
in its own region, and is wholly ignorant of ours.