ABSTRACT
“It is a blessing”, a friend once told me, “that as a rule you musicians should be inarticulate”. I need hardly add that my outspoken friend was himself a literary man. The answer, which of course did not then occur to me, might have been: “Well, what of it? If we take it that the only thing worth bothering about is the ineffable”, though I doubt whether my friend could have agreed. He went on:
Look at all the nonsense your best people have uttered as soon as they generalize upon characteristics, and, above all, upon the merits of their own or other nations’ music. From Rousseau, if you accept him as a composer, to Debussy’s Monsieur Croche Anti-dilettante, one could make a staggering anthology, and that is leaving contemporaries in peace.
