A GLEAM IN THE EYE

W
HENI was welve or so, a pianist of considerable
distinction gave a recital in our little town. Having
shown a decided interest in music and some knack
for the piano, I was taken to the concert. Next to me sat one of our promi-
nent "senior citizens" — a crusty old gentleman who had borne the rank
of Major in the Union Army. His presence at this entertainment, which
was for our community quite unusual, was due, we were sure, to a sense
of civic duty rather than to any native interest in music. He sat with deco-
rous inattention through the first group on the program (a Bach fugue
and a Beethoven sonata), adding merely a few perfunctory spats to the
generous applause. But the next group began with the Liszt arrangement
of Schubert's Hark, Hark! The Lark; and as it ended he turned to me
with an astonished gleam in his eye. "Pritti — ent it!" were his only
words, uttered in that accent which marked him for us Midwesterners
as a Down Easter; but the gleam, I will still swear, was one of genuine in-
terest.
I do not remember my own response. Some fifty years later, if I had
still been twelve, I should probably have said, "That sends me! "—a phrase
whose genuineness seems to me akin to that of the Major's gleam, and
which I find a heartening antidote for the pessimism nowadays frequent-
ly evoked by the spectacle of teen-age behavior.
Not only the Major and I but the whole audience —for the most part
musically illiterate — were "sent" by that charming little piece. Where
we were sent, none of us dreamed of inquiring. We knew we had been,
3
 THE WHY OF MUSIC
for the moment, in a region of delectable sensation that somehow roused
the imagination; we admired the skill that had sent us there; the other
numbers had sent us to other and quite dissimilar corners of the same re-
gion; but although we were sure we had "seen" in each corner something
of high interest, we could not in the least have told what we had seen. But
we had seen, as well as heard, that something.
Having been for many years a teacher of music in several of its many
aspects, historical, theoretical, and practical, I have come to think the
question as to where music sends its hearers and what they see there as
one of considerable importance. As with physical excursions to famous
sites, the object to be visited rather than the journey itself constitutes the
principal reason — the Why — for the trip; yet all too often that musical
Why is barely glimpsed, because our guide (the performer) persists in
calling our attention to the tonal vehicle which transported us, and to the
superlative skill with which he has "driven" the vehicle. From my pro-
fessorial chair I had to organize what might be called guided tours
through various musical fields. They had of course to be organized upon
a generally established academic plan whose rigidity my students often
resented because, instead of "sending" them, it confined them to dull and
apparently remote regions of historic fact or laborious technical routine;
and although I felt sure I was leading them toward an ultimate view of
the all-important musical Why, I could often detect, if only in wander-
ing eyes, the unuttered but devastating sophomoric question, So what?
Although our academic plan was intended to break down that legiti-
mate but oversimple question Why into its several essential parts, I came
to see that our curriculum (literally, our "racecourse") led rather toward
the mastery of a variety of Hows, leaving the Why to be explored (if at
all) in the academic field of aesthetics — another technical discipline
whose forbidding verbiage bars it from the organized musical curricu-
lum so that it is generally relegated to a rather minor position in its more
proper field of philosophy, where few music students have either time or
inclination to pursue it. A Why, however, that may be both the original
and the final purpose of music-making, lurks behind every How: too
often invisible in the glare of the How, but still discernible by one who
has become uneasy as to his appreciation of the art.
This book is intended as another guided tour: in part, along the famil-
iar roads of formal music appreciation, already copiously mapped and
heavily traveled, but chiefly into the byways where, all but hidden be-

4
 A GLEAM IN THE EYE
hind the many brilliant Hows that line the more familiar road, that essen-
tial Why lurks. The tour is open, not only to academically accredited
students but to that hypothetical figure called the average man; and I
have begun it with the gleam in the Major's eye because I believe that
even he — musically, a less-than-average man —descried for that brief
moment the possibility of a relation between music and his own world of
experience that might justify the musician's preoccupation with what,
until that moment, had been for the Major a trivial diversion.
That his mind was lit, even momentarily, by a musical spark, was
doubtless an accident. But similar sparks, catching in more receptive
minds more inflammable heaps of imaginative tinder, have ignited hotter
fires at which, from the beginning of music's history, such minds have
been warmed. What the original spark is, or by what sort of charge it is
generated, I cannot pretend to say. But the tinder it ignites is more than
that little store of exceptional musical sensitivity which the individual
happens to possess. It is also his mentally distilled store of nonmusical ex-
perience, filed somehow in the memory, with tiny wires attached that
lead both to the area of musical sensitivity and to that of present con-
sciousness. When those wires are charged, the resultant glow in the mind
— the glow of past experience galvanized into life and fused with present
awareness and future expectation — can be very brilliant. The gleam in
the eye is a sign that the mind is glowing.
It will glow, of course, even when no more than its "purely" musical
area is excited, and the response of that area, measured as Seashore and
later psychologists have attempted to measure it, is a fair index of musi-
cal sensitivity. But that measurement fails as an index of musical mentali-
ty; for music stimulates many others than the purely musical area of the
mind. The masterpieces of religious music, for example, excite the re-
ligious as well as the musical consciousness, and would never be judged
as masterpieces if they failed to do that. The real Why of those works,
then — the original stimulus to their creation and the model after which
they were shaped —was not the musical but the religious consciousness;
and we shall find not only that similar extramusical spurs have instigated
much secular music, instrumental as well as vocal, but that this nonmusi-
cal influence is discoverable in the musical texture itself.
This Why — this fertilizing commerce between music and human ex-
perience — although tentatively acknowledged, receives little critical at-
tention, whether in the books on music appreciation or in the severer
5
 THE WHY OF MUSIC
analytical studies. Indeed, the musical avant-garde flatly denies its inter-
est and even its existence. It points out that music neither portrays nor
symbolizes the tangible facts of experience, and it reasons — quite lucidly
— from that dubious premise that the long-cherished belief in that rela-
tion was a fiction. The Why of music, then, must lie in the interest of
music as music.
This book attempts, with a minimum of technical language, to sup-
port, in the general mind, the possibly shaken belief that that relation
does, did, and will exist; that a general interest in music purely as music
neither did nor does exist; and that the relation of music to experience,
instead of being a fiction, is a demonstrable fact.
That very general fact, however, is not self-evident, so that in the
course of its demonstration innumerable questions may arise. Many rep-
resentatives of what I envision as the general mind have put these ques-
tions to me, but I shall not falsify that mind if, for convenience, I put the
questions into the mouth of a single character, and answer them similarly
in my own person. In that composite character I am hoping that you,
dear reader, will often recognize yourself. You will find him, at any rate,
an earnest and intelligent questioner, reliant, as he should be, upon his
own musical perception, and unconvinced by any reasons other than
those which he can recognize as logical. To guide your eye to which of
us is speaking, I shall designate you as F (for my Friend, Fred) and my-
self simply as I.
Having thus been subpoenaed as collaborator, and having overheard
my comment on the Major, you begin:
F. Do you mean we're going to make a book about a gleam in the
eye?
7. Not, to be sure, about that mere effulgence. But it was a sign, wasn't
it, that the Major was "sent"? And we're going to try to find out what
sent him, and where? For he found himself, for a moment, in an unknown
region of his imagination; and it's really that region, in the general mind,
that we're going to explore. Less figuratively, we're hunting for the basis
of a sound musical judgment — a reasonably competent musical criticism.
Literally, criticism is a judgment — a discrimination — of value; and while
you may rightly call the Major's gleam the sign of an infantile discrimi-
nation, you will admit that more percipient eyes, such as your own, also
gleam. I am going to contend that what his eye, or yours, gleams for —
however vague or trivial it may seem to you now — will prove to be an
6
 A GLEAM IN THE EYE

important item in our critical summary. Do you know a more trustwor-

thy sign that value has been recognized?
F. Perhaps not; but merely to recognize value isn't to measure, or even
to establish it. There are certainly much more dependable measures of
value.
/. I didn't call the recognition of value a measure of it, and I'm not pro-
posing the gleam, although I think it a fairly accurate sign of interest, as
a measure of value. But mayn't it at least serve as a divining rod?
F. Gleams in the eye and divining rods! If your critical laboratory
hasn't any better apparatus than that, I don't think our critical effort will
get very far.
/. It won't. But with what, then, would you stock our laboratory?
F. Certainly with something more factually analytical. Isn't the aware-
ness of coherent musical design — of form — of primary importance? As
I studied them in school, the processes of musical structure, according to
which the masterpieces of the literature were shaped, rest on physical
fact and structural principle which I should think no criticism could ig-
nore.
7. Did your eye gleam for structural principle? or for the general pat-
tern of sonata or fugue as you found it described in your textbooks? or
even as exemplified by Bach or Beethoven?
F. Sometimes. . . . But sometimes it didn't.
7. Then was it the pattern you admired, or something in the pattern?
And if it wasn't the pattern as such, what was it?
F. Well, the tonal substance, as I remember the examples, was some-
times appealing and sometimes not. And it was the same with the
rhythms, which were mostly very much alive, but were sometimes rather
perfunctory. But the real appeal of the music was not so much emotional
as intellectual — at least it was so represented; and your gleam in the eye
seems to me the evidence of no more than the critical apparatus of Philip
Hale's "noble army of music lovers who know what they like."
7. Is that army's discrimination, then, based on no more than an appe-
tite for tonal sensation and rhythmic nudging? I'm not so sure. I grant
that the apparent musical public is always larger than the real, and I sup-
pose your noble army and my apparent public are largely identical. But
my real public has determined, probably more than any other influence,
the survival of the masterpieces you spoke of, and I'm not convinced that
its critical judgment has been directly, or even unconsciously, based on
7
 THE WHY OF MUSIC

the analytical principles you've just set forth. I'm sure I admire sound
musical structure as much as you do. But let me give you an example of
what a too-exclusive pursuit of structural analysis may lead to. I lunched
one day with a visiting professor (of chemistry, I think) at our univer-
sity, who had evidently been taught that it was his duty to understand
music as it was made. He summed up his achievement in criticism with
the phrase, "I think I have learned, now, how to recognize Bach's termi-
nal cadences." Which did he belong to — the real or the apparent musical
public? Frankly, I consider my Major's critical judgment, however pu-
erile, more soundly based than his.
F. Possibly. But your examples are too extreme to have much critical
value. Doesn't your own liking, which is partly determined by your
knowledge and your respect for structure, increase with your insight in-
to structure?
7. It does. But I believe my insight comprises more than structure, and
I think the boundary of such insight ought to be extended as far as pos-
sible. You didn't include in your catalogue of values the immense store
of knowledge which historians have accumulated about music. Doesn't
what you know of the history of the symphonic or the fugal forms illu-
minate any given example of those forms as you hear it?
F. It does, and my eye may even gleam when that light is turned on. It
seems to me there are two kinds of historical illumination, the structural
and the environmental. I think, perhaps because I've been taught to, that
the structural is more illuminating. But that wasn't the kind of gleam you
saw in your Major's eye. He probably didn't know that music had a his-
tory, nor had he any notion of the structural skill displayed, even in that
little piece.
7. Mmmm . . . And yet his eye gleamed. If it wasn't for structure as
such, or for history, of which I'm sure he had no inkling, what did it
gleam for?
F. I should say, only for sensuous pleasure — which I'm sure I enjoy as
much as he. I suggested it in my catalogue of values, but, critically, I
don't rate it very high. And anyhow, isn't it, as the old proverb says, non
disputandum?
7. If it were separable from the other values, I think I'd agree. But it
isn't separable. It is fused with your structure and with other values as
well, and the product of the fusion is a kind of amalgam or alloy, like
brass. So alloyed, its constituents are no longer copper and zinc. They've
8
 A GLEAM IN THE EYE

become brass. And, alloyed, even your musical elements, tone and
rhythm, aren't the simple entities, tone and rhythm. They've become
music; and to see those elements in the structural amalgam of music is to
focus your attention on the parts, rather than on the whole.
F. You're surely not denigrating structure?
7. I'm not. But the ultimate function of the structured musical elements
is to make sense; and if the only sense they make is that of coherent or-
ganization, I think relatively few listeners would be interested. For you
don't need to be instructed — unless by actual listening experience, as
even my Major momentarily was — to understand the sense of music; and
if you understand that sense, which may be more than sensory or struc-
tural, the essentials of structure will appear, as I think they ought, to be
appropriate to the whole sense you apprehend. The sense — the life, the
imagery that makes your eye gleam — isn't in structure as such.
F. Maybe not; but it couldn't have been there without the structure.
7. Nobody will dispute that, but it doesn't answer the question as to
where the life is. Your structural analysis will tell you what sort of musi-
cal thing was made, and how it was made. Your history will tell you
when and where, and against what background of musical experience,
the thing was made. Those facts are indeed a part of the whole sense the
music conveys. But unless you choose to consider the thing as just an-
other experiment in musical structure, they don't tell you what the im-
mediate creative impulse was — the real reason, why the thing was made.
Doesn't that Why also demand an answer — an answer somehow derived
from the life your eye gleamed for?
F. I think I see what you're driving at. There must have been some-
thing more, either in the structure itself or in its history, to account for
what you call the life of the music. But isn't that something just as nebu-
lous as the gleam in your eye? You can answer your question as to the
why of Beethoven's Fifth by invoking the rigmarole about Fate knock-
ing at the door. But how much does that tell about the music itself? I find
that story, if I recall it while I listen to the music, an irrelevant bore.
7. Are you sure you've not taken the knocking as literal? What Bee-
thoven is reported to have said about the "meaning" of his famous mo-
tive was, SO pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte — Thus Fate knocks at the
door — which is quite another matter than mere represented knocking.
For Schicksal, literally, means "that which is sent" — by Fate, if you like;
but the German word Schicksal hasn't necessarily the inimical implica-
9
 THE WHY OF MUSIC

tion usually read into the English word Fate. I can't of course be sure just
how Beethoven meant it, but I do know he was a thumping democrat,
and I've a notion that what he was really thinking of was the advent of
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Whether or not that actual image was in his
mind doesn't really matter. But whether in this or a hundred other re-
corded instances you take Beethoven's words literally or figuratively,
you'll have to agree that for him nonmusical experience had a genuine
contribution to make to music; and if you're going to account for that
contribution on structural grounds alone, I think you'll have to enlarge
your definition of structure considerably.
F. Lord! Are you trying to say that this "something more," this "inde-
finable something" that visionaries always evoke when they don't know
what they're talking about, is so positive a factor in musical creation that
critical study ought to find a way of identifying and defining it?
7. Haven't you already tentatively admitted that structure, as the pro-
fessors define it (for it was the professors, not the composers, who con-
cocted your definition) doesn't account for every value you find in mu-
sic? Isn't the gleam in the eye a recognition, either that something more
is present in structure than your definition accounts for, or that reference
is made through that structure to something that can at least be tentative-
ly defined as nonmusical experience?
F. You make the Fifth, and can doubtless make the Eroica — and of
course the Pastoral, and even the first three movements of the Ninth —
look as if they were so related. But doesn't that very linking of the stuff
of music to nonmusical experience narrow the perspective of those pieces
— drag them down into association with mere mundane event?
7. If you try to find Napoleon in the Eroica, or Robespierre in the
Fifth, you will do just that. But it will be you who did it. That music is
not "about" specific men or specific events. It is about heroism and
Schicksal — concepts too big to be reduced to the dimension of individ-
ual persons or events. Yet, heroism and fate are meaningless words unless
their origin is seen to be in event. Do you find the music, seen in that
broader perspective, contaminated?
F. Perhaps not. . . . But isn't that portion of the literature in which
nonmusical experience is reflected a pretty small fraction of the whole
body? Isn't the Well-tempered Clavier, and still more the Art of Fugue,
purely abstract music?
7. Frankly, I don't think so — nor do you, or else you wouldn't speak
10
 A GLEAM IN THE EYE

of one pure abstraction as being more abstract than another. But perhaps
you are subconsciously qualifying that term. Etymologically, what is an
abstraction?
F. Mmmm . . . abstraho . . . to draw away . . . Then it means a
drawing away from something — in the case of music, away from the
world of ordinary experience?
7. That seems to be the sense in which you and the purists use it. But
hasn't the word another meaning? What is an abstract?
F. In law, I suppose it's a summary — of content.
7. Drawn out of that content?
F. Obviously.
7. Then if we can find the something more we're looking for, mayn't
this sense of the word — implying that the music is drawn out of nonmusi-
cal as well as musical experience — be much more applicable?
F. Then you see the Well-tempered Clavier as drawn out of both?
7.1 do; and I suspect that your view is the same. Don't you often find
the Preludes in that work appropriate to their Fugues? Yet you can hard-
ly ever find even the slightest structural relation between them. How,
then, will you account for the appropriateness?
F. There's a similar tone that is obvious enough; but I'll have to admit
that it isn't structural.
7. Then the Fugues have also a "tone"? And that tone also isn't struc-
tural?
F. It seems to be in the structure but not of it. Of course, the Fugues
are much more elaborately "structural" than the Preludes, and I can't
always see their appropriateness to the Preludes; but it is sometimes strik-
ing.
7. In the Passions and the Cantatas there are hundreds of fugues, set to
words. Do you find in that music any appropriateness to the verbal text?
F. Well, I heard the B minor Mass for the third time, last month. I con-
fess I hadn't paid much attention to the texts during the first two per-
formances, but this time, when that incredible opening burst out, I think
I saw what the words Kyrie eleison might mean to a man as deeply re-
ligious as Bach must have been.
7. A little contribution from environmental history? And what did
you make of the huge fugue, set to the same two words, that follows?
F. The tone wasn't the same, although it was still tremendously strong,
and I was a little perplexed. And the second Kyrie eleison, although set
ii
 THE WHY OF MUSIC

to the same two words, was utterly different. But it did make a high mu-
sical contrast, both with the first Kyrie and the Christe eleison. Wasn't
that what Bach was aiming at?
/. In part, no doubt. But did it occur to you that the first Kyrie eleison
was addressed to the First Person of the Trinity, and the second to the
Third Person?
F. I'm afraid it didn't. But I can see it now, and . . . well, . . . almost
thou persuadest me.
7. It isn't I who am persuading you. It is Bach. You find in both pieces
an appropriateness, if not to the immediate sense of two words, at least to
two liturgical implications in them. Now go back to your Well-tem-
pered Clavier — to textless and, as you thought, abstract music. Is that the
music of a man abstracted from all worldly interest?
F. I heard a group of "advanced" piano pupils play the whole First
Book, not long ago, and they made it sound as if it were just that. But
when I fumble through the music for myself, that's not the impression I
get. The Prelude in E flat minor seems to me one of the most poetic mu-
sical ideas ever put on paper.
7. Oughtn't you, if you are an abstractionist, to have called it one of the
purest of musical ideas? But do you really see it so? Is there not a man —
perhaps BufFon's Vhonrme meme — a man with senses, affections, passions,
somewhere implicit in that music? And does the music lose interest when
it is seen as human?
F. Mmmm . . . The Prelude is, isn't it, a kind of musing — on some
sort of vision. I almost know what the vision is, it is so compelling; but
when you try to embody it in some human substance, don't you reduce
the dimension of it?
7. Its purely musical dimension? Possibly. But, conversely, don't you
enlarge the dimension of the human substance that is capable of the vi-
sion? You ask what the musing is on — a question you didn't ask so long
as the musing seemed embodied only in tone. But was it ever a purely
musical vision? You say the piece seems a kind of musing — on something
you can't quite define. If that musing were purely musical, wouldn't you
know, through your own musical faculties alone, what it is on? Didn't
the man, Bach, first see that human vision? And didn't he, through a very
remarkable . . . perhaps transubstantiation is the word . . . embody it
in tone so that you and I could at least glimpse it?
12
 A GLEAM IN THE EYE
F. It seems so. But you still don't tell me what the musing was on. Can
you answer that one?
7. Probably no better than you; but certainly not by looking at the
structure of the music only. Perhaps it will help if we think for a mo-
ment of what the musing wasn't on. The vision wasn't of any concrete
object?
F. Certainly not.
7. Yet you found it a meaningful vision?
F. Decidedly.
7. What sorts of things do you find meaning in?
F. I suppose in the things I encounter, not only actually but vicariously:
in the things I remember; in the things which — quite tautologically —
have meaning for me.
I. There are a good many of them?
F. Myriads.
7. Then may not this vision, incorporeal as it is, have arisen out of some
contemplation of the meaning — the possible import — of a host of con-
crete things? Of things ordinarily quite unrelated to one another but now
suddenly undergoing a meaningful conjunction? Don't we similarly con-
join ordinary things to make not only ordinary but sometimes quite ex-
traordinary sense out of them? But is that the only sense they possess?
And have we, after all, anything else to make sense out of?
F. Nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu"? * You do bring my vision
down to earth. But I grant that you land it gently, and perhaps it isn't too
deflated to rise again.
7.1 hope it isn't. But while it is on the ground, will you see how far
structure, as you define it, will go toward accounting for the vision you
get from that Prelude? It is a fairly homogeneous texture, so a few bars
will do (Example i).

EXAMPLE I

F. I'm not much good at formal analysis, but I'll try. What I can see is
a persistent, broad triple rhythm, which in prosody I think they call the
Molossus. Above it, since the texture isn't really polyphonic, there's a
* There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.

'3
 THE WHY OF MUSIC
rather rhapsodic melodic line. Perhaps it seems rhapsodic because it al-
most always moves by skip, instead of in the conjunct, step wise fashion
of more lyrical melody. I suppose you can say that a rhapsodic style is
suitable to the portrayal of a vision. The harmony, whether or not you
would call the chords unusual, is somehow very suspenseful, but perhaps
most of that suspense comes from the rhythm. Its long steps look heavy
on the page, but in spite of the slow motion they're very elastic. But
these things, however suggestive, don't add up to any vision. What have
I left out?
7. Nothing, apparently, that is essential to structure — unless the tonal
substance itself is essential. Doesn't structural analysis often ignore that
substance? Doesn't it consider notes as disembodied pitches — tones in the
abstract? You said you found the harmony suspenseful, and the rhythm
also. Suspense is suggestive, but in the purely structural sense it suggests
only resolution of the tension of discord or of incomplete musical pe-
riod. Do you think a minuter analysis of structure would have accounted
for your vision? Is structure as such suggestive of visions? Or does the
structured thing, seen as thing rather than structure, suggest them? But
that thing will then be more than a mere structure.
F. It didn't to those advanced pupils who played the Well-tempered
Clavier, although their performance set forth the structure very clearly.
But neither is my vision in the mere tonal substance as such. And if you
say, as you must, that it is somewhere in the structured tonal substance,
aren't we right back where we began?
7. If all you still see is structure as such, and tonal substance as such, I
think we are. All you see there is the What and the How of the music, not
the Why. Doesn't your vision somehow embody the Why of the struc-
ture — its purpose? Isn't that purpose extra-structural? And instead of
trying to describe purpose in terms of structure, oughtn't you rather to
try to describe structure in terms of purpose? Of purpose that is possibly
more than structural?
F. If your more than structural purpose were more concrete, I'd have
to agree. But the tangible stuff of music, which is tone, has no generally
accepted implications that lead outside the field of purely musical con-
templation. Of course, you can make representative noises out of tone.
My Mary Ellen, when she was three or four, found out how to hold
down the "loud" pedal of the piano and at the same time rumble her little
*4
 A GLEAM IN THE EYE

fists on the bass notes. It made, for her, electrifying thunder, but it wasn't
music.
7. Aren't you assuming that the only possible reference to the concrete
experience out of which, I think we agreed, most of our visions are gen-
erated, must be through the representation of literal facts of such expe-
rience? Everybody will agree that music can't do that. Yet you found a
vision in the E flat minor Prelude. Was that a vision of concrete fact?
F. Certainly not. But doesn't that illustrate and even establish my point?
7. Does it? Was your vision, then, just a tonal apparition?
F. If it had been, I suppose the dull performance would have evoked
it — faintly, at any rate. There wasn't any real vision there.
7. Are you suggesting, then, that visions come from competent man-
ners of performance, rather than from the performed music itself?
F. I got my vision of the Prelude, one day, with my own clumsy fin-
gers, so that can't be true. But I got it out of the music, so it must be some-
where in the music.
7. Doesn't that illustrate and even establish my point?
F. It seems to establish your "something more" as a possibility, but it
doesn't go very far toward defining it.
7. Do you expect that definition to be easy? It has taken us a long time
even to establish that the something exists, but we've at least learned a
little about what to look for, and where to find it. Shall we go on hunt-
ing?
F. If it's in the music there must be a way of finding it. I suppose it is,
really, just what the noble army sees when it calls music the language of
the emotions; and that notion has persisted long enough so that there
must be something in it. The word language, if it implies an organized
verbal structure, doesn't seem too far off the beam, for the phrases and
sentences of music do resemble, in pattern, those of language. But if that
word implies the sort of communication that language conveys, every-
body would call the analogy false. There just aren't any "words" in
music, and its process of communication must be altogether different.
You've pretty well convinced me that music does — or at any rate can —
somehow relate to things: to facts of experience that don't seem to be
either portrayed or symbolized in notes. But if the something more we've
glimpsed — I suppose we've hardly done more — is that sort of communi-
cation, haven't we got to find out not only what that something is but
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 THE WHY OF MUSIC

also how it is conveyed? And if that is what we're to hunt for, I'm eager
to begin.
/. You are looking pretty far ahead, but I think you're right. But hadn't
we better try to find out more about the something, before we try to see
the process by which it is communicated? Mull it over, and let's see what
we come up with.

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