Features of musical aesthetics

(By Will Earhart)

1. The first facts in music are emotional cries, as of birds, animals, primitive men.

2. In origin music is characteristically vocal.

3. The individual, at the moment of musical experience, is strongly active (emotionally).

4. The value of music to humanity is to heighten man's power by vast intensification of feeling.

5. The highest temple of musical art would be the music-drama auditorium.

In contrast to this general view a view that is seldom if ever, explicitly stated, but that may be discerned as implied by attitudes and preferences is another, similarly existing by implication only. It assumes that music arose because of
the Pleasure of the Ear in Tone. Instead of the emotional cries of birds, animals and men, this theory would find the origin of music in the twang of the bow-string, the sound of the wind in the reeds, the murmur of falling waters, the ring of wood on wood. All natural sonorities would become primary experiences in man's musical development. As against the other view, we would now think of music as primarily or characteristically instrumental; would conceive the individual, at the moment of musical experience, not as being strongly active but as being sensitively and beautifully receptive; would find the value of music to humanity to reside (in a word) in culture that is, in the ability to find joy in every beauty that nature or man provided; and would find the true temple of music represented, not by the
operatic stage, but perhaps by the organ-loft in St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, as Bach communed with incorporeal visions; or perhaps by the small chamber in which a string quartet would seek glories from an unseen world.