Now surely your inability to perform "The Maiden's Prayer" on a
piano need not prevent you from making yourself familiar with the
construction of the orchestra to which you listen a couple of nights
a week during a couple of months! As things are, you probably think
of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a
confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details
because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
If you were asked to name the instruments which play the great theme
at the beginning of the C minor symphony you could not name them for
your life's sake. Yet you admire the C minor symphony. It has
thrilled you. It will thrill you again. You have even talked about
it, in an expansive mood, to that lady--you know whom I mean. And
all you can positively state about the C minor symphony is that
Beethoven composed it and that it is a "jolly fine thing."
Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel's "How to Listen to Music"
(which can be got at any bookseller's for less than the price of a
stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the
orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras)
you would next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing
intensification of interest in it.
Pages:
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59