THOUGHT REVIEW
Principles
(1) Music is designed to give pleasure when heard, and therefore calls for immediate affective response. (2) Capacity for esthetic response varies with natural talent and training, both artistic and scientific. (3) It is important to know "where to laugh and when to laugh." (4) For scientific description of likes or dislikes we need a discriminating terminology. (5) As every scientific discovery and invention gradually becomes common-sense knowledge when popularly known, so artistic judgment tends to crystallize into common-sense feeling. (6) Musical criticism may be chastized and chastened into balanced and critical judgment, relatively free from emotional explosions. (7) The spontaneous and natural smile or frown is often more eloquently telling or cutting than words.
Consider These Questions
(1) Is the conventional response to music affectedly temperamental? (2) Why is listening intently to a major musical performance more exhausting than listening to an equally engrossing lecture on "International Relations?" (3) Was the English visitor right when he said, "You have no art, because whatever you have you display"? (4) Does insight into the nature and structure of the thing beautiful tend to lessen or to strengthen the artistic appeal?
Discuss This Situation
(1) During the last twenty years in a Midwestern city of 30,000 people music has "come to town." Curricular and extracurricular music in the schools has been tenfold what it was during the foregoing twenty years. Music clubs and other musical activities have greatly increased. The community often takes as strong an interest in local, district, state, and national contests in music as ordinarily attaches to football. Discuss the effect of this upon (a) the musical, (b) the social, (c) the recreational and (d) the educational life of the community. Evaluate the change in interest and capacity for assigning fair praise and blame to music.
Transcriber’s Note
Where hyphenation occurs on a line break, the decision to retain or remove is based on occurrences elsewhere in the text.
The errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original text.
| [8.2] | Play is essentially social and find | added |
| [21.13] | The old conflict be[t]ween enthusiasts for rote singing | added |
| [38.11] | has, of course, been unparall[el]ed in the history of the world. | added |
| [39.48] | generally has a[n] hereditary basis in | removed |
| [66.30] | for example, in the present "Novac[h]ord" | added |
| [71.23] | flexibilty of tone quality is even more desirable. | added |