II. WHAT TO NOTICE FIRST.
It is no wonder, when one stops to think of it, that music, in spite of its deeply stirring effect upon us, often defeats our best efforts to understand what it is all about, and leaves us after it is over with the uncomfortable sense that we have had only a momentary pleasure, and can take nothing definite away with us. It is as if we had been present at some important event, without having the least idea why it was important, or what was its real meaning. All of us, at one time or another, must have had this experience. And, indeed, how could it be otherwise? Music gives us nothing that we can see with our eyes or touch with our hands. It does not even give our ears definite words that we can follow and understand. It offers us only sounds, soft or loud, long or short, high or low, that flow on inexorably, and that too often come to an end without leaving any tangible impressions behind them. No wonder we are often bewildered by an experience so peculiar and so fleeting.
Yet these sounds, subtle as they are, have a sense, a logic, an order of their own; and if we can only learn how to approach them, we can get at this inner orderliness that makes them into "music." The process of perception which we have to learn here is somewhat akin to certain more familiar processes. For example, what comes to our eyes from the outer world is simply a mass of impressions of differently colored and shaped spots of light; only gradually, as we grow out of infancy, do we learn that one group of these spots of light shows us "a house," another "a tree," and so on. Similarly words, as we easily realize in the case of a foreign language, are to the untrained ear mere isolated sounds of one kind or another; only with practice do we learn to connect groups of them into intelligible sentences. So it is with music. The sounds are at first mere sounds, separate, fragmentary, unrelated. Only after we have learned to group them into definite melodies, as we group spots of lights into houses or trees, and words into sentences, do they become music for us. To approach sounds in such a way as to "make sense" of them—that is the art of listening to music.