"HOW TO HEAR MUSIC."
(With humble acknowledgments to the critic of "The Times.")
We were grateful to Mlle. Snouck Hugronje for giving us an opportunity of hearing the Violin Concertos of Prenk Bib Doda in C sharp minor, and of Basil Tulkinghorn in the composite key of F.E. The latter work, we may explain, is dedicated to Lord BIRKENHEAD. Doda's work is so rarely played that Mr. ERNEST NEWMAN has wittily suggested that he ought to be renamed Dodo. But let that pass. Here he is abundantly like himself, rich in self-determining phrases which emerge from a Hinterland of wild surmise, and tower aloft in peaks of Himalayan majesty like Haramokh or Siniolchum —— Mr. CANDLER must finish this sentence.
Tulkinghorn is also a master of transcendental effects, and as relentless in pushing home his points as Mr. SMILLIE when examining a duke before the Coal Commission. But he is not always to be trusted. He lacks the architectonic faculty. In between the clusters of clear-cut phrases there are too many nebulae of gaseous formation and spiral type, which deflect the orbital movement of his essentially electronic melody and impair its impact on the naked ear.
But when Mlle. Snouck Hugronje plays you forget all about self-determination, syndicalism, guild-control, proletariats, sunspots and even Mr. SMILLIE. If you are a poet, and we are all poets nowadays, you dream yourself into a punt on the Sonning backwater, wondering if the summer was ever so amazing before, nearly being shipwrecked on a sandy spit, startling moorfowl or it may be dabchicks, sending a frisson into the fritillaries, losing and regaining your punt-pole, always believing that the next bend —— Mr. FILSON YOUNG must really finish the sentence.
If you are a musician and an occultist you will, by due concentration of your pineal gland and pituitary body, rise with the rapidity of a HAWKER to astral altitudes immune from all mundane disquiet. You will notice —— However, this is best, left to Mr. CYRIL SCOTT or Sir RABINDRANATH TAGORE or Sir OLIVER LODGE. But if you are a mere listener you will listen and be thankful. But if you never go to concerts you will still be able, by the aid of the New Criticism, to attain to an ecstasy of appreciation far greater than if you had relied on the crude medium of your senses.
Niece. "BUT AREN'T YOU GOING TO GIVE THAT NICE PORTER A TIP, AUNTIE? HE'S AN OLD SOLDIER."
Aunt. "EXACTLY, MY DEAR. MUCH TOO POLITE TO BE UNPLEASANT TO ONE."