If art is expression, as estheticians agree, and music is an art, as we claim, then it must express something; and, given sufficient intelligence, training, and insight, that something—the vital essence of every good composition—can be stated in words. Not always adequately, I grant, but at least intelligibly, as a key to the fuller, more complex expression of the music; serving precisely like the synopsis to an opera, or the descriptive catalogue in a picture gallery. This is the aim and substance of esthetic analysis.
Musicians are many who see in their mistress
But physical beauty of “color” and “form,”
Who hear in her voice but a sensuous sweetness,
No thrill of the heart that is living and warm.
They judge of her worth by “perfection of outline,”
“Proportion of parts” as they blend in the whole,
“Symmetrical structure,” and “finish of detail”;
They see but the body—ignoring the soul.
She speaks, but they seem not to master her meaning,