“The same music will admit of the most varied verbal expositions, and of not one of them can it be correctly said that it is exhaustive, the right one, and contains the whole significance of the music.  This significance is contained most definitely in the music itself.  It is not music that is ambiguous; it says the same thing to everybody; it speaks to mankind and gives voice only to human feelings.  Ambiguity only then makes its appearance when each person attempts to formulate in his manner the emotional impression which he has received, when he attempts to fix and hold the ethereal essence of music, to utter the unutterable.”

[Sidenote:  Mendelssohn’s.]

[Sidenote:  The “Songs without Words."]

Mendelssohn inculcated the same lesson in a letter which he wrote to a young poet who had given titles to a number of the composer’s “Songs Without Words,” and incorporated what he conceived to be their sentiments in a set of poems.  He sent his work to Mendelssohn with the request that the composer inform the writer whether or not he had succeeded in catching the meaning of the music.  He desired the information because “music’s capacity for expression is so vague and indeterminate.”  Mendelssohn replied: 

“You give the various numbers of the book such titles as ’I Think of Thee,’ ‘Melancholy,’ ‘The Praise of God,’ ’A Merry Hunt.’  I can scarcely say whether I thought of these or other things while composing the music.  Another might find ‘I Think of Thee’ where you find ‘Melancholy,’ and a real huntsman might consider ‘A Merry Hunt’ a veritable ’Praise of God.’  But this is not because, as you think, music is vague.  On the contrary, I believe that musical expression is altogether too definite, that it reaches regions and dwells in them whither words cannot follow it and must necessarily go lame when they make the attempt as you would have them do.”

[Sidenote:  The tonal language.]

[Sidenote:  Herbert Spencer’s definition.]

[Sidenote:  Natural expression.]

[Sidenote:  Absolute music.]

If I were to try to say why musicians, great musicians, speak thus of their art, my explanation would be that they have developed, farther than the rest of mankind have been able to develop it, a language of tones, which, had it been so willed, might have been developed so as to fill the place now occupied by articulate speech.  Herbert Spencer, though speaking purely as a scientific investigator, not at all as an artist, defined music as “a language of feelings which may ultimately enable men vividly and completely to impress on each other the emotions they experience from moment to moment.”  We rely upon speech to do this now, but ever and anon when, in a moment of emotional exaltation, we are deserted by the articulate word we revert to the emotional cry which antedates speech, and find that that cry is universally understood