of musical critics and historians.  No harm is done by using both “classical” and “popular” in their common significations, so far as they convey a difference in character between concerts.  The highest popular conception of a classical concert is one in which a complete orchestra performs symphonies and extended compositions in allied forms, such as overtures, symphonic poems, and concertos.  Change the composition of the instrumental body, by omitting the strings and augmenting the reed and brass choirs, and you have a military band which is best employed in the open air, and whose programmes are generally made up of compositions in the simpler and more easily comprehended forms—­dances, marches, fantasias on popular airs, arrangements of operatic excerpts and the like.  These, then, are popular concerts in the broadest sense, though it is proper enough to apply the term also to concerts given by a symphonic band when the programme is light in character and aims at more careless diversion than should be sought at a “classical” concert.  The latter term, again, is commended to use by the fact that as a rule the music performed at such a concert exemplifies the higher forms in the art, classicism in music being defined as that principle which seeks expression in beauty of form, in a symmetrical ordering of parts and logical sequence, “preferring aesthetic beauty, pure and simple, over emotional content,” as I have said in Chapter III.

[Sidenote:  The Symphony.]

[Sidenote:  Mistaken ideas about the form.]

As the highest type of instrumental music, we take the Symphony.  Very rarely indeed is a concert given by an organization like the New York and London Philharmonic Societies, or the Boston and Chicago Orchestras, at which the place of honor in the scheme of pieces is not given to a symphony.  Such a concert is for that reason also spoken of popularly as a “Symphony concert,” and no confusion would necessarily result from the use of the term even if it so chanced that there was no symphony on the programme.  What idea the word symphony conveys to the musically illiterate it would be difficult to tell.  I have known a professional writer on musical subjects to express the opinion that a symphony was nothing else than four unrelated compositions for orchestra arranged in a certain sequence for the sake of an agreeable contrast of moods and tempos.  It is scarcely necessary to say that the writer in question had a very poor opinion of the Symphony as an Art-form, and believed that it had outlived its usefulness and should be relegated to the limbo of Archaic Things.  If he, however, trained in musical history and familiar with musical literature, could see only four unrelated pieces of music in a symphony by Beethoven, we need not marvel that hazy notions touching the nature of the form are prevalent among the untaught public, and that people can be met in concert-rooms to whom such words as “Symphony in C minor,” and the printed designations of the different portions of the work—­the “movements,” as musicians call them—­are utterly bewildering.