“Music is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and impels us for a moment to gaze into it,” exclaimed Carlyle.  Wagner found in music the conscious language of feeling, that which ennobles the sensual and realizes the spiritual.  “Music is the harmonious voice of creation, an echo of the invisible world, one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound,” wrote Mazzini.  Literature is rich in noble definitions of the divine art.

From a matter of fact standpoint music consists of a vast concourse of tones which are its raw materials and bear within themselves the possibility of being moulded into form.  Utterances and actions illustrating these raw materials are common to all living creatures.  A dog, reiterating short barks of joy, or giving vent to prolonged howls of distress, is actuated by an impulse similar to that of the human infant as it uplifts its voice to express its small emotions.  The sounds uttered by primeval man as the direct expression of his emotions were unquestionably of a like nature.

The tendency to manifest feeling by means of sound is universally admitted, and sound, freighted with feeling, is peculiarly exciting to human beings.  The agitations of a mob may be increased by the emotional tones of its prime movers, and we all know that the power of an orator depends more on his skill in handling his voice than on what he says.

A craving for sympathy exists in all animate beings.  It is strong in mankind and becomes peculiarly intense in the type known as artistic.  The fulness of his own emotions compels the musician to utterance.  To strike a sympathetic chord in other sensitive breasts it becomes necessary to devise forms of expression that may be unmistakably intelligible.

Out of such elements the tone-language has grown, precisely as the word-language grew out of men’s early attempts to communicate facts to one another.  Its story records a slow, painstaking building up of principles to control its raw materials; for music, as we understand it, cannot exist without some kind of design.  Vague sounds produce vague, fleeting impressions.  Definiteness in tonal relations and rhythmic plan is requisite to produce a defined, enduring impression.  In primitive states of music rhythmic sounds were heard, defined by the pulses but with little or no change of pitch, and sounds varying in pitch without regularity of impulse.  A high degree of intellectuality was reached before our modern scales were evolved from long-continued attempts at making well-balanced successions of sounds.  As musical art advanced rhythm and melodic expression became united.