How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 26

overture), and you enjoy the music. But you say you cannot play the
piano or the fiddle, or even the banjo; that you know nothing of music.

What does that matter? That you have a genuine taste for music is
proved by the fact that, in order to fill his hall with you and your peers,
the conductor is obliged to provide programmes from which bad music
is almost entirely excluded (a change from the old Covent Garden days!).

Now surely your inability to perform "The Maiden's Prayer" on a piano
need not prevent you from making yourself familiar with the construction
of the orchestra to which you listen a couple of nights a week during a
couple of months! As things are, you probably think of the orchestra as a
heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass
of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained
your ears to listen to details.

If you were asked to name the instruments which play the great theme at
the beginning of the C minor symphony you could not name them for your
life's sake. Yet you admire the C minor symphony. It has thrilled you. It
will thrill you again. You have even talked about it, in an expansive mood,
to that lady--you know whom I mean. And all you can positively state
about the C minor symphony is that Beethoven composed it and that it is
a "jolly fine thing."

Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel's "How to Listen to Music" (which
can be got at any bookseller's for less than the price of a stall at the Alhambra,
and which contains photographs of all the orchestral instruments and plans of
the arrangement of orchestras) you would next go to a promenade concert with
an astonishing intensification of interest in it. Instead of a confused mass, the
orchestra would appear to you as what it is--a marvellously balanced organism
whose various groups of members each have a different and an indispensable
function. You would spy out the instruments, and listen for their respective
sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a French horn from an English
horn, and you would perceive why a player of the hautboy gets higher wages