International studio (81.1925)

mceRnAcionAL

first time a piece which you may not have the
chance of hearing again for years. You don't
properly grasp it; it is full of difficulties and
mysteries for you; you feel that if you could only
hear it once more you would like it better. But
you are left helplessly in ignorance and confusion.
You can't order the conductor or the player or
singer to do it again for your further enlighten-
ment. Much less can you call to these mighty
ones: "Stop! I didn't get that passage. Go back
and start afresh." But you can behave thus with
impunity to a machine which you have at your
mercy in your own house. You can hear a passage
forty times if you wish; and a whole composition

just as often as you choose. (That this advantage
is a genuine one is sufficiently shown by the growth
of the practice at concerts of giving a new work
twice in the same programme.) Indeed a man
may not be able to attend a concert once a year
and may yet, by the aid of mechanics, books on
music, and lives of musicians, so organize his de-
lights as to get a deeper pleasure from music than
seventy per cent, of the lackadaisical frequenters
of concerts in large cities.

But whatever the circumstances, favorable or
unfavorable, nobody can obtain full enjoyment from
the arts or from anything else without organizing
himself to that end and taking some trouble.

/ wenty

APRIL I925