Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1930-12)

76 The Phonograph Monthly Review strange things which could not be without the phonograph. The secret is that the ailment of the ignoramus is often an inability to hear as quickly as his more gifted or better educated neighbor. He cannot study musical theory, illustrated by individual works, for, unable as he is to play anything for himself, he cannot hear the illustrations except in the concert hall, and there the performers play them only once and at a pace which the ignora- mus cannot follow. It is useless for him to ap- preciate that a symphony is a carefully organized artistic form, since one or two hearings of public performances disclose to him nothing of that form. He may understand on paper what a fugue is or may be, but a Bach fugue played once by an orchestra or on an organ may never suggest to him that it is a fugue at all, since one hearing gives him no time for anything but a vague emotional sense of pure sound, confus- ingly woven out of musical notes. What the phonograph gives as its chief gift to the ig- noramus, is time to hear. With time, and curi- osity, and the guidance of books, he may gradual- ly learn to appreciate. A book or a friend tells him that he would enjoy seeing how the fourth fugue in the Well- Tempered Clavier is constructed, and that its full beauty appears only when the senses are tuned not only to the essential loveliness of the total effect but also to the cooler intellectual beauty of the structure. At this point the ignoramus begs, borrows, or steals Harriet Cohen’s record of the C sharp minor fugue, and plays it not once but many times. At first this is a sheer exercise of will—he listens to it as a whole; he listens to it rigidly fixing his attention on one voice or another. If he survives he discovers suddenly that he likes the fugue, that he under- stands something of what he has heard or read of it, and he proceeds to use up his stock of needles and wear out the record by frequent replayings. He annoys his family and his friends by playing it to them; he even takes a superior attitude towards those who show no sign of warming to it. This is a crisis in his disease, and demands careful nursing. Wrongly treated he runs appreciation into boredom; rightly cared for he turns from one Bach piano fugue to another, and soon makes the two Colum- bia albums of preludes and fugues, 1 to 17, from the Well-Tempered Clavier, treasured posses- sions. Then he reads or is told that the last movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is a fugue. That puzzles him, but his love for what he has found in Bach gives him courage, and he wrestles with the new problem. He takes grave chances of injuring the record by beginning it in the middle in order that he may hear as often as he needs the most baffling passage of all. He discovers that he has trouble following the voices because he is too little aware of what various instruments sound like. He embarks on a quest for more information, buys a record of a viola solo, of a ’cello solo, of Bach’s ‘Es ist Vollbracht” in which Leon Goossens’ display of the oboe rivals Elizabeth Schumann’s glorious rendering of the vocal part. He gets someone to let him try the Columbia recording of Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, in order to hear the instrument which in the orchestra runs in its own inimitable way the whole gamut from sheer clowning to pro- found and moving dignity. He hears that in the First Symphony of Brahms there is a famous passage for the horn, and he plays Stokowski’s recording, because he wants to know what horns sound like-. By this time he has unravelled enough of the last movement of the Jupiter symphony, but he has started up a whole covey of other birds. Bach’s fugues he likes. “Es ist Vollbracht” makes him catch his breath. He wonders if Bach wrote other songs, and if they too might move him. On the strength of the horn passage he decides that he must know more of Brahms, and of Beethoven so often linked with him in the books. He has discovered that Moz- art’s symphonies and Tschaikowsky’s are not the only ones, and the possibilities seem vast. He explores a bit—and is lost. Lost to financial solvency, lost to restraint, lost even to the wis- dom of making haste slowly. Because he likes one song of Bach, and part of one symphony of Brahms, he, deftly egged on by a guileful dealer, buys records of many Bach songs and of all four symphonies of Brahms. And he buys much else! Once again he needs nursing, guidance, protec- tion against killing appreciation by an overdose of what is, after all in some cases, foreign to in- stinctive likes or dislikes or to what his experi- ence has qualified him to receive. But this second crisis is less dangerous than the first, and most patients survive it. If they do it is often because they discover that they actually have tastes, how- ever rudimentary, of their own. The ignoramus finds that one composer, or school, or type of mu- sic, appeals most fully to him. This, he learns, does not mean that the music in question at the first hearing awakes him most, but that, heard again and again, it comes to mean more with each repetition and touches him each time more deeply, leading always to further understanding and appreciation. The phonograph alone makes the process possible. If the ignoramus had to rely on what he could hear actually performed at concerts, he would be sure to confuse what his taste really demanded, what he really liked, with the quite different things which for him carried an effect with one hearing—carried it, and, alas, too often lost it forever after. Of course the ignoramus always remains an ignoramus of a sort, as any music-lover must be who cannot play a note himself. He still hears