The Creative Listener

How is an artist going to make a masterpiece unless the public makes half of it.

— SENHOUSE, in Halfway House.

I

SVENGALI never really hypnotized Trilby, and where the book says so it is merely indulging in poetic hyperbole. The fact is, Svengali was such a master of the art of listening that, whenever he was in the audience, Trilby could n’t help singing better than she knew how. Too bad that the dramatic requirements forced the author to make him such a crawly old villain! Otherwise he might have stood as the classic type of that most inspiring and necessary and admirable person, the creative listener.

Although very few realize it, there is nothing uncanny nor very difficult about the practice of creative listening. A few weeks of work that is more than half play will fit almost anybody to be as organic a part of the concert performance as is the business-like little man behind the drums, or the shaggy being who breathes vernal zephyrs into the French horn.

Wagner called true listeners naturalborn poets. Now, while it is true that creative listeners, like poets, are born and not made, yet far more of the former are born. In fact, nearly everybody enters life with possibilities along this line. And how is any deaf, inglorious dummy in the audience to know whether or not he was intended to be the Milton of listening until he has given his intellect a chance at the possibly latent gift? Just as plough-boy poets must, some time or other, quaff at the fount of metrics and form, so the best of natural listeners have to learn the science of their art before they can be called finished artists.

These facts are, as yet, known only to the initiated few. And this is where the fun of writing about creative listening comes in. Because, while music is by all odds the pet art of humanity, humanity has at present such a wistful, hopeless attitude toward it.

The ordinary person regrets few things more in life than his inability to play or sing. Or, if he does play or sing, he regrets all the more wistfully his inability to play or sing well. He calls music ‘ the universal language’ and, unless he can talk it loud and clear, he looks as pathetically shamed as the after-dinner orator who, after mute agonies, sinks back into the poignant silence without having been able to utter a syllable.

Look closely enough during any concert and you will see, hovering above the audience, the sad smoke of heartburning. The folk in the plush seats are sick for self-expression. They yearn to bear a hand in this divine game. They too would be ‘all glorious in song,’ — pitiful, barren souls that they suppose themselves to be, grieving like Lamb, the lonely bachelor, for their ‘dreamchildren.’

To all such mourners it is my delightful privilege to explain that their dreamchildren need not be compacted of dreams alone; to hold out the promise of an art whereby they may become as creative as that great hearer whom Wagner once thanked for the inestimable gift of Tristan, implying that she listened to his playing as mightily as ‘Brünnhilde listened to Wotan.’

II

It takes two to make music: one to perform, one to appreciate. And he is wise indeed who can discern which of these is the more important.

Now, in olden times it would not have occurred to any one to decide the relative importance of performer and listener, because when the arts were young they were such intensely democratic affairs. No distinction was drawn between artist and audience, for all men were alternately artist and audience.

Even to-day in some of the more primitive parts of the world no social function is complete until the psaltery has passed from hand to hand, or the harp with the solemn sound, or whatever the local instrument happens to be, and each member of the circle has extemporized a song to his own accompaniment. Such functions are reminders of the good old days when all men were free and equal in the realm of music,— when, even though the other fellow happened to be performing, you kept on listening to the music with the player’s active sense of creation, but unembarrassed by his handicaps.

Then after a while an aristocratic thing called technic came, and seemed to fix an unbridgable gulf between player and listener. Hence the wistfulness of modern concert audiences who gaze across this gulf to the realms of gold on the other side with as poignant a longing in their eyes as if they had once been driven out of them by a flaming sword.

At this sad stage of the proceedings enters science to declare this gulf a figment of the modern imagination, — to show that the audience is a more integral part of the performance than it has ever suspected. The recent tendency of scientific thought is to explain man’s craving for artistic expression along social rather than individualistic lines; to discuss the apparently passive function of the appreciator in active, creative terms.

A bird’s-eye view of this speculation is so essential to a proper understanding of the art of creative listening that there is here proposed to my more vigorous readers a brief but stony and rather steep scramble among the foothills of æsthetics. Non-climbers please skip.

A number of prominent European thinkers have come to believe that when we enjoy a statue, for instance, we unconsciously imitate its pose and suggested movements. Not only with our eyes but also, in a rudimentary way, with our whole bodies do we follow its outlines. We feel our way into the statue physically as well as mentally, so as to incorporate it into our actual experience. And thus with the products of the other arts as well. With unsuspected thoroughness we feel our way into their appreciation. Our very bodies resound to the rhythms of Rembrandt and Shakespeare, of von Steinbach and Beethoven.

Every one has experienced his body’s tendency to feel its way into music by nodding or tapping time to it. And I believe that most of us may detect in our throats or lips, even when we think of a tune, certain slight, involuntary contractions or puckerings which are the rudimentary attempts of our subconscious selves to sing or whistle in imitation. And not alone do our bodies thus try to reproduce reality; they even imitate our ideals. Witness the unconscious contortions of the billiard-player as his cue-ball misses the other by a hair.

This imitation theory of art-enjoyment has been of service to the Finlander, Yrjö Hirn, in his brilliant, pioneer work of demonstrating how social a thing the creative impulse is. He believes that art came into existence chiefly because it is natural for every ‘feeling-state’ to ‘manifest itself externally.’ This process tends, in the first place, to heighten the artist’s pleasure and relieve his pain. And, because‘art is essentially social,’ it tends, in the second place, to ‘awaken similar feelings in other human beings who perceive the manifestation; and their sympathetic feeling reacts upon the author of the original manifestation ... heightening in him the feeling-state which gave rise to it.’

Years ago Emerson’s prophetic vision caught a glimpse of this truth and embodied it in the splendid passage where he spoke of ‘that which man was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought.’

Hirn explains how the sympathetic response of the appreciator is greatly intensified by the sort of unconscious imitation which we have been considering; and how it recoils back from the appreciator to the creator and back again to the appreciator, and soon, back and forth, gaining in stimulating power at each recoil. The whole process is like a hot ‘volley’ in tennis, with the opponents closing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net faster with every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure. ‘ Social resonance ’ might be a good way of describing the thing. And it resounds more effectively in music than in any other art.

There is a vast difference between the creative appreciator who feels his way into statue or cathedral, painting or printed poem, and the creative listener to a musical — or dramatic—performance. However fully the former may project himself into the statue and resound its rhythm, his feeling cannot alter the finished marble in the least; although of course the expectation of his sympathy may have stimulated the sculptor in his modeling, or the memory thereof may lift him to higher flights in future work. Still, the appreciator is powerless to affect the stone as it stands on the pedestal, simply because a statue cannot be re-created, like a symphony.

Music, on the other hand, is a sort of chronic Nicodemus. It must be born again whenever it would enter into the kingdom of the human soul.

It is exactly this necessity that makes the listener so important a factor in music; for every listener in some way affects the quality of its reproduction. And if he is a mighty man of creative valor, he can even reduce the player at times t o a mere vehicle for what science would call the ‘exteriorization’ of his own emotion, as Svengali reduced Trilby.

The performer is the violin string, and the listener the resonant body of the instrument. Without that wooden sounding-box the strand of sheep’s-gut would strike ludicrously thin upon the ear. Without the string the music would be mute.

Thus, though the player first makes audible the poetry of the universal language, his recitation will not be effective without the coöperation of the creative listener. The two are absolute correlatives. The beautiful thing is that the more such a listener receives, the more he gives. Mundane music would soon come to be a fitting overture to the music of the spheres if our audiences were composed wholly of listeners, like a man I read of in The Hibbert Journal: ‘ a most pitiable cripple, shipwrecked in all save the noble intelligence,’ who ‘ hobbled away from the hearing of a Beethoven symphony exclaiming, “I have heard that music for the fiftieth time; you see what I am; yet with this in my soul I go down Regent Street a god! ” ’

After all, what is this strange giveand-take in the world of art but a fair symbol of the larger give-and-take of life? ‘Our souls,’said Balzac, in Eugénie Grandet, ‘live by giving and receiving; we have need of another soul. Whatever it gives us we make our own, and give back again in overflowing measure. This is as vitally necessary for our inner life as breathing for our corporeal existence.’

Perhaps it is not yet clear why any mere listener to music should be dignified by the royal title of‘creative.’ Now, just as the supremely creative thing about the great composer is his ability to store up emotion on music-paper, and the creative thing about the great player is his ability to liberate this emotion by mingling with it his own, — so the creative thing about the great listener is his ability to saturate this complex of emotion with his own and return it to the player in the form of heightened inspiration. At each step of this process the music is born again.

Who will deny that Svengali is at least as creative as the lady to whom he listens?

‘The potential poet or painter,’ says our Finlander, ‘whose embryo work is bound to remain forever a fact only of his own experience ... is not aware that he is composing a poem or a picture for himself as spectator or audience. Instinctively, however, he pursues ... an end which is essentially similar to that of the actually creating artist. In both these cases . . . the creative activity aims at making an emotional mood independent of the accidental and individual conditions under which it originally appeared.’

All this, applied to a ’cello recital, for instance, would mean that the creative listener is unconsciously endeavoring with might and main to help the ’cellist overcome his spiritual handicap in being more or less preoccupied with his fingers, wrist, and treacherous accompanist, with the beams in the ceiling that spoil the acoustics, or the perfidious usher who opens the door and lets an icy draft blow in upon his sensitive-plant of an instrument. But for the help of the creative listener the ’cellist could never transcend these conditions; and then where would the music be?

This in effect is what Mr. Hirn means by all his learned jargon. And I hope that our æsthetic scramble, now happily ended, will make it clear why a concert-hall full of creative listeners is such a wonderful place. Instead of an inert herd of humanity passively acquiescing in a single paltry act of attempted creation on the stage, you find a place fairly alive with acts of creation. You hardly recognize that piece for the battered old Chopin nocturne you have known so long: for the good angel of every true listener present is taking it and actually remoulding it nearer to the heart’s desire. Hush! Can you not feel the atmosphere of those gracious presences? Can you not well-nigh catch the eager rustle of myriad mysterious wings?

A still more wonderful experience it is to be so palpably the sole creative listener in the audience that all four members of the string quartette look to you alone to uphold the public’s end of the spiritual tennis game. And what a lark to be so en rapport with them as to share even their musical jokes and humorous by-play, undreamed-of by the rest; to have them take you into their tonal confidence as to what they really think of the music they are playing; and with them gravely explode with hidden hilarity when the pompous virtuoso comes in and, by way of doing the piano part of his own quintette, makes the unhappy instrument commit hari-kari!

The splendid thing about being a creative listener is that you alone can provide the necessary correlative for every great effect in the art. A musical Ulysses, you are a part of all that you have heard.

‘But,’ some one objects, ‘why lay such stress on the audience? Surely the player carries about his own best listeners with him in his two ears.’

A plausible fallacy. Few, in fact, are in a worse position to hear music than the one who makes it. He is under the malign spell of proximity, like some scene-painter who is unable to get farther away than the wings for a view of his masterpiece. For the instrumentalist is too near his instrument to catch more than hints of the tone-color that enchants his audience.

And his handicap is more than acoustic. Considerations of technic or ensemble, a frayed string, a squeaking pedal, or some bored philistine fidgeting in the front row, are usually there to bind him to earth with leaden chains. However passionately he may long to

he is allowed but few breaths of the upper ether.

How different the practical atmosphere of the concert stage is from that down below in the quiet audience, where music isolates pure spirits and convinces them of their high destiny, fulfilling the poet’s prayer: —

The player, like a harassed hostess, ‘is careful and troubled about many things’; the creative listener has chosen the better part. And if music is to prove itself indeed the most spiritual of the arts, it must do so by aid of the audience.

One naturally supposes that the symphony orchestra needs less help from the public than does the quartette, say, or the soloist, — that five-score musicians working together can generate any amount of the necessary atmosphere.

Far from it! Notoriously dependent on financial support, the orchestra is yet more dependent on that spiritual fee which no box-office ever demanded and no creative listener ever left unpaid.

Acoustically the orchestral player is at more of a disadvantage than any other musician. It depends somewhat on where he sits whether the tone-poem entitled, let us say, ‘The Afternoon Sunbath of a Mountain Faun,’ resolves itself for him into one prolonged growl of double-bass thunder that seems to loosen his very vertebræ, or a series of lightning flashes from the piccolo, like so many vigorous jabs of a hypodermic needle.

Though I first played in The Messiah at an age when music had begun to be almost more to me than food and raiment, the major impression I carried away of the performance was that of an adult trombone announcing directly into my right ear, ‘He is the-e King of Glo-ree!’ while, into my left, a large brass trumpet annotated this proposition with exhaustive — and exhausting — foot-notes.

In a situation like this the player is in the trough of a high sea, and hears only the breaking of the crest on either hand. He cannot see the wood for the trees. Or rather, he is somewhat in the position of our wretched scene-painter, supposing he were driven out of the wings and forced to contemplate his canvas from the lumber-room in the rear of the stage.

Nowhere, then, is the creative listener more needed than at the symphony. For, in large measure, both player and conductor must feel the spiritual force of the music by indirection, — through its effect on their audience.

In playing the ’cello the most delightful adventures have befallen me in connection with creative listeners. Two of my closest friends originally began the friendship by gleaming out from amid a crooked and perverse audience and helping me so potently as to turn what threatened to be a nightmare into a ‘pipe-dream.’ By the end of each of those performances we had advanced too far in intimacy ever to turn back.

And far better players than I can tell you the same sort of thing ad infinitum. One of the Kneisel Quartette once assured me that he never began playing in public without looking about for the most creative listeners there. He said that he could always recognize them at sight by a little sixth sense of his own. And then he played all the evening to no one else.

Nay, gentle amateur of listening, it is more than possible that Elman or Carreño, Gerardy or Wüllner, Zeisler or Spiering or Schumann-Heinck, may at this very moment be cherishing the picture of your glowing features and mysteriously revealed personality in one of those inner photograph-albums which are solely reserved for their dearest, most creative stranger-friends.

And, though you might never dream it from their stolid shoulders, the greatest orchestral conductors count on you as implicitly as any mere soloist. They have appreciative eyes for you in the backs of their heads. Hear the beloved father of American music on this point:

‘Very few people,’ said Theodore Thomas, ’have any idea how intelligent and discriminating listeners react upon the performers. A stupid audience kills the orchestra dead in five minutes, as water kills fire; whereas an intelligent and responsive audience will stimulate the musicians at once to their best efforts.’

My theory is that an exclusive, contemptuous, undemocratic spirit is a sorry defect in any musician. Of two otherwise equal conductors or players, the more democratic will be the better one every time. Any one who calls his public ‘the rabble,’ and proudly insulates himself, will always labor under a serious disadvantage. One feels the chill in such a man’s work. It is eccentric, abnormal, devoid of that human, emotional quality which is the soul of art.

After hearing a certain famous and frigid European conduct in New York not very long ago, I was not surprised when he remarked to me afterwards with a contemptuous grimace, ‘The masses — they are stupid! What do they care or understand? When I play or conduct I try to forget all about the audience absolutely.’

No wonder he found them stupid! This exclusive attitude is the surest means of putting listeners on the offensive, and quenching every creative spark that they may have brought as their offering.

It is a significant fact that Thomas, with far more provocation, never called his audiences stupid. This is why he left them far less so. For he valued and intensively cultivated every vestige of the creative instinct in his public.

Strange as it may sound, I believe that one proof of the rapid development of the art of listening among us may be seen in the popularity of the mechanical piano. For manipulating the stops of this musical makeshift is perhaps as satisfactory an outlet, and even training, for the listener’s creative faculty as he could find in radiating inspiration to the more stolid, uncreative kind of singer or player.

On the other hand, the existence of the art we are discussing is the surest guarantee that music will never be entirely mechanized. Even the most perfect possible reproduction of the efforts of the great interpreters will never supplant the actual throat and hand product, because the true listener will always insist on polling his own vote in the democracy of Tone. He will never consent to take his fingers from the reins of government. And thus he will never allow the human performance to be replaced by the mechanical; because the wildest imagination cannot conceive of a machine that will reproduce the spirit of some past performance of Paderewski and still be sensitive to the telepathic influence of its present audience. It is not enough for the creative listener to hear how distant places and persons influenced the Polish wizard. He resents anything that shuts him out from making himself an organic part of that music, and from actually influencing the spiritual quality of every note as Paderewski makes it. The mechanical substitute petrifies the Moonlight Sonata into a statue-like thing, so irrevocably finished that we may appreciate it until we break our hearts, yet never alter it by a grain.

No! One of the most precious parts of music is its capacity for infinite reincarnation, and the blessed opportunity that this offers the listener for self-expression. And this part will never be relinquished.

III

There is nothing that our music needs more than creative listening, unless it be apostles of creative listening.

The best musical missionary I ever knew was Walthers. And as the story of his labors is so illuminating, perhaps I would better tell how he began the movement for the conversion of Chicago, which has flourished so vigorously ever since.

In the old days of the Thomas Orchestra, every Friday afternoon would find Walthers in the parquet of the Auditorium. At first, he was of all men most miserable, for his creative listening was always being broken up by the musical impiety about him. For a time he was fiercely intolerant of this sort of thing, which he called destructive listening. His glare was superb and his hiss was of such a dismaying sibilance as to silence even the most abandoned whisperers, for a few measures. Now he and they would sit rigid in armistice; now Walthers would again be cutting single-mouthed a wide swath of silence about him.

But common sense foretold that things could not continue thus. And he began to make a study of the situation. Experience had furnished him abundant data to work with. As an accomplished amateur violinist he had learned, painfully, what the destructive listener means to the player. He knew that he who is not for the fiddler is against him, — is so much dead weight upon his bow-arm. He knew that the fiddler must either drag him up or be dragged down; and he used to say that the latter alternative was wont to distress him even more than he had been distressed in youth when compelled to stammer ‘Excelsior’ to derisive mates and a coolly critical schoolma’am. That was pure fun compared with trying Orphean miracles on human stocks and stones. He knew that one nodding head or fishy eye in the audience can sometimes reduce the player to depths wherefrom a whole row of eager, telepathic, creative listeners can scarcely rescue him.

Walthers grew convinced that the destructive listener has quite as pernicious an effect upon his fellow hearers as upon the music-makers; that he permeates the musical atmosphere somewhat as a drop of ink permeates a goblet of wine. Finding that his warlike methods only made matters worse about him in the Auditorium, he resolved to try the arts of peace, and deliberately scraped acquaintance with the most destructive listeners in his vicinity. Before long he made the important discovery that most of these were simply undeveloped listeners and, under the proper course of treatment, were capable of growing wonderfully creative. Thereupon, Walthers decided to convert the Auditorium.

He began with the sort of woman who attends concerts simply because that is the fashionable thing to do, and who exhibits to the world her exquisite culture by means of a voluptuously metronomic hat-plume, which comes to grief, however, at every change in the time.

Walthers found that this lady’s one genuine artistic interest was sculpture. He promptly loaned her a book that thrilled her with the disclosure that the music she had supposed to be an amorphous hodge-podge of notes was actually moulded into as fascinating forms as ever was clay or bronze.

A young violin student sat near by who never heard anything at a concert but fiddle technic. He used to finger out sympathetically on his right coatsleeve every simple passage and writhe in envy during every difficult one. Beauties of tone or nuance or construction did not exist for him. Every emotional appeal flew over his head. Music held nothing for him but finger-twiddling.

Walthers began by showing him broad, human horizons. He introduced the lad to Schubert, the poverty-stricken teacher, pouring out his deathless melodies on the back of a supper-card in a wretched tavern. He made him know what a droll, sunshiny old chap Papa Haydn was; let him see something of the hopeless passion that lay behind the writing of Tristan; and drew him word-pictures of poor, cold, deaf Beethoven, working in the room where his miserable brother would not even allow him a fire, — or on the stage, being turned around to see the people applauding his last great symphony.

The musical lotus-eaters next claimed Walthers’s attention. These are the sort that never really live at a concert, but only exist there, as Arnold Bennett puts it, ‘in a state of beatific coma, like a baby gazing at a bright object.’ Or, if they are more active than this, they merely know, with Elia, what it is to ‘ lie stretched upon a rack of roses .. . to pile sugar upon honey, and honey upon sugar, to an interminable . . . sweetness.’ Year in and year out they will take their symphony as regularly as their bath without coming the least bit nearer to knowing Johann Strauss from his namesake Richard, or a trombone from a shin-bone.

Walthers found some of these people actually afraid of knowing anything about music for fear the knowledge would make pedants of them. And then he would spout at them passages from Souriau’s L’ Imagination de l’Artiste or quote Krehbiel where he says, ‘Real appreciation ... is conditioned upon intelligent hearing. The higher the intelligence, the keener will be the enjoyment, if the former be directed to the spiritual side as well as the material.’ But more often he would scold the lotus-eater. ‘Oh, you don’t understand music, eh?’ he would growl, ‘you just enjoy it? Now, would you have the face to say that about any other element of human culture that you’d paid half as much attention to? Do you realize that a few days’ pleasant browsing in any library would make you decently intelligent about music?’ Then he would adopt a milder tone and tell them about philanthropists like Dickinson and Krehbiel, Mason and Henderson, who have compressed musical culture into tabloid form. For he knew that one taste of a tabloid is often enough to begin the reformation of the most abandoned.

Walthers’s success with people of the types I have mentioned was extraordinary. He used to say that almost any destructive listener may be reformed if you can get him to do four things: namely, to hear none but worth-while music; to take tabloids (which would give him the essentials of form, musical æsthetics, instrumentation, history, and biography); to interest himself in the human side of the players; and to cultivate his musical memory.

With some kinds of destructive listeners, however, Walthers never had the least success: with those who, in the Meredithean phrase, ‘ fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism’; with musical prigs, and pedants; and with the rank sentimentalists who insist on translating the infinite art of the composer into the finite art of the poetaster, tagging every musical number with a programme and explaining it either as ‘a song of undying love,’ or as ‘the struggle of a mighty spirit.’ ‘Confirmed programmatists like these,’he used to declare, ‘are worse bores and nuisances than confirmed epigrammatists, — and that is saying a good deal.’ Then there were the intellectual debauchees who take music instead of whiskey to stimulate cerebration.

Finally came people like the two matinée girls who sat just behind Walthers. Month after month they continued to whisper and giggle and crunch explosive taffy, in the same soft passages, in the same zestful way. Hissing only lent flavor to their outrageous repast. They appeared to gloat over the ability to give the listener more of pain than a hundred musicians could give him of pleasure. They took a morbid delight in impaling those curious worms of music-lovers on their vocal hat-pins to see them wriggle.

This sort of environment it was that finally drove Walthers into his memorable experiment.

IV

The laws of crowd-psychology lose none of their force when applied to the art of listening. Just as they can turn into so many murderers men who, taken one by one, would not stroke an insect the wrong way, so they can take a couple of destructive listeners and put their heads together and make the combination more deadly than any dozen isolated philistines.

One day while he was hopelessly contemplating the phenomenon of the hatpin girls, it occurred to Walthers that crowd-psychology, like a poor mule, would work both ways; that in listening, as in so many of the other best experiences of life, it is not good for man to be alone; that creative listeners, as well as destructive, must be effective inversely as the square of their distance apart, so that if you add them together you do not add, but multiply, their separate efficiencies.

At once he subscribed for half a dozen seats in the balcony and began to build about himself a bulwark of his most brilliant converts.

This proved such a delight that for the following season he chartered half of Section K and transformed it into a veritable Arcady for music-lovers. The sole requirement for admission was a passion for the true art of listening. This was the motto: —

By an instinct akin to that of the homing bee, Walthers singled out creative listeners from every part of the great audience. It mattered not if they were perfect strangers, he went straight for them. And the fact that they almost invariably met him half way and hailed the idea of the ‘ Ear Club ’ with joy, is simply one more proof how the appreciation of music, besides breaking down the spiritual barriers between stage and audience, breaks them down as well between all true appreciators.

For, whether its members are formally known to each other or not, there are few fraternities more intimate than fraternities of creative listeners. Therefore the Ear Club was almost as close as nineteenth-century conditions allowed to that state of things the prophets predict when, ages hence, brain technic will be so far advanced that the spoken word and the furtive thought and lying and conspiracy will be obsolete, because the secrets of all hearts will be revealed.

When the supply of Auditorium material ran short, Walthers cheerfully resorted to the highways and hedges that his fraternity might be full. And, as he never would risk hurting the feelings of proud poverty, many a watch-pawning enthusiast, starved for music, found in his mail a season ticket for Section K, the address type-written; and never afterward consciously beheld his benefactor nor realized who that lean, austere man in the third row was who seemed so popular; nor that he himself was a member of that epoch-making organization, the Ear Club.

Earnest neophytes were sometimes admitted on probation, but the line was absolutely drawn against any one who even faintly suggested kinship with the three most destructive classes of listener: grammarians, gluttons, and ghosts. These were defined respectively as: ‘all head and no heart,’‘all heart and no head,’ and ‘no head and no heart.’

This does not mean, of course, that all the members of the Ear Club were perfected in their art. In those old days the perfect listener — that exquisite balance of emotion and intellect which too many of us think of only in terms of the first person — was as hard to run to earth as a Platonic idea. Certainly there were no such persons in Section K, for even the leading spirits there were far from being such accomplished listeners as the delighted players of the Thomas Orchestra so often find to-day glowing in the heart of their audience like an Australian opal burning deep within its dull, brown matrix.

It was wonderful to see the Club’s influence spread. In a few brief months Sections J and L began to be honeycombed with creativeness, and small hives even began to appear in the desert of the parquet. It was no time at all before Flogan, K’s eager young usher, had counterbalanced his great heart for music by gathering from our lips and our libraries an astounding mass of erudition. Word was passed around the building that Flogan found it even more blessed to give than to receive. The public soon learned when in doubt to consult our encyclopædic protégé, and during the intermission he would face a fusillade of questions.

’Valkyries? Them’s Amazons-like. They fly on hossback and screech somethin’ terrible.’

(‘Telephone’s down two flights and to your right, sir.')

’Batch? Inventor o’ this here modern music.’

(‘First to the left, ma’am.’)

‘Bass clarionet? That’s the thing like one o’ them Dutchman’s pipes. Party with the brick-colored beard, looks like he was suckin’ instead o’ blowin’.’

(‘Sorry, but the programmes is all gone.’)

‘ Master Hugues ? One moment please.’

And Flogan would rush down to consult Walthers on the hero of SaxeGotha.

The Ear Club had been organized some weeks before the blessed Friday when Walthers first brought me to Section K. To my last hour I shall never forget the thrill of that moment when the master’s baton descended out of the tense, eloquent silence, invoking the power and the glory of the fifth revelation according to Beethoven. And then, as I felt something within me not only resounding the new creation of that music by reed and string and brazen throat, but vibrating as well to kindred resonances from the hearts about me, I suddenly was made conscious of art as a social power, binding one by myriad strands to all those other humans in space or time who have tasted, or are to taste, the ecstasy of creative listening.

Not long before that experience I had read with loud hilarity Tolstoi’s book on art. But that afternoon in Section K I realized that his pernicious theory had been irradiated by more than one golden gleam of truth. And on going home I re-read and assimilated into my creed these wonderful words: —

‘In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art. . . . Sometimes people who are together are, if not hostile to one another, at least estranged in mood and feeling, till . . . music unites them all as by an electric flash, and, in place of their former isolation or even enmity, they are all conscious of union and mutual love. Each is glad that another feels what he feels; glad of the communion established, not only between him and all present, but also with all now living who will yet share the same impression; and more than that, he feels the mysterious gladness of a communion which, reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all men of the past who have been moved by the same feelings, and with all men of the future who will yet be touched by them.’

Then, in reaction from this mood, I began to fear that the music I had just heard, fraught as it was with the splendor of its human revelation, had set me on the supreme heights of experience, and that any future concert must bring descent and disappointment.

The only thing doomed to disappointment proved to be the fear itself. Each new venture within the circle of Section K brought a deepened sensibility to art and to humanity, — and not the humanity of my fellow listeners alone, but of our friends in the orchestra as well.

Friends they literally were, thanks to Walthers who had led a pioneer expedition behind the stage during one historic intermission, to explore the sources of the symphonic waters. It had not been long before the Ear Club and the Orchestra were heartily attached to one another, and the musicians came definitely to depend for their inspiration on the wireless streams of sympathy that kept flowing over the footlights from Walthers and his listeners.

And after the Ear Club had organized an amateur orchestra it was the pleasure of our new friends to help us in our modest concerts, and to bear offerings of precious instruments such as oboes and bassoons and bass clarionets, like so many rare flowers and fruits for the bare spots on our musical banquet board.

True to its proud position as the American source of collective, creative listening, Chicago has not been content with pioneer honors. It has developed the art so consistently as to be the first, so far as I am aware, to attain an acknowledged state of sympathy between player and hearer. Not long ago the University Club invited the Thomas Orchestra to a banquet in their honor. The musicians, in turn, gave the Club a private concert in Orchestra Hall. And these events passed off with so much mutual satisfaction as to mark a period in the evolution of the art of listening.

A rather early period, however, as we must admit. For the hearing ear is still the weakest of American organs. Although we have imported an unequalled body of musicians, and have been hoodwinked into allowing a few native ones to struggle to eminence under various foreign disguises; although we boast a couple of the world’s foremost quartettes and orchestras, and one of the leading operas; although the greatest conductor of his time sacrificed his life to the task of making creative listeners of us,—Germany is nevertheless still justified in growling ‘Schweine!' at the flippant, noisy and remorseless bulk of our audiences. For the German can listen every bit as well as he can play (an even surer test of musical culture), and it is for this reason that his land remains the fatherland of Tone.

What our musical development most needs is a few more Waltherses, and a few million magic ear-trumpets.