I HAVE HAD MUCH pleasure in and understanding from choral music.
From long experience in it I have, I think, learned more about the
nature and purpose of music as a whole than in any other way. I
have, too, learned a great deal about people. As it happens I regard
people, as individuals, as more significant than any form of art which
may be said to exist 'for art's sake'. I can, therefore, rarely see a picture
without, at the same time, seeing with some conviction of reality the
working hand of the painter; nor the play without the presence of the
playwright. I can never hear a work by Bach without realizing also his
circumstances in Leipzig; without hearing the background of domestic,
ecclesiastical and civic activity against which he composed; without
feeling the impulses of time and place which caused the accent and
intonation of his style. So there is such companionship with the past
that the past, as such, ceases to exist.

Neither can I escape the other agreeable realities: the liveliness of
those choirs of children who have so often sung great music for me
whether at home or abroad; the gaiety of Austrian choirs, the sweetness
of Spanish choirs, the gravity of Roman choirs, the fervour of Welsh
choirs, the thoroughness and enthusiasm of American choirs I have
heard, and whose members I have met; the humility of those who have
been nearly associated with me in great enterprises in Bach or Handel.
I am with Jean Jacques Rousseau in one aspect of musical appreciation:

'. . . I vividly recollect the time, the place, the persons, and even
the temperature and odour of the air, while the lively idea of a
certain local impression peculiar to those times transports me back
again to the very spot; for example, all that was repeated at our
meetings, all that was sung in the choir, everything that passed then
--the beautiful and noble vestments of the canons, the chasubles of
the priests, the mitres of the singers, the persons of the musicians,
an old lame carpenter who played the double-bass, a little fair abbé
who performed on the violin, the ragged cassock which M. le

-9-