The Composer's Intention

Extract

The subject on which I am about to address you has been so often before the public of late, in one form or another, that I might well have hesitated to bring it forward again, were it not that its great importance—which I assume no one will question—gives me reason to hope that I may count on your patience while I lay before you certain aspects of it upon which I greatly desire to elicit opinion. The necessity for careful study of the scope and meaning of art, and of the duties which devolve upon its interpreters, becomes more pressing every day; and yet the number of those who undertake it is exceedingly small. This, at least, I infer from the fact that the majority of those who express themselves on the subjects in question speak as though there were no difficulties in the way—a sure sign that they have given little attention to the problems involved. My own sense of these difficulties is such that I have prepared this paper less as an assertion of personal views than as an incentive to discussion. With that end before me I have drawn largely on the opinions of great writers, feeling that truth would become visible in proportion to the number of variously coloured lights I could bring to bear.