The Vitality of Melody

Extract

On being honoured by a request from your Council for a paper, I chose for a subject “The Vitality of Melody,” for I think that perhaps in these modern days melody is a little apt to be obscured by the delight in triumphs of technical construction where the skilful harmonisation of separate parts is more a feature of composition. Melody pure and simple, I am certain, had a rather better recognised position among the older musicians than it has to-day. It is a generally felt opinion that anything tuney may be set down as cheap; but although tuney music can be both cheap and nasty, it is not the fact of tune being there that makes it so; it is the bad quality of the tune. Where melody and harmony are united I need not tell you that melody has had, in many cases, much right to complain of the union.