On the subject of the Songs of the Hebrides and of our work in connection therewith I have spoken so frequently to musicians and to the public and have written so fully in the introductory chapters of our published collections that I find it difficult, in a short paper, to avoid merely repeating myself.

What can I talk about that is likely to interest a scientific society such as the Musical Association? It is now twenty-six years since I was a practising musician, and I was never scientific. I have no business in a learned society, and certainly no claim to be addressing one. I can only speak about things I know, and have experienced, and remember. In my musical life I did not experience what you would call great things: my lines were laid in a pleasant but obscure place. Perhaps, however, it is true that the greatness of things is relative. The first hearing of a certain strain of music, even of a certain harmonic combination, may be for the hearer a psychological event. The first hearing of Schubert's C major Symphony may be as great an adventure to one man as the first ascent of the Matterhorn is to another, and a man may faint on catching his first salmon.

Consider the case of a competent organist reading a fairly complicated item at sight; he has before his eyes three sets of five lines with curious marks on them, and the control of mechanism of a complex instrument in front of him, on both sides, and at his feet. Dealing with the marks on the staves he has to remember that one on a particular line or space means that he must put down a corresponding key, at a particular instant, accurate within a very few hundredths of a second. He has also to raise his fingers with equal accuracy. He has to remember that sharps or flats at the signature alter the meaning of the marks. He has to remember that the meaning of the marks is also affected by the clefs, and he has at least two of these. The area of paper that is sharply focussed on his retina is narrower than a single stave, so he has to read what is on the three, or perhaps four in little bits in advance, piecing them together at the right moment. When an Alpine mule comes to a rough piece he stops when it is under his nose and plans out his pedalling. He then goes on, and puts each foot precisely right on each bit of rock. But the organist may not stop. He has to arrange his fingering and pedalling in advance at full speed. He has to remember the positions of his stops, and must take his eyes off the print to change them or to change manuals; and as far as is possible in such a case, he has to arrange his stops in advance. But all this is the unmusical mechanical part of his work. He must realise what each passage means before he plays it; and when he plays it he must phrase it properly, adjusting the duration of his notes with extraordinary precision. If he is a very competent musician, he will appreciate the construction of the piece as he plays it, remembering the subjects, and following the modulations without forgetting the main key; and, if asked, he will transpose it all as he plays. While he is doing this, he may carry on a conversation about golf; but most likely he will not. This is one feat. Take another case; a man thinks out a symphony movement in the train and then writes out a full score to record on paper, in a complicated and ridiculous way, what he has produced in imagination, while his wife reads the paper to him.

Looking back upon the development of any art, one is tempted to think of it as a more or less straight line leading towards the culminating achievement of the spectator. But just as saplings grow by putting out branches, first to one side and then to the other, so do Arts develop laterally. Music has so developed, and musical notation has followed and recorded its deviations. Their interdependence is so great that in many cases where one can only understand the music through knowing the notation, one can only understand the notation through being in sympathy with the music. Because a particular brand of notation is inadequate to express our modern ideas, it is idle to condemn it as being clumsy and obscure; it is foolish to suppose it has nothing to teach us. I have no doubt but that to those accustomed to it, the dots and dashes and tendrils of neumatic notation conveyed far more feelingly than any modern system can, the refinements of melismatic plain-song. Contemporary music makes enormous use of dynamic contrasts: accordingly its notation is very rich, though not rich enough, in dynamic signs of all descriptions. The music of this polyphonic period excelled in variety and subtlety of rhythm, and the most interesting and significant notational devices of that age have all the same object—to convey and articulate the rhythmical structure.

The commonest phenomena in life are (a) oar proneness to take things for granted—to repeat catchwords and shibboleths without thought or reflection, and (b) our blank ignorance of things which we have grown up to regard as most intimate and familiar. Certain names in literature (Shakespeare, for instance) or in music (say Tallis and Byrd) are so constantly on our lips that they have become what we term “Household Words.” But it does not always follow that we are as familiar with the works of such authors as we are with their names. Tallis and Byrd are known to us by only a few of their works, and those not necessarily their best. Merbecke, too, has suffered through becoming a “Household Word”; he has shared the fate of Tallis, Whyte, and Byrd, in being known only by his least distinguished work. No satisfactory biography of him has as yet been compiled. Beyond a short extract in Barney's “History of Music,” and a carol, given in Hawkins' “History of Music,” and republished by the Walter Scott Co., none of his part music has seen the light of print; and any critical examination of him as a composer of polyphonic music has not been attempted. If I ask you, therefore, to bear with me while I set down a “plain, unvarnished tale,” it is chiefly because I should like to share with you a more intimate acquaintance with an unjustly neglected composer, and also that we may try and arrive at some critical understanding of his music, and see it in clearer perspective.

With the exception of the libraries attached to such institutions as the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music, the Students' Libraries at Oxford and Cambridge, the Henry Watson Library at Manchester, and Mr. Cobbett's Free Library of British Chamber Music, musical libraries, in the sense of libraries solely devoted to music and musical literature, can hardly be said to exist in this country. But the term Musical Libraries is short and convenient, and under it I propose to deal briefly with (1) Great Public Libraries which have (or should have) a special department devoted to music, and which can be used for purposes of both general instruction and special historical research; and (2) Smaller Libraries, where music can only form one of the many subjects for which provision has to be made. In this second category I include (a) Free Libraries and (b) Libraries of Institutions (such as Cathedrals and Colleges), into which for a variety of reasons a certain amount of music has drifted. Private collections, though they are often of considerable importance, hardly come within the scope of this paper.

To begin with, I should like to make it quite clear that in this paper I have not attempted to give a catalogue, description or summary of contemporary composers and their works, but rather to state a particular point of view from which they may be regarded. I have confined myself rigorously to this one point of view, and perhaps some will think that I have laid undue emphasis on various issues arising from it. However, I shall not be sorry if certain utterances which may appear to you to be too sweeping and dogmatic provoke considerable opposition afterwards, in the discussion for which we have here such admirable opportunities.

The twin arts of Music and Poetry, the “sphere-born harmonious sisters, voice and verse,” have met with curiously different fortunes in the history of this country. Our poetry has the most continuous, and except for Greece, the most famous record in Europe: apart from our dark century—and that not so dark but that it produced some of the best of our English ballads—the line of succession is virtually unbroken from Beowulf to the present day: there is no generation, there is almost no decade, in which Englishmen were not at the forefront of skill and invention. But our musical history contains a lamentable number of what Bacon calls the deserts and waste-places of time—indeed, it has one century of lavish fruitfulness, and for the rest has been until now a desert with a few infrequent oases. There was one lyric outburst in the thirteenth century, it was followed by silence for over a hundred years. John Dunstable was the first musician of his time: at his death the sceptre passed, not to his English imitators, but to his Flemish disciples. Then, no doubt, came our glorious period of Tudor and Elizabe than composers, the period at which English music and English poetry attained side by side to the heights of human achievement; but there was no musical Milton to follow that Elizabethan age, only a Dryden, and he short-lived and without successors. It is to no service to make excuse—to say that Handel was an English musician of German extraction or to complain that his brilliance reduced our native genius to darkness. German art was not obliterated by Haydn, or French by Lulli: they were strong enough to accept the foreigner's music and graft it into the parent-stock. We let Handel overshadow us like a beech tree, under whose spreading and magnificent foliage nothing prosperous can grow.