Those of us who are students of history know, and those who are readers of Mr. Bernard Shaw's Prefaces take his word for it, that it was not until well on towards the end of what we call the Middle Ages that France and England began to feel and to show a national consciousness, and then only in a vague and indeterminate way. Italy, the Kingdoms and Principalities of Germany, and the Provinces and Countries of the Netherlands arrived at this condition still later. It is not surprising, therefore, that National Music, music which is the unconscious yet definite expression of this feeling, should be a comparatively modern thing. Art belongs to some extent to races and still more to individuals, and it was long before it became a possession of nations as nations. Nations even to-day are so often merely agglomerations of peoples under the government of one king or one state, and so rarely are separate and complete entities in themselves, with common feelings of race or family life, that it is only by long association in work or war, in personal loyalty to a sovereign or in joint effort against a common enemy, that they find and express any feeling which is either common to humanity or antipathetic as between the different peoples or districts making up the nation.

The most important of the remaining examples of English musical composition in the five centuries before Dunstable have been fairly well explored by musical historians and are known, at least by name, to our educated musicians of to-day. Such are the Winchester Troper, the Reading Rota, the theoretical work of Walter Odington and many others, the Agincourt song, the Selden Carols, and the Old Hall MS. But no one can yet claim that our musical history up to 1226, and from 1226 to 1415, is anything but a series of missing chapters. It is a period of mystery, and for that reason we might have expected that more serious attempts would have been made to explore it. Not that a good deal of efficient work has not been already done, but it is sadly little when we compare the abundant supply of specialised literature available in other departments or ages of English history, and we have only to look at the lists of the Henry Bradshaw Society, the Early English Text Society, and such bodies to realise what might have been done for our English Mediaeval Music.

It is probably true to say that there has been no more difficult period for the teacher of harmony than that in which we are now living. Not only are problems much more complex and much wider in their sphere than ever before,—problems of resource, medium, technique, form, and aim—but, living as we are in the throes of the second great harmonic upheaval that the evolution of resource has produced, we are confronted with the additional problem of what is practically a new language. The great English school with which we associate the names of Parry and Stanford was not remarkable for anything new in the idiom, but rather for the quality of what was said. But compare any score of these men with any page in Vaughan Williams's “London Symphony,” and you will see that the composer of to-day uses a new language, not because the old one is inherently bad or has necessarily worn itself out, but because the new language is the vogue of the time and the reflex of the progress of thought in other spheres. Greek music reflected the individual nature of Greek religion Greek religion, early Western music reflected the congregational principle of Christianity.

Before I start my attack—as I fear it is—upon the composers, the audiences and the traditions of opera, I think it may be valuable to dismiss for the moment all the accepted operatic beliefs and to try to frame some a priori plan which should act as the rough model for all the varieties of what is commonly called opera. Presume for five minutes that we know orchestral works and choral works, that chamber music has been exploited in all its branches and that the theatre, which has—for the sake of the premiss—been allowed to keep its history and development, has only had an effect on music to the extent of the interpretation of songs. It suddenly occurs to a member of the audience, who has heard—and seen, remember—a certain song well interpreted, that it might be possible to stage the dramatic story that has just been sung. The idea takes such root that in less than no time—for when we are presuming there are no limits to our presumptions—a performance is arranged which is to take place on a stage, with singers in costume, miming to the best of their very poor ability, and an orchestra providing a stirring and suitable accompaniment. How does this differ from the entertainments we have known for so long—according to our premiss? We have had singers before, and orchestras, and even suitable grimaces made by the singers in moments of intense passion, but the one novelty is the dressing up of the singers and the placing of them on the stage with a movable curtain, scenery and Schwäbe-Häselt lighting.

I hope that you will forgive me for passing over as rapidly as possible the early history of experiments with recorded sound. I am more anxious to call your attention in this paper to some of the problems that confront us in the present, and to offer you the results of my own practical experience with the gramophone rather than a hotch-potch of other people's acoustical theories which I lack either the ingenuity to exploit or the scientific training to appreciate.