Can Music Be Defined?
There is probably no musician who has not tried to define music.
Nevertheless, the subject is one of great interest to musicians, and has excited the imagination of many great thinkers and philosophers.
Most of them say what music does rather than what it is. An interesting collection of opinions is reprinted below by a musical encyclopedia compiled by Dr. Ralph Dunstan.
The following are the definitions given:
"The poetry of sound." - Encyclopedia Britannica
"The art of the beautiful and pleasing." - Quintilian
"The artistic union of inarticulate sound and rhythm." - National Encyclopedia
"The universal language which when all other languages were confounded, the
confusion of Babel left unconfounded." - Prof. Wilson
"Miraculous rhetoric! Excelling eloquence!" - Izaac Walton
"A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us on to the edge of the
infinite." - Carlyle
"The mysterious language of a remote spiritual realm." - Hoffman
"All deep thought is music." - Carlyle
"The harbinger of eternal melody." - Mozart
"Next to theology." - Luther
"The highest of all science." - Bach
"The fine art which more than any other ministers to human welfare."
- Herbert Spencer
"The worth of art appears most eminent in music." - Goethe
"What passion cannot music raise and quell?" - Dryden
"Exalts each joy, allays each grief." - Armstrong
"The medicine of the breaking heart." - Hunt
"The sweet companion of labor." - Sir J. Lubbock
"A genuine and natural source of delight." - Sir J. Hawkins
"The chief recreation of tired humanity." - Kay
"Of all delights, the most exquisite." - Dr. Tulloch
"Has the power of making Heaven descend to earth." - Japanese Proverb
"The voice of liberty." = W.S. Walker
"The sacred emblem of Truth, Peace and Order." - E. Smith (1707)
"There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music." - Browning
"The seed of many virtues is in such hearts as are devoted to music." - Luther
"One of the most forcible instruments for training, for arousing and for
governing the mind and the spirit of man." - Gladstone
"Rouses the soul to fearless deeds of daring and valour." - Acton
"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with any concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treason, stratagems and spoils." - Shakespeare
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Originally published in The Etude, November 1909
