Form in music, however, notwithstanding its origin as a means of defining those emotional expressions which without it would have remained vague, unimitable, and immemorable, is much more than a means of definition. At first practiced as a means to an end, it soon became an end in itself. For the perception of relations, the mental activity which groups impressions, is not merely useful; it is profoundly, indescribably delightful. Calling the mind into activity just as sensation calls the senses, it is a far deeper source of pleasure than sensation can ever be, because the mind far exceeds the senses in the subtlety, variety and independence of its action. When, therefore, the primitive musicians first made their syntheses of gestures and cries they discovered a novel pleasure, altogether more delicious than the crude joys of sensation and expression. Before they made such syntheses they had merely enjoyed the sweetness of tones, and taken satisfaction in expressing their feelings; but when once they learned to group their expressive tones together, to feel the subtle bonds which bound them into clear and salient unity, then they felt a joy altogether new and on a higher plane, they felt true æsthetic delight. Here was not merely a passive, or at most an automatic process; here was a truly creative activity, a conscious and free manipulation of materials. Mere hearing, however delicious, mere expression, however grateful, could not give this sense of mastery, of comprehension, of insight. Beauty alone, beauty depending on consciously made comparisons and contrasts, can give the highest æsthetic delight, the delight in form. And so, like painters who, using form at first to define their material, come quickly to a realization of its inherent value, and finally, if they be true artists, value its pure beauties of line and balance and composition more highly than any mere richness of color or of expression, musicians, in the degree of their true musicianship, came to prize the intrinsic beauty of music above all its other qualities.
Sometimes, doubtless, they carried their devotion too far. In certain periods and individuals the love of formal beauty has entirely eclipsed pleasure in expression. Unable to attend at once to expression and to beauty, many composers, and in some periods all, have devoted their entire energy to the quest for formal perfection. Thus in the work of the Netherland masters of early counterpoint, in some of Bach's ingenious weavings, and in much of the music of Haydn and his contemporaries, the search for purely plastic qualities goes on with little thought of the original emotional burden of the material that is being formulated. To such men form was much more than a means of defining expression; it was an end in itself, and an end worth a lifetime of painstaking, devoted effort.