The general subject of this course is European Thought; and, to some, music may perhaps seem in this connexion rather like an intruder. Indeed, if the musician is, in William Morris's phrase, 'the idle singer of an empty day', if his business is to administer alternate stimulants and soporifics to the nerves or, at best, the surface emotions, or to serve in Cinderella-like fashion any passing, shallow needs of either the individual or the crowd, then, obviously, he has no place worth self-respecting mention in the world as it exists for philosophy. But widespread as some such conception of the function of music is, I hope you will agree with me in throwing it aside as, at any rate for our present purpose, no more worth the trouble of even approximately patient argument than that other less general but more objurgated conception of musical composition as something like a mechanically calculated spinning of bloodless formulae. By the conditions of its being, music has to express itself through non-intellectual channels, but may we not say that its essence is intellectual, that it is, in Combarieu's phrase, the art of thinking in sound--thinking in as precise a sense as the word can bear? It does not express itself verbally: it is self-dependent, with a language available only for the expression of its own ideas and not even indirectly translatable by nature into a verbal medium. Yet it is thought none the less; perhaps all the more. Words, we have often been told, serve for the concealment of thought; but the language of music is more subtle, more comprehensive. It has been said that where words end, music begins; and anyhow, for musicians, there stands on record the serenely proud claim of one of themselves. 'Only art and knowledge', said Beethoven, 'raise man to the divine; and music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and all philosophy.'
But I must not allow this little preliminary apology to stray into the field of abstract aesthetics. The subject proposed to me, the correlation of the progress of specifically musical thought during the last generation with the progress of European thought in general, is so extensive that I cannot within the necessary limits attempt to deal with more than some of the most salient features, and even those I shall have to treat in very broad outlines, with a certain disregard of detail and nicely balancing qualifications. I shall only attempt to put before you what seem to me the most prominent considerations, and to throw out suggestions which I hope you may perhaps, if sufficiently interested, develop at leisure for yourselves.