Pleasures of Music [antikvár]

^----—li ^ INTRODUCTION Music and Words ^--- JACQ^UES BARZUN I Anyone, with or without a musical ear, who has learned to read words, can understand everything in this book. It is necessary to say this at the outset, because many educated people are known to harbor an odd prejudice against literature that deals with music. Whereas the ordinary reader courageously tackles the slang oL thieves, the jargon of psychiatry, and the ever-changing vocabulary of war, he balks at the supposed impenetrability of discourse on music. He will plunge in boldly and make out for himself what "flak" and "gremlin" stand for, he will tackle Finnegans Wa\e or thread his way through cookbooks laced with French, but will retreat baffled before such dread technicalities as "first violin," "accompaniment," and "repeat." There is modesty, no doubt, in this shying oflE, and perhaps the germ of a true principle, which is that words are no substitute for musical sound. All the books on "appreciation" and all the program notes in the world are powerless to reproduce the experience of music —of the simplest music as of the most complex. But the pleasure proposed in an anthology such as this is not the pleasure of music; it is the pleasure of reading. To many it will bring reminders of past musical pleasures, but to all it can yield the pleasure of beholding the many forms and roles of an art which is as old as man, and which modern means of communication have made all-pervasive. Music nowadays, whether we like it or not, is interwoven with the texture of our lives from morning till night. Music resounds for, with, and through everything; it is canned and broadcast, recorded and