r: all of which is somewhat weakened by the dictum
of still another theorist that the music is absolutely formless! A
form of so doubtful an identity can surely lay small claim to any
serious intellectual value.... In our modern days we too often,
Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the forms. We put our guest,
the poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out of
the mystery of the blue sky--we put this confiding stranger
straightway into that iron bed: the 'sonata-form'--or perhaps even the
'third-rondo form,' for we have quite an assortment; and should the
idea survive, and grow, and become too large for the bed, and if we
have grown to love it too much to cut off its feet and thus _make_ it
fit (as did that old robber of Attica), why then we run the risk of
having some wiseacre say, as is said of Chopin: 'Yes--but he is weak
in sonata-form'! ... Form should be nothing more than a synonym for
_coherence_. No idea, whether great or small, can find utterance
without form; but that form will be inherent in the idea, and there
will be as many forms as there are adequately expressed ideas in the
world."

Concerning programme-music he wrote at length. "In my opinion," he
says in one of his lectures, "the battle over what music can express
and what it cannot express has been carried on wrong lines. We are
always referred back to language as actually expressing an idea, when,
as a matter of fact, language expresses nothing but that which its
vital parallel means of expression, gesture and facial expression,
permit it to express. Words mean nothing whatsoever in themselves; the
same words in different languages mean wholly different things; for
written words are mere symbols, and no more express things or ideas
than any marks on paper would. Yet language is forever striving to
emulate music by actually expressing something, besides merely
symbolising it, and thus we have in poetry the coining of
onomatopoetic words--words that will bring the things they stand for
more vividly before our eyes and minds. Now music may express all that
words can express and much more, for it is the natural means of
expression for all animals, mankind included. If musical sounds were
accepted as symbols for things we would have another speech. It seems
strange to say that by means of music one could say the most
commonplace thing, as, for instance: 'I am going to take a walk'; yet
this is precisely what the Chinese have been doi