ground position,
admitting the beauty and power of music, _per se_, but acknowledging
also the fact that abstract beauty together with a certain amount of
suggested imagery, in combination, will usually make a stronger appeal
to the majority of people than either element by itself. Many of us
are entirely willing to grant, therefore, that a more complex and more
vividly colored emotional state will probably result if the auditor is
furnished with the title or program of the work being performed; _but
we contend nevertheless that this music, regardless of its connection
with imagery, must at the same time be sound music, and that no matter
how vividly descriptive our tonal art may become, if it cannot stand
the test of many hearings as music, entirely apart from the imagery
aroused, it is not worthy to endure_. It is not the _meaning_ of the
music which makes us want to hear it repeated, but its inherent
_beauty_; it is not usually our intellectual impression, but our
emotional thrill which we recall in thinking back over a past musical
experience.

Those of us who take the middle ground that we have just been
presenting contend also that descriptive music can only legitimately
arouse its appropriate imagery when the essential idea has been
supplied beforehand in the form of a title or program, and that even
then _the effect upon various individuals is, and may well be, quite
different_, since each one has the music thrown, as it were, upon the
screen of his own personal experience.

[Sidenote: EXPRESSION CONCERNS BOTH COMPOSER AND PERFORMER]

It will be noted that in this discussion we are constantly using the
word _expression_ from the twofold standpoint of composer and
performer, each having an indispensable part in it, and neither being
able to get along without the other. But in our treatment of
conducting, we shall need to come back again and again to the idea of
expression from the standpoint of interpretation, and in directing a
piece of music we shall now take it for granted that the composer has
said something which is worthy of being heard, and that as the
intermediary between composer and audience, we are attempting to
interpret to the latter what the former has expressed in his
composition. It should be noted in this connection that wrong
interpretation is possible in music, even as in literature. One may so
read a poem that the hearer, without being in any way to blame, will
entirely miss the point. So