nd. Instead of vague custom we
have schools, and instead of swaying multitudes academic example; but
many a discord and mannerism survive simply because the musician is so
suggestible, or so lost in the tumult of production, as never to
reconsider what he does, or to perceive its wastefulness.

Nevertheless an inherent value exists in all emitted sounds, although
barbaric practice and theory are slow to recognise it. Each tone has its
quality, like jewels of different water; every cadence has its vital
expression, no less inherent in it than that which comes in a posture or
in a thought. Everything audible thrills merely by sounding, and though
this perceptual thrill be at first overpowered by the effort and
excitement of action, yet it eventually fights its way to the top.
Participation in music may become perfunctory or dull for the great
majority, as when hymns are sung in church; a mere suggestion of action
will doubtless continue to colour the impression received, for a
tendency to act is involved in perception; but this suggestion will be
only an over-tone or echo behind an auditory feeling. Some performers
will be singled out from the crowd; those whom the public likes to hear
will be asked to continue alone; and soon a certain suasion will be
exerted over them by the approval or censure of others, so that
consciously or unconsciously they will train themselves to please.

[Sidenote: Physiology of music.]

The musical quality of sounds has a simple physical measure for its
basis; and the rate of vibration is complicated by its sweep or
loudness, and by concomitant sounds. What a rich note is to a pure and
thin one, that a chord is to a note; nor is melody wholly different in
principle, for it is a chord rendered piece-meal. Time intervenes, and
the harmony is deployed; so that in melody rhythm is added, with its
immense appeal, to the cumulative effect already secured by rendering
many notes together. The heightened effect which a note gets by figuring
in a phrase, or a phrase in a longer passage, comes of course from the
tensions established and surviving in the sensorium--a case, differently
shaded, of chords and overtones. The difference is only that the more
emphatic parts of the melody survive clearly to the end, while the
detail, which if perceived might now clash, is largely lost, and out of
the preceding parts perhaps nothing but a certain swing and potency is
present at the close. The mind has been rak