«78 THE NATURE OF MUSIC 



How account for this defect, what is its cause ? The 

 majority of those composing the rank and file of stu- 

 dents are only moderately endowed with musical gifts, 

 yet each student sets out with a deep love of music and 

 that love is the certain proof that he possesses innate 

 musical faculties, the activity and healthy growth of 

 which it is the function of eflBcient pedagogy to stim- 

 ulate and direct. The defect, its cause, indeed the 

 source of the whole difficulty lie in the universally 

 adopted form in which the work is presented to the 

 student, namely, in the exercises in fundamental 

 basses, in short, in the fundamental basses. To be 

 sure, the fundamental tone is the only true viewpoint 

 of chord-material as such in the light of its structure, 

 since each structure Tests and is built upon its root or 

 fundamrental. This being true it would seem that the 

 only natural and logical form of first exercises for 

 students is that of a series of fundamentals as is the 

 prevailing custom. So it would seem, but it is not 

 true. Our pedagogy has failed adequately to dis- 

 criminate between two essentially distinct viewpoints 

 of chord-material; first, that of the chord as a struc- 

 ture and mere material; second, that of the chord as 

 applied in the living stream of connected rhythmo- 

 harmonic feeling and thought. The first of these 

 viewpoints is that of the fundamental tone. The sec- 

 ond, as the above heading and all thus far said in 

 these pages imply, is melody. Melody is the stu- 

 dent's first consciousness of music, in melody he rec- 

 ognizes both the object and the proximate cause of his 

 love of music, to him melody is from the outset some- 

 thing real, tangible, comprehensible, the one thing he 



