22 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



the composer be controlled by the influence and dictates of his own 

 generation ? There are explanations to be found in the works of 

 the composers, but these sources of information are not in their col- 

 lective sense available to the general public, and are known, even by 

 the musician, only as a result of years of study. The debt which each 

 generation or epoch of creative musical energy owes the past, espe- 

 cially, as in some instances, its immediate past, is as great as that of 

 the poets, to say nothing of that of the other arts. That the genius 

 of Shakespeare, Bach or Beethoven stands a high mountain peak 

 among the foothills of lesser genius ought not to cause one to ignore 

 the foothills. A study of the composers of the sixteenth and seven- 

 teenth centuries reveals an almost unbroken line of development to 

 at least the lesser compositions of Bach, and this process of develop- 

 ment extends to the present time— development only in the case of 

 rare genius, otherwise only change or even retrogression. 



From the ancients to the present there seems always to have been a 

 desire to explain music as a language. Hardly in a single instance have 

 these explanations possessed any real value except as examples of 

 beautifully written passages of prose or poetry. In 1854 Dr. Eduard 

 Hanslick, afterward professor of musical history and aesthetics in 

 the University of Vienna, published his Vom musikalisch-Schmun, 

 an epoch-making work which has been translated into French, Italian 

 and EngHsh. In it he exposed the errors and absurdities which so 

 prevailed in the literature of universal aesthetics. His writings were 

 more bitterly attacked on account of his own attacks not only on 

 Wagner's music, but likewise on some of Wagner's essays on music. 

 Hanslick was a conservative and as such his attitude toward Wagner 

 is not altogether incomprehensible. But so valuable is this work that 

 it is almost a necessity to quote it more than once in the following pages. 

 Kant's statement that '' the Germans are the only people who at present 

 use the aesthetic for what others call the criticism of taste," and his 

 disbelief in attempts to systematize aesthetics was not contradicted 

 by the attitude of Hanslick, for he did not seek to construct a system 

 of musical aesthetics, but rather to destroy the errors of so-called 

 existing systems, though it is better to omit the word system when 



