The Music of Hindostan c17.163

c17.163

Art expresses. It finds words or tones for what was hitherto unnamed; it actually calls into being an experience which has not previously existed; it does not communicate to us, or acquaint us with, an antecedent experience. And what it expresses is the fact of emotion, not particular feelings. It is not that words or tones cannot indicate these, but that directly they do so the result ceases in so far to be a work of art. That music can, as most would agree, express emotion more immediately than other arts, depends on the fact that ‘in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire’.¹