The Power of Sound #234171

It is in this last point, in the convergence of my arguments to conclusions concerning the popular bearings and possibilities of Music, that my chief encouragement has lain throughout. It is to my growing conviction on that subject that I chiefly aim at winning others the conviction that this art, if its conditions were better understood, might do far more for numbers in all classes who at present feel themselves at sea in it, and get comparatively little out of it but more particularly that it has a unique message for the uncultivated and ignorant, for the publicans and sinners; and not in the millennium, but now; not after but before they cease to be uncultivated and ignorant. I may add, that if such phrases have here an ad captandum and exaggerated air, and suggest irrelevant rhetoric about the general soundness and impressibility for good of the popular heart, my support of them in the sequel, with restricted reference to this most isolated region of experience, will probably prove only too persistently plain and rigorous.