Excerpt from How to Understand Music, Vol. 2
The Present volume is a sort of accident, having grown out of the plan of modifying volume of "How to Understand Music," by replacing the last two essays and the Dictionary with new matter. Upon collecting the material it was found to greatly exceed such limits; so in place of adding it to the old volume it was decided to make a new one. The essays here collected represent the more important phases of the authors musical studies since the production of the first volume. Several of them were not originally intended for book form, and partake, perhaps too much, of the levity and sketchiness of newspaper writing. Others are essentially "studies," incident to the more important duties of a musical critic and teacher, or preparatory to a serious narrative of the entire course of musical history, the preparation of which is already well advanced, as a third volume of this series. The attentive reader will observe that the essays on Schubert and Berlioz belong to the same category as the biographical essays of the first volume, scarcely exceeding the limits of newspaper sketches. The chapters on Richard Wagner are, in part, from the essays published in the non-official program book of the Chicago Festival of 1884; in part, from the authors letters from Europe to the Chicago Daily News, in the same year, and in part, new. An important section upon "Die Meister-singer" and "Tristan and Isolde" was written expressly for this work by the well-knowm Wagnerian scholar and American composer, Mr. Fred. Grant Gleason, acknowledgment of which is here and elsewhere made. The essay upon the Tonal System will be found to contain the most complete historical summary of the subject accessible within similar limits. It is believed to present the existing state of knowledge and theory upon the subject of just intonation and temperament, with a series of tables affording at a glance an idea of the crudities concealed in our tempered keyboards and scales, which there is too much disposition in certain quarters to acquiesce in as final. The essays upon the Psychology of Music, the Tonic Sol-Fa, Piano Teaching, and Self-Culture in Music, are mutually complementary, and, taken together, form a foundation for Pedagogic, or the Philosophy of Teaching. The limits of the volume having been reached sooner than was expected, the elaborate essay upon Musical History, originally intended for this place, had to be cut down to about a fifth of its proposed compass. It is hoped that this circumstance will be taken into account in estimating its literary demerits.
The third volume of How to Understand Music has been in preparation for more than two years, and it is hoped will be ready some time in 1889.
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