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2^4 National Music of the World. |
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as it was in the days when the practice of the art here was limited.
Now, when the love and culture of music are grown again to be something like a household word, it is singular to mark how the prescience has become timid, how curiosity has been dulled, how research has stopped. Being virtuous, ' there are to be no more cakes and ale! And so, at the time being—with all the vast mechanical resources of this country, and with its prodigious wealth waiting for the lap of any man, woman, or child who will hold the apron open —it is singular to see combined an exclusiveness which in past poorer times did not exist. There is a large public for four or five composers: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Rossini (in his elect works). We may admire too deeply as -partisans: we may be too unwilling to admire three things instead of two; and therefore, with all our honesty, our wealth, our welcome—and now, our great and widely diffused musical culture —we may fail for a while—not for the future, I earnestly believe—betwixt eclecticism and exclusiveness, in having a music of our own.
It was my intention to attempt some outline of the forms of music in America; but on looking closer |
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