A fine singing voice has, perhaps, the most beautiful of all tone colors, but the sensibility of many people seems to be limited to that alone. In fact the love of singing is, in many cases, merely a sentimental thrill unconnected with any intellectual process and entirely devoid of imagination. In the orchestra the tone of the instrument is to the theme itself what the color is to the rose. It is much more than that, of course, because it is at any time both retrospective and prospective; _this_ tone color is a darker or lighter shade of _that_, or, perchance, another hue entirely. The colors shift from moment to moment always as a part of the design rather than as mere color. Taking it all together--rhythm, meter, melody, harmony, and tone color--this substance of a symphony is a wonderful thing. Nothing quite so delicately organized has ever been created by the mind and the imagination of man. With an interplay of parts almost equal to that of a finely adjusted machine, it seems to go where it wills to go regardless of anything but a whim. How marvelously does it express both the actions and the dreams of human beings; how true is it to their deeper consciousness--a consciousness that dimly fathoms both life and death; that knows itself to have come from across the ages, and feels itself to be a part of the ages to come. It is just as likely that life is a brief, shadowed moment in an endless light, as that it is “a rapid, blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine.” FOOTNOTES: [9] I stated in the first chapter what justification there is for using the word “intellectual” in regard to music, and I speak here of thought in that sense. [10] As examples of melodies with finely adjusted rhythms I may cite the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata, opus 13, and that of the slow movement of Brahms’s pianoforte quartette, opus 60. [11] In the “wood-wind” group, so called, there are flutes, oboe, clarinets, bassoons, English horn, etc.; in the brass, there are trumpets, French horns, trombones, tubas, etc. CHAPTER VII THE SYMPHONY (_continued_) I. THE UNITY OF THE SYMPHONY