Easier, however, and much more directly helpful to appreciation, is the study of the chief principles of musical form or structure, as they affect, not the composer, but the listener. As one going into a foreign country provides himself with some guidance as to the main things he is going to see there, so the music lover to whom symphonic music remains to some degree a foreign region likes to find out before he hears it what he is to listen for. That knowledge in detail will be found in the essay on musical form in Volume XII. Here it is our business, as before, avoiding detail, to get such a bird’s-eye view as may be possible of the most general facts of musical form. Especially agreeable and useful would it be if we could show that, in music as elsewhere, form and formalism are two essentially different things, and that while formalism is the conventionalizing and stiffening that indicate lowered vitality or incipient death in a work of art, form is the necessary shape it takes because it is alive. The formless is not yet alive; the formal is dying or dead; only the _formed_ truly lives. Therefore musical form is quite simple and natural, like the branching of trees or the crystallizing of salts, and the study of it is based on observation and common sense, and strives to determine how sounds have to be ordered to become intelligible. Essentially there are but three processes concerned in musical construction--the announcement or exposition of the themes, their elaboration or development, and their recapitulation. These processes are the natural outcome of quite simple psychological facts, and are duplicated in literature and other arts. The announcement of a theme is the preliminary statement, made as simple and as brief as possible, of the thought with which the composer proposes to occupy himself. For the listener, it is the presentation of a bit of melody of a particular rhythmic profile which he remembers by this profile, this characteristic combination of long and short, accented and unaccented notes, just as he remembers a person by the shape of his face. Careful attention to the main themes of a composition is of vital importance to appreciation, since the themes are the actors of the musical drama, and all the action is really only the working out of their latent characteristics. This is what we mean by development. In no music worthy of the name is development an artificial, intellectual process; it is simply the germination of the theme-seeds. As it results, however, in constantly increasing complexity, it would quickly confuse the listener were it not judiciously combined with simple repetitions of the original ideas, serving both to mark the completion of one cycle of development and sometimes to initiate a new one. The recapitulations insure the unity of the impression as a whole made by the work of art; the developments give it the richness and variety inseparable from all life.