The fact is that not one listener in a hundred has any sense of true absolute music--the pure ‘pattern music’ which is as far from emotions and sentiments as a conventional design is from a Whistler etching. Even the most rabid of purists, who exhaust a distinguished vocabulary of abuse in characterizing program music, may expend volumes of emotion in endeavoring to discover the ‘meaning’ of classical symphonies. They may build up elaborate significations for a Beethoven symphony which its composer left quite without a program, making each movement express some phase of the author’s soul, or detecting the particular emotion which inspired this or that one. They will even build up a complete programmistic scheme for _every_ symphony, ordaining that the first movement expresses struggle, the second meditation, the third happiness, and the last triumph--and more of the like. They will enact that a symphony is ‘great’ only in so far as it expresses the totality of emotional experience--of _specific_ emotional experience, be it noted. This sort of ‘interpretation’ has been wished on any number of classical symphonies which were utterly innocent of any intent save the intent to charm the ear. And nearly always the deed has been done by professed enemies of program music. But, in spite of the fact that the instinct for programs and meanings resides in nearly every breast, still there _is_ a theoretical case for absolute music. There is nothing to prove that music, in and of itself, has any specific emotional implications whatsoever. It is merely an organization of tones. As such, since it sets our nerves tingling, it can indeed arouse emotion, but not _emotions_. That is, it can heighten and excite our nervous state, but what particular form that nervous state will take is determined by other factors. In psychological language, it increases our suggestibility. Under the nervous excitement produced by music a particular emotional suggestion will more readily make an impression, and this impression will become associated in our minds with the music itself. The program is such a suggestion. In a more precise way the words and actions of a music drama supply the suggestion. Of course, we have been so long and so constantly under the influence of musical suggestions that music without a particular suggestion may have a more or less specific import to us. Slow minor music we are wont to call ‘sad,’ and rapid major music ‘gay.’ But this is because such music has nearly always, in our experience, been associated with the sort of mood it is supposed to express. Somewhere, in the course of our musical education, there came the specific suggestion from outside.