Nearly everything that is distinctive of the art-song involves conscious planning. However spontaneous and unrestrained a _Lieder_ singer may appear on the concert platform, there is behind his or her interpretation a whole conscious network of selection and rejection. A good folk-song, as everyone has noticed, asks for no intellectual comprehension--it ‘sings itself.’ But an art-song rarely ‘sings itself.’ It must be _sung_. And this is precisely one of the beauties of the art-song--the feeling that it has been achieved by art, that it is the working-out of somebody’s intention, that it has been _personally_ propelled. VII A good Lieder singer is like some weaver of a delicate design in silk. Every crossing is planned and the worker must not let a single thread slip through his fingers. Every detail of a song must be understood before it can be interpreted. This does not mean that the singer must have a ‘reason’--a logical argument in words--for everything done. Usually words and arguments about a song only befuddle the artistic sense. The song must be _understood_ in musical terms--by comparing each phrase with similar phrases in the song, by trying different tempos, different phrasings, different qualities of voice. To _understand_ a song in the musical sense is to know when you sing it that you could have sung it in ten or in fifty other specific ways, but that you chose to sing it exactly in _this_ way. It requires a great deal of attention to fix in your ear accurately all the little beauties and peculiarities of the melody, the distinctions contained in tiny variations of tempo, and so on. The facts are all obvious in the song, but they demand attention. So the process is exactly that of the primitive folk-singer who noticed, to his delight, that bluebells were blue and that the deer had four legs. And, like the folk-singer, when you have consciously noted a multitude of these obvious facts you feel more at home in the world--you have completed a step in your education.