“Criticism,” said a friend casually one day to me, “is the salt of life.” I think that is true: as long as man has experiences, he will persist in discussing them. Music is an experience, and about that I will put a preliminary question: — When was the criticism of music born ?—and will offer an answer for your possible acceptance. It was when the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God. shouted for joy?” The inscrutable wonder of creation was then in performance, it was sung to the tune of the music of the spheres, and a selection of mankind—those whose antecedents made it likely that they would have the requisite knowledge— were filled with the love that precedes understanding, and affirmed the glory of that wonder.

It is not the first time that your Association offers an opportunity to discuss the importance of John Dunstable in the history of music. I only recall the paper read by my esteemed colleague Professor Van den Borren who had the honour of speaking to you about The Genius of Dunstable seventeen years ago. Moreover, I am convinced that this paper will not be the last one on the same subject; for Dunstable is a figure who has a fascination which the contemporaries of the composer must already have felt more than we do to-day. The fame of Dunstable spread over the whole cultured world in a short time as the theorists of the fifteenth century give evidence and as the places of origin of the manuscripts which contain Dunstable's compositions prove. These sources were written in England, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and even Spain. And still, in the sixteenth century when all preceding composers lived in the shadow of such masters as Okeghem and Josquin, Dunstable figures in public opinion as a mythical ancestor of music art, and is regarded even as the “inventor of counterpoint.” Though it is evident that this legend was nothing but a confusion it was seriously maintained by modern writers. It is true, Johannes Tinctoris, the greatest theorist about 1480, tells us in the introduction of his Ars Contrapuncti (1477) that the music of the last forty years was more perfect than all preceding music, and that only that music which was written by most excellent musicians as Dunstable, Dufay and Okeghem really was worth hearing. A Spanish monk goes so far as to add to Tinctoris's statement his own conviction that the music of these three masters was not only the best of that time but, also, not surpassable in the future.

There are periods in the history of music when the problems of musical form seem to have been solved once and for all. At such times, there are fixed formal schemes, there are species each of which has its average length, and with each of which the musical world of the particular time can associate something definite, familiar and often apparently unchangeable that has always been and always will be. With a perfectly safe tradition behind them, the composers of such a period see no need to strive for new and ever new forms, and are content to demand a certain amount of freedom or variety within the established tradition. Such a time was, for instance, the age of Mozart, Beethoven and the Romantics, which had its Sonata form with three or four movements each of which was a type that meant something more or less well known to everybody, which had also the Rondo form, Aria form, Opera and Lied form, and so on.

The music we are going to hear this evening is really the fulfilment of a desire expressed by this Association nearly thirty-one years ago. After a paper on the subject of lute-music by Miss Janet Dodge, Mr. James Matthew said: “We were many of us rather hoping we might have the pleasure of hearing the actual instrument,” and Dr. Southgate added “We should of course have liked to hear the lute.” But in those days much patient effort had still to be made before the art of lute-playing (distinct from a kind of bastard imitation on the guitar) could be said to have been fully recovered; and so they had to be content with a piano. Even to-day, the sound of the lute will be strange and unknown to most of us here; and as I am convinced that any critical discussion of music for an unknown instrument can only be misleading, I have asked Mrs. Poulton to play the very generous programme you have before you, in the hope that you will be able to gain some clear idea how this music really sounded at the hands of its composers.

The history of music must necessarily be the history of musical performance. The earliest effort at making any musical sound must have been that of the voice, and the progress of music through its various stages is the evolution of sound from singing in single voices or unison or octaves, passing through the organum and diatessaron stages to the polyphony of the modal period, illustrating the progress from individual to combined vocal music-making: this represents the actual music-making by the purely human element. Inevitably, with the use of rhythm, possibly beginning with a form of dancing to the accompaniment of some percussion instrument, mechanical instruments, by which I mean instruments needing physical skill to play them, were evolved from the primitive psalteries and sackbuts to the modern instruments of the orchestra. In all music-making there was a need for a unifying instrument, something which one person could manipulate which would bind together a body of musicians and be as it were a means of reference in the matter of pitch and rhythm. We have little information concerning the great music-makings of old of which we read in the Old Testament—the great song of Deborah and Barak and the thanksgiving songs of David and his followers, for instance—and we do not know whether they had conductors or not; but we do know that they had psalteries and sackbuts and cymbals.

The Tudor Era was remarkable for the interest shown in music by all classes of society. Educationists as Sir Thomas Hoby through his translation of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke of the Governour, Roger Ascham in Toxophilus, and Richard Mulcaster in The Elementarie write at length on the value of musical education.

Members had the privilege, on May 25th, of inspecting apparatus and witnessing experiments in the Acoustics Laboratory of the N.P.L. at Teddington. About forty members and friends attended this visit, which was arranged at the suggestion of Mr. Llewellyn Lloyd. At tea beforehand both Dr. Darwin, the Director of the Laboratory, and Dr. Kaye, the Superintendent of the Physics Department, were present. Dr. Darwin welcomed us in a short speech to which our President replied.