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Musicians have been conscious lately that they have become less interesting to their fellows than they normally are, and many of us find—even though we may be ashamed to confess it—that music itself interests us less than it was used to do: Personally I have been made aware of this in many ways; (1)By the extreme difficulty I find in getting a single word about music into a certain daily newspaper, which only a few months ago insisted upon my supplying it with a column a day; and since that paper has been described as one for “all thinking men and women,” I can only suppose that men and women are now not thinking much about music;(2)I find it in the difficulty I have in concentrating my own attention upon the course of the music on the comparatively rare occasions when I enter a concert room;(3)And in the fact that yesterday when I was reading a book on the harmony of Arnold Schönberg, the only emotion it raised was a vague hope that Schönberg might be somewhere in the German trenches.

I offer no apology for introducing an academic subject to the attention of the Musical Association. Our Association is unique among Societies which employ the musical lecturer. Whereas all others that I know call on him either to instruct or amuse an audience (which may have to be cajoled into giving him its attention), the Musical Association allows its members to instruct or amuse themselves; to talk about their own interests in their own way. It is generally understood that there will be an audience of some sort, a few members and their guests, who will be sufficiently long-suffering to sit the lecturer out, in the hope that he will be equally complaisant towards them on some other occasion.