QotD: Music

All first-rate music suffers by the fact that it has to be performed by human beings — that is, that nature must be permitted to corrupt it. The performance one hears in a concert hall or opera house is no more than a baroque parody upon the thing the composer imagined. In an orchestra of eighty men there is inevitably at least one man with a sore thumb, or bad kidneys, or a brutal wife or katzenjammer — and one is enough. Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and larynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall have Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert in such wonderful and perfect beauty that it will be almost unbearable. If half as much ingenuity had been lavished upon music machines as has been lavished upon the telephone and the steam engine, we whould have had mechanical orchestras long ago.

When the human performer of music thus goes the way of the galley-slave, the charm of personality, of course, will be pumped out of the performance of music. But the charm of personality does not help music; it hinders it. It is not a reënforcement; it is a rival. When a beautiful singer comes upon a stage, two shows, as it were, go on at once; first the music show, and then the arms, shoulders, neck, nose, ankles, eyes, hips, calves, and ruby lips — in brief, the sex-show. The second of these shows, to the majority of persons present, is more interesting than the first — to the men because of the sex interest, and to the women because of the professional or technical interest — and so music is forced into the background. What it becomes, indeed, is no more than a half-heard accompaniment to an imagined anecdote.

H.L. Mencken, "The Tone Art", Damn! A Book of Calumny, 1918