It has always been a matter of wonder to me that the literature of music for two pianos (one player at each instrument), so rich, so attractive, and so high in quality, should be so little played by artists and teachers. This is the more remarkable, as this form of chamber music is both delightful to play and enjoyable to hear, and is as refreshing and exhilarating in the studio of the teacher as it can be effective in the concert room.

Spanish Madrigals are seldom mentioned in histories of music. Very few have been published, and those are never publicly performed. The word Madrigal, as a musical term, is not found in the Spanish language. The latest edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, published this year, gives as the only meaning, a form of verse, and repeats the derivation from mandra, a herd, which we now know to be false. Madrigal, however, has another meaning in Spanish, though that is not a musical one either. It is the name of a wine—and also of a town: Madrigal de las Altas Torres, “Madrigal of the High Towers”; and it is not altogether inappropriate that a place called Madrigal of the High Towers, should have been the birthplace of a great queen—Isabella of Castille.

A general review of modern musical education brings into prominence many interesting facts. It is, for instance, possible to trace five phases in the comparatively recent development of the teacher's craft.

It so happened that my first acquaintance with English music of the time of Queen Elizabeth was made, not with the madrigal, but with the music of the virginals. I have devoted one of my former books to virginal music, and it is my pleasant duty to admit that the authors really responsible for that work are two members of your Association, Mr. Fuller-Maitland and Mr. Barclay Squire. In fact, without their edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, with its great store of learning, I should not have been able to write the greater part of my book.

The most ardent patriot could hardly contend that the history of English Opera has been a glorious record; but the most captious critic must admit that that record has at least been intensely English. It has been a continuous—no, a very discontinuous—record of amateurishness and “muddling through somehow,” and it is well known that these are the characteristics of our English attitude to life in general. Our national temperament does not incline us to be positively proud of them, but we are certainly well contented with them, and there seems every probability that we shall continue for the rest of our national existence to take them for granted as our instinctive guiding principles, if indeed we are ever conscious of proceeding on principles at all.

The subject of this lecture, because of its exotic nature, would appear, at first sight, to be of little moment to Westerners. For that reason it may be advisable to indicate why attention should be directed to this question quite apart from any intrinsic worth that it may have. The doctrine of the Éthos, so highly prized in the art of antiquity, has an abiding interest, and therefore one may assume that its history may have a similar attraction. As Jules Combarieu pointed out not long since,∗ the doctrine of the Éthos had its origin in magic, and I take the liberty to draw up for you its genealogy, because, in the subject under discussion, it plays an important part.