An examination of our mental state at any moment of conscious experience reveals three distinguishable aspects in the relation of the “subject” experiencing and the “object” experienced, viz.: (1) the subject becoming aware of, or knowing the object, (2) the subject being attracted or repelled (pleased or pained) by the object, and (3) the subject attending to the object. These three relations are named respectively, cognition, affection (or feeling), and attention. Though they are readily distinguishable it must not be supposed that they occur in isolation; rather, they are all present at one and the same instant, being interdependent, but varying from time to time in relative predominance. Thus, when an unfamiliar object is presented to the subject, the cognitive process is by far the most important, but at a later stage when the object has become fully determinate, affection and attention are in the ascendant, the subject ultimately doing work upon the object (that is, attending to the object)—making its own positive contribution towards a change in the subject-object relation.

But surely the founding of the Royal Society was an act of some wisdom? It set the example for the French Academy, and Paris set the fashion for the courts of Europe. Philosophy was recognised in high places, and the cult of orderly thought encouraged. How important this fashion of an age of reason proved to be we know from every aspect of the eighteenth century history : in the musical works of the classicists just as much as in British business enterprise. There was a belief in the virtues of rationalisation amounting almost to a religion.

I have been oppressed to a considerable degree by the prospect of preparing and delivering an address to this learned Society, feeling it to be somewhat presumptious for one whose musicianship is founded rather upon an empirical than an academic basis to address didactically ladies and gentlemen who have had so much more leisure than I for musical and philosophical research.

Because of a Sound, the fortunes of The Pipers’ Guild began.

It seems appropriate, therefore, that I should open this account by introducing you to that sound, then lead you, if I can, down the widening stream of our experiment. For the pipe which we made nineteen years ago, has increased in musical capacity; but never has it lost the voice with which it began—a character traditional to mountain shepherds all over the world. This is my pipe, and the tune I will play is Purcell's Fairest Isle.

Although the modern conception of ground-bass did not emerge until the seventeenth century, its historical antecedents are not only in themselves of considerable importance and interest but vital to any comprehensive review of the subject of this paper.

In this paper my chief concern is with the place of the musical glasses and glass harmonica in musical and social history, and only incidentally with their technical development. I want to trace some little-known phases in their origins and use, and to try to build up a picture of their continuity in one form or another. The only work in English on the subject is C. F. Pohl's Cursory Notices on the Origin and History of the Glass Harmonica, written for the London Exhibition of 1862. This admirable pamphlet of sixteen pages is now very rare, and so I make no apology for repeating some of its contents. But as it deals almost entirely with Germany, apart from Benjamin Franklin, and does not go back beyond 1677, I shall take the subject farther afield in both time and place.

I think I had better warn you that, since sending in my synopsis to the Secretary, I have completely rewritten my lecture—so that, in my case, the relation between promise and fulfilment is likely to be strained. In this connection you may recall the words of Coleridge in introducing his lectures on Shakespeare:—

Unaccustomed to address such an audience, and having lost by a long interval of confinement the advantages of my former short schooling, I had miscalculated in my last lecture the proportion of my matter to my time, and by bad economy and unskilful management, the several heads of my discourse failed in making the entire performance correspond with the promise publicly circulated in the weekly annunciation of the subjects to be treated.