The Music Sense

Not everybody has it--maybe half, maybe less. It's hard to describe to the other fifty per cent what it is. Let us say that it means the capacity to be delighted by a Haydn symphony; call it the Music Sense. Shakespeare was maybe too hard on those that don't have it--"fit for Treason, Stratagems and Spoils". Think of Gertrude Stein who didn't have it, and Alice B. Toklas who did. I don't imagine that Alice thought any the less of Gertrude [Though they did, sort of, quarrel sometimes, and "Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils" is something they might have made ironic fun of.] who was as frankly bored by any and all music as Jackie Collins is "not ashamed" to be bored by Shakespeare; even though she herself [Alice], was in her own right a great cook and a great cookbook-writer, and so susceptible to the power of music, and so understanding of it, that she could hear, and "see," that a Chopin scherzo, well played, can be, among other things, the musical equivalent of a great cutlet.