But modern methods of communication are destroying this. As nations are brought into closer contact with each other they begin to lose their peculiarities. The truth of this statement may be seen in the fact that in the past fifty years composers all over the world have been affected by the modern German school of composition. Not one has escaped. While a nation lived unto itself it could preserve its national life in its art, but more and more the life of each nation is becoming a composite of the life of all nations. The musical output of the world shows this unmistakably.
What will be the music of the future? We know the music of yesterday and today, but the music of the future can be foretold only by the prophet whose vision is clear enough to see unmistakably what the trend of civilization will be during the coming years. There are mighty forces operating in the world today. If they succeed in bringing humanity to a saner, more normal state of mind, to a clearer realization of what is worth while and what is worthless, then all art will become purer and more wholesome, more helpful and necessary, and music speaking a language common to all will be supreme among the arts.
No artist can be graceful, imaginative, or original, unless he be truthful.
"Art is a transfer of feeling" said Tolstoy. While this applies to art in general it has a particular application to the art of singing. The material of the singer's art is feeling. By means of the imagination he evokes within himself feelings he has experienced and through the medium of his voice he transfers these feelings to others. By his ability to reconstruct moods, feelings and emotions within himself and express them through his voice, the singer sways multitudes, plays upon them, carries them whithersoever he will from the depths of sorrow to the heights of exaltation. His direct and constant aim is to make his hearers _feel_, and feel deeply. As a medium for the transfer of feeling the human voice far transcends all others. Since the beginning of the human race the voice has been the means by which it has most completely revealed itself, but the art is not in the voice, but in the feeling transferred. It is the same whether the medium be the voice, painting, sculpture, poetry or a musical instrument. We speak of a painting as being a great work of art, but the art is not in the painting, the art is the feeling of beauty which the painting awakes in the observer. When we listen to an orchestra the music is what we feel. Said Walt Whitman: "Music is what awakes within us when we are reminded by the instruments."