This unique book, also containing never before published the 1949 Harvard Lectures, is Schnabel’s last foray into public discourse and represents his most mature view of music and its function in society at large. It highlights the importance of understanding tradition and highlights the profound impact Artur Schnabel had, both as a performer and teacher upon future. Content Foreword Music and the Line of Most Resistance The Harvard Lectures – the Sources The Harvard Lectures Reflections on Music Short excerpt. Values in art are always fluctuant, and no decrees or measures will ever arrest their motion. Within the boundary of our civilization, only a few, perhaps only one, of the several departments we have referred to under the collective term “Music” are commissioned with the supply of such artistic values. By this I mean that not all music belongs to those values although all of it goes by that one term “Music”. It is different in literature, or the pictorial arts, or architecture. A clown’s gabbling is not spoken of as literature, a billboard is not called a still life, a portrait, or landscape, and a filling station or hot dog stand not architecture. We have, I repeat, unfortunately, no such differentiation in regard to music. It is all called “Music”, from the cheapest to the most sublime. If someone tells you that he loves music, you do not know whether he refers to trash or to treasures. If he tells you that he loves books or paintings, it is fairly clear that he speaks of a category addressed to some sort of discrimination.
