He conceived of music
as one of the humanities, and would have agreed with President Eliot
that "music is a culture study, if there is one in the world."
In his life it took the place that travel and many literatures held
in the lives of Longfellow and Lowell. He believed with Theodore Thomas
that Beethoven's music is "something more than mere pleasure;
it is education, thought, emotion, love, and hope."
Furthermore, Lanier believed in the religious value of music;
it was a "gospel whereof the people are in great need, --
a later revelation of all gospels in one." "Music," he says,
"is to be the Church of the future, wherein all creeds will unite
like the tones in a chord." He was one of "those fervent souls
who fare easily by this road to the Lord." Haydn's inscription, "Laus Deo",
was in Lanier's mind whenever he listened to great music;
for it tended to "help the emotions of man across the immensity of the known
into the boundaries of the Unknown." He would have composers
to be ministers of religion. He could not understand
the indifference of some leaders of orchestras, who could be satisfied
with appealing to the aesthetic emotions of an audience,
while they might "set the hearts of fifteen hundred people afire."
The final meaning of music to him was that it created within man
"a great, pure, unanalyzable yearning after God."
Holding this exalted view of music, he believed that its future was immense
and that in America its triumphs were to be greater than
they had been elsewhere.
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