t popular conception of a
classical concert is one in which a complete orchestra performs
symphonies and extended compositions in allied forms, such as
overtures, symphonic poems, and concertos. Change the composition of
the instrumental body, by omitting the strings and augmenting the reed
and brass choirs, and you have a military band which is best employed
in the open air, and whose programmes are generally made up of
compositions in the simpler and more easily comprehended
forms--dances, marches, fantasias on popular airs, arrangements of
operatic excerpts and the like. These, then, are popular concerts in
the broadest sense, though it is proper enough to apply the term also
to concerts given by a symphonic band when the programme is light in
character and aims at more careless diversion than should be sought at
a "classical" concert. The latter term, again, is commended to use by
the fact that as a rule the music performed at such a concert
exemplifies the higher forms in the art, classicism in music being
defined as that principle which seeks expression in beauty of form, in
a symmetrical ordering of parts and logical sequence, "preferring
aesthetic beauty, pure and simple, over emotional content," as I have
said in Chapter III.

[Sidenote: _The Symphony._]

[Sidenote: _Mistaken ideas about the form._]

As the highest type of instrumental music, we take the Symphony. Very
rarely indeed is a concert given by an organization like the New York
and London Philharmonic Societies, or the Boston and Chicago
Orchestras, at which the place of honor in the scheme of pieces is not
given to a symphony. Such a concert is for that reason also spoken of
popularly as a "Symphony concert," and no confusion would necessarily
result from the use of the term even if it so chanced that there was
no symphony on the programme. What idea the word symphony conveys to
the musically illiterate it would be difficult to tell. I have known a
professional writer on musical subjects to express the opinion that a
symphony was nothing else than four unrelated compositions for
orchestra arranged in a certain sequence for the sake of an agreeable
contrast of moods and tempos. It is scarcely necessary to say that the
writer in question had a very poor opinion of the Symphony as an
Art-form, and believed that it had outlived its usefulness and should
be relegated to the limbo of Archaic Things. If he, however, trained
in musical history and famili