Percy A. Scholes Listener's Guide to Music

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Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Oxford he devised what to many of us was a new method of lecturing. In place of the customary set discourses on Schools and Principles of Art he collected us into a dark room with a sheet and a magic lantern, and proceeded to show us how to look at pictures. I can still remember those 'hot summer afternoons, the shuttered windows, the Professor in cap and gown reading his manuscript by the light of two small candles, while we sat in serried rows following with literally breathless interest his accounts of the different ways of drawing hands or drapery, of the influence of one artist on another, of the rise and fall of conventions and schemes of composition. He never, so far as I recollect, endeavoured to direct our taste he did not scold us for admiring Rembrandt or failing to understand the Primitives; he told us what there was to see in a picture, and left us to form our judgements for ourselves. And to many of us a picture gallery has become, since those days, an entirely new place.