Central and East Java

Abstract

Anyone coming into contact with a form of music hitherto unknown to himself is confronted by considerable difficulties, even though he may be musically receptive and full of goodwill: he has to eliminate his own theoretical conceptions, his own aesthetics and axioms—if he has any—as well as his own conventional ideas—which he is sure to have. He will nevertheless find that he is, at first, inclined to criticize, in the art of the foreign race, that in which this art, which is strange to him, is backward as compared to his own; whereas those elements which in his own art have been more or less neglected, and for which he accordingly has a less sensitive—or, at any rate, a less developed—organ, are not, as a rule, esteemed at their proper value in the foreign art.