Now, before launching into the substance of my lecture tonight, some preliminary remarks are in order.

Now, looking around this room, I can say with a good deal of confidence that the great majority of you present, perhaps all of you have been thoroughly immersed,

even if unconsciously, in the Western diatonic, tonal, musical tradition.

Now, even if you don't consider yourself a musician in any sense of the term, your ears are tuned, as it were, to this Western

tonal tradition. And you are going to automatically judge music as good or bad, beautiful or ugly,

based on this merely innate tonal configuration. And to adapt a phrase from one of

my theological heroes, blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, I think we might even call this our shared

illative sense or an interior certitude of musicality and one to which we are all thoroughly accustomed.

Now, if some of you happen to be from the Himalayas or for some other far-flung eastern milieu,

this will not be as innate to you because because of course, there are venerable

tonal traditions in those areas, and I don't know anything about them. So I'm not going to bore

you with an attempt to tell you about them. Now, just so I have an idea of the crowd here, how many of you are professional,

or at least proficient amateur musicians? Oh, it's actually a good number. Great. And what about

armchair musicians who play or once played an instrument or who sing,

but just for fun, for school, or for church, even if badly?

Very good, yeah, there are more of that, right? Right. I play the clarinet that way. It's an

ugly thing. You don't want to

see it or hear it for that matter. And finally, who would say that they like music, but that they

couldn't sing a song or play an instrument if their life depended upon it? Okay, well, it's even Father Farron.

All right.

Well, good.

You see, this is all helpful to me to contextualize tonight's discussion, because there is

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