Despite the heading, the material on the Harmonium itself has been omitted; what appears here is the section on its usefulness. The article is one of several that show Berlioz not only to have been a perfectionist where music was concerned but also to have possessed what we would now call a ‘social conscience’, a feeling not so widely spread among composers of the time; it could well have come to him, at least in part, from his father, whom he saw ‘to be a humane, unprejudiced, sensitive man of liberal outlook and broad intelligence, well read in Latin and French classical literature, and devoted to his work and his fellow-creatures’. As the doctor in the small town of La Côte-St-André, Louis-Joseph Berlioz was, by all accounts, not merely respected but loved.

The popularization of music in small provincial towns, market towns, and even in villages far away from musical centres has often attracted the notice of serious-minded people who take an interest, either in the progress of music itself, or in the civilization of the lower classes, and who regard music as a very powerful means of achieving these ends. Sadly, in very many cases such attempts have, in my view, tended to produce either the opposite result to that intended, or no result at all. For music to exist, there are absolute requirements that must be met. Without these, the noises that are given the title of music must necessarily horrify those of a delicate disposition and encourage the barbarism of those who aren’t. I conclude from this that it would be better not to play any kind of music to people who are totally deprived of it, rather than get them used to the sort they’re all too often given.