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 tions which are the A B C's of every cabaret performer.

There is current an absurd theory to the effect that the test of good music is whether you tire of it or not. If I were to be permitted to apply this test I would say frankly that I no longer consider Die Walküre and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony good music. It is just as well to remember that if we heard the "classic" composers exploited by every street organ and cabaret pianist their music would soon become as intolerable as Pretty Baby has become during the summer just past. Probably a great many people are weary of listening to Die Wacht am Rhein, but that does not prove that it is not a good tune.

The creations of our best composers have been highly appreciated abroad. Stravinsky collects examples of them with assiduity and intends to use them in some of his forthcoming works, just as he has utilized French and Russian popular songs in The Firebird and Petrouchka. Popular songs, indeed, form as good a basis for a serious composer to work upon as folksongs. This is a remark I have been intending to make for some time and it will do no harm to make it

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 emphatically. Examine, for example, the songs in the repertory of Yvette Guilbert; some are folksongs and some are not. I defy any one outside of Julien Tiersot, Professor Jean Beck, H. E. Krehbiel, and one or two others, to tell you which is which. These men, being tolerably familiar with the available collections of French folksongs, take it for granted, when they hear Mme. Guilbert sing a melody strange to them, that it must have had a composer. There seems to be no other known method for distinguishing between a folksong and a popular tune of the same epoch. A folksong, according to some authorities, is a song which has no composer; it just grows. Some one sings it one day in the fields, some one else adds to it, and, finally, there it is before your ears, a song known all over the country-side, but no one knows who started it rolling. Swing low, sweet chariot is alleged to be such a folksong; it is an extremely good

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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THE IVORY TOWER of them, in the natural way, the inevitable, the illustrative, under some roof that places them vividly in relation to each other. Of course Mrs. Bradham has her great characteristic house away from N.Y., where anything and everything may characteristically find their background—the whole case being compatible with that lively shakiness of fortune that I have glanced at; only I want to keep the whole thing, so far as my poor little "documented" state permits, on the lines of absolutely current New York practice, as I further reflect I probably don't want to move Gray an inch out of N.Y. "during the winter", this probably a quite unnecessarily bad economy. Having what I have of New York isn't the question of using it, and it only, as entirely adequate from Book 4 to 8 inclusive? To keep everything as like these actualities of N.Y. as possible, for the sake of my "atmosphere", I must be wary and wise; in the sense for instance that said actualities don't at all comprise people's being at Newport early in the summer. How then, however, came the Bradhams to be there at the time noted in my Book 1? I reflect happily apropos of this that my there positing the early summer (in Book 1) is a stroke that I needn't at all now take account of; it having been but an accident of my small vague plan as it glimmered to me from the very first go-off. No, definitely, the time-scheme must a bit move 344


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 example of a tune without a known composer, and it has been quoted with effect in Dvořák's symphony, From the New World. Finiculi' Funicula' is not a folksong. It is a popular Neapolitan song, composed by Denza to celebrate the funicular railway at Naples. Nevertheless, Richard Strauss himself quoted it bodily in his symphonic fantasia, Aus italien, although, to be sure, he laboured under the impression at the time that it was a folksong. In a similar fashion an American tune, It looks to me like a big night tonight, found its way into Elektra. This may have been unconscious assimilation on the part of Strauss; at any rate it is interesting to note how a vulgar air has been transformed into the beautiful theme—one of the most expressive in this music drama—of the Children of

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 Agamemnon. When Paul Dukas's lyric drama, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House, the reviewers, almost to a man, referred to the song of the wives, which floats out of the cellar of the castle when Ariane opens the forbidden door in the first act, as a Brittany folksong. So it may very well be; I believe, indeed, that Dukas has said that it was. However, I am informed on excellent authority that he composed it himself! It has, to be sure, a folksong air, and it is interesting to catch its resemblance to the Berceuse of the Princess of the Sea in Rimsky-Korsakoff's opera, Sadko, and to the old Spanish tune, known to us as Flee as a Bird. La jambe de bois, borrowed by Stravinsky for an effect in the first scene of Petrouchka, might be a folksong, but it is not. It is a popular French air. "When Elgar used a genuine Welsh folksong in his Introduction and Allegro for Strings, a well-known London critic, a prominent member of the Folksong Society, declared it to be a poor imitation of the folk-style," writes Ernest Newman. "When the legend got about that a certain melody in in the South was an Italian folksong, the same critic recognized the genuine folk-quality in it, and it was distinctly unfortunate for him that the melody happened to be Elgar's own invention from first to last."

Thus it happens that while many composers,

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 even such celebrated men, in their day, as Raff, Rubinstein, Gade, and Mendelssohn, swiftly drop into oblivion, the composer of a good popular song is assured of immortality, as such things go. His song may be sung a century, indeed, after his name is forgotten. Sometimes, by a strange fatality, even his name may be remembered, along with his music. It must be apparent to any one that The Old Folks at Home, Dixie, My Old Kentucky Home, and Old Black Joe are better known and more admired today than the operas of Meyerbeer.

It is my opinion that the best contemporary American composers (I am still referring to Irving Berlin, Louis Hirsch, and others of their kind) have brought a new quality into music, a spirit analogous to that to be found in the best

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 folk-dances of Spain, in Gipsy, Hungarian and Russian popular music, and an entirely novel form. They have, to be sure, been working for a livelihood, but in that respect they have only followed the excellent precedent established by Offenbach, Richard Strauss, and Puccini. Bernard Shaw has probably made a great deal more money than Henry Arthur Jones, but no one thinks of calling him less of an artist than Mr. Jones for that reason. Zuloaga sells his portraits at very high rates; is he therefore to be considered less seriously than a portrait-painter in Greenwich Village who gives his canvases

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 away? There does not appear to exist, indeed, any particular reason why an artist should not be permitted to make money if he be able to do so. It is the nature of some artists to shy at the annoyances and complications of business. The work of others, Stéphane Mallarmé, Monticelli, Robert Franz, is antipathetic to the crowd and always will be. Many of the greatest artists, however, have made the widest appeal (I might mention Beethoven, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Tolstoy), and some few men of this stamp have been able to transform their inspirations into gold. In the circumstances, it seems unfair to speak derogatively of Irving Berlin merely because he happens to make money.

The most obvious point of superiority of our ragtime composers, overlooking, for the moment, the fact that their music is pleasanter to listen to, over Messrs. Parker, Chadwick, and Hadley, is that they are expressing the very soul of a nation and an epoch, while their more serious

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 confrères are struggling to pour into the forms of the past the thoughts of the past, rearranged, to be sure, but without notable inspiration. They have nothing new to say, and no particular reason for saying it. Louis Hirsch once told me of a conversation he had overheard at Rafael Joseffy's: A new pupil entered and proceeded to play for the master. Joseffy interrupted her. "You are not playing the right notes," he said. "I'm sure that I am," she replied. "Begin once more." She did so. Joseffy interrupted her again: "That's wrong. It isn't written like that." "But it is. Won't you look at it, please?" After examining the score the master apologized: "O, it's something of MacDowell's. I thought you were trying to play a transcription of the Tristan prelude." "I have remarked," writes Turgeniev, in one of his letters to Pauline Viardot, "that in imitative work the most spirituelles are precisely the most detestable when they take themselves seriously. A sot copies servilely; a man of spirit without talent imitates pretentiously and with an effort, with the worst of all efforts, with that of wishing to be original."

It is only through the trenchant pens of our new composers that the complicated vigour of American life has been expressed in tone. It is the only music created in America today which is

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 worth the paper on which it is written. It is the only American music which is enjoyed by the nation (even lovers of Mozart and Debussy prefer ragtime to the inert and saponaceous classicism of our more serious-minded composers); it is the only American music which is heard abroad (and it is heard everywhere, in the trenches by way of the victrola, in the Café de Paris at Monte Carlo, in Cairo, in India, and in Australia); and it is the only music on which the musicians of our land can build in the future. If it be urged against it that it is a hybrid product, depending upon Negro and Spanish rhythms, at least the same objection can be urged against Spanish music itself, which has emerged from the music of the Moors and the Arabs; Havelock Ellis even detects Greek and Egyptian influences.

If the American composers with (what they consider) more serious aims, instead of writing symphonies or other tattered and exhausted forms which belong to another age of composition, would strive to put into their music the rhythms and tunes that dominate the hearts of the people, a new form would evolve which might prove to be the child of the Great American Composer we have all been waiting for so long and so anxiously. I do not mean to suggest

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 that Edgar Stillman Kelley should write variations on the theme of O, You Beautiful Doll! or that Arthur Farwell should compose a symphony utilizing The Gaby Glide for the first subject of the allegro and Everybody's Doing It for the second, with the adagio based on Pretty Baby in a minor key. It is not my intention to encourage some one to write a tone-poem called New York, in which all these songs and ten or fifteen more should be thematically bundled together and finally wrapped in the profundities of a fugue. But if a composer, bearing the spirit and rhythm

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 and dynamics and clang-tints of this music in mind, will permit his inspiration to run riot, it will be quite unnecessary for him to quote or to pour his thought into the mould of the symphony or the string quartet or any other defunct form. The idea, manifestly based though it may be on the work of Irving Berlin and Louis Hirsch, will express itself in some new way. Percy Aldridge Grainger, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie are all working along these lines, to express modernity in tone, allowing the forms to create themselves, but, alas, none of these men is an American.

Americans are inclined to look everywhere but under their noses for art. It never occurs to them that any object which has any relation with their every-day life has anything to do with beauty. Probably the Athenians behaved in a similar fashion. When some stranger admired the classic pile on the Acropolis, the Greeks, it is safe to guess, turned up their noses with the scornful remark, "O, that old thing! That's the Parthenon; it's been there for ages." It will be remembered that Mytyl and Tyltyl, in. The Bluebird, spent considerable time and covered a good deal of ground in their search for that rare or-

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 nithological symbol, only to discover that it had existed all the time at home, the last place in the world they had thought to look for it. Our Woolworth and Flatiron Buildings we are likely to ignore, while we bow the knee before the Château district of Fifth Avenue and our ridiculous Public Library. Châteaux are all very well on the Loire, but imitations of them have no place in New York. As for that absurd Roman Library! The present building, years in course of construction, has already practically outgrown its space, and it is not yet a decade since it was first opened to the public. Acres have been wasted in the corridors alone. Of course, a library in New York should shoot up forty storeys towards the sky. Speeding elevators should hoist the student in a jiffy to whatever mental stimulation he requires. R. J. Coady, in an amusing magazine called The Soil, has sung the praises of American machinery, and his illustrations exhibit these steel works of art, of the best kind since they are also utilitarian. One day Mina Loy picked up one of those paste-board folders to which matches are attached, which are given away at all cigar counters for the use of patrons. "Some day," she said, "these will be very rare and then they will be considered beautiful." She was quite right. A few years after

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THE IVORY TOWER on, and give help thereby to the place-scheme; if I want Gray to arrive en plein Newport, as I do for immediate control of the assault of his impressions, it must be a matter of August rather than of June; and nothing is simpler than to shift. Let me indeed so far modify as to conceive that 15 or 16 months will be as workable as a Year—practically they will count as the period both short enough and long enough; and will bring me for Nine and Ten round to the Newport or whatever of August, and to the whatever else of some moment of beauty and harmony in the American autumn. Let me wind up on a kind of strong October or perhaps even better still—yes, better still—latish November, in other words admirable Indian Summer, note. That brings me round and makes the circle whole. Well then I don't seem to want a repetition of Newport—as if it were, poor old dear, the only place known to me in the country!—for the images that this last suggestion causes more or less to swarm. By the blessing of heaven I am possessed, sufficiently to say so, of Lenox, and Lenox for the autumn is much more characteristic too. What do I seem to see then?—as I don't at all want, or imagine myself wanting at the scratch, to make a local jump between Nine and Ten. These things come—I see them coming now. Of course it's perfectly conceivable, and entirely characteristic, that Mrs. Bradham should have a place at Lenox as well 345


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 we discover how to light our cigarettes with our personal magnetism, or perhaps stop smoking altogether, such a contrivance will naturally—assume an interest for curious collectors and thereby become automatically as diverting an object for a cabinet as a Japanese scent-bottle or a specimen of Capo di Monte porcelain. The Baron de Meyer has found it amusing to decorate rooms with Victorian atrocities, such as baskets of shells and antimacassars, the sort of thing that went with black-walnut whatnots, knitted fire-screens, and Rogers groups in the days, not so long ago, when Godey's Lady's Book reposed on the centre table near the family Bible.

In his essay on The Poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson found occasion to remark: "We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away." The poet, the novelist, in America, since Emerson's time, are at last aware of the

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 value of this contemporary material. The musician, aside from the popular composer, is not, and we have not learned to appreciate the popular composer. It is apparently impossible to consider anything art which is constantly buzzing in our ears. It would be absurd, we think, to consider it as art, because it is so commonplace. One might as easily consider the Woolworth Building or the Manhattan Bridge or the Pennsylvania Station works of art, and how could any one possibly do that? Just the same, I am inclined to believe that the Pennsylvania Station, the Manhattan Bridge, and that "roaring, epic ragtime tune," Waiting for the Robert E. Lee are among the first twenty-four beautiful things created in America. It is no more use to imitate French or German music than it is to imitate French or German architecture. The sooner we realize this the better for all of us.

January 23, 1917.

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In his most earnest and persuasive manner, H. L. Mencken recently pointed out to me that it was my duty to write a book about the American composers, exposing their futile pretensions and describing their flaccid opera bar by bar. It was in vain that I urged that this would be but a sleeveless errand, arguing that I could not fight men of straw, that these our composers had no real standing in the concert halls, and that pushing them over would be an easy exercise for a child of ten. On the contrary, he retorted, they belonged to the academies; a great many persons believed they were important; it was necessary to dislodge this belief. I suggested, with a not too heavily assumed humility, that I had already done something of the kind in a paper entitled The Great American Composer. "A good beginning," asserted Colonel Mencken, "but not long enough. I won't be satisfied with anything less than a book." "But if I write a book about Professors Parker, Chadwick, Hadley, and the others, I could find nothing new to say of each

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 on American Music of them; they are all alike. Neither their lives nor their music offer opportunities for variations." "An excellent idea!" cried Major Mencken, enthusiastically. "Write one chapter and then repeat it verbatim throughout the book, changing only the name of the principal character. Then clap on a preface to explain your reason for this justifiable procedure." My last protest was the feeblest of all: "I can't spend a year or a month or a week poring over the scores of these fellows; I can't go to concerts to hear their music. I might as well go to work in a coal mine." "I'll do it for you!" triumphantly checkmated General Mencken. "I'll read the scores and you shall write the book." And so he left me, as on a similar occasion the fiend, having exhibited his prospectus, vanished from the vision of our Lord, and I returned to my garret sorely troubled, finding that the words of the man were running about in my head like so many little Japanese waltzing mice.

After much cogitation, I examined my bookshelves until I discovered a very large red tome written by Louis Charles Elson; then I searched until I found another by Rupert Hughes, and, sitting down, perused these to see if their words of praise for our weak musical brothers would stir me to operate. They did not. My heart action remained normal; no film formed over my

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 eyes; foam did not issue from my mouth. I was able to read, indeed, quite calmly, in Mr. Hughes's American Composers, that A. J. Goodrich is "recognized among scholars abroad as one of the leading spirits of our time;" that "(Henry Holden) Huss has ransacked the piano and pillaged almost every imaginable fabric of high colour. . . . The result is gorgeous and purple;" that "The thing we are all waiting for is that American grand opera, A Woman of Marblehead (by Louis Adolphe Coerne). It is predicted that it will not receive the marble heart;" that "I know of no modern composer who has come nearer to relighting the fires that burn in the old gavottes and fugues and preludes (than Arthur Foote). His two gavottes are to me away the best since Bach;" that "the song (Israfel by Edgar Stillman Kelley) is in my fervent belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of the very greatest lyrics in the world's music;" and, in The History of American Music by Louis C. Elson, that "Music has made even more rapid strides than literature among us," and that "(George W. Chadwick) has reconciled the symmetrical (sonata) form with modern passion." In the fourth volume of The Art of Music, published by the National Society of Music, I found still more encomiums for our composers.

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 Therein I read with a sort of awed astonishment that one of the songs of Frederic Ayres "reveals a poignancy of imagination and a perception and apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any composer." I learned that T. Carl Whitmer has a "spiritual kinship" with Arthur Shepherd, Hans Pfitzner, and Vincent d'Indy. His music is "psychologically subtle and spiritually rarefied; in colour it corresponds to the violet end of the spectrum." Before he became acquainted with the later French idiom, Harvey W. Loomis "spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel." I flipped the pages until I came to the name of Miss Gena Branscombe: "Inexhaustible buoyancy, a superlative emotional wealth, and wholly singular gift of musical intuition are the qualities which have shaped the composer's musical personality (it might also be said without fear of contradiction that these are the qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality). . . . Her impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes."

Curiously enough, however, these statements did not annoy me. I found no desire arising in me to deny them and doubtless, though mayhap with a guilty conscience, I should have ditched the undertaking, consigned it to that heap of

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 undone duties, where already lie notes on a comparison of Andalusian mules with the mules of Liane de Pougy, a few scribbled memoranda for a treatise on the love habits of the mole, and a half-finished biography of the talented gentleman who signed his works Nick Carter, if my by this time quite roving eye had not alighted, entirely fortuitously, on one of the forgotten glories of my library, a slender volume entitled Popular American Composers.

I recalled how I had come by this book. Happening into a modest second-hand bookshop on lower Third Avenue, maintained chiefly for the laudable purpose of redistributing paper novels of the Seaside and kindred libraries, of which, alas, we hear very little nowadays, I asked the proprietor if, by chance, he possessed any literature pertaining to the art of music. By way of reply, he retired to the rear of his little room, searched for a space in a litter on the floor, and then returned with a pile of nine volumes or so in his arms. The other titles, such as Great Violinists, Harmony in Thirteen Lessons, and How to Sing, did not interest me, but, in idly turning the pages of this Popular American Composers, I came across a half-tone reproduction of a photograph of Paul Dresser, the only less celebrated brother of Theodore Dreiser, with a short biography of the composer of On the Banks

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 of the Wabash. As Sir George Grove neglected to mention this portentous name in American art in his excellent dictionary (notwithstanding the fact that he devoted sixty-seven pages, printed in double columns, to Mendelssohn), I saw the advantage of adding the little book to my collection. The dealer, when questioned, offered to part with the volume for a total of fifteen cents. Once I had become more thoroughly acquainted with its pages I realized that I would willingly have paid fifteen dollars for it.

This book, indeed, cannot fail to delight Doctor Mencken. There is no reference in its pages to Edgar Stillman Kelley, Miss Gena Branscombe, Louis Adolphe Coerne, Henry Holden Huss, T. Carl Whitmer, Arthur Farwell, Arthur Foote, or A. J. Goodrich. In fact, if we overlook brief notices of John Philip Sousa, Harry von Tilzer, Paul Dresser, Charles K. Harris, and Hattie Starr (whom you will immediately recall as the composer of Little Alabama Coon), it may be stated categorically that the author, Frank L. Boyden, has not hesitated to go to the roots of his subject, brushing aside the music critics and their dicta, and has turned his attention to figures in the art life of America from whom Mencken himself, I feel sure, would not take a single paragraph of praise, so richly is it deserved. I am unfamiliar with the causes con-

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 tributing to the book's obscurity; perhaps, indeed, they are akin to those responsible for the early failure of Sister Carrie. May we not even suspect that the odium cast by the Doubledays on the author of that romance was, quite possibly, actively transferred in some degree to a work which contained a biographical notice and a picture of his brother? However that may be, Popular American Composers, published in 1902, has fallen into undeserved oblivion, and so I make no apology for inviting my readers to peruse its pages with me.

Opening the book then, at random, I discover on page 96 a biography of Lottie A. Kellow (the lady's photograph graces the reverse of this page). In a few, well-chosen words, almost, indeed, in gipsy phrases, Mr. Boyden gives us the salient details of her career. Mrs. Kellow is a resident of Cresco, Iowa, a church singer of note, and the possessor of a contralto voice of great volume. As a composer she has to her credit "marches, cakewalks, schottisches, and other styles of instrumental music." We are offered a picture of Mrs. Kellow at work: "Mrs. Kellow's best efforts are made in the evening, and in darkness, save the light of the moonbeams on the keys of her piano." We are also assured that "she is happy in her inspirations and a sincere lover of music. All of her compositions

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 show a decided talent and possess musical elements which are only to be found in the works of an artist. Mrs. Kellow's musical friends are confident of her success as a composer and predict for her a brilliant future."

Let us turn to the somewhat more extensive biography of W. T. Mullin on Page 41 (Mr. Mullin's photograph faces this page). Almost in the first line the author rewards our attention: "To him may be applied the simplest and grandest eulogy Shakespeare ever pronounced: 'He was a man. We are also informed that he was born of a cultured family, that his inherited nobility of character has been carefully fostered by a thorough education, and told that one finds in him the unusual combination of genius wedded to sound common sense and practical business capacity. His family moved to Colorado, Texas, while he was still a lad, and here his musical talent began to bud. "The inventive faculties of the small boy and the innate harmony of the musician combined to improvise a crude instrument which emitted the notes of the scale. Successful at drawing forth a concord of sweet sounds, he continued to experiment upon everything which would emit musical vibrations (even the pigs, I take it, did not escape). He consequently discovered the laws of vibrating chords before he had mastered the intricacies of

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THE IVORY TOWER as at Newport; if it's necessary to posit her for the previous summer in her own house at the latter place. It's perfectly in order that she may have taken one there for the summer—and that having let the Lenox place at that time may figure as a sort of note of the crack in her financial aspect that is part, to call it part, of my concern. All of which are considerations entirely meetable at the short range—save that I do really seem to kind of want Book 10 at Lenox and to want Nine there by the same stroke. I should like to stick Rosanna at the beautiful Dublin, if it weren't for the grotesque anomaly of the name; and after all what need serve my purpose better than what I already have? It's provided for in Book 1 that she and her father had only taken the house at Newport for a couple of months or whatever; so that is all to the good. Oh yes, all that New England mountain-land that I thus get by radiation, and thus welcome the idea of for values surging after a fashion upon Gray, appeals to one to "do" a bit, even in a measure beyond one's hope of space to do it. Well before me surely too the fact that my whole action does, can only, take place in the air of the last actuality; which supports so, and plays into, its sense and its portée. Therefore it's a question of all the intensest modernity of every American description; cars and telephones and facilities and machineries and resources of certain sorts not to be exaggerated; 346


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 the multiplication table. Yet, strange as it may seem, his musical education was neglected. A four months' course in piano instruction was interrupted and then resumed for two months more. Upon this meagre foundation rested his subsequent phenomenal progress." I pause to remind the astonished and breathless reader that even Mozart and Schubert, infant prodigies that they were, received more training than this.

I continue to quote: "At the age of thirteen he joined the Colorado (Texas) Cornet Band as a charter member. The youngest member of the band, he soon outstripped his comrades by virtue of his superior natural ability. His position was that of second tenor. Wearying of the monotony of playing, he determined to venture on solo work. The boy felt the impetus of restless power and the following incident illustrates his remarkable originality. Taking the piano score of a favourite melody, he transposed it within the compass of the second tenor. This feat evoked admiring applause because of his extreme youth and untrained abilities. The bandmaster remarked that elderly and experienced heads could hardly have accomplished this.

"From boyhood to manhood he has remained with the Colorado (Texas) Band as one of its most efficient members, composing in his leisure

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 on American Music moments, marches, ragtime, waltzes, song and dance schottisches, etc. Of his many meritorious compositions only one has so far been given to the public: The West Texas Fair March, composed for and dedicated to the management of the West Texas Fair and Round-up. This institution holds its annual meetings at Abilene, Texas. There the march was played for the first time at their October 1899 meet with great success, and again at their September 1900 meet by the Stockman Band of Colorado, Texas, which has furnished music for the West Texas Fair during their 1899 and 1900 meetings. Mr. Mullin's position in the Stockman Band is that of euphonium soloist. He is a proficient performer upon all band instruments from cornet to tuba, including slide trombone, his favourites being the baritone and the trombone.

"He plays many stringed instruments, as well as the piano and organ. He is the proud possessor of a genuine Stradivarius violin—a family heirloom—which he naturally prizes beyond the intrinsic value. The feat of playing on several instruments at once presents no difficulty to him.

"This briefly sketches Mr. Mullin's life, character, and ability as a musician. His accompanying photograph reveals his superb physique. Personally he possesses charming, agreeable man-

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 ners and Chesterfieldan courteousness, which vastly contributes to his popularity. Sincere devotion to his art has been rewarded by that elevating nobility of soul, which alone can penetrate the blue expanse of space and revel in the music of the spheres."

What more is there to say? I can only assure the reader that Mullin stands unique among all musicians, creative and interpretative, in being able to play the organ, many stringed instruments, and all the instruments in a brass band, several of them simultaneously (it would be interesting to learn which and how), after studying the piano for six months. I sincerely hope that the error he made in withholding all his compositions, save one, from the public, has been rectified.

Helen Kelsey Fox, like so many of our other talented men and women, has a European strain in her blood. On her mother's side she is a lineal descendant of a French nobleman and a German princess. Nevertheless, she continues to reside in Vermilion, Ohio. She is of a "decided poetic nature and lives in an atmosphere of her own. She dwells in a world of thought peopled by the creations of an active and lyric mentality." She is so imbued with the poetic spark that, as she expresses it, she "speaks in rhyme half the time."

John Z. Macdonald, strictly speaking, is not

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 on American Music an American composer. He was born in Scotland and came to America in 1881 at the age of twenty-one, but as he is one of the very few composers since Nero to enter public political life he well deserves a place in this collection. In 1890 he was elected city clerk of Brazil, Indiana, a position which he held for seven years. In 1898 he was elected treasurer of Clay County, Indiana. This county is Democratic "by between five and six hundred" but Mr. Macdonald was elected on the Republican ticket by a majority of one hundred and thirty-three. He was the only Republican elected. Among the best known of Mr. Macdonald's compositions is his famous Expansion Song, in which he predicted the fate of Aguinaldo. He has autograph letters, praising this song, from the late President McKinley, Colonel Roosevelt, General Harrison, Admiral Schley, John Philip Sousa, and other "eminent gentlemen."

Edward Dyer, born in Washington, was the son of a marble cutter who "helped to erect the U. S. Treasury, Patent Office, and Capitol. . . . In the majority of his compositions there is a tinge of sadness which appeals to his auditors. . . . Mr. Dyer never descends to coarseness or vulgarity in his productions; he writes pure, clean words, something that can be sung in

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 the home, school, and on the stage to refined, respectable people."

We learn much of the study years of Mrs. Lucy L. Taggart: "From earliest childhood she received valuable musical instruction from her father (Mr. Longsdon) who, coming from England in 1835, purchased the first piano that came to Chicago, an elegant hand-carved instrument that is still treasured in the old home." Later, "she studied under Prof. C. E. Brown of Owego, N. Y., Prof. Heimburger of San Francisco, and Herr Chas. Goffrie. Mrs. Taggart was also for five years a pupil of Señor Arevalo, the famous guitar soloist of Los Angeles. . . . Mrs. Taggart has in preparation (1902) Methought he touched the strings, an idyl for piano in memory of the late Señor M. S. Arevalo."

David Weidley, born in Philadelphia, is the composer of the following songs, Old Spooney Spoopalay, Jennie Ree, Autumn Leaves, Hannah Glue, and Uncle Reuben and Aunt Lucinda. "He has done much to create and elevate a taste for music in the community where he resides and where he is known as 'Dave.' Even the little children call him 'Dave' as freely and innocently as those who have known him for years, and there can be no greater compliment for any man than that he is known and loved by the children.

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 Mr. Weidley is by profession a sheet metal worker. He is a P. G. of the I. O. O. F., and a P. C. in the Knights of Pythias. He is not identified with any church, but loves and serves his fellow men."

In the biography of Delmer G. Palmer we are assured that "Versatility is a trait with which musical composers are not excessively burdened. There are few performers who can include. The Moonlight Sonata and Schubert's Serenade with selections from The Merry-Go-Round, and do justice to the expression of each, much less would such adaptability be looked for among composers. As most rules have exceptions, in this there is one who stands in a class occupied by no one else, Mr. Delmer G. Palmer, the 'Green Mountain Composer,' who at present resides in Kansas City.

"As recently as 1899 Mr. Palmer wrote a song in the popular 'ragtime,' My Sweetheart is a Midnight Coon and almost in the same breath also wrote the heavy sacred solo, Christ in Gethsemane. The first is of the usual light order, characteristic of this class of music. The latter is as far removed to the contrary as comedy from tragedy. The 'coon' song entered the bubbling, effervescing cauldron of what is termed 'ragtime' music among the multitudinous others,

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 and soon was seen peeping through at the surface among the lightest and most catchy. . . . The sacred solo found its level among the heavier in its class, and, if the term may be here applied, it was also a hit."

S. Duncan Baker, born August 25, 1855, still lives (1902) in the old family residence at Natchez, Mississippi. "In this house is located the den where he has spent many hours with his collection of banjos and pictures, and in writing for and playing on the instrument which he adopted as a favourite during its dark days (about 1871)." We learn that he composed an "artistic banjo solo," entitled Memories of Farland. "Had this production or its companion piece, Thoughts of the Cadenza, been written by an old master for some other instrument and later have been adapted by a modern composer to the banjo, either or both of them would have been pronounced classic, barring some slight defects in form."

I cannot stop to quote from the delightful reports of the lives and works of Albert Matson, George D. Tufts, D. O. Loy, Lavinia Pascoe Oblad, and forty or fifty other American singers, but it seems to me, Mencken, that I have submitted enough evidence to prove to you that the great book on American music has been written. Without one single mention of the names of Ho-

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 ratio W. Parker, George W. Chadwick, Frederick Converse, or Henry Hadley, by a transference of the emphasis to the circle where it belongs, the author of this undying volume has answered your prayer.

December 11, 1917.

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Although it would appear that the moving-picture drama had opened up new worlds to the modern musician, no important composer, so far as I am aware, has as yet turned his attention to the writing of music for the films. If the cinema play is in its infancy, as certain enthusiasts would have us believe, then we may be sure that the day is not far distant when moving-picture scores will take their places on musicians' bookshelves alongside those occupied by operas, symphonies, masses, and string quartets. In the meantime, entirely ignorant of the truth (or oblivious to it, or merely helpless, as the case may be) that writing music for moving-pictures is a new art, which demands a new point of view, the musical directors of the picture theatres are struggling with the situation as best they may. Under the circumstances, it is remarkable, on the whole, how swiftly and how well the demand for music with the silent drama has been met. Certainly the quality of the music is on a level with, or even better than, the type of entertainment offered. Nevertheless, the directors have not squarely

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 Music for the Movtes faced the issue: they still continue to try to force old wine into new bottles, arranging and rearranging melodies and harmonies contrived for quite other occasions and purposes. Even when scores have been written for pictures the result has not shown any imaginative advance over the arranged scores. It is curious that it seems to have occurred to no one that the moving-picture demands a new kind of music.

The composers, I should imagine, are only waiting to be asked to write it. Certainly none of them has ever displayed any hesitancy about composing incidental music for the spoken drama. Mendelssohn wrote strains for A Midsummer Night's Dream which seemed pledged to immortality until Granville Barker ignored them; the Wedding March is still in favour in Keokuk and Kankakee. Beethoven illustrated Goethe's Egmont; Sir Arthur Sullivan penned a score for The Tempest; Schubert was inspired to put down some of his most ravishing notes for a stupid comedy called Rosamunde; Grieg's Peer Gynt music is performed more often than the play. More recent examples of incidental music for dramas are Saint-Saëns's score for Brieux's La Foi, Mascagni's for The Eternal City, and Richard Strauss's for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Is it necessary to prolong the list? I have only mentioned, to be sure, a few obvious instances

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 that would spring at once to any musician's mind, passing by the thousands upon thousands of scores devised by lesser composers for lesser plays. Of course, it has usually been the poetic drama (do we ever hear Shakespeare or Rostand without it?) which has seemed to call for incidental music, but, with more or less disastrous consequences, to be sure, it has accompanied the unfolding of many a "drawing-room" comedy, especially during the eighties.

On the whole, as a matter of fact, more films follow the general lines of Lady Windermere's Fan or Peg o' My Heart than those of poetic dramas such as Cymbeline or La Samaritaine. The case, however, is not analogous to that of the spoken drama. For, in motion-pictures, a poetic play sheds its poetry and becomes, like its neighbour, a skeleton of action. There is no conceivable distinction in the movies, beyond one created by preference, or taste, or the quality of the performance and the photography, between Dante's Inferno and a film in which the beloved Charlie Chaplin looms large.

When the first moving-picture was exposed on the screen it seems to have occurred at once to its projector that some kind of music must accompany its unreeling. The silence evidently appalled him. A moving-picture is not unlike a

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THE IVORY TOWER which I can't not take account of. Assume then, in fine, the Bradhams this second autumn at Lenox, assume Gussie blazing away as if at the very sincerest and validest top of her push; assume Rosanna as naturally there in the "summer home" which has been her and her father's only possessional alternative to N.Y. I violate verisimilitude in not brushing them all, all of the N.Y. "social magnates", off to Paris as soon as Lent sets in, by their prescribed oscillation; but who knows but what it will be convenient quite exactly to shift Gussie across for the time, as nothing then would be more in the line of truth than to have her bustle expensively back for her Lenox proceedings of the autumn. These things, however, are trifles. All I have wanted to thresh out a bit has been the "placing" of Nine and Ten; and for this I have more than enough provided.

What it seems to come to then is the "positing" of Cissy at Lenox with the Bradhams at the time the circumstances of Book Eight have occurred; it's coming to me with which that I seem exactly to want them to occur in the empty town, the New York of a more or less torrid mid-August—this I feel so "possessed of"; to which Gray has "come back" (say from Newport where he has been for a bit alone in his own house there, to think, as it were, with concentration); come back precisely for the passage with Horton. So 347


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 ballet in that it depends entirely upon action (it differs from a ballet in that the action is not necessarily rhythmic), and who ever heard of a ballet being performed without music? Sound certainly has its value in creating an atmosphere and in emphasizing the thrill of the moving-picture, especially when that sound is selected and coordinated. It may also serve to divert the attention. The musical directors of the motion-picture theatres have tried to meet this problem; that they have not so far been wholly successful is not entirely their fault.

It is no simple matter, for example, in a theatre in which the films are changed daily, a general rule even in the larger houses, for a musician to arrange a satisfactory accompaniment for five thousand feet of action which may include anything from an earthquake in Cuba to a dinner in Park Lane, and it is scarcely possible, even if the distributors be so inclined, which they frequently are nowadays, to furnish a music score which will answer the purposes of bands of varying sizes, ranging from an upright piano, solo, to a full orchestra. As for the pictures without prearranged scores, the orchestra leaders and pianists must do the best they can for them.

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 In some theatres, the chef d'orchestre strikes an attitude of total disrespect towards the picture. He makes up his musical program as if he were giving a concert, not at all with the view of effectively accompanying the action on the screen. In a theatre on Second Avenue in New York, for example, I have heard an orchestra play the whole of Beethoven's First Symphony as an accompaniment to Irene Fenwick's performance of The Woman Next Door. As the symphony came to an end before the picture, it was supplemented by Waldteufel's waltz, Les Patineurs. The result, in this particular instance, was neither altogether incongruous nor particularly displeasing, and it occurred to me that if one had to listen to music while the third act of Hedda Gabler were being enacted, one would prefer to hear something like Boccherini's celebrated minuet or a light Mozart melody rather than anything ostensibly contrived to suit the situation.

On the other hand, there are certain accompanists for pictures who remind one by their methods of the anxiety of Richard Strauss to describe every peacock and bean mentioned in any of his opera-books. If a garden is exposed on the screen, these players swing into. The flowers that bloom in the spring; a love scene is the signal for Un peu d'amour; a religious episode suggests. The Rosary to these ingenuous musi-

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 cians; Japan brings a touch of Madama Butterfly; a proposal of marriage, O Promise me; and a farewell, Tosti's Good-bye! This expedient of appealing to the emotions through the intellect bears the stamp of approval, it may be admitted, of no less a composer than Richard Wagner.

Waiting the birth of authentic moving-picture music, which a new composer must rise to invent, the safest way (not necessarily the best) is the middle course, one method for this film, another for that. One of the difficulties which arises is the necessity of arranging a score for a theatre with a large band, where the leader must plan his accompaniment, or have it planned for him, for an entire picture before his men can play a note. Music cues must be definite: twenty bars of Alexander's Ragtime Band, seventeen of The Ride of the Valkyries, ten of Vissi d'arte, etc. An ingenious young man has discovered a way by which music and action may be synchronized. I feel the impulse to quote from the vivid report of his achievement, published in one of the motion-picture weekly journals: "Here was a man-sized job—how to measure the action of the picture to the musical score, so that they would both come out equal at every part of the picture, and would be so exact that any orchestra might take the score and follow the movement of the play with absolute correctness. It was a question pri-

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 marily of mathematics, but even so, it was some time before a system of computation was devised and the undertaking gotten down to a certainty. As an illustration, on the opening night of one of the most notable photoplay productions now before the public, the orchestra, notwithstanding a three weeks' rehearsal, found at the conclusion of the picture that it was a page and a half behind the play's action in the musical setting." Then we learn that Frank Stadler of New York "provided the remedy for this condition of affairs. He remembered that Beethoven had overcome the difficulty of proper timing for his sonatas by a mechanical arrangement known as the metronome, invented by a friend of his." Mr. Stadler then began the measurement of a film with a metronome, a stenographer, and a watch. He quickly discovered that the film ran ten feet to every eight seconds, and he accordingly set the metronome for eight-second periods. The stenographer made a note of the action of the picture each time the bell rang, with the result that when the entire picture had been run off Mr. Stadler had a complete record of the production. All that was necessary then was to select from the classics and the popular melodies the music which would give a suitable atmosphere and a harmonious accompaniment to the theme of the play, so

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 synchronizing the music with the eight-second periods that every bar of it fitted the spirit of the many scores of scenes of the production."

The single man orchestra, the player of the upright piano, need not make so many preparatory gestures. He may with impunity, if he be of an inventive turn of mind or if his memory be good, improvise his score as the picture unreels itself for the first time before what may very well be his astonished vision; after that, he may vary his accompaniment, as the shows of the day progress, improving it here or there, or not, as the case may be, but keeping generally as near to his original performance as possible. He relies, naturally, on a generous use of rum-ti-tum, shivery passages (known to orchestra leaders as "agits," an abbreviation of agitato) to accompany moments of excitement. This music you will remember if you have ever attended a performance of a Lincoln J. Carter melodrama in which a train was wrecked, or a hero rescued from the teeth of a saw, or a heroine pursued by bloodhounds. Recently, in a moving-picture hall on Fourteenth Street in New York, I heard a pianist eke out a half-hour with similar poundings on two or three well-used chords, well-used even in the time of Haydn. The scenes represented the whole of a two-act opera, and the ambitious pianist was try-

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 ing, with his three meagre chords, to give his audience the effect of singers, principals and chorus, and orchestra.

A certain periodical, devoted to the interests of the moving-picture industry, conducts a department as first aid to the musical leaders and pianists who figure at these shows. In a recent number the editor of this department gives it as his solemn opinion that musicians who read fiction are the best equipped to play for pictures. Then, with an almost tragic parenthesis, he continues: "Reading fiction is the last diversion that the average musician will follow. He feels that all the necessary romance is to be found in his music." Facts are dead, says this editor in substance, but fiction is living and should make you weep. When you cry, all that remains for you to do is to think of a tune which will go hand in hand with the cause of your tears; this will serve you later when a similar scene occurs on the silver sheets.

There is one tune which every capable moving-picture pianist has discovered will fit any Keystone picture. For the benefit of the uninitiated I may state that in the Keystone farces some one gets kicked or knocked down or spat upon several times in almost every scene. I am ignorant of the title of this tune, but wherever Keystone pictures are shown, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Grand

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 Rapids, Michigan, Chicago, and even New York, I have heard it. When a character falls into the water, as at least ten of them invariably do, the pianist may vary the monotony of the melody by sitting on the piano or upsetting a chair. In one theatre I have known him to cause glass to be shattered behind the screen. How Marinetti would like that!

However, the day of this sort of thing is rapidly approaching its conclusion, I venture to prophesy. A few of the firms are already issuing arranged music scores for their productions. I might note in passing the score which accompanied Geraldine Farrar's screen performance of Carmen, largely selected from the music of Bizet's opera, and Victor Herbert's original score for The Fall of a Nation, a score which does not take full advantage of the new technique of the cinema drama. It will not be long before an enterprising director engages an enterprising musician to compose music for a picture. For the same reason that d'Annunzio, very early in the career of the moving-picture, wrote a scenario for a film, I should not be surprised to learn that Richard Strauss was under contract to construct an accompaniment to a screened drama. It will be very loud music and it will require a band of one hundred and forty-three men to interpret it.

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 Probably Strauss himself will conduct the first performance; later, excerpts will be played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the critics will say, in spite of Philip Hale's diverting program notes, that this music should never be performed save in conjunction with the picture for which it was written. Mascagni is another composer who should find an excellent field for his talent in writing tone-poems for pictures, although he would contrive nothing more daring than a well-arranged series of illustrative melodies.

But put Igor Stravinsky, or some other modern genius, to work on this problem and see what happens! The composer of the future should revel in the opportunity the moving-picture affords him to create a new form. This form differs from that of the incidental music for a play in that the flow of tone may be continuous and in that one never need soften the accompaniment in order that the voices may be heard; it differs from the music for a ballet in that the scene changes constantly; consequently, time-signatures, mood, and key, must be as constantly shifting. The swift flash from scene to scene, the cut-back, the necessary rapidity of the action, all these are adapted to inspire the future composer to brilliant effort: a tinkle of this and a snatch of that, without working-out or development; illustra-

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 tion, comment, piquant or serious, that's what the new film music should be. The ultimate moving-picture score will be something more than a sentimental accompaniment.

November 10, 1915.

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In a paper entitled Music for Museums I once complained of the unvaried fare offered to us by the program makers of the symphony concerts, a monotonous round of the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the overtures of Weber, and excerpts from Wagner's music dramas. A law should be enacted restricting orchestral organizations to one Beethoven symphony a season, I asserted, and I berated the conductors for their tendency to give the old masters places that should be reserved, at least on occasion, for the younger generation. My remarks seem to have been read and taken seriously, unless it can be supposed that the conductors themselves have seen the error of their ways, for during the current season (1916–17) we have observed Mr. Damrosch and Mr. Stransky (at least insofar as he has been able to do so without cracking the conditions of the famous Pulitzer will, which stipulates that the music of Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner shall be frequently performed at the

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 Electrical Picture Concerts concerts of the Philharmonic Society) vying with one another in their effort to discover unperformed works in dusty attics or on the shelves of the music shops and the libraries, and in their desire to give early hearings to new music by modern composers. Up to date, to be sure, they have ignored a good many compositions that we might conceivably listen to with pleasure, but they have provided us with specimens previously unproduced, at least in these benighted parts, of the art of Haydn and Mozart; Richard Strauss's long-buried Macbeth has been exhumed and the new and still-born Alpine Symphony has been played; a suite from Stravinsky's earliest ballet, l'Oiseau de feu, and several movements of a symphony by Zandonai have been added to the repertory of the concert room; and d'Indy's Istar, which we have long prayed for, has been revived, together with a more ancient treasure, Raff's Lenore Symphony, once as popular as Tchaikovsky's Sixth. Now these are steps, tentative, to be sure, in the right direction, and although some of us, at the cost of burning in hell, would refuse to hear a good deal of this music twice, it is certainly pleasanter to hear it once than to listen year after year to the standbys and battle horses of the ordinary concert season, a state of affairs which forces me to cry out with Shakespeare's duke, "Enough; no more; 'tis not so sweet now

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 as it was before." Dr. Muck in Boston does not agree with me. He even brings his men to New York to perform Schumann's Rhenish Symphony and Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade and calls the result a program. This strikes me as insolence, but it is an efficient kind of insolence. The concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall are always sold out, and Dr. Muck could, if he so desired (I am expecting something of the sort), make up a program consisting of the Beautiful Blue Danube waltz and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without any appreciable effect on the box office.

There is, of course, the necessity (at least it is so regarded) of educating the children. They must, according to the accepted theory of education, hear what has been done before they hear what is being done, but it does not seem necessary on this account to convert the best orchestra in America (one of the best anywhere) into a primary school. It is disheartening to realize, as some of us must, that this band, which one might hope to find exploiting new tonal combinations for our delectation, is fast becoming a museum where celebrated old bits of tune may be inspected and reheard.

Hope has appeared, however, in an unexpected quarter. The extreme popularity of the cinema theatres was not to be guessed at a few

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 seasons ago, nor could any of us have foretold that symphony orchestras of a size and quality which compare more than favourably with some of our established organizations would dispense sweet melody in these temples of amusement from late morning until midnight. The accompaniment to the pictures is scarcely, as yet, a matter for congratulation, as I have indicated in Music for the Movies, but the accompaniment to the pictures is only a small part of the present duty of a band in a theatre devoted to the electrical drama. As a matter of fact, a concert at a moving-picture show is now often a much more serious affair than an old Theodore Thomas popular program. Symphonies, concertos, rhapsodies, arias, overtures (from those of Dichter und Bauer and Guillaume Tell to those of Lohengrin and Susannens Geheimnis), all figure in the scheme. At one of these theatres more music is performed in one day than an assiduous concert-goer could hope to hear in three days in the concert halls. The duration of a symphony concert is about two hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission, that of a song recital about an hour and a half, but in a moving-picture theatre an orchestra, or an organ, or a piano furnishes a pretty continuous flow of melody from eleven to eleven  In the large houses soloists are sandwiched in between the films; sometimes

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 these soloists are better performers than those one hears under more holy auspices; frequently they are identical. The violinists play Kreisler, the Beethoven Romances, and pieces by Drdla, Vieuxtemps, de Beriot, Paganini, and Mendelssohn. Yes, the first movement of the E minor concerto figures occasionally in moving-picture theatre concert programs, where, at the present day, I am inclined to believe it belongs.

This might be regarded as poetic justice. In any case, it is a fact, and a fact that cannot be ignored. It strikes me that from this time on we should hear precious little about "concerts for young people," "educational concerts," "popular concerts," and the like. In the circumstances, the directors of our best orchestras can invent no flimsy excuse for playing too much Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and Wagner, or any of the works of Grieg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky. Brahms, by the peculiar veils of his art, seems, at the moment, to be protected from the cinema halls, although violinists occasionally perform his Gipsy Dances there, and almost any day I expect to hear some deep-voiced contralto sing the Sapphische Ode or the Vergebliches Standchen between Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin.

The importance of the musical accompaniment to the films and of the intermediate concert num-

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THE IVORY TOWER at any rate for the moment I seem to see that; my actual point being, however, that Cissy is posited at Lenox, that the Book "opens" with her, and that it is in the sense I mean "her" Book. She is there waiting as it were on what Horton does, so far as I allow her intelligence of this; and it is there that Gray finds her on his going on to Lenox whether under constraint (by what has gone before) of a visit to the Bradhams, a stay of some days with them, or under the interest of a conceivable stay with Rosanna; a sort of thing that I represent, or at any rate "posit", as perfectly in the line of Rosanna's present freedom and attributes. Would I rather have him with Rosanna and "going over" to the Bradhams? would I rather have him with the Bradhams and going over to Rosanna?—or would I rather have him at neither place and staying by himself at an hotel, which seems to leave me the right margin? There has been no staying up to this point for him with either party, and I have as free a hand as could be. With which there glimmer upon me advantages—oh yes—in placing him in his own independence; especially for Book 10: in short it seems to come. Don't I see Cissy as having obtained from Gussie Bradham that Horton shall be invited—which fact in itself I here provisionally throw off as giving me perhaps a sort of starting value.


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 bers is obviously recognized by the managers of such theatres as the Strand and the Rialto. The close attention with which the music is followed and the very violent applause which congratulates each performer, often exacting recall numbers, are ready proofs of the pleasure experienced by the customers. What is known as cheap music is seldom played. In fact, there is so much of an air of the concert hall about these performances that I am afraid they would bore me even if the music were less familiar to my ears. I should prefer, on these occasions, more informality, more excursions into the rhythmic realms conjured up for us by Louis Hirsch and Irving Berlin. Nothing of the sort need be hoped for. The music performed, and desired by the audiences, is what is known to the less tone-educated multitudes as "classic."

Any intelligent child, therefore, with a little direction from a musical elder, could pick up the routine of the concert and opera world in a ten weeks' course at the Rialto or the Strand. Such unavoidable songs as the Prologue to Pagliacci, the subsequent tenor lament from the same opera, all three of Dalila's airs, the waltz from La Boheme, the prayer from Tosca, Celeste Aida, Cielo e mar, O Paradis, Danny Deever, Les Filles de Cadix, the Habanera from Carmen, Dich, theure Halle, The Two Grenadiers, Dost

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 of thou know that fair land? from Mignon, the Jewel Waltz from Faust, the Page's Song from Les Huguenots, the Miserere, the Prayer from Cavalleria Rusticana, the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, Depuis le jour from Louise, the Gavotte from Manon, Pleurez mes yeux from Le Cid, the Drinking Song from La Traviata, the Ave Maria from Otello, Plus grand dans son obscurité from Gounod's La Reine de Saba, and Che faro senza Euridice? will be as familiar to his little ears as Dixie or the stolen strains of America.

In like manner he will accustom himself to the delights of Kreisler's Caprice Viennois and Tambourin Chinois, Beethoven's two violin Romances, the Bach air arranged for the G string, the Preislied from Die Meistersinger, arranged for violin by Wilhelmj, Pierné's Sérénade, Dvořák's Humoresque. . . . As for the concert repertory, he will hear the overtures to Euryanthe and Oberon, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Tannhäuser, Sakuntala, Semiramide, and such concert pieces and tone-poems as the Danse Macabre, Phaëton, Mephistowaltzer, Les Préludes, the orchestrated rhapsodies of Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakoff's Spanish Caprice, the Arlésienne Suite, the Peer Gynt Suite, a number of Strauss waltzes, Massenet's Elégie, the entr'actes from The Jewels of the Madonna, certain ballet airs of Gluck, etc.

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 Moreover, he will not be cognizant of the fact that he is acquiring what is known as a "musical education" (the knowledge of and the ability to hum tunes from one-fifth of the aforementioned numbers would generally be considered to constitute a musical education). Heaven forfend that such an idea be put into his head! The moving-picture concerts, like the pictures themselves, should be classified as amusements. Only, having gone this far, why not go a little farther? If one must become acquainted with Wagner in the concert hall at all, why not in the electrical picture theatre? There are no excerpts in the present concert repertory that could not well be played there; the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung, the Lohengrin prelude, the Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, the Ride of the Valkyries, and all the rest of them, should be doled out, between the actualities and the feature film, to the youngsters seeking tone-knowledge and to those oldsters who enjoy hearing them divorced from the text and the stage action. And while you can scarcely expect Dr. Muck or Mr. Damrosch to pay Beethoven the compliment of giving him up altogether for the time being, his music might be played less by the symphony organizations in view of the hearings it would receive at the hands of the moving-picture societies. The first two symphonies, at

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 any rate, might be left to their mercies. Mendelssohn, as a symphonist, assuredly should be tendered to their keeping. . . Grieg and Liszt, for the most part. . . Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, and Massenet. . . a good deal of Saint-Saëns. . . Glazunoff and Elgar, certainly Elgar, if the moving-picture audiences would permit it. There is another field for the Strand Philharmonic Society, for the band of the Academy of Music: the exploitation of the American composer who, one complains, never gets his chance at a hearing. The conductors of these concerts might introduce new music by George W. Chadwick, Henry Hadley, Arthur Farwell, Edgar Stillman Kelley, and Ernest Schelling.

If anything so nearly pleasant as this happens in the musical world (and there are, as I stated at the beginning of this paper, certain indications that it is happening), think of the space there would be on the programs of our august societies for the new music our curious ears are aching to hear! Think of the possible resurrections of works by Mozart, Haydn, and César Franck that one never does hear. Perhaps Debussy's La Mer, Nocturnes, and Images (Ibéria, Gigue, and Rondes de Printemps), all too infrequently performed, would become more familiar. I should like to listen at least once to Albéniz's

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 Catalonia and Turina's La Procesión del Rocio, which Debussy has compared to a luminous fresco, which reminds me that Spanish music altogether is unknown in our concert halls. We might hear more Sibelius and Musorgsky. . . Borodin. . . John Carpenter. . . Schoenberg's Five Pieces. . . Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. Why not even Petrouchka? Ornstein's The Fog, Ravel, Dukas (has La Péri been played here?), d'Indy, Korngold. ..

December 7, 1916.

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Five years ago in an oracular mood, I ventured to prophesy that moving-picture entertainments would soon be listed with symphony concerts. Probably, at the time, I wore the mask of Cassandra and nobody believed me. Nevertheless, my sapient prognostications have been amply fulfilled. No great composer, to be sure, has yet constructed a score to fit the flash-backs and double exposures of Bebe Daniels, but that will come later. Indeed, I am willing to predict that, within the next ten years, Igor Stravinsky will set a Chaplin film to music. Why not? In the meantime, while they gaze on Gloria Swanson in the arms of Wallace Reid, picture patrons are regaled with snippets of Verdi and Friml. Mary Pickford cutifies to a bar or two of Schubert, followed by a bar or two of Jerome Kern, while Norma Talmadge cavorts to remnants of Grieg and Offenbach. At the beginning of the show, and between the news and feature films, a more or less competent "symphony orchestra" of approximately ninety-five men (in the larger houses) performs music that hitherto could only

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 be heard in Carnegie Hall or the Opera House. Within a few months, indeed, at these cinema concerts, I have listened to the overture to Iphigénie en Aulide, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March, Dvořák's Carneval overture, the andante con moto from Schubert's major Symphony, Dukas's l'Apprenti-sorcier, the first movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the overture to Oberon, the March from the Symphonie Pathétique, Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien, and even the vorspiel to Die Meistersinger! In 1920, the direction of the Rialto Theatre in New York went so far as to offer a prize of $500 for the best orchestral composition submitted by an American. Among the judges in this contest were Artur Bodanzky, Victor Herbert, Carl Deis, and O. G. Sonneck. Eighty-five compositions were entered in this competition and the gold was awarded to Mortimer Wilson of Iowa for his New Orleans overture. This work was performed at the Rialto during the week of October 24, 1920. The week of December 19, Maurice Baron's Ouverture Triomphale, the second choice of the judges, was given a hearing. I listened to both of these numbers and can

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 testify that they were no better and no worse than might have been expected.

Soloists appear at these moving-picture concerts. I have heard them sing the Cardinal's air from La Juive, Son lo spirito che nega from Mefistofele, Una voce poco fà, Il est doux, il est bon from Hérodiade, and the Polacca from Mignon. I have heard them play Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen, Liszt's piano concerto in E flat, Saint-Saëns's Le Cygne, Tchaikovsky's B flat minor piano concerto, Grieg's piano concerto, and Bruch's arrangement for cello of the Kol Nidrei. These soloists are by no means all amateurs or broken-down opera singers. The first violin of the band in one of the New York electrical picture houses, who frequently appeared there in the rôle of virtuoso, was engaged by the Chicago Orchestra to fill a similar chair, and Percy Grainger, himself, played one week at the Capitol Theatre. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to foresee that, in the not too far-distant future, Pablo Casals, Harold Bauer, Elena Gerhardt, Eva Gauthier, and, probably, even Geraldine Farrar, will have hearings under these happy auspices.

There is no doubt in my mind, as a matter of fact, that the cut and dried Carnegie Hall type of concert, formal and forbidding, is bound to disappear in favour of this warmer and more

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 informal mode of entertainment, unless the entrepreneurs of the symphony societies take steps to meet this new and increasingly formidable form of competition. Percy Grainger, playing a Steinway grand in a darkened auditorium, in a highly decorative set arranged by John Wenger, with an amber light focused on his aureole of golden hair, is a vastly more effective performer than the Percy Grainger who plays on the bare stage of Carnegie Hall, with the house and its occupants brightly illuminated. Anybody who heard him at the Capitol Theatre will support me in this categorical statement. It must also be taken into consideration that the average customer cannot detect the difference between a performance of Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade by the Rivoli Orchestra and one by the Boston Symphony. Naturally he pays his money where he can hear the Scheherazade and see W. S. Hart on the same bill.

The backers and angels of the various symphony organizations may as well make up their minds that they will be compelled to face this new music. Now, observing how much effect the cinema palaces have made by combining music with pictures, it has occurred to me to wonder why some enterprising Henry Lee Higginson or Harry Harkness Flagler has not hit upon the idea of combining pictures with music. The

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 ways in which this suggestion might be turned to advantage, without loss of dignity, are manifold. Let our present concern be a consideration of pictures as an excellent substitute for program notes.

The obvious first use of the films in this capacity would have an educational value. For example, one reads in the program books that the first theme of Marecipio's Third Symphony is a tender melody in G flat minor played by the flute and the first violins. To the layman, it will be readily admitted, this statement conveys nothing whatever. I doubt, indeed, if the majority of the auditors who attend symphony concerts can distinguish the difference between a flute and a violin. Certainly, when glockenspiel, tympani, celesta, bassoon, clarinet, and oboe are concerned, the tired business man has not the faintest conception of how they look or sound. I am acquainted with a lawyer, a constant attendant of symphony concerts for the past ten years, who was amazed to discover recently that the bassoon was a wind instrument. He had always confused it with the double-bass. When this fellow read descriptions of various themes he must have been very much puzzled. My proposition would discourage such confusion. Simply, it is for the title of a theme to be flashed on the screen at the moment it is announced in the orchestra. Thus:

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A little later this will be followed by another title:

Then will come a proclamation of the working-out section, with indications here and there of the uses of the various themes. Still later, the recapitulation will be published, and the coda, if there be one. The performance may be preluded by general remarks about the composer and such particularizations regarding the symphony as may be deemed pertinent. If this course be rigorously pursued throughout the season, by the first of April, every constant concert-goer may be expected to know at least as much about the sonata form as I do.

It does not seem necessary to dwell at length on the advantages that will ensue from a resort to this simple device. Briefly, however, the hearer will be put into possession of accurate information at the time when he most needs it and when, therefore, it will make its maximum effect; there will be no rustling of programs to disturb honest listeners; above all, the requirements of the electrical machine will demand the darkening of the auditorium, an immense advantage. There is, to be sure, no apparent reason why the auditorium should not be darkened in any case.

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 The fact remains, however, that it never is. Seemingly, it never will be until there springs up a sufficiently compelling motive for this desirable procedure.

A second and more novel use of titles may be made under circumstances in which program notes are of small avail. I refer to quotations. Authors frequently quote from other authors. They indicate these borrowings either by inverted commas or by a reference to the original book or its writer. There is no hint of plagiarism in this line of conduct, which is recognized and regular. On the other hand, a composer, who quotes, consciously and intentionally, from another composer, is in danger of being misunderstood. He can, to be sure, label his intention in the printed score. When Meelisande speaks in Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Dukas cites a phrase from Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. In the book of the lyric drama this fact is noted. In performance, however, it cannot be noted. In this particular instance, with Mélisande singing on the stage, Dukas's intention is fairly obvious. Suppose, however, that the composer of a symphony wishes to quote a few bars from Beethoven for some reason of emphasis or irony. How can he indicate this to his auditors? The fact is that he cannot indicate it. He may mention his obligation in the published score, and the conductor

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 who performs the work may be aware of it, but, even if it be acknowledged in the program notes, the passage cannot be denoted with exactitude. Moreover, the composer cannot depend on every auditor reading these notes; furthermore, many concerts are given without any notes at all. His purpose, therefore, is liable to misconstruction. My plan, then, is for a title to be flashed on the screen at the exact moment the quotation is being performed, something like this:

There is a passage in Strauss's Ein Heldenleben in which the composer cites themes from his own earlier works. By means of this simple device, each of these quotations (I believe there are twenty-three) could be distinctively labelled.

But the third and most important possible use of the electrical pictures in connection with symphony concerts carries us much further than the mere employment of titles. I think it would be an excellent idea to illustrate symphonic poems, all program music, indeed, by appropriate accompanying action on the screen. This expedient

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 would provide a concert with almost as many moving-pictures as are presented in an evening at a cinema theatre, for it is well to realize that eight-tenths of the music played at modern concerts is program music. Let me offer a concrete example. When an orchestra plays Dukas's l'Apprenti-sorcier, it is the custom to print Goethe's verses, on which the tone-poem is founded, in the program books. Why not, instead, cause a picture to be taken which will synchronize exactly with the music, and run off this picture whenever and wherever the music is performed? A roll of films, indeed, should be sold with each score. Now, when the theme of the broomstick demon, roused to fetch water by the inquisitive apprentice, is heard in the orchestra, the stick will rise on the screen and go through the motions of bearing pails of water into the laboratory of the sorcerer until the room is flooded. In vain the apprentice begs him to desist, for, although the lad has puzzled out the incantation necessary to summon the spirit, he has neglected to acquaint himself with the countercharm essential to dispel the disturbing presence. This magic broom, pouring out pails of water, could be cleverly counterfeited on the silver sheets, and, I think that the music performed before this appropriate action would make treble the ordinary effect.

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 Just here, some conservative confederate veteran or Presbyterian music critic from Joliet will rise to confront me with the dictum that music which depends upon another art is not music at all. I will smite this churl right lustily with a blow which he will remember all his days. What he says is, perhaps, true—I neither affirm nor deny it—but granted that such a phenomenon as program music exists—and any honest concert-goer will testify to the truth of my earlier assertion that eight-tenths of all the music performed at contemporary symphony concerts is program music—it is certainly preferable that this program be enacted before the eyes than that it be presented as reading matter. There is, I believe, no room for argument here. The symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and a few others, pure music, so-called, should be played with titles on special educational occasions, but program music should invariably be performed to pictorial accompaniment. I am not quite sure but that even Beethoven's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies should be included in this class.

Berlioz's mad, transcendental Fantastic Symphony, presented in the customary manner, is, it must be admitted, a colossal bore, but, performed with cinema decorations, the opium dream of the young musician, the brilliant ball, the pastoral scene in the fields, the ghoulish

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 march to the scaffold, and the concluding Walpurgisnacht scene, the witches' sabbath, with its revels of two-horned goats, mephitic necromancers, and writhing pythonesses, would be another matter. Nijinsky and his Russian nymphs should film l'Après-midi d'un faune, as they danced it. The Russians might also give their effulgent interpretation of Balakireff's Thamar. Debussy's La Mer is a superb movie subject, and so is César Franck's Le Chasseur Maudit. In Saint-Saëns's Le Rouet d'Omphale, I see Francis X. Bushman as the subjugated Hercules spinning for. Theda Bara as Omphale. Phaëton would be more difficult to photograph, but the Danse Macabre would be easy. Wagner, of course, when performed in concert, should be filmed. During a rendering of the overture to Tannhäuser, one should see a vision of the Venusberg and the march of the pilgrims. To illustrate the march from Götterdämmerung, the moon should shine on the cortège of Siegfried, as the body of the hero is borne slowly through the mountain passes. The picture illustrating the

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 prelude to Tristan, however, could only be exhibited privately before the Society of the Friends of Music. The State Board of Censors would certainly issue no permit for public showings of this film at Carnegie Hall.

The music of Richard Strauss, all of it, bawls for illustration. How true this is, one realizes completely when one listens to his operas. Every bar in Salome is accentuated by the stage action: the sombre piety of John, the sensuality of the Princess of Judea, the ribaldry of Herod, the shrieking peacocks, and the raucous Jews. Think of the effect the symphonic poems would make when visualized! Aus Italien, with views of the Campagna, the ruins of Rome, the shores of Sorrento, concluding with a wild Neapolitan tarantella; Till Eulenspiegel, for which Nijinsky would again be requisitioned; Don Juan, probably another private picture. Macbeth and Don Quixote, never very successful when presented as pure music, would benefit especially by this treatment. Even the celebrated episode of the sheep would at last be clear.

But the particular Strauss works I desire to see filmed are the Sinfonia Domestica and Ein Heldenleben. Richard, as the hero of these autobiographical compositions, must be asked to assume the leading rôle in both productions. In the first, he must be assisted by his wife and a

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 baby; probably his own son has grown too big to play his own part. In the second, I look forward with particular interest to a glimpse of the battle with the critics. This section of the film, I think, will have to be retaken in every country in which the symphonic poem is played. Certainly, I have no great curiosity to see Strauss in combat with the German Spanuths, Weissmanns, Istels, and Riemanns. Let us inveigle the composer to Fort Lee with our local Sarceys. Let us see Papa Krehbiel heaving a brick at him, while Strauss retaliates with his booted toe in Papa Krehbiel's tenderest spot. Let us watch Mr. Finck valiantly climbing a hill, bearing over his shoulder a placard with the device:

and Strauss putting him to route amidst utter cacophony. At the close of this episode I see Henry Theophilus in a heap at the foot of the hill, woefully nursing a bruised shin. The combat with Henderson should be a glove match in the ring.

These are merely a few suggestions, not too idle, I hope, which an enterprising conductor with a little money would do well to carry out. The idea, of course, is capable of being stretched to

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 infinitude. But the first man who accepts even these few hints merely at their face value will no longer have to worry about a deficit at the end of the season, no longer have to struggle with the recalcitrant and ignorant ladies who form his board and attempt to dictate his programs. Without the aid of Fritz Kreisler or Frau Schumann-Heink, he can always fill his house, and the hieroglyphics on the front door will be changed from S. O. S. to S. R. O.

October 18, 1921.

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The art of vocalization is retarding the advance of the modern music drama. This is a simple statement of a fact although, doubtless, you are as accustomed as I am to hearing it expressed a rebours. How many times have I read that the art of singing is in its decadence, that soon there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in public! The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825, for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than mine. For twenty years I have heard this same man shouting in the marketplace that a piece without action was not a play (usually the drama he referred to had more real action than that which decorates the progress of Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model), that a composition without melody (meaning a creation by Richard Wagner, Robert Franz, or even Edvard Grieg) was not

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 music, and that verse without rhyme was not poetry. This same type of brilliant mind will go on to aver (forgetting the Scot and the Greek) that men who wear skirts are not men, and that women who smoke cigars are not women; indeed, he will not hesitate to settle a score of other problems in so silly a manner that a ten year old, half-witted schoolboy, after three minutes light thinking, could be depended upon to do better.

The rules for the art of singing, laid down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have become obsolete. How could it be otherwise? They were contrived to fit a certain style of composition. We have but the briefest knowledge, indeed, of how people sang before 1700, although records exist praising the performances of Archilei and others. If a different standard of vocalization existed before 1600 there appears to be no sound reason why a different standard should not exist after 1917. As a matter of fact, maugre much authoritative opinion to the contrary, a different standard does exist. In certain respects the change in tradition is taken for granted. We do not, for example, expect to hear male sopranos at the opera. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe admired this artificial form of voice almost to the exclusion of all others. His favourite singer, Pacchierotti, was a male so-

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 prano. But other breaks have been made with tradition, breaks which are not yet taken for granted. When you find that all but one or two singers in every opera house in the world are ignoring the rules in one way or another you may be certain, despite the protests of the professors, that the rules are dead. Their excuse has disappeared and they remain only as dead commandments framed to fit an old religion.

In Handel's day a singer was accustomed to stand in one spot on the stage and sing; nothing else was required of him. He was not asked to walk about or to act; even expression in his singing was limited to pathos. The singers of this period, Nicolini, Senesino, Cuzzoni, Faustina, Caffarelli, Farinelli, Carestini, Gizziello, and Pacchierotti, devoted their study years to the preparation of their voices for the display of a definite variety of florid music. They had nothing else to learn. As a consequence, they were expected to be particularly efficient. Porpora, Caffarelli's teacher, is said to have devoted six years to the instruction of his pupil before he sent him forth to be "the greatest singer in the world." Contemporary critics appear to have been highly pleased with the result, but there is some excuse for H. T. Finck's impatience, expressed in Songs and Song Writers: "The favourites of the eighteenth century Italian au-

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 diences were artificial male sopranos, like Farinelli, who was frantically applauded for such circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on to a note, or racing with an orchestra and getting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who entertained his audiences by singing, in one breath, a chromatic chain of trills up and down two octaves. Caffarelli was a pupil of the famous vocal teacher, Porpora, who wrote operas consisting chiefly of monotonous successions of florid arias resembling the music that is now written for flutes and violins." All very well for the day, no doubt, but could Cuzzoni sing Isolde? Could Faustina sing Mélisande? And what modern rôles would be allotted to the Julian Eltinges of the eighteenth century?

When composers began to set dramatic texts to music, trouble immediately appeared in the doorway. The coevals of Sophie Arnould, the "creator" of Iphigénie en Aulide, are agreed that she was greater as an actress than she was as a singer. David Garrick pronounced her a finer actress than Clairon. From that hour to the present there has continued to rage a triangular conflict between critic, composer, and singer, which, up to date, it must be admitted, has been consistently won by the academic pundits, for, although the singer has struggled, she has generally bent under the blows of the critical knout,

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 thereby holding the music drama more or less in the state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to the laws of bel canto, and enough singers exist, unfortunately, to justify this assertion), save that the music is not so well sung, according to the old standards, as it was then. No singer has possessed enough courage to entirely defy tradition, to refuse to study with a teacher, to embody her own natural ideas in the performance of music, to found a new school. . . but there have been many rebels.

The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, on the whole, do not demand great histrionic exertion from their interpreters and for a time singers trained in the old Handelian tradition met every requirement of these composers and their audiences. If more action were demanded than in Handel's day, the newer music, in compensation, was easier to sing. Nevertheless, early in the nineteenth century we observe that those artists who, pushing on to the new technique, strove to be actors as well as singers lost something of the old vocal facility. I need only speak of Ronconi and Mme. Pasta. The lady was admittedly the greatest lyric artist of her day, although it is recorded that her slips from true intonation were frequent. When she

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 could no longer command a steady tone, the beaux restes of her art and her authoritative style caused Pauline Viardot, who was hearing her then for the first time, to burst into tears. Ronconi's voice, according to Chorley, barely exceeded an octave; it was weak and habitually out of tune. This baritone was not gifted with vocal agility and he was monotonous in his use of ornament. Nevertheless, Chorley asserts that Ronconi afforded him more pleasure than almost any other singer he had ever heard in the theatre! If this critic did not grasp this opportunity to point the way to the future, on another occasion he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolution: "There might, there should be yet, a new Medea as an opera. Nothing can be grander, more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini's setting of the 'grand fiendish part' (to quote the words of Mrs. Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, as music, it becomes simply impossible to be executed, so frightful is the strain on the energies of her who is to represent the heroine. Compared with this character, Beethoven's Leonora, Weber's Euryanthe, are only so much child's play." This is topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, but at the same time it is suggestive.

The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach between the two schools. Wagner called upon the singer to express powerful emotion, passionate

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 feeling, over a great wave of sound, nay, in many instances, against a great wave of sound. It is small occasion for wonder that singers began to bark. They very nearly expired, indeed, under the strain of trying successfully to mingle Porpora and passion. According to W. F. Apthorp, Max Alvary once said that, considering the emotional intensity of music and situations, the constant co-operation of the surging orchestra, and, most of all, the unconquerable feeling of the reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing actors did not go stark mad, before the very faces of the audience, in parts like Tristan or Siegfried. The critics, in this new situation, were consistently inexorable; they stood by their guns. There was but one way to sing the new music and that was the way of Bernacchi and Pistocchi. In time, by dint of persevering, talking night and day, writing day and night, they convinced the singer. The music drama developed, but the singer was held in his place. Some artists, great geniuses, of course (for example, Jean de Reszke

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 and Lilli Lehmann) made the compromise successfully, but they rendered the further progress of the composer more difficult thereby; music remained merely pretty. The successors of these supple singers even learned to sing Richard Strauss with broad cantilena effects. As for Puccini! At a performance of Madama Butterfly a Japanese once demanded why the singers were producing those nice round tones in moments of passion; why not ugly sounds?

Will any composer arise with the courage to write an opera which cannot be sung? Stravinsky came very near to achieving this happy result in. The Nightingale, but I am looking forward to a more complete break with the past. Think of the range of sounds made by the Japanese, the Gipsy, the Chinese, the Spanish folk-singers. The composer of the future may ask for shrieks, groans, squeaks, screams, a thousand delicate shades of guttural and falsetto vocal tones, from his interpreters. "Why should the gamut of expression on our opera stage be so much more limited than it is in our music halls? Why should the Hottentots be able to make so many delightful noises that we are incapable of producing? Composers, up to date, have taken into account a singer's apparent inability to bridge difficult intervals. Why? It is only by ignoring all such artificial limitations that the new music

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