ssed gifts as an orchestral writer, but we
might easily wish him more spontaneity and less dryness." We cannot,
however, miss the dignity and elevation of style found in d'Indy's
works or fail to be impressed by their wonderfully planned musical
architecture. His music demands study and familiarity and well repays
such effort. D'Indy's work, as a teacher, centres about the "Schola
Cantorum" so-called, in which several talented American students from
Harvard and other Universities have already worked. Here all schools
of composition are thoroughly studied, and the rigid and formal
methods of the Conservatoire abandoned. D'Indy believes that the
materials for the structure of modern music are to be found in the
Fugue of Bach, and in the cyclical Sonata Form and the free Air with
Variations of Beethoven--these forms, by reason of their inherent
logic and simplicity, allowing scope for infinite freedom of
treatment. D'Indy is also a thoroughly modern composer in that he is
an artist in words as well as in notes. His life of Cesar Franck is a
model of biographical style, and he has recently published a life of
Beethoven refreshingly different from the stock narratives. In fine,
d'Indy is a genius, in whom the intellectual aspects of the art,
rather than purely emotional appeal, are clearly in the ascendant.

[Footnote 286: D'Indy's significant contributions to operatic and
choral literature, such as _Fervaal_, _L'etranger_, _Le Chant de la
Cloche_ and _La Legende de St. Christophe_, lie without our province.]

[Footnote 287: From the Cevennes region whence d'Indy's family
originally came.]

[Footnote 288: See the elaborate analysis by Mr. Mason in the essay
above referred to.]

We shall now comment briefly on one, only, of d'Indy's compositions,
the Symphonic Poem, _Istar_, which is a set of variations[289] treated
in a manner as novel as it is convincing; the work beginning with
variations which gradually become less elaborate until finally only
the theme itself is heard in its simple beauty. This reversal of
customary treatment is sanctioned by the nature of the subject, and
the correspondence between dramatic logic and musical procedure is
admirably planned. The story of the work is that portion of the
Assyrian epic Izdubar which describes, to quote Apthorp's translation
of the French version, "how Istar, daughter of Sin, bent her steps
toward the immutable land, towards the abode of the dead, towards the
seven-gated