Rupert Hughes, to see if their words of
praise for our weak musical brothers would stir me to action. I found
that they did not. My heart action remained normal; no film covered
my eyes; foam did not issue from my mouth. Indeed I read, 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, _The 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 "he (George W. Chadwick) has reconciled
the symmetrical (sonata) form with modern passion." But it was in the
fourth volume of "The Art of Music," published by the National Society
of Music, that I found the supreme examples of this kind of writing.
The volume was edited by Arthur Farwell and W. Dermot Darby. Therein I
read with a sort of awed astonishment that one of the songs of
Frederick 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." I turned 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
(without much effort of the imagination we might say that they are the
qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality).... Her
impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her
accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbrea