rrelate recent musical development with
the development of the conceptions of nationality and race. With
nationality in the strictly political sense music has, indeed, nothing
to do: there is no inborn musical expression common to all the
inhabitants of Switzerland, or the United States, or the British Empire
(or indeed the British Islands). And if we abandon political nationality
entirely and think of national music solely in terms of race, we still
have to make very large deductions. Heredity counts, it would seem, for
far less than environment in musical development--especially so in these
days of free intercourse. Nevertheless, we may to some extent isolate
the racial element; and within the last generation increasingly vigorous
efforts have been made to do so--though they have perhaps neglected
sufficiently to observe that racial ancestry is often an extremely mixed
quantity.

To the musician, this insistence on race is in the main a quite modern
thing. It is true that, as the successive waves of Italian influence
flowed northward in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, they met in England, France, and Germany, and, at the end, in
Russia, native cross-currents; and there was plenty of controversy
between the opposing parties. But this controversy was mainly concerned
with matters of technique; whereas the whole force of the modern
movement consists in its reliance on the simple folk-music which is
supposed to be characteristic of the race as a whole, and about which
hardly any composers of the past consciously troubled themselves at all.
Haydn and Beethoven, no doubt, used folk-tunes in their own works to
some extent, but the former's adaptations from the uncultivated tunes of
his own Croatian people are polished nearly out of recognition, and when
the latter commandeers from Ireland or Russia or elsewhere, nothing but
pure Beethovenishness remains after his masterful hand has done its
will. We may say, indeed, that nationality, as such, was never in their
time a conscious factor in musical composition.

The modern movement seems to owe its origin to several non-musical
causes. For example, the spread of political democracy had no little
influence in arousing interest in the music specifically characteristic
of at any rate the non-urban sections of the newly enfranchised classes.
But, in the main, it was caused by the modern rise into something like
political prominence of the smaller nations, sma