writing, constructive and poetic powers of the very highest order.
This fact, taken in connection with his unquestioned mastery of the
pianoforte and the epoch-marking originality of his technic and effects
upon this instrument, should make us pause before considering anything
of his as standing beyond the line of the beautiful. Schumann was
condemned for many years after his death, yet at the present time no
master stands higher as a pianoforte writer pure and simple. It is
more than likely that Brahms will later stand as the maker of an epoch
in piano playing not less significant than that established by the
works of Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann.

One of our American masters also, Mr. Edward Alexander MacDowell, is
held by many to belong to the very highest rank of living composers
(1898). Comparisons of this kind have no proper place in a work like
the present. The question which these chapters are intended to assist
in solving is not as to the highest, the broadest, the most pleasing,
but the characteristic individuality of certain composers, of ability
so high that they have gained the ears of their own generation and have
been found of lasting interest.

"_What_ have these men done?" And "What is the new note which they have
sounded in the pantheon of art?" These are the two questions which
this little essay is meant to discuss.

Moreover, we may remember that it is one of the laws of gravitation
that it increases in proportion to the "square of the proximity," as
they say in social science. Composers near to us, and the outgrowth of
our own conditions of life and our national heredity, can hardly escape
bringing to expression in their works something of the American
character and turn of thought. This inner something may well give
their works a transient interest for us which better works wanting
these national traits might fail to awaken. The programs in these
supplementary chapters, therefore, should be taken up after those of
the first ten have been fully mastered.

If a word of regret is needed that so little of American matter has
been included, the explanation must be that the scope of this work and
the present resources of the writer do not afford him the means of
treating American music in the broad and comprehensive way possible to
epochs in art the works of which are fully finished and catalogued. In
the nature of the case the treatment of American writers herein is
tentative and incomplete