ndency among a few masters toward
original expression. For, after all, even in the heyday of the
greatest art periods, only a handful of artists have ever stood out as
strongly individual; the rest have done good work as faithful
imitators and past masters in technic. It is, then, fortunate that
there is any tendency at all among any of our composers to forsake
academic content with classical forms and text-book development of
ideas.

Two things, however, are matters for very serious disappointment: the
surprising paucity of musical composition displaying the national
sense of humor, and the surprising abundance of purest namby-pamby.
The presence of the latter class might be explained by the absence of
the former, for namby-pamby cannot exist along with a healthy sense
of the ludicrous. There has been a persistent craze among native
song-writers for little flower-dramas and bird-tragedies, which,
aiming at exquisiteness, fall far short of that dangerous goal and
land in flagrant silliness. This weakness, however, will surely
disappear in time, or at least diminish, until it holds no more
prominent place than it does in all the foreign schools, where it
exists to a certain extent.

The scherzo, however, must grow in favor. It is impossible that the
most jocose of races, a nation that has given the world an original
school of humor, should not carry this spirit over into its music. And
yet almost none of the comparatively few scherzos that have been
written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes
Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque
sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I
recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. Kelley and Harvey
Worthington Loomis.

The opportunities before the American composer are enormous, and only
half appreciated. Whereas, in other arts, the text-book claims only to
be a chronicle of what has been done before, in music the text-book is
set up as the very gospel and decalogue of the art. The theorists have
so thoroughly mapped out the legitimate resources of the composer, and
have so prescribed his course in nearly every possible position, that
music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free
expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly
more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had.
Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more