dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting
theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number of
charts, giving every scheme of color and every juxtaposition of values
permissible to a painter. The music of certain Oriental nations, in
which the religious orders are the art censors, has stuck fast in its
rut because of the observance of rules purely arbitrary. Many of the
conventions of modern European music are no more scientific or
original or consistent; most of them are based upon the principle that
the whim of a great dead composer is worthy to be the law of any
living composer. These Blue Laws of music are constantly assailed
surreptitiously and in detail; and yet they are too little attacked as
a whole. But music should be a democracy and not an aristocracy, or,
still less, a hierarchy.

There is a great opportunity for America to carry its political
principles into this youngest of the arts. It is a gratifying sign
that one of the most prominent theorists of the time, an American
scholar, A.J. Goodrich, is adopting some such attitude toward music.
He carries dogma to the minimum, and accepts success in the individual
instance as sufficient authority for overstepping any general
principle. He refers to a contemporary American composer for authority
and example of some successful unconventionality with the same respect
with which he would quote a European's disregard of convention. His
pioneering is watched with interest abroad as well as here.

Worthy of mention along with Mr. Goodrich' original work is the effort
of Homer A. Norris to instil French ideas of musical theory. As a
counterweight to the German monopoly of our attention, his influence
is to be cordially welcomed.

Now that Americanism is rife in the land, some of the glowing interest
in things national might well be turned toward an art that has been
too much and too long neglected among us.

The time has come to take American music seriously. The day for
boasting is not yet here,--if indeed it ever comes; but the day of
penitent humility is surely past.

A student of the times, Mr. E.S. Martin, shortly before the Spanish
War, commented on the radical change that had come over the spirit of
American self-regard. We were notorious in the earlier half of the
century for boasting, not only of the virtues we indubitably had, but
of qualities that existed solely in our own imagination. We sounded
our barbaric yawp over