in his science of orchestration, the sense of the
instruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to impose
his will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his
teacher failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his remarkable
sense of the chemistry of timbres, despite his fine intention to develop
further the science which Berlioz brought so far, was prevented from
minting a really new significant orchestral speech through the poverty
of his invention. His orchestration is full of tricks and mannerisms
that pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets
of "Scheherazade" in "Mlada," in "Sadko," in a half-dozen works. The
orchestra that paints the night-sky of "Mlada" rolls dangerously like
that which paints the sea of "Scheherazade" and "Tsar Saltan." The
famous "Chanson indou" seems to float vaguely through half his Oriental
evocations. But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that he
lacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the
pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all his
life, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through the
chinks of the door.

Rachmaninoff

It was in an interview given at the beginning of his recent American
tour that M. Sergei Rachmaninoff styled himself a "musical
evolutionist." The phrase, doubtless uttered half in jest, is scarcely
nice. It is one of those terms that are so loose that they are well-nigh
meaningless. Nevertheless, there was significance in M. Rachmaninoff's
use of it. For he employed it as an apology for his work. His music is
evidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is cautious and
traditional. Even those who are not professionally on the side of the
musical anarchs find it somewhat unventuresome, too smooth and soft and
elegantly elegiac, too dull. And in substituting for revolutionism a
formula for musical progress less suggestive of violent change, more
suggestive of a process like the tranquil, gradual and orderly unfolding
of bud into blossom, was not M. Rachmaninoff very lightly and cleverly
discrediting the apparently revolutionary work of certain of his
fellows, and seeking to reveal a hitherto unsuspected solidity in his
own?

However, it is questionable whether he was successful, whether the
implications of the phrase do quite manage to manoeuver his work into
genuine importance. No doubt, music does not invariably refor