ther it is a waltz or a polka which the
music is beating in their ears with the rhythmic flail.

In the first decades of our century an ear for fine rhythmic _nuances_
of dance music scarcely existed any longer, while at the same time, in
concert-music, a greater wealth of rhythm was developing. Never were
people inspired by more rhythmically flat dance tunes than those of the
waltzes, schottisches, etc., which, for example, were danced in the
twenties. The ear for the fine shades of "danceableness" in musical
rhythm had at that time become absolutely dulled and had fallen asleep;
now it is perceptibly awakening once more. Our polkas, mazurkas, etc.,
based on the clearly defined original rhythm of the national
folk-dances, are promising harbingers of this. But is there not an
important hint for the historian of culture in the fact that the sense
for the finer dance rhythms began to die out at the time of the French
revolution and was most completely extinguished in the rough days of the
Napoleonic tempest and the decade immediately following, whereas in the
age of Louis XIV. the ear for the subtleties of dance rhythm appears to
have been most universally and most highly developed? And with the newly
awakening delight in the _rococo_ the modern ear is again becoming
perceptibly keener as regards the _nuances_ of dance rhythms.

We have grown quicker in tempo in exactly the same proportion as we have
become more elevated in pitch. We live twice as quickly as the
eighteenth century, and therefore our music is performed twice as
quickly. Most of our musicians can no longer play even a Haydn minuet
because they no longer have an ear or a pulse for the comfortable
moderate movement of these compositions. The calm, easy-going _andante_,
in which our classical age portrayed many of its clearest and purest
musical pictures, is a tempo absolutely tabooed by modern Romanticists.
_Comodo, comodamente_, i.e., comfortably, was, a hundred years ago, a
very favorite designation for the manner of performing individual
musical compositions. This superscription has quite disappeared from
circulation in our day, and we are much more apt to mount up to the
_furioso_ than to remain quietly behind with the _Comodo_. The old
masters also had a species of composition with the superscription
"_Furia_," but their fury was not to be taken very seriously, for the
_furia_ was a dance. The French in former times considered the very slow
trill to be