Just here, some conservative confederate veteran or Presbyterian music critic from Joliet will rise to confront me with the dictum that music which depends upon another art is not music at all. I will smite this churl right lustily with a blow which he will remember all his days. What he says is, perhaps, true—I neither affirm nor deny it—but granted that such a phenomenon as program music exists—and any honest concert-goer will testify to the truth of my earlier assertion that eight-tenths of all the music performed at contemporary symphony concerts is program music—it is certainly preferable that this program be enacted before the eyes than that it be presented as reading matter. There is, I believe, no room for argument here. The symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and a few others, pure music, so-called, should be played with titles on special educational occasions, but program music should invariably be performed to pictorial accompaniment. I am not quite sure but that even Beethoven's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies should be included in this class.
Berlioz's mad, transcendental Fantastic Symphony, presented in the customary manner, is, it must be admitted, a colossal bore, but, performed with cinema decorations, the opium dream of the young musician, the brilliant ball, the pastoral scene in the fields, the ghoulish
