hereby given permission to transfer what I said ten years ago about Stravinsky and Satie to Darius Milhaud and the young Italians.
There was a still more pregnant reason for my desertion of the camp of musical criticism. I seemed always to be about ten years ahead of most of the other critics and the orchestral conductors who make out programs. I missed the reviling of Wagner in New York, but I have watched the pundits of the press revile, in turn, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky, only, in the end, after their ears, through repeated hearings, had grown accustomed to the new clang-tints, to accept these composers as part of the sacred hierarchy. My orchestral education was carried on under Theodore Thomas in Chicago. Now Thomas was not a great conductor, although he always gave honest musical readings of his scores, but he had one great virtue: he believed that new music should be heard. He performed, therefore, every important European composition as soon as possible after it had been performed abroad. As a result, when I arrived in New York in 1906, having listened to and appraised nearly all the major works of Strauss and Debussy composed up to that date, I was amazed to discover that the New York critics were still fighting about these composers, first underpraising them and a little later overpraising
