confrères are struggling to pour into the forms of the past the thoughts of the past, rearranged, to be sure, but without notable inspiration. They have nothing new to say, and no particular reason for saying it. Louis Hirsch once told me of a conversation he had overheard at Rafael Joseffy's: A new pupil entered and proceeded to play for the master. Joseffy interrupted her. "You are not playing the right notes," he said. "I'm sure that I am," she replied. "Begin once more." She did so. Joseffy interrupted her again: "That's wrong. It isn't written like that." "But it is. Won't you look at it, please?" After examining the score the master apologized: "O, it's something of MacDowell's. I thought you were trying to play a transcription of the Tristan prelude." "I have remarked," writes Turgeniev, in one of his letters to Pauline Viardot, "that in imitative work the most spirituelles are precisely the most detestable when they take themselves seriously. A sot copies servilely; a man of spirit without talent imitates pretentiously and with an effort, with the worst of all efforts, with that of wishing to be original."
It is only through the trenchant pens of our new composers that the complicated vigour of American life has been expressed in tone. It is the only music created in America today which is
