worth the paper on which it is written. It is the only American music which is enjoyed by the nation (even lovers of Mozart and Debussy prefer ragtime to the inert and saponaceous classicism of our more serious-minded composers); it is the only American music which is heard abroad (and it is heard everywhere, in the trenches by way of the victrola, in the Café de Paris at Monte Carlo, in Cairo, in India, and in Australia); and it is the only music on which the musicians of our land can build in the future. If it be urged against it that it is a hybrid product, depending upon Negro and Spanish rhythms, at least the same objection can be urged against Spanish music itself, which has emerged from the music of the Moors and the Arabs; Havelock Ellis even detects Greek and Egyptian influences.
If the American composers with (what they consider) more serious aims, instead of writing symphonies or other tattered and exhausted forms which belong to another age of composition, would strive to put into their music the rhythms and tunes that dominate the hearts of the people, a new form would evolve which might prove to be the child of the Great American Composer we have all been waiting for so long and so anxiously.[1] I do not mean to suggest
- ↑ Henry F. Gilbert has composed a set of American Dances in ragtime rhythm, besides his ballet, The Dance in Place
