In his most earnest and persuasive manner, H. L. Mencken recently pointed out to me that it was my duty to write a book about the American composers, exposing their futile pretensions and describing their flaccid opera bar by bar. It was in vain that I urged that this would be but a sleeveless errand, arguing that I could not fight men of straw, that these our composers had no real standing in the concert halls, and that pushing them over would be an easy exercise for a child of ten. On the contrary, he retorted, they belonged to the academies; a great many persons believed they were important; it was necessary to dislodge this belief. I suggested, with a not too heavily assumed humility, that I had already done something of the kind in a paper entitled The Great American Composer. "A good beginning," asserted Colonel Mencken, "but not long enough. I won't be satisfied with anything less than a book." "But if I write a book about Professors Parker, Chadwick, Hadley, and the others, I could find nothing new to say of each
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The Authoritative Work on American Music
