Therein I read with a sort of awed astonishment that one of the songs of Frederic Ayres "reveals a poignancy of imagination and a perception and apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any composer." I learned that T. Carl Whitmer has a "spiritual kinship" with Arthur Shepherd, Hans Pfitzner, and Vincent d'Indy. His music is "psychologically subtle and spiritually rarefied; in colour it corresponds to the violet end of the spectrum." Before he became acquainted with the later French idiom, Harvey W. Loomis "spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel." I flipped the pages until I came to the name of Miss Gena Branscombe: "Inexhaustible buoyancy, a superlative emotional wealth, and wholly singular gift of musical intuition are the qualities which have shaped the composer's musical personality (it might also be said without fear of contradiction that these are the qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality). . . . Her impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes."
Curiously enough, however, these statements did not annoy me. I found no desire arising in me to deny them and doubtless, though mayhap with a guilty conscience, I should have ditched the undertaking, consigned it to that heap of
