lists.

Another, and a most important sign of the growing influence of music upon American life, is seen in the place it is gaining in the college curriculum; new chairs have been established, and prominent composers called to fill them, or old professorships that held merely nominal places in the catalogue have been enlarged in scope. In this way music is reëstablishing itself in something like its ancient glory; for the Greeks not only grouped all culture under the general term of "Music," but gave voice and instrument a vital place in education. Three of our most prominent composers fill the chairs at three of the most important universities. In all these cases, however, music is an elective study, while the rudiments of the art should, I am convinced, be a required study in every college curriculum, and in the common schools as well.

Assuming then, for the nonce, the birth—we are too new a country to speak of a Renascence—of a large interest in national music, there is large disappointment in many quarters, because our American music is not more American. I have argued above that a race transplanted from other soils must still retain most of the old modes of expression, or, varying them, change slowly. But many who excuse us for the present lack of a natural nationalism, are so eager for such a differentiation that they would have us borrow what we cannot breed.

The folk-music of the negro slaves is most frequently mentioned as the right foundation for a strictly American school. A somewhat misunderstood statement advanced by Dr. Antonin Dvôrák, brought this idea into general prominence, though it had been discussed by American composers, and made use of in compositions of all grades long before he came here.

The vital objection, however, to the general adoption of negro music as a base for an American school of composition is that it is in no sense a national expression. It is not even a sectional expression, for the white Southerners among whose slaves this music grew, as well as the people of the North, have always looked upon negro music as an exotic and curious thing. Familiar as it is to us, it is yet as foreign a music as any Tyrolean jodel or Hungarian czardas.

The music of the American Indian, often strangely beautiful and impressive, would be as reasonably chosen as that of these imported Africs. E.A. MacDowell had, indeed, written a picturesque and impressive Indian suite, some time before the Dvôrákian invasion. He asserts that the Indian music is preferable to the Ethiopian, because its sturdiness and force are more congenial with the national mood.

But the true hope for a national spirit in American music surely lies, not in the arbitrary seizure of some musical dialect, but in the development of just such a quality as gives us an individuality among the nations of the world in respect to our character as a people; and that is a Cosmopolitanism made up of elements from all the world, and yet, in its unified qualities, unlike any one element. Thus our music should, and undoubtedly will, be the gathering into the spirit of the voices of all the nations, and the use of all their expressions in an assimilated, a personal, a spontaneous manner. This need not, by any means, be a dry, academic eclecticism. The Yankee, a composite of all peoples, yet differs from them all, and owns a sturdy individuality. His music must follow the same fate.

As our governmental theories are the outgrowth of the experiments and experiences of all previous history, why should not our music, voicing as it must the passions of a cosmopolitan people, use cosmopolitan expressions? The main thing is the individuality of each artist. To be a citizen of the world, provided one is yet spontaneous and sincere and original, is the best thing. The whole is greater than any of its parts.

Along just these lines of individualized cosmopolitanism the American school is working out its identity. Some of our composers have shown themselves the heirs of European lore by work of true excellence in the larger classic and romantic forms.

The complaint might be made, indeed, that the empty, incorrect period of previous American music has given place to too much correctness and too close formation on the old models. This is undoubtedly the result of the long and faithful discipleship under German methods, and need not be made much of in view of the tendency among a few masters toward original expression. For, after all, even in the heyday of the greatest art periods, only a handful of artists have ever stood out as strongly individual; the rest have done good work as faithful imitators and past masters in technic. It is, then, fortunate that there is any tendency at all among any of our composers to forsake academic content with classical forms and text-book development of ideas.

Two things, however, are matters for very serious disappointment: the surprising paucity of musical composition displaying the national sense of humor, and the surprising abundance of purest namby-pamby. The presence of the latter class might be explained by the absence of the former, for namby-pamby cannot exist along with a healthy sense of the ludicrous. There has been a persistent craze among native song-writers for little flower-dramas and bird-tragedies, which, aiming at exquisiteness, fall far short of that dangerous goal and land in flagrant silliness. This weakness, however, will surely disappear in time, or at least diminish, until it holds no more prominent place than it does in all the foreign schools, where it exists to a certain extent.

The scherzo, however, must grow in favor. It is impossible that the most jocose of races, a nation that has given the world an original school of humor, should not carry this spirit over into its music. And yet almost none of the comparatively few scherzos that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. Kelley and Harvey Worthington Loomis.

The opportunities before the American composer are enormous, and only half appreciated. Whereas, in other arts, the text-book claims only to be a chronicle of what has been done before, in music the text-book is set up as the very gospel and decalogue of the art. The theorists have so thoroughly mapped out the legitimate resources of the composer, and have so prescribed his course in nearly every possible position, that music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free expression of emotions and æsthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number of charts, giving every scheme of color and every juxtaposition of values permissible to a painter. The music of certain Oriental nations, in which the religious orders are the art censors, has stuck fast in its rut because of the observance of rules purely arbitrary. Many of the conventions of modern European music are no more scientific or original or consistent; most of them are based upon the principle that the whim of a great dead composer is worthy to be the law of any living composer. These Blue Laws of music are constantly assailed surreptitiously and in detail; and yet they are too little attacked as a whole. But music should be a democracy and not an