realization, he should annul, that he himself may not be drawn into repetitions when his next work shall be in the making.

The function of the creative artist consists in making laws, not in following laws ready made. He who follows such laws, ceases to be a creator.

Creative power may be the more readily recognized, the more it shakes itself loose from tradition. But an intentional avoidance of the rules cannot masquerade as creative power, and still less engender it.

The true creator strives, in reality, after perfection only. And through bringing this into harmony with his own individuality, a new law arises without premeditation.

*
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So narrow has our tonal range become, so stereotyped its form of expression, that nowadays there is not one familiar motive that cannot be fitted with some other familiar motive so that the two may be played simultaneously. Not to lose my way in trifling,[N] I shall refrain from giving examples.

*
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That which, within our present-day music, most nearly approaches the essential nature of the art, is the Rest and the Hold (Pause). Consummate players, improvisers, know how to employ these instruments of expression in loftier and ampler measure. The tense silence between two movements—in itself music, in this environment—leaves wider scope for divination than the more determinate, but therefore less elastic, sound.

*
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What we now call our Tonal System is nothing more than a set of “signs”; an ingenious device to grasp somewhat of that eternal harmony; a meagre pocket-edition of that encyclopedic work; artificial light instead of the sun.—Have you ever noticed how people gaze open-mouthed at the brilliant illumination of a hall? They never do so at the millionfold brighter sunshine of noonday.—

And so, in music, the signs have assumed greater consequence than that which they ought to stand for, and can only suggest.

How important, indeed, are “Third,” “Fifth,” and “Octave”! How strictly we divide “consonances” from “dissonances”—in a sphere where no dissonances can possibly exist!

We have divided the octave into twelve equidistant degrees, because we had to manage somehow, and have constructed our instruments in such a way that we can never get in above or below or between them. Keyboard instruments, in particular, have so thoroughly schooled our ears that we are no longer capable of hearing anything else—incapable of hearing except through this impure medium. Yet Nature created an infinite gradation—infinite! who still knows it nowadays?[O]

And within this duodecimal octave we have marked out a series of fixed intervals, seven in number, and founded thereon our entire art of music. What do I say—one series? Two such series, one for each leg: The Major and Minor Scales. When we start this series of intervals on some other degree of our semitonic ladder, we obtain a new key, and a “foreign” one, at that! How violently contracted a system arose from this initial confusion,[P] may be read in the law-books; we will not repeat it here.

*
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We teach four-and-twenty keys, twelve times the two Series of Seven; but, in point of fact, we have at our command only two, the major key and the minor key. The rest are merely transpositions. By means of the several transpositions we are supposed to get different shades of harmony; but this is an illusion. In England, under the reign of the high “concert pitch,” the most familiar works may be played a semitone higher than they are written, without changing their effect. Singers transpose an aria to suit their convenience, leaving untransposed what precedes and follows. Song-writers not infrequently publish their own compositions in three different pitches; in all three editions the pieces are precisely alike.

When a well-known face looks out of a window, it matters not whether it gazes down from the first story or the third.

Were it feasible to elevate or depress a landscape, far as eye can reach, by several hundred yards, the pictorial impression would neither gain nor lose by it.

*
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Upon the two Series of Seven, the major key and the minor key, the whole art of music has been established; one limitation brings on the other.

To each of these a definite character has been attributed; we have learned and have taught that they should be heard as contrasts, and they have gradually acquired the significance of symbols:—Major and Minor—Maggiore e Minore—Contentment and Discontent—Joy and Sorrow—Light and Shade. The harmonic symbols have fenced in the expression of music, from Bach to Wagner, and yet further on until to-day and the day after to-morrow. Minor is employed with the same intention, and has the same effect upon us now, as two hundred years ago. Nowadays it is no longer possible to “compose” a funeral march, for it already exists, once for all. Even the least informed non-professional knows what to expect when a funeral march—whichever you please—is to be played. Even such an one can anticipate the difference between a symphony in major and one in minor. We are tyrannized by Major and Minor—by the bifurcated garment.

*
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Strange, that one should feel major and minor as opposites. They both present the same face, now more joyous, now more serious; and a mere touch of the brush suffices to turn the one into the other. The passage from either to the other is easy and imperceptible; when it occurs frequently and swiftly, the two begin to shimmer and coalesce indistinguishably.—But when we recognize that major and minor form one Whole with a double meaning, and that the “four-and-twenty keys” are simply an elevenfold transposition of the original twain, we arrive unconstrainedly at a perception of the UNITY of our system of keys [tonality]. The conceptions of “related” and “foreign” keys vanish, and with them the entire intricate theory of degrees and relations. We possess one single key. But it is of most meagre sort.

*
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“Unity of the key-system.”

—“I suppose you mean that ‘key’ and ‘key-system’ are the sunbeam and its diffraction into colors?”

No; that I can not mean. For our whole system of tone, key, and tonality, taken in its entirety, is only a part of a fraction of one diffracted ray from that Sun, “Music,” in the empyrean of the “eternal harmony.”

*
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However deeply rooted the attachment to the habitual, and inertia, may be in the ways and nature of humankind, in equal measure are energy, and opposition to the existing