ave advanced. We have extended the limits of musical style. We have
adopted in sober earnest methods forecasted at rare intervals in the
past by adventurous explorers, and employ musical notes not as elements
in any harmonic scheme but purely as points of colour, exactly as if
the definite notes were mere clangs of indefinite instruments like
cymbals or triangles. Wordless vocal tone, moreover, of several
different types, is pressed into the same service. Varied tonal and
harmonic colour, and structural freedom: those are the two battle-cries
of the young generation. Little by little the old tonalities, based as
they were on fixed centres, are slipping away; all the notes of the
chromatic scale are acquiring even status; the principles of structure
are newborn with every new work. And advance of this kind has been
extraordinarily accelerated during the last twenty years. At no time in
musical history have there been such express-speed modifications of
manner as those which divide, let us say, the latest piano pieces of
Brahms (1893) and the latest of Scriabin (1914). It is possible, indeed,
that our standard system of keyboard tuning may require modification in
the not very distant future. Once again, as three hundred years ago,
music seems to be in the throes of a new birth. On the former occasion,
the process of convalescence lasted rather more than a century, from
Monteverde through Carissimi and Schuetz and Purcell to Bach; and it may
perhaps take as long now.

But it is plain enough that mere novelty does not involve progress; if
it were so, the music of the casually strumming baby would demand high
recognition. Nor is progress to be found in merely quantitative,
Brobdingnagian expansion. And when we have taken our stand on what seems
a sufficiently sound definition of musical progress in its material
aspect--the combination of novelty with expansion, the new thought with
its appropriately enlarged medium--we have yet to remember that many
very fine composers still can, and do, express their natural and full
selves in older idioms, and that progress of this kind, however
widespread it may become, is not necessarily advance in the scale of
values. There is, somewhere or other, a limit to the cubic capacity of
things: they cannot increase indefinitely in depth and breadth at once.
We may confidently hope that we have not yet musically come within
hailing distance of the limit: but nevertheless it is becoming more and