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psychological variety that runs through five movements, scherzando, vigoroso, con sentimento, religioso, and a marcia fantastico. The suite called "Village Fete" is an experiment in French local color. It contains five scenes: The Peasants Going to Chapel; The Flower Girls; The Vagabonds; The Tryst; The Sabot Dance; and the Entrance of the Mayor, which is a pompous march. On the occasion of a performance of this, Louis Arthur Russell wrote: "His orchestra is surely French, and as modern as you please. The idiom is Berlioz's rather than Wagner's." CHAPTER III. THE ACADEMICS. _John Knowles Paine._ [Illustration: JOHN KNOWLES PAINE.] [Illustration: Autograph of John K. Paine] There is one thing better than modernity,--it is immortality. So while I am a most ardent devotee of modern movements, because they are at worst experiments, and motion is necessary to life, I fail to see why it is necessary in picking up something new always to drop something old, as if one were an awkward, butter-fingered parcel-carrier. If a composer writes empty stuff in the latest styles, he is one degree better than the purveyor of trite stuff in the old styles; but he is nobody before the high thinker who finds himself suited by the general methods of the classic writers. The most classic of our composers is their venerable dean, John Knowles Paine. It is an interesting proof of the youth of our native school of music, that the principal symphony, "Spring," of our first composer of importance, was written only twenty-one years ago. Before Mr. Paine there had never been an American music writer worthy of serious consideration in the larger forms. By a mere coincidence Joachim Raff had written a symphony called "Spring" in 1878, just a year before Paine finished his in America. The first movement in both is called "Nature's Awakening;" such an idea is inevitable in any spring composition, from poetry up--or down. For a second movement Raff has a wild "Walpurgis Night Revel," while Paine has a scherzo called "May Night Fantasy." Where Raff is uncanny and fiendish, Paine is cheerful and elfin. The third movement of Raff's symphony is called "First Blossoms of Spring," and the last is called "The Joys of Wandering." The latter two movements of Mr. Paine's symphony are "A Promise of Spring" and "The Glory of Nature." The beginning of both symphonies is, of course, a slow introduction representing the torpid gloom of wi
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