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usic appears thin. But if it is at all thin, its thinness is that of the steel cable. And it has the rhythmical vivacity and plenitude that characterizes the newest musical art. If there is one quality that unites in a place apart the Strawinskys and Ornsteins, the Blochs and Scriabines, it is the fearlessness and exuberance and savagery with which they pound out their rhythms. Something long buried in us seems to arise at the vibration of these fierce, bold, clattering, almost convulsive strokes, to seek to gesticulate and dance and leap. And Berlioz possessed this elemental feeling for rhythm. Schumann was convinced on hearing the "Symphonie Fantastique" that in Berlioz music was returning to its beginnings, to the state where rhythm was unconstrained and irregular, and that in a short while it would overthrow the laws which had bound it so long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical innovations of our time. The personality that could beat out exuberantly music as rhythmically various and terse and free must indeed have possessed a primitive naivete and vitality and spontaneity of impulse. What manifestation of unbridled will in that freedom of expression! Berlioz must have been blood-brother to the savage, the elemental creature who out of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on his rude musical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he must have been like a powerful and excited steed, chafing his bit, mad to give his energy rein. His blood must forever have been craving the liberation of turgid and angular and irregular beats, must forever have been crowding his imagination with new and compelling combinations, impelling him to the movements of leaping and marching. For he seems to have found in profusion the accents that quicken and lift and lance, found them in all varieties, from the brisk and delicate steps of the ballets in "La Damnation de Faust" to the large, far-flung momentum that drives the choruses of the "Requiem" mountain high; from the mad and riotous finales of the "Harold" symphony and the "Symphonie Fantastique" to the red, turbulent and _canaille_ march rhythms, true music of insurgent masses, clangorous with echoes of tocsins and barricades and revolutions. But it is in his treatment of his instrument that Berlioz seems most closely akin to the newest musicians. For he was the first to permit the orchestra to dictate music to him. There had, no doubt, existed skilful and sen
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