the melodies
of European and Asiatic Russia from the Ukraine to Turkestan.

And he and his companions were right. Their instincts had not misled
them. The contact with real Russia loosed them all. Through that new
musical orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength.

It was the contact of like with like that made them expressive. For what
they inwardly were was close akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch,
that had invented those chants, and built those minarets and wrought
that armor and composed those epics. The accent of Moussorgsky was in
the grave and popular melodies, in the liturgical incantations, before
he was born. His most original passages resemble nothing so much as the
rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia.
Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been in
generations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who on
a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume, centuries before the
music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the
temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch
these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious.

It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhaps
even the Tartar imprint in the emblems of the Russian past that
liberated Borodin. For he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, of
modern music. In very person he was the son of military feudal Russia.
His photographs that exhibit the great chieftain head, the mane and the
savage, long Mongolian mustache in all their flat contradiction of the
conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon of
court costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was of
pure Circassian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russian
maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly the
imprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently
the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and
color, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartar
fifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for the
savage life that had spawned upon the steppes. And as such it is
distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has
none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep
humility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It
has none of the brilliant