hich they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded
in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" in
folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky
music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or
nothing at all. And so he would have it performed in ordinary places of
congregation, at fairs, in taverns, music-halls, street-cars, if you
will, in order to enable it to function freely once again. His art is
pointed to quicken, to infect, to begin an action that the listener must
complete within himself. It is a sort of musical shorthand. On paper, it
has a fragmentary look. It is as though Strawinsky had sought to reduce
the elements of music to their sharpest and simplest terms, had hoped
that the "development" would be made by the audience. He seems to feel
that if he cannot achieve his end, the communication of his lyrical
impulse, with a single strong _motif_, a single strong movement of
tones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot achieve it at all. So we find
him writing songs, the three Japanese lyrics, for instance, that are
epigrammatic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that is played
in fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can be performed in thirty
minutes.

But it is no experiment in form that he is making. He seems to bring
into music some of the power of the Chinese artists who, in the painting
of a twig, or of a pair of blossoms, represent the entire springtide. He
has written some of the freshest, most rippling, delicate music.
Scarcely a living man has written more freshly or humorously. April, the
flowering branches, the snowing petals, the clouds high in the blue, are
really in the shrilling little orchestra of the Japanese lyrics, in the
green, gurgling flutes and watery violins. None of the innumerable
Spring Symphonies, Spring Overtures, Spring Songs, are really more
vernal, more soaked in the gentle sunshine of spring, are more really
the seed-time, than the six naive piping measures of melody that
introduce the figure of the "Sacre" entitled "Rondes printanieres." No
doubt, in venturing to write music so bold and original in esthetic,
Strawinsky was encouraged by the example of another musician, another
Russian composer. Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his own
innocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church,
had dared obey the promptings of his own blood and set down cho