at the music of the future would, in the logic of things,
take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomed
to disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, that
new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a new
freedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and had
proceeded to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds the
experimental and methodical at every turn throughout these compositions.
Behind them one seems invariably to perceive some one sitting before a
sheet of music paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking to
discover what would result were he to accept as harmonic basis not the
major triad but the minor ninth, to set two contradictory rhythms
clashing, or to sharpen everything and maintain a geometric hardness of
line. One always feels in them the intelligence setting forth
deliberately to discover new musical form. For all their apparent
freedom, they are full of the oldest musical procedures, abound in
canonic imitations, in augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts of
grizzled contrapuntal manoevers. They are head-music of the most
uncompromising sort. The "Five Orchestral Pieces" abound in purely
theoretical combinations of instruments, combinations that do not at all
sound. "Herzgewaechse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck made
contemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon the
singer, asks the voice to hold high F _pppp_, to leap swiftly across the
widest intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accompaniment
of celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is in the piano-music that the
sonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one as
nothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of
the works of Schoenberg's second period made in the hope of arriving at
definiteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of the
synagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor of
Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no
feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law.

The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression
rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their
apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and
Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather more to
the sort of music that has no more relation with yes