His music consists of scattered, highly polished phrases,
hard, exquisite, and cold. He is pre-eminently the _precieux_.

Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even, of
Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the
music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which his
compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to inclose
within each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich, set him
forever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the academic and
conforming crew. The man who has composed these scores makes at least
the gesture of the artist, and comes to music to express a temper
original and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and the
commonplace, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and fantastic. He
is eminently not one of the pathetic, half-educated musicians so common
in America. He knows something of musical science; knows how a tonal
edifice should be unified; has a sense of the chemistry of the
orchestra. He appears familiar with the plainsong, and has based a
symphony and portions of a quartet on Gregorian modes. Even at a period
when the sophisticated and cultivated composer is becoming somewhat less
a rarity, his culture is remarkable, his knowledge of literature
eclectic. Gogol as well as Virgil has moved him to orchestral works.
Above all, he is one of the company of composers, to which a good number
of more gifted musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of their
medium, and infinitely curious concerning it.

It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity,
he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. In seeking by main force
to be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever is
trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence of the
harmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and impersonal and
undistinguished in his style, he has become over-anxious,
over-meticulous of his diction. Because his phraseology was colorless,
he has become a stainer of phrases, a sort of musical euphuist. All his
energy, one senses, has gone into the cutting and polishing and shining
up and setting of little brightly colored bits of music, little sharp,
intense moments. One feels that they have been caressed and stroked and
smoothed and regarded a thousand times; that Loeffler has dwelt upon
them and touched them with a sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it mu