eramentally related
to the _decadents_, writing music at first resembling that of Faure and
the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas, and last that of d'Indy
and Magnard, has lived the greater portion of his life in no other city
than Boston. Coming originally to America for the purpose of playing
first violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found the
atmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remained
there practically ever since. He whom one might suppose almost native
to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave
Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially
tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and
manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing
numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own
career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the
preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one,
the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music
seems some psychic banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis,
a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle,
at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicks
and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile
"American Composers."

Ornstein

Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The first
of his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves
and towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare
become music. They are like sensitive surfaces that have been laid in
the midst of the New Yorks; and record not only the clangors, but all
the violent forms of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, the
intersecting planes of light, the masses of the masonry with the tiny,
dwarf-like creatures running in and out, the electric signs staining the
inky nightclouds. They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon the
crowded, swarming cells; seven o'clock steam whistles on a winter morn;
pitiless light filtering over hurrying black droves of humanity;
thousands of shivering workers blackening Fourteenth Street. They
picture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves herded by giants of
their own creation, the commands and cries of power in the bells,
whistles, signals. The grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in the
tubes, cranes laboring