CHAPTER XIV

NATIONALISTS, ECLECTICS, AND ULTRA-MODERNS

The new spirit and its various manifestations--Henry

F. Gilbert, Arthur Farwell, Harvey W. Loomis--Frederic

Ayres, Arthur Shepherd, Noble Kreider, Benjamin

Lambord--Campbell-Tipton; Arthur Nevin; C. W. Cadman; J. A.

Carpenter; T. C. Whitmer--W. H. Humiston, John Powell, Blair

Fairchild, Maurice Arnold--Sidney Homer; Clough-Leighter,

and others--Charles M. Loeffler and other Americans of

foreign birth or residence.

With the struggle toward national musical individuality on the part

of the different nations of Europe, especially with the achievements

of modern France, and with the development of the internal aboriginal

musical resources of America, the creative musical life of the United

States took on an entirely new aspect. While the influences which

shaped the romantic and neo-classic epoch did not cease, they became

greatly modified. The ideals of that epoch yielded to new issues,

and the general forward movement was divided into two camps, one

seeking a national individuality for American music and the other a

continuation of the most recent European developments, especially

those of France and post-Wagnerian Germany. Neither of these two

movements was destined eventually to dominate the field. The promoters

of neither movement were wholly convinced or wholly single-minded.

The so-called 'Nationalists' experimented to some extent with the

ultra-modern technical developments, and the ultra-moderns could

not refrain from some essays with primitive American themes. It was

inevitable that a broad eclecticism should arise, and in this a more

truly national movement stepped forth than was presented by either

of the existing wings. The will for the greatest freedom, essential

to the American spirit, asserted itself, and in its newest phase the

nation is declaring for a complete musical independence, based upon

the unrestricted assimilation and reflection of every phase of musical

influence, within and without.

I

No American composer stands forth with a more sharply defined

individuality than Henry F. Gilbert, and none has given himself with

greater ardor to the accomplishment of something truly American in

musical art. The ultimate stature of an artist finds a certain measure

of adumbration in the absorptive and impressionable capacity of his

early years. With Gilbert this capacity was exceptionally large and

sensitive. As a mere boy in his teens he had an insatiable curiosity

concerning every discoverable phase of the world's music, and at that

age, while America was still in the throes of the Wagner controversy,

he was thoroughly familiar with the music of the entire group of

now famous French, Russian, Bohemian, and other composers, whose

names at that time were wholly unknown on this side of the water,

and comparatively little known at home. At the same time he gained

an authoritative knowledge of the folk-songs of the world, and made

extensive studies into remote aspects of the world's literature.

Gilbert was born in Somerville, Mass., in 1868, and studied for a time

with MacDowell, in Boston, but he never had much academic training.

Concerning his formative influences, the composer may be allowed to

speak for himself, as he has done in the following words:

'It has been my ideal not to allow any composer or school of

music to influence me to the point of imitating them. I have

striven to express my own individuality regardless whether

it was good, bad, or indifferent. I prefer _my own hat_ to

a _borrowed crown_. Of course, I have had many admirations

and have absorbed musical nutriment from many sources. I

believe that catholicity of education is a thing greatly

to be desired.... More than the music of any individual

composer; more than the music of any particular school,--the

folk-tunes of the world, of all nationalities, races, and

peoples, have been to me a never-failing source of delight,

wonder, and inspiration. In them I can hear the spirit of

all great music. Through them I can feel the very heart-beat

of humanity. Simple as these folk-melodies are in structure,

they yet speak to me so poignantly, and with such a deep

sincerity of expression, as to be (for myself, at least)

more pregnant with inspirational suggestion than the music

of any _one_ composer.'

[Illustration] American Composers: John Alden Carpenter, Charles Martin

Loeffler, Henry F. Gilbert Campbell-Tipton.

Finishing in his earliest period with the strictly German influence,

Gilbert had also done with the exhibition of a predominating modern

French influence before his colleagues had awakened to the existence

of such a thing. It is, however, significant to note that the 'Negro

Episode' for orchestra, and arranged also for piano, dates from

earliest days. An orchestral 'Legend' was a companion piece. The modern

French influence appears in the richly colored and highly poetic

soprano aria, 'Salammbô's Invocation to Tänith,' on Flaubert's text; in

the very imaginative songs, 'Orlamonde' (Maeterlinck), and 'Zephyrus'

(Longfellow), and in the fanciful tone-poem for piano, 'The Island of

the Fay,' after Poe. From this general period came, in strong contrast,

the barbaric and famous 'Pirate Song,' as well as the delicate 'Croon

of the Dew,' and the 'South American Gypsy Songs.' A strong Celtic

influence now asserted itself, based upon the Irish literary revival

and a study of ancient bardic and other Celtic folk-songs. The chief

results were the 'Lament of Deirdre,' a remarkable song of intensest

pathos and mood-heaviness; four very individual songs called 'Celtic

Studies'; and the 'Fairy Song,' all on verses of the Irish poets. A

fine piece of American savagery from this period, presumably deriving

from Whitmanic influences, is the song on Frederick Manley's poem,

'Fish Wharf Rhapsody.' These various phases finally yielded to a strong

impulse toward a bold expression of Americanism, and Gilbert composed

the 'Comedy Overture on Negro Themes,' a vigorous and jubilant work

which has been widely heard and has awakened much interest in the

composer. A less important 'Humoresque on Negro Minstrel Tunes,' for

orchestra, followed, and a massive orchestral 'Negro Rhapsody,' first

produced at the 'Norfolk Festival' under the composer's direction in

1913. 'The Dance in the Place Congo,' for orchestra, after a vivid

word-painting by George W. Cable, is the composer's most extensive

work. There are also for orchestra 'American Dances in Ragtime Rhythm,'

and, in another vein, an impressive 'Symphonic Prologue' to J. M.

Synge's 'Riders to the Sea,' conducted by the composer at the MacDowell

festival at Peterboro, N. H., in 1914. There is a song on Whitman's

'Give me the splendid silent sun,' a chorus with orchestra, 'To Thee,

America,' five 'Indian Scenes' for piano, and other works. Often rough

in technique, though greatly resourceful, and rich in orchestral

imagination, it is to the spirit of the time and nation that Gilbert

makes his contribution and his appeal. He is the avowed enemy of

tradition and fashion, whether in art, dress, or speech, and a fighter

for freedom and individuality in music.

A. F.

* * * * *

Arthur Farwell is a composer who may well be called representatively

American, inasmuch as his work contains elements which exemplify the

spirit and aims of our native art. Mr. Farwell is perhaps most widely

known for his studies in Indian music and for such of his compositions

as are built from this material. He has realized, however, that

presenting as it does only one phase, and that a more or less exotic

one, Indian music in no way can stand as an accepted basis of our

national musical art. Mr. Farwell has kept well abreast of the tide

of modern music and has cultivated a style in which its idioms are

employed with considerable originality and imbued with the rare poetic

feeling that is his. It is with this broadness of view also that Mr.

Farwell conducted the Wa-Wan Press, established by him in 1901. This

institution had as one of its principal missions the promulgation of

the Indian and other folk elements in American composition and the

exploitation of such works as employed this element. Its pages were,

nevertheless, open to all native composers, irrespective of 'school,'

who had something to say, and its founder has to his great credit the

record of having lent early recognition to a number of the younger and

progressive American composers.

Farwell's earlier compositions reveal the usual sway of varied

influences with a tendency to the original harmonic treatment that has

remained the distinctive feature of his late work. He may be said to

have first 'found himself' in an overture, 'Cornell' (op. 9), written

while he was a musical lecturer at Cornell University. Combining Indian

themes and college songs in a sort of American academic overture, the

vigor of style and effectiveness of scoring has gained for this work

a permanent place in the orchestral répertoire. Following this Mr.

Farwell devoted himself for some time to the study of and experiments

in Indian music, and thus follow in his list of works several of his

best-known compositions; the book of 'American Indian Melodies,'

for piano; 'Dawn'; 'Ichibuzzh'; and 'The Domain of the Hurakan.'

The orchestral version of the last-named work is a score of great

impressiveness and of brilliant color. It has had several conspicuous

performances which have done much to win recognition for his larger

gifts.

The 'Symbolistic Studies,' comprising opera 16, 17, 18, and 24, are

tone-poems with a generic title. The composer describes them as being

'program music, the program of which is merely suggested,' an attempt,

in other words, to create a form that shall offer the composer the

means of unrestricted expression, while its musical coherence shall

preserve an intrinsic worth and general appeal as absolute music. In

the 'Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony' (opus 21) and the 'Navajo War

Dance' (opus 29) Mr. Farwell has made further interesting and effective

treatment of the Indian color. The set of pieces comprised under

the former title contains some very atmospheric pages in which the

strange monotony that marks the Indian song is obtained by novel uses

of diatonic material at once bold and beautiful. The barbaric crudity

is still further implied in the 'Navajo War Dance,' where Farwell has

renounced almost all defined harmony, preserving only the vigorous

rhythm of the dance in the bold intervals of the Indian melody.

Mr. Farwell was one of the first composers to write music for the

so-called community pageants. In the 'Pageant of Meriden' and the

'Pageant of Darien' he has obtained a remarkable success by the

masterly skill with which he has welded the diffusive elements of

pictorial description, folk-song suggestion, dances and choruses,

into a coherent and artistic whole. Equally successful along similar

lines was Farwell's music for Louis N. Parker's play, 'Joseph and His

Brethren,' and Sheldon's 'Garden of Paradise.'

In his vocal compositions Farwell shows some of his best inspirations.

Among the larger of these works is a tone-poem for voice and orchestra,

opus 34 (the words from Sterling's 'Duandon'), a score of rich color

and poetic description in which the voice has little of what has

heretofore been known as melody, but performs a more modern function

of sounding the salient notes of harmonies that are woven in an

ultra-modern profusion of color. The same is true of several other

large songs, such as 'A Ruined Garden' (opus 14), 'Drake's Drum' (opus

22), and 'The Farewell' (opus 33). In the second section of 'A Ruined

Garden,' however, there is a clearer line of melody over a harmonic

scheme of haunting loveliness. This song is one of the more popular

ones of Mr. Farwell's list, having been sung frequently by Florence

Hinkle and others of note. There is an orchestral version of the

accompaniment which enhances its rich color effects. In his two most

recent songs, 'Bridal Song' and 'Daughter of Ocean' (opus 43), the

composer has applied in a more modern and highly colored scheme some of

the experiments with secondary seventh chords that lend such interest

to his later Indian studies.

In some of his shorter songs Farwell has again made some valuable

contributions to the nationalistic development. Besides the interesting

cowboy song, 'The Lone Prairie,' already mentioned (see Chap. VII),

there is a remarkable utilization of the negro element in 'Moanin'

Dove,' one of the 'negro spiritual' harmonizations beautiful in its

atmosphere of crooning sadness. In concerted vocal music Farwell has

made a setting of Whitman's 'Captain, My Captain' for chorus and

orchestra (opus 34), a 'Hymn to Liberty,' sung at a celebration in the

New York city hall (1910); some male and mixed choruses, and part-songs

for children.

B. L.

* * * * *

Harvey Worthington Loomis occupies not merely a unique place in

American music, but one which is elusively so, and difficult of both

determination and exposition. To place the delicate and fragile spirit

of a Watteau or a Grétry in the midst of the hurly-burly of American

life would seem a sorry anachronism, as well as anatopism, on the part

of the Providence which rules over the destinies of art. Yet it is some

such position that Loomis occupies, a fact which tends to explain why

he has not received the attention at the hands of his countrymen that

the rare originality, charm, and finish of his work merit. The court

of Louis XVI would have opened its palaces and gardens to him, but

the America of the twentieth century with difficulty finds standing

room for him in the vestibule. Bringing with him such a nautilus-like

spirit as animated the artists of an earlier France, he matured it in

an America which as yet knew scarcely anything of any musical system or

spirit beyond the German. It is, therefore, a wholly amazing phenomenon

of art that, out of materials thus solid, Loomis contrived to fashion

his aerial and delicately tinted fairy edifices of tone, of a character

totally different from those of Teutons of the subtler sort, and

foreshadowing the achievements of the later Frenchmen with a newly

devised medium at their command. It is evidence of the purest kind of

the yielding of matter to spirit.

Consider that exquisite masterpiece, 'In the Moon Shower'--a very

epitome in miniature of Loomis' genius--a setting of Verlaine's

_L'heure exquise_ for singing voice, speaking voice, piano, and

violin. It seems not to contain a harmony or a progression with which

we have not long been made familiar by our Germanic system, and yet

how complete the departure which it makes from the spirit of German

tradition, and how utterly it dissolves the medium which it draws upon

to re-materialize it as the shadowy reflection of a Verlaine dream.

It is not that Loomis has not become familiar with, and in a measure

assimilated, the later French idiom, but that, without the knowledge

and employment of it, he earlier spontaneously breathed forth the

quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel.

Loomis has also been exceedingly hospitable to native aboriginal

themes and has treated them in the spirit of a delicate and refined

impressionism. His technique is invariably of the nicest, with minute

attention to every detail.

Loomis has produced much. There is a grand opera, 'The Traitor

Mandolin'; two comic operas; incidental music of most aristocratic

artistry to the plays 'The Tragedy of Death,' by René Peter, and

'The Coming of the Prince,' by William Sharp, and music of similarly

refined mood to a number of pantomimes--a favorite form of Loomis--'The

Enchanted Fountain,' 'Put to the Test,' 'In Old New Amsterdam,'

'Love and Witchcraft,' and 'Black and White.' There are many piano

compositions of charm, sprightliness, humor, and impressionistic

interest, including two books of 'Lyrics of the Red Man'; and many

songs brimming with poetry and character, among them 'In the Foggy

Dew,' 'Love Comes, Love Goes,' 'Hark, Hark, the Lark' (a delightful

conception inviting no comparison with Schubert), and songs of negro

character, such as the exquisite 'Hour of the Whippoorwill.' Loomis has

written choruses and part-songs, and a stupendous quantity of excellent

children's songs for schools. The composer was born in Brooklyn, N. Y.,

in 1865 and makes his home in New York. He started upon his musical

career in the National Conservatory, where he was awarded a free

scholarship by Dr. Dvořák.

II

If, thus early, it may be said that the many musical ideals and

influences which have struck root in America have centred and blended

in any single composer, that composer is Frederic Ayres. The true

eclecticism which constitutes the latest phase of American development,

to have value for musical art, must necessarily involve the complete

submergence and assimilation of hitherto unreconciled influences in a

single new creative personality. Of such a new and authentic American

electicism Ayres stands forth so clearly as the protagonist that a

claim for him in this rôle will hardly be successfully disputed.

This occupation of such a position is, however, a purely spontaneous

circumstance, arrived at by obedience to no theory, but only through

creative impulse.

Without being unduly extravagant, informal, though logical, as a

formalist, Ayres commands his many qualities for the expressive

purposes of a spirit eager for the discovery and revelation of perfect

beauty. Such a perfection of beauty he by no means always finds;

indeed, his earlier experimental excursions not infrequently left

the ground rough over which he trod. And even at the present time he

is only entering upon a full conscious command of his material. Only

a keen sensitiveness to every significant influence, European and

American, could have led to the development of so rounded and typical

a musical character. Taught, in the first instance, by Stillman-Kelley

and Arthur Foote, his broad sympathies led him early to blend the

German, French, and American spirit through a devotion to no less

striking a group of composers than Bach, Beethoven, Stephen Foster, and

César Franck. A constant contact with natural scenes of the greatest

grandeur, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, has undoubtedly exercised

a broadening effect upon his conceptions. While he has not employed

native aboriginal themes, or even made a special study of them, many of

his melodies have a strong Indian cast, which is difficult to explain

except on the basis of some psychological aspect of climatic and other

environmental influences.

The trio for piano, violin, and 'cello (opus 13) abounds in supreme

qualities of freshness and spontaneity. Taken as a whole, it is typical

of the manner in which the composer rises, easily and blithely, out

of the ancient sea of tradition into the blue of a new and happier

musical day. The work was first heard on April 18, 1914, at a concert

of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and has since had various

public performances. The violin sonata (opus 15) is of great beauty and

rich in characteristic qualities, and presents an interesting study

in formal originality. A piano sonata (opus 16) and a 'cello sonata

(opus 17) have been completed. Ayres has written songs of surpassing

loveliness and originality. His 'Sea Dirge,' a setting of Shakespeare's

'Full Fathom Five,' from 'The Tempest,' reveals a poignancy of

imagination and a perception and apprehension of beauty seldom attained

by any composer. Other highly poetic Shakespeare songs are 'Where the

Bee Sucks,' 'Come Unto These Yellow Sands,' 'It was a Lover and His

Lass.' A richly colored vocal work is 'Sunset Wings' (opus 8), after

Rossetti. 'Two Fugues' (opus 9) and 'Fugue Fantasy' (opus 12), for

piano, of American suggestiveness, Indian and otherwise, are striking

_tours de force_ of originality. The 'Songs of the Seeonee Wolves'

(opus 10), from Kipling's 'Jungle Book,' are vivid presentations of

the composer's conception of the call of the wild. Ayres was born at

Binghamton, N. Y., March 17, 1876, and lives in Colorado Springs, Col.

* * * * *

One of the most keenly individualized of American composers, and one

of the most daring and original in the employment of ultra-modern

resource, is Arthur Shepherd, formerly of Salt Lake City and at present

connected with the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston,

Mass. His work, as a whole, is almost unique in American music in

the completeness of its departure from the styles of any individual

composers who may earlier have stimulated or influenced him. The

dominating factor in his work, almost from the beginning, has been

the will to express himself in a certain manner, wholly his own, and

on this positive ground extraneous influences have been able to gain

but a scant foothold. Of the Brahms and Wagner influences which he

acknowledges, the former can be traced only in his earliest pages,

and the latter seems nowhere to appear. His harmony would make any

other German than a radical Strauss enthusiast shrink with horror,

so sweeping and so subversive of the usual order are its departures

from the accepted scheme, while, on the other hand, it can be said

to be very little suggestive of the characteristic harmonic quality

of the modern French school. Especially it eschews the luscious and

velvety harmonic surface of Debussy. In both melody and harmony, the

saccharine--even the merely sweet--the sensuous and the languorous,

Shepherd dethrones with the sedulous intolerance of a Pfitzner and,

like that composer, exalts in its place a clear and luminous spiritual

beauty. Otherwise he works in lines that cut, in chords that bite and

grip, and rises often to great nobility of conception and expression.

In his latest works, 'The Nuptials of Attila,' a dramatic overture

after George Meredith, and a 'Humoreske' for pianoforte and orchestra,

he has fought against the tendency toward over-complexity manifested in

his earlier work, and has gained a greater clarity of harmonic texture.

The pianoforte sonata in F minor (opus 4), with which the composer

took the National Federation of Musical Clubs' prize in the 1909

competition, is a massive work of great breadth of conception. The

second movement shows Shepherd's peculiar power of evoking deeply

subjective moods; it presents an almost ghostly quality of the elegiac

and has much of nobility. The third movement makes bold use of a cowboy

song and has a magnificent original melody of a broad Foster-like

quality, but the composer holds 'nationalism' to be merely incidental

to a broader artistic function. He rises to an unusual naturalness in

this movement, which, like the others, is highly virile. 'The City in

the Sea,' a 'poem for orchestra, mixed chorus, and baritone solo,' on

Bliss Carman's poem, is a large work of extraordinary modernity and

individuality. 'Five Songs' (opus 7) are worthily representative and

contain much of beauty. There are also 'Theme and Variations' (opus

1), and 'Mazurka' (opus 2), for pianoforte, and a mixed chorus with

baritone solo, 'The Lord Hath Brought again Zion.'

* * * * *

Noble Kreider, through the possession of that more exalted sense of

beauty and flashing quality of inspiration which illuminates only the

rarer musical souls of any period, takes his place with those in the

forefront of American musical advance. In this capacity, however, his

place is less that of a militant than that of a standard-bearer of

ideals of beauty. He has the further distinction of being the only

American composer, of first rank at least, who has found the complete

expression of his personality and ideals through the medium of the

piano, and who, as an inevitable corollary of this circumstance, has

more intimately and sympathetically than any other made the piano

speak its own proper language. American composers write seriously,

and sometimes admirably, for the piano now and then; Kreider lives

and breathes through it. It responds to him sensitively and with its

whole soul, as it did to Chopin. It has become identified with his

imaginative quality.

Chopin has, indeed, been the strongest influence in the formation of

Kreider's musical character, and while, in his earlier work, nothing

was more evident than this fact, in his later nothing is more evident

than the emergence of his own individuality. So distinct, however, is

Kreider's personality that it is unmistakably present even in much of

his earliest music. A mystery and sombreness, as of an influence of

the North, foreign to Chopin, dominates certain of his moods; and then

Kreider is more of a pagan than Chopin was.

The 'Two Legends' (opus 1) have beauty and inspiration, if not a

particular distinction of modernity. The 'Ballad' (opus 3) is of

heroic and Ossianic cast, restless, like much of Kreider's music, with

contained passion--a passion which at times flashes forth in unexpected

lightning strokes. A 'Nocturne' (opus 4) is haunting in melody and

of an almost Oriental languor. The 'Impromptu' (opus 5) is a darting

and upspringing inspiration, with a middle section of great lyrical

warmth and beauty. Opus 6 comprises two 'Studies,' both containing

a very high quality of beauty with special technical interest. 'Six

Preludes' (opus 7) are characteristic, at times Chopinesque, and

always fresh and inspirational. The 'Prelude' (opus 8) is a broad and

powerful processional of great cumulative dynamic force. 'Three Moods'

(opus 9) show the full emergence of the composer's individuality;

the second, 'The Valley of White Poppies,' is a rarely perfect

and ecstatic inspiration. Opus 10 contains a 'Poem' and a 'Valse

Sentimentale.' There is also an unpublished work for 'cello and piano

and a very original 'Nocturne.' Kreider's development has been chiefly

self-directed. His birthplace and home is Goshen, Indiana.

* * * * *

Benjamin Lambord is a composer whose work reflects in a striking

manner the evolutionary upheaval which, in the present generation, has

carried the nation from the end of the old epoch to the beginning of

the new. There could not well be a closer fidelity to the old German

musical spirit and style, especially as pertains to the _Lied_, than

in Lambord's early songs. Even that restricted medium, however, lent

itself to all levels of creative impotence or dignity, and if there

is a particular distinguishing characteristic in Lambord's work in

that style, it is to be found in a peculiar depth of sincerity, an

adumbration of personality yet to emerge in individualized expression.

This quality will be observed in the first number, Christina Rossetti's

'Remember or Forget,' of the composer's opus 1, which consists of

three songs. 'Four Songs,' opus 4, fall under the same dispensation;

all indicate a leaning to poetry of high character. A trio for violin,

'cello, and piano (opus 5) from the same period shows good impulse

and bold and well-defined themes, but is conventional in harmony and

structure generally. An elaborate 'Valse Fantastique' (opus 6) shows

a similar energy and boldness of contour. The modern musical ear must

search diligently, however, to discover its fantastic element. 'Two

Songs' (opus 7), on poems of Heine and Rückert, are deeply felt, and

'_Lehn deine Wang_' in particular manifests a tendency to enrich the

older medium.

With opus 10, 'Two Songs with Orchestra,' however, the composer stands

forth in a wholly new light, as an ultra-modern of exceptional powers,

and with a subtlety, an imagination and a rich and varied color-sense

of which the earlier works can be said to give no appreciable

indication. The second of these songs, 'Clytie,' on a poem by André

Chénier, is a highly mature expression in the ultra-modern Germanic

idiom, technically speaking, though in its musical quality there

is much of subtle individuality. The voice part is managed with an

appreciation of both delicacy and power, as well as the requirements

of artistic diction, and the accompaniment is a web of sensitive

modulation and dissonance pregnant with sensuous beauty at every point.

The upbuilding of the climax is masterly. The song was presented with

much success at a concert of the Modern Music Society in New York in

the season of 1913-14, when it was sung by Miss Maggie Teyte. At the

same concert, under the composer's direction, was heard a number from

his opus 11, 'Verses from Omar,' for chorus and orchestra. Here Lambord

adds to his expressional scheme an effective pseudo-Oriental quality,

gaining an insistent atmosphere with very simple means. Particularly

interesting is the way in which he has varied the manner of employment

of his main theme, showing a keen sense of thematic organization.

Peculiarly gratifying is the _a cappella_ rendering of the lines

beginning 'But ah! that Spring should vanish with the rose' after

the powerful climax for chorus and orchestra combined. The composer

also has an 'Introduction and Ballet' (opus 8) for orchestra, a work

of considerable elaborateness and much rhythmic and melodic variety,

one which shows his thorough grasp of orchestral technique. With the

nationalistic school Lambord has nothing in common. He is, however, a

native New Englander, being born in Portland, Me., in 1879, and his

earlier studies in composition were pursued under MacDowell at Columbia

University. Later he travelled in France and Germany and studied

orchestration with Vidal in Paris.

III

In the modification of the romantic through the influence of the

ultra-modern school, the musical development of Campbell-Tipton

presents a circumstance which is typical of the experience of many

American composers whose formative period coincides with the present

transitional epoch. The style of the composer's earlier work rested

upon a broad Germanic basis, modern, yet scarcely having passed

from the modernity of Liszt to that of Strauss. His work in the

earlier vein is vigorous, structurally firm, definite in its melodic

contours, and warm in its harmonic color. Force of personality asserts

itself, even if the means employed are not highly individualized

and lean overheavily upon tradition. To this period belong 'Ten

Piano Compositions' (opus 1); 'Romanza Appassionata' (opus 2),

for violin and piano; 'Tone Poems' (opus 3), for voice and piano;

two 'Legends,' and other works, especially songs. The culminating

expression of this period is the 'Sonata Heroic,' for piano, a work

of solidity and brilliance, in one broadly conceived movement. It is

quasi-programmatical and is founded upon two themes, representing the

'Hero' and the 'Ideal,' the latter in particular being a melody of much

warmth and beauty. These are variously interwoven in the development

section, and lead to a return upon the second theme and a climax

upon the heroic theme. The work has had various public performances

in America and Europe. 'Four Sea Lyrics,' for tenor with piano

accompaniment, on poems by Arthur Symons, belong, broadly speaking, to

the period of the sonata. They are works of distinguished character,

'The Crying of Water' being especially poignant in its expressiveness.

The somewhat elaborately worked out 'Suite Pastorale' (opus 27), for

violin and piano, and 'Two Preludes' (opus 26), mark no particular

departure in style, except that the second of the latter is so modern

as to have no bar divisions.

With the 'Nocturnale' and 'Matinale' (opus 28), especially the former,

comes a marked departure toward impressionism and ultra-modern harmonic

effect, with a gain in color and a corresponding loss in structural

quality. The 'Four Seasons' (opus 29), symbolizing four seasons of

human life, bear out the tendency toward impressionism and harmonic

emancipation, and at the same time seek a greater substantiality of

design and treatment. There is an 'Octave Étude' (opus 30), for piano,

and a 'Lament' (opus 33), for violin and piano. Among other songs are

'A Spirit Flower,' 'Three Shadows,' 'A Fool's Soliloquy,' 'The Opium

Smoker,' and 'Invocation.' An opera is in process of completion.

Campbell-Tipton was born in Chicago, in 1877, and lives at present in

Paris.

* * * * *

Arthur Nevin would be deemed an out-and-out romanticist were it not

that the authorship of so significant a work as an Indian opera,

drawing freely upon Indian songs for thematic material, places him

in the ranks of those who have proved the existence of available

sources of aboriginal folk-music in America. Nevin is not, however, a

nationalist, avowed or otherwise, but with the freedom and experimental

eclecticism which has come to be so general a characteristic with

American composers, he is ready to draw upon any promising new source

of musical suggestion or inspiration. The opera in question, 'Poia,'

text by Randolph Hartley, is based upon a sun legend of the Blackfeet

Indians of Montana, with whom the composer spent the summers of 1903

and 1904 collecting material. 'Poia' was produced at the Royal Opera,

Berlin, Dr. Karl Muck conducting, on April 23, 1910, under stormy

circumstances, due to the violent opposition of an anti-American

element in the audience. The composer was, nevertheless, many times

recalled at the close. The orchestral score is elaborate and modern

in instrumental treatment. While Nevin acknowledges Wagner as the

chief formative influence upon his musical character, the music of

'Poia' presents little or nothing in the way of obvious Wagnerisms.

It is freely lyrical, often very melodious, and, where not boldly

characterized by Indian themes, is built on modern German lines. A

second opera, 'Twilight,' in one act, has not been performed.

'The Djinns,' a cantata on the metrical fancy of the same name by

Victor Hugo, won, with the _a cappella_ chorus, 'The Fringed Gentian'

(Bryant), the divided first prize of the Mendelssohn Club of Cleveland,

Ohio, in 1912. The cantata is composed for mixed chorus accompanied

by two pianos. The composer has chosen not to follow in his musical

rhythms the metrical caprice of the poet, but to employ the words

freely in a piece of modern musical tone-painting, following the single

emotional crescendo and decrescendo of which the poem consists. The

work is thoroughly representative of the restless energy of Nevin's

muse and contains examples of the sustained lyricism and melodic and

rhythmic charm which characterize much of his music. The miniature

orchestral suite, 'Love Dreams,' had its first performance, under

the composer's direction, at the Peterboro Festival in 1914. Other

works of the composer are a pianoforte suite, 'Edgeworth Hills,' 'Two

Impromptus' for piano, two mixed choruses on poems by Longfellow, 'At

Daybreak' and 'Chrysoar,' and many songs of much charm, including a

very direct and sincere piece of expression, 'Love of a Day,' the

well-known 'Egyptian Boat Song,' and the exquisite 'Indian Lullaby' on

a Blackfeet Indian melody. A piano trio in C major and a string quartet

in D minor are in manuscript.

* * * * *

Charles Wakefield Cadman, despite his sympathetic and successful

entrance--successful, very likely, because sympathetic--into the

field of Indian music, can scarcely be justly classed as a downright

nationalist. None of the reputed 'nationalist' composers of America,

for that matter, will bear strict analysis as such, for in all cases

their compositions upon aboriginal or other primitive melodies peculiar

to America constitute but one department of their endeavor, and

represent but one element of their ideal. Cadman, nevertheless, had he

composed nothing beyond the famous Indian song, 'From the Land of the

Sky-Blue Water,' would have done enough to prove the most important

and valuable contention included in the nationalist creed, which is

that aboriginal American folk-songs may be a stimulus to the making of

good music of a new sort, and that there is nothing inherent in Indian

melodies to repulse popular sympathy. Like other American nationalists,

Cadman is at heart an eclectic. The nationalism of Grieg, Tschaikowsky,

and Puccini interests him, but not so much as the American freedom of

choice.

The song mentioned is one of a set of four which first brought the

composer into public notice, in 1907. The others are 'Far Off I Hear a

Lover's Flute,' 'The Moon Drops Low,' and 'The White Dawn is Stealing.'

In his treatment of these Indian themes he does not accentuate their

aboriginal character, but enfolds them naturally in a normally modern

harmonic matrix, with very pleasing effect. These songs were followed

by 'Sayonara,' a Japanese romance, for one or two voices; 'Three Songs

to Odysseus,' with orchestral accompaniment (opus 52); 'Idyls of the

South Sea'; and 'Idealized Indian Themes,' for the piano--revealing

various phases of the composer's versatility and fertile fancy. A

representative recent work is the 'Trio in D Major' (opus 56), for

violin, violoncello, and piano, of which the leading characteristics

are melodic spontaneity and freshness of musical impulse. Everywhere

are buoyancy, directness of expression, motion, but little of thematic

involution or harmonic or formal sophistication. It is the trio of a

lyrist; from the standpoint of modern chamber music it might be called

naïve, but the strength, sincerity and beauty of its melodies claim,

and sometimes compel, one's attention. There are strong occasional

suggestions of Indian influence, probably unintentional on the

composer's part, as there is no evidence revealing this work as one of

nationalistic intention. The trio has been widely performed.

Cadman has a completed three-act Indian opera, 'The Land of Misty

Water,' libretto by Francis La Flesche and Nelle Richmond Eberhart.

Forty-seven actual Indian melodies form its thematic basis. Other

works are 'The Vision of Sir Launfal,' a cantata for male voices; 'The

Morning of the Year,' a cycle for vocal quartet; and many works in

various small forms. Cadman won the second prize in its class in the

National Federation of Musical Clubs Prize Competition of 1911 with

a song, 'An Indian Nocturne,' and one of the 'Four Indian Songs' was

awarded a prize in a Pittsburgh Art Society competition.

* * * * *

The recent sudden appearance of John Alden Carpenter among American

composers, with work of singularly well-defined individuality and

notable maturity of style, is a phenomenon which calls to mind Minerva

springing full-grown from the head of Jove. Except for a sonata for

violin and piano, Carpenter's published work consists wholly of songs.

The first set, 'Eight Songs for a Medium Voice,' show forth at once the

unique personality of the composer. It is Carpenter's distinction, in

a sense, to have begun where others have left off. He is a personality

of the new musical time with its new and transformed outlook upon the

art. The margin of advance gained by the most recent developments of

modernity, more especially from the French standpoint, becomes his main

territory, while it would be well-nigh impossible, from his work, to

suspect that the old ground of tradition and formula had ever existed.

Far from his modernity meaning complexity, it is attained generally

by means of a veritably startling simplicity. It is the _principles_

of modernity which interest him, and he seeks the simplest means of

their exemplification. Above all, he takes high rank in the sensitive

perception of beauty. These characteristics are all manifest in the

'Eight Songs' which comprise the richly beautiful 'The Green River'

(Lord Douglas), a limpid setting of Stevenson's 'Looking-Glass River,'

a setting of the Blake 'Cradle Song' which combines science and poetry

in a remarkable degree in view of the simplicity of treatment, the

somewhat overweighted 'Little Fly' (Blake), the lusty Dorsetshire

dialect song, 'Dont Ceäre' (Barnes), a crisp interpretation of

Stevenson's 'The Cock Shall Crow,' and characteristic settings of

Waller's 'Go, Lovely Rose' and Herrick's 'Bid Me to Live.' Of four

highly modernized and colorful Verlaine songs, _Le Ciel_ and '_Il

Pleure dans mon Cœur_,' attain the most modern scheme of musical

thought with astonishingly simple means; the _Chanson d'Automne_ is

sympathetically set, and '_Dansons la Gigue_' is sufficiently sardonic.

'Four Songs for a Medium Voice' contain the mysterious tone-painting

'Fog Wraiths' (Mildred Howells), 'To One Unknown' (Helen Dudley), and

two poems by Wilde, _Les Silhouettes_ and 'Her Voice.'

In the somewhat elaborate settings of poems from Tagore's 'Gitanjali'

Carpenter wrestles with the problem of setting prose poetry to music,

often with felicitous effect and yet not always convincingly, despite

the intrinsic beauty of his musical ideas. The violin sonata in

its themes, its strikingly individual harmonic intuitions, and its

structure generally, is of great beauty and interest. The composer was

born in Illinois in 1876, graduated at Harvard and studied music with

Bernard Ziehn and Sir Edward Edgar. In 1897 he entered the business

established by his father in Chicago and has since directed it.

* * * * *

An American ultra-modernist of extensive attainments, but whose work

has as yet come very little into public attention, is T. Carl Whitmer.

In an age when sensationalism and sensuousness have predominated in

the taste of the musical world it is not surprising to find but slight

public progress being made by a composer whose whole tendency is in

the direction of a highly clarified spirituality, as is the case with

this composer. Whitmer has a spiritual kinship with that small group of

composers (Arthur Shepherd in America, Hans Pfitzner in Germany, and

d'Indy in France may be included in it) who, however different they

may be in musical individuality, unite in banishing utterly from music

not only the vulgar but also even the more distinguished aspects of

the sensuously sweet, which chiefly and most quickly (except for the

rhythmic element) recommends music to the multitude the world over.

Whitmer's music is psychologically subtle and spiritually rarefied;

in color it corresponds to the violet end of the spectrum. It shuns

realistic and elemental qualities and seeks an ethereal expression

which gives it not infrequently a sense of over-earthliness. Its

salient characteristics are well represented in a soprano song,

'The Fog Maiden,' an achievement of extraordinary originality and

distinction of mood. Among the composer's many other songs are the

scintillating and crisp 'My Lord Comes Riding,' the poignantly

expressive 'Song from the Gardener's Lodge,' the sanely ultra-modern

'Just To-night,' 'Song from Pippa Passes,' 'My Star,' 'Ah! Love, but

a Day,' 'Cloud and Wind,' 'Nausicaa,' 'Willowwood,' 'Ballad of Trees

and the Master,' 'I Will Twine the Violet,' 'Christmas Carol,' and

'Our Birth Is but a Sleep.' Whitmer's manuscripts include no less

surprising an offering than six 'Mysteries,' or spiritual music-dramas,

'The Creation,' 'The Covenant,' 'The Nativity,' 'The Temptation,'

'Mary Magdalene,' and 'The Passion,' upon which works the composer has

published a little essay entitled 'Concerning a National Spiritual

Drama.' For chorus with orchestra is an 'Elegiac Rhapsody,' and for

orchestra alone a set of 'Miniatures,' originally for piano, of which

'Sunrise' is the most important. There are an 'Athenian' sonata for

violin and piano, various organ works, anthems, and women's choruses,

and a number of 'Symbolisms'--readings of original texts with piano

accompaniment.

IV

William Henry Humiston has not given out a large quantity of work,

but all that he has done bears the stamp of a genuine personality and

indicates a composer of rich and sincere musical feeling. One may go

further and say that Humiston is animated by the spirit of nobility

of the old classicists from Bach down, and shares their passion for

cleanness and clarity of expression. In his eschewing of the more

fashionable ultra-modern idiom of the day there is neither a pose of

'back to Mozart' nor a sense of incapacity or unwillingness to join

the chase. Merely he goes his own way and takes his own time about it,

and the result is music that is worth hearing and that takes strong

hold of the affections. In 'Iphigenia before the Sacrifice at Aulis'

(poem by Sara King Wiley), a dramatic scene for soprano, chorus, and

orchestra, Humiston has produced a work of great dignity, fervor,

and beauty. His themes are few and trenchant, each an authentic

creative idea, and he has admirably, in his music, contrasted the

dramatic motives of the poem. His well-known 'Southern Fantasy,' for

orchestra--the quiet Americanism of which makes it possible to include

him in the present chapter--is based on three principal themes of

negro character, and in general strikes the more sombre note of negro

psychology, though a lively dance appears in the middle, later to be

combined, with contrapuntal wit, with one of the other themes. It is a

work of true beauty and reveals Humiston's mastery of orchestration. A

suite for violin and orchestra is virtually, in its three movements,

built out of a single theme, which the composer finally fugues for

a climax. The work is no less beautiful than clever and, like the

compositions already mentioned, is bound to take a high place in the

final accounting of American music. There is also an overture to

'Twelfth Night,' written for Maude Adams. Among Humiston's songs are:

'Song of Evening' and 'Song of a Young Girl' (both Sara King Wiley),

'_Yo te amo_' (Rosalie Jonas), 'Beauty's Daughters' (Byron), and 'Thou

Beauteous Spring' (Kern).

A personality of unusual vigor and distinction of character is that

of John Powell, who has rather suddenly come into notice through a

number of large-dimensioned works of interesting content. Disregarding

from the outset the classical thematic styles, the composer yet

retains the cyclical forms, almost recklessly surcharging them with

an Americanism of the boldest sort. This Americanism derives from the

folk-songs and folk-music generally of the south-eastern part of the

United States and from Virginia in particular. He easily brushes aside

at a stroke the critical objections of the past decade to the modern

harmonization of these folk-tunes. Through all his work is an unusual,

an almost singular, opulence of impulse, of inspiration--the composer

has an amazing amount to say and the notes tumble over themselves

in his eagerness for expression. 'Sonata Virginianesque' (opus 7),

for violin and piano, is in three movements, 'In the Quarters,' 'In

the Woods,' and 'At the Big House,' and is based on negro motives

and old reel tunes. There are three piano sonatas, _Psychologique_

(opus 15), _Noble_ (opus 21), and _Teutonica_ (opus 24). The first

treats of the human soul-struggle under the text 'The wages of sin is

death.' The _Sonata Noble_ is strongly Virginian and _volkstümlich_.

The 'Teutonica' is an expression of the Teutonic psychology and is

a kind of symphony for piano, in the form of an _allegro sostenuto_

(sonata form), and a set of variations which comprise the elements of

several movements. Opus 13 is a piano concerto in B minor and opus 23

is a violin concerto largely based on Virginian folk-tunes. The string

quartet (opus 19) is strongly American, even in its finale, which

is a tarentella. The piano suite 'In the South' (opus 16) includes

'Humming Birds,' a remarkable combination of realistic tone-painting

and musical structure, a splendidly sombre 'Negro Elegy' and a big and

virile 'Pioneer Dance,' on a melody of 'Crocker' fiddle-tune type.

Another piano suite, 'At the Fair' (opus 22), gives us a classic on the

notorious 'Hoochee-Coochee' dance; 'Clowns,' with peculiar harmonic

and melodic kinks; 'Banjo-picker,' a remarkable art-expression of the

typical banjo tune, and other movements. Beyond these are 'Variations

and Double Fugue' (opus 20), for piano, on a theme of F. C. Hahr, a

work of American characteristics, and 'Three Songs' (opus 18).

* * * * *

Blair Fairchild is one of the American composers who have preferred to

live chiefly abroad, a sin for which the penalty is to be little known

at home. Fairchild was heard in New York in the season of 1913-1914

with his choral and orchestral work 'From the Song of Songs,' which

was performed at a concert of the Modern Music Society. It is a work

of excellent musicianship, though singularly apart from the chief

elements of modern French advance for a composer who is so much at home

in Paris. The tonally 'non-committal' chord of the augmented fifth is

occasionally employed, but otherwise the scheme is distinctly Germanic,

though without violent modernity. The most memorable phrase of the

work is a little _a cappella_ section at the words 'I adjure you, O

daughters of Jerusalem,' which in its simple lyricism contrasts well

with the more elaborate context. The choral writing is excellently

managed. A companion work in the same form is 'David's Lament.'

Fairchild has produced several chamber music works, a string quintet

(opus 20), a _Concerto de Chambre_ (opus 26), for violin, piano, and

string quartet, and a trio for piano, violin, and 'cello (opus 24), all

maintaining his high standard of musicianship. For orchestra there is a

pair of sketches, 'Tamineh,' after a Persian legend, containing _Songe

d'amour_ and _Paysage_, the score being dedicated to Florent Schmitt.

There are also 'Six Psalms' for chorus (_a cappella_) and soli.

Maurice Arnold is a member of the group of Americans who came under

the influence of Dvořák during the latter's stay in America, and he

has lent his striking gifts to the cause of the romantic-nationalistic

movement. His Symphony in F Minor, produced under his own leadership

in Berlin in 1907, called forth warm praise from the German press,

which found it a vigorous and poetic work, and in certain of its

aspects boldly American. The directness and warmth of Arnold's melodic

inspiration is equally manifest in the Sonata in B Minor for violin

and piano. The main theme of the first movement is a rhythmically

sparkling melody showing negro characteristics, although the composer

achieves his effects of negro musical color without the employment of

actual folk-tunes. The second movement attains a high level of beauty

and intimate poetic appeal, and the last movement, in the character

of a jig, is virile. Arnold's cyclical works are not highly involved

thematically, though formally well-balanced; their strength lies in

their admirable lyrical qualities. The very pleasing 'Plantation

Dances' for orchestra have been heard in many places, but a 'Dramatic

Overture' remains almost unknown. Other works are a cantata, 'The

Wild Chase,' various piano exotics, including a _Danse de la Midway

Plaisance_, a Turkish march, and a _Caprice Espagnole_, a number of

songs, and two comic operas.

The work of Henry Schoenefeld bears a certain relation to that of

Arnold in that both composers felt the influence of what Rupert Hughes

has termed the 'Dvořákian invasion,' although Schoenefeld, like other

Americans, had essayed the field of negro music before that historic

event. The most significant and representative published work of

the composer is the 'Sonata (quasi fantasia) for Violin and Piano'

(opus 53), which won the prize offered by Henri Marteau in 1899.

Schoenefeld's better known works comprise a suite for strings (opus

15), an overture, 'In the Sunny South,' and a festival overture, 'The

American Flag,' all of which have been described by Hughes, as well as

a 'Rural Symphony,' which won a National Conservatory prize. An ode

for male chorus, solo and orchestra, _Die drei Indianer_, a 'Reverie'

for string orchestra, harp, and organ, and two impromptus for string

orchestra, _Valse Noble_ and 'Meditation,' are among the composer's

later works, and there are many small piano compositions.

The last ten years of the composer's life have been devoted to a study

of Indian music and themes, which have served as the inspiration of his

recent compositions. He has composed a pantomime-ballet, 'Wachicanta,'

founded on an Indian legend, the music of which idealizes Indian life,

retaining the barbaric color. This ballet, in the opinion of Ruth St.

Denis, the dancer, is the first adaptation of an Indian theme to the

modern ballet form by an American composer.

Still later, and of greater magnitude, is Mr. Schoenefeld's opera

in three acts and four scenes, based on a libretto in English, which

portrays a tragedy of Indian life in Florida. The structure is modern,

and the composer's purpose again to idealize his Indian material.

Mr. Schoenefeld is of the belief that Indian folk-lore and tradition

constitute the most poetic and essentially American musical material

available. Mr. Schoenefeld was born in Hughestown in 1857.

V

It is seldom that a serious American composer trains all his batteries

upon the target of a single musical form, but this is what Sidney Homer

has done with respect to the song. In consequence he has attained a

high development of his individuality in the song form, as well as

having produced many examples of it, his published songs numbering

nearly eighty. His work shows immense range of character, from a

veritable drama in song form, such as the stormily emotional 'How's

My Boy?' (Dobell), to childhood songs of the utmost simplicity, such

as the 'Seventeen Lyrics from Sing-Song,' by Christina Rossetti,

containing the charming 'Boats Sail on the Rivers.' While Homer

frequently makes elaborate tone-poems of his accompaniments, he

does not follow the modern French vocal declamatory style, but aims

rather at what might be termed dramatic melody. He seeks an intimate

union of music not only with the general emotional character and

fluctuations, but also with the particular verbal shadings of the

text. German in technical foundation, his individuality is well

defined, and he is thoroughly emancipated from dependence upon the

German idiom. 'Infant Sorrow,' an impassioned plaint of babyhood, is

interestingly representative of the type of dramatic song which Homer

has developed. It is one of two settings from the 'Songs of Experience'

of the undying, yet strangely living, William Blake, the other, 'The

Sick Rose,' being peculiarly poignant in its melody, which is almost

entirely constituted of the intervals of the minor second and major

seventh. The harsh 'Pauper's Drive' (Noël), and the bold challenge,

'To Russia' (Joaquin Miller), are in the dramatic tone-poem style,

while the whimsical 'Fiddler of Dooney' (Yeats) more nearly approaches

being a downright tune. To the writing of sheer tunes Homer has devoted

also a considerable share of his effort, with signal success, as

the popularity of 'A Banjo Song' and 'Uncle Rome' testifies. Widely

known, also, are his deeply felt setting of Stevenson's 'Requiem,'

the charming and humorous 'Ferry me across the water,' on Christina

Rossetti's poem, and the warmly melodious 'Dearest' (Henley), and

Hood's 'Song of the Shirt.'

Almost exclusively devoted to vocal writing is Henry Clough-Leighter,

who has over one hundred published songs and nearly an equal number

of choral works, including settings of the Anglican Service.

Exceptions are in the form of duets and studies for piano. In the

classification somewhat loosely undertaken in the present chapter

Clough-Leighter would be regarded as an eclectic. His work shows the

influence of the various modern schools without leaning overheavily

upon the individuality of any one of them, albeit there is evidence

of a considerable influence from the Germany of Richard Strauss.

He lays tumultuous siege to the strongholds of modern harmony and

especially modulation, in which latter respect he is bold sometimes

to a fault, inclining to a tonal restlessness that will not bear too

much insistence. His harmonic fluency is unusual, and his workmanship

immaculate. Among Clough-Leighter's most important choral works are:

'The Righteous Branch' (opus 32), 'Christ Triumphant' (opus 35), and

'Psalm of Trust,' all contrapuntal in treatment and requiring a large

chorus of skilled voices. There are a number of song cycles, including

'Youth and Spring' (opus 5), 'Rossetti-Lyrics' (opus 58), 'Two Lyrics'

of Victor Hugo (opus 53), all with piano accompaniment; 'Love-Sorrow'

(opus 44) with accompaniment of violin, 'cello, and piano, and 'The

Day of Beauty' (opus 48), for high voice, string quartet, and piano.

'Lasca,' a symphonic ballad for tenor and orchestra, is one of the best

and most dramatic of the composer's works. 'Seven Songs' (opus 57) show

a wealth of emotion and fancy, _Requiescat_ (Oscar Wilde) attaining

a considerable distinction of mood. Clough-Leighter is a native of

Washington, D. C. (b. 1874), and held organists' posts there and in

Providence. Latterly he has been head of the editorial department of

the Boston Music Company, and has made Boston his home.

* * * * *

Marshall Kernochan, though his output has not been large, has written

a number of songs possessing qualities of distinction. He is among

those brave souls who have essayed Walt Whitman and in his two Whitman

settings, indeed, he has come off with an unusual measure of success.

These are: 'Out of the rolling ocean the crowd' and 'We two together.'

While neither of these songs reveals striking originality or more

than a mild modernism so far as harmony goes, they are conceived with

a breadth and carried through with a power that lift them out of the

usual run of contemporary native songs. The composer has made the most

of the lyrical possibilities of the lines, and has done well with the

less singable phrases by a careful attention to syllabic accent and

duration. 'We Two Together' has an exquisite middle section and a very

powerful climax, and will require a singer of heroic mold. 'Lilacs'

(Armitage Livingston) is a little work of true delicacy and possesses

style, and its companion, 'A Child's Song' (Richard Hovey), treats

sympathetically a little masterpiece of childhood poetry. Among the

composer's other songs are four on poems by Browning, 'A Serenade at

the Villa,' 'Round Us the Wild Creatures,' from 'Ferishta's Fancies,'

'At the Window,' and 'Give a Rouse.'

Homer Norris has not been without an influence upon the development

of ultra-modernism in America by virtue of being one of the first

teachers of theory in this country to receive his training in Paris.

Moreover, he was writing songs revealing modern French influence at a

time when probably Loeffler and Gilbert were the only others in America

who knew what was happening to musical evolution in France. His richly

harmonized 'Twilight' is a song of much beauty, and more daring than

successful, probably, is 'Peace' (Sill), the accompaniment of which

consists of nothing but slow descending scales of C. Interesting, also,

as a bit of early French influence is the Maeterlinck _Et s'il revenait

un jour?_ of delicate mood. Norris has also a sacred cantata, 'Nain,'

and a cycle for vocal quartet on words chosen from Whitman and entitled

'The Flight of the Eagle.'

Gena Branscombe is one of the very few women composers of America

who have established for themselves a genuine creative musical

individuality. Even among this few Miss Branscombe holds a position

of distinction, partly through the intensity of her personality and

partly through her approach to harmonic ultra-modernism, a field to

which most women composers, being only melodists, are strangers.

There would be no occasion to refer to the question of sex in the

present instance except that when it is stated to be feminine it

commonly implies an inevitable discount upon attainment and is urged

as an excuse for feeble work, which circumstance entitles a woman

composer for whom such excuse need not be made, as in the case of Miss

Branscombe, to a measure of corrective credit. Inexhaustible buoyancy,

a superlative emotional wealth, and a wholly singular gift of musical

intuition are the qualities which have shaped the composer's musical

personality. Being a woman, it may be said at once that structural

ideals do not interest her. Her work is an outpouring of moods,

moods of an intensity and richness which demand a high musical color

scheme. This, not science--though Miss Branscombe is well grounded in

theory--but a startling character of intuition, provides her withal.

Her impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her

accompaniments abound in harmonic hair-breadth escapes. No considered

harmonic or modularity scheme gives her music its richness of color;

she continually leaps into apparently remote progressions without

looking before, and the same intuition which suggested the hazard

suggests also the way out, which comes with surprising facility. She

is best known for her many songs, among them the dreamful and haunting

'Krischna' and 'Dear Little Hut by the Rice Fields,' both Laurence

Hope's poems, also Hope's 'Just in the Hush,' 'The Deserted Gypsy,'

and the stirring 'Dear Is My Inlaid Sword'; the rich and impassioned

Browning settings, 'There's a Woman Like a Dewdrop,' 'Serenade,' from

'In a Gondola,' 'Boot and Saddle,' etc.; the sombre 'Sleep, Then, Ah,

Sleep!' (Le Gallienne); the fanciful and exotic little cycle 'A Lute of

Jade' (Crammer-Byng), and many others. Miss Branscombe has written a

very spirited 'Festival March' for orchestra, which was produced at the

Peterboro Festival in 1914; an extended _Concertstück_ for piano and

orchestra; part-songs for women's voices; and a number of compositions

for violin and piano. Miss Branscombe is Canadian by birth.

Alexander Russell is the composer of a number of songs of strong

emotional appeal. He first became known for his setting of Lanier's

'Sunset,' a warmly colored work, but somewhat over-Wagnerized. 'My

Heaven' (Harry S. Lee) also has lyrical intensity and bears out the

chromatic scheme of the other. 'The Sacred Fire' (Alice Duer Miller)

has more distinction of mood as well as greater unity of design,

and 'Expectation' (John Hay) also shows an advance in style and

individuality. 'In Fountain Court' (Arthur Symons) is perhaps his most

mature and characteristic expression. Among other songs are 'Elegy on

the Death of a Mad Dog' (Goldsmith), 'The Prayer Perfect' (Riley), 'My

True Love Lies Asleep' (Lizette Reese), and 'A Gypsy Song' (Braley).

Russell's work shows chiefly the influence of the modern German school.

James Philip Dunn is a militant ultra-modern realist. He was first

known by an extremely vigorous quintet for pianoforte and strings,

in G minor, which was heard at one of the concerts of the New York

Manuscript Society. It is of considerable thematic, and particularly

of dramatic, interest, though scarcely revealing a settled style.

Strauss, Wagner, Tschaikowsky, and Puccini have all influenced him

strongly, with Strauss leading, but what ultimate personality will

issue from this strenuously boiling melting-pot it is too early to

say. The far from bashful realism of Dunn's setting of Poe's 'Annabel

Lee,' for voice and orchestra, which was sung by Frank Ormsby at a

People's Symphony Concert in the season of 1913-14, somewhat shocked

the sensibilities of the critics, for futurism was still merely a name

(Schoenberg's quartet not yet having arrived on the scene) and realism

could still hold terrors for the sensitive. The goal of realism is

the stage, and so in fact Dunn's latest works are designed for the

theatre. They are called 'Lyric Scenes' and consist of two short and

superlatively intense musical stage episodes, 'The Fountain,' after

Charles McMillan, and the grewsome 'A Kiss in the Dark,' after Maurice

Lavelle. They are truly amazing in musical structure and emotional

content and may well be considered to represent the _dernier cri_

in realism, after which can come only the deluge--or futurism. The

composer has also a sonata for violin and piano in G major and a piano

tarantella and minuet.

Alexander Hull, whose great quantity of work is accessible as yet

only through one book of ten songs, is a composer who is likely to be

heard more of in the future. These songs reveal influences ranging

from Schubert to Hugo Wolf, but, of much greater importance, they

reveal also a richly endowed creative musical personality, even if

one that has only begun to find itself in terms of a matured art.

One will look far for a clearer spiritual beauty than that of the

'Wanderer's Night Song' (Goethe), or for a fleeting spontaneity and

dissolving charm surpassing that of the little 'Blue, Blue, Floweret

Mine.' 'My Love Is Lovelier than the Sprays' (Ezra Pound) has moments

of magical and haunting beauty, though it runs the risk that Hull not

infrequently takes of sacrificing simplicity and clarity of the voice

part to harmonic interest in the accompaniment. 'Within the Convent

Close' (Wilbur Underwood) reveals the composer's power to establish

and maintain a mood and it also hints at the unexploited possibilities

of the secondary seventh chords. Hull experiments; he is quite willing

to be unsuccessful, but he insists upon the essay and is thus strongly

creative. He admits many influences, and therefore will find his

own mature style tardily. He has written over one hundred songs, a

symphony, a suite for string orchestra, a fantasia for orchestra with

piano, violin compositions, a suite for piano, a piano sonata, choral,

and other works.

A. Walter Kramer has put out a considerable number of works in small

forms, ranging in tendency from the earlier to the later German and

deriving influence occasionally from French sources. He is an eclectic,

but from the German standpoint. His works are chiefly songs and

string pieces. Among the former are: 'I Dreamed and Wept a-Dreaming'

(Heine), very German in scheme, albeit sufficiently modern; 'In Dreams'

(Prudhomme), a work of ultra-modern tendencies which follows its title

well and successfully establishes its mood; 'Come to Me' (Christina

Rossetti), a mood of spiritual exaltation, which presents an avoidance

of traditional harmonic formulæ not always to be found in Kramer's

music; the languorous and somewhat Debussyish 'A Nocturne,' and 'Bes'

ob All,' a song in negro character based upon a melody originally

composed for violin, which suggests MacDowell in mood-quality. For

violin and piano is the characteristic _Intermède Arabe_, a fervent

'Elegy' of melodic warmth and breadth, and other works. Beyond these

are works for piano, 'cello and piano, string orchestra, organ, and a

number of part-songs.

So rapidly and in such numbers do new American composers appear in

these days that both omission and disproportion must occur in dealing

with the coming generation in any such chapter as the present. A

few names may be mentioned, however, of composers who have given

indications of having serious aims. Francis Hendricks has written piano

compositions that are not without charm and modernity of style, as well

as songs. Charles T. Griffes, in songs and piano pieces, has shown a

refined appreciation of modern ideals. Deems Taylor was heard at the

MacDowell Festival in 1914, with an admirable ballad, 'The Highwayman,'

for solo baritone, women's chorus, and orchestra. At the same festival

was heard a prelude by Edward Ballantine to Herman Hagedorn's play

'The Delectable Forest,' a work regarded as subtle and imaginative,

and two movements of Lewis M. Isaacs' ballet suite, 'Atalanta.'

Chalmers Clifton's suite for trumpet and orchestra has been heard at a

MacDowell Festival. Leo Ornstein, in his 'Preludes' and 'Impressions

of Notre Dame,' for piano, has out-moded Schoenberg and Stravinsky and

inaugurated the school of post-futurism.

American nationalists are not to be sought exclusively among the

native-born, as the example of Dvořák shows. Carlos Troyer, an Alsatian

of long residence in America, has made a significant contribution

to the nationalistic phase of native music in his songs of the Zuñi

Indians, collected during his sojourns with that extraordinary tribe.

Among them are the 'Zuñian Lullaby,' 'Sunrise Call of the Zuñis,' 'The

Coming of Montezuma,' 'Great Rain Dance of the Zuñis,' 'Festive Sun

Dance,' and 'Hymn to the Sun.' If Troyer has not escaped Germanizing

the accompaniments of these songs, neither has he obscured their

essential character.

On the side of negro music contributions of great value have been made

by two gifted representatives of the race, Harry Burleigh and Will

Marion Cook. Burleigh is known by a number of original songs, sincere

in their feeling and of much melodic and harmonic appeal, among them

the favorite 'Jean' and the very passionate 'Elysium.' In 'Plantation

Melodies Old and New' he has given excellent settings to seven highly

characteristic negro songs, two of them, 'My Merlindy Brown' and 'Negro

Lullaby,' being original, poems for the group being provided by R. E.

Phillips, J. E. Campbell, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Of much original

poetic fancy, as well as valuable in its presentation of various

negro motives in effective development, is his piano suite, 'In the

Southland,' which has MacDowellish touches about it. There are also

'Saracen Songs,' 'Five Songs of Lawrence Hope,' and arrangements of

songs in H. E. Krehbiel's book, 'Afro-American Folk Songs.'

The work of Will Marion Cook presents some quite extraordinary

qualities and in part deals with characteristics of the negro which

have hitherto found little or no expression in terms of modern musical

art. Such a thing as his song, 'A Negro Sermon,' was certainly never

set forth in print before. It reflects the quintessence of the

drollery and humor of the primitive negro in religion, and follows

with prodigious alertness his swift and erratic, though deeply

sincere, zig-zaggings of thought and mood. It is an altogether amazing

production, a psychological musical achievement. The same is to be

said of 'An Explanation,' a negro court scene in the form of a song.

From such unusual works as these to straightforward ragtime Cook's

songs cover a wide range of style. The 'Rain Song' is whimsical and

forceful, with elemental emotion and impulse, and 'Swim Along' is full

of instinctive joy of life.

VI

No composer in America has so completely arrived at an authentic and

mature musical individuality along the line of ultra-modern European

developments as Charles Martin Loeffler. Though of Alsatian birth,

his long residence in this country has identified him with American

musical life. Too much the artist to theorize about his art, he has

enunciated no creed, although he has been known to suggest the idea

that the composer's musical personality is largely constituted by

the assimilation of all that is sympathetic to him in the range of

his musical observation. Applying this principle to his own work, it

is plain that his closest affiliation is with the school of modern

France, although the work of no American composer is less closely

identified than his with that of any one individual of the modern

French group. There speaks through Loeffler's music a distinct

personality, one that lives upon a high plane of poetic imagination,

and whose intuitions are subtle and refined in a wholly extraordinary

degree. Here is no convenient falling back upon modish scale effects

or generic modern harmonies, but a pressing forward to the keenest and

most poignant individualism. If it is an individuality that insists

upon a veritable aristocracy of emotional and psychological subtlety,

a total repudiation of the primitive passions which bind certain

great composers to mother earth and lead them to brave the charge

of occasional banality, on the other hand, it is one which gives an

intense and unvitiated delight to those minds which are able to follow

its excursions into the remote and unwonted regions of the soul.

'Tuneful' Loeffler's music cannot be called, but it sings constantly

in its own preordained and peculiar way, and its motives are often

haunting and always distinguished. Loeffler's literary researches

are incredible in extent and singularity, and have undoubtedly had

a far-reaching effect upon the character of his genius, as has also

his intimate knowledge of and devotion to the Gregorian chant, of the

austere arcanum of which he is a supreme master. He is a consummate

master of orchestration and his orchestral works have been heard with

most of the great orchestras of the world.

His serious claims as a composer were first made known through his

_Veillées de l'Ukraine_, for violin and orchestra, a suite based

upon tales by Gogol, which was heard in Boston, with the composer

as soloist, in 1891, although an earlier string quartet in A minor

had been previously heard in Philadelphia. A sextet for two violins,

two violas, and two 'cellos next came into notice, and after that a

'Fantastic' concerto for 'cello and orchestra. The 'Divertimento in

A Minor,' for violin and orchestra, the composer played at a Boston

symphony concert in 1895. Loeffler's fame has rested chiefly upon

his remarkably imaginative tone-poems, _La Mort de Tintagiles_,

after Maeterlinck, _La Bonne Chanson_ and _La Villanelle du Diable_,

after Verlaine and Rollinat, respectively, and the 'Pagan Poem,'

after Virgil, which includes a piano and three trumpets behind the

scenes. The songs are exquisite reflections of the composer's subtle

imagination; among them are: _Harmonies du Soir_, _Dansons la Gigue_,

_La Cloche fêlée_, _Timbres Oubliés_, 'The Hosting of the Sidhe,' 'The

Host of the Air,' and 'To Helen.' There are also an octet for strings,

clarinets, and harp; a quintet for three violins, viola, and 'cello;

two rhapsodies for oboe, viola, and piano; 'By the Waters of Babylon,'

for women's chorus, two flutes, 'cello, harp, and organ; and other

works. The composer was for many years second concert master of the

Boston Symphony Orchestra, and makes his home in Boston and Medfield,

Mass.

* * * * *

Extreme ultra-modernism, stopping, however, on the hither side of

futurism, has not been pushed farther in America than in the very

remarkable work of Carl Engel. Except that he is himself, he might be

regarded as a disciple of Loeffler. His published work consists of

several groups of songs, in which the voice is treated in the modern

French mode of lyrical declamation over an accompanying tone-poem

of high refinement of mood, a positively diabolical ingenuity and

subtlety of invention, and impeccable technical finish. In this

scheme--determined by the most recent Gallic influences--Engel goes his

individual way, producing work that is always interesting and often

unusual in both originality and beauty. Of the six _Chansons intimes_,

on poems by Jean Moréas, one is struck particularly by _A l'Océan_,

which is extraordinarily bold in its assertion of tragic oceanic

emotion. _Rions_ is a fine piece of bitter ultra-modern irony--a

companion piece to Loeffler's _Dansons la Gigue_. _Trois Epigrammes_,

on poems by Paul Mariéton, have much of poignancy and eloquence and

weave a dizzying web of ingenious ultra-modernism. One thinks--how

far from Americanism is this remarkable work! Of 'Two Lyrics,'

poems by Amy Lowell, 'The Sea Shell' is of most ingratiating charm,

particularly with respect to its lilting motion; and here the composer

has allowed himself to write a _tune_! 'Three Sonnets' present _Lecture

du Soir_ (Chantavoine), an excellent example of Engel's capacity

for originality, _Dors, ma Belle_ (Marsolleau), and _En Voiture_

(Ajalbert), all of recent date. 'Four Lyrics' (poems by Cora Fabbri)

are earlier songs and show the composer's point of departure.

Another extreme ultra-modern of Gallic musical sympathies is Henry

Eichheim, who is known by a group of 'Seven Songs,' a showing not great

in quantity but of a quality revealing at once a convincing distinction

of achievement. It is not, however, the emotional refinements of the

French poets to which Eichheim responds, but to the alluring and

shadowy tints of the 'Celtic Twilight.' From Yeats he has chosen 'The

Heart of the Woman' and 'Aedh Wishes His Beloved were Dead'; from Fiona

Macleod, 'When the Dew is Falling,' 'The Undersong,' 'Across the Silent

Stream,' and 'The Lament of Ian the Proud'; while he has made a single

departure in the 'Autumn Song' of Rossetti. Individual and subtly felt

as these songs are, Eichheim is concerned not so much with sheer or

extreme ingenuity of means as with the attainment of the expression

of deep and dreamful moods, modern in poetic expression, and hence

demanding an equally modern musical treatment. This the composer gives

them, finding a deeply sincere expression through the highly modern

means employed. Perhaps the most eloquent of the 'Seven Songs' is

'Aedh Wishes His Beloved were Dead,' its solemn march of rich harmonic

progressions conveying an emotion of singular depth and beauty.

Eichheim has also written three symphonic poems.

* * * * *

Victor Herbert has made departures into the realms of serious music,

notably of late years, in two grand operas, 'Natoma,' in three

acts, and 'Madeleine.' 'Natoma,' the text of which is by Joseph D.

Redding, was first produced on February 23, 1911, in Philadelphia

and subsequently in New York and Chicago. It deals with a story of

Spanish and Indian life in California in the early part of the last

century. The opera has had a very considerable measure of success and

reveals Herbert's skillful handling of the orchestra, his power in

broad concerted forms, and his unsuspected knowledge of Indian music.

'Madeleine,' produced at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in the

season of 1913-14, was not regarded with an equal favor.

Besides some already included in this chapter there are other composers

of foreign birth who either live or have sojourned here, as well as

American composers who have preferred to live chiefly abroad.

Walter Morse Rummel, who makes his home in Berlin and Paris, has made

for himself an individual and significant place in modern music. The

tonal emancipation which Debussy gained through a basic devotion to

the Gregorian chant, Rummel with increasing success seeks and finds

in certain mediæval songs of the folk, in particular those of the

troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. His earlier works,

for example the 'Five Songs,' dating from 1906, seem conventional in

scheme, although one notes their essential refinement and _esprit_.

The 'Ten Songs for Children, Young and Old,' are of another stamp.

Innocently simple in appearance, they reveal on closer observation all

the sophistication of a profound devotee of the ecclesiastical modes,

or, it may be, the spontaneous utterance of one with whom these have

become 'second nature.' Like 'Alice in Wonderland,' they will speak

with equal pertinence to children and grown-ups. 'A Fairy Suite,' for

piano, being 'Five Short Stories Preceded by a Prologue and Followed

by a Moral,' are an achievement of similar intent, scintillating with

fancy, charm, humor, and modern interest. As the 'Prologue' and 'Moral'

are practically identical, the purpose of the latter would seem to be

to exhort us always, in art, to return to our main subject.

'Hesternæ Rosæ' consists of a collection of troubadour and other

mediæval songs, rhythmically reconstructed from the original neumes,

and hence hypothetical. They are profoundly interesting and merit close

study. Rummel has composed also a quartet for strings, a violin sonata,

for piano a 'Prelude,' 'Sea Voices,' and 'Seven Little Impressions for

a Simple Mind,' and many songs.

Hugo Kaun, an American resident of Berlin, has been a prodigious

producer, his work being in keeping with the modern German musical

scheme. He has much structural power, a fertile imagination, and a

considerable sense of beauty. His chief works are three symphonies, a

piano concerto, a violin concerto, a _Fantasiestück_ for violin, eight

chamber music works, five symphonic poems, and an enormous quantity of

songs, the best known, perhaps, being 'My Native Land,' and many short

piano pieces. He has also written two oratorios, the most important

being 'Mother Earth.'

Paul Allen, of Boston, has lived chiefly in Italy, where, as one would

expect, he has produced operas. Two of these are 'The Philtre' and

'Milda,' each in one act. They follow the modern Italian operatic

scheme and show the composer's close sympathy with the spirit of

modern Italian stage music. He has written extensively for the piano

also, among his writings in this form being an _Alla Tarantella_, an

excellent and refined little work, sensitive to the genius of Italian

folk-music, and a 'Meditation' having remarkable depth of feeling, a

work emerging from a real emotion and expressed in unusually beautiful

terms.

Kurt Schindler, of German birth, and latterly a resident of New York,

has put out about twenty-five songs possessing charm and simplicity,

though not of a very strong modernity. One of the best, and a work

of true beauty, is the 'Faery Song' on Keats' poem. 'Adoration' is

another of the Keats group, and in another group the composer has set

poems of Wilde, Swinburne, and--a strange third to companion such a

pair--Meredith. He has also 'Five Folk-Song Paraphrases,' the originals

drawn from Italy, Russia, and France.

Platon Brounoff, a Russian living in New York, has composed, among

other works, an overture, 'Russia,' which has been performed at

the Central Park concerts under Arnold Volpe's direction, and a

characteristic piano suite, 'In the Village.'

The _Suite Fantastique_ for piano and orchestra by the pianist Ernest

Schelling has been heard in New York. It is a clever and brilliant

work, and makes ingenious use of 'Yankee Doodle,' 'Dixie,' and the

'Swanee River.'

Arthur Fickenscher, at present living in Berlin, has developed a highly

refined and highly modernized art of which more is likely to be heard

later. One of his most important works is a setting of Rossetti's

'Willowwood' for chorus and orchestra.

A. F.