Because of their lack of technical skill many composers in this country never venture into the broader fields of composition at all. As a class, we write short piano and violin pieces, or songs. We write them because we do earnestly desire to write something and because they do not demand the technical resourcefulness and sustained inspiration that we lack. Parenthetically, I don’t for a moment mean to imply that clumsy workmanship and sterility are unknown in Europe, that we are all mediocrities and they are all _Uebermenschen_. As a matter of fact, we have to-day probably much more creative musical talent, if less brains, than Europe; but, talent for talent, the European is infinitely better trained. This, at least in part, because he respects theory and has a desire for technical proficiency that we almost totally lack. Then too, the European has some cultural background. There is a curious lack of inter-communication among the arts in this country. The painter seems to feel that literature has nothing direct to give him, the writer, that music and painting are not in his line, and the musician--decidedly the worst of the three in this respect--that his own art has no connection with anything. The American composer’s most complete failure is intellectual. The fact that he writes music seldom warrants the assumption that he has the artist’s point of view at all. He is likely to be a much less interesting person than one’s iceman. Ten to one, he never visits a picture gallery or a sculpture exhibition, his taste in the theatre is probably that of the tired business man, and what little reading he does is likely to be confined to trade papers, _Snappy Stories_, and best-sellers. He takes no interest in politics, economics, or sociology, either national or international (how could they possibly concern him?), and probably cannot discuss even music with pleasure or profit to anybody. The natural inference that might be drawn from this diatribe--that the composing of music in this country is confined exclusively to the idiot classes--is not strictly true. Plenty of American musicians are intelligent and cultured men as well; but that is not America’s fault. She is just as cordial to the stupid ones. And the widespread impotence and technical sloppiness of American music is the inevitable result of the American attitude toward music and to the anomalous position the art occupies in this country.