Among our best song writers are many women:—Harriet Ware, Gena Branscombe, Alice Barnett, Fay Foster, Eleanor Freer, Mana Zucca (who has written also a piano concerto, and piano pieces), Rhea Silberta, Ethel Glenn Hier (piano pieces and songs), Fannie Dillon (piano pieces and violin compositions), Mabel Wood Hill (songs, chamber music and an arrangement of two preludes and fugues of Bach for string orchestra), Lilly Strickland, Mabel Daniels, Katherine Ruth Heyman (songs, many of them in old Greek modes, and a book, _Relation of Ultramodern Music to the Archaic_), Rosalie Housman (songs, piano pieces and a complete Hebrew Temple Service), Gertrude Ross, Mary Turner Salter, Florence Parr Gere and Pearl Curran, writer of several popular successes. And although she is not a composer of art songs, we must not forget Carrie Jacobs Bond, whose _End of a Perfect Day_ has sold in the millions, and her songs for little children have brought joy to many. ONE OF OUR MOST SCHOLARLY MUSICIANS Another Boston musician and composer, teacher of piano and composition is Arthur Whiting (1861), nephew of the organist and composer George Whiting. He has made a specialty of harpsichord music, and plays charmingly on the little old instrument. Since 1895, he has lived in New York City. CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER—FIRST IMPRESSIONIST IN AMERICA Charles Martin Loeffler is a composer belonging to a different class from any of the Boston group just mentioned. Loeffler is French by birth, as he was born in Alsace in 1861, French in his musical training and in his musical sympathies. For forty-two years he has lived in Boston, twenty of them at the second desk (next to the concertmaster) of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He was the first composer to write in this country, the kind of music that existed at the end of the 19th century in France,—the music of Fauré, Dukas, Chausson and Debussy. The seed he planted did not fall on fertile soil, for all his fellow musicians as well as the orchestral conductors, from whose hands the public received its music, were Germans and German trained. They knew their “three B’s,” their Wagner and even the French Berlioz, but Loeffler brought something different, something disturbing, and was not easy to place. His music belonged neither to the classical nor to the romantic school. Not only in America did this new French music have a fight, but on its own ground in France was it misunderstood! But you have seen from Monteverde to Wagner that the path of true innovation never ran smooth!