On the whole, I think, I should have found it impossible to write this article which, with a new light shining on my paper, is dancing from under my darting typewriter keys, if I had not stumbled by good luck into the camp of the enemy. For I find misunderstanding, lack of sympathy, and enmity towards the new music to a certain degree inspirational. These qualities, projected, have crystallized impressions in my mind, which might, under other circumstances, have remained vague and, in a sense, I think I may make bold to say, they have made it possible for me to synthesize to a greater degree than has hitherto been attempted, the various stimuli and progressive gestures of modern music. I can more clearly say now _why_ I like it. (If I were to tell others how to like it I should be forced to resort to a single sentence: “Open your ears”.) A good deal of this new insight has come to me through assiduous perusal of Mr. Richard Aldrich’s comment on musical doings in the columns of the “New York Times.” Mr. Aldrich, like many another, has been bewildered and annoyed by a good deal of the modern music played (Heaven knows that there is little enough modern music played in New York. Up to date [April 16, 1916] there has been nothing of Arnold Schoenberg performed this season later than his _Pelléas und Mélisande_ and his _Kammersymphonie_; of Strawinsky--aside from the three slight pieces for string quartet--nothing later than _Petrouchka_. Such new works as John Alden Carpenter’s _Adventures in a Perambulator_ and Enrique Granados’s _Goyescas_--as an opera--do not seriously overtax the critical ear) but he has done more than some others by way of expressing the causes of this bewilderment and this annoyance. Some critics neglect the subject altogether but Mr. Aldrich at least attempts to be explanatory. My first excerpt from his writings is clipped from an article in the “New York Times” of December 5, 1915, devoted to the string quartet music of Strawinsky, performed by the Flonzaleys at Æolian Hall in New York on the evening of November 30: “So far as this particular type of ‘futurist’ music is concerned it seems to be conditioned on an accompaniment of something else to explain it from beginning to end.”