Under the circumstances it seems a bit thick to jump on Strawinsky for writing music which has to be explained. Such pieces as _Fireworks_ or the _Scherzo Fantastique_ need no more extended explanation than the titles give them. His three pieces for string quartet were listed without programme at the Flonzaley concert and might have been played that way, I think, without causing the heavens to fall. But Strawinsky had told some one that their general title was _Grotesques_ and that he had composed each of them with a programme in mind, which was divulged. When the music was played, in the circumstances, what he was driving at was as plain as A. B. C. There was no further demand made on the auditor than that he prepare himself, as Schumann asked auditors to prepare themselves to listen to the _Carneval_, by thinking of the titles. In Strawinsky’s opera, _The Nightingale_, the text of the opera serves as the programme. There are no representative themes; there is no “working-out.” You are not required to remember _leit-motive_ in order to familiarize your emotions with the proper capers to cut at particular moments when these _motive_ are repeated. You are asked simply to follow the course of the lyric drama with open ears, open mind, and open heart. Albert Gleizes, the post-impressionist painter, once told me that he considered the title an essential part of a picture. “It is a _point de départ_,” he said. “In painting a picture I always have some idea or object in mind in the beginning. In my completed picture I may have wandered far away from this. Now the title gives the spectator the advantage of starting where I started.” A title to a musical composition gives an auditor a similar advantage. No doubt Strawinsky’s _Fireworks_ would make a nice blaze without the name but the title gives us a picture to begin with, just as Wagner gives us scenery and text and action (to say nothing of a handbook of representative themes) to explain the music of _Die Walküre_....