Is anything true? I hope not. At dinner the other evening a lady attempted to prove to me that there were standards by which beauty could be judged and rules by which it could be constructed. She was unsuccessful. IV It has occurred to me that Mr. Aldrich meant that he wanted the juxtaposition of notes explained from beginning to end. Inspiration is not always conscious ... one feels in the end whether such a collocation is inevitable or not ... I wonder if Beethoven could have explained one of his last quartets or piano sonatas. I doubt it. Of course, on the other hand, Wagner explained and explained and explained. V I am afraid that this quality alone, the fact that the music needs explanation, is not the rock on which Mr. Aldrich splits, so to speak. He writes somewhere else in this same article: “All he asks of his listeners is to forget all they know about string quartet music.” Now this is really too much. That is exactly what Strawinsky does, and why shouldn’t he? Has not every great composer done as much? To quote Ernest Newman again (this time from his book “Richard Strauss”), “All the music of the giants of the past expresses no more than a fragment of what music can and some day will express. With each new generation it must discover and reveal some new secret of the universe and of man’s heart; and as the thing uttered varies, the way of uttering it must vary also. There is only one rational definition of good ‘form’ in music--that which expresses most succinctly and most perfectly the state of soul in which the idea originated; and as moods and ideas change, so must forms.” “The true creator strives, in reality, after _perfection_ only,” writes Busoni, in “A New Æsthetic of Music,” “and through bringing this into harmony with _his own_ individuality, a new law arises without premeditation.” The very greatness of Beethoven is due to the fact that he made a perfect wedding of form and idea. His forms (in which he broke with tradition in several important points) were evolved out of his ideas. Now the very writers who give Beethoven the credit for having accomplished this successful revolution and who write enthusiastically of Gluck’s “reform of the opera,” object to any contemporary instances of this spirit (Maurice Ravel “corrects” with great care, I am told, the exercises of his pupils. “He who breaks rules must first know them,” he says. And I have no disposition to quarrel with this sort of reverence although I think it is sometimes carried too far. However the critic attempts to “correct” the finished pupil’s work, from the work of the past--a sad and impossible task). Why in the name of goodness should not Strawinsky, or any other modern composer, for that matter, be allowed to make us forget everything we know about string quartets, if he is able? Some of us would be grateful for the sensation. Leo Ornstein in a recent article said, “The very first step which the composer must be given the privilege of