Still another point is raised by Mr. Aldrich. I quote from the “New York Times” of December 8, 1915; the reference is to the second string quartet of David Stanley Smith, played by the Kneisel Quartet (the italics are mine): “Mr. Smith does not hesitate at drastic dissonance _when it results from the leading of his part writing_.” There at last we have the real nigger in the woodpile. The relation between keys is so remote, the tonalities are so inexplicable in a modern Strawinsky or Schoenberg work that the brain, prepared with a list of scales, refuses to take in the natural impression that the ear receives. This sort of criticism reminds me of a line which is quoted from some London journal by William Wallace in “The Threshold of Music,” “The whole work is singularly lacking in contrapuntal interest and depends solely for such effect as it achieves upon certain emotional impressions of harmony and colour.” And, nearer home, I culled the following from the “New York Sun” of December 12, 1915 (Mr. W. J. Henderson’s column), “This is what is the matter with the futurists or post-impressionists in music. They are tone colourists and that is all.” (Amusingly enough Mr. Henderson begins his remarks by praising Joseph Pennell for writing an article in which the post-impressionist painters were given a drubbing; this article is treated with contumely and scorn by the art critic of the “Sun” on the page opposite that on which Mr. Henderson’s article appears.) In all these cases you find men complaining because a composer has done exactly what he started out to do. F. Balilla Pratella in one of his futurist manifestos discusses this point (the translation is my own), “The fugue, a composition based on counterpoint par excellence, is full of (such) artifices even when it achieves its artistic balance in the works of the great German Sebastian Bach. Soul, intellectuality, and instinct are here fused in a given form, in a given manifestation of art, an art of its own times, historical and strictly connected with the life, faith, and culture of that particular period. Why then should we be compelled or asked to live it over again at the distance of several centuries?” And later, “We proclaim as an essential principle of our futurist revolution that counterpoint and fugue, stupidly considered as one of the most important branches of musical learning, are in our eyes only the ruins of the old science of polyphony which extends from the Flemish school to Bach. We replace them by harmonic polyphony, logical fusion of counterpoint and harmony, which allows musicians to escape the needless difficulty of dividing their efforts in two opposing cultures, one dead and the other contemporary, and entirely irreconcilable, because they are the fruits of two different sensibilities.” To quote Busoni; again: “How important, indeed, are ‘Third,’ ‘Fifth,’ and ‘Octave’! How strictly we divide ‘consonances’ from ‘dissonances’--_in a sphere