This idea of natural expression becomes associated in any great composer’s mind with another idea, the horror of the _cliché_. Each new giant desires to express himself without resorting to the thousand and one formulas which have been more or less in use since the “golden age” of music (whenever that was). Natural expression implies to a certain extent the abandonment of the _cliché_, for, under this principle, if a rule or a habit is weighed and found wanting it is immediately discarded. “Routine (_cliché_) is highly esteemed and frequently required; in musical ‘officialdom’ it is a _sine qua non_,” writes Busoni. “That routine in music should exist at all, and furthermore that it can be nominated as a condition in the musician’s bond, is another proof of the narrow confines of our musical art. Routine signifies the acquisition of a modicum of experience and art craft, and their application to all cases which may occur; hence, there must be an astounding number of analogous cases. Now I like to imagine a species of art-praxis wherein each case should be a new one, an exception.” Even so early a composer (using early in a loose sense) as Schumann found it unnecessary, at times, to close a piece with the tonic; and many other composers have disregarded the rule since, leaving the ear hanging in the air, so to speak. Is there any more reason why all pieces should end on the tonic than that all books should end happily or all pictures be painted in black and white? In music which Mozart wrote at the age of four there are chords of the second (and they occur in music before Mozart). In books of the period you can read of the horror with which ears at the beginning of the nineteenth century received consecutive fifths. Some of the modern French composers have disposed of the _cliché_ of a symphony in four movements. Chausson, Franck, and Dukas have written symphonies in three parts. What composer (even the most academic) ever followed the letter of a precept if he found a better way of expressing himself? Moussorgsky avoided _cliché_ as he would have avoided the plague. He took all the short cuts possible. There are no preambles and addendas, or other doddering concessions to scientific art in his music dramas and his songs. He gives the words their natural accent and the voice its natural inflections. Death is not always rewarded with blows on the big drum. The composer sometimes expresses the end, quite simply, in silence. In all the arts the horror of _cliché_ asserts itself so violently indeed that we find Robert Ross (“Masks and Phases”) assailing Walter Pater for such a fall from grace as the use of the phrase, “rebellious masses of black hair.” Of course some small souls are so busy defying _cliché_, with no adequate reason for doing so, that they make themselves ridiculous. And as an example of this preoccupation I may tell an anecdote related to me by George Moore. “For a time,” he said, “Augusta Holmès was interested in an opera she