The successors of Cézanne (some of them) have gone much farther. They draw us a few bones and expect us to reconstruct the woman, body and soul, after the fashion of a professor of anatomy reconstructing an ichthyosaurus. Strawinsky and some other modern musicians have gone as far; they have left out the tum-ti-tums and twilly-wigs which connect the pregnant phrases in their music.... This does not signify that they do not _think_ them, sometimes, but it is not necessary for any one with a receptive ear (not an _expectant_ ear, unless it be an ear which expects to hear something pleasant!) to do so. In fact this kind of an auditor appreciates these short cuts of composers, gives thanks to God for them. Surprise is one of the keenest emotions that music has in its power to give us (even Hadyn and Weber discovered that!). It is only the pedants and the critics, who, after all, do not sit through all the long symphonies, who are annoyed by these attempts at concentration and condensation. (I say the pedants but I must include the Philistines. It is really _cliché_ which makes certain music “popular.” The public as a whole really prefers music based on _cliché_, with a melody in which the end is foreordained almost from the first bar. Of course in time public taste is changed.... The transition is slow ... but the composer who follows public taste instead of leading it soon drops out of hearing. The _cliché_ of to-day is not the _cliché_ of day before yesterday. According to Philip Hale, Napoleon, then first consul [1800] said to Luigi Cherubini, “I am very fond of Paisiello’s music; it is gentle, peaceful. You have great talent, but your accompaniments are too loud.” Cherubini replied, “Citizen Consul, I have conformed to the taste of the French.” Napoleon persisted, “Your music is too loud; let us talk of Paisiello’s which lulls me gently.” “I understand,” answered Cherubini, “you prefer music that does not prevent you from dreaming of affairs of state.”) Strawinsky, working gradually, not with the intention to astonish but with no fear of doing so, dropping superfluities, and all _cliché_ of the studio whatsoever, arrives at a perfectly natural form of expression in his lyric drama, _The Nightingale_, in which there is no working-out or development of themes; the music is intended to comment upon, to fill with a bigger meaning, the action as it proceeds, without resorting to tricks which require mental effort on the part of the auditor. The composer does not wish to burden him with any more mental effort than the mere listening to the piece requires and he strikes to the soul with the poignancy of his expression. (The foregoing may easily be misunderstood. It does not mean necessarily that there is no polyphony, that there are no parts leading hither and thither in the music of Strawinsky. It does not mean that dissonance has become an end in itself with this composer. It simply means that he has let his inspiration take the form natural