We may be on the verge of a still greater revolution in art than any through which we have yet passed; new banners may be unfurled, and new strongholds captured. I admit that the idea gives me pleasure. Try to admit as much to yourself. Go hear the new music; listen to it and see if you can’t enjoy it. Perhaps you can’t. At any rate you will find in time that you won’t listen to second-rate imitations of the giant works of the past any longer. Your ears will make progress in spite of you and I shouldn’t wonder at all if five years more would make Schoenberg and Strawinsky and Ornstein a trifle old-fashioned.... The Austrian already has a little of the academy dust upon him. _New York, April 16, 1916._ A New Principle in Music A New Principle in Music Although Igor Strawinsky plainly proclaimed himself a genius in _The Firebird_ (1909-10), it was in _Petrouchka_ (1910-11) that he began the experiment which established a new principle in music. In these “scènes burlesques” he discovered the advantages of a new use of the modern orchestra, completely upsetting the old academic ideas about “balance of tone,” and proving to his own satisfaction the value of “pure tone,” in the same sense that the painter speaks of pure colour. And in this work he broke away from the standards not only of Richard Strauss, the Wagner follower, but also of such innovators as Modeste Moussorgsky and Claude Debussy. Strauss, following Wagner’s theory of the _leit-motiv_, rounded out the form of the tone-poem, carried the principle of representation in music a few steps farther than his master, gave new colours to old instruments, and broadened the scope of the modern orchestra so that it might include new ones (in one of his symphonies Gustav Mahler was content with 150 men!). Moussorgsky (although his work preceded that of Strauss, the general knowledge of it is modern), working along entirely different lines, strove for truthful utterance and achieved a mode of expression which usually seems inevitable. Debussy endowed music with novel tints derived from the extensive, and almost exclusive, use of what is called the whole-tone scale, and instead of forcing his orchestra to make more noise he constantly repressed it (in all of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ there is but one climax of sound and in _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ and his other orchestral works he is equally continent in the use of dynamics).