Igor Strawinsky has not been deaf to the blandishments of these composers. He has used the _leit-motiv_ (sparingly) in both _The Firebird_ and _Petrouchka_. He abandoned it in _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ (1913) and in _The Nightingale_ (1914). His powers of representation are as great as those of Strauss; it is only necessary to recall the music of the bird in _The Firebird_, his orchestral piece, _Fireworks_, which received warm praise from a manufacturer of pyrotechnics, and the street organ music in _Petrouchka_. Later he conceived the mission of music to be something different. “La musique est trop bête,” he said once ironically, “pour exprimer autre chose que la musique.” In such an extraordinary work as _The Nightingale_ we find him making little or no attempt at representation. The bird does not sing like the little brown warbler; instead Strawinsky has endeavoured to write music which would give the _feeling_ of the bird’s song and the effect it made on the people in his lyric drama to the auditors in the stalls of the opera house. As for Strauss’s use of orchestral colour the German is the merest tyro when compared to the Russian. There is some use of the whole-tone scale in _The Firebird_, and elsewhere in Strawinsky, but it is not a predominant use of it. In this “conte dansé” he also suggests the _Pelléas et Mélisande_ of Debussy in his continent use of sound and the mystery and esotericism of his effect. Strawinsky is more of an expert than Moussorgsky; he handles his medium more freely (has any one ever handled it better?) but he still preaches the older Russian doctrine of truth of expression, a doctrine which implies the curt dismissal of all idea of padding. But all these composers and their contemporaries, and the composers who came before them, have one quality in common; they all use the orchestra of their time, or a bigger one. Strauss, to be sure, introduces a number of new instruments, but he still utilizes a vast number of violins and violas massed against the other instruments, diminishing in number according to the volume of sound each makes. He divides his strings continually, of course; they do not all play alike as the violins, say, in _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_, but they often all play at once.