One always feels in them the intelligence setting forth deliberately to discover new musical form. For all their apparent freedom, they are full of the oldest musical procedures, abound in canonic imitations, in augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts of grizzled contrapuntal manoevers. They are head-music of the most uncompromising sort. The "Five Orchestral Pieces" abound in purely theoretical combinations of instruments, combinations that do not at all sound. "Herzgewaechse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck made contemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon the singer, asks the voice to hold high F _pppp_, to leap swiftly across the widest intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accompaniment of celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is in the piano-music that the sonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one as nothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of the works of Schoenberg's second period made in the hope of arriving at definiteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of the synagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law. The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather more to the sort of music that has no more relation with yesteryear than it has with this or next. They belong to the sort that never has youth and vigor, is old the moment it is produced. Their essential inexpressiveness makes almost virtueless the characteristics which Schoenberg has carried into them from out his fecund period. The severity and boldness of contour, so biting in the quartet, becomes almost without significance in them. If there is such a thing as rhythmless music, would not the stagnant orchestra of the "Five Orchestral Pieces" exemplify it? The alternately rich and acidulous color is faded; an icy green predominates. And, curiously enough, throughout the group the old romantic allegiance of the earliest Schoenberg reaffirms itself. Wotan with his spear stalks through the conclusion of the first of the "Three Pieces for Pianoforte." And the second of the series, a composition not without its incisiveness, as well as several of the tiny "Six Piano Pieces," Op. 19, recall at moments Brahms, at others Chopin, a Chopin of course cadaverous and turned slightly green.