Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even, of Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which his compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to inclose within each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich, set him forever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the academic and conforming crew. The man who has composed these scores makes at least the gesture of the artist, and comes to music to express a temper original and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and the commonplace, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and fantastic. He is eminently not one of the pathetic, half-educated musicians so common in America. He knows something of musical science; knows how a tonal edifice should be unified; has a sense of the chemistry of the orchestra. He appears familiar with the plainsong, and has based a symphony and portions of a quartet on Gregorian modes. Even at a period when the sophisticated and cultivated composer is becoming somewhat less a rarity, his culture is remarkable, his knowledge of literature eclectic. Gogol as well as Virgil has moved him to orchestral works. Above all, he is one of the company of composers, to which a good number of more gifted musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of their medium, and infinitely curious concerning it. It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. In seeking by main force to be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever is trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence of the harmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and impersonal and undistinguished in his style, he has become over-anxious, over-meticulous of his diction. Because his phraseology was colorless, he has become a stainer of phrases, a sort of musical euphuist. All his energy, one senses, has gone into the cutting and polishing and shining up and setting of little brightly colored bits of music, little sharp, intense moments. One feels that they have been caressed and stroked and smoothed and regarded a thousand times; that Loeffler has dwelt upon them and touched them with a sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it must have been a great labor that was expended on the darkening and spicing and sharpening of the style in certain of his orchestral poems; the effort to create a new idiom based on the Gregorian modes, to which "Hora mystica" and the recent work for string quartet bear witness, must in itself have been large. But though in result of all the chasing and hammering on gold, the filing and polishing, the vessel of his art has perhaps become richer and finer, it has not become any fuller. His second period differs from his first only in the fact that in it he has gone from one form of uncreativity to another somewhat more dignified and unusual.