TERPANDER TERPANDER _or_ MUSIC AND THE FUTURE BY EDWARD J. DENT [Illustration] New York E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue Published, 1927 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY _All rights reserved_ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA _All ancient writers who mention the progressive state of music in Greece, are unanimous in celebrating the talents of TERPANDER. Several writers tell us that he added three strings to the lyre, which before his time had but four. Plutarch, in his “Laconic Institutions,” informs us that Terpander was fined by the Ephori for his innovations. However, in his Dialogue on Music, he likewise tells us that the same musician appeased a sedition at Sparta, among the same people, by the persuasive strains which he sung and played to them upon that occasion. There seems no other way of reconciling these two accounts, than by supposing that he had, by degrees, refined the public taste, or depraved his own to the level of his hearers._――BURNEY. TERPANDER I In the early years of the present century a certain learned and cultivated musician, then about eighty years of age, was heard to say, as he came out from a concert at which works by Debussy had been played: “Well, if this is the ‘music of the future,’ I’m very glad I shan’t live to hear it!” Debussy has passed over to the classics since then, but there are still plenty of music-lovers, many of them, too, not more than middle-aged at the most, who feel apprehensive about the future of music. Wherever they turn, there seems to be complete chaos. The music of the present day is for them an unending succession of hideous noises. There are some who, remembering that in their own lifetime they have passed through periods when even Brahms and Wagner, Richard Strauss and César Franck seemed unintelligible, are yet resolved not to be baffled by Schönberg and Stravinsky. They study contemporary music with perhaps little pleasure, but with passionate interest and curiosity. Yet they are inevitably conscious of difficulties which do not appear to have confronted them before. They can see in the music of the early twentieth century some clear continuance of the classical tradition; in the later music they can find nothing that gives them even a faint hope of being able to understand it――some day if not now. They find themselves in the position of a man who sets out to learn a language which has no connection with the Indo-European stock. It is bad enough to have to master a new alphabet; one may possibly, by dint of strenuous effort,