Now 'modern' may mean merely _new_ or _up-to-date_. And in that sense it may indicate any degree of newness: it may include the last twenty-five years or the last century, or it may be made to apply to contemporaneous works only. But in another sense--that generally accepted in connection with music--it means 'advanced,' progressive, or unprecedented in any other period. Here, too, we may understand varying degrees of modernity. The devotees of the most recent development, impatient of the usual broad application of the term, have dubbed their school the 'futurist.' In fact, any of these characterizations, whether in a time sense or a quality sense, are merely relative. Wagner's disciples, disdainful of the romanticists, called his music the 'music of the future.' Now, alas, critics classify him as a romantic composer! Bach, on the other hand, long popularly regarded as an archaic bugaboo, is now frequently characterized as a veritable modern. 'How modern that is!' we exclaim time and again, while listening to an organ toccata or fugue arranged by Busoni! Beethoven, the great classic, is in his later period certainly more 'modern' than many a romanticist--Mendelssohn, for instance, or even Berlioz--though only in a harmonic sense, for he had not the command of orchestral color that the great and turbulent Frenchmen made accessible to the world. The newness of the music is thus seen to have little to do with its modernity. Even the word 'contemporary' gives us no definite clue, for there are men living to-day--like Saint-Saëns--whose music is hardly modern when compared to that of a Wolf, dead these twelve years, or his own late countrymen Chabrier and Fauré--not to speak of the recently departed Scriabine with his _clavier à lumière_.