Among the most earnest and advanced leaders of American music stands Arne Oldberg (b. 1874), a musical personality of the highest nobility and idealism, and a consummate master of his art. Unquestionably as fully equipped master of thematic development in the cyclic forms as America has produced, his loftily conceived chamber music and orchestral works present themselves in a spiritual and technical serenity, artistic authenticity and completeness, which baffle the critical beholder. Indeed, it is with the music-makers who wrote before relentless Beethoven forced the skyey goddess down into the world-struggle that Oldberg has the closest spiritual kinship. Never since Mozart has music been more bafflingly 'absolute' than in the bulk of his works in orchestral and chamber music, and piano forms. The appearance of these works, so modern from the standpoint of thematic and formal development in this epoch, seems to call for a revision of modern musical psychology and philosophy. Much of modern 'pure' music is too dramatic to endure a comparison in this respect, or else too philosophical and too deeply involved in the world-problem. To Brahms' technical system that of Oldberg more nearly corresponds than to any other. In this music, at the same time, there is no reversion to the style of an earlier day; it carries no slogan of 'back to Mozart.' Trained as he was in the severe school of Joseph Rheinberger, to Oldberg, to be sure, the modern French school does not exist, but neither, for that matter, does the traditional shadow of turgidity and heaviness which hangs about the Teutonic genius even at its most idealistic. Those who think to perceive a measure of old-fashionedness in his music are looking at the letter rather than the spirit, which is ever onward and creative, though in its own way, and without admitting that modern progress lies only in the adoption of the Gallic idiom. It is the music of spiritual upliftment and refreshment, waiting its day until sensationalism and mere color-riot shall have lost their power to appeal. The two quintets for piano and strings (opera 16 and 24) present a joyous and upspringing lyricism all but unknown to the music of the day, together, especially in the latter and more mature work, with a thematic involution that would be appalling were it not for the exuberant spontaneity of their inspiration. A string quartet in C minor (opus 15) is a less complete revelation of the composer's powers. A woodwind quintet in E flat major (opus 18), on the other hand, is a miracle of gladness and of grave and haunting loveliness.