Hadley is a native of Massachusetts, and comes of a musical family. Among his teachers are, first, his father, and later Chadwick in Boston and Mandyczewski in Vienna. He has several times been a prize-winner with his compositions, the second symphony winning the Paderewski Prize and one offered by the New England Conservatory, both in 1901, and the 'Culprit Fay' winning the National Federation of Musical Clubs' Prize in 1909. Mr. Hadley became conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 1909 and the San Francisco Orchestra in 1911, which latter post he still holds. * * * * * One of the sturdiest musical figures in the ranks of American _arrivés_ is Frederick Shepherd Converse (b. 1871), artistically of strong romantic leanings, although brought up under the classic influences of the widely influential course in theory conducted by the late James K. Paine at Harvard University. A taker of honors here, as well as at Munich under Rheinberger, where he went after a period of study with Chadwick in Boston, Converse has realized a degree of scholarship seldom attained or even aspired to in America. He is typically representative of what might be called the second generation of modern American composers, the one following immediately upon that of Foote, Chadwick, and their colleagues. Like all the active minds of his generation, he exhibits the tendency to break the shackles of classical tradition while still preserving reverence for its ideals. With the exception of one retrospective inspiration, the string quartet (opus 18), he appears to be done with the sonata form at about the eighth opus number. Previous to that he had produced a symphony in D minor (opus 7), a sonata for violin (opus 1), a string quartet, and an overture. The later string quartet has qualities of admirable lyrical beauty. It is in his large romantic outreachings that Converse is best and most favorably known. Indeed, the composer himself styles his first orchestral tone-poem, the 'Festival of Pan,' a 'romance.' Subsequent orchestral works in so-called 'free' form (an absurd term, since every authentic form gains its strength through conformity to some law, even if not a familiar one) are 'Endymion's Vision,' a bit too 'free' in form but of rich and imaginative orchestral color, and, better known and more highly appraised, 'The Mystic Trumpeter,' after Walt Whitman. 'Night' and 'Day,' two poems for piano and orchestra, and _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, ballade for baritone and orchestra, as well as the orchestral works mentioned, have all been produced by orchestras and artists of the first prominence and with marked success.