One of the most keenly individualized of American composers, and one of the most daring and original in the employment of ultra-modern resource, is Arthur Shepherd, formerly of Salt Lake City and at present connected with the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Mass. His work, as a whole, is almost unique in American music in the completeness of its departure from the styles of any individual composers who may earlier have stimulated or influenced him. The dominating factor in his work, almost from the beginning, has been the will to express himself in a certain manner, wholly his own, and on this positive ground extraneous influences have been able to gain but a scant foothold. Of the Brahms and Wagner influences which he acknowledges, the former can be traced only in his earliest pages, and the latter seems nowhere to appear. His harmony would make any other German than a radical Strauss enthusiast shrink with horror, so sweeping and so subversive of the usual order are its departures from the accepted scheme, while, on the other hand, it can be said to be very little suggestive of the characteristic harmonic quality of the modern French school. Especially it eschews the luscious and velvety harmonic surface of Debussy. In both melody and harmony, the saccharine--even the merely sweet--the sensuous and the languorous, Shepherd dethrones with the sedulous intolerance of a Pfitzner and, like that composer, exalts in its place a clear and luminous spiritual beauty. Otherwise he works in lines that cut, in chords that bite and grip, and rises often to great nobility of conception and expression. In his latest works, 'The Nuptials of Attila,' a dramatic overture after George Meredith, and a 'Humoreske' for pianoforte and orchestra, he has fought against the tendency toward over-complexity manifested in his earlier work, and has gained a greater clarity of harmonic texture. The pianoforte sonata in F minor (opus 4), with which the composer took the National Federation of Musical Clubs' prize in the 1909 competition, is a massive work of great breadth of conception. The second movement shows Shepherd's peculiar power of evoking deeply subjective moods; it presents an almost ghostly quality of the elegiac and has much of nobility. The third movement makes bold use of a cowboy song and has a magnificent original melody of a broad Foster-like quality, but the composer holds 'nationalism' to be merely incidental to a broader artistic function. He rises to an unusual naturalness in this movement, which, like the others, is highly virile. 'The City in the Sea,' a 'poem for orchestra, mixed chorus, and baritone solo,' on Bliss Carman's poem, is a large work of extraordinary modernity and individuality. 'Five Songs' (opus 7) are worthily representative and contain much of beauty. There are also 'Theme and Variations' (opus 1), and 'Mazurka' (opus 2), for pianoforte, and a mixed chorus with baritone solo, 'The Lord Hath Brought again Zion.'