The recent sudden appearance of John Alden Carpenter among American composers, with work of singularly well-defined individuality and notable maturity of style, is a phenomenon which calls to mind Minerva springing full-grown from the head of Jove. Except for a sonata for violin and piano, Carpenter's published work consists wholly of songs. The first set, 'Eight Songs for a Medium Voice,' show forth at once the unique personality of the composer. It is Carpenter's distinction, in a sense, to have begun where others have left off. He is a personality of the new musical time with its new and transformed outlook upon the art. The margin of advance gained by the most recent developments of modernity, more especially from the French standpoint, becomes his main territory, while it would be well-nigh impossible, from his work, to suspect that the old ground of tradition and formula had ever existed. Far from his modernity meaning complexity, it is attained generally by means of a veritably startling simplicity. It is the _principles_ of modernity which interest him, and he seeks the simplest means of their exemplification. Above all, he takes high rank in the sensitive perception of beauty. These characteristics are all manifest in the 'Eight Songs' which comprise the richly beautiful 'The Green River' (Lord Douglas), a limpid setting of Stevenson's 'Looking-Glass River,' a setting of the Blake 'Cradle Song' which combines science and poetry in a remarkable degree in view of the simplicity of treatment, the somewhat overweighted 'Little Fly' (Blake), the lusty Dorsetshire dialect song, 'Dont Ceäre' (Barnes), a crisp interpretation of Stevenson's 'The Cock Shall Crow,' and characteristic settings of Waller's 'Go, Lovely Rose' and Herrick's 'Bid Me to Live.' Of four highly modernized and colorful Verlaine songs, _Le Ciel_ and '_Il Pleure dans mon Cœur_,' attain the most modern scheme of musical thought with astonishingly simple means; the _Chanson d'Automne_ is sympathetically set, and '_Dansons la Gigue_' is sufficiently sardonic. 'Four Songs for a Medium Voice' contain the mysterious tone-painting 'Fog Wraiths' (Mildred Howells), 'To One Unknown' (Helen Dudley), and two poems by Wilde, _Les Silhouettes_ and 'Her Voice.' In the somewhat elaborate settings of poems from Tagore's 'Gitanjali' Carpenter wrestles with the problem of setting prose poetry to music, often with felicitous effect and yet not always convincingly, despite the intrinsic beauty of his musical ideas. The violin sonata in its themes, its strikingly individual harmonic intuitions, and its structure generally, is of great beauty and interest. The composer was born in Illinois in 1876, graduated at Harvard and studied music with Bernard Ziehn and Sir Edward Edgar. In 1897 he entered the business established by his father in Chicago and has since directed it. * * * * *