The reasons for the New Yorker’s peculiar bitterness against Dr. Muck are not difficult to discover. He makes only ten appearances each season: the Philharmonic and the New York Symphony each gives many more concerts. From our point of view, would it not be better if we relied on Stransky and Damrosch (the merits of the one and the fripperies of the other are too apparent to call for comment here) for our first hearings of novelties? Then, if a particular composition seemed to warrant it, the Boston Orchestra could play it for us in its usual masterly manner. Just so long as New York worships the men from Boston in the mad feminine way it does, just that long will it resent Dr. Muck’s playing what it doesn’t want to hear. It was Theodore Thomas, I think, who, discovering that people cared very little for Wagner’s music, played it until they changed their minds. That is all very well when you have a Wagner, but I wonder just how heartily Dr. Muck admires the music he has recently served up to his New York audiences. To begin with there was Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. Now Sibelius is one of the great living composers. He is a genuine musician—by which I mean that you do not suffer all the agonies of stage fright when you hear a composition of his for the first time. He knows the business of his craft and you usually feel safe in his hands, thanks to three Symphonies and Finlandia. But how rudely this fourth symphony shakes your confidence! Call it musicianly: show how consistently-planned and executed it is: you won’t like it any the more. To be sure, Sibelius is a Finn and an intensely feeling one. He gives expression to the emotions of that curiously unhappy race. But music to appeal must be more universal than this angry symphony of ugly moods. You can’t explain it on cubist grounds—unless the Finns also call it disagreeable. But one ventures the guess that they, perchance, find it richly agreeable, in which case its performance should, by International law (or what is left of it) be confined to Finland.