At a concert in Aeolian Hall, January 6, 1917, Harold Bauer played Laparra's _Rhythmes Espagnols_ (announced as the first performance in New York). These proved to be a series of characteristic dance impressions. The composer supplied the following comment: "There exists a world in Spain, little known outside the Iberian peninsula itself, made up of these people with their schools, their traditions. That is what I have tried to seize, that is what I am passionately interested in. Without the use of native tunes I have moulded my music on the native rhythms and forms and thereby endeavoured to interpret the spirit of the people. Thus _Petenera_ is conceived in the characteristic style and rhythm created by the singer of that name, an Andalusian woman, who lived in the last century. Old singers who had heard her told me that she sang 'like an angel.' Nobody could tell the date of her birth or death, and she has become a legendary character for whom all Andalusia wept and still weeps, although her beauty and her voice caused many men much unhappiness. "_Tientos_ reproduces the impression of those mysterious comments of the guitar before or during the singer's sobbing melodic figures. The singer and the guitar-player improvise together and, strangely enough, always in harmony, as though animated by a single impulse. "The _Sevillanas_ is authentic in form. Its four figures portray the dance. In the Sevillana two dancers, one in red, the other in yellow, chase each other like two big butterflies, amidst the rattle of the castanets. It is at once the most graceful and the _proudest_ dance I know. "_Rueda_ is built up on the rhythm of the Castilian dance of that name in 5-8 time. We are no longer in Andalusia, but in another scene: high plateaus, where, grave as the natural surroundings, massive beings dance who seem to have come out of the past. It is a dance of dead cities, Ávila, Burgos and many others sleeping in the sublime sadness of old Castile where the great winds weep. "_Solea_ belongs to a world of magic, a world of gipsies. Each of these gipsies seems to have in his heart and in his eyes some grief, some unrecognized fatality. Hence the motive of my _Habanera_ and the character of its hero, Ramón. "_Paseo_: sun, copper, red, gold--such are the vibrations of sound and sight of the Spanish fête. It is especially at the bull-fights that they dazzle you, when, amid the wild acclamations of an excited assembly the _Cuadrilla_--the troop of combatants and caparisoned horses and mules--makes its entry into the arena. Such is the subject of this musical 'note.'"