the years now with us are prophetic of a century notable from its beginning; a century destined to achieve perhaps beyond our boldest imagining. already is the century achieving, as, like a youthful but formidable being, it assaults that citadel of mystery wherein truth must relinquish, one by one, her most valued and guarded possessions.

to the observant, the present is a time of shaken foundations, a time of much actual overthrow, and even a time of planning that broader and deeper bases shall well sustain the super-imposed new. amidst an upheaval of things social, political, scientific, ethical and ?sthetic; an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily sourced in the sub-strata of the world of causes; art, for instance, is unavoidably disturbed throughout its various provinces.

only the over-sanguine will assume that the better must needs rise from upheaval and overthrow. therefore let us look but for the reasonable, for does not many a desolated province of this material world belie the theory of uninterrupted advance?

appearances indicate that the art of music is entering upon a period the most momentous of its existence, a period of transition more radical than when it was emerging from the greek modes; a period perhaps of storm and stress, of morbid and eccentric individualism; a period like that which almost overwhelmed literature in the early days of goethe and schiller; or, perhaps, a period of real progress; but, in either event, a period from which it will come forth an art far different from that of bach, beethoven, chopin and wagner.

because progressive, the human mind will not regard its greatest work with a complacency inimical to further effort. ever it fashions and re-fashions, achieving yesterday, failing to-day, and then more than retrieving on some fortunate morrow. strange doings and sayings are rife in the musical world of the present. denying the validity of fixed key, claude debussy begins and ends his tone creations anywhere within the limit of the chromatic scale. max reger teaches the intimate fellowship of the entire twenty-four keys, while richard strauss has well-nigh outgrown the twelve semitones of our time-honored gamut which must be enlarged if it would meet the needs of his successors. it is the opinion of many that, in this event, the art of music will be merged in what we shall here call the art of sound. concerning this realistic art, this art to be, let us explain briefly that, whereas the word sound signifies all that the ear cognizes, whether as euphony, cacophony or mere noise, yet, for sound to attain to the status of an art, art must endow with definite and adequate purpose not only euphony, but also every other sound, including mere noise.

while strauss with almost audacious boldness is leading toward the enharmonic possibilities of an augmented scale, the more conservative but no less ingenious reger is looking back to his beloved bach, and showing what, through a greatly extended key relationship, that master might have accomplished with the good old semitones. eschewing programme music, and all else demanding literary elucidation, reger will, to the tone-poems of his rival, offset a fugue or a sonata ultra enough for any save the disciples of strauss and debussy.

like strauss, debussy is in no wise to be ignored, but always and wholly to be reckoned with in an estimate of advanced methods. paradoxical at first thought is the fact that debussy, whose measures abound in unresolved discords of ultra-modern origin, should found his music not uniformly on the major and the minor scales, but, by preference, largely on the old church modes. this reversion to the medi?val indicates a period of crisis wherein the beam fluctuates between the extremes of old and new tonal methods. dispensing with the size and blare of the modern orchestra, and shunning, as if an obsession, the wagnerian models, debussy will not for one brief moment permit in the lyric drama such outbursts of vocal melody as crown the climaxes of ?lohengrin,? and the passionate love scenes of ?tannh?user.? and this for the specific reason that ?melody is almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotional life. melody is suitable only for the song which confirms a fixed sentiment.?

while strauss is held to be the lineal successor of liszt, he is in fact a compound of various modern tendencies. in him we find the philosophy of nietzsche, the impressionism of manet, and the realism of which de maupassant and zola and whitman and the youthful swinburne were exponents; a realism which, because it over-emphasizes the erotic, the pathological, and the ugly, misinterprets man and nature, and so betrays the characteristics of decadent art.

what would have been the attitude of wagner toward strauss may be inferred from his caustic attacks on berlioz whose music he called foolish and eccentric; and yet, as a producer of novel effects he himself was much indebted to the french composer, and, in turn, was no small factor in the formation of one whom strauss' disciples deem the greater richard. notwithstanding which, we affirm that strauss is more closely related to liszt whose talents, both in pianoforte and orchestral composition, tended to virtuoso display more than to the utterance of original and lofty ideas.

prior to the advent of wagner, the musical composer deemed it necessary always to appeal to the sense of the beautiful. whatever his theme, his music, ever conforming to the established laws of harmony, must not be repugnant to that ?sthetic sense. at times he no doubt overstepped his self-imposed limit, but, somehow, the ear of the listener has accustomed itself to the innovation, and with the result that not a few wholly doubt the existence of a line of cleavage between the ugly and the beautiful. however, a sane philosophy will demonstrate that beauty and ugliness are as unlike as are good and evil.

neither the painter nor the sculptor restricts himself to pleasing subjects; the grotesque and the horrible have been deemed not unworthy the brush and the chisel of artists indubitably great, and it can be argued that to music should be accorded an expression free and faithful as that allowed to painting and the plastic arts. on the other hand, popular opinion has ever been, and perhaps ever will be, that what is actually ugly is not music. to this opinion the modern reply is that the word music carries with it far too restricted a meaning; the office of the tonal art, like that of all other arts, is to express not the half but the whole of life; in fact, the universal duality in nature and in man.

with deep philosophic and artistic insight, wagner elaborated an art destined, as he believed, to supersede italian opera. despite his harsh but convincing strictures, and despite the theories and practice of debussy who holds that in the music drama the vocal parts, lest they hinder the dramatic action, should be reduced to a rhythmic chant devoid of melody, italian opera survives; from temporary eclipse it is emerging bright as before. in the life labors of the great reformer, we are beginning to see simply a new school supplementing the old. we are beginning to see that the denouncer of donizetti and rossini and verdi and bellini and the rest, was himself not quite faultless in practice, however correct in theory. musicians of eminence now admit that the incongruities of italian opera are offset by the over-long and the slow-moving in the wagnerian music drama. naturally the world refuses to forget ?lucia? and ?il barbiere? and ?rigoletto? and ?norma,? and in fact any work whereinto the muse of italy has poured her quenchless fire.

granting that the faulty and inadequate greek modes had so cramped and chilled musical expression that, in their abandonment, little of value was lost to the musicians of past centuries, what shall be said of our modern musical heritage, the gift of the last two hundred years, and which the universal adoption of a new and enlarged musical scale would render obsolete? will not that spirit of love and loyalty which defends the cause of italian opera, make determined stand against the novel system? from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale the great german masters have evoked the superlatively beautiful. shaping their imaginings to lofty ideals, they have in fact epitomized the larger, better part of man and nature, as understood by the german mind. admitting this, can the cultured musician bring himself to ignore the past of german art? for this he must needs do under an exclusively modern regime. no! a thousand times no! that for music a different scale can be no more than supplementary is indicated by the history of all other ?sthetic arts. their every worthy type endures; not any one has quite eclipsed another.

the two leading races, once peopling the southmost peninsulas of europe, were extinct centuries ago, but their daily tongues survive, dead languages never while endures the world, for they bring to all enlightened peoples the period and climax of the orator, the meter of the tragic dramatist, and the notes of the homeric and the virgilian muse, fresh and unrivalled as when greece and italy first lent ear.

there have been schools of architecture, both pagan and christian, schools of sculpture from phidias onward; schools of modern painting since the mature work of giotto; and the wise ages, far from selecting and excluding, have preserved them all.

to men of creative genius were granted glimpses of truth; each from his own angle beheld the ineffable vision. through the sundered veils of illusion, as through the storm's momentary rift, the permitted artist beheld his own ruling star, sometimes a royal sun, sometimes a subordinate planet, but always one without which the hierarchy of heaven were incomplete.

that neither the school of wagner nor that of strauss will supersede existing national schools is assured for the additional reason that these are the outcome of national ideals. in every race of civilization the man of creative genius proves his people to be possessed of ideals of art peculiarly their own. there results for example the slavic, the scandinavian, the english, the german, the spanish, the french, the italian ideals, and, lofty in possibilities, that of the amalgamating race destined to fill this ample western land of ours.

the ideals of tonal art! surely the wagnerian and the straussian models cannot include them all! varied as the geography of the globe, as the configurations of its surface, those national ideals are sombre with the solitude of barren steppes; they are gloomy with the twilight of deep-indenting fjords; they are rich with the ancient, the medi?val, the modern, of a land of memories gathered since the coming of arthur. otherwhere they are fraught with the romance of rhenish castles where minnesingers and meistersingers have proved the magic power of song; or else they bring the southern night of castinets and tripping feet, and the moonlit wonder of moorish alhambra. how well those ideals have embodied the gay and the graceful, also the volatile as the vintage of vine-clad champagne! and how fitly are they born by adriatic and mediterranean shores where the ardent day-beam warms the heart to love's emotion; and, in days to come, shall they not suggest the amplitude of snowy mountain chains, the undulating sweep of prairies, the breezy expanse of vast inland seas, and the eternal dash and roar of ocean on our eastern and our western coasts?

these, and countless other ideals sourced in the world's composite life, have given rise to a necessarily varied art whose inner unity must remain undiscovered till mankind becomes one great family, bound by a community of ideals and interests in the millennial dawn of a yet-unrisen day.