Modern Developments in Music

Extract

Two years ago I had the privilege of reading a paper on the subject of “Modern Tendencies in Music” at a meeting of the Arts League of Service, in which the general aspects of creative thought of to-day were broadly reviewed, and the relative features of the different European schools discussed by a comparative summary of the work of their chief representatives. Such is the rapidity of musical advancement in these days that in the light of recent experience I have attempted in this present paper to crystallise in a more definite manner certain aspects of the present day idiom (and deductions therefrom) which in the previous paper were necessarily treated in a sketchy and more or less cursory manner. The views expressed in the following paper are, it need hardly be added, a result of my own personal observation, and we must recognise that in a subject of such magnitude it would manifestly be impossible to discuss fully within such limited scope, each and every feature of a development which is without parallel in the history of any other art, by reason of its astonishing rapidity and the constant and almost hourly changes taking place in its internal characteristics. It is also obvious that in a critical estimate of this description anything in the nature of mere rhetoric or fulsome adulation for its own sake would be very much out of place, if only for the reason that an unbiassed outlook is an essential preliminary to any reasoned discussion on the relative value or otherwise of the tenets held by a particular school of thought.