MUSICAL CHRONICLE
WERE the queen of music a light divinity, like as not Professor Sam Eliot, Jr of Smith would have been hearing her, the last past months, play all sorts of nice little things to him upon her harp. Being not one of the looser, but of the graver Olympians, it is probable that she has merely been leaning over him from out a window in heaven and addressing hallelujahs and salves, gaudias and pax vobiscums from the pipes of a concert-organ; fluting rapturously upon him many a brilliant morning, and encircling his front many a sunset hour with tender-breathéd thanks. Some marvellous expression of her gratitude, assuredly, she has been making him. Few of late have been kindlier than he to her congregation upon the earth, or more deserving of her smiles. Not himself of the musical confession, he has nevertheless most admirably supported her cause. It seems he is a member of that race which is falling more rapidly than leaves do in November, or Nordics in the minds of neo-Hegelians: the race of American college professors who have not yet permitted the environing elements to annihilate intellectual curiosity and courage in them. In the course of the last year this young man persuaded the class about to be graduated from Smith to give Andreyev's The Black Maskers as its commencement play; persuaded the faculty to sanction the heterodox choice; and, most inspiredly of all, procured the right to invite a certain unknown young composer to supply the incidental music so richly invoked by the dramatist. In this fashion, he built well; placed Polyhymnia in his debt. For he made himself the immediate producing cause of one of the most important events in the life of music in America. He made himself the midwife to an event which commences a new time in it.
We have proof that, at length, for the first time since the colonization of the Atlantic seaboard, an whole creative musicianship has appeared among the Americans. The audiences which assisted at the three performances of The Black Maskers in Northampton in June heard an incidental music poorly performed, muffled by the two circumstances that it was sounded from behind the stage, and by a scratch body of instrumentalists; and nevertheless thrilling and winged. Only those of the auditors quite shut in sensibility could
