declares him marvellously in control of his resources, capable of producing hard form which reveals itself the larger the more it is heard. Broken as it sounds, elusive and mysterious as it is in outline, full of abrupt brutal resolutions and strange new sounds and sudden suspensions and blinding blurs, his work has a fine clarity and solidity of form. There is not a consonance in the work; the ideas are subtle and delicate; nevertheless, we do not go lost in this free, ultramodern style.
A living flow informs the structure. The clangorous and ironic passages subside naturally into the weeping, dolorous, soft ones. Nor has the music form in the American manner: at the expense of robustness and vibrancy. There is great strength in the movements; powerfully pulsing rhythms; long melodic lines that flow and continue and extend in beauty; no padding, no waste. The orchestral dress, too, is masterly. There were twenty-nine or thirty instruments playing; the score calls for no more; yet musicians in the audience found themselves deceived as to the number and character of the components of the band. One, an expert, went behind the stage looking for bass-clarinets and contrabassoons; and found merely clarinets and fagots: the brilliant handling of the lower registers of these common instruments had caused the mistake. Indeed, perhaps only one element which might have been present in this art was wanting. That, was the absolute individuality of style. Not that there was any plagiarism or even derivative material in the score. Except for some moments, mostly in the final fire-music, when vague resemblances to Moussorgsky and to Bloch appear, the music is never reminiscent. It merely wants that final sharpness of contour which the musics written by composers in the fulness of their maturity beget. But taking into consideration the youth of the composer, we see that it could not possibly have put in appearance at this early time. It is thoroughly normal, even by the laws of genius, that it should have absented itself.
Roger Huntington Sessions, the composer of this beautiful, moving work, is indeed still in his twenty-seventh year. He was born at the close of 1896 in Hadley, Massachusetts, the residence of his family during nearly two centuries. Whether or not there were musicians among his ancestors is not known. There were clergymen, however; his maternal grandfather was Episcopal Bishop of western New York. Sessions matriculated at Harvard at the age of fourteen; was editor for a while of the Harvard Musical Maga-
