ABSTRACT
Composers have their fates, as do books. Music, the most abstract of all the arts, a substance taken from nowhere, or-as the recent experiments of a Russian professor purport to show-from anywhere, by means of a radio antenna and a human hand, that elusive substance seems to live a tense life of its own on the music sheet and in the concert-hall. What a riot of conflicting tendencies! What ingenuities of the creative hand! What intricacies of development, rivaling the trickiest problems in mathematics! As in science, new things are discovered, discussed, rejected, or finally accepted and put into practice. From simplicity, if not simpleness, it has evolved logically to sky-scraping edifices of sound. With the “ceiling” thus attained (to use an aviator term) the composers turned back.
