New Placing of Rakhmaninov [date unknown]

If there exists a fundamental distinction between the era of modern music and the preceding period of emotive music, it lies in the gradual dispersion of individual creative power and a more equal distribution of that creative power among a greater number of musicians-a phenomenon not unlike mass production in economic life. While in time past a great composer was a musical dynast, head of an individual cult, nowadays personality is but an attribute to a current theory of composition. What more grotesque than the sight of a Stravinsky establishing a personal cult! Yet what more appropriate than this same Stravinsky establishing a school of thought, a church, a musical conclave whose decisions are binding for the faithful. This is certainly an idealistic age with the idea (neo-classicism, new musico-mathematical theology, scholasticism or any other) reigning all supreme; personalities are engulfed by it as the personalities of the medieval inquisitors were engulfed by the idea of Inquisition. The antagonism now existing among the various schools and branches of modern music is by far more acute than the purely personal animosities of the romantic ages. The cold idea is a much more murderous incentive than personal ambition. But how much nobler it is to stab a fellow-mathematician in a feud concerning the formula for extraction of cubic roots, as it happened in the Italian Renaissance, than to exchange paper-knife thrusts in a Liszt-Wagner controversy!