CHAPTER III.
THE ACADEMICS.
John Knowles Paine.
There is one thing better than modernity,—it is immortality. So while I am a most ardent devotee of modern movements, because they are at worst experiments, and motion is necessary to life, I fail to see why it is necessary in picking up something new always to drop something old, as if one were an awkward, butter-fingered parcel-carrier.
If a composer writes empty stuff in the latest styles, he is one degree better than the purveyor of trite stuff in the old styles; but he is nobody before the high thinker who finds himself suited by the general methods of the classic writers.
The most classic of our composers is their venerable dean, John Knowles Paine. It is an interesting proof of the youth of our native school of music, that the principal symphony, "Spring," of our first composer of importance, was written only twenty-one years ago. Before Mr. Paine there had never been an American music writer worthy of serious consideration in the larger forms.