Mr. Mason is a native of Boston and a member of a famous family of musicians, being a grandson of Lowell Mason, and a nephew of Dr. William Mason. He is a graduate of Harvard, where some of his early musical studies were pursued under Paine. Since 19 he has held the associate professorship of music in Columbia University, and he has done much by lectures and literary work to promote musical appreciation. His 'From Grieg to Brahms' (1902) and its sequels have exerted a wide influence.
Emanating from strongly academic influences, David Stanley Smith (b. 1877), who has for a number of years been associated as assistant professor with the musical department of Yale University, exhibits a marked romantic tendency of imagination, albeit one exceptionally well guarded by a devotion to the structural ideals of the classic writers. The distinguished character of his talent has brought him rapidly to the front, and none of his more important works have had to wait long for a hearing. Smith places a strong insistence upon coherence in thematic development and tonality as the only basis upon which to found a musical work, and, while partial to high harmonic color and ready to depart from the text-books in harmonic usage, he is unwilling to allow color effect to usurp the place of structural continuity. Desirous and capable as he is of advancing upon the debatable borders of modern harmonic resource, he does not burn the bridges of conservatism behind him. His music bespeaks a sensitively poetic nature, sentiment, color and emotion rising easily through the foundational stratum of a thorough but not overweighted technique.
His symphony in F minor was performed by the Chicago Orchestra under Stock in December, 1912, and was well received. It is thoroughly representative of the composer's blending of modern and classic ideals and methods. The quartet in E minor (opus 19), departing from earlier styles chiefly in rhythmic intricacy, has been played by the Kneisels in many cities. An 'Overture Joyeuse' (opus 11) was conducted by the composer at one of the Chickering production concerts in 1904; it finds the composer scarcely emancipated from academic trammels. This and a much later 'symphonic sketch,' 'Prince Hal,' have both been conducted by the composer with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. A 'Symphonic Ballad' (opus 24) has been given with this orchestra, and also at the concerts of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. 'Pan,' a chorus for women's voices, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem, with orchestra and Pan-pipe obbligato inevitably assigned to the oboe, has been widely heard, and is a work brimming with color and rhythm. 'The Wind-Swept Wheat' and 'The Dark' are also for women's chorus with orchestra. A mixed chorus with orchestra, 'The Fallen Star,' won the Paderewski Prize in 1909. A trio in G major (opus 16) and an orchestral 'Allegro Giocoso' have, like all the foregoing works, been publicly performed, as well as numerous anthems and songs. Smith was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and educated at Yale.
A composer of the younger Boston group is Edward Burlingame Hill (b. in 1872), a music-maker of reflective temperament whose work, always refined and thoughtfully molded, inclines to tints and moods of delicate and subtle texture. His musical studies were conducted at Harvard University, under Professor Paine, but the music of MacDowell, then a resident of Boston, was the chief influencing factor in his earlier work. At this time he wrote several piano sonatas, one in F sharp, one in E after Kipling's 'The Light that Failed,' and a 'Sonata Patriotica,' the title of the latter being far from an indication of any nationalistic tendency in his later work. These works have not been published. Under the same influence he wrote a number of short piano compositions and songs, among the former a set of 'Four Sketches after Stephen Crane', (opus 7), containing an engaging satirical pleasantry on the 'little devils grinning in sin,' and 'Country Idyls' (opus 10), exquisitely tinted and showing a quality of charm which is not the most prominent attribute of American music in general. The titles of some of the above-mentioned works reveal the composer's discriminating literary tastes, which are further borne out in the choice of the poems for his songs, among their authors being the names of Tennyson, Rossetti, Henley, Arthur Symons, Ambrosius, and Dowson. He has written many part-songs to Elizabethan words. A work of much more importance than any of the foregoing is 'The Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration' for chorus and orchestra (opus 15), on the poem by Dowson, which was performed at a concert of the Modern Music Society of New York in 1914, under the direction of Benjamin Lambord. It reveals refined musicianship of a high order and, rather dangerously for the maintenance of interest, though advantageously for an exhibition of the psychological penetration of the composer, sustains a peculiar mood of spiritual aloofness. A pantomime 'Jack Frost in Midsummer' (opus 16), which has been publicly performed, is one of the best of the later works of Hill, who is more distinguished in artistic personality than in the quality of being prolific. Another pantomime is 'Pan and the Star.' He has in manuscript an overture to 'She Stoops to Conquer,' and a set of variations for string quartet. Hill was comparatively early attracted to the modern French school and his later work has been strongly influenced by it, though not to the point of radical ultra-modernity. This tendency is exhibited at its most advanced in the symphonic poem, 'The Parting of Launcelot and Guenevere,' after the poem by Stephen Phillips. As in 'Pan and the Star,' the composer's dramatic instinct comes strongly into play, and the work might be as aptly called a dramatic symphony, since the dramatic aspects of the poem have appealed most strongly to the composer.
Another representative of the Harvard University influence is Philip Greeley Clapp, whose tone-poem 'Norge' and a symphony have been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the latter in the spring of 1914 under the composer's direction. The former received considerable commendation, but the latter was not greeted with unmixed cordiality. Olin Downes, the critic of the Post, pronouncing denunciation upon it in unequivocal fashion, though Philip Hale regarded it with a measure of favor. Clapp is gifted with ideas and temperament, but is considered not yet to have issued from the formative stage or to have acquired a definite and personal style. The forms in which he writes indicate a strong classical tendency, but his sympathies with respect to thematic treatment and harmony are modern. Among his works are a quartet for strings, in C minor, a prelude 'In Summer,' for orchestra, a number of songs for solo voice, as well as part-songs, and several songs with orchestral accompaniment.
John Beach has shown evidence of distinguished sensitiveness and refinement of feeling in a number of songs and piano compositions which, as in the case of Hill, find the composer going to high literary sources for inspiration. While not original in a startling sense, there is a very personal element in Beach's music; without a very abundant technique he succeeds in his best work in getting himself expressed and is singularly free from imitation, both in the emotional content of his music and in his technical presentation of it. He is a true and original melodist, with a sense of beauty of no mean order which is quite his own, and at times shows a considerable and subtle harmonic imagination. 'A Song of the Lilac,' poem by Louise Imogen Guiney, is an inspired little picture of the perfumed and mystic night wind. 'A Woman's Last Word,' on Browning's poem beginning 'Let's contend no more, love,' is very sincere in its emotion, as is also his warmly autumnal ‘'Twas in a World of Living Leaves,’ on Henley's poem. 'In a Gondola,' an extended 'dramatic monologue for baritone,' on Browning's poem, is a complete drama in brief, with some effective and luscious tone painting. Of the piano compositions one remembers with pleasure 'A Garden Fancy,' on lines by Rossetti, an 'Intermezzo' with a very poetic middle section, a 'Monologue' of Schumann-Brahms influence, and the 'New Orleans Miniatures,' reflecting charmingly a series of impressions gained in that city during the composer's residence there as a teacher. Beach comes from Gloversville, N. Y., and was for a time instructor in music at the University of Minnesota.
One of the most brilliant of the younger American group is Arthur Bergh (b. 1882), the spread of whose fame as the composer of melodramatic music to Poe's 'Raven' has been almost as rapid as was that of the erratic poet-genius himself through his achievement of that immemorially haunting poem. It was first produced by David Bispham, to whom it is dedicated, in 1909, and has become a universal favorite with his audiences everywhere. This music offers no startling problems for the modern theorist, scarcely for the lay musician, in fact, so simple and clear is it in construction; but it has an inner quality not easy to describe, a quality of verity, of directness, of immediacy of expression, seldom attained by composers of the time. Here are no blotches or wastes of mere color, such as Poe might easily invite; the work is everywhere thematic. Three themes, of electrical directness and poignant eloquence (two for the raven and one for the 'lost Lenore'), suffice the composer for the entire work, with a subsidiary theme or two, but there is not a spot of tedious or laborious thematic development in the composition; it is everywhere fresh, crystalline and crisp. It is music that lives and speaks at every point. A little tempered programmatic suggestion is employed, at the rapping on the door, but always with the musical aim above the realistic. The 'Lenore' theme is of haunting loveliness, and the theme of the 'stately raven' is a stroke of genius in the simple expression of mystery and dignity. Everywhere is poetic and idealistic atmosphere, gained always with the simplest of means. It is to the composer's credit that, with a true intuition for the relative values in the content of the poem, he has made, not the gloom of the shadow-haunted chamber, but the dream of the 'lost Lenore,' the dominant note of the work. The composer has made an admirable orchestral score of the composition, which was produced, with Bispham as reader, the composer conducting, at a concert of the 'American Music Society' in New York, on April 18, 1909.