Consider that exquisite masterpiece, 'In the Moon Shower'—a very epitome in miniature of Loomis' genius—a setting of Verlaine's L'heure exquise for singing voice, speaking voice, piano, and violin. It seems not to contain a harmony or a progression with which we have not long been made familiar by our Germanic system, and yet how complete the departure which it makes from the spirit of German tradition, and how utterly it dissolves the medium which it draws upon to re-materialize it as the shadowy reflection of a Verlaine dream. It is not that Loomis has not become familiar with, and in a measure assimilated, the later French idiom, but that, without the knowledge and employment of it, he earlier spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel. Loomis has also been exceedingly hospitable to native aboriginal themes and has treated them in the spirit of a delicate and refined impressionism. His technique is invariably of the nicest, with minute attention to every detail.
Loomis has produced much. There is a grand opera, 'The Traitor Mandolin'; two comic operas; incidental music of most aristocratic artistry to the plays 'The Tragedy of Death,' by René Peter, and 'The Coming of the Prince,' by William Sharp, and music of similarly refined mood to a number of pantomimes—a favorite form of Loomis—'The Enchanted Fountain,' 'Put to the Test,' 'In Old New Amsterdam,' 'Love and Witchcraft,' and 'Black and White.' There are many piano compositions of charm, sprightliness, humor, and impressionistic interest, including two books of 'Lyrics of the Red Man'; and many songs brimming with poetry and character, among them 'In the Foggy Dew,' 'Love Comes, Love Goes,' 'Hark, Hark, the Lark' (a delightful conception inviting no comparison with Schubert), and songs of negro character, such as the exquisite 'Hour of the Whippoorwill.' Loomis has written choruses and part-songs, and a stupendous quantity of excellent children's songs for schools. The composer was born in Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1865 and makes his home in New York. He started upon his musical career in the National Conservatory, where he was awarded a free scholarship by Dr. Dvořák.
II
If, thus early, it may be said that the many musical ideals and influences which have struck root in America have centred and blended in any single composer, that composer is Frederic Ayres. The true eclecticism which constitutes the latest phase of American development, to have value for musical art, must necessarily involve the complete submergence and assimilation of hitherto unreconciled influences in a single new creative personality. Of such a new and authentic American electicism Ayres stands forth so clearly as the protagonist that a claim for him in this rôle will hardly be successfully disputed. This occupation of such a position is, however, a purely spontaneous circumstance, arrived at by obedience to no theory, but only through creative impulse.
Without being unduly extravagant, informal, though logical, as a formalist, Ayres commands his many qualities for the expressive purposes of a spirit eager for the discovery and revelation of perfect beauty. Such a perfection of beauty he by no means always finds; indeed, his earlier experimental excursions not infrequently left the ground rough over which he trod. And even at the present time he is only entering upon a full conscious command of his material. Only a keen sensitiveness to every significant influence, European and American, could have led to the development of so rounded and typical a musical character. Taught, in the first instance, by Stillman-Kelley and Arthur Foote, his broad sympathies led him early to blend the German, French, and American spirit through a devotion to no less striking a group of composers than Bach, Beethoven, Stephen Foster, and César Franck. A constant contact with natural scenes of the greatest grandeur, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, has undoubtedly exercised a broadening effect upon his conceptions. While he has not employed native aboriginal themes, or even made a special study of them, many of his melodies have a strong Indian cast, which is difficult to explain except on the basis of some psychological aspect of climatic and other environmental influences.
The trio for piano, violin, and 'cello (opus 13) abounds in supreme qualities of freshness and spontaneity. Taken as a whole, it is typical of the manner in which the composer rises, easily and blithely, out of the ancient sea of tradition into the blue of a new and happier musical day. The work was first heard on April 18, 1914, at a concert of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and has since had various public performances. The violin sonata (opus 15) is of great beauty and rich in characteristic qualities, and presents an interesting study in formal originality. A piano sonata (opus 16) and a 'cello sonata (opus 17) have been completed. Ayres has written songs of surpassing loveliness and originality. His 'Sea Dirge,' a setting of Shakespeare's 'Full Fathom Five,' from 'The Tempest,' reveals a poignancy of imagination and a perception and apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any composer. Other highly poetic Shakespeare songs are 'Where the Bee Sucks,' 'Come Unto These Yellow Sands,' 'It was a Lover and His Lass.' A richly colored vocal work is 'Sunset Wings' (opus 8), after Rossetti. 'Two Fugues' (opus 9) and 'Fugue Fantasy' (opus 12), for piano, of American suggestiveness, Indian and otherwise, are striking tours de force of originality. The 'Songs of the Seeonee Wolves' (opus 10), from Kipling's 'Jungle Book,' are vivid presentations of the composer's conception of the call of the wild. Ayres was born at Binghamton, N. Y., March 17, 1876, and lives in Colorado Springs, Col.
One of the most keenly individualized of American composers, and one of the most daring and original in the employment of ultra-modern resource, is Arthur Shepherd, formerly of Salt Lake City and at present connected with the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Mass. His work, as a whole, is almost unique in American music in the completeness of its departure from the styles of any individual composers who may earlier have stimulated or influenced him. The dominating factor in his work, almost from the beginning, has been the will to express himself in a certain manner, wholly his own, and on this positive ground extraneous influences have been able to gain but a scant foothold. Of the Brahms and Wagner influences which he acknowledges, the former can be traced only in his earliest pages, and the latter seems nowhere to appear. His harmony would make any other German than a radical Strauss enthusiast shrink with horror, so sweeping and so subversive of the usual order are its departures from the accepted scheme, while, on the other hand, it can be said to be very little suggestive of the characteristic harmonic quality of the modern French school. Especially it eschews the luscious and velvety harmonic surface of Debussy. In both melody and harmony, the saccharine—even the merely sweet—the sensuous and the languorous, Shepherd dethrones with the sedulous intolerance of a Pfitzner and, like that composer, exalts in its place a clear and luminous spiritual beauty. Otherwise he works in lines that cut, in chords that bite and grip, and rises often to great nobility of conception and expression. In his latest works, 'The Nuptials of Attila,' a dramatic overture after George Meredith, and a 'Humoreske' for pianoforte and orchestra, he has fought against the tendency toward over-complexity manifested in his earlier work, and has gained a greater clarity of harmonic texture.
The pianoforte sonata in F minor (opus 4), with which the composer took the National Federation of Musical Clubs' prize in the 1909 competition, is a massive work of great breadth of conception. The second movement shows Shepherd's peculiar power of evoking deeply subjective moods; it presents an almost ghostly quality of the elegiac and has much of nobility. The third movement makes bold use of a cowboy song and has a magnificent original melody of a broad Foster-like quality, but the composer holds 'nationalism' to be merely incidental to a broader artistic function. He rises to an unusual naturalness in this movement, which, like the others, is highly virile. 'The City in the Sea,' a 'poem for orchestra, mixed chorus, and baritone solo,' on Bliss Carman's poem, is a large work of extraordinary modernity and individuality. 'Five Songs' (opus 7) are worthily representative and contain much of beauty. There are also 'Theme and Variations' (opus 1), and 'Mazurka' (opus 2), for pianoforte, and a mixed chorus with baritone solo, 'The Lord Hath Brought again Zion.'