"I remember," says the popular Gaiety composer, "driving one Sunday evening to St. George's Cathedral, when the melody to an 'O Salutaris' struck me. I pencilled it down during the sermon, and my brother-in-law, Furneaux Cook, sang it after the sermon at Benediction the same evening."
Herr Lutz believes in taking up some verses and carefully studying them.
"This I often do," he says, "and soon seem to hear a fitting melody without trying it on the piano till finished."
Fugues and canons, in his opinion, want studying and mathematically experimentalizing. "Composers," he says in conclusion, "are musical poets, and 'Poëta nascitur, non fit.'"
The music in his autograph will, I imagine, be familiar to not a few of my readers.
A. C. Mackenzie.
Most of Dr. Mackenzie's work is done in the morning from nine to one-thirty, and he never touches it in the afternoon. As a rule he leaves scoring for the orchestra or looking over the morning's work for the evening hours. "But," in his own words, "if I feel capable of inventing, why, I begin to work again about eight-thirty and continue until I am tired."
As a rule, the principal of the Royal Academy of Music sketches his music on two or three lines, as shown in the illustration.
"When I am engaged upon anything that absorbs my entire attention," he continues, "I carry a little musical note-book about with me and jot down roughly any idea which may occur to me, and I have found this plan useful. When I am composing I never lose the thread of it, morning, noon, or night; even at meals I am unconsciously occupied with it—this goes on until the work is finished."