[Gutenberg 56593] • Contemporary Composers

Excerpt from Contemporary Composers

"We live," wrote Stevenson to Will H. Low in 1884, "in a rum age of music without airs, stories, without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood-engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that ought to have been mezzo-tints.... So long as an artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher's needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and plaudits shower along with roses. But any plain man who rites to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure. ... He will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts."