Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/563



T often has been remarked that the paradoxes of to-day are the platitudes of to-morrow. Less frequently has it been observed that the heresies of the hour are usually the conventions of the day before yesterday. Neglect of this latter truth has led the disciples of revolutionary art into many amusing and tragic blunders. A decade ago it led the free-verse enthusiasts into announcing the triumphant liberation of poetic technique; whereas poetry had been freed from its conventional shackles by the French decadents twenty years earlier, and had been freed two thousand years before that by several of the Greek dramatists. Two decades ago it led the Debussy devotees into hymning the esoteric Frenchman as a Galileo of the so-called whole-tone scale; whereas Eric Satie and Modest Moussorgsky—not to mention the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Hindoos—had bagged the discovery from twenty to five hundred years before him, and Claude Achille Debussy was merely a man who turned his ears toward a discovered star and transposed the music of that sphere into the key of his own temperament. Latterly it has begotten a similar error; for it has misled the exponents of what might be termed free-music into hailing Leo Ornstein as the original arch-anarch of tonal art. Leo Ornstein is unquestionably a musical anarchist, both as a pianist and a composer. There are only twelve tones in the present chromatic scale, otherwise he would probably commit more than twelve musical sins simultaneously; there are only eighty-eight notes on the modern keyboard, else he would very likely play on eighty-nine of them at once. But anarchist though he is, in the monarchic government of Bach, in the oligarchic governments of Beethoven and Brahms, and in the tentatively socialistic governments of Ravel and Debussy, he is neither the discoverer nor the actual creator of modern musical anarchy. On the contrary, his system of harmonic and contra-