Much is said and written about an American national music.  I am reminded of a colored mammy who was left in charge of “Marse John” and the house while “Miss Mary an’ de chillun” were away at the springs.  When the larder needed replenishing she would break the news to her employer like this:  “Marse John?” “Yes, Mammy!” “You know the flour?” “Yes, Mammy!” “Well, there ain’t none!” It is even so with our national music—­“there ain’t none.”

Arthur Farwell, president of the American Music Society, thinks differently.  He says:  “One must make a very broad study of the works of eighty or one hundred American composers before he will begin to perceive the indisputable American qualities arising in our music.  The endeavor not to repeat, parrot-like, the formulae of the Old World has driven many American composers to seek out new inventions and has led to a freshness, in a considerable mass of American work, as in MacDowell’s, which may be said to be directly a product of American conditions.”

Music is seldom a thing of nationality or locality.  Early opera in Germany was Italian and the French grand opera school was founded by a Florentine.  The style of music that appeals most keenly to the people of a country or community influences largely the method and manner of its native composers.  Authors, musical and literary, write more often to fill a demand, subjectively felt perhaps, than to create one or to establish a form representative of their nation or section, though occasionally, when the author is a genius and fearlessly gives expression to his own divinity, regardless of precedent, he finds himself responsible for a new order, though in that case the individuality of the author is the leaven that leaveneth the lump, and not the locality.

We are only beginning, as a nation, to recognize music as an essential to general culture.  A new country must become familiar with and learn to appreciate what has already been done along artistic lines before it is capable of evolving its own type in any permanent, living fashion.  We have no people’s music.  “Give me, oh give me, the man who sings at his work,” said Carlyle, and I often think when I hear an American laborer singing at his task that if dear old Carlyle were only alive and I could give him the unmelodious disturber of the public peace, the pleasure would be all mine.  American music, the music of the people, is built upon the Puritan hymn tunes and savors of the persecution that made the Pilgrim Fathers fly to the new land.

Some think that the negro melodies should form the basis of our American music; but why?  The negro is an importation, not a native, and if we want the real thing, it seems to me that we will have to find it in the Indian melodies, but it will take artistic handling to develop them from aboriginal simplicity to the intricacy necessary to represent in any sense present-day, cosmopolitan America.