And Old Masters programme so arranged as was Sunday's symphony concert in the Lykeum as a contrast between the old masters and modern composers is most revealing of the merits and shortcomings of each. If, within the confines of so short an article as this, it is possible to write accurately of the history of music, then that early history can be summed up as three successive stages, In the 16th century music was functional; there was dance music and there was vocal music, both secular and sacred, Respighi's arrangement of three such examples was played in the concert. From this stage developed the opera at the end of the 16th century and as an example we heard the Overture to "Alceste." Lastly came the absolute music of Bach and Haydn, After an interval of about a century we arrive at the modern composers and the music of today which can conveniently be separated into two rough divisions. On the one hand there is the iconoclastic and atavistic breakaway of Stravinsky and the modern German school and on the other the survival of Romanticism, It was from the latter that the second half of the programme was chosen, This survival of Romanticism in music—it also exists in literature though not in the visual arts—is a fact difficult to understand in the unromantic world of this day; yet in it alone are the seeds of a sane music of tomorrow.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.