He is those who have never before
spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us one
with them.
But it is not only as content that they are in this music. This music is
they, in its curves and angles, in its melody and rhythms, in its style
and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as
some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of
scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The
unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence
are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats.
No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them
from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms are
visible on page after page. When his music laughs it laughs like
barbarians holding their sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little
old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all the
boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins
and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and
suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and
wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom
expression is like a tearing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving.
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