What chiefly lives in it
are certain poignant phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing, winey
bit of color here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a
sharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wandering melody for the
voice there. His music consists of scattered, highly polished phrases,
hard, exquisite, and cold. He is pre-eminently the _precieux_.
Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even, of
Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the
music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which his
compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to inclose
within each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich, set him
forever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the academic and
conforming crew. The man who has composed these scores makes at least
the gesture of the artist, and comes to music to express a temper
original and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and the
commonplace, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and fantastic. He
is eminently not one of the pathetic, half-educated musicians so common
in America. He knows something of musical science; knows how a tonal
edifice should be unified; has a sense of the chemistry of the
orchestra.
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