Conductor

An active figure, with two eyes peering through large glasses emerged from the door at the left of the platform. He advanced to the centre in front of the expectant orchestra and bowed to the audience. The audience assembled in Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, applauded loudly. The conductor turned to the orchestra--it was the Philharmonic Orchestra. He was new to it and to the audience. He stood poised, at once elastic and tense, as if he were restraining a great passion.

The orchestra glanced at their music, Song of the Volga Boatmen, scored for wind instruments and percussion, poised their instruments, as their eyes turned on the conductor. His baton twitched. "Boom" went the bass-drum in answer. It answered again and again, its portentious stroke punctuating the strains of the Boat Song, composed by Stravinsky, conducted by Stravinsky.

It was his first appearance in the U. S. After a voyage hither which, he said, made him feel like writing a "snown-storm symphony" because there was 'no more sun the whole time than a 20-franc piece," he had received pressmen in his hotel. . They had seen him disembark from his ice-blistered vessel in a black topcoat, orange shirt, orange muffler, monocle in right eye, but were somewhat abashed to find that his lounging costume consisted of a brown-and-rose pullover sweater, heavy gold bands on each wrist to support watch, bangles, etc., and five massive rings. As he talked, he fidgeted. His glass had kept dropping from its bed between the fold of his brow and the pouch of his eye. He waved long arms, discussed his music in French and German.

"A modernist? But no, I am not a modernist. That is a debauched term (mot compromise). The modernists set out to shock the bourgeoisie, and they only succeed in pleasing the Bolsheviki. My music is neither 'futurist' nor 'passeist,' but the music of today."

The music, however, that he conducted with so much verve for that assemblage in the famed concert hall, the music which had made him so famous was, for him, the music of yesterday. Yet there were not a few in the great assemblage who love still the loveliness he has forsworn; and, though the members of the Philharmonic Orchestra seemed to weary of all his impetuous antics, to grow listless in sounding their horns and strings, these people applauded long the music of the old Stravinsky, by the new Stravinsky.