Music Trade Review

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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
SO/IE RECENT CONCERTS.
Miss Carmela Cosenza, the charming and
clever pianiste, achieved a pronounced suc-
cess by her finished interpretation of a
lengthy program at a concert given at the
Madison Square Concert Hall on the even-
ing of April 2 ist. The opening number
was Beethoven's Sonata, op. 2, No. 3,
followed by compositions by Schubert,
Schubert-Liszt, Chopin, Rubinstein; and
Paganini-Liszt's " Campanella," which was
played in a brilliant style, closed the pro-
gram. Miss Cosenza is an artiste of
great promise; she plays fluently. Her
wrists are flexible and her touch is virile.
She possesses all the essentials to make
her mark in the musical world, and we will
follow her career with interest. Misses
Sally Akers, Jennie Dutton and Mr. E. de
Gogorza contributed vocal numbers. There
was a cultured and appreciative audience
present, among whom we noticed some
of the most prominent society women in
the metropolis.
0
The annual concert of Mme. Eugenie
Pappenheim's pupils, which took place at
Chickering Hall on Thursday evening last,
afforded pleasing evidence of the partici-
pants' ability. The program was catholic,
hence interesting and was appreciated by a
large and enthusiastic audience. Mr. Wm.
Balck, 'cello, and Mr. A. C. Junker, man-
dolin, assisted. Mme. Pappenheim has
good reason to feel proud of her talented
pupils.
0
The Cantata Club,of which Albert Gerard
Thiers is conductor, gave its second con-
cert on the evening of April 20, at Associ-
ation Hall, Brooklyn, assisted by Hans
Kronold, 'cellist; Herr Weisthoff, basso;
Kate S. Chittenden, organist, and Emma
Richardson Kuster, accompanist. Carl
Reinecke's cantata "The Enchanted Swan"
was sung with Miss Susan Boyce as Al-
frieda, Miss Helen Lynch, Fairy Queen,
and Miss Weber as Prince. Other num-
bers sung by the club were the "Mariner's
Christmas," Chaminade; "Spring Song,"
Saint-Saens; "Rest Thee on This Mossy
Pillow," Smart; "Noble Be Thy Life,"
Beethoven; "Love's Philosophy," Roeder;
"Come, Dorothy, Come," Bishop.
The club continues to show steady pro-
gress in its work,in fact the singing through-
out was in every way satisfactory. It elic-
ited the approval of a critical audience,
and reflected credit on the talented direc-
tor. The Cantata Club gives promise of
becoming one of the "great" musical insti-
tutions of Greater New York.
©
The most notable numbers of the delight-
program presented by the Manuscript
Society at its last public concert at
Chickering Hall, April 22, were Arthur
Foote's suite for grand orchestra in D
minor and Homer N. Bartlett's concerto
for violin and orchestra.
0
The Musical Teachers' National Associ-
ation has recently started a department for
women, of which Mrs. Theodore Sutro has
been chosen president.
IS THERE AN AilERICAN LITERATURE?
There is no one, I think, who will not
admit that the case of two independent
literatures written in the same language is
a wholly unprecedented one; but it is no
argument that because a thing is unprece-
dented it is therefore impossible. The dis-
covery of America was an unprecedented
event. It was a most marvelous and world-
revolutionizing event. There are men,
even among those whose ancestors for gen-
erations have been natives of the new soil,
who have not ceased to wonder about it,
who insist upon measuring it only by old-
world standards, on treating it as if it were
merely a vast addition to the area of
Europe. America in the first centuries
after its discovery was almost literally a
new world. Man never went to live in an
environment more strange to him. Every
element save that of race tended to sepa-
rate the minds of the settlers from those of
their kindred in the motherland. There
was something in the air of the new conti-
nent, in its vastness and freedom, in its
unlimited wealth and unprecedented op-
portunities, that tended to put a new spirit
into its sons—to breed a new race with a
new outlook and new ideals. Three hun-
dred years of this environment have pro-
duced a peculiar people, with a distinct
and strongly marked individuality, living
under an unprecedented form of govern-
ment.
The element of epoch has had its share
in the problem. The past century has been
an unprecedented one, and nowhere more
so than in America. It has been a century
of quick growths, of broad and enduring
foundations laid with unheard of rapidity.
It would have been madness a century ago
to have prophesied even a fraction of the
wonders which were to take place on our
soil. The history of the development of
Western America reads like a page from
the Arabian Nights. What an era of bustle
and stir! Where else in all history can you
find similar conditions? When have men
been thrown more fully upon their own re-
sources? The revolution, that furnace that
tried the metal of our character to its ut-
most limit, was our heroic period. The
mad struggle in the forests of a new world
was at length over; the colonists found
themselves face to face with a bewildering
and undreamed of situation. Then came
the reconstruction period, which called for
almost superhuman wisdom. The early
years of the new government, with their
test cases, their doubt and uncertainty; the
opening of the vast areas beyond the Alle-
ghanies, with their almost interminable
forests and prairies, with the swarming
fauna and strange flora.
That the American literature is written
in the English language, is, in the minds
of many, an insuperable argument against
its independence. But this in reality is
the least of all the arguments. Literature
springs from the soul; it is the embodiment
of hopes and fears, of moods gay or melan-
choly, of experience, of sensation, of con-
jecture, and the language is only the life-
less medium of communication. Do Ho*
raer into any language, and he isstill Greek.
No translation can take the French out
of Hugo or the Russian out of Tol-
stoi. It has been safe to define a liter-
ature as all the writings in a given lan-
guage. So firmly fixed is this idea that a
recent critic of Roger Bacon, who wrote in
the thirteenth century, declares that "his
writings, being all in Latin, do not belong
to the English literature." To what liter-
ature, then, do they belong? This habit
of classifying literature according to the
medium through which it has passed has
come from the fact that in the history of the
old world there have been no two nations
with distinct governments and personali-
ties using the same language. It remained
for the new world to break this precedent.
Can we never achieve our literary inde-
pendence? Must we go down through the
ages forever tied intellectually to the apron
strings of our mother? The idea is absurd.
It is certain, unless civilization be obscured
by other dark ages, that we shall never
drift away from England in our language,
but we are constantly drifting from her in
everything else. We are doing our own
thinking, solving our own problems in our
own way, and we have been doing so for a
century. It was in 1820 that Sydney
Smith demanded of a British public, "Who
reads an American book?" In the mean-
time we have produced an Emerson, a Poe,
a Cooper, a Hawthorne, a Whittier, a
Lowell, a Whitman—there is no end to the
list. The writings of these men have been
no feeble imitation of European models.
They have been strong and intensely
original; they have overflowed with a spirit
of a new world; they have been colored by
its soil and permeated with Americanism,
until to attempt to remove this native ele-
ment would be to destroy the fabric. Men
like Cooper and Whitman and Mark Twain
would have been impossible on any other
soil.
Then for more than a century we have
been making our national songs, says Mr.
Pattee in the Dial. There are hundreds
of lyrics that have burst hot from the
American heart, and that profoundly thrill
every American, which yet mean nothing
to an Englishman save as he translates
into them his own emotions of fatherland.
Are these hymns not our own? Is it not
foolishness to speak of such songs as the
Concord Hymn, The Star Spangled Banner,
My Country 'Tis of Thee, and The Battle
Hymn of thi Republic as English songs in
America? Did we not evolve them from
as profound and tragic an experience as did
England her Rule Britannia?
It seems to me that it may be laid down
almost as an axiom that when a distinct na-
tion has acquired a distinct personality,
and has produced writers and writings sui
generis, reflecting the soil, the spirit, the
individuality of that people, then that na-
tion has a distinct literature, no matter
what may be the language in which it is
written. American literature is proud of
its origin. It passed its infancy and child-
hood in the land of Chaucer. The first
chapters of its life history are the same as