At Prague

It is now some years since Ferruccio Benvenuto Busoni, Italian master-pianist and modernist, startled the musical intelligenzia by advocating an entirely new musical scale. It was to be composed of quarter-tones, the pitch of each two adjacent tones being only half of what it is on a piano. It was then already noted that music played on a quarter-tone piano would only sound "out of tune"--and that this would be no novelty at all. Quarter-tone effects, it was added, were achieved by every Hawaiian guitar-player when he executed that lugubrious wailing slide along his seductively twanging strings.

Since then, futuristic string-quartet composers have used quarter-tones, and really achieved genuine new effects with them. Expert violinists can manage them, with a little practice (beginners without any practice at all). At last, however, a quarter-tone piano keyboard has been invented, by one Alois Haba, a young Czech pupil of the daring Franz Schreker. His instrument was the chief exhibit at the International Music Festival held in Prague last month.

The Prague celebration was a riot of modernistic delicacies. Arnold Schpnberg, Florent Schmitt, Sergei Prokofiev, Ernest Bloch, Arthur Honegger were all well represented by new works, guaranteed to irritate unaccustomed ears. A new composer of unquestioned merit was also brought to light oh this occasion. He is Alexander von Zemlinsky, an Austro-Czecho-Slovakian. His Third, or "Lyric", Symphony was performed; its seven long movements are all built around a single leading motif: the theme of "a man bent on conquest and adventure, to whom love is but an episode in a life of combat and struggle." Zemlinsky used a baritone voice and many kettledrums to bring home with emphasis his dominant idea.