… [They] played Europe and the New World off against each other at the International Guild. Schoenberg's Serenade began the program; Varèse's Intégrales ended it, and the interval was broad as the sea. It was delicate lacework sound against brute shrilling jagged music. It was the latest ghostly flowering of the romantic tradition against a polyphony not of lines, but of metallic cubical volumes. It was, essentially, the thinking introverted solitary against mass movement in which the individual goes lost; for the reason either piece did its author uncommon justice. Few works of Schoenberg traverse less writing for the eye than this new one, and breathe more thoroughly. The march which leads on the Serenade and then leads it off again may ultimately belong to the company of Schoenberg's paper pieces. But the rest of the little movements, the minuet, the variations, and the setting of Petrarch's sonnet Number 217, the "Dance Scene" and the "Song without Words," flow lightly; and bring within their small compass and in the familiar character of the Serenade a very personal quality of sound. The mood is serener than it was in Pierrot Lunaire, and the movement less languorous and less explosive. Nonetheless, the piece's quality is similarly half painful, half dreamy; characteristically Schoenbergian; the tone eerie and sotto voce; the structure submitted to intense concentration. The nervous, excited strumming of the mandoline and guitar called for by the score has correspondences throughout the form. And like so much of Schoenberg the Serenade is fundamentally Brahmsian in feeling. The conservatism of the structure, the frequency of rhythmic repetitions, the symmetrical formation of motifs, themes, and entire sections, has been marked by the German aestheticians. Perfectly apparent to the layman is the brooding romanticism of the melos, particularly in the "Song without Words," and the spookromanticism of the loose-jointed periods of the minuet and "Dance Scene." The characteristic undulant movement, the lyrical upheavals of the line, true, have been compressed by this ultramodern into minute spaces; stand immeasurably tightened, curtailed, and broken up. But they exist in Schoenberg as essentially as in Schumann, Wagner, and Brahms. That is the German, apparently, and the European in touch with a past. Schoenberg is the carrier-on, the continuator of his predecessors' line of advance. Despite the architectural preoccupation distinguishing him from the great mass of his artistic ancestors, from Brahms, even, Schoenberg is the romanticist of today; as Stravinsky justly if unkindly denominated him. He is the singer par excellence of the individual, the proud, solitary, brooding soul; the lover par excellence of the singular, the raffiné, the precious in musical expression; of the strange and unwonted in harmony and mood. The sudden entirely unheralded high F, pianpianissimo, which squeaks in the singer's voice toward the close of the song Herzgewächse: what is it but a very extreme example of Schoenberg's characteristic processes? To a degree the Serenade approaches the humanistic ideal a little more closely than Pierrot Lunaire and Herzgewächse, less descriptive and macabre and perverse as it is. But the divergence is insignificant. Jewelry and feeling of rarity remain; and with those aspects of romanticism, its more permanent attractive ones. Like his masters, Schoenberg is busied in a rigorous search for his own truth, for his own naturalness, and uncompromisingly bends the inherited means of music to parallel his way of feeling. The Serenade is the work of a truthseeker, not satisfied with conventions, and actively developing the suppleness, copiousness, and precision of his medium. To be sure, there is a novelty in Schoen-berg's approach. His touch is less warm, his emotional frontage narrower than the great romanticists'. He is the man of his hour, and that hour is a difficult and tortured one, less communicable than its forerunners, isolating its members in moody loneliness and semimystical adventure. Schoenberg's music sounds as exquisite, shadowy, and remote as Paul Klee's painting looks. Brahms shudders like a ghost. But the ghost has the old gravity and sentiment, and wears Wagnerian plumes, besides.

Passing from the Serenade to Intégrales is like passing from the I-ness to the it-ness of things; from a hypersensitive unworldly feeling to a sense of strident material power; and from a traditional expression to one which is independent, and rooted as largely in life as in Berlioz and Stravinsky. Varèse stems from the fat European soil quite as directly as Schoenberg does. The serious approach, the scientific curiosity, of what of the nineteenth century remained on the Continent, is active in him and his audacious art. Besides Varèse is somewhat of a romanticist. For all his extreme aural sensitivity to the ordinary phenomena and perception of the prodigious symphony of the city and port of New York, he has a tendency to seize upon life in terms of the monstrous and the elemental. Amériques, the first of his characteristic "machines," resembles Brontosaurus, the nasty hungry Fresser, waddling filthy, stinking, and trumpeting through a mesozoic swamp. Fafner was an elf in comparison. That is the Berlioz influence: it is significant that Varèse first appeared before the American public in the capacity of conductor of the Frenchman's prodigious Requiem. But his romantic aspects are balanced by more humanistic ones. Varèse has derived his idiom through direct perception, and used it in interests other than those of descriptivity. He has never imitated the sounds of the city in his works, as he is frequently supposed to have done. His music is much more in the nature of penetration. He will tell you how much the symphony of New York differs from that of Paris: Paris' being noisier, a succession of shrill, brittle hissing sounds, New York's on the contrary, quieter, for the mere reason that it is incessant, enveloping the New Yorker's existence as the rivers the island of Manhattan. He works with those sonorities merely because he has come into relation with American life, and found corresponding rhythms set free within himself. It is probable that at the moments in which Varèse is compelled to give form to his feelings about life, sensations received from the thick current of natural sound in which we dwell, push out from the storehouses of the brain as organic portions of an idea.

His feeling is equally preponderantly unromantic. It is much more a feeling of life massed. There are those who will say, of course, that Intégrales is merely cubical music. To a definite degree, Varèse's polyphony is different from the fundamentally linear polyphony of Stravinsky's art. His music is built more vertically, moves more to solid masses of sound, and is very rigorously held in them. Even the climaxes do not break the cubism of form. The most powerful pronouncements merely force sound into the air with sudden violence, like the masses of two impenetrable bodies in collision. The hardness of edge and impersonality of the material itself, the balance of brass, percussion and woodwind, the piercing golden screams, sudden stops and lacunae, extremely rapid crescendi and diminuendi, contribute to the squareness. The memorable evening of its baptism, Intégrales resembled nothing so much as shining cubes of freshest brass and steel set in abrupt pulsing motion. But for us, they were not merely metallic. They were the tremendous masses of American life, crowds, city piles, colossal organizations; suddenly set moving, swinging, throbbing by the poet's dream; and glowing with a clean, daring, audacious, and majestic life. Human power exulted anew in them. Majestic skyscraper chords, grandly resisting and moving volumes, ruddy sonorities, and mastered ferocious outbursts cried it forth. For the first time in modern music, more fully even than in the first section of Le Sacre, one heard an equivalent Wotan's spear music. But this time, it had something to do not with the hegemony of romantic Germany, but with the vast forms of the democratic, communistic new world.

Without the juxtaposition of the Serenade, Intégrales would have been a great experience adding to a growing prestige. But that evening the Atlantic rolled. The opposition of the two works precluded such concepts as "Schoenberg's music" and "music by Varèse." One saw two kinds of music, apart as two continents, and based a thousand leagues from each other. Far to the east one saw romanticism rooted in the individualism of western Europe, romanticism that indeed was the gentle old European life. And close, there lay the new humanism, the hard, general spirit, rooted in the massive communal countries: Russia and the United States, itself an integral portion of all one meant saying "the new world" and "America."