The eternally baffling question for music critics (who, all popular prejudices aside, really like music and wish it well) is where to find the bridge between what is true and great in sound combinations and what is true and great in a man's life. It would probably be easier and more pleasant to dispense with the critics altogether and let music work out its own future with the public, but making value judgments about what we like seems to be an inevitable human trait. (The more we like a thing, the more greatness we are led to claim for it); so we nominate a number of men whose job it is to live on more intimate terms with the respective arts than is possible for anyone else, and let them do the bulk of the selective sifting.

What has been the criterion used by all the music critics of history, above and beyond the changes in musical style? If any, it has been the demand that great music must arise from greatness in the composer himself, greatness not defined in terms of talent, fecundity, or energy, but in terms of character. The internal strength, in a sense, the moralness, of music is what binds it fast as an art to the sum-total of human history and behaviour. Like a piece of music, the life of a man is an improvization and development of a period of time. Both, to be great, must pack as much meaning and strength as possible into the time given.

The great sickness of modern music is not any lack of talent, resources, or opportunities. A composer today has fare more chance of success than was the case in Europe until Wagner's time. We have a plethora of composers: What we lack is men writing music. Shostakovitch, the most talented and promising of the moderns, is a case in point. In his recent Seventh symphony, which Haggin of the "Nation," a top-notch critic, called "pretentious, feeble, inane, and banal," he was trying to express the heroic character of the time we live in although his own nature is unwarlike and introverted. He attempted to say with music what was in the nature of the case impossible.

Music, by nature and definition, can only mean itself. The parts of Shostakovitch's work which have rung true in the past have been the slow, introspective, semi-ecclesiastical movements like the first movement of his Fifth symphony. Here he is presenting the sombre, God-seeking element of Russian life that he understands. Beethoven was successful with his "Eroica" symphony in memory of Napoleon, because he himself was a big enough man to make the music strong and sincere. Shostakovitch is no Beethoven, and the twenties was not a time for breeding heroic figures, but what the present lacks in faith and breadth, it partially makes up in technique and heightened self-understanding.

The hope for the composers we have now is not to sell out to popular political movements or "ideologies," no matter how strong their political sympathies may be, but to keep music the sincere expression of personal qualities and ideals that it has been in the past, and must continue to be if it wants to survive as an independent art.