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The musical world in convention assembled has covenanted that certain harmonies shall be set apart for pasturage. Just why these arbitrary pastorales should suggest meads and syrinxes, and dancing shepherds, it would be hard to tell.

They will judge a composer on a single work, or a group of works, and class him once and for all.... In reality, my father was a man of all-round accomplishments. As a finished musician, he was master of every form of composition. He wrote both religious and secular music melodies, dances, pastorales, oratorios, symphonic poems, symphonies, sonatas, trios, and operas.

It is hardly necessary to consider here the fantastic fashionings of Erik Satie, the "newest" French composer. He seems to have out-Schoenberged Schoenberg in his little piano pieces bearing the alluring titles of Embryons desséchés, preludes and pastorales. Apart from the extravagant titles, the music itself is ludicrous qua music, but not without subtle irony.

A certain number of plays, presumably of a more or less pastoral nature, have perished. Thus no trace remains of the Lusus Pastorales licensed to Richard Jones in 1565, the nature of which can be only vaguely conjectured.

But an admirable idea of Daumier's versatile genius may be gleaned at the Lenox Library, as all the celebrated series are there: Paris Bohemians, the Blue Stockings, the Railways, La Caricature, Croquis d'Expressions, Emotions Parisiennes, Actualités, Les Baigneurs, Pastorales, Moeurs Conjugales, the Don Quixote plates, Silhouettes, Souvenirs d'Artistes, Types Parisiens, the Advocates and Judges, and a goodly number of the miscellanies.