Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...for the creation of diverse rhythmic streams, for the composition of music that depends on its melodic, harmonic and contrapuntal interests. How infinitely more at home he is when writing for the piano! But here he is content to remain entirely conservative, and anything in the nature of novelty is indeed far to seek. As a composer for his own instrument he is relatively a classicist, for one cannot, in days when music is almost universally accepted as primarily a medium of expression, continue to reserve this category for the pre-Beethovenians, and in styling Rakhmaninof an old-fashioned romanticist, one has in mind a differentiation between the real modernist, who makes no apology for boldly attempting illustration by means of music, and the nineteenth-century romanticist of the Schumann or Chopin type who, from our point of view, is to be considered as having merely hinted, and sometimes a little faint-heartedly, at the emancipation of music and its enfranchisement as a highly expressive art. In the smaller piano pieces, of which Rakhmaninof has composed a large number, he writes in a variety of moods and styles. At times he is meditative, as in the B major Prelude (No. 11) from the series Opus 32, on occasion almost feminine in delicacy, as in the fifth item of the same set; although he rarely approaches the uncompromising' popularness' of the Polka, which forms part of the Album inaugurating the Russian Music Publishing Company's Edition, the G minor Prelude from the group of ten (Opus 23), dedicated to Siloti, is quite fairly to be described as a concession to those who prefer the lighter kind of music; examples are to be found in which there is a greater ruggedness than in Brahms, though falling short of the rather savage emotionalism of...