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MILWAUKEE SCHOOL OF MUSIC
     John C. Fillmore, Director.
             Milwaukee, Wis., Dec.17th,1893.189

My dear Miss Fletcher:---This is Sunday and I am doing just what I happen to fancy, and taking it easy. I can't work seven days in the week all the time;so I am resting to-day with a clear conscience.I have just been looking over Gilman's paper on Chinese music. It is vastly more respectable than his treatment of the Zuni songs;but after re-reading Edgar S. Kelley's article on the same subject, I am once more impressed with the fact that Kelley is a real musican who gabbles about music without having any real understanding of it. Yet he evidently has the confidence of Eastern scientific men,Ethnologists and psychologists. I see he had the co-operation of Prof. Frederick Starr and worked at Columbia University as well as at Clark. This means that the East is likely to be condemned to a long period of apparent activity in musical archaeology and ethnology, but activity wich will be anything but fruitful.No real musical intelligence can come out of such work as Gilman's.He knows just enough to hurt him and to hurt the cause in wich he is engaged, and those who have to do with him will never learn the difference. He has that "little knowledge" wich is "a dangerous thing" and in his case is a very bad thing. But it can't be helped.If this lovement of ours on the Governement fails,(and I am by no means so sanguine as are my friends here),I think we ought to try seriously wether there cannot be a place found for me in Leland Stanford University.The West is the place for new ideas and real enlightenment. The Eastern folks are too hide-boune.
But I tell you,my friends,if I am to do any work inthe fields of folk-music,there is no time to be lost. I indulged to-day in an inspection of myself in the Mirror,and there can be no doubt that Krehbiel was right:I am a"gray-bearded,bald-headed,old sinner".I shall be 51 years old in February;and I look at least 61.However,perhaps it doesn't matter much whether I do much more or not. I do believe that we have got at the real bottom facts and the underlying principles of primitive music;and whatever work is done further will have to be done on the lines we have laid down.Perhaps this is service enough and honor enough.But what puzzles me is that our work seems to make so little stir Nobody in the East, except Krehbiel,has said anything about it,to my knowledge;and even my review of Gilman has not brought me a single kick. I would rather have Gilman and his friends howling bloody murder and abusing me from Dan to Beersheba than this ominous silence. It doesn't promise well at all.Is it possible that he and his friends are