My dear Elgar, Why Paris? I recommend Peiping (ci-devant Peking) where you must go to the Lama temple and discover how the Chinese produce harmony. Instead of your laborious expedient of composing a lot of different parts to be sung simultaneously, they sing in unison all the time, mostly without changing the note; but they produce their voices in some magical way that brings out all the harmonics with extraordinary richness, like big bells. I have never had my ears so supersatisfied. The basses are stupendous…. At Tientsin they had a Chinese band for me. It consisted of a most lovely toned gong, a few flageolets (I don’t know what else to call them) which specialised in pitch without tone, and a magnificent row of straight brass instruments reaching to the ground, with mouthpieces like the ones I saw in the Arsenal in Venice many years ago: brass saucers quite flat, with a small hole in the middle. They all played the same note, and played it all the time, like the E flat in the Rheingold prelude; but it was rich in harmonics, like the note of the basses in the temple. At the first pause I demanded that they should play some other notes to display all the possibilities of the instrument. This atheistic proposal stunned them…. Then there is the Japanese theatre orchestra. I daresay you fancy yourself as a master of orchestration; but you should just hear what can be done in the way of producing atmosphere with one banjo string pizzicato and a bicycle bell. But the Chinese will reveal to you the whole secret of opera, which is, not to set a libretto to music, but to stimulate actors to act and declaim. When there is a speech to be delivered, the first (and only) fiddler fiddles at the speaker as if he were lifting a horse over the Grand National jumps; an ear splitting gong clangs at him; a maddening castanet clacks at him; and finally the audience joins in and incites the fiddler to redouble his efforts. You at once perceive that this is the true function of the orchestra in the theatre and that the Wagnerian score is only gas and gaiters. << less