Musical Spirits

I was looking at a recent biography of Rachmaninoff, and came across a statement of his that was published days after he died, in 1943:

I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.

I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to the new ones.

The new kind of music seems to me to come, not from the heart, but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their music 'exult' as Hans von Bulow called it. They meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate, and brood - but they do not exult.

It may be that they compose in the manner of the times, but it may be, too, that the spirit of the times does not call for expression in music.

He tried to feel the new,
but it left him feeling cold.

What then, could he do
but play for the gods of old?