his instrumental ideas and, indeed, instrumental motifs derived or inspired by the melodic curves of speech occur in all his mature purely instrumental works as well, of course, as in his vocal works which have instrumental accompaniment. Jan?ek's instrumental themes are notoriously brief, usually consisting of only a few notes: it was his particular genius that he would give these few notes a wealth and variety of musical meaning, and certainly no other composer ever achieved so much with so little material. One may take leave to doubt, however, whether speech is not far too subtle in its pitch variations and far too fluid in its rhythms to fit into the rigid 5 lines-4 spaces limits of our music paper. Let us rather say that Jan?ek got the pitch-content of the speech phrases he heard and instantly streamlined and adjusted them to fit our Western-tempered scale system. Certain musicologists have closely related the difference between traditional folk music of various countries to the different speech habits of the people in these countries. As early as 1906, Jan?ek was advocating a plan for a musical dictionary of the Czech language. Such a standardization of the sound content of language was impractical because the melodic curves of speech vary from speaker to speaker, from dialect to dialect: in any one speaker there would be variation according to mood, temperament, etc., as no one knew better than Jan?ek who during his London visit noted twenty different versions of the English monosyllable "Yes"! An