The infinite variety of stress, in prose, offers the musician quite new horizons that will save him from monotony and uniformity. Independence and freedom of pace will then come to terms with observance of the higher laws that govern periodic pulse and the thousand nuances of prosody. Every syllable will then have its own quantity, its own precise weight in truth of expression and accuracy of language. Longs and shorts will not have to make those cruel concessions, those barbarous sacrifices of which composers and singers, it must be admitted, take so little notice. What inexhaustible mines of variety there will be in sung or declaimed phrases, in the duration and intensity of stress, in the proportion and extension of musical periods, extensions that will no longer depend on continual reiteration and repetition but on logical progression and the growth of the germinal idea on which the piece is based….

Is rhythm indispensable for musical effect? By no means. In fact it often disappears beneath the shape of the musical phrase, in caesuras and enjambements, which conceal its periodic return from the ear. Verse is a kind of pied piper [dada] that leads the composer astray; he nonchalantly lets himself be led. . . . It seems obvious to me that if he is induced to care for truth by the natural shape of prose, the composer has everything to gain in expressiveness, and nothing to lose but predictability.