Die am 15.4.1887 erstmals veröffentlichte Äußerung zur 7. Symphonie [am 5.2.1887] erscheint wortgetreu auch in der in Wellsford (Kansas) herausgegebenen Zeitung Kiowa County Democrat Nr. 15 auf S. 5 in der 2./3. Spalte:
"The Humbug of Fashionable Craze.
     A Boston man is actually so lost to local pride as to write to the Gazette that he cannot appreciate "classical" music. Moreover, he finds others who are in the same fix. "At the symphony concert recently a work by a composer named Bruckner was performed. It took nearly an hour in the playing, and from beginning to end there was not a moment in which it afforded me the slightest pleasure. There was nothing melodious in it, and, as far as I was able to judge, nothing that suggested a purpose beyond noise making and a curious attempt to try how far extreme chromatic harmonies and ear-distributing modulations could be carried without violating the rules of the music grammar." The gentleman adds:
     I wanted to enjoy it, but I could not. Others appeared to enjoy it without the slighest effort. It is true that there were not many of these; but as few as there were, their superior capacity to find what I could not find filled me with envy. Here was classical music, so extremely classical that it required an exceptional and special talent to understand it; while I feel that if I lived for a hundred years I could not attain to that point of achievement. I was almost inconsolable at my lack of taste, till upon leaving Music hall I met a group of musicians who were discussing the work, and who agreed that it was the dullest and most incomprehensible making of much-a-do about nothing that they had ever listened to. "But the applause," I suggested. "Oh!" replied one of them, a well-known and eminent artist, throughly eclectic in taste, "some people chew paper, slate pencils, spruce gum and other flavorless things, not because they can possibly derive any nourishment from them,     but because they have perverted appetites, and masticating these things has become a habit with them. So it is with those who applaud such a work. It is habit, my dear fellow; a bad habit, founded upon a perverted taste which pretends to more than it knows. It is chewing slate-pencil music. Let us go and have a glass of beer to take the taste of it out of our mouths." This was hard on those who applauded this tone-nightmare, but I was comforted."