These same victrolas, by the way, with their cousin, the player-piano, which so outrage the sensibilities of many a musician of the elder day, are a very real force in helping to civilize this country musically. The American is by no means as unmusical as he thinks he is. His indifference to art is only the result of his purely industrial civilization, and his tendency to mix morals with æsthetics is a habit of thought engendered by his ancestry. The Puritan tradition makes him fearful and suspicious of any sort of sensuous or emotional response, but it has not rendered him incapable of it. Catch him off his guard, get him away from the fear of being bored, and he is far from insensitive to music. He buys victrola records because he is a hero-worshipper, because he wants to hear the expensive Caruso and Kreisler and McCormack; but inevitably he is bound to take some notice of what they play and sing, and to recognize it when he hears it again. In spite of himself he begins to acquire a rudimentary sort of musical background. He begins by buying jazz rolls for his player-piano, and is likely in the long run, if only out of curiosity, to progress from “blues” to Chopin, via Moszkovski and Grainger. But the greatest present-day force for good, musically, in this country, is the large motion-picture house. Music has always been a necessary accompaniment to motion pictures, in order to compensate for the uncanny silence in which these photographic wraiths unfold their dramas. Starting with a modest ensemble of piano and glass crash, the motion-picture orchestra has gradually increased in size and quality, the pipe organ has been introduced to augment and alternate it, so that the larger houses to-day can boast a musical equipment that is amazingly good. A few years ago S. L. Rothafel devised a glorified type of entertainment that was a sort of combination picture-show and “pop” concert. He built a theatre, the Rialto, especially to house it, containing a stage that was little more than a picture frame, a large pipe organ, and an orchestra platform large enough to hold seventy or eighty players. He recruited a permanent orchestra large enough to play symphonic works, and put Hugo Riesenfeld, an excellent violinist and conductor, who had been trained under Arthur Nikisch, in charge of the performances. These, besides the usual film presentations, comprised vocal and instrumental solos and detached numbers by the orchestra. All the music played at these entertainments was good--in what is known in this country as “classical.” Riesenfeld devised a running accompaniment to the films, assembled from the best orchestral music obtainable--a sort of synthetic symphonic poem that fitted the mood and action of the film presented, and was, of course, much too good for it.