But Houston’s past may be suggested by other than old things. The Southwest and the frontier are recalled by the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and its annual prelude, the Salt Grass Trail, on which hundreds of city people ride horseback for three days to retrace a pioneer cattle trail. Silky stalactites of Spanish moss, dripping from oaks and sweet gums, faintly evoke Houston’s role in the old South. But the primitiveness and individualism of the wild west and the relaxation of the Southern mood have been shed. Though Houston was shaped to a large extent by the South and the Southwest, it has come to be lightly marked by those regions. “It is partly an unconscious romanticism and it is partly a conscious cult that one still thinks of Houston as pre-eminently a Texas city,” Hubert Mewhinney wrote in the Houston _Post_. “But it is not. Houston since the (Second World) war ... has not been so much Texan as generalized American....” [Illustration: Music Hall] In becoming so, it gained in a way that has been concealed by the city’s more arresting millionaire legend. Slowly, perceptibly, Houston is becoming cosmopolitan. With its interest in music, art, and the theater, with its universities and medical schools, Houston is becoming an important center of culture. But nearly all is new: the organization dates of only the symphony, one art museum, and the universities precede World War II, those of only the symphony and one university precede World War I. No cultural institution dates from the nineteenth century, though a tradition of opera and theater goes far back. Houston’s musical life has long been centered in its symphony, which gives the city much more than symphony music. From its first and second chairs come most of the musicians in the chamber music groups, which are the most remarkable new development in the city’s cultural life. Sir John Barbirolli succeeded Leopold Stokowski in 1961 as conductor of the symphony, which was organized in 1913. The Music Guild, organized in 1948, is the oldest of three chamber music groups of distinction, and the J. S. Bach Society, one of the few performing Bach groups in America, gave its first concerts in 1954. The Houston Grand Opera Association was organized in 1955. During the six years Stokowski led the symphony he organized the Contemporary Music Society, which gave its first concert in 1959.