Real music requires not only that the tones should be clear and resonant, but that they should be uttered amid harmonious surroundings. "Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," sung with a banjo accompaniment on a lawn in the evening, surrounded by gay companions, may be the most delightful music, which will start the blood coursing or rest the disturbed mind, but it would not be called music if sung at a funeral. "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" is glorious music when it is sung in a great cathedral, with echoes from its shadowy arches and the dim light of its stained-glass windows. But the same solo would be in awful discord with a ballroom jig. Harmonious circumstances and appropriate environment are as essential for perfect effects in music as is the concord of sweet sounds. The foolish idea that music consists in screaming up to the highest C and growling down to the lowest B has misled many an amateur, and destroyed her helpfulness to a world that has far too much misery and far too little of the joy that comes from a sweet-voiced songster. The beginner in voice culture who attempts to wiggle her voice like a hired mourner, and with her tremulous effects sets the teeth of her audience on edge, has surely been misled into darkest delusion as to music, and will soon be lost amid the throng of vocal failures. Extremists are out of place anywhere, but the myriads of them in the musical world make humanity shudder. What is needed in music to-day more than anything else is a standard of musical culture which shall demand careful discipline in all the influences that contribute to good music. True music is the music that always produces benign effects, the music that holds the attention of the auditor and permanently influences him to nobler thought, feeling, and action. Those large-hearted, artistic-souled men and women who are capable of interpreting into feeling what they have heard from voice or instrument must be the final court of appeal. A trapeze performance in acoustics is not music.