Chapter VIII CONCLUSION 241 INTRODUCTION During the last twenty or thirty years there has been an enormous increase in the United States of what may be called “institutional” music. We have built opera houses, we have formed many new orchestras, and we have established the teaching of music in nearly all our public and private schools and colleges, so that a casual person observing all this, hearing from boastful lips how many millions per annum we spend on music, and adding up the various columns into one grand total, might arrive at the conclusion that we are really a musical people. But one who looks beneath the surface--who reflects that the thing we believe, and the thing we love, that we do--would have to do a sum in subtraction also; would have to ask what music there is in our own households. He would find that in our cities and towns only an infinitesimal percentage of the inhabitants sing together for the pleasure of doing so, and that the task of keeping choral societies together is as difficult as ever; that the music we take no part in, but merely listen to, is the music that flourishes; that our operatic singers, the most highly paid in the world, come to us annually from abroad and sing to us in languages that we cannot understand; that, in short, while music flourishes, much of it is bought and little of it is home-made. The deduction is obvious. This institutional music is a sort of largess of our prosperity. We are rich enough to buy the best the world affords. We institute music in our public schools and display our interest in it once a year--at graduation time. We see that our children take “music lessons” and judge the result likewise by their capacity to play us occasionally a very nice little piece. Men, in particular,--all potential singers, and _very much needing to sing_,--look upon it as a slightly effeminate or scarcely natural and manly thing to do. Music is, in short, too much our diversion, and too little our salvation.