Among the many memories of this great occasion I can never forget the first rehearsal of the four orchestras and sixteen kettledrums which Berlioz used in the “Tuba Mirum” to depict the Last Judgment. This rehearsal took place in the Foyer of the old Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street; and as the sixteen kettledrums came in like one man just as the fanfare of the judgment Trumpets begins, the effect of these vibrations in a comparatively small room was so tremendous that one by one the orchestra men arose and a murmur began which grew and grew and finally relieved itself in a loud shout of enthusiasm. It was several minutes before my father could continue the rehearsal. I have never witnessed anything quite like it since. We are now so sophisticated by Strauss and the later-day dissonancers that so-called instrumental “effects” neither shock nor stir us. And as regards the dissonances with which some of the ultramoderns seek to irritate our ears, I have always claimed that the human ear is like the back of a donkey—if you whip it long enough and hard enough, it gradually becomes insensitive to pain. Theodore Thomas and his supporters were much irritated that my father should have “gotten ahead” of them with so stupendous a musical demonstration, and they immediately proceeded to copy his idea by giving a Music Festival the following year in the same building. For me, the immediate result of the Festival was my election at eighteen years of age as permanent conductor of the Newark Harmonic Society. This gave me the long-desired opportunity to produce choral works with orchestral accompaniment, and for several years I gave three or four of these every winter, including not only the older oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, but more modern works like Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust,” Rubinstein’s “Tower of Babel,” the Verdi “Requiem,” and choral excerpts from the operas of Wagner. All of these concerts my father attended, and after each performance he would analyze my conducting, praise freely and enthusiastically where he thought I deserved it, and also show me where he considered a tempo wrong or an entrance of instruments or chorus not properly indicated. My mother and aunt would often lend their lovely voices in the choruses at the performances whenever I thought I needed them, but they would always insist in the most blindly partisan way that my concerts were wonderful and that I was altogether a very remarkable boy.