producer; this narrow American 'culture' world pays for the maintenance of fashionable foreign standards, and resents any interference with this course. Concert singers are seldom heard in American songs worthy of their artistry, and orchestral conductors seldom give, on their own initiative, successful native orchestral works, an isolated performance of which has been arduously procured elsewhere. With the people generally, however, the matter is quite otherwise. The people of the nation have never shown a disposition to receive otherwise than cordially the work of their own composers. From Stephen Foster, through the ranks of popular music composers, to MacDowell, to many song composers of the present, and latterly to the composers of music for popular festivals and pageants--wherever the composer has gone directly to the people and served their needs, whether in the sphere of lesser or greater ideals, he has found a ready welcome and a hearty response. The pathway of true creativity, of healthy growth and achievement for the composer in America to-day, lies in abandoning the competition with European sensationalists and ultra-modernists in the narrow arena of the concert halls of 'culture', and turning to the fulfilment of national needs in the broadest and deepest sense. The accomplishment of this matter is linked with the third and last general division of our main subject, the question of administration. As a natural consequence of events in American musical history, dating from the earliest days, there has arisen the so-called 'musical world' of America to-day, the well-defined national system of concert, recital and operatic life. This system arose normally to supply the new world with the products of the highly developed musical art of the old, and in such a capacity it has admirably served its purpose. In the course of time, however, and with the increasing wealth and musical culture of America, the harvest to be reaped by the commercial exploitation of foreign artists has not remained unperceived by a country not naturally backward in the perception of commercial advantage. It is quite natural that those who took into their hands the management of these affairs should seek the greatest profit which they could be made to yield. This, it will readily be seen, was not to come from the broad development of a given locality, which would involve education and a departure from the centres of wealth, but from the exploitation of the narrow circle of wealth and culture which existed in every community of importance. Thus a great circuit was established throughout the country, by which a process of skimming the cream from as many communities as possible was set in operation, in the presentation of famous foreign artists to what has been allowed to pass as the American public. Thus a system established originally as a service to the people has finally degenerated to the condition of a commercial enterprise