In the West Cincinnati takes the lead as a pioneer in choral music. As early as 1819 there was a Haydn Society in Cincinnati which seems to have been the successor of an older organization. Its first concert was devoted to Handel and Haydn, and its second included also Mozart. Soon afterward were born the Episcopal Singing Society and the Euterpean Society. Then came the Sacred Music Society and the Amateur Musical Association. The latter gave the 'Creation' in 1853. Coincidentally there grew up a number of Männerchor societies, which in 1849, collaborating with several similar bodies in neighboring towns, organized the first of the great _Sängerfeste_ already mentioned. In 1856 the Cecilia Society came into being and inaugurated a new era for choral music in Cincinnati. At its first concert it performed Mendelssohn's 'Forty-second Psalm,' a cantata of Mozart, a chorus for female voices from Spontini's _Vestale_, Haydn's 'Come, Gentle Spring,' and some choruses from Schneider's 'Last Judgment.' Subsequently it presented other works of Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, as well as compositions of Beethoven, Schumann, Handel, Gluck, Gade, Neukomm, Weber, and Wagner. The next important society in Cincinnati was the Cincinnati Harmonic, out of which grew the Festival Chorus Society. The latter was organized in connection with the Cincinnati May Festivals which started in 1873 and in which thirty-six societies from the West and Northwest, including over one thousand singers, participated. The stimulation furnished by this and subsequent coöperative festivals resulted, as Theodore Thomas hopefully predicted, in sending 'new life and vigor into the whole musical body of the West.' Cincinnati still retains its activity in choral music and possesses a large number of excellent singing societies, most of which are German. Among these we may mention the Männerchor and the Orpheus as perhaps the most conspicuous. It would indeed be impossible to estimate fully the value the influence exercised by Germans and German singing societies had on the cultivation of music in America. In Milwaukee, for example, the _Musikverein_, organized in 1849, stood for years as a beacon light of musical culture, shedding its rays far and near over the artistic darkness of the newly settled West. 'The elements of which the _Musik-Verein_ was composed,' says Ritter, 'were many-sided. There were to be found that German indigenous growth, the _Männerchor_ (male chorus), the orchestra, the chorus composed of male and female voices, amateurs performing the different solo parts. The whole field of modern musical forms was cultivated by those enthusiastic German colonists, the male-chorus glee, the cantata, the oratorio, the opera, chamber music in its divers forms, the overture, the symphony were placed on the programs of this active society. Its musical life was a rich one and its influence through the West was of great bearing on a healthy musical development.'