'On the recreation piers the band concerts provided by the Dock Department have been enjoyed by many thousands. An innovation there has been to classify the program, and give the concerts distinctive character on different evenings--an Italian Opera Night, American Night, Wagner Night, Folk Songs and Dances, German-Slavonic Night, etc.... 'In these activities of only a single summer, it will be seen what a vista of possibilities has been revealed. If these developments have any meaning whatsoever, they have a meaning of the deepest sort for every American city and village. The magnitude of New York's operations is not the most important point. We are most deeply concerned with the spirit of these progressive activities, a spirit which may find its appropriate expression wherever there exists a community, large or small, which senses the upward trend of American humanity and democracy.' M. M. M. FOOTNOTES: [56] It is reproduced in 'The Musician,' Vol. X, p. 484. [57] This society must not be confounded with one of the same name founded in 1858 at St. Louis by Edward Sobolewsky, the opera composer, for the purpose of producing the best choruses. [58] During the Civil War Root was a missionary of patriotism as well as of music, his 'Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching' and 'The Battle-cry of Freedom' contributing greatly to the martial spirit of the North. _Cf._ Chap. XI. [59] Members of the so-called 'reform' administration of Mayor William J. Gaynor, which came into power January 1, 1910. CHAPTER XI THE FOLK ELEMENT IN AMERICAN MUSIC Nationalism in music--Sources of American folk-song; classification of folk-songs--General characteristics of the negro folk-song--The negro folk-song and its makers--Other American folk-songs--The negro minstrel tunes; Stephen Collins Foster, etc.--Patriotic and national songs. We have been frequently obliged to indicate, in the course of our 'Narrative History of Music,' that certain known facts about musical beginnings were not first facts--that there were premises upon which these facts were based--beyond the ken of the historian. Thus we discovered that some time in the early centuries of our era a type of chant known as plain-song was systematized by musicians, but we were unable to reveal the actual source of that music; later we came upon a more or less artistic expression in the form of troubadour songs, and again found their actual source shrouded in mystery--or tradition--and so forth. We were consequently forced to the conclusion that, as practice precedes theory, something else precedes artistic music, which is its source and real beginning. That something is the elementary expression of the race--or folk-song. Art music is rooted in folk-song as surely as the tree is rooted in the soil.