Gottschalk enjoyed during his life equal fame as pianist and composer. His claim to the former was probably just; Berlioz himself spoke with enthusiasm of his playing and of our own artists we have the testimony of many, such as William Mason, Carl Bergmann, and Richard Hoffman, as to the genuine enjoyment which they obtained in hearing the concerts of Gottschalk. But how evanescent has been the fame of his compositions, existing only in the memory of comparatively few; as entities they are already silent pages of notes. All that is heard of his music to-day is an occasional faint tinkle of that surviving strain of sentimentality which was destined to such continued popularity in the polite répertoire, 'The Last Hope.' Gottschalk wrote two operas and several orchestral scores and many songs, but his piano compositions comprise the bulk of his works. While there are among these compositions many pages of beauty not unlike that of Chopin, and in the dance compositions on negro-creole and Spanish themes a certain vigor and distinction, the majority of them represent the merest vehicles of virtuosity written to tickle the ears of a public which had been brought up on the banalities played by the sensational pianists that visited America in those days. Over-sentimental, and at times vulgar, as the art of Gottschalk now appears to us, his place in American music is an important one and we cannot but feel that amid environments more sustaining to a higher ideal of art such a genuinely musical temperament as was his would have produced an art less ephemeral. II These early apparitions of American musical art are now to us only matters of history. Whatever influence they may have had on the conditions of their day, our present day musical life has been unaffected by them. For the establishment of that which, for lack of better name, we call the American school of composers we again look to New England. Through the few composers known as the Boston group America first assimilated into its musical life the best traditions of European musical culture and in the labors of these men the American community was taught in some degree to look seriously upon the native composer and his achievement.