While we write (the first week in October) the musical season, in what we take to be the most music-loving of our cities, Boston, has not commenced, or shaped itself into much distinctness of plan. The season is late; hard times may make it later; yet shall "the winter of our discontent be glorious summer" ere long. Boston, for its best music,--best in artistic tendency, though not perhaps the most exciting or most fashionable,--has always relied more than New York on its own quiet, domestic resources. Our musical societies have been the centres of our musical activity, and have more or less successfully provided us with sterling opportunities of making ourselves acquainted with the master compositions in the various forms of Oratorio, Orchestra, Chamber Music, etc., where the end has been more to get at the intrinsic worth and beauty of the music, than to go into fashionable raptures about some new-come singer or solo-playing virtuoso. Yet virtuosodom and the Italian opera come in to reap an annual harvest here too, and have and long will have their zealous party of admirers. Were Opera an organized home industry among us, as much as other forms of music,--were there some meaning in the name "Academy of Music" worn by operatic theatres, it would be more useful to our artistic progress. But Italian Opera, as managed, and "star" concerts generally, are no part of the healthy, permanent development of our own musical resources. They are speculations; they attack us from without, exploiting a factitious enthusiasm, and exhausting the soil in one short season, so they may only carry off the present fatness of the land. Operas and virtuoso concerts are wholly in the hands of speculators, musical Jew-brokers, who do a formidable business in old clothes, the worn-out musical celebrities of Europe;--often with great skill, often much to our pleasure and advantage; for it is much to us to hear great artists, even when the voice has lost some of its freshness, and to admire now what long ago perhaps exhausted admiration in the Old World. But the effect is bad on our domestic industry. We almost need a musical protective system. Our good old society concerts have been much thrown out of joint. Few of them of late, as compared with former years, have paid. The dazzling novelties, that come trumpeted with all the cunning speculators' arts, debauch us somewhat from our wholesome, quiet love of pure, high music for its own sake, and lead the public into little short-lived fanaticisms about certain prima donnas, baritones, or tenors, and about music chiefly made to show off the singer, full of the commonplaces that he loves to make "effect" in,--fanaticisms alternating with _blasé_ indifference. But this would lead us into a long discussion, and it is our wish here to avoid vexed questions. For the present we will avow no sides, of German or Italian, "light" or "classical."