When the sailing list of each trans-Atlantic liner reads like the program of an all-star gala performance, and conductors, managers and husbands also sail, the small number of the cultured rich who maintain music in New York go likewise; but the city is not left empty. Then the Metropolitan assumes a perpetually “morning after” appearance; so, too, Carnegie Hall; and the new piano emporium will serve as a sounding board for band concerts across the way. It is to these band concerts—not only in Bryant Park but in almost every park and pier in the city—that the reader’s attention is called. The vastness of New York is one of the greatest problems confronting any public spirited enterprise which aims to reach that vague, elusive faction—the people. The problem has been met and fairly solved musically by the three men who are responsible for the invasion by band and orchestra of the city’s parks and piers during the past three years. It is refreshing to meet with a movement which aims toward no tangible education, moral rescue or poor relief, and to find a department of city government frankly idealistic enough to organize a force whose only aim is the presentation of pure beauty. And it is curiously paradoxical that this movement should have found its opportunity in New York. It is, nevertheless, true that New York supports more entirely free summer concerts than any city in the world. At the beginning of the current municipal administration the park and pier music in its present form had its birth in the constitution of a committee consisting of the commissioner of docks and ferries, the commissioner of parks and a new official designated as the supervisor of municipal concerts in parks and recreation piers. To the latter is due the lion’s share of credit for the ideals, the organization and the practical working of the system. To the commissioners New York owes a debt for their hearty co-operation, and in some cases, acute personal interest in the problems of the undertaking.