interest in national music. Large vocal societies are giving
an increasing number of native part songs and cantatas; prizes are
being awarded in various places, and composers find some financial
encouragement for appearing in concerts of their own work. Manuscript
societies are organized in many of the larger cities, and these clubs
offer hearing to novelty. There have latterly appeared, from various
publishers, special catalogues vaunting the large number of American
composers represented on their lists.

Another, and a most important sign of the growing influence of music
upon American life, is seen in the place it is gaining in the college
curriculum; new chairs have been established, and prominent composers
called to fill them, or old professorships that held merely nominal
places in the catalogue have been enlarged in scope. In this way music
is reestablishing itself in something like its ancient glory; for the
Greeks not only grouped all culture under the general term of
"Music," but gave voice and instrument a vital place in education.
Three of our most prominent composers fill the chairs at three of the
most important universities. In all these cases, however, music is an
elective study, while the rudiments of the art should, I am convinced,
be a required study in every college curriculum, and in the common
schools as well.

Assuming then, for the nonce, the birth--we are too new a country to
speak of a Renascence--of a large interest in national music, there is
large disappointment in many quarters, because our American music is
not more American. I have argued above that a race transplanted from
other soils must still retain most of the old modes of expression, or,
varying them, change slowly. But many who excuse us for the present
lack of a natural nationalism, are so eager for such a differentiation
that they would have us borrow what we cannot breed.

The folk-music of the negro slaves is most frequently mentioned as the
right foundation for a strictly American school. A somewhat
misunderstood statement advanced by Dr. Antonin Dvorak, brought this
idea into general prominence, though it had been discussed by American
composers, and made use of in compositions of all grades long before
he came here.

The vital objection, however, to the general adoption of negro music
as a base for an American school of composition is that it is in no
sense a national expression. It is not even a sectional expression,