Music in America should be the property of everybody. The talking
machines come near making it that, if one may judge from the sounds that
come from half the homes at night. But the people want to hear the best
music from living performers "in the flesh." At the same time,
comparatively, very few can pay from two to twenty dollars a seat to
hear great opera and great singers. The reason why grand opera costs so
much is that the really fine voices, with trained operatic experience,
are very, very few; and, since only a few performances are given a year,
the price must be high. It is simply the law of supply and demand.
There are, in America, two large grand opera companies and half a dozen
traveling ones, some of them very excellent. There are probably twenty
large symphony orchestras and at least one hundred oratorio societies of
size. To say that these bodies and others purveying good music, reach
more than five million auditors a year would possibly be a generous
figure. But five million is not one-twentieth of the population of
America. What about the nineteen-twentieths?
On the other hand, there are in America between two and three thousand
good vaudeville and moving picture houses where the best music in some
form is heard not once or twice a week for a short season, but several
times each day. Some of the moving picture houses have orchestras of
thirty-five to eighty men, selected from musicians of the finest
ability, many of whom have played in some of the greatest orchestras of
the world. These orchestras and the talking machines are doing more to
bring good music to the public than all the larger organizations, if we
consider the subject from a standpoint of numbers.