seasons ago, nor could any of us have foretold that symphony orchestras of a size and quality which compare more than favourably with some of our established organizations would dispense sweet melody in these temples of amusement from late morning until midnight. The accompaniment to the pictures is scarcely, as yet, a matter for congratulation, as I have indicated in Music for the Movies, but the accompaniment to the pictures is only a small part of the present duty of a band in a theatre devoted to the electrical drama. As a matter of fact, a concert at a moving-picture show is now often a much more serious affair than an old Theodore Thomas popular program. Symphonies, concertos, rhapsodies, arias, overtures (from those of Dichter und Bauer and Guillaume Tell to those of Lohengrin and Susannens Geheimnis), all figure in the scheme. At one of these theatres more music is performed in one day than an assiduous concert-goer could hope to hear in three days in the concert halls. The duration of a symphony concert is about two hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission, that of a song recital about an hour and a half, but in a moving-picture theatre an orchestra, or an organ, or a piano furnishes a pretty continuous flow of melody from eleven a. m. to eleven p. m. In the large houses soloists are sandwiched in between the films; sometimes
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