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 land ballads now forgotten; the songs of German peasants at the fireside and spinning wheel; the native corn songs, "wails" and "shouts" of Southern negroes on the plantations; and the medicine songs, scalp songs, ceremonial chants and love ditties of the American Indians.

The contingency which will be presented here is this: If a certain group of unprofessional singers and musicians in the highly cultivated Italian town of Vicenza, about midway of the sixteenth century, had not banded themselves together in a society called the Philarmonia, and for the first time in Europe given musical entertainments to which the public were admitted, the musical institution called the concert might never have existed, and music in that case would have remained a spontaneous expression of human emotion, untainted with what is now called virtuosity—that is, the strife and strain after technical mastery, which affects the whole