MUSIC FOR MULTITUDES.

“Give the public what it wants!” is a trite and familiar observation one is always hearing in connection with music. “The Superior Person” clinches his argument with it, and with an air of finality which settles the question once and for all so far as he is concerned. Nevertheless the question does arise again and again, “What does the public want?” As a matter of fact the public does not know or recognise what it wants as regards music until it gets it; and it is the unenviable position of our music-caterers in the shape of composers, authors, concert-givers, bands, and entertaining managers either to make a guess or became possessed of a super-human kind of intuition before the event, so to speak, if they want, in the slang phrase, to “click” with that unknown quantity, “The Public.”

It has been my good fortune – or otherwise – during the past few years to be in a position enabling me to make a study of audiences in various parts of the world, and to have come into contact with most conceivable kinds, from what one meets in a West-end drawing-room to a mining community in South Africa; from an Irish theatre to a London bandstand.

It may come as a surprise to many to know that the various crowds that collect round a London bandstand are as different in their musical tastes as the districts are one from another. One might reasonably expect a difference between Hampstead and Houndsditch, but how is one to account for a most marked difference between a bandstand audience at Wapping and another at Poplar? That was my experience some years ago when I was arranging programmes for band performances. At the one place the public insisted on as many Irish tunes and selections as were available; at the other the programme had to include a certain proportion of semi-classic items and – the exact opposite – all the latest rag-times!