nd baseless.

He now began to see the possibility of a whole world of beauty which up
to that time had been closed to him, and he made up his mind that he
would enter it. Somehow or other, he found the appeal of music did not
confine itself to women; it seemed to have a message for men. Then, too,
instead of dreading the approach of Saturday evenings, he was looking
forward to them, and invariably so arranged his engagements that they
might not interfere with his attendance at the orchestra concerts.

After a busy week, he discovered that nothing he had ever experienced
served to quiet him so much as these end-of-the-week concerts. They were
not too long, an hour and a half at the utmost; and, above all, except
now and then, when the conductor would take a flight into the world of
Bach, he found he followed him with at least a moderate degree of
intelligence; certainly with personal pleasure and inner satisfaction.

Bok concluded he would not read the articles he had published on the
meaning of the different "sections" of a symphony orchestra, or the
books issued on that subject. He would try to solve the mechanism of an
orchestra for himself, and ascertain as he went along the relation that
each portion bore to the other. When, therefore, in 1913, the president
of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association asked him to become a member
of its Board of Directors, his acceptance was a natural step in the
gradual development of his interest in orchestral music.

The public support given to orchestras now greatly interested Bok. He
was surprised to find that every symphony orchestra had a yearly
deficit. This he immediately attributed to faulty management; but on
investigating the whole question he learned that a symphony orchestra
could not possibly operate, at a profit or even on a self-sustaining
basis, because of its weekly change of programme, the incessant
rehearsals required, and the limited number of times it could actually
play within a contracted season. An annual deficit was inevitable.

He found that the Philadelphia Orchestra had a small but faithful group
of guarantors who each year made good the deficit in addition to paying
for its concert seats. This did not seem to Bok a sound business plan;
it made of the orchestra a necessarily exclusive organization,
maintained by a few; and it gave out this impression to the general
public, which felt that it did not "belong," whereas the true relation
of public and or