The Chinese interpretation of Western music is indeed a strange if not distorted one. Perhaps the foreigner is apt to judge too much by his own standards. What to is commonplace or even keyed comes to the Celestial with all its one-time freshness.
The celebrated band of the Into President Yuan Shih-kai is reputed to have on one occasion presided at a wedding and to have struck up the then popular air of "Everybody's doing it." On another occasion in Amoy when at a funeral, a Chinese band was heard to play a music hall, song of which the words with yuler appropriateness were recalled as:—"You won't get them up in the morning." A little discrimination on the part of the Chin ese band master would probably be 'a great advantage, but it is more ikely than not that his passive audience would prefer things to remain as they are,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.