The question before the house is one that has been asked before on Firing Line:

How should the arts be supported? But this time we approach it in a novel way--through an account of the Irving S. Gilmore Piano Competition, ingeniously devised by Mr.

Pocock in fulfilling the terms of Mr. Gilmore's will. A delightful and quite out-of-the-

ordinary conversation about a topic host and guests all love. One sample, from Mr.

Morris: "Music is not necessarily--I am going to choose my words carefully in a way

that I hope you will appreciate--it's not so much a competitive art as an emulatory art.

And I like to think that in music we ... are spurred on to our best efforts by the best

efforts of our colleagues, and therefore, competition, naked competition [as in the Cliburn

or Tchaikovsky competitions] is to some extent anti-musical, because it causes you to

concentrate only on those elements of music which make a naked appeal to the guts of

the audience, and there is a lot more to music than that, as of course you know."