The pianist’s performance was so beautiful that the audience was uproarious in its approval; it had calculated, of course, upon an encore, and recalled the pianist again and again until he had appeared and bowed his thanks several times.  But there was no encore; the stage hands appeared and moved the piano to one side, and the audience relapsed into unsatisfied and rather bewildered silence.

Then followed Bok’s publicity work in the newspapers, beginning the next day, exonerating Hofmann and explaining the situation.  The following week, with Mischa Elman as soloist, the audience once more tried to have its way and its cherished encore, but again none was forthcoming.  Once more the newspapers explained; the battle was won, and the no-encore rule has prevailed at the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts from that day to this, with the public entirely resigned to the idea and satisfied with the reason therefor.

But the bewildered Bok could not make out exactly what had happened to his preconceived notion about symphonic music.  He attended the following Saturday evening concert; listened to a Brahms symphony that pleased him even more than had “The New World,” and when, two weeks later, he heard the Tschaikowski “Pathetique” and later the “Unfinished” symphony, by Schubert, and a Beethoven symphony, attracted by each in turn, he realized that his prejudice against the whole question of symphonic music had been both wrongly conceived and 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.