In a lecture to the Society of Arts in November 1884, Ernest Hart (1835–98) – surgeon and editor of the British Medical Journal –reported his observations of the recently closed London International Health Exhibition. ‘It was often said by the public scorner’, he began, ‘when walking through the crowded course of the Exhibition … “This is a Health Exhibition – Where is the health?”’. The popular response to this question, Hart determined, was ‘outside in the gardens’. From their inception, exhibitions had been designed to combine education, entertainment, and spectacle. While their educational aspects generally remained confined to the inside of the buildings, by the 1880s the gardens that surrounded them had become hives of entertainment. These outdoor spaces, in layout and function, inherited the traditions of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European ‘pleasure garden’, combining fountains, walkways, grottos, and spectacular lighting effects with a wide variety of refreshments and carnival amusements. The centrepiece of these gardens was the bandstand, and military or brass bands and light orchestras filled the programmes of most exhibitions, playing to a consistently numerous and attentive public. The bands in their impressive garden setting were, for many, the main drawcard of the exhibitions. As the Illustrated London News explained in 1886, ‘we have heard several honest pleasure-takers avow that they go, year by year … not to inspect the objects displayed there, but to listen to the music’. The St James's Gazette oncurred; most exhibition visitors only wanted ‘to stroll upon the terraces and amongst the flowers and fountains, and to lounge within hearing of good music well played’.

But what constituted ‘good’ music? For the critical musical press this was the kind of music that could enlighten and ‘improve’ the public, and was found in the high art of symphonies, oratorios, and the works of the canonic greats. It was certainly not the kind of music curated to popular taste or to make money. The bands in the exhibition gardens were, therefore, categorically not good music. The same could be said of the organ recitals that were given inside the exhibitions. While the quasi-religious atmosphere of buildings was heightened by the performance of organ music, critics were frequently frustrated by the organists’ supposed pandering to popular taste, with repertoire more closely resembling the bands in the gardens than the transcendental art expected of them.