American composer and conductor John Philip Sousa viewed the increasing popularity of the phonograph with deep dismay. He suggested that it would "reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things, which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, living, breathing daughters." Such "mechanical" music was not sincere, according to Sousa: "The nightingale's song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth. The boy with a penny whistle and glass of water may give an excellent imitation, but let him persist, he is sent to bed as a nuisance." Sousa further decried a "decline in domestic music," noting the decline of musical instrument purchases and predicting that when music comes so easily out of a phonograph, mothers will not bother to sing lullabies to their babies. He opined that when music is so readily playable, musical and vocal instruction as a normal part of education will fall out of fashion, the "tide of amateurism" receding, and music will become the province of machines and professional singers only. "What of the national throat?" asked Sousa. "Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"