In a recent issue of the London "Spectator" there appeared) an interesting letter alleging that the study of the piano is on the decline and seeking to assign a cause therefor. The writer seen it stated that—piano-playing among amateurs, is declin. ing and that at the present rate of decline piano-playing will become ively, rare within a few I wonder whether this is! true.
What change there would) be in the educated world as know it—or, rather, as I have known can ook back to the times when every daughter in every educated family was expected to play her piece or sing her s after dinner in the drawing-room, 1 suppose I must have joined rapture ously in the dishonest applause. Well, thank Heaven, that is all over. T say it with reverence.
What are the causes of the d I suppose there are three there is the improvement li musical taste, so that what wa once regarded as a passable performance by an amateur is now regard ed as intolerable. The second and third reasons are much more im portant. They are, of course, the! spread of the gramophone and of wireless. When we can listen to the reproduction of really, first-class music with not more than about a ten per cent. reduction in the value the tone, why should we listen to the young miss, however magister-laily or admiringly her parents may push her forward?
I have suggested the causes of the decline without feeling quite sure that there is one. My apology, after all, for writing is that I want] to know.
There is a good deal to excite] controversy in this letter, apart} from the main question. For instance, it will appear to many that the writer's enthusiasm for music reproduced by wireless and gramophone, and his evident belief that a certain loss of tone ly all that can be urged agains' it, puts" him out of court as a critic deserving of attention. The obtrusiveness of the mechanical side of the production, for instance, destroys the enjoyment of many hearers; for music essentially human (where it is not divine); the methods of making it are fundamentally simple; they depend in the main on nicety of finger, lip and feel ing; and the more there is of mechanism in the performance, the less there appears of personality. Certainly one has. heard very beautiful "records" of great players: but the difference between them and hearing' the musician himself is very much more than ten per cent. and indeed cannot be measured mathematically at all.
There is no doubt that a vast amount of time and money has been wasted on teaching or trying to teach children the plane who have no aptitude for it whatever. Boys usually escaped from the thralldom earlier than girls the first year at a public school probably brought them deliverance, whereas the girl could only hope for marriage to win her freedom in this as in other servitudes. What used to be known as "a little music after dinner"
indeed a thing justly to be dreaded and we fully share with the "Spectator's" correspondent is horror of the "dishonest apclause" entailed. On the other hand, unless the "young miss" discovers a positive dislike for the "piano—and this usually shows out very soon indeed—there is something to be said Keeping her to the disd studies and the simpler fugue To anyone with a spark of mugical appreciation, there {s a mental toute in these the value of which cannot be underrated. A friend of the writer's, when visited by that form of moral biliousness which is known among the Seven Deadly Sins as "Accidia," and in ordinary lange uage as "the hump," finds that an hour or two with the "well-tempered Klavier" works a complete cure, The chief difficulty with young pianists is, partly, that most of the pieces specially written for them are such tiresome rubbish; partly, that their teachers are usually most happy drudges, the best teacher of course, refusing to take any but pupils already advanced.
But the root of the trouble is that the piano is the most terribly abused of all instruments. Ita usefulness for the vamping out of an accompaniment or dance tune has degraded its standing in the eyes of all unthinking mortals. If it disputes with the john the kingship of musical instruments, it is also-a helot and slave amongst them to an extent that the violin never i 'To those who know what a piano may be, what even a small cheap instrument was capable of doing when it left the makers' hands, there is nothing more melancholy than the sight of the poor old, battered, tuneless, toneless box of rusty wire and deadened keys which are to be found all over the world, in coasting steamers, m cafes and restaurants, in those dreadful dingy lodging-house: where derayed gentility makes its tragic fight for appearance, in nameless haunts "beyond the rainbow's end." Every semi-intoxicated brute, with some remnants of the common chords of C and G and a diminished seventh or two lurking in his cramped fingers, is free to bang the wretched derelict into yot lower depths of blasphemy and rebuke. There are indeed times when one almost wishes that Guido d'Arezzo—who believed that all his sins were pardoned when he discovered the diatonic scale; and they might have been forgiven him for less—had never lived: and a piano is almost invariably the unhappy and Yet when properly handled, when treated with the reverence and approached with the selt-abnegation it so richly deserves, there is no instrument to com: pare with the piano, If violin has qualities it cannot val, the same may be said of the piano as against all other competitors. That it is poly-Phonal is, of course, an obvious advantage; but so too is the very fact that is sometimes moved against it, namely, that it is only capable of sustained tones to a limited extent. We grant to the Crum and triangle—the only other instruments of percussion we recall off-hand—cer qualities in the archest all their own. The: qualities the piano reproduces and multiplies thousand fold and with a thousand different shades of colour and intensity; and re is nothing in music which surpasses the effect of its massive chords or the crystal runs and trills it can be made to yield. Nor, again, is any instrument more express ive of the personality of a musician than the piano, which is indeed the supreme test in musi in all the arts. And in flits one may say that it is not necessary to be a Levitzki, Godowsky or a Rubinstein to give. true pleasure. One has had more real enjoyment, a deeper feeling of, what the' piano can, do, from some simple composi-,, tion played sincerely and with'! feeling by a very moderate.; amateur, than when listenjng- tp many technically flawless; fessional, For all which
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.