Scan 326
The American history and encyclopedia of music, 1908
4 lines. Read by computer on 11 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1APPRECIATION
3It is the duty of the piano player to study the composition thoroughly, that he catches the spirit in which it was written before he attempts to give it to an audience. We cannot pick up the score sheets of music and read them as we would a book; not until we hear the tones do we get any conception of them. And the composer, in this respect, suffers a great disadvantage when compared with the sculptor or the novelist. The carved image, the printed page are more or less intelligible to all who can see, but the score sheet with its hundreds of little dots, scattered with seeming carelessness singly or in groups over its pages remains an unsolved enigma, and not until the tones which those little black notes stand for are produced can we understand or even guess at what the composer has to tell us. The piano with its wide range of pitch, with its modern contrivances for sustaining and blending the tones by means of different kinds of pedals, is now an almost perfect instrument. Formerly, when composers worked out their compositions they used the violin as their medium of tone production, but now the piano is used for such purposes. This goes to show how high a place this instrument holds in the estimation of music creators. The old harpsichords were utterly incapable of producing the blending masses of tone of the modern piano. Their tones were thin and fleeting, utterly devoid of the rich tone coloring of the piano. That player who best tells the story, or, who by his touch adds caprice, pathos or tenderness to a melody, who satisfies the intellect and arouses the emotions, that player is an artist and we are grateful to him for the pleasure his music has given us. Music should reach the heart through the ear just as a beautiful landscape rouses the emotions through the eye. Its effects should be ennobling, it should not satisfy the sensual side of your nature by pleasing the ear as a bit of luscious fruit pleases the palate, but should lift your thoughts to higher things. Not until the music does this, by striking an answering chord within the breast of the hearer, can it be called great or good, nor will it live.
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