Of Interpretation

How you begin a piece is everything. it is in the first bar that you establish your art with the listener. Some there are who arrive at their tempo and tone level only after some desultory bars have passed. Such vacillation proves to be costly. There remains more to recover than has been lost; like reestablishing a good name after a misdeed.

Of Melody

As between melody and accompaniment, it is better to exaggerate their difference than to minimize it. However, the restraint of the introvert, often described as a failure of power of "projection," sometimes bespeaks a sensitivity that is preferable to the overemphasis of the extrovert.

Of Form and Style

Much nonsense is said about "good" and "bad" form. A form is good if it serves its purpose, if it awakens and keeps alive interest, if it proportions its materials, shapes them to the contours of human psychology; if it satisfies the expectations it arouses, even to the point of surprise.

Of the Hands

The good "piano hand" belongs to the person of good musical mind.

Of the Fingers

It is a good study at times to practice all scales with a c major fingering, wherein the thumb must also play on the black keys. This calls for a limp and supple hand, and prepares the playing of sequential patterns with unchanging fingerings, at such moments where immediate adjustment to each separate scale fingering would hinder continuity, and cause confusion. More time is often lost in changing to the best pattern, than in pursuing the pattern already established.

Of the Pedals

Like the vibrato with the violinist, nothing so much reveals a pianist's capacity to hear himself as his pedaling. One could almost say that pedaling is tone.

Of Study

The study of a work should begin like an oil portrait. You sketch in the main outlines; you add then certain tones perhaps; then comes the laying on of paint, the large labor; and finally there is the critical appraisal with last modifications. The important thing is to progress from the general to the particular, returning finally to the general again.

Of Teaching

Gratitude in teaching is best when mutual. He is commonly paid the best who has already been fully rewarded by the privilege of instructing others. It is a fair balance: the student's trust and labor as against the teacher's generous formulation of experience.

Of Schools

This is the dilemma of most music schools. They began as a need and have become a burden. The more they have become entangled with the self-perpetuating business of teaching only teachers, the less well they teach. The more smoothly they run, the less room is there for that quality of genius without which their very existence loses meaning. Equability is not music.

Of Performance and the Public

Public performance pulls at the weakest link, at the same time that it tempers the strongest link, in the chain of experience. A mishap in performance can usually be traced to some "Schlamperei", some moment of "I-guess-that's-good-enoughedness."

Of Ensemble and Accompaniment

Sight-reading is encouraged most of all through accompanying and ensemble-playing whereby the compulsion to continue playing without interruption overcomes the common habit of pausing before each new musical hurdle. There is also a spirit generated between two or more players, as in conversation, that promotes continuity and dislikes vacillation.

Of Authorship

There are limestone caves that seem to have no end. You venture first into their known passages, then detect a hitherto undiscovered opening, which again reveals a whole new network of caves. In time you make a new map including all known explorations, and settle down, content with what you have. But another person comes along, looking for new openings where you perceived none, and in time enlarges your map, relegating your considerable findings into the large body of the past. An era lies just behind us when the dogma of the exhaustion of musical invention was current.

Of the Environment

An artist should be seen as well as heard. A record may reinforce our impressions of him, but it will never establish him as a personality.

Commonplaces

The realest playing is often pure illusion. This is shown by the player who, when contending with a defective or untuned instrument, succeeds nevertheless in imagining ideal sounds, and transporting his hearers out of all awareness of the piano's blemishes. He compels them to hear imaginarily along with himself.