Selected Content
from the Five Minute Talks With Girls Department 
Content is listed chronologically in the order originally published by "The Etude". To be alerted of new content posted to this department, subscribe to the RSS feed.
Five-Minute Talks To Girls - January, 1900
Individuality is indeed such a rare thing, you know. One has to sift one's self through such a heap of readymade thought before one is able to squeeze out even one little drop of individuality, and even then it is questionable if this drop be not a composite of other men's wisdom, and have only the color of originality from having passed through such a wondrous variety of knowledge and experience as to bear no noticeable resemblance of any one influence. Read More
Five-Minute Talks With Girl Pupils - February, 1900
Listen to the voices of those who are tone-deaf, who are without a sense of tonality, and see if you do not miss something. The speaking voices of such remind me of nothing so much as of two boards being struck together, or the "clappers" in which boys delight. I remember, when at school, two boys being excused from singing because, on examination, they were found to be tone-deaf. This seemed to me most extraordinary at the time, but I have since met with many who are without any sense of pitch, tonality, or key-relationship. I want you to be sorry for these people, and to think of the pleasure they can never share with you. Read More
Five-Minute Talks With Girls. - March, 1900
BY HELENA M. MAGUIRE. The People to Whom a Girl Plays. Music has a two-fold influence: first upon the character of the girl who studies it; and, secondly, through her, upon those for whom she makes music. Music is to... Read More
Five-Minute Talks With Girls. - April, 1900
BY HELENA M. MAGUIRE. Reading Between the Staffs.On glancing carelessly at a sheet of music one receives the impression that all the music is on the staffs, but closer observation proves that that which is between the staffs is just... Read More
Five-Minute Talks With Girls. - April, 1901
And how prone we of to-day are to extravagance! Extravagance of energy, of gesture, of emotion, of sound. Yankee thriftiness seems to have disappeared, and we seem to be intent only to spend, spend, spend, more than we have and more than it is pleasant to witness, until we seem musically to be all crises, and, through our extravagance, to have reached a new and painful monotony, for one can be as much upon a dead level on an arid table-land as upon the lowest of moorlands. Read More
Five-Minute Talks With Girls. The Lessons of the Summer. - July, 1901
In times primeval knowledge was acquired in many and various ways. People took lessons from things animate and inanimate, and learned from vegetable and animal, as well as from human, nature. As time went on, however, the wisdom gleaned from natural sources became sorted and stored into neat bundles and handed down from wise man to wise man, until it came to be taken for granted that these bundles contained all knowledge, and that it was only necessary to go to a man possessed of a store of knowledge and receive due portion thereof. Read More
Five Minute Talks With Girls, By Helena M. Maguire - October, 1901
THE SISTERS OF MUSICIANS. “Our lives are not laid out in vast, vague prairies, but in definite, domestic door-yards, within which we are to exercise and develop our facilities.” Many of us never go outside our own “door-yards,” but to... Read More
Five Minute Talks With Girls, By Helena M. Maguire - December, 1901
The relationship of the brother and sister of to-day is, of course, different in many ways from what it was in the time of Lazarus and Mary, or even in the days of Wolfgang and Nanny Mozart. Girlhood has received what it has long been petitioning for, co-education; but the very privilege which has permitted you to enter the ranks and march beside your brother has made you a responsible person, you music-students with the rest. Read More
Five Minute Talks With Girls, By Helena M. Maguire - January, 1902
To the Beginners in Harmony. Studying harmony means gaining a working knowledge of the materials used in making music. It does not necessitate a gift for composition; it does not require that you have even so much as a desire... Read More
Five Minute Talks With Girls, By Helena M. Maguire - May, 1902
By Helena M. Maguire The Art of Fingering as Applied to the Pianoforte Legato. “It takes the art instinct to make sufficient account of the very small things in the study of music.” In the March Etude Mr. Louis Arthur... Read More
