of eighth notes with great steadiness and smoothness and keep this movement up for some time. Then make a trial at slipping in the seven-note scale in the left hand, without interrupting in the least the right hand movement. Of course, you will fail time and again, just like the boy learning to pitch a curve, but then after long persistence it will come in a jiffy—i t may then disappear again for some time and then pass up again until eventually it becomes established and the "knack" seems laugh-ably easy. Liszt's Polonaises and innumerable passages in Chopin can only be acquired by "getting the knack" after the manner we have described. Music in Industry THE possibilities of music in industry are as boundless as the seas. The subject will be discussed more and more as time goes on. In England for years there have been musical activi-ties connected with thousands of industrial and mercantile com-munities. In fact, TH E ETUD E some years ago contemplated the preparation of a special article upon the subject. After a little investigation we found that the subject was so big that it would require volumes instead of one issue. It was therefore abandoned. Books upon the subject have since appeared, but nothing so good as a pamphlet entitled Music in Industry, prepared by C. M. Tremaine, of the National Bureau fo r the Advancement of Music, 105 West 40th St., New York, which may be had for the asking. In the back of the book there is a long list of firms which have introduced music into their indus-trial work and anyone interested may correspond with these firms for special information. Conservatory Monkeys THE roots of American achievement reach back into the past on one side to the great teachers and conservatories of Leip-sig, Munich, Milan, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, etc., and on the other side to the pioneer spirit of educational investigation and invention possessed by such men as Lowell Mason, Stephen Emery, William H. Sherwood, W . S. J]. Mathews, B. J. Lang, MacDowell, William Masoi: and others. How can TH E ETUD E present with sufficient force the great fact that though, thousands and thousands of Americans went to Europe and had instruction from the greatest masters, those who succeeded did not do so merely by virtue of that fact, but because they had Yankee inquiring minds, Yankee initiative, Yankee grit, Yankee penetration, Yankee inventiveness, and with good taste and high ideals applied all these to their musical development. I ny student who can possibly get the opportunity to study at a fine conservatory or with a real master should first of all rejoice over his good fortune and then realize that the best musical training in the world is only a foundation upon which lie must build his individual structure. William Mason was not great merely because he was the pupil of Plaidv, Moscheles and Liszt, but because lie never lost the identity of William Mason the man. Stephen Emery stud-ied with Richter and Hauptman, but so did thousands of others in the Leipsig days. Emery understood and digested what hQ learned abroad and adjusted his knowledge in superior form for American music students. W. S. B. Mathews with his; keen and active mind, his great productivity and his incessant activity was worth more than thousands of conservatory mon-keys who forget that their very birthright as Americans enti-ties them to "individuality," "originality," and "distinctive-ness." Instead of using their American-made brains as Edison, Foe, Innes, Whitman, Westinghouse, Horace Greeley, Ben-jamin Franklin, Whistler, "O. Henry," Mason, Root, Sousa, Foster, Wright, Lieurance, Roosevelt, MacDowell, Gorgas, Gottschalk, Goethals, Cadrnan and others have done to create something fresh and AMERICAN , they have simply kept on climb-ing around the monkey cage with the other conservatory mon-keys, doing in minute imitation what the "dear old master" with the bobbed hair did back in the glorious old days of Petro-grad or Napoli. The Psychology of Mistakes EVER Y teacher knows that the majority of mistakes in pianoforte playing seem to be made by a certain class of pupils. Others seem to be able to steer their pianistic argosies so that they avoid the rocks and the shoals most of the time. The average teacher when she encounters a mistake-making pupil throws up her intellectual hands and mutters "careless-ness." But it may be something much different and far more deep-seated than carelessness. Dr. James Sonnett Greene, founder and medical director of the New York Clinic for Speech Defects, has given a lifetime of investigation here and abroad to the causes of stuttering and stammering. In the July issue of the American Magazine he gives some suggestions resulting from his experience, which anyone who has had actual long-continued experience in piano-forte teaching will readily see are analogous to certain condi-tions found in persistent mistake-making pupils. After pointing out that some of the most brilliant of people —such, for instance, as Charles Lamb—have been bad stam-merers, he indicates that mental acuteness and stammering often appear concurrently. Mistake-making in piano playing is usually a matter of lack of coordination in thinking and in muscular execution at the keyboard. Similar lack of coordination is the cause of stut-tering and stammering. Dr. Greene asserts that the worse thing that you can do for a stutterer is to say the right thing for him, or to try to say it in advance of his saying it. W e might transplant this observa-tion to piano teaching. How many thousand teachers fail to have the patience to let the pupil work out his problem rightly, but instead rudely brush his hands off the keyboard and play the passage as it should be played. This is an exhibition of the teacher's ability as a performer no doubt, but it is an injury to the formative processes in the pupil, whether child or adult. Dr. Greene's advice is to "make the stutterer feel that he has an unlimited time to say what he has to say." Hurrying pupils with any show of impatience is positively injurious in many cases. Dr. Greene also describes a condition known as agito-phasia. Agitophasia produces excessive rapidity of speech resulting in a kind of jumble. In piano playing it produces confusion and endless mistakes. It should be treated with gentle-ness, sympathy and possibly an intelligent use of the metronome. Such cases arc, according to Dr. Greene, basically due to lack of concentration. Not the excited, intense concentration, but the reposeful concentration which helps one to have full control of one's powers. The teacher's specific for hundreds of mistakes made by pupils is PATIENCE . Oh, the destruction done by loud-voiced, commanding teachers, who, in bygone days, sought to compel progress by yelling like cattle drovers when the pupils made mistakes. Can You Do This? COUL D you take the text of an unknown or unfamiliar hymn and with your eyes shut dictate to another, first, an orig-inal melody for the text, then the contralto part, then the tenor part and finally the bass part in such a way that you produce a really worthy hymn? That is what Dr. Adam Geibel has been doing for years, in his numerous addresses before all kinds of audiences. The fact that he is blind does not impede his work. In fact, he composes at a far more rapid rate than do most normal composers, and while he is doing it, standing up before a strange audience, he will keep up a talk upon other subjects. It is an astonishing exhibition to the ordinary musi-cian who sees it for the first time. Very few musicians really think music. They think that they think music, but it is all based upon a kind of false founda-tion. T o know the language of music is to be able to talk it just as Dr. Geibel does. This composer of hundreds of effective musical works is as familiar with music as lie is with English, and his melodic sense is very exceptional.
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