virtuosos, like Paderewski, Rosenthal and other pianists, play them; or gifted instructors in music, like Carl Reinecke, would have them performed. It's like taking lessons in interpretation from these people.

"There's another matter that will interest you. Take pieces like Rubinstein's 'Melody in F' or the best known selection from his 'Kammenoi, Ostrow,' where the melody lies, in the former in between the accompaniment, in the latter below it—you recall, of course, how the accompanying figure hovers above it. In pieces like these it is important that the melodic line should be clearly distinguished, otherwise it will be smothered. Fortunately an attachment to the instrument, the themodist, enables you to bring out the melody and, at the same time does not prevent your retarding or accelerating the general movement of the piece or of varying the volume of sound as much as you like.

"While I've had the instrument only a little while, I've been struck with something else. I find that you can accomplish a good deal through what I may call 'foot-technique,' varying the degree of strength with which you use the pedals that pump in the air. By this means you can play louder or softer at will and by a sharp pressure emphasize individual chords and phrases. This, I find, makes the interpretation seem more personal than when I use the sustaining and soft levers alone. Altogether I'm beginning to look upon myself as a virtuoso, and the best thing you can do, old man, is to take my advice and become one too."

Fortunately you are musical enough and intelligent enough to appreciate the philosophy and significance of the instrument—that it supplies what you haven't got, the technique, but that you give it the expression, the soul; that although it is not a pianoforte, but an attachment to that instrument, nevertheless, in playing it, you express something of yourself, something of your inner being, something of your higher artistic nature through it.

There is a large class of people to whom the "piano-player" is or should be a great boon. I mean those who play the pianoforte, but not well enough to play publicly or professionally. To this class belong the thousands of music teachers and the amateurs. The majority of them may be more truly musical than many of the virtuoso pianists, but they are lacking in technique. For the technical standard is growing higher every year. Comparatively few music teachers have much opportunity of hearing music, the result being that they find it difficult to keep up with the times. They become old-fashioned, and in these progressive days to become old-fashioned means to be forced to "drop out." They lack the technique to run through the modern repertoire, and the time to hear others in it. It hardly is necessary to point out what the pianola, which gives them complete technical mastery of the keyboard, should be to them.

As regards the amateur I can cite my own case as an example. I had progressed on the pianoforte until I was able to play Liszt's arrangement of the Spinning Song from Wagner's "Flying Dutchman." It is a difficult piece, but there is a great deal of pianoforte music that is more difficult and that was entirely beyond me. Moreover the fact that I was able to play this composition after much assiduous practice, did not mean that I could play equally difficult or even considerably less difficult music with ease by sight. The repertoire of even the best amateur is apt to be a small one. He gains his general knowledge of music from what he hears.

With me, in time, as with so many amateurs, pianoforte playing had to yield first place to my regular work. I took up writing and that became paramount. I began to lose my pianoforte technique, and I should not like to say how many years it is since I lost the ability to play Liszt's arrangement of the Spinning Song from the "The Flying Dutchman," the "Butterfly" etude of Chopin and other works that I had had at my fingers' ends. Often, when I went to pianoforte recitals and heard these compositions played, I grieved over what I had lost—through sacrificing the pianoforte to the pen.

I grieve no longer. I have acquired a perfect technique, the technique of a great virtuoso—through the pianola. It is a key that has unlocked for me the whole repertory of music. With it I can play the most difficult work ever written as easily as I can a five-finger exercise. It gives me the technique, but all that is summed up in the one word "expression," I am at liberty to put into the music myself.

In the whole world there are perhaps two, at the most three pianoforte virtuosos who really deserve to be called great. To listen to them is the acme of musical delight. But right next to this comes the performance of any musical person, whether a child or grown up, on the pianola. It is better than the playing of any virtuoso not absolutely of the very first rank, and infinitely preferable to the playing of the most gifted amateur, while the performance of the average amateur almost is juvenile compared with it. Moreover there are pieces of which the Liszt "Campanella," the Mendelssohn "Rondo Capriccioso" and the "Rosamunde" impromptu of Schubert, are examples, that, when played on the pianola by a musical person, sound just as well as if they came from under the fingers of the greatest living virtuoso—possibly better.

These are not dreams, they are facts; and discoverable in due time by everyone who is made musical through the instrument of which I am writing; and, in an incredibly short time by any one, already musical, who takes it up. Moreover they are facts readily susceptible of explanation, and here it is:—All technical difficulties being eliminated by the pianola, the player is free to give his whole attention to interpretation, to that subtle something which we call "expression," and which constitutes the supreme quality of a musical performance.

III. FIRST STEPS OF THE MUSICAL NOVICEToC

I confess that when I first thought of writing this book my intention was to plan it somewhat on the same lines as the usual "How to Listen to Music" book, but to make it somewhat simpler. As the catalogue of pianola music includes everything from Bach to Richard Strauss it seemed to me that it would be easy to give the reader a course in musical development, beginning with the simpler pieces of Bach, like the bourrées and gavottes; then taking up the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven; the compositions of the romantic school from Schubert to Chopin; and ending with the modern school of Wagner, Liszt and Richard Strauss—in other words giving a survey of the whole evolution of music.

This would coincide with the ordinary course of musical instruction, which naturally ranges from what are considered the easier and simpler pieces to the more difficult ones, early music being less complicated and making less demand upon the player's technique than music of the present day. But I had forgotten one important point which is, that on the pianola nothing is difficult, that with this modern instrument the question of difficulty entirely disappears, and that the most hair-raising, breath-catching exploits of virtuosity are as easy for the pianolist as the most commonplace five-finger exercises are for the pianist. In other words, the pianolist can approach music from a wholly new