Publisher's Synopsis
From the FOREWORD:
AFTER leaving college my natural desire to teach was frustrated by my unwillingness to put up with certain restrictions, especially in the way of initiating innovations, imposed by the entrenched system of secondary education. So many were the features I had no patience with, that I saw a lifetime of unsuccessful agitation staring me in the face. Since then I have been happy to read, principally in the Atlantic Monthly, article after article pointing out the very faults that dissuaded me from joining the ranks of the teachers in the secondary schools. The teaching of music offered the chance for initiative and independence, but it was a question whether my limited ability as a performer would interfere too much with the realization of my teaching ideals. I was well aware that financial success is easily obtainable by any of a hundred advertising methods as this profession is more full of successful quacks than any other, but the financial side alone never made any stronger appeal to me than technique alone does. Josef Hofmann once said to me: "Technique is to the pianist what financial resources are to a business man; money does not improve the mental quality of the latter." If there ever was penned a more trenchant sentence, I have failed to find it. It took but a very short time to discover that the teaching of music is in about as chaotic a condition as possible and that my limited ability as a performer need cause no uneasiness. I have been in home after home where the music teacher has failed and gone away. The first thing I do is to go to the music cabinet and find out what she has left. And right here is the surprising thing: I find stacks of the conservatory's pedagogic material bound in the familiar yellow paper covers of the Schirmer Library; almost invariably Czerny, and much Burgmuller, Loeschhom, Bertini, Clementi, a sonatina album and a scale book. Then there will be a few pieces by men who should have been strangled soon after birth - music that is a mute witness to the ineffectiveness of the conservatory's stuff and to the desire of the teacher not to lose the pupil. Thus have hundreds and even thousands of people been "stung" by never getting any inspired music by the great composers, never getting anything for their money except disappointment. This is all wrong. It is the purpose of this article to show why. This teacher failed because she couldn't make a pianist. Bless your soul, you don't have to be a pianist to play the inspired works of the great composers, you simply have to be a musician. A child may have such a type of hand that it will never be able to play piano solos of any difficulty. Its sense of rhythm or sense of pitch may be so undeveloped that the usual pedagogic material will result in immediate failure, but if the teacher has sense enough to throw this stuff away and sit down with the child and play some of the simplest chamber music, like some of Schubert's, * these serious difficulties will melt like the snow in spring. The wealth of material for this purpose is astonishing. Neither will it be necessary to carry on any separate work in ear training, rhythmic drills or specious and spurious transposition exercises. Transposing pieces of considerable difficulty into remote keys is no child's play and the playing of simple and silly child's music by ear or otherwise in half a dozen keys "by request" is not going to lead one single step in that direction. Time is all too short and altogether too precious for this kind of thing when better results can be secured without deflecting the child's attention for a single moment from inspired music by simply playing with the pupil...."
