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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
Educating the Public Generally to a Higher Appreciation and Desire for Good
Music Will Materially Enhance the Future Popularity of the Player—How
a Chamber of Commerce in the Music Trade Might Accomplish This Result
For reasons which it is alike impossible and
useless to attempt to analyze the player
business has been consistently conducted on
the supposition or assumption that the promo-
tion and sale of a musical instrument, like the
player-piano, can go on successfully without
any relation, conscious or unconscious, to the
music which the instruments in question are
intended to produce, and on which they com-
pletely depend for their very existence. In
other words, the trade has looked at music as
something with which it has nothing to do, and
on musicians as persons who have no relation
with it. Again, the trade has consistently sup-
posed that the player-piano can be sold by
means of the same essential arguments as will
suffice to sell an instrument like a sewing ma-
chine or an automobile, arguments, that is to
say, which are essentially arguments of utility.
In short, it has taken the existence of public
musical appreciation in some form entirely for
granted and has quite overlooked the important
fact that, in truth, the American people are not
a musical people, that the atmosphere of our
life militates against the formation of a mu-
sical environment for most people, and that,
in short, the difficulty is not to keep people
away from things musical but to drag them to-
wards such things.
The Player as a Musical Instrument
On its merits as a pure musical instrument,
it ought to be much easier to sell a player-
piano than it is to sell a piano without player.
Even a pianist should be only too glad to get
an instrument which he can use not only for his
manual work but also for the immensely broad-
ened field of study and comparison which he
can open up by means of the pneumatic mech-
anism. Again, the musical student should wel-
come the player-piano for precisely the same rea-
sons, reasons which again apply to the musical
amateur who plays a bit but wants to repro-
duce much more than he can manually play.
Lastly, there are the joyous citizen and citi-
zette, not to mention citizen and citizette junior,
who neither know nor care for the art of music,
but want to get their own particular land of
melodic joy opened up and on tap. Mind, we
say that each and every one of these ought to
see in the player-piano a highly desirable de-
velopment of the original instrument, much more
desirable and therefore, much more to be sought
for and acquired. Yes, they all ought to prefer
the player, on the merits of the case. But do
they?
Candor and a due regard for fact compel the
admission that they don't, that it is just as hard
to sell a player as to sell any other kind of
piano. Of course, many players are sold, but
the trade does not progress as it should.
Not Doing Enough With the Player
In short, one can see with half an eye that
we are not doing with the player-piano anything
like what we ought to do. As for the musicians
at large, we cannot expect to educate them out
of their present attitude until we have improved
the player technically and have ceased to an-
tagonize th« entire musical profession by set-
ting the player up as a competitor with the
straight piano and with the music teacher. So
long as musicians believe that we are pushing
the player on the basis of its being a musical
education don« up as a box readymade by
machine, so long will they fight us as hard as
they can.
But we may. for our present purpose, disre-
gard the musicians and rather consider the case
of the great mass, the public, the people who
are to be reached if the player-piano is to sell
as it ought, on its merits, to sell. How are they
to be reached?
These are the people whose taste after toy-
ing with the foot-driven player, first slipped over
to the power-driven as being easier, and now
is reaching out to discard the player-piano for
the talking machine, because that is still easier.
What are we going to do with them?
Giving the Public What They Want
For ten years we have yelled "Give the dear,
unsophisticated people what they want. Don't
dare to try to educate them." Very well; we
have given them what they want, and they don't
appear after all to have wanted it very badly.
We -have tried to do what they have seemed
to want. We began on a high plane with a per-
sonal interpretation player. That did not go;
too difficult. Then we pushed in automatic ac-
cents and phrases. They were too subtle. Then
we dragged in the hand-played roll. That has
a moderate success, but has not set the ocean
on fire. Then we abolish foot-pumping. That
does not fill the bill; too complicated. Now we
find them yelling for talking machines. And
still we don't see the facts, still we refuse to
look the situation in the face, still we waste our
time trying to stop a leak at the bung by block-
ing the spigot. Yet the answer is ready for
us anytime we want it.
It is just this, that the player-piano, no mat-
ter how badly it be abused by its owners, ap-
peals to a musical sense of some sort. No one
can or will appreciate the player-piano except
he possess some musical sense to some "slight
degree. The desire to produce music personally
is the root and foundation of the player-piano
and when that ambition is not present there is
no use promoting any instrument which rests
its appeal on the possession of such an ambition.
For those whose sole interest in music is as
listeners to popular songs or as dancers of
popular dances, the talking machine is positively
the best music-means. That is self-evident.
Emphasing the Personal Equation
The future of the player does not rest upon
any attempt to bring it closer and closer to the
talking machine, but rather upon its value as
a means for the personal production of music,
and it is for us in the trade to see that some-
thing be done to spread the general understand-
ing that such personal production is desirable
and delightful, one as much as the other. The
truth is that a large section of the American
people have never been waked up" as yet to an
understanding of this. They have always tried
to take their amusements by deputy and have
thought themselves . musical while listening to
paid musicians, as they have thought themselves
athletic, while watching the performances of
paid baseball players. It is the future task of
those who would push the player-piano, there-
fore, to assist the various agencies which are
striving now to overcome this condition. An
immense amount of effort, quite uncoordinated
for the most part, is being expended on the
task of spreading the musical gospel throughout
the United States. From all the efforts thus
being made, the piano men have stood con-
spicuously aloof, apparently indifferent. This at-
titude must be dropped. If it not dropped then
there will be a drop in business which will leave
a large and impressive vacancy. The player-
piano has been distributed pretty nearly as
widely as it can be on a hit or miss plan; now
we must get busy on system.
If the Music Industries Chamber of Commerce
comes into being a step will have been taken
at once in the right direction, for all branches
of the trade will be able to get together and
think out some national policies. Then there
is the National Federation of Women's Music
Clubs which is doing a splendid work in spread-
ing the musical gospel throughout the nation,
but whose efforts have never even been heard
of by the majority of men in the trade. How
many piano men go to concerts or help to sup-
port them? Some indeed, but relatively very
few. Why is it not possible for the trade
through its associations to make overtures to-
wards the formulation of plans for cooperation
between itself and the agencies of musical cul-
ture now existing? Surely, when we consider
the enormous amount of good work that has
been accomplished in the past twenty years by
the women's musical clubs alone, we can see the
possibilities ahead of us.
Educating the American People
But to what end? Why simply to the end
of educating the American people into some-
thing more of musical appreciation, for only
those who appreciate music understand and ap-
preciate the player. Let us away with bosh
and bunk, let us begin by cleaning our own
houses. We can start with better demonstra-
tion, with getting intelligent, musically versed
people to sell music rolls, with a systematic
attempt to study out and secure the distribu-
tion of better music, with systematic attempts
to sell player-pianos to the musically and so-
cially intelligent among the people. We can
support all efforts to improve local musical cul-
ture, and by cooperating with the recognized
agencies now acting for this purpose, we can
do very much indeed, both to show that the
player-piano is worthy of serious consideration,
and to open up new fields for its development
and promotion. It is time to cease dreaming
and to wake up. It is time to get busy on real
facts and face conditions as we find t-hem. The
new fields must be opened up; why not begin
with the first and most obvious, instead of beat-
ing all around the bush in an effort to do indi-
rectly what can better be done by going right
ahead at the most serious of problems before
us: namely, the creation of a response to the
player-piano's real and only genuine appeal, the
appeal to musical instinct?
Krtmpa
Record Rolls
"Music as Actually Played"
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Your proof is in our sample
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BENNETT & WHITE, Inc.
67-71 Gobel St., NEWARK, N. J.