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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
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The Last of a Series of Articles, Written in Collaboration with a Music
Lover, Wherein Is Described How the Player-Piano Awakened in Him a
Desire for Good Music—How to Develop A National Love for Music
[Editorial Note:—This is the last of a series of "experi-
ences" which have been set down as told to the Editor
of the Player Section by an amateur music-lover whose
musical education has been obtained through the medium
of his player-piano; which, however, he had to master by
himself without the slightest assistance from anybody in
the trade. Dealers and manufacturers may well ponder
the words of this disinterested owner, who has so much
that is pertinent to say and says it so well.]
In what has gone before, I have tried to set
out in some intelligent sort of way, my own
experiences with music. I have told you things
that, after all, have only been very ordinary
and have no great interest, save perhaps that
one hears so little of other experiences paral-
lel with them. And yet, surely, the fact does
remain that your average business man is
neither quite so stupid nor quite such a bar-
barian as you music men seem to suppose.
Will you let me digress from the thread of
these "Adventures" of mine with my player-
piano to say a little of what my own experi-
ence has told me concerning the musical tastes
of my fellow men?
In the first place remember that we are citi-
zens of an enormous country. A continent in
size, comprising every variety of climate, tem-
perature, productivity, wealth and manner of
life; it is inhabited by more than one hundred
million people. Thj£"*i\ormous mass of popula-
tion is very largely ar mixture of all the races of
Europe and of the rest of the world. It is of
the most diverse t'kstes, habits and degrees of
civilization. It does not anywhere consist of
any one type distinct from all other types.
The American citizen of the educated sort is a
minority in his own country as the educated man
is a minority everywhere. Our great cities arc
filled with a mass of immigrants and the chil-
dren of immigrants. Their tastes, in the be-
ginning, were not high, and one generation of
American life does not suffice to change them
fundamentally very much. But even the chil-
dren of immigrants, despising—not without rea-
son—the horrors of "poppa's" personal habits
and the bovine stupidity of "momma," cannot
be expected to find very much uplift in the ex-
perience of growing up to know American ideals
only through the factory, the movie show and
the street. Now, the shallow surface indications
of American life are all against any notion of
popular culture and above all they are against
musical culture. That is not the fault of any-
body in particular, for it arises through condi-
tions antecedent to our time, and over which
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we have had no control. The virgin territory
to be conquered, the rush and hustle of a life in
which a leisured class could not exist in any
numbers, have kept in the background the idea
of culture. The American people are all pro-
fessionals. There are no amateurs. A man who
is musical is musical because he is a musician.
The business man is a professional business
man and gives up his career to the development
of that wonderful business machine which Amer-
ican industry really is. He is a figure of great
and wonderful import. The world needs him.
But he is professional to the exclusion of other
interests. He is not an amateur musician in his
spare moments, for he has no spare moments.
Latent Music Taste in America
So that is the real reason why we do not have
a public running after high class music. T h e
educated and the general lot of business men
are professionals in their business and mold their
lives on their professions. There are few musi-
cal amateurs in this country. No one has time
to be an amateur; and no one brings up his
sons to be amateurs in anything.
But—and the But is a big one—does all this
mean that there is no latent musical taste in
America? Of course, it means no such thing.
You will find that in times of abnormal pros-
perity, when money flows like water and the
immigrant makes seven dollars a day while the
business man cannot fill his orders for lack of
capacity, public taste runs towards the crude,
the garish and the noisy. No one cultivates
good music when the cabaret is at hand and
thoughts run to motor parties. But when you
dig deep down into the hearts of the people,
you find an awful lot of sickness and weariness
with the noisy life. You have to scratch our
people pretty deep sometimes to find them seri-
ous; but when you have found the fine things in
them, you find they possess them in plenty.
Now along comes the player-piano and at a
blow destroys the necessity for the theoretical
and practical cultivation of music that goes to
make up the ordinary amateur of other lands.
Here is all that is fine in the finest of arts
brought—in theory at least—within the immedi-
ate grasp of every potential or actual music
lover. Yet, after fifteen years of steady and
persistent exploitation, do we find that the
player-piano has brought out the dormant musi-
cal culture of our people and done something to
lift them above the banalities, the clatter, the
hustle and the noise of everyday life? We do
not. We find, on the contrary, that the noise,
the clatter and the banalities, have siezed this
new instrument and made it their minister.
Develop National Musical Idiom
Does that, then, show that we have no music
in us? Far from it. We Americans have de-
veloped a musical idiom of our own. We have
developed rag-time. Now rag-time may not, as
a mere rhythm, be very important in itself, nor
worth a great deal of itself. But when it pro-
duces—as it has produced—something like a
completely distinct shape of tune, and makes a
definite kind of music that you can recognize
anywhere, then you have to admit that rag-time
is an achievement; really, and sincerely.
My musical friends do not sneer at rag-time
as a rhythm or as the foundation of an American
musical idiom. They dislike, not rag-time, but
the cheap, nasty and stupid associations bound
up with it. The rhythm, taken alone and treated
with good sense and the free cleanness of the
natural American mentality, is itself clean, joy-
ous and even inspiring. It is the tonal language
of skyscraper, workshop and hammer. But when
you degrade it and confine its use to association
with cheap and nasty tunes, and cheaper—not
to say nastier—words; when you make it de-
scriptive of nothing save the cabaret and the
cheap vaudeville, not to say the back room of
the saloon, then you spoil it; and in so doing
you give the American people an undeserved
black eye, artistically speaking. You spoil the
idea in the first place, and in the second place
you make its creators half ashamed of it them-
selves, and, therefore, naturally inclined to be-
lieve that anything different is for high-brows,
since their own stuff is said to be so bad.
Yet, you have only to keep your ears open to
know that this is all wrong. A fine old melody
gets more applause than the latest shoddy, pop-
ular hit, any day. Of course, at a cabaret cafe
where the crowd is one half full of food and the
other half full of wine, the music must be
either riotous or maudlin; but you will find that
the folks at home would rather listen to "Arkan-
saw Traveler," "Money Musk," "Old Hundred"
and "All Bound 'Round With a Woolen String"
than to all the latest atrocities of the moment.
Folks in the cities may not know it and the
young folks who think they must be up to the
latest silliness may exist from moment to mo-
ment in an agony lest they be not up to date;
but the American people still live in country
more than in city and their musical hearts, if
not precisely cultivated, are in the right place.
There is no good, though, in telling people
to go out and buy your player-pianos and pro-
ceed to play and love music. The music is
there, but you cannot tell them to draw it out
with any hope of success. But if every dealer
in player-pianos in every city of the country
were to organize a singing society or a band in
his town—especially a singing society—and get
the people actually singing; then we should have
a musical nation in a few years; and every com-
munity would have its eager purchasers of
player-pianos.
Player-Piano As Music Love Producer
Don't forget it; the player-piano is the great-
est music love producer in the world when
once your man or woman has been persuaded to
treat it as such. But until you have got people
to think music a little bit, until you have got
them to sing, you need not expect they will be-
come music lovers of the right sort over night
just by having a player-piano in the house.
And so there follows the point that is of
more interest to you gentlemen of the piano
and music industries than any other. You will
never sell player-pianos to the mass of the peo-
ple as you ought to until you learn to cease de-
pending upon the less intelligent and concentrate
your energies on the more intelligent, of the peo-
ple. When you have taught them what the
player-piano really is—not by merely talking
about it or by demonstrating high-brow music
to people who don't understand it, but by help-
ing your communities to love music for them-
selves and to speak out aloud their own half
suppressed musical thoughts—then you will find
that the American people have been musical
all the time; and you will sell more pianos and
especially more player-pianos than ever before.
These are the views of one who is no musician,
no piano trade man, no reformer, but an ordi-
nary prosaic business man who, however, learned
to love fine music through one of your player-
pianos and has tried to tell you what his own
experience and observation have been telling
him e.ve.r since.,