28
PRESTO
STRICH & ZEIDLER, Inc.
GRAND, UPRIGHT and PLAYER
WHY NOT TEACHERS
OF PLAYER=PIANO?
AND
HOMER PIANOS
740-742 East 136th Street
NEW YORK
The LEADING LINE
WEAVER PIANOS
Qrands, Uprights and Players
Finest and most artistic
piano in design, tone and
construction that can be
made.
YORK PIANOS
Uprights and Player Pianos
A high grade piano of great
value and with charming tone quality.
Livingston Pianos— Uprights and Player Pianos
A popular piano at a popular price.
Over 70,000 instruments made by this company are sing-
ing their own praises in all parts of the civilised world.
Write for catalogues and state on what terms you would
like to deal, and we will make you a proposition if yot are
located in open territory.
WEAVER PIANO CO, Int
Factory: YORK, PA.
Established 1870
"Built onlFamily Pride"
Doll & Sons
Represent the Artistic
in Piano and Player Piano
Construction
JACOB DOLL & SONS
STODDART
WELLSMORE
Jacob Doll & Sons, Inc
Southern Boulevard, E. 133rd St.
E. 134th St. and Cypress Ave.
NEW YORK
TRADE MARK
Factory and General Offices: ROCKFORD, ILI
CHICAGO WAREIOOMSi NORTH AMERICAN BLDG.
Warning to lnfringers
This Trade Mark is c u t in the plate and also
£cfnimAnn Pianos, and all infringe™ will be
prosecuted.
Beware of imitations such as
Schumann & Company, Schumann & Son,
and also Shu.man, as all stencil sbx>ps, dealers
and users of pianos bearing a name in imitation
of tip name Schumann with the intention of
deceiving the pubfic will be prosecuted to the
fuUatt eftent of the law.
SCHUMANN PIANO COMPANY
W. W. VAN MA7KS. !»*•*!*)•»«
Contributor to a London Magazine Puts the
Question and Gives the Reasons Why
the Answer Should Be in the
Affirmative.
Several years ago Presto published several
articles on the advisability of a more systematic
method of playerpiano performance. It was sug-
gested that the time had come when regular player-
piano teachers might find the new occupation not
only useful but also profitable.
The idea is now being discussed in England and,
in a recent issue of "Music," the London monthly,
there is an article by Ernest Newman which is well
worth reproducing. Following is the greater part
of it.
A NEW VOCATION.
A few years ago I threw out the suggestion that
some of the more enterprising Competition Fes-
tivals might try the experiment of a competition
for pianoplayers. The suggestion was received with
stony silence; within the last week or two the sec-
retary of one of the largest festivals now being
revived after its long war-sleep, has chaffingly writ-
ten me asking if I still believe in the possibilities
of a pianoplayer class. I dd*
The day has gone by when the pianoplayer could
be dismissed with a patronizing shrug of the shoul-
ders as a mere mechanical instrument. Like the
gramophone, it is destined to play a great part in
the musical education of the country. It is the
gramophone's good luck tha* it plays itself. The
pianoplayer, unfortunately, Joes not. It can be
played excellently or vilely, and if it is played vilely,
as it is generally is, musicians are quite rightly
horrified at it. Rut there is no real need for it to
be played as badly as it is in most homes; and if
it were only played better, on the average, it would
give infinitely more delight both to the performer
and to his audience.
A Sensitive Instrument.
Anyone who has had much experience of the
pianoplayer knows that it is almost as hard to play
as the piano. It may be a little exaggeration to
say, as I sometimes say in self-excuse when I have
given a particularly bad performance on the in-
strument, that it takes as long to acquire a first-rate
pianoplayer technique as it does to acquire a first-
rate hand technique; but it is not so very much of
an exaggeration.
You need only a very slight acquaintance with
the pianoplayer to realize that it is anything but
a mechanical instrument in the sense that you have
only to set it going and it will do all the work for
you. If it were a machine in that sense it would
be the same under everyone's hands, and under the
same performer's hands today, tomorrow, and the
day after. But we all know that it behaves differ-
ently with different people, and with the same per-
son from day to day or from hour to hour.
Each particular instrument has a personality of
its own—a personality as variable as that of the
ordinary human being. That is at once its irrita-
tion and its charm. It is annoying to have it behave
so capriciously; but it behaves capriciously only
because it can do what is ostensibly the same thing
in a hundred different ways; and the possibility of
doing it in ninety-nine ways that are wrong implies
the possibility of it being made to do it in the one
way that is right. A machine it undoubtedly is, to
a large extent; but it is a most sensitive machine,
and its sensitiveness can be controlled to beautiful
uses.
Wide Range of Expression.
No one who has ever heard the pianoplayer per-
formed upon by one who is both a musician and a
pianoplayer expert, can doubt that it is an instru-
ment with a wide range of expression. If you know
"fiow to do it you can get many varieties of touch
upon it, and, of course, all possible flexibilities- of
phrasing. To do all this, to create the illusion that
the hearer is listening to a good performance by
hand, the performer must of course be in the first
place a thorough musician who knows his score
by heart. The plain music-lover who cannot read
music easily is at a disadvantage. But much could
be done for him by a more artistic method of roll-
cutting.
About Music Rolls.
Most of the rolls in existence are—one regrets to
say—very badly cut. Every musician knows that
notes, like words, are only symbols, the power of
which lies in the performer's imaginative illumina-
tion of them. There is, no doubt, a great difference
to begin with between any fifty words put together
by Keats and any fifty by Martin Tupper, or be-
February 26, 1920.
tween any ten consecutive bars of Scriabine and
any ten of Carl Bohm. But the Keats and the
Scriabine are not actual, but only potential Keats
and Scriabine if they are recited or played with no
thought of anything but the scansion of the one or
the absolute time-values of the other.
The true reader of poetry, the true musician,
deals with these values—which in themselves are
only approximate—with a certain amount of free-
dom: only thus does the poetic line or the musical
melody become a living thing. Now the defect of
the ordinary pianoplayer roll is that it gives us
merely the notes as they exist on paper, not the
notes as an artist would play them, not the symbols
translated into vision.
To a large extent this is a matter of elasticity of
phrasing; and for the plain man the roll should be
so cut that if he simply plays it according to the
directions he will get the organic flow of rhythm
through it that a fine pianist would give to it. This
can easily be done; and when it is done, a great
deal of the present prejudice against the piano-
player as a mere mechanical instrument will dis-
appear.
Expert Instruction Needed.
But the average good musician who takes up the
pianoplayer because he has not had the time or the
opportunity to develop a hand technique wants
something more than this. He wants to know how
to get the best possible results out of his instru-
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Price & Teeple Piano Co.
218 South Wabash Avenue
CHICAGO
A LIVE LINE FOR LIVE DEALERS
WEBSTER
PIANOS AND PLAYERS
Fulfill Every Promise of
Profit to the Dealer
and Satisfaction to
His Customers.
NOTHING BETTER FOR YOUR TRADE
Manufactured by
THE WEBSTER PIANO CO.
450 Fifth Ave., NEW YORK CITY
W. P. HAINES & CO.
(INCORPORATED)
PLAYERS and PIANOS
138th Street and Walton Avenue
NEW YORK CITY
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