From Brain to Keyboard:—New and Complete Practical Solution of all Technical Difficulties

Extract

“I will use my influence to get you appointed organist to a deaf and dumb asylum.” So said, with quaint humour, a professor to a lady who had been lamenting her technical improficiency and telling of the delights of enjoying fine music by reading it over in an arm chair, where she said she could play it “in her mind” to perfection. And many of us have doubtless dwelt upon the beauties of a favourite movement in like manner, untrammelled by the technical imperfections of our fingers. But unfortunately music in general is not quite such an imaginative and ethereal art as all this, and requires for its interpretation, first and foremost, no doubt, the musical soul and musical brain; but secondly, the delicately regulated contractions of certain muscles to produce the sounds from whatever instrument is being played. In the case of the pianoforte, the deservedly popular instrument of our time, very great attention and study have been given to that part of the mechanism which intervenes between keyboard and string; but it is to the remaining part of the chain—and this chain, as all others, is no stronger than its weakest link—that I wish to draw your attention to-day; trusting that you will in no wise consider me an interloper, or a trespasser upon ground sacred either to the expert pianoforte maker or to the experienced piano teacher, seeing that my task has been simply to enlist, in the cause of music, hidden principles of physiology and anatomy besides those of mechanics, and to apply them to the perfecting of this weak link. That this technique, this link between brain and keyboard—in a word, this perfection of muscular control—is the weak link in the chain, needs, I think, no confirmation—every performer knows it only too well, from the girl of nine who cries over her scales, to the concert-player who laments that the arduous practice he knows not how to avoid is eating the soul out of his playing.