d, in a
sentimental tone, "Love!" Promptly Karl Formes sounded the solution to
the chord. "There is your answer," quoth he. "I ask a question, and it
is thought I speak of love. Go home, my good girl, and seek some other
avocation. You have a fair voice, but you are tone-deaf. You can never
make a musician."

A favorite motto of the piano teacher Leschetitzky is, "Think ten times
before you play once." If this rule were more generally observed we
should have better interpreters of music. A great composition should
completely occupy mind and heart before it is attacked by fingers or
voice. In that case it would be analyzed as to its form, its tonal
structure, its harmonic relations, its phrasing and rhythms, and its
musical intention would become luminous. The interpreter would
understand where accents and other indications of expression should
occur and why they should so occur, and would be able, in however feeble
a way, to find and reveal the true heart music that lies hidden in the
notes.

It is never too early in a course of music study to consider the
requirements of musical expression. Persistent observance of them will
inevitably quicken the artistic sense. The rules to which they have
given rise are for the most part simple and easily explained. For
obvious reasons, all musical interpretation is expected to imitate song
as closely as possible. The human voice, the primitive musical
instrument, in moments of excitement, ascends to a higher pitch,
increasing in intensity of tone as it sweeps upward. Consequently every
progression from lower to higher tones, whether played or sung, demands
a crescendo unless some plainly denoted characteristic of the music
calls for different treatment. A descending passage, as a return to
tranquillity, requires a decrescendo.

"The outpouring of a feeling toward its object, whether to the endless
heavens, or forth into the boundless world, or toward a definite,
limited goal, resembles the surging, the pressing onward of a flood,"
said the great teacher, Dr. Adolph Kullak. "Reversely, that feeling
which draws its object into itself has a more tranquillizing movement,
that especially when the possession of the object is assured, appeases
itself in equable onward flow toward the goal of a normal state of
satisfaction. The emotional life is an undulating play of up-surging and
subsidence, of pressing forward beyond temporal limitations and of
resigned yielding to temporal necessit