m very difficult pieces apparently without effort, often, indeed,
while thinking and talking of something quite other than his music; yet
he will play accurately and, possibly, with much expression. If he has
been playing a fugue, say in four parts, he will have kept each part well
distinct, in such a manner as to prove that his mind was not prevented,
by its other occupations, from consciously or unconsciously following
four distinct trains of musical thought at the same time, nor from making
his fingers act in exactly the required manner as regards each note of
each part.

It commonly happens that in the course of four or five minutes a player
may have struck four or five thousand notes. If we take into
consideration the rests, dotted notes, accidentals, variations of time,
&c., we shall find his attention must have been exercised on many more
occasions than when he was actually striking notes: so that it may not be
too much to say that the attention of a first-rate player has been
exercised--to an infinitesimally small extent--but still truly
exercised--on as many as ten thousand occasions within the space of five
minutes, for no note can be struck nor point attended to without a
certain amount of attention, no matter how rapidly or unconsciously
given.

Moreover, each act of attention has been followed by an act of volition,
and each act of volition by a muscular action, which is composed of many
minor actions; some so small that we can no more follow them than the
player himself can perceive them; nevertheless, it may have been
perfectly plain that the player was not attending to what he was doing,
but was listening to conversation on some other subject, not to say
joining in it himself. If he has been playing the violin, he may have
done all the above, and may also have been walking about. Herr Joachim
would unquestionably be able to do all that has here been described.

So complete may be the player's unconsciousness of the attention he is
giving, and the brain power he is exerting, that we may find it difficult
to awaken his attention to any particular part of his performance without
putting him out. Indeed we cannot do so. We observe that he finds it
hardly less difficult to compass a voluntary consciousness of what he has
once learnt so thoroughly that it has passed, so to speak, into the
domain of unconsciousness, than he found it to learn the note or passage
in the first instance. The effort after a