individual lines I had devised. To my great delight details that had
always defied me, the rebellious trills, the faltering bravura passages,
the uneven runs, all came into beautiful submission and with them came a
new delight in playing.

FINDING INDIVIDUAL FAULTS

"I trust that my experience will set some ambitious piano students to
thinking and that they may be benefited by it. There is always a way of
correcting deficiencies if the way can only be found. The first thing,
however, is to recognize the detail itself and then to realize that
instead of being a detail it is a matter of vast importance until it has
been conquered and brought into submission. In playing, always note
where your difficulties seem to lie. Then, when advisable, isolate those
difficulties and practice them separately. This is the manner in which
all good technical exercises are devised.

"Your own difficulty is the difficulty which you should practice most.
Why waste time in practicing passages which you can play perfectly well?
One player may have difficulty in playing trills, while to another
player of equal general musical ability trills may be perfectly easy. In
playing arpeggios, however, the difficulties which prove obstacles to
the players may be entirely reversed. The one who could play the trill
perfectly might not be able, under any circumstance, to play an arpeggio
with the requisite smoothness and true legato demanded, while the
student who found the trill impossible possesses the ability to run
arpeggios and cadenzas with the fluency of a forest rivulet.

"All technical exercises must be given to the pupil with great
discretion and judgment just as poisonous medicines must be administered
to the patient with great care. The indiscriminate giving of technical
exercises may impede progress rather than advance the pupil. Simply
because an exercise happens to come in a certain position in a book of
technical exercises is no reason why the particular pupil being taught
needs that exercise at that particular time. Some exercises which are
not feasible and others which are inexpedient at a certain time, may
prove invaluable later in the pupil's progress.

"Take the famous Tausig exercises, for instance. Tausig was a master of
technic who had few, if any, equals in his time. His exercises are for
the most part very ingenious and useful to advanced players, but when
some of them are transposed into other keys as their composer demand