becoming
worse and worse and actually cultivating faults rather than approaching
perfection. The student must always remember that his fingers are only
the outward organs of his inner consciousness, and while his work may be
mechanical in part he should never think mechanically. The smallest
technical exercise must have its own direction, its own aim. Nothing
should be done without some definite purpose in view. The student should
have pointed out to him just what the road he must travel is, and where
it leads to. The ideal teacher is the one who gives the pupil something
to take home and work out at home, not the one who works out the
student's lesson for him in the class room. The teacher's greatest
mission is to raise the consciousness of the pupil until he can
appreciate his own powers for developing an idea.

FREEDOM FROM CONVENTION

"Oh the horror of the conventional, the absolutely right, the human
machine who cannot make an error! The balance between the frigidly
correct and the abominably loose is a most difficult one to maintain. It
is, of course, desirable that the young student pass through a certain
period of strict discipline, but if this discipline succeeds in making
an automaton, of what earthly use is it? Is it really necessary to
instruct our little folks to think that everything must be done in a
"cut and dried" manner? Take the simple matter of time, for instance.
Listen to the playing of most young pupils and you will hear nothing but
a kind of "railroad train" rhythm. Every measure bumps along precisely
like the last one. The pupil has been taught to observe the bar signs
like stone walls partitioning the whole piece off into sections. The
result as a whole is too awful to describe. As a matter of fact, the bar
signs, necessary as they are as guide-posts when we are learning the
elements of notation, are often the means of leading the poorly trained
pupil to a wholly erroneous interpretation. For instance, in a passage
like the following from Beethoven's F minor Sonata, Opus 2, No. 1
(dedicated to Joseph Haydn), Beethoven's idea must have been the
following:

[Illustration]

before it was divided into measures by bar lines as now found printed:

[Illustration]

The trouble with the pupil in playing the above is that he seems
inclined to observe the bar lines very carefully and lose all idea of
the phrase as a whole. Music should be studied by phrases, not by
measures. In studying a poem y