dicapped by the rather
absurd custom which forces the singer to drag in poetry (much to the
latter's disadvantage), and therewith distract his own attention and
that of his audience from the music.

The fact remains that one art at a time is none too easy for even the
most perfect medium of expression to cope with. To make a somewhat
less than perfect instrument like the human voice, cope always with
two simultaneously is an indication that the young art of music has
not yet emerged from its teens. This is one reason why most song is as
yet so intrinsically unmusical. Its reach is, as a rule, forced to
exceed its grasp. Also the accident of having a fine voice usually
determines a singer's career, though a perfect vocal organ does not
necessarily imply a musical nature. The best voices, in fact, often
belong, by some contrariety of fate, to the worst musicians. For these
and other reasons, there is less of the true spirit of music to be
heard from vocal cords than from the cords and reeds and brazen tubes
of piano, organ, string quartet, and orchestra. Thus, when the
phonograph threatened to identify song with music in general, it
threatened to give the art a setback and make the singer the
arch-enemy of the wider musical culture. Fortunately the phonograph
now gives promise of averting this peril by bringing up its
reproduction of absolute music near to its vocal standard.

Another charge against most machine-made music is its unhuman
accuracy. The phonograph companies seldom give out a record which is
not practically perfect in technic and intonation. As for the
mechanical piano, there is no escape from the certainty of just what
notes are coming next--that is, if little Johnnie has not been editing
the paper record with his father's leather-punch. Therefore one grows
after a while to long for a few of those deviations from mathematical
precision which imply human frailty and lovableness. One reason why
the future is veiled from us is that it is so painful to be certain
that one's every prediction is coming true.

A worse trouble with the phonograph is that it seems to leave out of
account that essential part of every true musical performance, the
creative listener. A great many phonograph records sound as though the
recorder had been performing to an audience no more spiritually
resonant than the four walls of a factory. I think that the makers of
another kind of mechanical instrument must have realized this
over