of pieces. I do not believe
in spending a lot of time in such practise, for I feel it is time wasted
and leads nowhere. I do not believe, for instance, in the struggle to
play a perfectly even scale. A scale should never be 'even,' for it must
be full of variety and life. A perfectly even scale is on a dead level;
it has no life; it is machine-made. The only sense in which the word
'even' may be applied to a scale is for its rhythmic quality; but even
in this sense a beautiful scale has slight variations, so that it is
never absolutely regular, either in tone or rhythm.

"Then I do not believe in taking up a new composition and working at the
technical side of it first. I study it in the first place from the
musical side. I see what may be the meaning of the music, what ideas it
seeks to convey, what was in the composer's mind when he wrote it. In
other words, I get a good general idea of the composition as a whole;
when I have this I can begin to work out the details.

"In this connection I was interested in reading a statement made by
Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_. The statement, which, I think, has
never been refuted, is that while the great Italian painters, Raphael,
Coreggio, and the rest have left many immature and imperfect pictures
and studies in color, their drawings are mature and finished, showing
that they made many experiments and studies in color before they thought
of making the finished black and white drawing. It seems they put the
art thought first before the technical detail. This is the way I feel
and the way I work.

AVOID RESTRICTING RULES

"Because our ancestors were brought up to study the piano a certain way,
and we--some of us--have been trained along the same rigid lines, does
not mean there are no better, broader, less limited ways of reaching the
goal we seek. We do not want to limit ourselves or our powers. We do not
need to say: 'Now I have thought out the conception of this composition
to my present satisfaction; I shall always play it the same way.' How
can we feel thus? It binds us at once with iron shackles. How can I play
the piece twice exactly alike? I am a different man to-day from what I
was yesterday, and shall be different to-morrow from what I am to-day.
Each day is a new world, a new life. Don't you see how impossible it is
to give two performances of the piece which shall be identical in every
particular? It _is_ possible for a machine to make any number of
repetitio