eart. The extensive and involved
nomenclature of music, added to the complicated and inconsistent
system of notation, is a continual and exhausting strain upon the
memory. Teachers commence their drill in vocalization, as a rule, with
the scale of the key of C, and the pupils, fired with a noble ambition
to become musicians, make a strenuous effort to remember where _do_,
_re_, _mi_ and the other notes are placed on the lines and spaces of
the staff. Presently the "key is changed," and with that change comes
chaos. All the notes are now on a different series of lines and
spaces. The confusion continues until the series of seven notes is
exhausted. Then come scales with new names, commencing upon different
notes (flats and sharps), but with places on the staff identically the
same as others having different names!

Long before this point is reached by the pupil his courage flags,
his ambition cools, and in the greater number of cases dies out
altogether. To be sure, if he has the rare courage to persist he will
come to recognize the notes of any key, not by the number of lines
or spaces intervening between them and some landmark, but by their
relative distances from each other measured by the eye. But this
requires long practice. At first he must remember if he can, and when
he cannot he must count up to his unknown note from some remembered
one. It is, at best, a labor of Sisyphus. With many people--bright and
intelligent people, too--it requires years of practice to read new
music at sight even tolerably readily; for it is not simply a question
of learning the notes, difficult as that may be: there is a further
difficulty, and to many even a greater difficulty--that of the
measure. Not the number of beats in a measure or bar and their proper
accentuation--this is but the alphabet of time--but to group correctly
and rapidly the fractional notes, rests and prolongations in their
proper place in time. In very rapid music this becomes an herculean
task, requiring long-continued and arduous practice. It is not simply
a question of nice appreciation of rhythm, but of mathematical
calculation, to know instantly and unhesitatingly, for example, that
one-sixteenth, one half of one-sixteenth and one thirty-second added
together equal one-eighth--that is, one-third of the unit of time or
beat in six-eighths time.

Any one can see that such mental feats, ever varying as they are in
music, and demanding instant solution at the sa