Of course there is no denying that the existence of music-making
machinery has a certain relaxing effect on some of the less talented
followers of the muse of strumming, scraping, screeching, and
blatting. This is because the soul of music is not in them. And in
striving to reproduce its body, they perceive how hopeless it is to
compete with the physical perfection of the manufactured product. In
like manner, the invention of canned meats doubtless discouraged many
minor cooks from further struggles with their craft. But these
losses, I, for one, cannot bring myself to mourn.

What seems a sounder complaint is that the phonograph, because it
reproduces with equal readiness music and the spoken word, may become
an effective instrument of satire in the hands of the clever
philistine. Let me illustrate. To the Jones collection of records,
shortly after "Tannhaeuser" began to win its way, there was added a
reactionary "comic" record entitled "Maggie Clancy's New Piano." In
the record Maggie begins playing "Tannhaeuser" very creditably on her
new instrument. Presently the voice of old Clancy is heard from
another room calling, "Maggie!" The music goes on. There is a
_crescendo_ series of calls. The piano stops.

"Yes, Father?"

"Maggie, is the new pianny broke?"

"No, Father; I was merely playing Wagner."

Old Clancy meditates a moment; then, with a gentleness of touch that
might turn a New York music critic green with envy, he replies: "Oh,
I thought ye wuz shovelin' coal in the parlor stove."

Records like these have power to retard and roughen the otherwise
smooth course of a family's musical evolution; but they are usually
unable to arrest it. In general I think that such satires may fortify
the elder generation in its conservative mistrust of classical music.
But if they are only heard often enough by the young, I believe that
the sympathies of the latter will end in chiming with the taste of the
enlightened Maggie rather than with that of her father.

Until recently a graver charge against the phonograph has been that it
was so much better adapted for reproducing song than pure instrumental
music that it was tending to identify the art of music in the minds of
most men with song alone. This tendency was dangerous. For song is not
all of music, nor even its most important part. The voice is naturally
more limited in range, technic, and variety of color than many
another instrument. And it is artificially han