ayer breathes his own breath as the breath of life,
it surpasses all its rivals, save the organ, in its capacity for
publishing the grand harmonies of the masters, for uttering their
"sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."

[Sidenote: _Defects of the pianoforte._]

[Sidenote: _Lack of sustaining power._]

This is one side of the picture and serves to show why the pianoforte
is the most universal, useful, and necessary of all musical
instruments. The other side shows its deficiencies, which must also be
known if one is to appreciate rightly the many things he is called
upon to note while listening intelligently to pianoforte music.
Despite all the skill, learning, and ingenuity which have been spent
on its perfection, the pianoforte can be made only feebly to
approximate that sustained style of musical utterance which is the
soul of melody, and finds its loftiest exemplification in singing. To
give out a melody perfectly, presupposes the capacity to sustain tones
without loss in power or quality, to bind them together at will, and
sometimes to intensify their dynamic or expressive force while they
sound. The tone of the pianoforte, being produced by a blow, begins to
die the moment it is created. The history of the instrument's
mechanism, and also of its technical manipulation, is the history of
an effort to reduce this shortcoming to a minimum. It has always
conditioned the character of the music composed for the instrument,
and if we were not in danger of being led into too wide an excursion,
it would be profitable to trace the parallelism which is disclosed by
the mechanical evolution of the instrument, and the technical and
spiritual evolution of the music composed for it. A few points will be
touched upon presently, when the intellectual activity invited by a
recital is brought under consideration.

[Sidenote: _The percussive element._]

[Sidenote: _Melody with drum-beats._]

[Sidenote: _Rhythmical accentuation._]

[Sidenote: _A universal substitute._]

It is to be noted, further, that by a beautiful application of the
doctrine of compensations, the factor which limits the capacity of
the pianoforte as a melody instrument endows it with a merit which no
other instrument has in the same degree, except the instruments of
percussion, which, despite their usefulness, stand on the border line
between savage and civilized music. It is from its relationship to the
drum that the pianoforte derive