to excel without hard labor is the bane of
students of the piano especially. It leads them to muddle over music
too difficult for them; finally, to learn it after a fashion, so that
they may be able to "rattle and bang" through it to the delight of
fond relatives and the amazement and pity of severe culture. Not that
we should have consideration for all that passes for severe culture
and exquisite sensitiveness among musical dilettanti. In no field of
art is there so much affectation, assumption and charlatanry as in
music. Some years ago a musician in New York of considerable
reputation refused to play on a friend's piano because, as he said, it
was a little out of tune and his ear was excruciated by the slightest
discord. The lady wondered that the instrument should be out of tune,
as it was new and of a celebrated manufacturer. She sent to the
establishment where it was made, however, and a tuner promptly
appeared. He tried the A string with his tuning-fork, ran his fingers
over the keyboard, declared the piano in perfect tune, and left. That
evening the musician called, and was informed that a tuner had "been
exercising his skill" upon the instrument. Thereupon he graciously
condescended to play for his hostess, and the sensitiveness of his ear
was no longer shocked. She never dared to undeceive him, but mentioned
the fact to another musician, a violinist, who exclaimed, greatly
amused, "The idea of a pianist pretending to be fastidious about
concord in music! Why, the instrument at its best is a bundle of
discords." Both of these musicians were guilty of affectation; for,
although the piano's chords are slightly dissonant, the intervals of
the chromatic scale are made the same by the violin-player as by the
pianist. What right, then, has the former to complain? To be sure, the
violinist _can_ make his intervals absolutely correct: he _can_ play
the enharmonic scale, which one using any of the instruments with
fixed notes cannot do. But does he, practically? Does he not also make
the same note for C sharp and D flat? The violinist mentioned of
course alluded to the process called _equal temperament_, by which
piano-makers, to avoid an impracticable extent of keyboard, divide the
scale into eleven notes at equal intervals, each one being the twelfth
root of 2, or 1.05946. This destroys the distinction between the
semitones, and C sharp and D flat become the same note. Scientists
show us that they are different notes,