Excerpt from Transformation: A Brochure on the Teaching of Music to Children

See illustration on page 47performers on the piano are eternally smoothing music with their foot! Why not play with your pupil and run the pedal yourself and thus make him smooth it with his fingers? It is a wonderful way to lay a foundation for a musician; much better than the umbilical strangulation of your pupil's nascent talent with the groundwork of the prestidigitator's art. Many a musician can be developed at the pianoforte to whom the major piano solos are and always will be a closed book, and many a pianist there is who never was and never will be a musician. Let us have more musicians. Everybody gains. Nobody gets a stone for bread. Real pianists get a broader and more finely adjusted technic at the sacrifice of precocity only, and teachers will retain many more pupils and will take real delight in playing good music wit H them all the time.

Such would be the immediate gain, if all teachers who under stand and love the works of the master composers would play nothing but their works with their pupils until the fifth or sixth year of piano study. The ultimate gain, on the other hand, would be to confer upon the art of music teaching the greatest boon possible - the elimination of the quack. The quack does not fatten on the masterworks of genius; except for a few pieces, usually very well known by the public at large, which she has acquired by imitation, these master composers are a closed book to her. To put her hors de combat it is only necessary for all her opponents to use this music which is Greek to her and use nothing else. She can teach scales, and old sonatinas (not the splendid new ones of Sibelius and X. Scharwenka) and the transparent Czerny and his ilk; theory, ear training and rhythm exercises are her delight. I do not mean to imply that all teachers who use this material are quacks but that many quaclm are quite adept in using this material. If all teachers would play with their pupils nothing but the works of the great masters, they themselves would see less use for this material and they would put the quack out of business. They would discover the nearest thing to a panacea that I know of. I speak with the conviction of years of experience with young children when I say that if you will start your own pupils yourself at seven to eight years of age and play nothing but the greatest music with them for five or six years, you will discover that there is only one thing left to do, viz. Lead them to play the same composers' works for two hands. You can burn your scale books, throw away your Czerny, forget about ear training, rhythm, etc., and your pupilsin toto will be superior in musical intelligence and appreciation to the pupils of any other teacher. With such material such a result stands to reason. That they will be able to sit down and play from memory a more brilliant piano solo than certain few pupils of other teachers is very doubtful, as you will learn from the article Transformation. However, you will discover the profound truth that it is not necessary to study technic so as to have good music, but it is necessary to study good music so as to have a technic. You will easily establish a correct technic and you will never have to correct an established technic. The refinement of advanced technic should be left to the initiative of the mature player. It should be his delight to discover etudes by the great composers that appeal to his mind and at the same time improve his means of self-expression.

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