The First Principles of Pianoforte Playing (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to me: " The ease with which an essay is read, is often a measure of the laboriousness with which it has been written;"? and in concluding, I can only express the hope that my readers may find some measure of correspondence between my labour in this instance, and its result! I must also here take the opportunity of thanking the many kind friends who have encouraged me in my self-imposed task, and to acknowledge the valuable help given me in the revision of the proofs, etc., by Mrs. Kennedy-Fraser, of Edinburgh, and others. Tobias Matthay. Hampstead, London, July, 1903. THE ACT O ?il accomplished by the unio CONCEPTION, ?the Perception of Musical Sense. The power of perceiving musical sense depends on the degree of our MUSICIANSHIP. Musicianship, the power of understanding Music, has two sides: ? The EMOTIONAL SIDE; and Emotional Musical-ability, or Musical- Feeling, permits ns to perceive: the Emotional Import of Music. It permits ns to perceive, and enjoy, the sensuously Beautiful in Music; and its parallelism to Human emotion. The INTELLECTUAL SIDE; ARTIS1 Intellectual Musical-ability, or Musical-Reasoning, Artistic-jndf permits us to perceive: the Musical-Shapes em- edge of, and T ployed to convey such emotion. the instrument It permits us to perceive, and enjoy, the perfec- it is alone pc tions shown in the musical structure; workmanship sense as one c; ?in its largest and smallest manifestations. It also embr It enables us to perceive Rhythmical structure;? ity; a sensibil the facts of Climax, or Crisis, 1n its larjre swings of enough to feel form, and in its smaller ones of the Phrase and its even when its subdivisions?down to its component ideas. rily suspended, Training is hence required in both the de...