Only the Best!

by Edward Baxter Perry

At first glance the above would seem to be the most ideally appropriate motto for every musical school, club, and conservatory. In a sense, it is, but in too many cases it serves merely as a plausible excuse to cloak a mere petty local vanity, and an utter ignorance or indifference to the real musical needs of the community. It sounds well to say, we have only the best, the desired inference being our taste is so cultured and super-refined that we are not satisfied with anything but the very highest artistic performance. What it really means, in most cases, is that the community wishes to be known through securing a more famous and expensive celebrity than any other institute or organization in the vicinity can afford. It is expected that the person's foreign name and international reputation will shed a reflected glory upon the musical locality. It is not musical enjoyment, or education, or the culture of the general public that is sought, but the credit of having basked, for a moment, in the effulgence of the strictly correct European halo, that is supposed to crown the heads of the princely few in the artistic world.

For example, I received, not long since, a letter from a leading college in the South to which I had written in regard to a possible recital engagement. It stated that their students and public had been educated to demand "only the best, that they had engaged Paderewski six years ago at great expense and as his superior had not yet appeared they had had no pianist since, and should not have, for the present." I was perforce reminded, as one is so often of that trenchant dictum by Carlyle, "England is inhabited by twenty million people, mostly fools." Increase the number of inhabitants and the percentage of fools and it fits our own beloved country like a glove.

There are some three hundred students in that college, mostly from country villages or farms, many of whom have never heard an artist in their lives, trying to get the rudiments of a musical education, yet they are not to hear a pianist for six years because, forsooth the institution must not lower its standard and prestige by engaging any artist who can be had for less than three thousand dollars, and who is not recognized as being able to beat Paderewski. This is the point in the minds of so many--to beat, the excel. Is then our musical art nothing but a competitive effort, an exhibition of skill in which only the winner counts as in a prize fight? Are we to give our lives, our very souls for the chance of winning the champion's belt by knocking out all competitors in the third round, by superior swiftness, strength and endurance? Failing in that, are we to throw up the sponge, retire from the ring, admit that we are down and out, and proceed to find ignoble graves for ourselves?

In spite of the fools, who are many, and their folly, which is great, there is still a fairly good and profitable field of usefulness, for the honest capable worker in the cause of true musical art, even if he is guilty of the crime of having been born on this side of the Atlantic, and even if he does not quite measure up in all respects to the imported, rainbow-colored elephants of the first magnitude and consequent drawing power. His field would be better, his usefulness much great, and his life far easier if the public, and especially the mass of teachers and students of music, could be made to realize the fact that a concert pianist or a vocalist is not a mere curiosity to be seen once, but a practical and important factor in a musical education to be listened to earnestly and intelligently as often as possible.

Students Must Hear Fine Music

No student, no matter how gifted and well taught, can obtain a broad comprehensive grasp of his art, it's material, its resources, its possibilities without hearing much music well given and repeatedly given by different artists, that he may learn to compare, analyze, and discriminate, and thus develop his own taste, judgment and appreciation. It is a question of necessary training and information, not of momentary entertainment, astonishment or even real aesthetic pleasure.

For any school or club, making a feature of musical study, ten recitals by ten good American performers who can be had for fifty to a hundred dollars a night, are worth just then times as much as one by some so-called "great star," who costs a thousand or more. The difference is quality would not be perceptible to half a dozen persons in the audience, while the difference in quantity is as ten to one and the expense no more.

Every student in Europe expects, as a matter of course, to hear, at least , two recitals a week for a series of years. It is a part of his education. One of the chief reasons why many students go abroad to study is that Europe offers unlimited opportunities to hear fine concerts. We might have the same conditions here if the mass of students would realize the importance and value of frequent good concerts.

We ought to have a hundred, able, well-trained American pianists doing nothing but recital work, visiting schools, clubs and smaller communities, annually in regular rotation, furnishing this needed element in our musical development at moderate prices, yet getting a worthy income out of it and doing a worthy and useful life-work. As it is, we have perhaps ten who are trying to do it under countless difficulties and discouragements, and I know of only one who has ever succeeded in doing it for more than two successive seasons before being forced back into teaching for a living. If the public, and especially the musical students, could be induced to attend concerts for the sake of hearing music, and learning something instead of merely from curiosity to hear a new man, who comes from a long distance and has a long name, these conditions might be secured in a short time, for we have plenty of good concert talent at home, people able and willing, nay, eager to do the work well, and at fair compensation.