The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-05-30
THE LITTLE GIRLS MUSIC.

What She Did to Duvernay and Her
 "Pieces"- Music No Delight.
 One of the members of the sedate
 and highly respectable family that lives
 in the flat right beneath mine,' said the
 man with the haunted, worried look and
 the nervous jerky manner lis little
 girl about 12 years of age,' says the
 Washington Evening Star. She is a 1 nice, tidy, pleasant-mannere little girl, too-but l wish, sometimes, that
 her father hadn't secured the govern l ment job that brought him to Washing ton. Otherwise, he would probably
 have remained in northern Missouri with his family, including that nice,
 tidy, pleasant little girl. | Why? Well, the little girl Is taking lessons, as they say, on the pianoforte' She goes to school, of course, and there- fore she has to do lot of her practis- ing in the morning. She begins about
 o'clock in the morning, an hour at which before that family moved into their flat l was usually employed in dreaming of money and gilt-edged se- curities and other glorious and impos-
 sible things. The little girl has ar
 rived at that stage of her musical in" struction at which she is permitted by her teacher to take up pieces She has quite list of pieces on her little list now, and the things that she does to 'em during the early morning hour or so would never. never do to print.
 "She begins the morning with about 10 minutes of Duvernay scales. She al ways whacks two side-by-sde keys with each finger in doing this, but that doesn't seem to bother her at all. her main idea being it would seem, to get through just as quickly as possible in order to reach her piece playing per- formance.
 "Duvernay having been butchered quartered, sliced into sections, salted and put away, this nice little girl with the pleasant manners puts 'Silvery Waves on the rack in more ways than one and proceeds to make that imme- morial bore of a composition sound like
 =, well, like Ais if mule were playing
 xylophone solo on pair of Venetian blinds. if such thing could be. It is in the variations that the nice little girl makes every moment of 'Silvery Waves an incredibly long -drawn-out agony
 'Silvery Waves having been played off the boards, to employ slangism of the race course, the nice little girl gets the thumbscreWs on Eerdi's iriinor.aI 'Mieerere' from II Trovatore' Now, don't yield to anybody in my reverence for the 'Miserere I don't suppose ,t,o L ing melody than that But it was as- suredly never designed to be played as a rag g-time composition. That's how the nice little girl below me plays it. She works in all the syncopstion of rag time very skilfully. She makes the Mis- erere sound like something that ought to have words fitted to it about nah Coal-tar Lady, or Or Nah Crap-sh in Baby, and l am always, oh, so glad when she gets through executing that mpositon--yes, executing is the word.
 Being by this time in a lightsome. frolcsome mood, the nice little girl hungers for something light and airy. so she takes down The Frolic of the Frogs Waltz She's got this one down so pat, it having been her first piece that she can play the whole thing from beginning to end in something less than i2 seconds, and that's the way she plays It. If grasshoppers could waltz to the dead gallop that she makes of that | time composition, they'd | never be caught by small boys and be | made to spit tobacco juice.
 She follows this up with The Little | Fisher Maiden, which by some strange | rick of fancy she seems to imagine is a | jig or buck dance. She l seems to entertain the same notion | with respect to My Queen Waltz which is her next performance. It takes Ter all of "A secondsI timed her---to olay My Queen Waltz from beginning |