Mountain Home maverick. [volume] (Mountain Home, Idaho) 1906-1911, 1907-01-10

following few, simple, common
sense rules, to get along with
of friction and maxi
mum of pleasure and profit.
III
Music is one of the fairest and
most glorious gifts of God, to which
Satan is a bitter enemy, for it re-
moves from the heart the weight of
sorrow and the formation of evil
thoughts. Martin Luther.
Music is as susceptible of color
ing as is a painting. To properly
blend chords and produce perfect
tone picture is as great an art as to
skillfuly blend paints and produce
a perfect painting. Music without
expression is worse than none.
With expression it can awaken all
the emotions of which the human
heart is capable.
III
The oldest piece of music in the
world is said to be a selection called
THE Blessing of the Priests" 1t
was sung in the temple of Jerusa-
lem, and even now in the syna-
gogues of Spain and Portugal it is
frequently heard. The manuscript
papyrus is kept in a small iron box.
Explain it as we may, martial
strain will urge a man into the
front rank of battle quicker than an
argument, and fine anthem excites
his devotion more certainly than a
logical discourse.
If parents, as a general rule,
would give their children chance
to learn the rudiments of music,
and also in some degree the tech
nique of the piano, before they per-
NIT the teacher to pound pieces"
into their youthful heads, they
would be doing themselves, the
children, the teacher and the COM
munity at large an act of simple
justice. But no! If the child can
not rattle off piece after about the
tenth lesson the fond parents, who
generally know less about music
than anything else in the wide
world, conclude that the teacher is
incompetent or that the child has
no music in its makeup, and either
changes instructors with the same
result as before, or deprive the poor
student of further opportunity to
study. Music is language, and a
child can learn it in the same man
ner that it learns to read its mother
tongue-that is by commencing at
the a, b, c, and gradually spelling
| its way upward. 1t is just as I'M
reasonable to expect piano pupil
to play composition after few
weeks instructions as it is to ex-
pect il to read a newspaper after
the same length of time spent in
4 the school room. There are of
course many teachers of music who,
like many school teachers, have no
other aim in teaching than to earn
stipulated sum, and who are mer-
cenary enough to realize that any
method that will rapidly advance
the pupil will as rapidly curtail
their income from that particular
pupil, Let parents have little
patience and not expect the imros-
sible, and let them firmly insist up
on the teacher doing the work as
signed to him or her in thor ough
and painstaking manner, and they
will obtain results that will
greatly surprise and please them.
Instances are on record where
parents have paid as high as twenty
five dollars to have a son or daugh-
ter learn to play a popular waltz or
two-step, when, if proper method
other selection, would have been
rendered with very little practice
without other assistance than the
knowledge rightly acquired.
The following appreciation of the
late Theodore Thomas is from the
Dial, the literary journal which has
no peer on this continent: 'It is
not easy to adjust our minds to the
fact that Theodore Thomas is dead.
Those who, like the present writ
er, have heard something like five
hundred concerts given under his
leadership during the past thirty
years, who owe to him practically
their whole acquaintance with or
chcstral music, must be simply
dazed by their loss. To such, he
has stood for all these years as the
beginning and the end of music,
almost as their sole means of ac-
cess to its fountain of inspiration.