Excerpt from Crude Conditions in American Musical Education The following item was recently seen in a well-known German periodical: "There are upwards of one hundred Americans now in Germany endeavoring to finish a musical education which was never begun." This, in more dignified phraseology, means that, from the German point of view, American musical training or education is lacking in the fundamentals. There are scores of piano players who possess a good degree of keyboard facility and many singers who possess considerable vocal facility, to whom a page of unfamiliar music is little better than a blank page, except as they ascertain how it sounds by playing it. The sight conveys no idea to them of the sound. Many readers will exclaim: "How could any one be expected to know how it sounds until it is heard?" This question alone is quite sufficient to prove the soundness of the German criticism just quoted. It also reveals the cause, - namely, a deep popular ignorance of what constitutes the true foundation of a musical education. No such degree of ignorance exists as to what constitutes the foundation of a literary, scientific, or business education. Therefore no one thinks of sending a child to a teacher of English grammar before that child has learned to read and write. If one could imagine such as absurdity, he could also imagine that there could be found teachers who would undertake the task. "How Absurd!" About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.