"Well, I don't think they're any worse than these Deppe two-finger exercises."
"Wait till you begin counterpoint, dear," says another, consolingly.
And then the bell strikes, and off they all go, still chattering, to the various class-rooms or lesson-rooms. A few minutes later the conservatory becomes a dreadful babel of confused sounds. Down in the basement some one is groaning out an organ fugue by Thiele, with a great clattering of heels on the pedals. On the first floor the sight-reading class is droning angularly a part song by Weinzierl in the large room, while in the apartment next to them the "gold medal" pupil is pounding Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques into sounding brass without any tinkling of cymbals. Upstairs one young woman is pursuing the uneven sopranos of her way up and down the scale, a boy is playing a violin étude in several kinds of pitch, and a dozen girls are hammering out their semi-weekly allowance of Bach, Beethoven, Weber, Mozart, and Chopin all at once. The teachers—German, Polish, Russian, French, Italian, occasionally American—sit, stand, or pace the floor, according to their temperaments, and correct, guide, and urge gently or excitably as the case may be.
"No, my dear, the accent on the second beat, and the pedal taken after it, and held over to the first beat of the next bar."
"Ach! You, dere! You play mit your knuckle! Vat is dat? Bay, bay; hit de bay!"
"Ah, mon enfant! You sing wiz ze troat vide oppen, so—ba-a-a-ah. Is it not? Vell, I vish you sing viz ze glottis a lettle pinch, so—bu-u-u-uh. Now, sing."
And the unhappy pupil closes her throat up, as if she had a sort of artistic croup, and tries to force her voice through by main strength. In the mass of pupils in the conservatory there are always twenty or thirty who are studying seriously, with the hope of making artistic careers for themselves. These do not simply study the pianos or singing; they study music, which is a vastly more laborious undertaking. For once a week there is the lesson in harmony, which is one of the driest and most discouraging topics in the world. Yet no one can be said to know anything about music who does not understand harmony. Just think of it—harmony, counterpoint and fugue, form, theory, composition, instrumentation, sight-reading, history of music. Those are the subjects which the educated musician must know, and they are all taught in the regular music-schools. Harmony is the science of chords, you know. The teacher explains the laws by which the various intervals are governed, leading the pupil step by step till he has advanced from a simple "resolution" like this:
to something like this:
