winds of life are passing. Sometimes a musical parent, such as Mr. William Platt, listens and hears his babies rediscovering the plagal cadence and canon for themselves, and gathers material for pianoforte pieces from their lips. But much oftener to-day the real music is stopped, and something else is forced on the singer. When the instrument is so fine that it sings or plays in him almost from the first, we have a "prodigy."
The point is that the original of all musical instruments is within us. But when did they, like tools, begin to be projected? Long ago, for in the very oldest books allusion is made to a variety of musical instruments. Perhaps the first was a horn (Mr. Platt's children made one with paper), but it is certain that the first instrument maker did not know that he was shaping the eustachian tube in his own throat.[1]
This tube, and also the tongue, the larynx, the lungs, the ear-drum, all the outer and more obvious
- ↑ Mr. William Platt, who has written a short book on this, gives examples of short, single-themed pianoforte pieces, a child's song, a hymn, a double-themed duet, and a three-themed duet, the entire material of which was gathered from the lips of young children. "One terse piano solo of twenty bars is founded on a stirring theme by a youngster of seventeen months, a child just striving to talk, and quite incapable of doing anything with a pencil, except trying to swallow it!"
