What effect will this have upon pianoforte music? In the first place, we shall gradually rid ourselves of misplaced pride in the amateur’s very limited technical powers. We shall no longer praise So and So for being able to play Chopin’s _Studies_ after a fashion, but shall consider him either a fool for wasting his time trying when he could much more easily enjoy Cortot’s performance of them, or sympathize with the poverty that prevents his purchasing this mechanical aid. Secondly, we shall not waste time and kill natural love of music by the dreary routine of “teaching the piano.” Instead, we shall teach appreciation. If all the energy spent in acquiring a very inadequate technique were diverted to the real business of appreciation, we should be a more musical nation. Thirdly, we shall cease to tolerate the incompetent player now so often foisted upon us or even sought for want of any better, and the ostentatious “virtuoso” executant. Before very long the piano-player will cost no more than an ordinary piano; in fact the ordinary instrument will no longer be manufactured. In our schools “piano-playing” will be erased from the curriculum and classes in appreciation substituted. But what about non-pianoforte music? There is a big difference. While the piano-player produces exactly the same kind of musical tone as the hand-played instrument, the gramophone, or the wireless, does not reproduce at all exactly the timbre, quality or volume of the instruments recorded. It provides not the real thing but a substitute, which, though excellent, can never be entirely satisfactory. We do not care to assert dogmatically what science will or will not make possible in the future; at least, however, it is extremely doubtful that a mechanical violin as adequate as the mechanical piano will ever be invented. Wind instruments depend less upon human manipulation--the organ, for instance, is nothing but an imperfect essay in this direction. This is but idle speculation, however. As a practical proposition we may say that the perfect mechanical reproduction of music will be confined to the pianoforte.