The piano has always played a commanding rôle in the history of chamber music. From the early days when the harpsichord with its figured bass was the foundation for almost all music, both vocal and instrumental, few forms in chamber music have developed independently of it, or of the piano, its successor. The string quartet and a few combinations of wind instruments offer the only conspicuous exceptions. The mass of chamber music is made up of pianoforte trios, quartets, and quintets, of sonatas for pianoforte and various other instruments; and, indeed, the great part of pianoforte music is essentially chamber music. It may perhaps seem strange to characterize as remarkably fine and intimate the music which has been written for an instrument often stigmatized as essentially unmusical. But the piano has attracted nearly all the great composers, many of whom were excellent pianists; and the music which they have written for it is indisputably of the highest and most lasting worth. There are many pianoforte sonatas which are all but symphonies, not only in breadth of form, but in depth of meaning. Some composers, notably Beethoven and Liszt, demanded of the piano the power of the orchestra. Yet on the whole the mass of pianoforte music remains chamber music. The pianoforte style is an intricate style, and to be effective must be perfectly finished. The instrument sounds at its best in a small hall. In a large one its worst characteristics are likely to come all too clearly to the surface. And though it is in many ways the most powerful of all the instruments, truly beautiful playing does not call upon its limits of sound, but makes it a medium of fine and delicately shaded musical thought. To regard it as an instrument suited primarily to big and grandiose effects is grievously to misunderstand it, and is likely, furthermore, to make one overlook the possibilities of tone color which, though often denied it, it none the less possesses. In order to study intelligently the mechanics, or, if you will, the art of touch upon the piano, and in order to comprehend the variety of tone-color which can be produced from it, one must recognize at the outset the fact that the piano is an instrument of percussion. Its sounds result from the blows of hammers upon taut metal strings. With the musical sound given out by these vibrating strings must inevitably be mixed the dull and unmusical sound of the blow that set them vibrating. The trained ear will detect not only the thud of the hammer against the string, but that of the finger against the key, and that of the key itself upon its base. The study of touch and tone upon the piano is the study of the combination and the control of these two elements of sound, the one musical, the other unmusical.