A piano, alone on a stage; shadowed light around and above it; ivory and ebony moving out of the shadow; and the silence that hangs there before the musician plays. There is nothing like it in the world,—nothing more wonderful.... * * * * * There are “revolutions” going on in all the arts. The revolution in poetry is coming in for a lot of discussion, so that even the layman is conscious of it. His feeling about it is that some effeminate beings called Imagists are trying to emasculate the noble art of poetry. But the thing is happening right under his nose and he is careful to keep posted, in order to be able to defend his favorite theory. As for the stage, he knows that Gordon Craig and Rhinehart have been using screens instead of marble pillars painted against red velvet curtains. In painting he knows all about the cubists and futurists; he even knows that the donkey’s tail story was something of a joke. In sculpture he has heard of an unreasonable reaction from Rodin, and he has probably seen Brzeska’s head of Ezra Pound. In the ballet he has a rather clear idea of why the old classical form wouldn’t serve; perhaps because the Russians have demonstrated so clearly what it was they could do with the new form. In opera he thinks very little is happening. He is right. But the slowest revolution of all—and the most interesting—is that which is just beginning in the art of the piano. It is the slowest because it is not the public alone that is bound to the old form. The masters themselves have not visioned toward a need that would make a new form inevitable. The need is—a deeper music. And it is the most interesting because the convention that has bound the piano,—virtuosity,—is a more worthy convention than that which has restricted any of the other arts.