The bagpipe, which has been so long the companion of the lonely folk of northern moors and glens, can produce at times a certain rousing martial strain, but, even then, a wailing air creeps into the music like a Scotch mist. Its very reels and strathspeys, which ought to be jolly enough, only sound to me like elaborate complaints against life; their transitory snatches of gaiety are obviously forced. At all other times, the bagpipe is frankly pessimistic, and laments its very existence.
There is probably some technical reason why these instruments produce such doleful tones. Perhaps our sophisticated ears rebel against their peculiar harmonies and discords. But it is certainly curious that mouth-organs, concertinas, tin-whistles, and the rest, so beloved of simple people, should be intolerable to so many of us. Is it that we have no miseries to express in sound? Or is it that our optimism is so brittle that we dare not submit it to the onslaught of this strange music? I do not know.
All that I do know is that at the present moment I am sitting in my armchair before a bright fire, depressed beyond belief by the sound that floats through my window; while outside, in the cold, there stands a small boy, holding a mouth-organ in his numbed hands and bravely sliding his lips over the cold metallic edges of the thing; and by this time he is probably as gay as I am miserable.
Ignoring those musical labourers who are paid so much per hour, at cinemas and dance-halls, to make some sort of rhythmical sound, all pianists, I think, may be divided into four classes. There are, first, the great soloists, the masters, Paderewski, Pachmann, and the rest, who would seem to have conquered all difficulties. With them the piano, a dead thing of wires and hammers, becomes a delicately responsive organism; its hammers are extra muscles, and its strings added nerves, running and leaping to obey every fleeting impulse; their playing is as saturated with personality as their gait or speech. Not so with the members of the second class, which is, to my mind, a dubious fraternity. They may be called the serious amateurs. Very often they take expensive lessons from some professor, who undertakes to ‘finish them off.’ But they never are finished off. The sign and mark of the serious amateur is that he practises assiduously some piece of music, maybe a Chopin study or a Brahms sonata, until he has it by heart; after which he assembles a number of friends (or, more often, new acquaintances), squashes their attempts at conversation, and, amid a tense silence, begins to play--or, as he would say, ‘interpret’--his laboured solo. The fourth class consists of odd strummers, vampers and thumpers; young ladies who play waltzes and old ladies who play hymns; cigarette-in-mouth youths with a bang-and-rattle style of performance; all inexorable, tormenting noise-makers, from those who persist in riveting--rather than playing--Rachmaninoff’s C sharp minor Prelude to those who buy Sunday newspapers in order that they may pick out with one finger the tune of a comic song. All such are the enemies of peace and harmony, and as they cannot be ignored in any other place, here they can be quickly dismissed with all the more pleasure.