While it has only been possible in this appendix to give the barest outline of the player-piano problem, the reader is besought to recollect that the industry is still new, and that the “present state of the art” hardly admits of any didactic assertions on principles of construction. We do not even know, today, whether the pneumatic principle will continue to prevail, or whether some new refinement of electric mechanism will not eventually surpass every device now known, both in responsiveness and convenience.
It is a curious fact, but none the less characteristic of that most curious of industries--the pianoforte craft--that in it the development hypothesis, so familiar to all other branches of human endeavor here, appears not to be fully applicable. While the aim of the present treatise has been to systematize and codify, as it were, the laws that underly all right constructional methods, we have been forced to recognize that there is no appearance of any accurate and uniform generalization which may be applicable to the future guidance of pianoforte builders in their efforts to attain to the greatest perfection in later types. Although we have succeeded in laying down the broad and universal principles that govern intelligent practice of the art, yet we cannot fail to note that a progressive evolution is not yet possible. That is to say, there is no progressive synthesis in the art which shall carry us continually further from the original types, so that the ancient models shall become in time quite unrecognizable in the light of modern improvement. Rather would it seem that the course of improvement is leading us back to reversions towards the original types, and of this tendency the rise of the small grand pianoforte is one of the most striking illustrations.
It is not to be supposed that this reversionary movement is to be taken as implying a dissatisfaction with the methods that have grown up in the course of the last hundred years, and the systematization of which has been our task in the present work; it is rather that the tendency today is in the direction of utilizing the most modern methods in the resuscitation and further development of the type of pianoforte that was earliest in the field.