Miss Castleman's School

DADDY DEAR:

    You say I seldom write you a long letter unless I want something. Well, this is going to be the exception. It's going to be a long letter, because I have lots to tell you, but its main object is to tell you something you want — something you need very  badly.

     Father, I had the most wonderful time at the Lawrenson's over the weekend — it seems like a fairy dream to me.

     I arrived Friday, late in the afternoon, but before any of the family came home. After taking off my things I went down to watch for Eleanor, who I knew was at a matinee. The drawing-room was in semi-darkness. I went to the window and looked out.

     A downy snow-blanket lay over everything. The sun had left a faint rose flush in the West, and just above hung the slender, silver crescent moon.  One by one the lights began to twinkle in the park; the sky purpled slowly. I stood spellbound and
listened — for softly to my ears, as if to paint indelibly upon my mind, the lovely winter scene before me, came Music —

    I lisened almost breathlessly to the end. Then leaving the window, walked across to where stood a grand piano. Then I paused; there was no one there!

    But as I hesitated, half startled, a low laugh greeted my ears and Eleanor rose from a dim corner and came toward me. Greetings over, I turned again to the piano.

    "That might have been Paderewski," I said, still wondering.

    "It was," she rejoined. "This was Father's Christmas present to us. It is a Duo-Art Piano. Let me show you the secret."

    She lifted a section at the front, disclosing a perforated music-roll.

    Paderewski played it, and as he played, these cuttings were made in the roll and each touch of his fingers, each tone shade, each phrase of his interpretation was made to live forever.  Just as Paderewski played his beloved Chopin at Aeolian Hall one day before he sailed for Poland, you hear it when we put this roll into the piano and press this little lever."

    I listened to two or three lovely numbers and would have sat for hours drinking in the wonder of it, but Eleanor bore me away to dress for dinner, and the theatre. Six of us went to see "Buddies" that night; Eleanor's brother Jim, with two college friends of his and her cousin Nan, who is visiting her, too. Such a corking show — we enjoyed it immensely.  The next morning we three girls went down to Aeolian Hall and bought a Duo-Art roll of two of the quaint, dainty songs from "Buddies" made into the snappiest Fox Trot.

    Saturday night they had a dance — fourteen couples. The drawing-room was cleared for dancing, and such music as the Duo-Art gave us!  Daddy, it is the weirdest, most fascinating instrument!  Imagine at one time it's playing Chopin with all of Paderewski's genius; at another, perfect dance music; one-steps, fox-trots, the dreamiest of waltzes — as though possessed by the very spirit of Terpsichore — dashing it off with a richness, a spark, a clear pulsating rhythm that would make a wooden Indian dance!

    Then in the interims between dances, Eleanor would put in the piano a music-roll of a popular song. Many of them have the words printed right on the roll, and what fun it was to gather 'round the piano and sing.

    The vocal event of the evening, however, was Jim's clear, well-trained tenor singing Frank La Forge's "Like a Rose Bud," played by La Forge himself. The world's greatest accompanists and song-writers are making record-rolls for the Duo-Art; can you imagine what this would mean to a singer or vocal student?

    When it was announced the next day that we were going to hear Josef Hofmann at Carnegie Hall, my cup of joy was full. For two hours we sat in that great dim hall and listened to the piano magic of Hofmann. Then home, and seated in the fire-lit dusk, we conjured up the same magic music — reveled at close range in the ravishing piano playing of the master.

    His technical perfection, his incomparable beauty of tone, that mystic quality which only Hofmann evokes from the piano, were as clearly distinguishable as they had been earlier in the day at Carnegie Hall.

    What inspiration — what education for anyone studying music to be able to hear at leisure over and over the inspired art of great pianists such as Gabrilowitsch, Novaes, Grainger, Ganz — forty of them there are — who play records only for the Duo-Art!

    Daddy, dear, that Sunday afternoon, I pictured a Duo-Art in our living-room and you and I sitting on the sofa, my head on your shoulder, listening to the music that is dearest to both of us — the things Mumsie played so often when she was with us — the "Melody in F," "The Evening Star," "Kamennoi-Ostrow," "To Spring."

   Great masters have played them for the Duo-Art and they sound to me as though they played them with special tenderness and sympathy, knowing they were to place the benediction of beautiful music in countless homes — to bring sweet memories to install the love of good music in the breasts of little children, to light the dimming path of those grown old!

    I am sending you a beautiful Duo-Art Catalogue by registered mail. Of course, the Duo-Art costs more than a plain piano, but not so very much, and it is so wonderful — it is worth anything that anyone who loves music can afford to pay. If I thought I would find a Duo-Art when I come home for Easter vacation, I should like, oh! so much to have a week-end party like Eleanor Lawrenson's with the crowning touch of joy added by the presence of the nicest Daddy in the whole world.