In our Talk on Listening, it was said that the sounds we hear around us are the more easily understood if we first become familiar with the melody which is called the major scale.  But in order to think music it is necessary to know it—­in fact, music-thinking is impossible without it.  As it is no trouble to learn the scale, all of you should get it fixed in the mind quickly and securely.

It is now possible for you to hear the scale without singing its tones aloud.  Listen and see if that is not so!  Now think of the melodies you know, the songs you sing, the pieces you play.  You can sing them quite loudly (can you sing them?) or in a medium tone, or you can hum them softly as if to yourself; or further yet, you can think them without making the faintest sound, and every tone will be as plain as when you sang it the loudest.  Here, I can tell you that Beethoven wrote many of his greatest works when he was so deaf that he could not hear the music he made.  Hence, he must have been able to write it out of his thought just as he wanted it to sound.  When you understand these steps and ways you will then know about the beginning of music-thinking.

Let us inquire in this Talk what the piano has to do in our music-thinking.  What relation is there between the music in the mind and the tones produced by the piano?  It seems really as if the piano were a photographic camera, making for us a picture of what we have written,—­a camera so subtle indeed, that it pictures not things we can see and touch, but invisible things which exist only within us.  But faithful as the piano is in this, it may become the means of doing us much injury.  We may get into the habit of trusting the piano to think for us, of making it do so, in fact.  Instead of looking carefully through the pages of our new music, reading and understanding it with the mind, we run to the piano and with such playing-skill as we have we sit down and use our hands instead of our minds.  Now a great many do that, young and old.  But the only people who have a chance to conceive their music rightly are the young; the old, if they have not already learned to do it, never can.  That is a law which cannot be changed.

We have talked about listening so much that it should now be a settled habit in us.  If it is we are learning every day a little about tones, their qualities and character.  And we do this not alone by hearing the tones, but by giving great heed to them.  Let us now remember this:  listening is not of the ears but of the thoughts.  It is thought concentrated upon hearing.  The more this habit of tone-listening goes on in us, the more power we shall get out of our ability to read music.  All these things help one another.  We shall soon begin to discover that we not only have thoughts about sounding-tones, but about printed tones.  This comes more as our knowledge of the scale increases.

We can now learn one of the greatest and one of the most wonderful truths of science:  Great knowledge of anything comes from never ceasing to study the first steps.