IT

the well-known French pianist and song-composer, will tour the United States next season with Henri Marteau, the violinist.

The auditory nerves of people born deaf are often susceptible to a considerable degree of training. One exercise is begun by indicating to the patient certain vowels to be used. After several minutes' use of these vowels, called into the ear in a steady, loud voice, the patient often arrives at a differentiation of sound. Gradually the other vowels should be employed. Let this exercise be graded carefully, increasing the distance between teacher and scholar as rapidly as the latter can bear it. At first the lessons must be very short (not more than ten minutes) and repeated two or three times each day, for the undeveloped power of hearing is soon tired. Age is no obstacle to the success of this method, and very beneficial results are seen from it in cases of either congenital or acquired deaf

ness.

Spanish theatres have no programs.

It is said that Delle Sedie, the famous vocal teacher, never puts people back, when commencing study with him, merely to vindicate his own method. If ready, he lets them go right on, and seeks only to correct the faults of the unprepared without seeking to extinguish their former teachers.

Trainers maintain that tobacco and alcoholic liquors diminish the muscular power and endurance of athletes.

"Music," says Clifford Harrison, the poet, is less personal and more delicate and ductile than words. Music is vocal, but never verbal. It has supreme tact and adaptability. However supersensitive we may be, it never says the wrong thing; at least to us who hear as well as listen to its voice. We find in it a perpetual self-expression; and by its word of power we can enter a free, a more spiritual, and a purer world than color and form, too intimately connected with this natural world to be ever quite liberated from terrestrial thought, can create."

**

*

In Stockholm, Sweden, there is a telephone for every twenty-six inhabitants. There are now 28,500 miles of telephone lines in Sweden.

**

The late Sir Isaac Pitman, the originator of phonography, was passionately fond of music. When he was a child his father engaged a competent instructor to give Isaac and his elder brothers and sisters music lessons. The piano was then beginning to supersede the harpsichord. After attaining proficiency in fingering on the harpsichord, the children were rewarded with a piano of five and a half octaves. Young Isaac regarded this as a special dispensation from God, so, in order to show his gratitude, he saved up his spending money until it amounted to five shillings and dropped it in the collection-box. Later on his musical bent led him even to compose a hymn and an anthem on a passage from Isaiah. In 1859, when uniformity of musical pitch was so widely discussed, he drafted a table showing the number of vibrations of each note compared with every other note in the octave.

**

*

་་

Great things are expected of Sir Henry Irving's interpretation of the role of Napoleon in Mme. Sans Gêne," which will soon be produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London. For some time Irving has been interested in Sardou's play, and the author at his request made some slight changes in its action. He will represent Napoleon at two stages in his career-as an impetuous young captain and as the French emperor. It will be doubly interesting to note how, with his awkward physique, Irving can be made to resemble Napoleon. Henry (or John Henry Brodriff, to call him by his real name) was once a clerk in

Sir

**

Aurists claim that the deafest person, even the deaf and dumb, still has a trace of auditory power. M. Dussaud, a Swiss philanthropist and professor of applied physics at the University of Geneva, has invented an instrument for developing this latent power by strengthening the sound-waves. It is called the microphonograph and consists practically of a phonograph on whose membrane a microphone of a new kind has been adapted. The phonograph is set in motion by clockwork, while a dry battery sends a current first through a rheostat, then into the microphone, and then into a receiver similar to that of a telephone. When the receiver is applied to the ear, the words or the airs repeated by the phonograph are heard with an intensity that may be governed by the rheostat, by varying the power of the current circulating in the microphone. By increasing the strength of the current gradually, so great an intensity of the airs or the words repeated can be obtained that the ear can not perceive them without pain. M. Dussaud then gives the receiver to persons afflicted with different degrees of deafness. By regulating the current properly, they can follow, after a little practice, different melodies.

*

**

The Paris courts have just concluded an interesting case in favor of Mlle. Marie Delna, mezzo-soprano of the Opéra Comique, who was sued for $3,600 by Mme. Savary, her teacher of elocution. The latter's argument was that whenever Mlle. Delna was to appear in a new role, she always came to her to be coached in its declamation and acting. This assertion the singer denied. Many eminent composers and singers were called upon to testify how far this singer, or any artist, was indebted to a teacher for her success. Among them were Marchesi, Viardot, Krauss, Massenet. The last named thought that while Mme. Savary was an excellent teacher, Mlle. Delna was so talented that any role she undertook was sure of success. Mlle. Delna's début was made in 1892.

** Herbert Spencer says that muscular movements are originated by feelings, whether of pleasure or of pain. Thus, jumping, gesticulating, and shouting, employed to greet a chieftain or a god, gradually by repetition become regularized into the measured movements we know as dances, and into the organized utterances

called songs. In the same way there gradually arise from the crowd of jumpers and shouters some who, distinguished by skill, are set apart as professional dancers and singers. Dancing and singing become associated with forms of worship. Dancing was secularized first. Its power of expression was limited to joy, whereas music could express awe and penitence. The processional, however, survived when dancing ceased. The musical professor had a clerical origin during Christian times. Differentiation of music into sacred and secular was begun in the 12th century by minnesingers. Independent of worship music there grew up simple popular music. Emotions excited by the various incidents of life have always prompted spontaneous vocal expression. The higher developments of music, however, arose out of elaborated religious music, and the clerically developed musician's art, influencing the simple secular music of the people, began to evolve out of this the higher forms of music we know

now.

AMERICAN.

The Boston Globe recently published a symposium on the question, Is Woman Growing Physically Weaker?" Among

those expressing negative opinions were Dr. D. A. Sargent, Dr. Charles Wesley Emerson, Dr. S. S. Curry, and Baroness Rose Posse. Dr. Sargent said that much credit was due the bicycle for its work in this direction, for it influenced into muscular exertion women who never exercised. Baroness Posse stated that just as we are stronger physically than our grandmothers were. so the next generation will be stronger than

we are.

** The city of Brooklyn has passed an ordinance for the licensing of itinerant street musicians. Licenses are granted upon the payment of $10 annually. No musician is allowed to perform before 9 A. M. or after 9 P.M. on week days, or on Sundays, or within 500 feet of any school or church during session hours, or within a like distance of any hospital, asylum, or public institution.

A monument is to be erected over the grave of Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star Spangled Banner," at Mount Olivet Cemetery, Frederick, Md. The figure of Key, which is raised on a pedestal thirteen feet high, is nine feet in height, and is supposed to represent the poet on shipboard. With his right hand he points to the stars and stripes, while in his left he waves aloft the poem he has just written. The' statue will be unveiled in June, 1898.

Although eighty-five years old and so feeble as to require support in walking, Lewis G. Clarge, the original George Harris in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," recently signed a contract with a Southern company producing that play. Mr. Clarge is very poor and was compelled to take this step as a means toward liquidating some of his debts.

** *

Celebrities pay the penalty of fame by being pestered by callers of all sorts, who trump up countless excuses to catch glimpses, en famille, of the idols whom they worshipped on the stage. Prima donnas are Were I to give particularly besieged. audience to all the ambitous women, admirers, and advertising agents, who call upon me," said Mme. Melba, just before she sailed for Europe, "my life would be a burden. They usually begin coming about nine o'clock in the morning, although I seldom rise before twelve when I sing at the opera. In the list are the women who have thrown me flowers, and who think that that act entitles them to some favor from me,-my photograph, autograph, etc.; then come the agents for new summer drinks and patentmedicines, who think that my name will start them toward fortune; and women in society who think that I shall be flattered by their acquaintance without introduction. I try to answer all requests for my autograph, especially when girls write me from far-off cities, but the army of callers must be treated with some coldness or they would prevent my eating and sleeping." Few people are as unapproachable as Frau Lilli Lehmann, who even withholds her autograph. "I speak only German," she says. "If the caller does not speak German, I do not receive him. They come to me with the most ridiculous requests. Some even ask if I will give them lessons in German singing. I am glad to help people when I can, but the only way for a prima donna to get the rest she needs when singing in grand opera is to deny callers who come with foolish requests."

**

*

When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, an elaborate ball was given in his honor in New York. During the evening a series of tableaux vivants with subjects drawn from his novels was presented. Among those given were Mrs. Leo Hunter receiving the Pickwickians, modeled after the Phiz" picture in Pickwick Papers;" Oliver Twist asking for more; Little Nell; the Nickleby family; and the Pickwickians seated around the Club table. The final tableau was in two parts, and represented Rip Van Winkle arriving in England with Dickens's works in his hands, and Pickwick arriving in America with Irving's works.

*

** In an interesting paragraph on voice-photography the Journal of Photography says: "The transmission of sound' by agency of light is the problem of the immediate future. Selenium, and many other bodies in thin sheets, such as hard rubber, ebonite, metals, ivory, and paper, will give sounds under the influence of intermittent light. Mercadier enclosed lampblack, cotton, woollen threads, and cork, in a small tube connected with an ear-trumpet, and caused light to fall upon them through a revolving disc. Distinct sounds were given out by these bodies; light was converted into sound. Friese Greene published a method for converting sound vibrations into photographic action. His plan of photographing the vibrations of the human voice is simple and neat. A piece of parchment is first obtained and stretched like a drum. Upon the centre a very thin piece of silverpolished glass is pasted. A ray of light coming through a pinhole having a piece of talc, colored green, before it is made to fall upon the polished silver glass. The reflected ray is carried on until it strikes a sensitive plate. This plate must be arranged to move gradually, and be at a distance of three feet from the reflector. Start the plate moving and speak into the drum from behind the silver reflector, and the vibrations of the parchment diaphragm, caused by talking into it, will be recorded on the sensitive plate when developed. Different voices will give different waves on the plate, and it is said that in the case of the vowels repeated singly these waves are wonderfully uniform."

**

"If an actress has to fall to the ground in a death-agony," says Viola Allen, who has been so successful in "Under the Red Robe," "she must be careful that she does not perform the feat as though she were a clasp-knife folding up. Then, again, she must cultivate breathing so that she may seem not to be breathing at all. Nothing is more ridiculous than to see a supposed corpse whose chest is heaving violently, in consequence of the emotion attendant upon falling. I remember in Vir

ginius' I was stabbed and fell backward to the ground. The blow made me gasp, gradually my limbs became rigid, and I fell at the moment life was supposed to have left my body. I used to remain motionless with mouth and eyes open. The length of the actual death-scene is about five minutes. When I played in 'Othello' with Salvini, I was always very nervous during the smothering scene, because he used to get extremely excited. I would turn my face sideways and hold a small space open under the pillow so that I could breathe, but even that breathing-hole would frequently get closed under Salvini's forceful energy. Then, when he found that he had killed Desdemona without cause, in his remorse he would throw himself heavily upon the body. I used to wait for this piece of business as one would for a locomotive about to project itself upon the waistband."

** "When Mr. Smith and I decide to write a new opera," said Reginald De Koven, in a recent interview, "there are points we have to settle before we begin actual work. The first thing is what country presents most in the way of a novelty that has not been done to death. We had Robin Hood' in England, Rob Roy' in Scotland, The Fencing Master 'in Italy, etc., so the last time we decided that China had been least worked. Then we had to decide whether it should be all China or have other countries introduced into the plot. These points decided, Mr. Smith works out the plot, and I begin to write music. Perhaps he gives me the lyrics roughly sketched out and I set them to music. Perhaps I have some bits of music which I give him and he fits his verses to them. When we work separately, our efforts combine very well when we come to put them together. We never write an opera right through from beginning to end. We have a song or a bit of music and we talk it over some time before we decide whether it shall go in the first or the last act."

FTER George Riddle had finished his Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, on the evening of Feb. 6, he went to the Montauk Club, where he was the guest of honor at a dinner given by Herbert L. Bridgman. This date was selected, because it marked Mr. Riddle's fiftieth appearance before a Brooklyn andience. The menu was tastefully gotten up and designed with special reference to the fact that Mr. Riddle's reading had been from "Hamlet." It was printed on a heavy card, and was made up of four pages. On the front page was an excellent half tone portrait of Mr. Riddle, bordered on the right-hand side by a broad band of crimson ribbon, significant of Mr. Riddle's Harvard associations.

The things to eat and to drink were presented in the following novel form, with the appropriate quotations from "Hamlet."

The dramatis personæ, or those who assisted at the feast, were announced on the third page of the menu card as follows:

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

George Ridd e "The observed of all observers!" The King James McKeen "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below." The Ghost George S. Coleman "The spirit that I have seen May be the Devil; and the Devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape." Polonius

Prof. Issac F. Russell Polonius: Do you know me, my lord?" Hamlet: "Excellent, excellent well; you're a fish-monger.' H. H. Benedict

Horatio

"As just a man

Mrs. Josephine D. Peary "Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you.' First Grave-Digger Prof. William Libbey "There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers and grave-makers." Mrs. Herbert L. Bridgman "None wed the second but who killed the first.'

The Player Queen

The Player King

Herbert L. Bridgman "A king of shreds and patches." Chefs, waiters, officers, police, conductors, motormen, trolley-cars and elevated trains. Time-To-day and to-morrow. Scene-Lodge of Montauk. Borough of Brooklyn. This included the entire company, and a representative one it was. There were no formal speeches, nor was there a rehearsal of Hamlet." as one might suspect from a glance at the menu card. Conversation and story-telling filled out a most enjoyable evening, and everybody, from Hamlet to the First Grave-digger, played his part well, contributing to the success of the occasion.