Rehashing old research subjects always allows you to find information you wish could have been used on the prior projects. Just found James Huneker's autobiography and his description of the beginnings of The Etude. I just love his writing voice- full of hyperboles mixed in with truths and such vivid descriptions.
About this time I met Theodore Presser, who, as everyone knows, has started musical orphan asylums, homes for reformed musicians, and sanatoriums for hands lamed by excessive use of the thumbs on the black keys. Then, Mr. Presser was a lean, hungry-looking man with his head full of half-crazy schemes; at least, they seemed so to me. He had started a musical monthly whose pulse, temperature, and respiration he watched as if it had been a chick in an incubator. And it was a chick of uncertain health. I wrote paragraphs for it; betimes, I spread my wings and flew to the editorial roost and sounded my little cock-a-doodle-doo. My salary was as ever, nothing; but Theodore let me splash about in his pond and I was contented. Many nights we went to the post-office there anxiously to open letters. What a hurrah of joy when a dollar bill was found for an annual subscription! Presser, who is the Henry Ford of Philadelphia sheet-music, saw further ahead than I. The Etude has a subscription list that must make envious even Mr. Bok. Presser did all with his canny Yankee patience and shrewdness. He knew that the daughter of the plumber, the daughter of the policeman, hankered after music, and he deliberately built a machine to cater to their needs. The curious part of it is that he really improved their taste. The most famous pianists contribute to The Etude, are read and inwardly digested. I am in hopes that if these "few lines may meet his eye" -- as they say in manuals of writing made easy for servant-girls-- that he will give me a bed for my old bones in one of his eleemosynary institutions.
from Steeplejack, pg 201-2.
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