Etude's Coda

For years after the late Music Teacher Theodore Presser started his magazine in 1883 on a $250 stake. Etude had an impenetrable format, and articles with such titles as "The Great Composers' Love of Flowers." "Why Are Sharps Harder Than Flats?" and "Places That Don't Sound Right and What to Do with Them." The magazine was highly thought of by music teachers, who relied on it for hints on technique and for its advertisements suggesting graduation gifts ("A Very Attractive Lyre Design Pin--10K. solid gold, $1.25"). It was loathed by the thousands of rebellious children who had to plunk through its monthly exercises.

Made far more readable since then, but still the bane of thousands of music students, and still printing articles like "A Thought for the Piano Tuner," Etude by last fall was badly out of tune. Despite a peak circulation of 250,000 in 1919, Etude had been carried at a loss for some 30 years on the books of Presser's highbrow Bryn Mawr music publishing firm (owned since Presser's death in 1925 by the Presser Foundation, which also operates a home for aged music teachers).

Late last year, with circulation down to a dwindling 53,000, the Theodore Presser Co.'s president, onetime Cellist Arthur A. Hauser, cut Etude's staff from twelve to six. Last week, after prospecting without success for buyers, the foundation announced that Etude would fold with its May-June issue. Highlights of Etude's coda: a cover portrait of Beethoven, an interview with Soprano Renata Tebaldi, a biographical sketch of Composer Igor Stravinsky, and a lengthy obituary on Master Pianist Josef Hofmann.

A method of piano pedagogy more modern than Etude appeared in the magazine's wake. Chicago's educational TV channel, WTTW, last week introduced a program of weekly keyboard lessons. On the screen Pianist Carroll H. LeFavor leads two pupils up and down the scales. In 4,000 Illinois homes children follow LeFavor's fingering through the half-hour lessons. Most attractive feature of the lessons, to parents and neighbors: the home course, sold for $1 by a local instrument firm, includes a cardboard keyboard guaranteed to guard against resounding wrong notes.

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