art.

"As you already know I do not believe in so-called 'piano technic,'
which must be practised laboriously outside of pieces. I do not believe
in spending a lot of time in such practise, for I feel it is time wasted
and leads nowhere. I do not believe, for instance, in the struggle to
play a perfectly even scale. A scale should never be 'even,' for it must
be full of variety and life. A perfectly even scale is on a dead level;
it has no life; it is machine-made. The only sense in which the word
'even' may be applied to a scale is for its rhythmic quality; but even
in this sense a beautiful scale has slight variations, so that it is
never absolutely regular, either in tone or rhythm.

"Then I do not believe in taking up a new composition and working at the
technical side of it first. I study it in the first place from the
musical side. I see what may be the meaning of the music, what ideas it
seeks to convey, what was in the composer's mind when he wrote it. In
other words, I get a good general idea of the composition as a whole;
when I have this I can begin to work out the details.

"In this connection I was interested in reading a statement made by
Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_. The statement, which, I think, has
never been refuted, is that while the great Italian painters, Raphael,
Coreggio, and the rest have left many immature and imperfect pictures
and studies in color, their drawings are mature and finished, showing
that they made many experiments and studies in color before they thought
of making the finished black and white drawing. It seems they put the
art thought first before the technical detail. This is the way I feel
and the way I work.