Although music for performance in grand theaters is wonderful, music study can bring the art intimately and actively into the home, where it belongs, without professional connotations. In homes where the child is simply following along family traditions of culture, music making should be easy; the child’s parents can be the guides, to help and play along beside. And in homes where the child is the first, he can know the pleasant responsibility of bringing music to his elders who were denied the advantages made possible to him.

In either case, an hour a day can well be devoted to a coming together of the guider and the guided, of the older and younger generations in the home, for the sake of making music, hearing it, discussing it, for the sake of taking it into their midst as a friend and living with it.

The music that is most real and most lovely to me is the music I heard as a young lad. My grandfather purchased a brand new upright player piano for my mother in 1918. I would push the pedals and make music via piano rolls. I was so excited about the beautiful melodies that I could hardly wait to reach the keys and make my own harmonies. My mother as a young girl studied with a blind man, Professor Alfonso F. Borrows. I also studied with him at an early age. I didn't know any better, so I listened to his and my mother's advice about practicing and reading difficult music.

Know thyself. Contentment comes from within if it's cultivated the right way. Reach for your dream. Hang on for dear life and swing on your star.

When I was privileged to play in church at the age of 8, I hardly knew some of the old hymns, but the key word was determination. When I put the hands to the ivories, something took hold of me and my course in life was charted right then. I never dreamed that one day I would get to play for presidents and their ladies or entertain thousands of roller skaters from the age of 17, or be the international organist and pianist for the great International Association of Lions Clubs, or be associate/assistant organist at the Scottish Rite Cathedral in Indianapolis, Ind., for 17 years, or create our own family business in the music industry 37 years ago.

You too can set yourselves the goal of studying music as it deserves to be studied, for its own sake, as something that will make you happier and something that will widen the horizon of the world you live in. Perhaps some of you will rise to greater heights than have yet been attained; perhaps some of you will never carry music beyond your own four walls.

Either way, let the future take care of itself. Live in the present and use the present for the cultivation of something lovely. That is the purpose of music study. And each and every music student is entitled to carry with him the proud consciousness that he is individually responsible for the building of a good taste in music for mind, body and soul.