The Etude magazine, Sept. 1912, p. 654
SYSTEMIZING YOUR MUSICAL READING. BY JOHN EARLE NEWTON. We are, all of us, familiar with the type of musician (fortunately now rapidly disappearing), whose studio is always in a frightful state of disorder, who never knows where to find anything, who is always behind time, whose person is never quite immaculate. Musicians, and particularly music teachers, are waking up to the fact, however, that there is no good reason why the highest aesthetic instincts should not be found closely associated with sane business and administrative methods in the make-up of real artist.
Have you ever found yourself embarrassed and provoked during a lesson because you could not find the piece of music or the article in a magazine or book which you wanted to use as an illustration? If you persisted in hunting, several minutes were lost (not to mention the lost temper), and the thread of the subject under discussion dropped. Here is a system of indexing, not so complicated and laborious as to render one a slave to his system, which will prove to be a very simple and altogether efficient remedy.
When you read an article in a magazine or book which interests you, write the name of the essay and its author, together with the page where it is to be found, upon the fly-leaf of the book or upon the cover of the magazine. When the magazine cover is too dark in color to show up the writing well, use white ink or if the surface be very glossy, paste a plain piece of white paper upon it and in abbreviated form designate the nature of the interesting articles thereon. Then have your musical magazines close at hand and arranged in chronological order so you can find any issue readily.
For the indexing use an ordinary note-book of about 250-300 pages with alphabetical thumb-index. Arrange the subjects in alphabetical order and write each down in the index under its initial letter. For example, under "A" such subjects as Accent, Acoustics, Analysis, Appreciation, Arpeggios; under "B" Bach, Balekirew, Beethoven, Berlioz, Books on Music, Brahms, Breithaupt, Busoni; under "C" Chaminade, Chopin, Chords, Class Teaching, Coleridge-Taylor, Concentration, Clementi, Cramer, Czerny, Cui, and so on through practically the whole alphabet.
It becomes only the work of a moment to hunt up the name of an article in the index and find there the issue of the magazine or the page in a certain book where it is to be found.
