Read Ebook: Music and Life: A study of the relations between ourselves and music by Surette Thomas Whitney

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for you numbers have come to have that significance which makes them beautiful; an island may have touched your imagination as it has Conrad's, who calls it "a great ship anchored in the open sea"; you have seen that beauty which lies behind facts when they fall, as with a click, into the mechanism of things. So must children be taught to realize at the very beginning something of that great unity which pervades the world of thought and of matter. Some comprehension must be given to them of that marvelous sense of fitting together, of perfect correspondence, which all nature reveals and which is ultimately beauty. It is this quality, residing in every subject, which constitutes the justification for our insistence on beauty as a part of education.

With our present systems of education all ideality is crushed, for this ideality is a personal quality, whereas all we are, we are in mass. "You are trying to make that boy into another you," said Emerson, some fifty years ago; "one's enough." Modern education, subject to constant whims, has become a capacious maw into which our children are thrown. Everything for use, nothing for beauty; for use means money, while beauty--what is beauty good for?--. This is indeed an old thesis, but never has it more needed stating than now. It applies everywhere. Literature taught as beauty is uplifting and joyful; taught as syntax it is dead and cheerless. All other forms of instruction lose their force if they are detached from that poetic harmony of which they are a part. Numbers, cities, machines, symphonies, the objects on your table, you yourself,--all these are to be seen as belonging to this harmony, without which the world is Bedlam.

I desire therefore to deal here with the possibilities which music offers to children, not to a few children in playing the pianoforte, but to all children in love and understanding. It is obviously desirable to make them all love music, and, since few of them ever attain satisfactory proficiency in playing instruments, our chief problem lies in trying to develop their taste and thereby keeping their allegiance.

In the first chapter I discussed the qualities and properties of music as such--music, that is, in its pure estate, unconnected with words as in songs, or with words, action, costume, and scenery, as in opera. And now, in writing about children's music, it is still necessary to keep in mind that, even when music is allied to words, it has the necessities of its own nature to fulfill, and that the use of suitable or even fine words in a child's song does not change this condition.

In beginning this discussion I propose to ignore for the moment the effect in after life of what we advocate for children, and I also discard the common notion--true enough in its way--that music is for them a rest and a change after burdensome tasks. For we must see music, in relation to children, as it really is. I go behind the psychologist who says, " ... the prime end of musical education ... is to train the sentiments, to make children feel nature, religion, country, home, duty, ... to guarantee sanity of the heart out of which are the issues of life"; for I say that music, by itself, cannot make children feel nature, religion, country, home, or duty, and that these sentiments are aroused by the heightened effect of words set to music, and not by the music itself. The prime end of music--and of the other arts--is beauty. Song is not story, melodies have nothing to do with morals, and all the theories about music--such as those of Darwin and Spencer--are wrong when they attribute to it any ulterior purpose or origin whatever. Music is an end, not a means.

Now this beauty which the soul of man craves, and always has craved, cannot be brought to little children in literary form, because they cannot read or because their knowledge of words is too limited; nor can it be brought to them in the form of painting, because they are not sufficiently sensitive to color-vibrations; nor of sculpture, for their sense of form is not sufficiently developed. In fact, their power of response is exceedingly limited in most directions. They can neither draw nor paint nor write nor read, so that this beauty which we value so highly seems shut out from them. This were so but for music.

On every side this sort of instruction goes on. One hears glib statements on the lips of uninstructed persons about child psychology, "second" brain, and so forth. A pupil is asked to listen to a phrase of music and then tell the teacher what "comes through." We must remember that art is discipline and that there is no real liberty except under law. We want children to use their minds accurately and to have control of their bodies, but this use and this control can only come through definite and regulated effort. Gropings in the dark, detached and illusive pursuits of the will-o'-the-wisps of education will never accomplish our purpose.

But even these artificial and false methods are less harmful to children than are the poor, vapid, and false songs by means of which their taste is slowly and surely disintegrated. Now the nature of music is such that many people are unable to see why one child's song is better than another. There is a considerable number of people having to do with children's music who seem quite incapable of distinguishing between a really beautiful folk-song and a trivial copy of one. Long association with the latter has produced the inevitable result. Only one argument can be brought to bear on such persons, an argument having nothing to do with aesthetics--namely, that the current music for children of one generation is inevitably displaced by that of the next, whereas the same folk-songs are continually reproduced, and are sung by increasing generations of children the world over. Any musician can string together in logical sequence a series of notes to fit a verse of simple poetry--almost every musician has; any poet can put together simple and easily understood verses; but the hand of time sweeps them away to oblivion. Out of the depths of simple hearts, in joy or sorrow or privation, as a balm to toil and labor, as a cry from a mother's heart, in battle, in moments of religious exaltation--wherever and whenever the depths are stirred, song springs forth. A composer can express only what is in him; his limitations are as confining as are those of every other artist. Dickens could no more create a Clara Middleton than could Tschaikovsky a theme like that at the opening of the Ninth Symphony; and to suppose that the creation of a child's song is a simple matter of putting notes together in a correct and agreeable sequence, is to misconceive the whole creative process.

It is our cardinal error that we think any tune good enough which is attractive at first hearing. In the music-books provided for kindergarten and for home singing there is an endless series of poor, vapid, over-sweet melodies which children, hungry for any music, will sing readily enough for lack of better. Some of these tunes smack unmistakably of a Broadway musical comedy; many of them are full of mawkish sentiment and affected simplicity. No real progress can be made until we reach definite conclusions on this point and act on them. Our taste and that of our children is never stationary,--we continually advance or go backwards,--and the subtle disintegration of the taste of children by bad songs results inevitably in indifference to good music in later life. The road branches here; one leads the way we know too well, the other leads to a real love of fine music, to a real happiness in it, and to a real respect for it. Let me say, also, that children love good songs, and that, as a part of their natural or normal endowment, they possess in this respect, and to a remarkable degree, that quality which we ignobly call "taste."

The number of musical nostrums for children is legion, and I have no desire to enumerate them. Their effects are in inverse relation to their extensive and--sometimes--expensive paraphernalia. But I will quote a single sentence from a popular song-book for children as an illustration of the tendency which they represent: "Understanding as we do the innate fondness of children for rich harmonies, we have given special attention to the harmonization of the melodies; and although it is occasionally necessary for children to sing without accompaniment, yet such a lack is to be deplored, as the accompaniment often serves as the rhythmic expression of the thought."

The foregoing specimen is almost a compendium of what children's songs and the teaching of them should not be. If children are fond of "rich" harmonies, the fact is to be regretted. The best possible thing for them, in that case, would be to hear no harmonies at all for some time, but to sing entirely unaccompanied ; special attention given to the harmonization of children's songs is given in an entire misconception of their character and their uses; for the essence of a child's song lies in its own rhythmic and melodic independence, and if it depends on an accompaniment for its rhythm, it is by just so much a poor song. There is no harm in a simple accompaniment to a folk-song, but in teaching them to children an accompaniment does for them precisely what we want them to do for themselves, namely, reproduce correctly the metre and the rhythm, the pitch and the contour of the melody.

Such training as I have advocated, if carried on through early childhood, brings with it a natural desire to continue singing and makes learning to sing from notes much easier than it would otherwise be. The capacity to sing music at sight is a valuable acquisition for children, for it enables them to take part in choral singing and provides them in after years with a delightful means of access to some of the finest music. The advantage to the individual of this acquired technique is that it is of the mind and not of the muscles; it does not desert its possessor as finger technique deserts the player who ceases to practice. To sing part songs with friends, or to be one of a larger number singing a composition by Bach or some other great composer, in which each singer is contributing to reproduce a noble work of art--this, in itself, is a highly desirable experience. But the process of learning to sing at sight has sometimes led far away from true aesthetics and has resulted in a certain debasing of the taste through singing inferior music. Vocal exercises for sight singing are necessary, and we can accept them as such, for they do not evoke the aesthetic sense; but bad songs taught to illustrate some point of technique are unnecessary and inexcusable.

But the majority of the children who have private instruction in music take lessons in pianoforte-playing. It has become a custom; the pianoforte is an article of domestic furniture ; pianoforte-playing is a sort of polish to a cursory education. But the reason is chiefly found in the fact that this is the line of least resistance: there are plenty of teachers of pianoforte-playing but few teachers of music, so parents accept that which is available.

There is here a confusion between performing music and understanding it. Learning to perform seems a tangible asset--something definitely accomplished; while merely learning to understand music seems to parents a vague process likely to have somewhat indefinite results. They want their children to produce tangible results in the form of "pieces" well played. Here again we find the same misconception. Music in this sense is half titillation of the ear, and half finger-gymnastics. Such music instruction consists in finding the right key, black or white, holding the hand in a correct position,--patented and exploited as the only correct method,--putting the thumb under, and finally, after going through an almost endless series of evolutions covering many years and carried on at fearful cost of patience to every one within hearing, in dashing about over the glittering keys with an abandonment of dexterity positively bewildering. Nine tenths of the aspirants, however, fall by the wayside and some time later look back grimly on a long procession of endless hours almost wasted. One pictures to one's self a little girl of seven or eight seated before that ponderous and portentous mass of iron, steel, wood, wires, and hammers which we call a "pianoforte" , her legs dangling uncomfortably in space, her little fingers trying painfully to find the right key, and at the same time to keep in a correct position, struggling hard the while to relate together two strange things, a curious black dot on a page and an ivory key two feet below it, for neither of which she feels much affection. And then one pictures to one's self the same child at its mother's knee, or with other children, singing with joy and delight a beautiful song.

I do not advocate the abolishment of pianoforte-teaching to children, but I do advocate the exercise of some discrimination in regard to it, and particularly I insist that it should not be begun until the child has sung beautiful songs for several years and has developed thereby its musical instincts,--and even then only when a child possesses a certain amount of that physical co?rdination which is absolutely essential to playing the pianoforte. For pianoforte-playing is by no means a sure method of developing the musical instinct in children. In the first place it lacks the intimacy of singing, and in the second place the playing itself demands the greater part of a child's attention, so that often it hardly hears the music at all. Any method of teaching music is, of course, wrong which attempts to substitute technical dexterity for music itself.

The foregoing is not typical of the most intelligent instruction in pianoforte-playing, for there are many teachers who reason these matters out, and there are some parents who see them clearly enough to allow such teachers a reasonable latitude. But it is true of pianoforte-teaching in general, as doubtless almost every one of our readers has had some evidence. It is obvious that even a slight capacity to play the pianoforte is useful and delightful provided one plays with taste and understanding, for one gets from it a certain satisfaction which mere listening does not give. I deplore only an insistence upon playing as the only means of approach to music; I question the wisdom of forcing children to play who are not qualified to do so; and I think playing should, in any case, be postponed until the musical faculties are awakened by singing.

It is perhaps too much to expect to stem the tide of bad pianoforte music. Here, as elsewhere, the home influence counts for much. Is it not the duty of parents to satisfy themselves that the teacher of music is giving their children the best and nothing else? The teaching of music in this country has suffered enormously through being detached from the highest professional standards, and, on the other hand, the professional standard suffers in being disconnected from the common life and thought. In other words, anybody who plays the pianoforte a little can set up in business as a teacher, while, at the same time, the highly qualified professional teacher often forgets that he is dealing with a human being who wants to understand music and whose happiness in dealing with it must ultimately depend on that understanding.

What we are seeking to do is to make ourselves complementary to the music. We need to see that aesthetic pleasure is not by any means entirely of the senses, but rather of the imagination through training of the feelings and the mind. We want our listeners to assimilate all the elements in a piece of music and then to re-create it in the imagination. It is the office of art to create beauty in such perfect form as shall make us reflect upon it.

This principle applies, of course, to the appreciation of any artistic object whatsoever. One cannot appreciate Whistler's portrait of his mother by merely realizing that the subject looks like a typical Victorian dame, any more than one can appreciate Whitman's "To the Man-of-War-Bird" by locating Senegal. Whistler's idea is expressed through composition, drawing, and color, and each of these qualities has a subtlety of its own; the pose of the figure is a thing of beauty in itself; the edge of the picture-frame just showing on the wall, the arrangement of curves and spots on the curtain, the tone of the whole canvas--all these make the picture what it is, and all these we must comprehend and take delight in. Whitman's poem is a thing of space and freedom; the sky is the wild bird's cradle, man is "a speck, a point on the world's floating vast"; the poet's imagination ranges through the whole created universe and flashes back over vast reaches of time as if to incarnate again man in the bird. So this music, which reaches our consciousness through rhythms, melodies, and harmonies, through form and style, through the delicate filigree of violins, or the triumphant blare of horns; which says unutterable things by means of silence; which means nothing and yet means everything,--this Ariel of the arts,--this, in all its quality,must find echo within us.

So let me say finally that I wage war here against patent nostrums, against enforced and joyless music-teaching, against the development of technical proficiency without taste or understanding; and that I uphold here a process of musical education which has for its object "being musical," and which takes into its fold every child, boy or girl, and keeps them there as man and woman.

FOOTNOTE:

G. Stanley Hall.

PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC

It is characteristic of our compliance in matters educational that of late years we have seen subject after subject added to the curricula of our public schools, and have cheerfully voted money for them, without having much conception of their value or of the results attained by introducing them. Education is our shibboleth, our formula. The school diploma and the college degree constitute our new baptism of conformity. We do not question their authority or their efficacy. They absolve us. Our public schools have become experimental stations for the testing of theories, until the demand for more and more specialization has resulted in an overcrowding of the curricula and a consequent superficiality in the teaching. "That any man should die ignorant who is capable of knowledge, that I call a tragedy," says Carlyle. But there is a greater tragedy still, which is that our capability for knowledge may be so overburdened by irrelevant information that it becomes worthless to us. We study everything and we know nothing. Our schools become detached from the realities of life because we pursue so diligently the semblance of those realities.

Our objective is definitely practical. We expect education to fit boys and girls to cope successfully with the everyday affairs of life, we frown on anything that savors of the unpractical, and we instinctively distrust the word "beauty." We are like Mime who thought that courage lay in the sword itself. We, too, have the pieces of the broken blade, and they are as useless to us as they were to him. Of what avail all this information which we so slowly and painfully acquire? Can it be put together Mime-fashion? Or is there something that can fuse it? Has it not all a common source, and is not that source in nature? "Every object has its roots in central nature and may be exhibited to us so as to represent the world." This unity in things, to which Emerson refers, gives order and sequence to all objects, persons, and ideas; they become significant and potent, for we see them as they really are. No one can be said to be educated who fails to apprehend that unification of all matter, of all thought, of all sensation--that harmony in things which brings into relation a speck of dust and a star, the individual and the cosmos. The very thing we fear most in education is the one thing that tempers all the others--namely, beauty. For in education, as in everything else, beauty means sequence, order, and harmony; beauty relates things to each other, multiplies arithmetic by geography, objects by sounds, acts by feelings. If there were a world with one human being in it, and only one, his sweetest, gentlest, and most inevitably perfect act would be to leap-into the mother sea and rejoin nature. An isolated fact or an unrelated piece of information only differs in this respect from the human being in that it never was alive.

We pay lip service to beauty. We study poetry, but we deal chiefly with poets--with their being born and their dying, with the shell of them, whereas the poet is only valuable for what beauty he brings us. We even try to extract morals from him, or to find in him codes of conduct, philosophies, and the like, forgetting Swinburne's fine saying that "There are pulpits enough for all preachers in prose; the business of verse writing is hardly to express convictions; and if some poetry, not without merit of its kind, has at times dealt with dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and all the weaker for that." One of the prime objects of the study of English should be to instill in the student a love of English poetry. But we are afraid of it; we distrust it, or we think it effeminate.

But poetry does, at least, express itself in words, and words can be punctuated, and spelled, and parsed and scanned, and, above all, words provide material for examinations. You cannot do any of these things with music, for it consists in mere sounds meaning nothing that any one can find out. We do allow music to enter a corner of our educational sanctuary, and then we slam the door on her and leave her there until June when we expect her to come forth garlanded for the graduation exercises. The taxpayer attends these exercises and listens to the singing of the children in that complacent mood which he commonly assumes when he thinks he is getting his money's worth, although he very likely knows that his own public school education in music did nothing whatever for him.

I propose, then, first, to examine the claims of music as a subject to be taught in our public schools; second, to examine into prevailing methods of teaching it; third, to investigate the results now obtained; and finally, to suggest ways of bettering our situation.

In the last chapter I referred to the qualities in music which make it especially valuable for children, and what I said there applies with equal or even greater force here. Any one who has compared town or city life in this country and in Europe, and has seen what a pleasure, and what a civilizing influence music may become when it is properly taught in childhood, must realize how great a loss our people sustain by the neglect of singing. We are only now beginning to realize how long it takes to weld a diverse people into one by means of an intellectual conception of nationality. The thin bond of self-interest, the advantage of "getting on" in the world--these keep us together in ordinary times, but in a great crisis these bonds break. The leaven of sentiment is needed. We want a common sympathy; we want above all some means of expression for that sympathy. There have been of late numerous great meetings at which the feelings of men and women have expended themselves in shouts, in cheers, in the clapping of hands, and in other inarticulate methods of expressing emotions. What would not a song have done for these thousands--a song they all knew and loved? Are we forever to be dumb?

Our hope is in the children, to whom music is of inestimable value. In the first place music supplies the only means of bringing young children into actual and intimate contact with beauty. In the kindergarten or in the early grades of our public schools children are capable of singing, and love to sing, simple songs which, within their limited scope, are quite perfect, whereas their capacity for drawing, or for appreciating forms and colors is comparatively slight. In music children find a natural means of expression for that inherent quality of idealism which is a part of their nature. When children sing together their natures are disciplined while each child at the same time expresses its own individuality. Activity of ear, eye, and mind together tends to cultivate quickness of decision and accuracy of thinking. In the matter of rhythmic co?rdination alone music justifies itself. Rhythmic movements to music have long since come to be recognized as a means of mental and physical development. All sorts of interesting and stimulating exercises can be used in connection with the teaching of songs to little children, and any one who has ever watched a child's development through intelligent instruction in singing and in rhythmic exercises must have realized how keen its perception becomes and how valuable to its general intelligence the training is. So important is training in rhythmic movement that it should be a part, not only of all musical education, but of all primary education everywhere.

Singing beautiful songs prepares children by the best possible means for an intelligent understanding of the compositions of the great masters which, for lack of this preparation, many adults never comprehend. The educational administrator who denies a great composer the distinction he gives to a great writer is going against the testimony of generations of cultivated and educated people all over the world, and, moreover, is tacitly acknowledging that he believes greatness to be a matter of mere outward expression. The element in Shakespeare's writings, for example, which reveals his greatness is the same element that reveals Beethoven's--namely, an imaginative, beautiful and true concept or idea of human life. Beethoven is as true as Shakespeare. The same fancy, the same daring, the same grandeur, the same extravagance of imagination, and the same fidelity to life are found in each. That one uses words and the other mere sounds affects the case not at all, or if at all, in favor of music, since these elements or qualities of life are expressed more directly and more intensely in music than in words.

That compliance of ours to which I have referred is nowhere more evident than in the large sums we spend on the teaching of music, and in our ignorance of the results. School boards and school superintendents usually possess little knowledge of the subject and have no means of knowing the quality and the effect of music teaching save by such evidences as are supplied by the singing of the children at the end of the school year. No one asks what the one thousand or the fifty thousand dollars spent by the school board earns. The money is appropriated and expended on salaries, music books, etc., and there the matter is left hanging, as it were, in the air, and not to be heard from again until the end of the school year. No committee supervises the selection of the books or the methods of teaching. The supervisor is in autocratic control. The system is like an inverted pyramid propped up by an occasional show of singing, by the fallacious excuse that singing is a relaxation after burdensome tasks , but most of all supported and fostered by the equally fallacious belief that reading music "at sight," so called, is an end in itself. So completely divorced is it from such control as is exercised over other subjects that it has become the prey of theorists who have accumulated around it a mass of pedagogical paraphernalia quite unknown in any other form of music teaching, and essentially artificial and encumbering.

It is obvious that a long experience of music through singing should precede any instruction as to the time values of notes, and that if a child has sung many times by ear the sounds represented by these artificial terms, and has continued to sing by ear for two years or more, and has stored up a series of musical impressions that have developed its musical taste and instinct, and has mastered the rudiments of numbers, the teaching of the notes becomes a much simpler and more natural process, involving no other terms than those ordinarily in use in music. You can then call a note by its generally accepted name--"half," "quarter," "eighth," etc.

How did this all come about? Primarily through the indifference of the public, and through the incapability of the school authorities to control the teaching. Never having been so educated in music as to realize that it contains the highest kind of educational possibilities, parents take little interest in the music their children learn in school. The connection between music and life is lost. The supervisor may, or may not be a good musician; he may be entirely indifferent to the higher possibilities of music as a factor in education; his taste may never have been properly formed. He is likely to be helpless even though he feels the need of reform because he needs music books, and has to take what he can buy. The making of music books for schools has become too much a matter of commercial competition, and particularly of commercial propaganda, and this latter condition is fostered by the summer schools for supervisors controlled and operated by the publishers of school music books. The result of all this is that a cumbersome pedagogical system has become firmly entrenched in many American towns and cities.

What is meant by the term "sight-singing"? It means, if it means anything, that a person shall be able to sing correctly at the first trial his part in any piece of vocal music which he has never seen or heard before. And this, which we spend our money for, is an entirely artificial attainment, since in real life we are almost never required to do it. "Sight-singing" has become a shibboleth. What we want is a reasonable capacity for reading music, for that is all we are called upon to do in actual life. In choral societies and choirs all over this country the number of singers who can read music at sight is negligible, and there is probably not one of them who could master at once the intricacies of modern choral writing. Let us then teach children to read music by giving them as many trials as is necessary, and let them gradually acquire such a familiarity with intervals and with rhythmic figures as will make it possible for them to sing with other people, and enjoy doing so. We shall then get rid of an artificial ideal and have just so much more time in which to cultivate music for its own sake. It goes without saying that the vast majority of the children in our public schools never attain to that expertness which is the present objective of the teaching. So we have a double failure--in ideal and in practice.

The supervisor, who takes so much pride in the capacity of his pupils to sing at sight, ought to be chiefly interested in something much more important--namely, their ability to sing a beautiful piece of music and particularly their joy in doing so, for that is the only real justification for his presence there. Many supervisors seem to have almost forgotten that music is a thing of beauty and that the only way to keep it alive in a child's heart is to teach the child to sing beautiful songs. Constant contact with inferior songs for children may, indeed, have so affected the supervisor's taste that he himself can no longer detect the difference between good and bad.

For eight years, then, in our public schools children are taught--as far as may be--to sing at sight. Is there a fine song which presents a certain difficulty, it is placed in the book at the point where that difficulty arises, and is treated as a sight-reading test. It is subjected to analysis as to its melodic progressions, each of which is taken up as a technical problem. This is precisely the method so often and so fatally used in connection with poetry. The Skylark's wings are clipped; the Grecian Urn becomes an archaeological specimen; the Eve of Saint Agnes a date in the almanac.

This brings me to the most important part of the whole matter. If expert sight-singing is not only a false ideal, but one impossible of general attainment in public schools under the conditions at present existing, what does justify our expenditure of such large sums of money? The sole justification for it is to bring children to love the best music, and so to train their taste for it as to make them capable of discriminating between good and bad. Now a thorough test of the children in the kindergarten or the lower primary grades of any public school anywhere will surely reveal that such children start life with the makings of good taste in music. Nature is prodigal here--prodigal and faithful. In the most remote villages in this country, in purely industrial communities, among the poor and among the rich , children love good songs. It is their natural inheritance. No excess of materialism in the generations affects it in the least. This is the primitive endowment; deep down in human character there lies a harmony of adjustment with nature. Overlay it as you may with custom or habit; sully it with luxury; it still persists, for without it human life cannot be. This idealistic basis of human life, which is never destroyed, appears fresh and unstained in children, and in their song it bubbles up as from a pure spring.

It has been a matter of frequent comment that there has been no such increase in choral singing either in town or city as our public school music teaching should lead us to expect. In fact the countless young people who graduate from our schools seem to make almost no impression on choral singing. It still remains the least of our musical activities. It is as difficult as ever to secure people who care enough for the practice of singing to come to rehearsals. Voluntary choir singing, for the pleasure to be derived from it, is rare. Are not our public schools partly responsible for this condition? Is not that natural taste and love for good music, to which I have just referred, allowed to lapse and finally almost to disappear? And is not this largely the result of too much technical instruction, and too little good music? I know that there are many more distractions for children than formerly; I know that the home influence in music is slight, and that parents assume less responsibility for their children than they used to do. But, granting all this, the musical instruction in public schools does not fulfill its proper function, nor can it hope to do so until it changes its ideals.

I have said that children like real tunes in preference to false ones. We have therefore a perfectly sound basis upon which to build. But it must not be forgotten that singing is in itself an agreeable pastime to children and that their taste can be lowered as well as raised. With their fundamental good taste to build on, we can be reasonably sure of accomplishing our purpose if we provide them all through their school life with the best music and no other. This is not done and the failure of our school music to justify itself can be attributed chiefly to this.

I have drawn the foregoing conclusions from an extended observation and experience of public school music, and I ought to add--lest the record seem too despairing--that in a considerable number of places intelligent and open-minded men and women have been doing their best to stem the tide of inferior music and of artificial methods of teaching. During the last two years I have been serving on an unpaid advisory committee appointed by the School Committee of the City of Boston to improve the teaching of music in the public schools. The School Committee of Boston consists of five people elected by the people. They became aware of the inefficiency of the teaching through an independent investigation carried on by Dr. A. T. Davison, of Harvard University , and they asked him to form a committee to help them. Boston was spending some forty thousand dollars for public school music. During one school year the members of our committee visited schools, taking note of what they heard and saw, and finally each member submitted a written report to the chairman. These were made the basis for a general report to the School Committee by whom it was accepted.

But the most distressing condition in the Boston schools--and this would be more or less true everywhere in our country--was that all the children in the kindergarten and primary grades were learning such songs as would eventually destroy their natural taste for fine music. This is the one great indictment against public school music in the United States--that it has been made to order for schoolbooks, and to fit technical problems, and that it consequently fails to keep the allegiance of children. Nothing but the best will ever do that, and until we supply the best our school music is bound to fail. Our committee, as a preliminary step toward reform, recommended that all instruction in reading music should be postponed until the last half of the third grade. This allowed us to institute singing by ear and at the same time to teach rhythm by beating time, clapping hands, marching, etc. A book of folk-songs was compiled by Dr. Davison and myself and was adopted and published by the School Committee. The greatest difficulty here has been to get suitable verses for the simpler songs. We have spent much time over this one matter and have not, even then, always been successful. Good verses for very young children are difficult to secure, and--to instance how painstaking the process of making a book of such songs is--we have sometimes received half a dozen sets of verses for a simple melody without finding one that we thought suitable.

It is perhaps too soon to draw very definite conclusions from the results of these reforms in the Boston schools. One thing is certain: a very large number of children five, six, and seven years of age are now singing really beautiful songs without seeing any music at all and without being told anything whatever about the notes, rests, intervals, etc., which occur in them. Upon the experience of these two and one half years of singing by ear we shall build up skill in singing by note and this skill will be acquired with much greater ease than would be otherwise possible. It is also worth noting that the expense of music books in these grades is more than cut in half. In the kindergarten and the first primary grades the children sing without a book; in the second and third grades they use a simple and inexpensive book of words, while the teachers in these grades use the small collection of folk-songs already referred to.

In the Boston schools ninety minutes a week is given to drawing, and sixty minutes a week to music. It is obvious that a daily lesson in music twelve minutes long is entirely inadequate for proper instruction. An increase to twenty minutes a day, or to three half-hours a week is highly desirable. In many schools entirely too much time is devoted to preparing music for the graduation exercises. Failing an examination, what is there left but an exhibition?

It is a task of real difficulty to reform any strongly entrenched system or method of education. What is conclusively demonstrated as a more sensible method runs against self-interest, tradition, intellectual immovability , and other even more violent opposition. The reforms we are instituting in Boston need the combined force of all the persons in authority, of all the teaching staff, and of public opinion. No one of these forces is being fully exerted owing to circumstances over which we have no control. But we have accomplished something, for we have reduced the expense and we have simplified the teaching; and each of these improvements was sadly needed.

One of the encouraging signs of our advancement is in orchestral playing. School orchestras have become important features of school life, and the excellence of some of the orchestral playing is remarkable. It often outshines the singing, and it is frequently self-contained, being under the direction, not of the music teachers, but of the head master or one of his assistants. In this department of music teaching, as in the singing lessons, much depends on the attitude of the head master. In our Boston schools there are notable examples of fine music fostered and sustained by enthusiastic head masters who lay great stress on that as contrasted with mere technical expertness. Credit toward the high-school diploma is now given in Boston for study of the pianoforte or an orchestral instrument outside school hours and with independent teachers. Lists are issued to indicate the standard of music and of performance for each grade, and certificates of hours of practice are required of parents. This system of credits depends for its success on securing competent examiners not otherwise connected with the schools, for by this means poor teachers are gradually eliminated. Many schoolrooms are provided with phonographs which may be a powerful factor in building up or in breaking down the taste of children. An approved list of records for the Boston schools is in course of preparation in order to eliminate undesirable music and to increase the usefulness of the instruments.

Singing by ear spontaneously and without technical instruction, but rather for the joy of doing it, and for the formation of the taste on good models, is the proper beginning of all musical education. Such experience, coupled with proper rhythmic exercises, constitutes a real basis, not only for sight-singing, but for performance on any instrument. No child should be admitted for possible credit in pianoforte playing or be allowed to enter violin classes until so prepared in singing and in rhythm. The pianoforte neither reveals nor corrects the defective ear; the violin, on the other hand, does reveal it, though it does not necessarily correct it. Defective rhythm can be properly corrected only through actual rhythmic motions of the body.

Many high schools now offer courses in what is called "The Appreciation of Music." The success of such courses depends to a considerable extent on the quality of music used in the primary and grammar grades. If the children have been singing inferior music for eight years, the difficulties of teaching them to appreciate the best is correspondingly increased. If, on the contrary, their taste has been carefully formed on good models, the introduction to great music has already been made. In studying symphonies, for example, one would begin with Haydn whose symphonies and chamber music are largely based on folk-melodies. In short, courses in appreciation should be the culmination of the musical education of our young people. Such courses should have for their object, first and foremost, the cultivation of the musical memory, for this is an absolute essential to anybody who hopes to listen to music intelligently. After this has been accomplished, the student should listen to simple instrumental pieces whose style and form should be explained, and the explanation should be as untechnical as possible. Each of the properties or qualities of music is susceptible of treatment on the broad grounds of aesthetics, and one's success in teaching young people to understand it depends considerably on the ability so to present it. The instructor and an assistant should play on a pianoforte all the music studied, or, failing that, a mechanical piano-player should be used.

And now let me say that the most important and beneficial step any community could take toward improving its school music would be to secure a supervisor who is untainted by current American pedagogical theories of sight-singing, who will not attempt to teach little children something they cannot possibly understand, and who will use nothing but the best music from the kindergarten to the high school. No community is really helpless if it will bestir itself. If our public school music teaching were well devised and properly administered and if our children were taught to sing nothing but the best music, we might look forward to a time, not far distant, when a generation of music-lovers would take the place of the present generation of music-tasters. Our young people would gravitate naturally into choirs and singing societies. Groups of people would gather together to sing; families would sing together; there would be chamber music parties; we should pass many a quiet domestic evening at home listening to Mozart and Beethoven instead of playing bridge or going to a moving-picture theater. The whole body of American music would be affected by the influx of those young people who would want the best. In course of time, perhaps,--although one must not expect the millennium,--the vapid drawing-room song would disappear along with the tinkling pianoforte show-piece. 'Cellists would play something better than pieces by Popper; the thirteenth concerto by Viotti and the thirtieth Hungarian rhapsodie would be relegated to that limbo where now repose the "Battle of Prague" and "Monastery Bells." This cannot be brought about casually. We must set about it; and the place to begin is in our public schools.

FOOTNOTES:

A certain small proportion of children are backward in music, but the possibility of teaching them to sing has long since been satisfactorily demonstrated. They need special attention which it is difficult to give in public schools. They should, I think, never be taken from their seats in the room and placed at one side, but should be asked to listen to the other children, and occasionally to sing with them, the teacher standing near for help and encouragement.

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