MUSIC AND ART
=Rhythm and Musical Sound.= Even the tiny baby responds to rhythm
and to melody. Rhythm brings “a cadence to the soul”, to use
G. Stanley Hall’s phrase; it relaxes and soothes both mind and
body; it has far-reaching significance as a spiritual and moral
force. Chanting any rhythmic poem or jingles, singing, rhythmic
performing of physical exercises, are the beginnings of music as
a rhythmic art. When the noise-enjoying age arrives, at about six
months, a string of soft-toned, musical sleigh bells, or later in
the first year, at the pounding stage, a tubephone, will give as
much enjoyment as harsh noises; and at the same time these are
cultivating a rudimentary musical sense. With the development of
the phonograph, good music can be had even in households where no
one plays a musical instrument. A baby of six months will notice
the music, and most children from a year old will show enjoyment in
hearing it. It is less important to acquaint little children with
well-known classics—which are easily thus worn stale—than it is
to provide good types of melody, harmony, and rhythm,—music that
is sincere, enduring, normal. If children hear much of such music
from the great masters and their disciples, before the age of ten,
their tastes may be permanently influenced, and cheap, flashy,
sensational music will fail to attract them.
As rapidly as a child develops motor ability to use them, musical
instruments of good tone, adapted to his size, will provide him
with enjoyable toys that at the same time cultivate sense of
good musical sound and opportunity for musical experimenting and
self-expression. A stout drum, cymbals, triangle, a tambourine,
flute (being careful of its use by only one individual, and that
it is wiped before using) are inexpensive. Montessori uses musical
glasses and a series of bells tuned to scale and sounded by
striking them. Kindergartners make wind harps by stringing mandolin
or other cheap strings and wires on a wooden frame made in the
workshop. This may be tuned for chords and hung where the wind will
play fairy music upon it.
Every little child loves to play upon the piano. The ordinary toy
piano is a jangle of noises that can only pervert the child’s sense
of musical sound. Good toy pianos, with about two scales, small
enough for the three-year-old size, can be purchased for a moderate
price from some large musical stores. If circumstances will at all
permit a child to play at his own sweet will and in his own way
upon a real piano, the act will not only yield him indescribable
bliss, but will foster immeasurably his love of music, and provide
a means of musical self-expression. Few people expect to become
great artists on any instrument. Technique, therefore, is of minor
importance. The love of music, the desire to find expression
through music, is the important feature to cultivate, leaving
technique to a later age, nearer the teens.
The hearing of singing as a daily experience of early childhood,
is potent for imitation and for good humor. A baby who hears much
singing or humming will, even in his first year, attempt to hum,
and in his second year, make up little snatches of song. This is
music as it should be, developing out of the daily experience of
life, illuminating that experience. Froebel urged his teachers
to encourage this spontaneous, natural singing, and to set the
example by their own spontaneous singing when with the children. In
progressive schools of to-day, children of all ages are encouraged
to compose melodies for nursery rhymes or little poems that they
know, and later to develop harmonies. Thus through creation the
child develops a richer self-expression, and if he is interested
to become more proficient, he furnishes his own incentive for the
drudgery of acquiring technique. What more pathetic situation than
that of a child compelled to “practice”, whose soul is in revolt,
and who every moment is acquiring a deeper loathing for music?
For teaching musical notation, there is a pasteboard keyboard, a
set of pasteboard notes of different time-length and a special
blackboard with the musical lines on which the notes can be hung.
With these many games can be played, even at five or six years of
age with some children, although others will not be ready until
seven or eight.
=The Crude Tastes of Childhood.= Little children, like savages,
have not developed fine discriminations in color. This is largely
a matter of education. The little child shows a preference for
vivid color, and no sense of harmony in color. His color sense
is as undeveloped as his spoken language, and needs training,
especially through good examples, for its refinement. A glass
prism hung in the sunlight will give him pure spectrum hues while
delighting even his baby days. It is not yet known with certainty
at what age children’s eyes are sufficiently developed to really
perceive color, although they are evidently able to distinguish
degrees of brightness before a year of age, and show a preference
for red or yellow objects rather than gray. They prefer colored
pictures to black and white. Kindergarten supply houses now furnish
large colored wooden beads, to be strung on shoe laces, and
colored papers in graduated series of hues, and large colored wax
crayons the size of a marking pencil. The Montessori apparatus now
includes a set of flat wooden bobbins, about two by three inches
square, painted in graduated shades of the spectrum colors, which
the children at four and five years love to match or arrange by
graduations of shade. A box of water colors (primary colors only)
is indispensable to childhood.
=Art Education.= Good pictures, well colored, with sufficient
vividness to interest the child, abound in the magazines and the
shops. The classic nursery rhymes and tales have been illustrated
in color by several eminent artists, and copies may be secured
through any kindergarten supply house. The little child prefers
pictures of animals, children, and mothers with children, realistic
or homelike. He is rarely interested in still life, the classic, or
the symbolic.
The ambitious teacher can easily overdo the matter of taking
children to an art museum. An occasional trip, between five and
nine years of age, will do no harm, if they are permitted to wander
at their will. It starts the habit of going to a museum. Of greater
potency for æsthetic training is the beauty and harmony of the
child’s own home, and especially of his own room. Here inexpensive
but beautiful colored pictures hung low enough for him to see them
easily, and charming little plaster casts, will feed his mind and
his soul, as does the daily singing. He is learning that art is for
the daily life, not merely for unusual places and occasions as in
the museum.
At five or six years of age children may begin to make scrapbooks
of beautiful and charming pictures that they find in magazines, or
that are purchased through the kindergarten or art stores. Postcard
reproductions in color are obtainable of many famous pictures, both
classic and nursery subjects.
In art, as in morals, the constructively good will naturally crowd
out the crude, the vicious, and the mediocre.
=Children’s Drawings and Painting.= To quote from Doctor G. Stanley
Hall:
Children often like to look at and more or less understand
pictures early in the second year. They care most for those that
have a story connected with them, and want their pictures read.
Children like to draw illustrations of stories and concrete
things, which must not be taken away from them in order that
they may be precociously taught to see lines only. Instead,
therefore, of current methods, the thing for kindergarten and
lower grades to draw is the human figure, and vastly more freedom
and individuality are needed. Geometrical lines are ghostly
and wooden. Things in motion are more interesting, and perhaps
Ruskin is right in saying that the child should be limited to the
voluntary practice of art. The prevailing methods that begin with
mathematical forms, cube, cylinder, etc., are stultifying and
not only destroy the natural zest and ability to draw, but take
away the power to enjoy art and to understand nature, geography,
history, literature, which it is one object of art to inculcate.
The child desires to draw human beings, generally in action.
Drawing teachers usually demand complete visual control, but the
children draw lines symbolizing the direction birds fly, draw
the wind, draw a zigzag line representing the dance a person is
engaged in, and even gross errors are repeated after correction
and explanation, showing how dominant muscle habits are. Young
children draw anything with abandon and pleasure. They do not
use their eyes much, no matter how difficult the theme, but draw
their own image of it with about as good success as if there
were no model. Children care nothing for accuracy here, which
is the ideal of the methodists. Their order below ten years
of age is the human figure, then animals, plants, or houses,
then mechanical inventions, geometrical designs and ornaments.
Children’s work is essentially pictorial and not decorative. Thus
Ricci declares that art as such to children is unknown. Froebel
is wrong, therefore, and the child enters the educational field
by the door of literature rather than by that of mathematics.
Always some one or, at most, a few details are focused upon
and magnified, betraying just what and how far the child has
observed up to date. If we only had a complete collection of all
the drawings of a single child with proclivities for art but who
had been unrepressed by criticism or derision, we should find
its very soul in each developmental stage represented. Too early
insistence upon technique crushes. Teachers have so long put form
above content that they little suspect the innate power and love
of children for this kind of work. Above all, teaching should be
to encourage and not to repress the tendency to exaggerate each
new trait, and should have regard not to the finished product and
should pay little attention to symmetry or to an artistic whole.
Uniformity, too, should be cast to the winds and the teacher
should encourage the deep instinctive tendency of pupils to
perfect each item as it looms into the center of interest.
From several hundred drawings, with the name given them by the
child written by the teacher, the chief difference inferred is
in concentration. Some make faint, hasty lines, representing all
the furniture of a room, or sky and stars, or all the objects
they can think of, while others concentrate upon a single object.
It is a girl with buttons, a house with a keyhole or steps, a
man with a pipe or heels or ring made grotesquely prominent. The
development of observation and sense of form is best seen in the
pictures of men. The earliest and simplest representation is a
round head, two eyes, and legs. Later comes mouth, then nose,
then hair, then ears. Arms, like legs, at first, grow directly
from the head, rarely from the legs, and are seldom fingerless,
though sometimes it is doubtful whether several arms, or fingers,
from head and legs without arms, are meant. Of 44 human heads
only 9 are in profile. This is one of the many analogies with the
rock and cave drawings of primitive man.
=The Sunday Supplement.= Fortunate the child who is protected
from the encroachment of these execrations. They are like the
cheap colored candy in the penny shops,—made to sell to those of
undeveloped sensibilities, and further dulling those sensibilities
to better life. The ordinary Sunday Supplement page for children is
a clever combination of all the crudities that children enjoy—vivid
color, crude drawing, bad manners, defiance of authority, clownish
humor. Of course children cry for it, as they do for drugs that
have dulled their nerves and set up perverted tastes. If it is kept
from the child until his teens, and meanwhile his taste is being
trained by natural, daily means, the probabilities are that he will
then find it offensive; at least he will have passed the age when
it can pervert his taste and ideals.
The clownish humor, the crude drawing, the humor of the unusual
position and unexpected dilemma, without the bad manners and other
unethical conditions, are furnished in abundance in the drawings
of Leslie Brooke, Gelett Burgess, Peter Newell, in Tenniel’s
illustrations of Alice’s Adventures, in Edward Lear’s Nonsense
Books, to mention only a few. Delicately colored pictures, which
adults find exquisite, do not attract the child, but in this day
there are abundant treasures of pictures and picture books with
colors strong, yet not blatant. In this respect the English and
American work is in the main preferable to French, German, Russian.
Many books of songs for little children are published that are
merely mediocre, or ill-adapted to children because not based on a
knowledge of child psychology and the range of the child’s voice.
Some children can carry a tune at three years, others not until
six or seven years. The natural range of the child’s voice can be
easily tested by trying it out with the piano; it will usually
range from E to A at three years and from middle B to upper D at
six years. These physiological limitations indicate that songs for
children to sing should have a simple melody, within this range,
and should be short. Children like simple hymns, lullabies, songs
about animals, nature, play, dolls, and action songs.
If a child is thought to have vocal talent, the voice should be
especially protected from strain and misuse, and intensive training
postponed until late in the teens when the voice has become placed.
A teacher of ability should be engaged for the first training.
All children should be trained to use the voice intelligently,
which is hygienically. They should be taught to sing softly and
naturally, and never allowed to sing harshly, boisterously, or
falsetto. Screaming and shouting injure the voice, especially
in childhood, while the vocal cords are developing. By a little
careful hygiene, the example of musical, well-modulated voices
in their elders, and the selection of songs within their range,
American children might develop as pleasant voices as are found in
some of the countries across the sea.
(music note) = boys (backwards music note) = girls
[Illustration:
AGE 0 1-2 3-5 6-7 8 9 10 11 12
From Gutzmann and Paulsen.]