If the voice be cultivated, and the piano used as an accompaniment,
the music in a girl's education would prove ten-fold more valuable.
Indeed, vocal music might prove, with many girls, the most valuable
part of education. It is more likely to be continued, because of the
greater pleasure it affords; while social singing serves more than
any other influence to bind the inmates of a home together. As a
source of general health, it stands unrivalled.
In this country of consumptives, it is especially valuable in
fortifying the pulmonary apparatus.
Let us, by every means, foster social singing. Its influence is, in
many ways, most precious. How interesting the group of sisters and
brothers gathered about the piano, and how blessed the home where
the evening is welcomed by family song.
Contrast this with the average mechanical execution of classical
music, by one of the girls, or with the fashionable operatic singing
by one of them.
And just here I wish to speak of a fashion which should be
deprecated. It is another piece of that growing vice, which would
remove music from the social sphere, and make it, like some
peculiarity of dress, a mere show. Suppose we have singing. Instead
of four persons performing the several parts of some rich melody,
Miss Arabella is invited to "give us that exquisite Aria," and we
all sit by, and wonder at her execution.
The great service of music is one of the heart, and not of the head.
There are departments of music, there are possibilities in this
divinest of the arts, which appeal to the subtlest appreciations of
the intellect, and the most exalted conceptions of the imagination;
but still it is true that the greatest service which music renders
to man is in the social sphere, is one of the heart When our voices
blend, our hearts will not long be kept asunder.
The whole tendency of the times is to deprive music of this, its
most precious influence. Indeed, so far has this gone, that even
that natural and most happy of all the harmonies of music,--that
between the male and female voice, is well-nigh lost. It is rare in
what is called the better class of music to hear them together. A
woman executes for awhile, then a man executes, then the woman
executes again, then the man executes a little, so they execute by
turns.
The great heart-service of music is subordinated to imagination and
vanity.