FAMILY MUSIC.
Our grandfathers and our grandmothers were drilled in vocal music in
the church or neighboring singing-school. In that day--and for
twenty-five years later--almost every household possessed and made
frequent use of the Boston Academy, the Carmina Sacra, the Shawm and
other collections of vocal music adapted for the use of societies and
churches. Nearly everybody sang by note, and she was dull of ear or
wits who could not bear her part at sight in any simple church tune.
The pianoforte took the place of our grandmother's spinet and
harpsichord, and every girl in every family was taught to play upon it
after a fashion. She who had not taste or talent for music gave it up
after her marriage. In this particular she was no more derelict than
the "performer" of our times, whose florid flourish of classic music
costs thousands where her grandmother's strumming cost hundreds.
The musical education of the girl of that period hardly deserved the
name. The national ear for music, like the national eye for painting
and sculpture, has made marvelous progress in fifty years. The singing
school has gone to the wall along with the volunteer choir and the
notion that every boy and girl can and ought to sing. Once in several
whiles you find a "music-mad family," of which every member plays upon
some instrument and studies music with expensive professors. Or one
child displays what relatives rate as musical genius, and is educated
to the full extent of the parent's ability. This done, the proficient
becomes, in his or her own opinion, a privileged prodigy. Critical
from the outset of his musical career, he grows intolerant of amateur
work and disdainful of such compositions as the (musically) unlearned
delight to honor.
"Don't you suppose," said the late Mrs. Barrow (the dearly-beloved
"Aunt Fanny" of a host of little ones) to me at an evening
_musicale_, "that seven out of ten professed disciples of the Wagner
cult here present would, if they dared be unfashionable and honest,
ask for music that has a tune in it rather than that movement in
something flat or sharp to which they have seemed to give breathless
attention for the last fifteen minutes?"
"A tune in it!" repeated a bystander in intense amusement. "Dear Mrs.
Barrow, tunes are musical tricks, not true art."
This dogma, and others like unto it, are putting all our music-making
into the hands of professional artists and hushing the voice of song
and gladness in our homes. The one musician of the household is
accredited with perfect taste and unerring judgment, and usually
becomes a nuisance to his circle of acquaintances. He shudders at a
false note; the woman who sings sharp is an agony, the man who flats
is an anguish, and the mistakes of both are resented as personal
affronts.
I know one girl (I wish I could stop at the singular number) who
cannot enjoy going to her own church because the choir does not come
up to her standard of perfection. She never sings in church herself.
To mingle her voice with the tide of thanksgiving and praise would be
like the crystal flash of the arrowy Rhone into the muddy Arve. She
sets her teeth while ignorant and unfeeling neighbors join in the
service of song, and confides on her way out of church to anybody who
will listen to her that she really thinks it a misfortune to have as
fine and true an ear as her own so long as people who do not know the
first principle of music _will_ persist in trying to sing. She has
many companions in the persuasion that this part of the worship of the
sanctuary should be left altogether to a trained and well-salaried
choir. In the family honored by her residence there is no home music
except of her making. There are, moreover, so many contingencies that
may deprive her expected audience of the rich privilege of hearkening
to the high emprise of her fingers and voice, that the chances are
oftentimes perilously in favor of her dying with all her music in her.
Shall I ever forget, or rally from, the compassionate patronage with
which she, a week agone, met my petition for
"When sparrows build and the leaves break forth?"
"I never sing ballad music," she said, loftily. "Indeed I could not do
myself justice in anything this evening. I make it a matter of
conscience not to attempt a note unless I am in perfect tune
throughout--mentally, spiritually and physically. I should consider
it an offence against the noblest of arts were I to sing just because
somebody wishes to hear me."
This is not entirely affectation. The tendency of her art-education
has been to make her disdainfully hypercritical. It has not awakened
the spirit of the true artist, who is quick to detect whatever
promises excellence and encourages the tyro to make the best of his
little talent.
With all our newly-born enthusiasm for German composers, we have not
taken lessons from the German people in this matter of home music. We
do not even ask ourselves what has made them a musical nation. At the
risk of writing myself down a hopeless old fogy, I venture the opinion
that we were more nearly upon this track when the much-ridiculed
singing-school was in full swing and every child was taught the
intervals and variations of the gamut, and ballads were popular and
part-songs by amateurs a favorite entertainment for evenings at home,
than we are in this year of our Lord. The pews in that age united with
a volunteer choir in singing with the spirit and with the
understanding. The few may not have played their part as well as now,
but the many did their part better. In the family, Jane may have
surpassed her sisters in musical talent and proficiency, but one and
all knew something of that in which she excelled, enjoying her music
the more for that degree of knowledge. This brings forward another
argument for the musical education of the masses, large and small. It
would make general and genuine appreciation of good music, and put an
end to the specious pretences of which we spoke just now. The German
artisan's ear and voice are cultivated from childhood; his love of
music is intelligent, his enjoyment of it hearty, yet discriminating.
Our babies hear few cradle songs under the new _régime_, except such
as are crooned, more or less tunelessly, by foreign nurses. Girls no
longer sing old ballads in the twilight to weary fathers and allure
restless brothers to pass the evening at home in innocent
participation in an impromptu concert, the boys bearing their part
with voice and banjo or flute. We did not make perfect music when
these domestic entertainments were in vogue, but we helped make happy
homes and clean lives.
We used to sing--all of us together--upon the country porch on summer
nights, not disdaining "Nelly Was a Lady" and the "Old Kentucky Home,"
and sea songs and love songs and battle songs that had thundering
choruses in which bassos told mightily. Moore was in high repute, and
Dempster and Bailey were in vogue. The words we sang were real
poetry, and so distinctly enunciated as to leave no doubt in the
listener's mind as to the language in which they were written. We had
not learned that tunes were musical tricks. Better still were the
Sunday evenings about the piano, everybody lending a helping (never
hindering) voice, from grandpapa's cracked pipe down to the baby's
tiny treble. Every morning the Lord of the home heard "our voices
ascending high" from the family altar, and in the nursery feverish or
wakefully-fretful children were lulled to health-giving slumber by the
mother's hymns.
These are some of the bits of home and church life we would do well to
bring forward and add to the more intricate sum of to-day's living.
Granted, if you will, that we have outgrown what were to us the seemly
garments of that past. Before relegating them to the attic or
ragpicker, would it not be prudent and pleasant to preserve the laces
with which they were trimmed?