MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
I. TRAINING THE SENSE FOR BEAUTY
In what I have to say about music for children I am not unmindful
of the diversity of American life, and of the prevalent idea that
Americans do not pay much attention to music (or to any other form of
beauty) because they live in a new country in which the greater part of
their energy is devoted to subduing nature and carving their fortunes.
As a nation we are said to be too diverse to have evolved any definite
æsthetic practice, and we suppose ourselves too busy with the practical
things in life to pay much attention to it.
While it is doubtless true that there are numberless prosperous
American families in which the words “art” and “literature” mean
nothing whatever, this condition is due, in most cases, not to lack of
time, but to lack of inclination. We, like other people, do what we
like to do. No real attention is paid in childhood to the cultivation
of a love of the beautiful; very little attention is paid to it in the
educational institutions where we are trained; so we grow up and enter
upon life with a desultory liking for music, with a distinct lack of
appreciation for poetry, and with almost no interest in painting or
sculpture.
And this condition is likely to increase rather than diminish as time
goes on, until, having finally arrived at moments of leisure and
finding that neither our money nor any other material possession gives
us any deep or permanent satisfaction, we turn to beauty only to be
confronted with the old warning: “Too late, ye cannot enter now.” For
we have arrived at the time when, in Meredith’s phrase, “Nature stops,
and says to us, ‘Thou art now what thou wilt be.’” For this capacity
for understanding and loving great books and paintings and music has to
grow with our own growth and cannot be postponed to another season. The
average American man is supposed to have no time for these things. He
has time, but he refuses to turn it into leisure,--leisure which means
contemplation and thoughtfulness,--though he very likely knows that
this has been accomplished over and over again by men who have saved
out of a busy life for that purpose a little time every day.
One recalls Darwin’s pathetic statement wherein he describes his
early love for poetry and music, and the final complete loss of
those “capabilities” through neglect. “The loss of these tastes,” he
says, “is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the
intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the
emotional part of our nature.”
The intellect of man, in itself, is never supreme or sufficient.
Feeling or instinct is half of knowledge. “Whoever walks a furlong
without sympathy,” says Whitman, “walks to his own funeral drest in
his shroud.” Of any man, American or otherwise, who lives his life
unmindful of all beauty we may justly say, as Carlyle said of Diderot,
“He dwelt all his days in a thin rind of the Conscious; the deep
fathomless domain of the Unconscious whereon the other rests and has
its meaning was not under any shape surmised by him.”
Must not the education of children in beauty begin, then, with their
parents? Must they not be aroused, at least, to an _intellectual_
conviction of its value, even though they have missed its joy?
Can the matter be safely left to the jurisdiction of the schools
themselves whose curricula are already overcrowded with methods of
escape from this very thing? Does not the school answer the general
conception of education obtaining among the fathers and mothers of the
school-children? Can it be expected--is it possible for it--to rise
far above that conception? My object is therefore to suggest, first,
that the perception of beauty is, in the highest sense, education;
second, that music is especially so, because it is the purest form of
beauty; and, third, that music is the only form of beauty by means of
which very young children can be educated, because it is the only form
accessible to them.
Need I point out that there has never been a time in the history of
mankind when human beings have not paid tribute to beauty? In their
attempt to escape what may be called the traffic of life and to rise
above its sordid limitations, have they not always and everywhere
created for themselves some sort of detached ideal by means of which
they justified themselves in an otherwise unintelligible world? This
ideal may have been a god of stone, but it figured for them a perfect
absolution. Surrounded by brutal forces about which they knew nothing,
subject to pestilence, to war, to starvation, to the fury of the
elements, unable safely to shelter their bodies, they built for their
souls a safe elysium. This ideal was always one of order and beauty;
every civilization has possessed it, and it was to each civilization
not only religion, but also what we call “art.”
I referred in the first chapter to that quality in art which consists
in its “holding a mirror up to nature,” and thus focusing our
attention. Browning expresses this in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” where he
says,--
“For, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.”
But the highest office of art is not so much to attract our attention
to beautiful objects as to make us realize through the artist’s skill
what the objects signify. It is the artist who so depicts life as
to make it intelligible to us; it is he who sees all those deeper
relations which underlie all things; he, and he only, can so present
human aspirations and human actions as to lift them out of the maze
and give them order and sequence. Through all the welter of political
theories, of philosophies, of dogmas insisted on at the point of
excommunication; amid the discoveries of science and the tendency to
make life into a mechanically operated thing, the still small voice of
the poet rises always supreme--supreme in wisdom, supreme in insight,
the seer, the prophet, the philosopher; when all else has passed he
remains, for beauty is the only permanence. To eliminate beauty from
education is to destroy its very soul.
From the law of gravity to Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” beauty is
the central element. In physics, in mathematics, in astronomy, in
chemistry, there is the same perfection of order and sequence, the same
correlation of forces, the same attraction of matter which, operating
in the fine arts, brings about what we call “painting,” “sculpture,”
“poetry,” and “music.” The whole of nature is a postulate of this
doctrine, and there is no subject taught from kindergarten to college
which may not be taught as in accord with it. There is a rhythm of
beauty in all things animate and inanimate--an endless variety around
a central unity. The individuality in nature and in human life is as
a rhythmic diversity to a divine and central unity. The leaves of a
maple tree are all alike and all different; the difference between
the mechanical arts and the fine arts is a difference of rhythmic
flexibility: one is fixed in rhythm in accordance with physical laws,
and acts in perfect sequence and regularity; the other is a free
individualized rhythmic play around a fixed center. The painter may
not dispose the objects on his canvas as he pleases--nature allows him
only a certain freedom; the sculptor may distribute his weights and
his rhythms around the axis with only so much freedom from the demands
of nature as his particular purpose justifies; even the strain of
music, which seems to wander so much at will that it is often called a
“rhapsody,”--it, too, is merely a play of rhythms and contours around
a fixed center, and conforms to a common purpose just as a maple leaf
does. A machine acts in mechanical synthesis, a melody acts in æsthetic
synthesis; neither is free. So we say there is no such thing as an
isolated fact, or subject, or idea.
Thus everything taught to children can be taught as beauty, and if it
is not so taught, its very essence must dissolve and disappear. “The
mean distance from the earth to the moon is about two hundred and forty
thousand miles”; “two and two make four”; “an island is a body of land
entirely surrounded by water”;--so a child learns his lesson in what
are called facts (the most deceptive and soulless things in the world).
To him “the moon” and “a mile” are little more than words; 2 + 2 are
troublesome hieroglyphics; “an island” is, perhaps, merely a word in a
physical geography book; but to you all these objects and quantities
are, perhaps, beautiful; for you
“The moon doth with delight
Look around her when the heavens are bare”;
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?--(a question which Lowell, in
one of his essays, says “would be death to the rose and be answered
triumphantly by the cabbage”). 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.
American children are musical, American adults are not, and the chief
reason lies in the wasted opportunities of childhood. If the natural
taste of our children for music were properly developed, they would
continue to practice it and to find pleasure in doing so, and thus
would avoid the fatal error of _postponing their heaven to another
time_--the great mistake of life and of theology.
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.
II. THE VALUE OF SINGING
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 (with a certain contempt) 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[4] 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.
By singing, and by singing only, a little child of five may come in
contact with a pure and perfect form of beauty. Not only that, but
the child can reproduce this beauty entirely unaided, and in the
process of doing so its whole being--body, mind, heart, and soul--is
engaged. The song, for the moment, is the child. There is no possible
realization of the little personality comparable to this. Here, in
sounds, is that correlation of impulses in which the stars move; here
is the world of order and beauty in miniature; here is a microcosm
of life; here is a talisman against the cold, unmeaning facts which
are driven into children’s brains to jostle one another in unfriendly
companionship. Through this they can feel a beauty and order which
their minds are incapable of grasping. The joy which a child gets in
reproducing beautiful melodies is like no other experience in life. It
is absolutely a personal act, for the music lends itself to the child’s
individuality as nothing else does. Music, in this sense, preserves in
children that ideality which is one of the most precious possessions
of childhood, and which we would fain keep in after life; which loves
flowers and animals, which sees the truth in fairy stories, which
believes everything to be good and is alien to everything sinister,
which sees the moon and stars, not as objects so many millions of miles
from the earth, and parts of a great solar system, but as lanterns hung
in the heavens.
The prime object, then, of musical education for children is so to
develop their musical sensibilities as to make them love and understand
the best music. Does this bring up the question, “What is the best
music?” By the “best” music I mean exactly what I should mean if I
were to substitute the word “literature” for “music”--I mean the
compositions of the great masters. And if you say that the great
masters did not write music suitable for little children, I reply
that such music has nevertheless been produced by all races _in their
childhood_, that it exists in profusion, that it is commonly known as
“folk-song,” that it is the basis upon which much of the greatest music
in the world rests, and, finally, that it is the natural and, indeed,
the inevitable means of approach to such great music.
This basis, to which I refer, is both actual and ideal. Many great
composers have used actual folk-melodies. The chorales in Bach’s “St.
Matthew Passion,” for example, are based on traditional melodies.
In Haydn’s instrumental compositions folk-songs are often used
_verbatim_, and the total number of them to be found in his works is
very great. Notable examples may be found in Beethoven--as in the
“Rasoumoffsky” quartettes, and the Seventh Symphony--while Schubert,
Brahms, and Tschaikovsky used folk-melodies freely. Dvořák and Grieg
are essentially national in their idiom and style, and folk-music may
be said to be the basis of the music of each. Ideally the debt of music
to folk-song is greater still. Any typical, _Adagio_ of Beethoven (such
as that in the so-called “Pathétique Sonata”) springs from folk-song,
and, in spite of the long process of development through which music
had passed, reflects--in a more mature form--the same sentiment one
finds in the original. How could it be otherwise? Is there any art, or
any other intellectual activity of man, of which the same thing cannot
be said? Were not Keats and Shelley waiting to be born of Coleridge
and Wordsworth? Is there such a thing as a fruit without a vine; a
blossom without a stem; an end without a beginning? There have been
composers, poets, and painters who have lived detached from the common
consciousness--like those strange organisms in nature that float in
sea or air and draw nothing from the earth’s native soil; but all
the greatest minds have been rooted in the past and have drawn their
inspiration from common human experience. Keeping in mind, then, that
our object is to train the taste of children so that they will love
the best music, let us examine what is actually taking place in the
teaching of music to children.
III. CURRENT METHODS OF TEACHING
The most common fallacy in our teaching consists in putting knowledge
before experience, or theory before practice. Children are taught
_about_ music before they have had sufficient experience of it. They
are taught, for example, to pin pasteboard notes on a make-belief
staff; they are told that one note is the father-note and another the
mother-note (one supposes the chromatics to be irascible old-maid
aunts); all sorts of subterfuges are resorted to in an attempt to teach
them what they are too young to learn and what, in any case, can have
no significance whatever except when based on a long process of actual
experience. One might as well try to satisfy a hungry child with a
picture of an apple as to show a child notes before it has dealt with
sounds.
This, then, is our great fallacy. It is impossible to expect children
to be musical if they begin with symbols of any kind. Furthermore, in
the teaching of songs without notation, the whole stress can be laid on
fundamental things. What are these? First, a sense of rhythm. In the
development of music rhythm came before melody, as melody came before
harmony. Rhythmic freedom and accuracy are essential, not only to a
child’s musical education, but to his physical well-being. Now there
is one thing certain,--namely, that freedom and accuracy in rhythm can
be brought about only by actual bodily movement. (It is unnecessary
to dwell on the fundamental difference between actual rhythmic
movement and any symbol of it, such as a half or quarter note.) And
the beginning of the musical training of children should consist in
marching, or clapping hands to music played by the teacher. Following
this the _actual notes_ of simple folk-song may be expressed in bodily
motion--as in running or dancing--the chief point being to engage the
whole body. The beginnings of _Eurhythmics_ as evolved by Dalcroze
serve this purpose excellently, the meter of the song (4/4 or 3/4)
being expressed with the arms, while, at the same time, the rhythms (or
actual notes) are expressed by the movement of the feet with the body
in motion. It must always be kept in mind, however, that this training
is for the mind and the æsthetic sense, and that the bodily motions are
for the purpose of giving children an exact sense of rhythm. Too great
stress cannot be laid on the necessity of always using good music.
Furthermore, I wish to avoid the pitfalls that are spread at every hand
in the form of schools for _self-expression_ in which children and
adults are taught so-called “æsthetic” movements to music. Æsthetic
dancing is one thing; a musical education is another. The cry for
self-expression is characteristic of out attitude toward education. A
child or an adult is asked to listen to a piece of music and then to
express in motion or pose what _it feels_. Undisciplined by experience,
incapable--as we all are--of fathoming the mystery of great music,
uneducated in those immutable laws that underlie all æsthetics,
what can such a person express--save that idiosyncrasy which he at
that moment is? So, ultimately, one expresses a Beethoven sonata or
symphony by poses and movements--in a Greek dress, against a curtained
background and under a calcium light! This delicate, transitory,
elusive, and impenetrable thing we call music is something more than
motion; yes, more even than motion, melody, and harmony together, for
they are but its body; its spirit can neither be fathomed nor expressed
save in terms of itself.
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.
IV. WHAT SHOULD CHILDREN SING?
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 æsthetics--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.” (I recall an old Egyptian
manuscript in the Bodleian Library containing a letter which ran thus:
“Theon to his father, Theon--Greeting. It was a fine thing that you did
not take me to Alexandria with you. Send me a lyre, I implore you! If
you don’t, I won’t eat anything. I won’t drink anything. There!”)
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. (I do not believe
that the average child is.) 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 (just as you would deprive them of sweetmeats
if they had been made ill by them); 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 æsthetics 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 æsthetic sense; but bad songs taught to illustrate some point of
technique are unnecessary and inexcusable.
V. THE FALLACY OF THE INEVITABLE PIANOFORTE LESSON
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 (and a very ugly one);
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 (and is) 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”
(sixty pounds of tender, delicate humanity trying to express itself
through a solid ton), 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 coördination 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 doubtless the conventional and domestic character of the
pianoforte that leads us to train our children to play upon it rather
than upon the violin. The pianoforte is available for casual music,
for accompaniments to songs, for dance music, and so forth. The violin
is, perhaps, only useful to one person. But how much more intimate it
is! Tucked under the chin it becomes almost a part of the player--as
the sculls used to be to the Autocrat when he went rowing. The tones
of the violin are _yours_ and have to be evoked through your own
patient effort; the pianoforte stands glistening and repellent, almost
impervious to your personality. I would have children taught to play
the violin, or violoncello in preference to the pianoforte, and I look
forward to the time when we shall train our young people to play other
orchestral instruments as well. This is being successfully done even
now in the public schools. My own observation leads me to believe that
talent for pianoforte-playing is quite rare, and that the average child
is more likely to be able to play the violin. What more delightful than
a quiet evening of chamber music in a small room, young and old playing
together? Each person has his own interesting part to play. Each
expresses himself and at the same time conforms to the _ensemble_. This
would be true self-expression under the best kind of discipline.
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.
When children show an aptitude for playing the pianoforte there exists
still the important question of developing their taste. Playing loses
much of its value if there is any lack of musical taste and judgment
on the part of the teacher. An examination of the programmes of what
are called “pupils’ recitals” will reveal how lax some teachers are
in this respect. There is no excuse whatever for giving children poor
music to play, for there is plenty of good music to be had and they can
be taught to like it--_but the teacher must like it also_. Children
are quick to discover a pretense of liking, and it is difficult to
stimulate in them a love for something which you do not love yourself.
VI. THE REAL GOAL
These questions now inevitably arise: “How can children be taught music
itself?” “By what process is it possible for them to become musical?”
Obviously through personal experience and contact with good music, and
with good music only, first by singing beautiful songs to train the ear
and awaken the taste, second by learning how to listen intelligently,
and third (if qualified to do so) by learning to play good music on
some instrument. Intelligent listening to music is obviously such
listening as comprises a complete absorption of all the elements in
the music itself. It is not enough to enjoy the “tune” alone, for
melody is only one means of expression. The listener must be alive
to metric and rhythmic forms, to melodies combined in what is called
“counterpoint,” to that disposition of the various themes, harmonies,
and so forth, which constitutes form in music. The groups of fives, for
example, which persist throughout the second movement of Tschaikovsky’s
“Pathétique Symphony” constitute its salient quality; the steady,
solemn tread in the rhythm of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony defines the character of that piece; the weaving of the
separate, individual parts in a composition by Bach is his chief
means of expression, and his music is unintelligible to many people
because they are incapable of answering to so complex an idiom; the
latitude in melody itself is, also, very great, and one needs constant
experience of the melodic line before one can see the beauty in the
more profound melodies of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
What we are seeking to do is to make ourselves complementary to the
music. We need to see that æsthetic 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.
Observation, discrimination, reflection; cultivating the memory for
musical phrases and melodies, disciplining the senses, enlarging the
scope of the imagination, nurturing the sense of beauty--these are the
means and the objects of musical education for children. By such a
process we attain in some measure to that joy which is one of the chief
objects of art, and of which our present situation almost completely
deprives 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:
[4] G. Stanley Hall.