PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC
I. IDEALS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION
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. (It means nothing that we are now praising “free
verse,” for we are only interested in the first half of the term, and
that is not applicable to poetry, since no verse worth having ever has
been or can be free. We nibble.)
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.
What are the claims of music as a means of educating the young? To some
educational administrators it seems to have almost no justification.
“What can be accomplished by it?” they ask. “Singing is not necessary
as a factor in life.” “Music is of little importance in a work-a-day
world.” So argue the school men who want “results” as they call them.
But the real object of education should be first to make human beings
capable of hearing and seeing intelligently, and of using their hands
skillfully, and then to train the mind so that it can receive and
assimilate knowledge and turn it into wisdom. There are a few school
authorities who see music as an important part of such education, but
most of them--being in themselves unconscious of its power and of its
value--only accept it because other people similarly placed have done
so, or as a relief from other studies, or as a means of enlivening
public school exhibitions. That there is something in our natures which
music fulfills and satisfies; that great men have given expression
to their ideas through it; that the understanding and appreciation
of their utterances depends on the training of the ear and of the
imagination, and that, when this training has been completed, a man
or woman has access to a whole world of beauty--all this the average
school man does not see. Nor can he be expected to see it, for he
has never experienced it in himself. But he should be convinced by
the phenomena; by the large number of people who derive enjoyment
and stimulation from great music; by the persistence of the love for
it; even, perhaps, by the colossal sums spent on it. But he cannot
dispel his distrust of a study whose results are illusive; he often
sees it badly administered, and is unable to remedy the condition, so
he leaves it to its fate. The one medium of human expression that is
universal, that transcends language, that knows no distinctions save
such as it seeks out itself in our own souls; that speaks to the
tiniest child and to his grandfather in common terms; that does _not_
deal in beliefs, or in dogma, or in events, or things, or persons, or
localities--this he suspects! Put all this on his educational scales; a
few lessons in arithmetic will outweigh it. The passion for categorical
facts, arranged in methodical sequence term by term, year by year, and
culminating in a sky-rocket burst, every fact blazing up separately for
an instant as though it really were alive, and then going out while
the charred embers fall far apart on a patient earth--this is called
Education! But this passion is almost ineradicable--is, indeed, one of
the most common of human failings. It is what is called in these days
“efficiency”: that is, a sort of nose-on-the-grindstone persistency in
detail entirely oblivious of those larger aspects of any case which
really decide its destiny. Systems, categories, precedents; these are
safe. Why wander from beaten paths? Individual aspiration, a desire for
beauty--these are dangerous. We have ceased memorizing the names of
rivers, or the capitals of Patagonia and Bolivia, but we still cling
tightly to “useful” subjects, and we still test our education by
weighing it in June.
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.
II. THE VALUE OF MUSIC IN PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION
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 (as I have already pointed out) 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
coördination 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.
Yes, there is every reason for giving music a real place in the
curriculum save one, and that is this: you cannot give an examination
in it. Fatal defect! No A + or A - for the child to take home proudly
to its parents; on a certain day at a certain hour you cannot find out
by a set test what, of the beautiful thing we call music, a child has
in its heart and soul. The result you hope to gain consists chiefly in
a love of good music, and a joy in singing it--a result that is likely
to affect the happiness of the child all its life long; the whole
tendency of singing in schools has been to civilize the child, to make
it happy, and to help its physical and mental coördination; yet you
deny the value of such training, you refuse to give it a real place in
your curriculum, you call it a fad or a frill. What an extraordinary
attitude for an educational administration to assume! The world is,
then, merely a place of eating and drinking, of mechanical routine, of
facts. There are to be no dreams; the flowers and brooks and mountains,
the sky, birds’ songs and the whole fantasy of life--these are nothing.
Beautiful objects in which the eye delights, beautiful sounds that
fill the soul with happiness and create for us a perfect world of our
own, these are useless because they won’t submit to an examination in
June and can’t be made to figure in a diploma. How many young people,
I wonder, graduate from our institutions of learning with nothing
_but_ a diploma? Would it not be of great value to the children if they
were taught to see and to hear vividly and intelligently, to be alive
to all beautiful objects, to love a few beautiful poems, to have the
beginnings of a taste for literature, to be able to sing fine songs, to
take part in choral singing, and to know well a few pieces by Mozart
or Schubert? Do not all great things establish relationship and do not
all little things accentuate differences? What education is better than
that which unifies the individual with the universal? Is not this whole
world of fine literature, painting, sculpture, and music in the very
highest sense, then, an education to the individual?
We march in endless file along a hard-paved way out of the sun, our
goal a place where _use_ holds sway. To reach the goal and begin our
labors under the lash, catching a glimpse only now and then of stars,
of flowers, of brooks, of green fields--only a glimpse, for _use_ holds
us fast. After a time we forget them altogether as _use_ fastens its
grip upon us more securely. We plod onward, machine-like, until all
sense of beauty is dead, and the world is a treadmill of money-getting
and of trivial pleasures. Then our blindness reacts on our children.
We have forgotten the impulse of our childhood. The love for beautiful
things has left us, and we have no longer a sense of their value. Must
our children continue to suffer for this? Must they, too, become the
slaves of use?
III. FALSE METHODS OF TEACHING
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 (fallacious because
such relaxation by singing could be carried on without the expensive
paraphernalia of a school music system), 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.
I have attended conventions of teachers where all the interest centered
in pedagogical methods, and in the discussions of artificial terms and
theories. I have met teachers who say they discourage the children
from singing--because it ruins their voices! and who confine their
instruction to the theory of music. The fetish of sight-singing has
cast its blight over the teaching of little children so that instead
of letting them sing by ear simple and beautiful songs,--which nearly
every child loves to do,--they are taught at the age of five or six
years the mysteries of intervals, etc. And since the time divisions
of music present difficulties too great for their young minds, the
vertical measure lines are discarded, thus obliterating the accents and
taking away from music one of its most fundamental elements. This makes
necessary the substitution of purely empirical terms to describe the
time values of quarter notes, eighth notes, and so forth, such as “type
one,” “type two”; or artificial syllabic terms are piled up one upon
another until such a monstrosity as _tafate-fetifi_ results.
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.
One of the greatest difficulties connected with public school music
teaching is the inability of some of the grade teachers to teach music.
The daily lesson is given by her. The music teacher visits each room
once in two, three, or even four weeks. It is not necessarily the grade
teacher’s fault if she cannot teach music well, because the training
given her in the grade schools and normal school may have been quite
inadequate. But teach music she must--as a part of her regular duties.
My own observation leads me to believe that a good many grade teachers
are capable of doing this work well, that few do it as well as they
might do if they were given more training, and that some teach so badly
that it results in more harm than good. In any case I am opposed to
any transference of the daily lesson from the grade teachers to an
expert, not because I think the expert would not do it in some ways
better, but because it would mean a very large increase in the expense
of our schools and because I believe that only a few grade teachers
are incapable under proper training of giving a satisfactory music
lesson. Furthermore, I believe in keeping the music lesson as a bond
of sympathy between the grade teacher and the children. Singing is an
entirely natural art for any human being who begins it in childhood
and pursues it through youth. I look forward to the day when we shall
all sing. I object to the displacement of the grade teacher in the
one function of school life which is intimate, free, and beautiful,
in which facts, members, places, events, names are forgotten, and in
which the spirit of each child issues forth _under the discipline of
beauty_. (I place these words in italics because I am constantly being
told that the great thing in the education of children is to give
them self-expression; to which I reply that self-expression except
under discipline--using the word in its larger sense--has never helped
either the individual or the race.) We must look to the normal schools
for this improvement in the ability of our teachers to teach music,
and the normal schools, in turn, must expect our high schools to send
forth their graduates, properly taught in music, so that normal schools
will not have to spend time (as they often do now) supplementing the
imperfections of the earlier training.
At present we are moving in a vicious circle. Many of our normal
schools still preserve something of that artificial pedagogy to which I
have referred, and still send out teachers who are, _humanly speaking_,
ill-fitted to lead the children in music. (I refer to the human element
in the matter because it is impossible to teach music properly if you
have not had experience with the best of it, and if you do not love the
best more than any other. So long as our normal schools lay too great
stress on the technique of teaching music at the expense of the greater
thing, just so long will our schools suffer. And it is easily possible
for the normal school authorities to be deceived as to what is the best
music, as well as by a brave showing of musical performance.) The real
failure in the administration of music is due to a false ideal. And
it is in this mistaken ideal or purpose that the crux of the whole
matter lies. Nearly the whole stress of teaching is laid on expert
sight-reading of music. Go into a schoolroom with a supervisor to hear
his class sing and he will almost invariably exhibit to you with pride
the capacity of the children to sing at sight. He will ask you to put
something impromptu on the blackboard as a test of their proficiency.
He will exhibit to you classes of very young children who have already
learned to read notes and who can sing all sorts of simple exercises
from the staff.
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. (This is not the place for a
discussion of the various methods of teaching sight-singing. The method
commonly used in this country is derived from English practice and we
have ignored the much more accurate and scientific systems of France
and Germany.)
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.
IV. GOOD OR BAD MUSIC?
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 archæological 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 (both having
forgotten), 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.[5]
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.
There is no doubt whatever that, speaking generally, the best music
with which to train the taste of young children is that known as
“folk-song.” The supposition that any musician is capable of composing
a fine enduring song suitable for children is false in its very
essence. The constant appearance of new songs for children and their
inevitable disappearance in the next generation is evidence enough
that this is so, apart from the unmistakable evidence in the songs
themselves. In reality the good tune is right, the poor tune wrong;
the good tune conforms to, is a part of nature; the poor tune is false
in quantity and in sentiment, and not a part of nature. The fine tune
is straightforward, honest, and genuine in sentiment; the inferior
tune professes to be so, but it is not. Fine simple tunes of the kind
suitable for children to sing have been composed,--“Way Down upon the
Suwanee River” is an example,--but they are very few in number. The
only safeguard is to keep chiefly to the old melodies whose quality
has been proved. And since the number of fine folk-tunes is more than
sufficient for our purpose, and since most of them are not copyrighted,
there would seem to be no reason whatever why they should not
constitute the larger part of the music we give our children to sing in
their early years of school life.
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.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the very place where it will
do the most harm--namely, in the kindergarten. And this is true of
kindergartens generally. In the process of providing very young
children with suitable words for their songs--which in the kindergarten
are considered of first importance--the effect of inferior music seems
to have been entirely ignored. In other words, the one sense through
which young children receive their most vivid impressions has been
systematically and persistently violated. I have examined a great many
song books used in American kindergartens and I have never found one
that was really suitable for the purpose of training the musical taste
of young children. Our craving for a complete pedagogical system is
characteristic; it is our refuge, our bulwark. Instead of facing actual
problems as they are, we take some ready-made system--which some other
perplexed person has made for a shelter--and proceed to adopt it _in
toto_. I mean by this that the custom of kindergarten authorities is
to buy a book in the open market--a book whose sole guarantee is that
it is for sale. It probably contains inferior music, but the purchaser
asks no questions. Now an enterprising and well-equipped teacher could
gather together during a summer holiday twenty-five simple folk-songs,
could have suitable words written for them, and could have them
mimeographed (if more copies were needed), and put into use in her
school. I say nothing of the benefit to her of doing this.
It is obvious, then, that our public school music labors under great
difficulties. The classes are too large,--sometimes forty-five children
in a room,--the music lesson period is too short; the music teacher
visits each room at too great intervals; the grade teacher is perhaps
not properly qualified to teach music and the head master’s interest
in it may be perfunctory. The study itself is, therefore, irregular,
as must be the case when such conditions as these exist. Yet we are
trying to produce _expert_ results. Why not say to ourselves that since
our population as a whole is not yet actively interested in the best
music, and since the children are unlikely to hear much of it outside
the school, and since by nature and habit and association there is
really nothing in our musical life to justify spending our money on
teaching expert sight-singing to children--the undertaking being in
a sense anomalous and detached; why not say to ourselves: “We must
first of all teach our children to love the best music, and then we
must train them to read it, not necessarily ‘at sight,’ but to read
it well enough to satisfy all the demands likely to be made in that
direction in after life.”[6] I would sweep away half the pedagogical
paraphernalia of our public school music teaching. I believe much more
valuable results could be secured by constant contact with the best
music, and continued observation of it, with a minimum of technical
exercises. I believe the processes of music to have no significance
whatever except as they appear in great compositions, and that
constant contact with and observation of fine music is more valuable
than the study of the rules by which it is made, or the technique by
which it is produced. In music as in poetry we deduce the rules and
laws from the artistic objects themselves. The composer and the poet
are to us what nature is to them.
V. ATTEMPTS AT REFORM
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
(who is chairman of our committee), 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.
The Boston teaching was especially weak in dealing with rhythm, and
for a perfectly simple reason. Rhythm was taught, not as action, which
it is, but as symbol, which it is not. The various rhythmic figures
were taught, in other words, through the mind instead of through the
body. These rhythmic figures were given arbitrary names (to which I
have already referred), and the children, looking at the symbols,
were told the strange name given to them, and, sitting quite still,
produced the required sounds. The teachers did not even beat the time.
The usual answer we got when asking about rhythm was, “Oh, they feel
the rhythm.” This may have been true, but, if it were, the children
were extreme individualists! This sort of rhythmic teaching is common
in the United States and the defect is a grave one. The arithmetical
complications of rhythm in music should never be taught to little
children at all. Just as they should sing the melody by imitating the
teacher, so they should be taught the rhythm by imitating, _in action_,
the time value of the notes. A child who has sung a simple folk-song
many times, and has danced, or marched, or clapped his hands in exact
time and rhythm with the notes, can be taught later the pitch names
and the time names of those notes without the slightest difficulty and
without any subterfuge whatever. In a schoolroom containing some forty
children, and with the space largely occupied by desks and seats, it
is, of course, impossible to carry on any extended exercises in rhythm.
But every effort should be made to teach musical rhythms as action
before they are taught as sounds. Whenever possible classes should be
taken to the assembly room, where there is a sufficiently large open
floor space, for such exercises.
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[7] 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 (and the same will be true of later 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 (to use a moderate term!), 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.
VI. OTHER ACTIVITIES IN SCHOOL MUSIC
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[8] as
possible. Each of the properties or qualities of music is susceptible
of treatment on the broad grounds of æsthetics, 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 (we hope
in death) 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:
[5] 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.
[6] I do not mean by the foregoing that I consider a fair degree of
expertness in reading music “at sight” an impossible attainment for
children. What I have said has been entirely in reference to our public
schools as they are at present constituted, and to the arrangements now
made for the teaching of music. The teaching of sight-singing requires
the services of an expert, more time than our schools now give, and a
more scientific method than that now employed.
[7] Now published by the Boston Music Company, 26 West Street, Boston,
Massachusetts.
[8] Counterpoint, for example, is, strictly, note against note, two
melodies parallel to each other; æsthetically, counterpoint consists in
illuminating, illustrating, or developing, a phrase or theme by _parts_
of _itself_--what in architecture would be described as making the
ornament grow out of the structure.