In Europe music sprang from the ground and it is the folk-songs and
folk-dances of the peasant that have gradually—refined and developed in
the hands of the great composers—worked their way upward and become the
possession and delight of the cultured classes.
In this country we have no peasantry, and what slight remains of
folk-songs and folk-dances we possess, apart from the music of the
negro, have only recently been dug out of the isolated mountain
fastnesses of Kentucky and Tennessee. These are generally of British
origin and cannot be considered as having been part and parcel of our
national life. As against the rich subsoil of the folk-songs of Germany,
Bohemia, Russia, France, and Scotland we can show but the thinnest
artificial layer of music, and this has been created and carefully
nurtured by a small educated class.
The dreary social life of the early Puritan settlers and their frowning
attitude toward the joys of life further retarded the growth of the arts
among us.
I do not think there has ever been a country whose musical development
has been fostered so almost exclusively by women as America.
Musical education began among the well-to-do classes who could afford to
engage the European musicians who immigrated to America to teach their
daughters—but not, alas, their sons. A strong feeling existed that
music was essentially an effeminate art, and that its cultivation by a
man took away that much from his manliness and, above all, made him
unfit to worship at the most sacred shrine of business. I am speaking
now of fifty years ago. Conditions have improved since that time, but
not sufficiently as yet to produce normal and healthy conditions
regarding the civilization of our people.
Women’s musical clubs began to form in many a village, town, and city,
and these clubs became the active and efficient nucleus of the entire
musical life of the community, but, alas, again principally the feminine
community. It is to these women’s clubs that the managers turn for fat
guarantees for appearances of their artists, and it is before audiences
of whom seventy-five per cent are women that these artists disport
themselves.
The result of this has been that the cultural life of American women has
often been absolutely a thing apart from their relations with their
men-folk. It has become accepted that of course men do not and need not
share the women’s interest in the arts; and while business does not
perhaps monopolize the American man in quite as unhealthy a fashion as
in former years, the principal change which has been brought about is
the introduction of golf, at least an occupation in which men and women
may share. What a pity that the elusive ball is not composed of a little
Beethoven and Brahms instead of the mysterious mixture of concrete and
gutta-percha, and that family life, which is the very fortress of
civilization, cannot make use of the cultivation of music as one of the
strongest ties to bind husband and wife, sons and daughters together!
Some of us are too prone to look upon modern plumbing, telephones, and
motor-cars as evidences of high civilization or even culture, when they
are really only more or less agreeable conveniences which minister to
our comfort but not to our heart or head.
In Europe men and women share more equally in the love and cultivation
of music, and the emotional and personal attitude of the women is offset
by the more impersonal and mental attitude of the men. The result of
this is shown in audiences in which neither sex predominates and, above
all, in the cultivation of chamber-music at home in which professionals
and amateurs, men and women, participate to their mutual pleasure and
development. Nothing more charming can be imagined than such family
evenings of music, during which the players indulge themselves in the
string quartets and piano trios of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, with
perhaps a small audience of enthusiasts composed of other members of the
family and half a dozen friends who afterward all join in a jolly supper
of bread and cold meats, together with a good bottle of wine or beer.
My father carried this lovely custom into the New World, and I owe
almost my entire education in chamber-music to the Sunday afternoons at
his house, the tranquil and spiritual atmosphere of which is
unforgettable.
A few years ago a meeting was held in the mayor’s office at City Hall at
which I had been asked to speak in behalf of good music for the people
on Sunday afternoons and evenings. A clergyman from Brooklyn had made a
tremendous appeal against any Sunday recreations and wanted the aldermen
to revive the old blue laws of two hundred years ago. The room was
crowded with people, and when I spoke of what the chamber-music on
Sunday afternoons at my father’s house had meant to me as a boy, this
audience broke into such enthusiastic applause that there was no
mistaking the general attitude, and my Sunday symphony concerts, which I
was the first to inaugurate in New York, have only once been interfered
with by municipal authorities.
Some American women have realized the false and one-sided condition of
musical culture in our country and have sought to remedy it by
encouraging their sons to take up the study of some musical instrument,
but it has been up-hill work, as the general sentiment of the country
has not yet been sufficiently awakened. Plato considered the study and
appreciation of music an educational necessity for the young Athenian,
but such schools as Groton, Saint Paul’s, and Saint Mark’s, for
instance, have not yet admitted music to their regular curriculum, and
in so far as it is studied there it is considered rather an outside
privilege with which the school course has no official connection. Among
the boys the necessity for excelling in football or baseball is so
carefully and consistently insisted upon that almost the entire time
left from school hours is devoted to these sports, and the boy who wants
to continue the study of a musical instrument, which a fond mother has
perhaps begun with him before he entered the school, is looked upon by
the other boys as a sissy. The standard of personal conduct set in these
schools is high, but the tendency seems to be to make the boys as like
each other as possible. Many of them, if not discouraged, would develop
decided artistic talent, but individuality and independence of thinking,
which should be the end and aim of all teaching, is often frowned upon,
and the results only contribute still further to the monotony of our
social life, in which the courage to be one’s self is submerged in the
desire to be exactly like every one else.
The public schools of our country, however, show a much more intelligent
attitude than formerly; and, while the time allowed for singing and the
study of the beginnings of music is still all too short, music is taught
to the boys as well as to the girls. The singing of the children has
greatly improved, and in many cities school orchestras have been formed,
which the boys and girls enjoy immensely and in many of which music of
good character is studied.
In Los Angeles and Berkeley, California, I heard some excellent school
orchestras, and in Dayton, Ohio, Mrs. Talbot has interested herself
personally in this movement with great enthusiasm and excellent results.
In New York, my brother Frank, while supervisor of music in the public
schools, effected a complete reform in the teaching of the children and
succeeded in interesting the authorities to give music a more important
position. The singing improved immensely and since his retirement Mr.
Gartlan, his successor, has continued the good work. I have several
times used choruses of a thousand school children at the music festivals
of the Oratorio Society in the production of such works as Pierné’s
exquisite “The Crusade of the Children” and “The Children of Bethlehem,”
and the children sang the three-part harmonies of their music with such
purity and exquisite quality of tone as to bring happy tears to the eyes
of the audience.
School orchestras have been formed all over the city, and once a year I
take my entire orchestra to one of the large auditoriums of the public
high schools and for two thousand little would-be orchestra musicians we
play a programme composed of the music they have been studying during
the winter. We never play before a more enthusiastic and delightful
audience.
Thirty-one years ago I gave the first orchestral concert for children,
and twenty-five years ago my brother Frank founded the Young People’s
Symphony Concerts, which were designed to introduce the beauties of
orchestral music to children, and in a short explanatory talk to unravel
its mysteries of construction and demonstrate the tone colors of the
different instruments of the orchestra. These concerts have proved an
enormous success and of great importance for the education of the coming
generation. When my brother retired from public work in order to devote
himself exclusively to the direction of the Institute of Musical Art I
took over these concerts, and have since added another course intended
exclusively for little children from seven to twelve years of age. The
audiences are truly remarkable. The faces of the children are aglow with
interest and excitement, and when I sit down at the piano after playing
an overture with the orchestra and, repeating some melodic phrase from
it, ask them, “Which instrument played this melody?” their little voices
ring out from all over the hall in high, shrill accents, like little
pistol-shots, “The oboe! The oboe! The trumpet!” Then I let all those
who think it was the oboe raise their hands, and if they are right great
is their triumph, and if they are wrong equally great is their chagrin.
Generally they are right!
On my orchestral tours I have several times given such children’s
concerts on the afternoon preceding the regular evening symphony, and
while two such concerts in one day are a great exertion, the children’s
especially demanding a great output of vitality in order to keep their
interest, I have felt more than repaid by the results; in many of the
cities my work in this direction has been continued by the local
orchestras or musical clubs (again the women!), and with the happiest
results.
In New York also women devoted to music have greatly contributed toward
its development, but occasionally the result of their efforts has not
been so beneficial. Not so long ago a handsome but incompetent foreign
musician (I will not disclose any name or dates in this story) came to
New York and enlisted the sympathies of a few enthusiastic women. As
many women need some personality on which to centre their devotion to
art, they decided that New York should have this particular gentleman to
direct its symphonic future. The American business man is proverbially
good-natured to his womenkind and ready to pour out money for music
provided he is not compelled to listen to it, and so these ladies
gathered a huge fund with which to give a series of orchestral concerts.
The amount was large enough to maintain a good symphony orchestra in
proper hands for an entire winter, but in this instance was to be
expended on six concerts only. The handsome young foreigner gave his
first concert, which was a failure so complete and dismal—he being not
only without any reputation but with hardly any experience in work of
this kind—that even his little group of adorers became appalled and
proposed to cancel the rest of the concerts. One lady, however, who had
her own special favorite conductor, suggested that a complete disgrace
might be averted if her protégé were invited to conduct the remaining
concerts. As he was an excellent artist and thoroughly routined in the
handling of orchestral players the results were so good and, above all,
such a contrast to the dire tragedy of the first concert that the
enthusiastic lady devotee saw her opportunity and suggested that a new
orchestra should be formed for the following winter, the concerts of
which should be conducted by the man who had saved the situation for
them. New York had already an average during the winter of a hundred and
fifty symphonic concerts by the New York Philharmonic, the New York
Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and it
would seem from this that the symphonic needs of our public were already
more than amply supplied; but an enthusiastic woman, especially when
driven by devotion for some pet artist, refuses to recognize practical
conditions, and so this little group proceeded to gather more funds,
amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, in order to put the new
orchestra properly on its feet.
Their first difficulty was to find good players. There are never very
many first-class symphonic players to be found. Not only do the two
old-established New York orchestras employ about a hundred players each,
but the orchestras of other cities come to New York to fill their
vacancies. For years the Philharmonic, the New York Symphony, and other
out-of-town orchestras had a gentleman’s agreement that they would not
steal each other’s players, but this new organization immediately
proceeded to take thirty-seven from the Philharmonic by offering them
immensely higher salaries. They did not take a single player from the
New York Symphony Orchestra because, as they vowed, of their great
personal respect for me, but I think it was partly because we happened
to have a two-year contract with all our men which bound them to us very
effectively for another season. They filled their ranks further from
members of the Boston Orchestra and from other out-of-town
organizations, and then proceeded on their first regular season as a New
York Orchestra with loud protestations that New York at last had an
organization worthy of the metropolis. This orchestra carried on its
existence for two years, at the end of which it came to a dismal close
with an expenditure for the three seasons over and above the receipts of
the box-office of nearly a million dollars, which their surprised and
chagrined men guarantors had to pay. This is but one of several such
irregular ventures, each one of which has swallowed hundreds of
thousands. One would think that the inevitable failure of these efforts
would deter others from undertaking them, but such is not the case. Hope
springs eternal in the breast of the musical woman devotee and I have
just heard of a new orchestra now being formed in order to enable still
another foreigner, whose interpretations will of course be a revelation
to our public, to wield his stick in this country as his own has refused
to accept him at his own valuation.
In recent years chamber-music in New York has received great
encouragement and intelligent support from women. Mrs. Frederick S.
Coolidge has proved a veritable godmother to this lovely branch of
musical art, and every fall the festivals of chamber-music which she
gives in Pittsfield in the Berkshire Hills bring together notable
gatherings of musicians and music lovers as her guests. For several
years she has offered generous prizes in competition for various forms
of chamber-music. But to me the most encouraging thing that she has done
is the commissioning of certain composers to write compositions for
these festivals. Neither string quartets nor violin sonatas can ever
become profitable to the composer in the ordinary way of commerce, as
the number of copies which can be sold of such works is necessarily
limited. Even young American composers must live, and if they are to
devote their time to the creation of serious forms of art they should be
assured of at least some financial recompense for the time they must
give to it.
Mrs. Ralph Pulitzer has entirely maintained an excellent string quartet
for the past three years, and I should like to see such excellent
examples followed by others among our well-to-do, as chamber-music is
essentially written for performance in the home and loses much of its
charm and intimacy if given in a larger hall and before hundreds of
people.
For some time to come the initiative for a more general musical
education of our people will have to come from the women. If American
mothers will demand and obtain for their sons the same musical
privileges and opportunities which their daughters now enjoy America
will speedily become the most musical country in the world.
So much has already been done, but much remains, and I should like to
live a hundred years longer just to watch this development and to
rejoice in its results.