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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[4] G. Stanley Hall.
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.
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?
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.
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.