THE SERVICE OF MUSIC TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter in her book, At the Foot of the Rainbow, makes a certain Scotch character say that he does not care for better talking than the "tongues in the trees"; for sounder preaching than the "sermons in the stones"; finer reading than the "books in the river"; no, nor better music than the "choirs of the birds." This music he calls the music of God; he would rather have this, every time, than "notes fra book."
This philosophy of Dannie Macnoun's is excellent; but we must not forget that God made the "notes fra book" also, and gave us our power to design and to enjoy them. It is true also that there is little man has done in copying after the ideas of God that comes so near to the divine as do his attempts in the realm of music. This field nearly all, if they have ears to hear and a voice to sing, can approach in some, at least, of its aspects.
The service of music to the human soul is so excellent that it seems as if it must be one of the necessities. Why does the shepherd invariably possess a flute? The answer is this: some kind of music he must have in his solitary life, and the flute is the instrument that can be carried in the pocket. The ills of isolation may be measurably alleviated by this harmonious companionship and this fact seems to meet a fairly widespread appreciation along our countryside. The emphasis is however placed almost entirely upon instrumental music. The piano of course predominates; but the organ frequently takes its place, the violin, 'cello, cornet, flageolet, guitar and trombone are also found. Then there comes in the phonograph, the graphophone, the Victrola, and the Angelus music-box; the instrument that stands for "all that ever went with evening dress" appears among country customers also, and there seems to be room for mouth-organ and jew's-harp when nothing else offers.
Now a jew's-harp is better than no harp, a mouth-organ is better than no organ; and an accordeon can happify a lowering twilight. The banjo is an all-round-the-world delight and a guitar may be almost heaven to a music-hungry boy or girl. A twenty-dollar organ worked by foot-pedals may be a household blessing, and a flageolet has kept many a sheep herder from insanity on a lonely mountain. But any report on music makes on the whole a sad impression when the human voice is not mentioned; and a hundred will tell of having a musical instrument and some song book or other, where one will speak of singing in the family. Almost every conceivable collection of songs will be mentioned but the general impression gained will be that the American countryside is not filled with singing; that the people do not sing at their work, and that not one hundredth part is there of the joy due them in community music.
In the art and joy of singing together our people seem to have retrograded. Perhaps the dominant influences at the beginning were not favorable to this art. Whatever love we had for music was cherished, however, in the church of New England, but the advent of the soloist in the choir loft has put a quietus upon the musical expression in the pew. Harriet Beecher Stowe tells us how those old billowy fuguing tunes used to be sung, with what gusto the men and women, bass, counter, soprano, and tenor, trained in that national institution, the singing school, would chase the melody around, racing after one another, each singing a different set of words, until at length by some inexplicable magic they would all come together again and sail smoothly out into a rolling sea of song. To her those tunes, as she remembered them from her childhood, were like the ocean aroused by stormy winds, when deep calleth to deep in tempestuous confusion, out of which at last is evolved union and harmony.
It is a pity that such musical impulse as this should be allowed to go to waste. And it is not as if the primitive musical quality were extinguished in us, but the impulse remains submerged unless something brings it out. Professor Peter Lutkin of Northwestern University, head of a school of music that constantly draws students from the Western States, says that you cannot give musical culture to an acre of the Western land without having music talent spring there.
We should follow the example of little Wales, that sturdy sister in the confederation of the British Isles. How wonderful is the singing of the Welsh when they come together in their great national Eisteddfod! There they have a national contest in which many singing societies join, and a prize is given to the victorious one. How do we account for this great interest in singing? Why, there is a Choral Society in every village of Wales. Between village and village, between city and city, there are competitive tests, and this annual event is the outcome of all the smaller ones, the crowning engagement for the highest honors. How much must this mean to the people of the villages! What a comfort to the isolated ones! For twelve miles about any village or town center the people come walking in every Sunday evening, to attend rehearsals for practise in sacred music, hymns and chorals being their mainstay. In northern England we find the same musical feeling, and in Italy. Why these special parts of the world should move in this direction, who can tell? It is enough to know that those rougher, more hilly, and more secluded regions do this service for the people. They make them feel the impulse and the necessity for song.
That the case with us is not by any means hopeless is shown by the story of Norfolk, Connecticut. Here a great musical movement has been led by the Litchfield County Choral Union, a musical society that was founded and led by an inspired man, the keynote of whose life may be found in his own words when he said: "Had I my life to live over again, with such slight knowledge as I may have gained, I would become an humble laborer in a primitive and ignorant farming community where by word and example I might perhaps help to raise its members to a higher standard of life in material and spiritual matters; and could I but implant one better thought into a single soul, life would not have been lived in vain." Such was the quiet but radiant ideal of Robbins Battell, the man that tuned all the life of the lower Berkshires to lofty music. The Choral Union as it now stands is a federation of the musical societies of the larger towns of the county, and includes seven hundred members. Each of these societies has many concerts and festivals for the expression of its own skill and joy in the compositions of the masters; and besides this there is an annual three-day meeting and concert at the great "Music Shed" in Norfolk.
In the festival of 1912 they gave the Elijah with a chorus of four hundred and fifteen voices, all chosen from the members of these county Unions. The year before, the same chorus gave excerpts from Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice and the Hora Novissima of Horatio Parker; the year before that they gave Verdi's Requiem and The Song of Hiawatha by S. Coleridge-Taylor. Other concerts accompanied these in which noted soloists took part and great composers were present and conducted their own compositions as given by trained orchestras. So, in 1906 about thirty-six thousand people of the region were able to hear pieces from Wagner, Beethoven, Haydn, Vieuxtemps, Liszt, Rossini, Schumann, Strauss, and Mendelssohn—these were the names represented in the program of 1906, while selections from Goldwork, Beethoven, Tschaikowsky, Saint-Saens, Grieg, Mozart, and Wagner, in 1912 were heard by eight thousand persons.
It is quite impossible to estimate the effect of such musical opportunity or the meaning of these rehearsals from January to June to those villages. The people become consecrated to their art, like the Oberammergauers. Personal ambition is swept away in the success of the song or the oratorio. As there is no entrance to the concerts except by invitation, all mercenary and selfish desire is removed. There is one aim—to express the music perfectly and in the most lofty spirit; therefore the festival is both a vital element in the community and a welder of the people into a social unity. The chorus is also an influence for democracy. There is a weekly rehearsal. Women sometimes walk several miles to attend this and members rarely miss a meeting. One couple came twelve miles every week for eight years. There is no expense except for music and sometimes the sum does not go over sixty cents a year. The possession of a voice is the one condition for entrance, and the land does not assign tuneful voices according to man-made aristocracies; maid and mistress, bank president and store clerk, sing side by side. Into many lives, otherwise inert, the music brings a motive and an inspiration. They sing with wonderful enunciation and with a fervor that can come only from spontaneous rapture. When in Elijah the prophets of Baal cried out their prayer for "Fire!" outsiders ran, it is said, and notified the fire department!
To have a large part of the community thus trained, to have all the community thus interested and inspired, to have every least member of the community honored by citizenship in a village where these nobly cultural influences are found, is certainly a great thing. And when we remember that this could happen or rather, could be developed, in any town or village in the land, we can but mourn our silent roadsides, our unsinging lips, our wicked waste of the good gifts of God.
Another rare expression of musical enthusiasm comes from the Central West. The little town of Lindsborg, on the broad high prairies of Kansas, holds each spring during Holy Week a musical celebration called, naturally, the "Messiah Festival." In this case a college is the leader—Bethany College, where there are a thousand students with regular standard courses of study besides varied and excellent choruses, orchestras, societies, and classes for musical development. In the spring of 1914 there was a chorus of six hundred voices; another of children alone contained four hundred and fifty; distinguished singers gave the solos; a week was filled with concerts of classic and modern renderings; Brahms, Dvorak, MacDowell, Sibelius, were found together with Beethoven and Handel, and the whole reached a wonderfully high level of attainment.
What interests us most, however, is to see what this work does for the people of the region. Men and women come from fifteen miles away to attend the rehearsal, and this in winter; three generations of one family sang in the chorus at the last Festival; they play and sing for the pure love and enjoyment of the music. It is altogether impossible to state in words what all this must mean to the moral and spiritual development of the region, to the binding of the hearts of the people in the community, and to the forging of those ties that will hold the young people true in their loyalty to their homes.
It is not claimed that every country community can have such a concourse as this for concert work during the winters; but something like the old singing school might be installed, and home music might be made far more of a joy and comfort than it now is.
That this can be the mission of music in community service is being discerned by many. In the always forward-looking University of Wisconsin, a plan has been made for the development of musical feeling among the people. The desire is to make the people realize the immense social power of music and to give a chance for this welding and delighting influence to have its way in the home, the schools, the churches, in musical organizations of all kinds, in all places of amusement, and in entertainments of all kinds. No doubt other universities in other States will follow this admirable example.
But we do not need colleges and universities to tell us that we should do more with singing than we at present do. Here are six million girls of the countryside—what can they do to redeem the country from this dull silence and unmelodious tedium? What, in fact, might they not do? Let every one of them resolve that she will wake up every morning singing; that she will sing at her work all day long; that she will call for songs in the evenings, with the whole family around—not one, of any age, allowed to be absent from the circle; that she will require that music of some sort shall be part of the ceremony of every society and club she belongs to; that she will get the young people together to sing once at least every week; that she will suggest that the older people should sing together—it is unnecessary and absurd to let the singing days disappear along with youth into the background; and that she will persevere in this till the whole countryside shall ring with song from east to west, and until the stigma that we are a people that do not care for music shall be forever removed. We have some magnificent old folk songs; we have glorious national songs; we have some religious songs with a marching rhythm and a fervor that make them good for every day in the week, for threshing times and for all times; we have a song for every mood and every experience; why not use our songs and enjoy them?
The larger breadths of musical repertory are not so far away from the remote country places as formerly, now that the victrola and other instruments of like kind bring a knowledge of the great orchestral and operatic passages to our very sitting-room. Every village should have this help in order to understand the great music that without it might be shut off from us. There should be one in every social center for general use in the community. A good way is for some member of the music-study committee to give a description of the opera or the oratorio, with comments on the particular passage that the instrument can render; then the listeners are better able to understand what is being played and by the imagination to place the solos in their right background as they are being heard; an impression of the work as a whole will be thus gained that will to some extent approach the composite scene as it is shown on the stage. "Ah! can you imagine what the victrola means to us out here on this prairie!" wrote a friend from western Nebraska. This may be the experience of every rural circle the country over if it will only have community spirit enough to work together and acquire the music-reproducing apparatus.
Another thing that can be done is to get together all the people in the community that can play on any kind of instrument, and make them play together. Do not despise the day of small things. There must be a beginning. It will not be long before we can do more in any village, and at last we can have music of a higher order to drive the ills of isolation out of our atmosphere and introduce a healthful harmony in their place. If a boy belonged to an orchestra that met on Monday and Friday evenings for practise, to a class in voice on Tuesday evening, and had engagements with groups of young men and young women to train for concerts all the other evenings of the week and was to sing in the church choir on Sunday, is it possible that he would feel that he could be spared to go away to the city to live? The case of the Country Girl will be exactly parallel. Her voice is the leading voice in the quartette; she is necessary to the musical atmosphere of the village; she is the hostess everywhere; she cannot be spared from any village and country life that is full of musical and other social engagements. And among the influences that beneficently endow human beings, the one that is at once most welding, most unifying, and most delighting is music.