II. THE VALUE OF SINGING
In the first chapter I discussed the qualities and properties of music as such—music, that is, in its pure estate, unconnected with words as in songs, or with words, action, costume, and scenery, as in opera. And now, in writing about children’s music, it is still necessary to keep in mind that, even when music is allied to words, it has the necessities of its own nature to fulfill, and that the use of suitable or even fine words in a child’s song does not change this condition.
In beginning this discussion I propose to ignore for the moment the effect in after life of what we advocate for children, and I also discard (with a certain contempt) the common notion—true enough in its way—that music is for them a rest and a change after burdensome tasks. For we must see music, in relation to children, as it really is. I go behind the psychologist[4] who says, “ ... the prime end of musical education ... is to train the sentiments, to make children feel nature, religion, country, home, duty, ... to guarantee sanity of the heart out of which are the issues of life”; for I say that music, by itself, cannot make children feel nature, religion, country, home, or duty, and that these sentiments are aroused by the heightened effect of words set to music, and not by the music itself. The prime end of music—and of the other arts—is beauty. Song is not story, melodies have nothing to do with morals, and all the theories about music—such as those of Darwin and Spencer—are wrong when they attribute to it any ulterior purpose or origin whatever. Music is an end, not a means.
Now this beauty which the soul of man craves, and always has craved, cannot be brought to little children in literary form, because they cannot read or because their knowledge of words is too limited; nor can it be brought to them in the form of painting, because they are not sufficiently sensitive to color-vibrations; nor of sculpture, for their sense of form is not sufficiently developed. In fact, their power of response is exceedingly limited in most directions. They can neither draw nor paint nor write nor read, so that this beauty which we value so highly seems shut out from them. This were so but for music.
By singing, and by singing only, a little child of five may come in contact with a pure and perfect form of beauty. Not only that, but the child can reproduce this beauty entirely unaided, and in the process of doing so its whole being—body, mind, heart, and soul—is engaged. The song, for the moment, is the child. There is no possible realization of the little personality comparable to this. Here, in sounds, is that correlation of impulses in which the stars move; here is the world of order and beauty in miniature; here is a microcosm of life; here is a talisman against the cold, unmeaning facts which are driven into children’s brains to jostle one another in unfriendly companionship. Through this they can feel a beauty and order which their minds are incapable of grasping. The joy which a child gets in reproducing beautiful melodies is like no other experience in life. It is absolutely a personal act, for the music lends itself to the child’s individuality as nothing else does. Music, in this sense, preserves in children that ideality which is one of the most precious possessions of childhood, and which we would fain keep in after life; which loves flowers and animals, which sees the truth in fairy stories, which believes everything to be good and is alien to everything sinister, which sees the moon and stars, not as objects so many millions of miles from the earth, and parts of a great solar system, but as lanterns hung in the heavens.
The prime object, then, of musical education for children is so to develop their musical sensibilities as to make them love and understand the best music. Does this bring up the question, “What is the best music?” By the “best” music I mean exactly what I should mean if I were to substitute the word “literature” for “music”—I mean the compositions of the great masters. And if you say that the great masters did not write music suitable for little children, I reply that such music has nevertheless been produced by all races in their childhood, that it exists in profusion, that it is commonly known as “folk-song,” that it is the basis upon which much of the greatest music in the world rests, and, finally, that it is the natural and, indeed, the inevitable means of approach to such great music.
This basis, to which I refer, is both actual and ideal. Many great composers have used actual folk-melodies. The chorales in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” for example, are based on traditional melodies. In Haydn’s instrumental compositions folk-songs are often used verbatim, and the total number of them to be found in his works is very great. Notable examples may be found in Beethoven—as in the “Rasoumoffsky” quartettes, and the Seventh Symphony—while Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikovsky used folk-melodies freely. Dvořák and Grieg are essentially national in their idiom and style, and folk-music may be said to be the basis of the music of each. Ideally the debt of music to folk-song is greater still. Any typical, Adagio of Beethoven (such as that in the so-called “Pathétique Sonata”) springs from folk-song, and, in spite of the long process of development through which music had passed, reflects—in a more mature form—the same sentiment one finds in the original. How could it be otherwise? Is there any art, or any other intellectual activity of man, of which the same thing cannot be said? Were not Keats and Shelley waiting to be born of Coleridge and Wordsworth? Is there such a thing as a fruit without a vine; a blossom without a stem; an end without a beginning? There have been composers, poets, and painters who have lived detached from the common consciousness—like those strange organisms in nature that float in sea or air and draw nothing from the earth’s native soil; but all the greatest minds have been rooted in the past and have drawn their inspiration from common human experience. Keeping in mind, then, that our object is to train the taste of children so that they will love the best music, let us examine what is actually taking place in the teaching of music to children.