V. MUSIC AS A SOCIAL FORCE
Leaving this actual experience and its effects on the community, let us ask ourselves what this singing means to the individuals who do it. In the first place, it makes articulate something within them which never finds expression in words or acts. In the second place, it permits them to create beauty instead of standing outside it. Or, to speak still more definitely, it not only gives them an intimate familiarity with some great compositions, but it accustoms them to the technique by means of which music expresses itself. They learn to make melodic lines, to add a tone which changes the whole character of a chord; they learn how themes are disposed in relation to one another; they come into intimate contact with the actual materials of the art by handling them. This, we do not need to say, is the key to the knowledge and understanding of anything. You cannot understand life, or love, or hate, or objects, or ideas, until you have dealt in them yourself. Singing has the profound psychological advantage of giving active issue to that love of beauty which is usually entirely passive.
The artist has two functions: he draws, or paints, or models; he uses language or sounds. This comprises his technique. But he also possesses imaginative perception. Now, nothing is more certain than that our understanding of what he does must be in kind. We learn to understand his technique by actual experience of it. So, also, we learn to enter into the higher qualities of his art by the exercise of the same faculties which he uses. Our feelings, our minds, and our imaginations must take a reflection from him as in a mirror. If the glass is blurred or the angle of reflection distorted we cannot see the image in its perfection. The light comes from we know not where.
Let any reader of these words ask himself if the statement they contain of the qualities of music and of our relation to it could not with equal force be applied to his own business or occupation. Is not his understanding of that business or occupation based on these two essentials: first, familiarity with its methods and materials, and, second, some conception of the real meaning, significance, and possibility that lie behind its outward appearance and manifestation?
I have not laid sufficient stress on the advantage to men of singing. Not only does it enable them to become self-expressive, but it gives them the most wholesome of diversions, it equalizes them, it creates a sort of brotherhood, it takes their minds off per cents, and gives them a new and different insight. This is, of course, not accomplished by the kind of music men now sing, which is chiefly associated with sports and conviviality. So long as music is only outside us, so long as we educate our children without bringing them into actual contact with its materials, giving them little real training in the development of the senses, just so long will it remain a mystery, just so long will its office be misunderstood. What a perplexity it is now to many of us! How it does thrust us away! We have got beyond being ashamed to love it, but we love it from afar.
From a sociological point of view this discussion has thus far been somewhat limited. Now, the possibilities in music to weld together socially disorganized communities have never been fully realized in America. Were we to set about using it directly to that end, we should find out how valuable it is in breaking down artificial barriers. By choral singing, people in any one locality can be brought into a certain sympathy with each other. Groups who attend the same church, the fathers and mothers of children whom the settlements reach—wherever there is a “neighborhood” there is a chance for singing. It needs only a person who believes in it, and who will rigidly select only the best music. And where neighborhood groups have been singing the same fine music, any great gathering of people would find everybody ready to take part in choral singing. This would make community music a reality, and would doubtless so foster the love of the art as eventually to affect the whole musical situation. Any one who has ever had personal experience of bringing fine music to those who cannot afford to attend concerts knows that such people are as keen for the best as are those who can afford it. There is no one so quick to appreciate the best as the person who lives apart from all those social usages of ours which constitute our silk-spun cocoons. There we lie snugly ensconced, protected from sharp winds, completely enshrouded, while these other folk are battling with life itself. We may be satisfied with a gleam or two through the mesh; they are not. They meet reality on every hand and know it when they see it. No make-believe can deceive them.
And when I say this I mean that the experiment has been tried over and over again. In what are called “the slums” of the greatest American and English cities I have seen hundreds and even thousands of poor people listening to the music of Beethoven, and to a few simple words about it in rapt and tense silence, and have heard them break out into such unrestrained applause as comes only from those who are really hungry for good music. Put a good orchestra into any one of these places and you will find the best kind of an audience. Such people have no taint of hyper-criticism, no desire to talk wisely about the latest composer. They have not constructed for themselves a nice little æsthetic formula which will fit everything—a sort of protective coloring; their minds are not “made up.”
Let us not misunderstand this situation. I am not writing about painting or sculpture, for I know that these arts involve certain perceptive and selective qualities of the mind which require long training. I am writing about music, which appeals to a sense differentiated and trained long before the sense for color-vibration or for beauty of form was developed, a sense which we possess in a highly developed state in very childhood.
Imagine a small opera house in the lower East Side of New York or in the North End or South End of Boston, which the people there might frequent at sums within their means; imagine a small Western city with such an opera house; and compare the probable results with those now attained by our gorgeous and needlessly expensive operatic performances which, whether at home or abroad, leave little behind them but a financial vacuum, and a dim idea that somehow opera means famous “stars” singing in a highly exaggerated manner in a strange language, in stranger dramas, where motives and purposes are stranger still. Concerts and operatic performances such as I have advocated would supplement and complete our own musical activities. These paid artists would be playing and singing to us in a language we ourselves had learned by using it. Music would be domestic; we should understand it better and love it more.
I am familiar with the old argument that concerts and operas so conducted would not pay. To this I reply that it is probably true. Does settlement work pay? Does a library pay? Does any altruistic endeavor anywhere pay? No; nothing of this sort ever shows a money balance on the right side of the ledger. But we do not keep that column in figures. It foots up in joy, not in dollars. The best kind of social “uplift” would be something that made people happier. The real uplift is of the soul, not of the body. Let a rift of beauty pierce the dull scene. Let us have a taste of heaven now; and let it be not yours or mine, but theirs. In music everybody makes his own heaven at the time.
But it is not money that is lacking. Hundreds of thousands are annually spent to make up the deficits of our symphony orchestras. Millions are spent for the physical well-being of our poorer people. Beauty for the well-to-do, who are, like as not, too well-to-do to care much for it; materialistic benefits for the poor and unfortunate, who are fairly starving for something bright and joyous. What would it not mean to these latter were they able to go once a week to a hall in their own part of the city, to hear a fine concert at a fee well within their means, and to know that there would be no chairman there to tell them “what a great privilege,” etc., but that they would be let alone to enjoy themselves in their own way. These, after all, make up the great body of our city populations; from these humble homes come the future American citizens; in some ways they are superior to us, for they survive a much harder battle, and preserve their self-respect in face of enormous difficulties. Why should we dole out to them what we think they need? Why not offer them something that puts us all on the same level?
The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from an investigation of our musical situation is that we need only opportunities of expressing ourselves. Every village contains a potential singing society, every church contains a potential choir, every family in which there are children might sing simple songs together. There is a singing club hidden away in every neighborhood. Every city might have, on occasion, thousands of people singing fine songs and hymns. What is the present need? Leaders: educated musicians who have learned the technique of their art and have, at the same time, learned to understand and appreciate the greatest music, and who prefer it to any other. Our institutions for training musicians are sending out a continual stream of graduates, many of whom begin their labors in small towns and cities. Nearly every community has at least one man who has sufficient technical knowledge of music to direct groups of singers, large and small. What kind of music does he, in his heart, prefer? The answer is to be read in programmes here and there, in the record of unsuccessful singing societies, in the public performances of “show pieces.” Should not our institutions pay more attention to forming the taste of their students? Is it really necessary to teach them technique through bad examples of the art of music? Can they safely spend several years dealing with distinctly inferior music for the sake of a facile technique? Is rhetoric or oratory superior to literature? There is no such thing as teaching violin or piano-playing and teaching music. If the violin or piano teaching deals with poor music which the pupil practices several hours a day, no lessons in musical history, theory, form, or æsthetics can counteract the effect of that constant association. We cannot advance without leaders. We look to the training schools for them. And these schools cannot expect to supply them to us unless they so conduct their teaching as to develop in students a love and understanding of the best.
This article, then, expresses my conviction that the average American man or woman is potentially musical. I believe the world of music to be a true democracy. I am convinced that our chief need is to make music ourselves. I believe that under right conditions we should enjoy doing so; I think all art is closely related to the sum of human consciousness. And just as I see great music based on what we are and what we feel, so I see the expert performance of music as being merely our own performance magnified and beautified by extreme skill. I see, in short, a necessary and natural connection between ourselves and both composer and performer. I believe that all the great pictures and sculpture and music lay first in the general consciousness and then became articulate in one man. I believe no statesman, no philosopher, no, not even a Christ, to be conceivable save as he lies first in men’s hearts. What they are in posse he is in esse. That we all are more musical than we are thought to be; that we are more musical than we get the chance to be—of this there is no doubt whatever.