VI. THE REAL GOAL
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.