CONSERVATORY LIFE IN BOSTON.
Our aspiring young friend from the rural districts who comes to Boston, the great musical centre, for the art-training she cannot enjoy at home, is full of enthusiasm as she crosses the threshold of that teeming hive, the New England Conservatory of Music. The conflicting din of organs, pianos and violins, of ballad, scale and operetta, though discordant to the actual ear have a harmony which is not lost to her spiritual sense. It is a choral greeting to the new recruit, who gathers in a moment all the moral support humanity derives from sympathy and companionship in a common purpose. Devoutly praying that this inspiration may not ooze out at her fingers' ends, she goes into the director's sanctum to be examined. This trial has pictured itself to her active imagination for weeks past. Of course he will ask her to play one of her pieces, perhaps several. Has she not, ever since her plans for coming to the Conservatory were matured, been engaged in carefully training, manipulating, her battle-horse for this critical experiment? As the door of that little room closes upon her her knees begin to tremble. But how easy and reassuring is the director's manner! He requests her to be seated at the piano. Will she be able to remember a note at all? That is now the question. Her musical memory is for the nonce obliterated. He may have an intuition of this, for he says quietly, "Now play me a scale and a five-finger exercise." Cecilia does this mechanically, and feels encouraged. Now for the piece, the battle-horse, to be brought out and shown off. She waits quietly a minute. But he asks for nothing more. Her mere touch expresses to his practised ear her probable grade of acquirement, and he assigns her to the instructor he deems best suited to test her abilities and classify her in accordance with them.
In a day or two she finds herself in regular working order, one of a class of four. "And am I only to have fifteen minutes for my lesson," she asks herself, "when I always had an hour from the professor at Woodville?" She knows that recitation is the cream of the lesson. In the actual rendering of her task she can, in justice to her companions, consume but a quarter of the allotted hour, but she soon discovers that she is to a great extent a participant in Misses A——, B—— and C——'s cream. After the master's correction of her own performance, to see and hear the same study played by others with more or less excellence—to compare their faults with her own—is perhaps of greater benefit to her, while in this eminently receptive frame, than a mere personal repetition would be. The horizon is broader: she gets more light on the work in hand.
"And now," she asks of her teacher, "how much would you advise, how much do you wish, me to practise?"
He smiles: memory reverts to his own six hours at Leipsic or Stuttgart, but "milk for babes:" "Certainly not less than two hours a day under any circumstances or obstacles, if you care to learn at all. If you have fair health, and neither onerous household duties nor educational demands upon your time outside of music, let me earnestly recommend you to practise four hours. Less than this cannot show the desired result."
The new pupil accepts the maximum of four hours' daily practice. "I should be ashamed to give less," she generously confides to herself and her room-mate: "it is but a small proportion, after all, of the twenty-four."
But this is not all. There are exercises at the Conservatory apart from her special lessons which are too valuable to a broad musical education to be neglected—the instruction in harmony, sight reading, the art of teaching, analyses of compositions, as well as lectures and concerts. One of the Conservatory exercises strikes her as being alike novel and edifying. This is called "Questions and Answers." A box in one of the halls receives anonymous questions from the pupils from day to day, and once a week a professor of the requisite enlightenment to satisfy the miscellaneous curiosity of six or seven hundred minds devotes a full hour to the purpose. These questions are presumed to relate solely to musical topics, and the custom was instituted for the relief of timid yet earnest inquirers. A motley crew, however, frequently avail themselves of the masquerade privilege to steal in uninvited. Cecilia illustrates these fantastic ramifications of the young idea for the benefit of friends in the interior. She jots down some of these questions and their answers in her note-book:
"How does a polka differ from a schottisch?"—"A schottisch is a lazy polka. A polka is the worst thing in the world: the next worst is a schottisch. A schottisch is so lazy, so slow, that a fire would hardly kindle with it."
"In preparing to play a piece in public should one practise it up to the last moment?"—"Try it and see: you will soon decide in the negative. Lay it aside some time before if you would avoid nervousness."
"What would you give as a first piano-lesson to a young lady who had never taken a lesson before?"—"Make her get the piano-stool at exactly the right height and place: then ensure a good position of her hands and easy motion of the fingers. Let her practise this for three days."
"How far advanced ought a person to be in music to begin to teach?"—"Teaching involves three things: first, a knowledge of something on the part of the teacher; second, a corresponding ignorance on the part of the learner; third, the ability to impart this knowledge. These conditions fulfilled might sometimes allow a person to begin to teach with advantage at a very early age and with a very moderate range of acquirements, though, as every instructor knows, his earlier methods were very different from his later ones. The difficulty with young teachers in general is that they try to teach too much at once, like the young minister who preached all he knew in his first sermon. Never introduce more than two principles in any one lesson, and as a rule but one."
"Is a mazourka as bad as a polka?"—"No. I think it is not morally so bad as a polka: it has somewhat the grace of the waltz."
"Who is the best music-teacher in Boston?"—"As there are twenty-five hundred persons teaching music in and about this city, and seventy-five regular teachers at this Conservatory alone, both ignorance and delicacy on my part should forbid a definite reply. It were well to remember Paris, the apple of discord and the Trojan war."
"Is Mr. A—— (a young professor at the Conservatory, voted attractive by the feminine pupils in general) married?"—"This being Leap Year, a personal investigation of the subject might be more satisfactory and effectual than a public decision of this point."
At the expiration of her first term Cecilia realizes that her condition is one of constant growth: quickening influences are in the air. She came to Boston to learn music: she is also learning life. She perceives, moreover, that in her musical progress the æsthetic part of her nature has not been permitted to keep in advance of technique. Heretofore she was ever gratifying herself and her friends by undertaking new and more elaborate pieces, not one of which ever became other than a mere superficial possession. Now her taste is inexorably commanded to wait for her muscles: the discipline has been useful to her. After a few more such winters she will return to Woodville a teacher, herself become a quickening influence to others. Musical thought will be truer, will find a more adequate expression, in her vicinity. She will act as a reflector, sending forth rays of light into dark corners farther than she can follow them.
And this is the motive, the mission, of the conservatory system in this country, inasmuch as organized is more potent than individual effort to elevate our national taste, to prepare the way for the future artist, that he may be born under the right conditions, his divine gift fostered and directed to become worthy of its exalted destiny. Already centuries old in Europe, the conservatory is a young thing of comparatively limited experience on our soil. It was introduced here twenty-five years ago by Eben Tourjée. He had longed and vainly sought for the advantages to perfect his own talent, and resolved while a mere boy that those of like tastes who came after him should not have to contend with the obstacles he had fought—that instruction should be brought within the reach of all by a college of music similar to those in Europe, embracing the best elements, attaining the most satisfactory results at the least possible cost to the student. This project, for a youth without capital, dependent upon his abilities for his personal support, was regarded even by sympathetic friends as visionary. But nothing progressive is accepted as a mere optimistic vision by the predestined reformer. Remote Huguenot and immediate Yankee ancestry is perhaps a good combination for pioneer material. However this may be, his efforts were crystallized, shaped, sooner than most schemes of such magnitude. Continuing his classes in piano, organ and voice for a year or two with successful energy, Mr. Tourjée found in 1859 the desired opportunity for his experiment. The principal of a seminary in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, accorded him the use of his building, and more students presented themselves ultimately than could be accommodated on the grounds of the institution. After a visit to Europe for the purpose of examining the celebrated German, French and Italian schools, Mr. Tourjée returned, and, fired with new zeal, started in 1864 a chartered conservatory at Providence. This proved eminently successful. But Boston was the ideal site: talent gravitates toward large cities, and Boston's acknowledged "love of the first rate" would be the best surety for a lofty standard and approximate fulfilment. In 1867, under a charter from the State, he finally transplanted his school to this metropolis under the name of the New England Conservatory of Music, which it retains to the present date. It has, with characteristic American rapidity, become the largest music-school in the world, having within fifteen years instructed over twenty thousand pupils: in a single term it frequently numbers between eight and nine hundred. It has a connection with Boston University, the only one in the country where music is placed on the same basis with other intellectual pursuits, and the faculty numbers some of the most renowned artists and composers in the land. Eben Tourjée was appointed dean of the College of Music in the University, with the title of Mus. Doctor.
The New England Conservatory deserves this special mention as the parent school in America, and it has been promptly and ably followed by the establishment of others in most of our large cities.
F. D.