The Federal government of our United States may not be able under its Constitution to institute Schools of Music, but the states should begin to give more consideration to State Schools of Music. If the U. S. Government is constitutionally unable to maintain National Schools of Music, any comparison with European governments so licensed by their constitutions, would be unjust and misleading. The statistics given are intended merely to show what the various governments are doing along the line of national support of musical culture, and no comparison is attempted. Our States and cities are expending vast sums upon music. The contention of the author, however, is that State Musical Colleges will not produce a national type of music, and that the highest ideal rests in a Federal control of musical culture. When music can be regarded as a national need, and not merely as a social diversion, the Federal government may see its way clear to a Federal support of musical education. Music as an important measure in social control, and as an equally important factor in individual health, belongs under the eye of the national head. With the faint hope that this place will sometime be granted to music, we submit this work.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] An atrocious murder had been committed by one of this group during the week and the Mission Superintendent warned us by telegram of serious revolt and danger.
[27] Professor Giddings’ “Law of Increasing and Diminishing Returns” would apply here as elsewhere.
CHAPTER IV.
Toneurology: A New Branch of Study.
Humanity then must maintain its pulse in a rhythmic-stimulation-and-repose-for-distribution system. This can best be done by the greater exercise of the emotional nature, and by the indulgence of romantic ideals, for emotions are pulse-lifters, dragging the stagnant life motions up to a normal mean rhythm. The man or nation, whose pulse is kept most constantly keyed up to the normal, is the man or nation which achieves the finest results. Our four national examples, England, France, Germany, and Italy, demonstrate these emotional products. Germany leads in her quality of musical (or emotional) output, because she led during the century in her sufferings, prepared, as they were, by so much of heart breaking experience during the preceding century. France comes next. Her national emotions have been weakened in tragic elements by the love of the spectacular, by the intellectual need of vivid pictures and colors, and by the assertiveness and pride of an ancestral supremacy, hard to subdue to the state of tender romance and heart tragedy, which characterized Germany’s strong and sentimental temperament. After France comes Italy, emotional, poetic, merry-hearted, making a farce of tragedy because her century’s life produced so little national sadness. Only in recent years has it come to be felt that the mean rhythm of Germany can become like the mean rhythm of any nation, even of Italy, if the depths or motions are sounded as were Germany’s. England brings up the rear, her century’s mean rhythm being far below the high water mark. This is shown by the delicate comedies, and naive sentimentalism of her music, which are the fit measure of her national pulse rate of emotionalism.
Music, as a human need, carries us deep into the secrets of life, and will in time open the way for a new science. Music is not the name for this new branch of knowledge, as the study would involve an exhaustive investigation of nervous reactions in their social and individual relations to sound vibrations. We would suggest the name “Toneurology” because tone is understood in all modern languages, and “neuros” has the same advantage. This study would involve research along entirely new lines, such as an investigation of motions in bodily organs; mathematical estimation of the vibration value of each pulse beat, and of the sums of tone vibrations in chords, upon one instrument and upon many, as in an orchestra; the rate of increase or decrease of the pulse after contact with tonal force, with approximate computation of the time that the latter can maintain a normal pulse, and the necessary frequency of its application. The research student in this new science must have a working knowledge of physics, biology, psychology, sociology, harmony, counterpoint, musical history, political history and physiology, with a new study of the Human Will. We should thus add a new science to the group of exact concrete sciences.
It is with no little diffidence that we suggest this as a new branch of study. There are indications that universities adopting Music into their lists of studies, recognize the need of Music’s closer touch with scientific courses. If Music is ever to outgrow its swaddling clothes of sentimental and frivolous superficiality, and mere amusement conception, it must clearly manifest its scientific dignity, and its inseparable connection with physics, sociology, biology and psychology. It must take its place among those studies which encourage scientific tests and lifelong research. It must leave its hitherto “divine aspect” on the rubbish heap, along with the “divine rights” of kings, magic, ancestor worship, and ghost theories. We believe some secrets of life preservation will be found in Toneurology.
The curious effect of Music upon groups suggests a possible counterpart of such reaction upon individuals. Music, once regarded in terms of motion, with laws of motion likewise applied to the bodily integrations, the path opens out clear and true.
The fact that men, in spite of all the great scientific discoveries, harden and fade with age, tends to prove that the human body has not been completely envisaged by any or all of them. We offer here a study which includes many of the abstract and concrete sciences but directed towards a new combination, i. e., tone and nerve, to be tested and quantitatively measured under the laws of motion instead of under the laws of perception and of appreciation. We take Music out of the field of ideals entirely, and place it upon a level with rhythm establishers, incident forces, and pulse fillers. Our statistics[28] show the sub-conscious appreciation of Music as a human need by the countries represented, and those governments show a larger proportion of internal unrest where musical provision is small. This test, although indicative, is far from satisfactory, since no provision, adequate to act constantly upon the life forces, has as yet been made.