CHAPTER IX.
United States.
It is a matter for surprise and deep regret that the United States Federal Government should show a lack of interest in musical education. But our young country is not likely to remain for long behind smaller lands. Our hope is secure in the fundamental generosity and wisdom of our national mind, which now squanders vast sums upon musical diversion, but spends nothing at all for the free musical education of its gifted citizens.
We have in this country a strange mixture of races and of ideals, all contributing something of Old World conditions, and combining to form a new type. The people who struggled so bravely through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries were of various origins, but all came to the struggle with tragedy of some kind or other implanted in their mental composition. Emotions beat the pioneers into their one refuge, the Church; even the ballad, simple as it was, found but scant room where the prayer book lay. Pioneer life gave little ground for complication of stimuli, until the Nineteenth century opened the gates of our country to the industrial inventions, and to the discontent of foreign labor. A subdued and almost religious atmosphere stifled emotions during the first half of the Nineteenth century, but the waves of reform sweeping over Europe found their way even here by 1861, and the Great Civil War would have stirred us to our depths, had not the mighty currents of feeling within us been kept in subjection by our Church habits. The few valves of relief permitted to our people in the primitive vaudeville and theatre productions, were not sufficient to offset the irritation of quickly complicating economic stimuli. At this period our immigrant population came from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. These immigrants generally possessed cool heads, and were of fine stern characters, skilled in various crafts, and they came to stay permanently. They became one with our people, and our struggles were their struggles. Italian opera and the higher intellectual diversions were later additions to the pleasures of the rich, but the masses rarely shared in such amusements, and the old-fashioned ballads, and the splendidly developed hymnal Music furnished our only relief for emotional disturbance. Yet this was endurable because of the beautiful hymnal exercise, until the gold-fever and the oil-madness, united with the agitation of the Southern States, set our emotional depths to new movements, and the cry of the laborer for liberty and of the manufacturer for more power, added fear and rage to our every-day emotions. The rapid rise of our national power, the enormous strides in public education, and the incredible multiplication of stimuli upon every side, twisted and stretched our national nerves until we now see ourselves confronted with an abnormal type, which must soon find its normal calm in rhythmic pulse action, or else go to pieces under the strain. Nowhere have we any outlet or re-establishing agency, except in the dance, and in such cheap shows as permit of but a partial relief. The class of foreign labor arriving since 1883 is from the south of Europe, illiterate, fiery, adding another element of danger to our tense nationality, and still our blind government has not opened musical safety valves, for the steam that is fast rising to the bursting point. Our musical talent is of the finest order, but, not having any governmental aid in free instruction, is obliged to go to Europe, there to learn to compound a German, French or Italian medicine for an American disease, when our peculiar social pressure demands a particular American remedy. Private schools, having only their own financial gains in mind, are farcical agents for carrying out any truly social functions. The land cries out for its own musical culture, as strongly in rural districts as in urban. Cannot the government see that musical employment in America is already covering a vast field? Scarcely any function is conducted without Music. Restaurants, hotels, clubs, opera houses, plays, churches, funerals, weddings, social events, parades, steamboat service, labor union meetings, support hundreds of thousands of professional musicians. Yet practically all of this employment is given to foreign-born talent, because only the well-to-do in America can study Music, and the common people who may possess the best talent, and who may both love it and need it the most, are denied this means of making a living, while municipal governments spend useless thousands upon concerts, and a few park bands which but whet the public appetite, while our rich musical talent among the poor lies dying and neglected.[37] No wonder revolution knocks at the door! The government is giving the eye-openers in its free educational plan, so aiding the disturbance of human rhythm by sensational newspapers, noisy streets, high prices and too quick life, yet closes the door to free musical instruction which would tranquillize the mind, and restore equilibrium of pulse. The churches nail down the natural impulses, and society frowns upon “new” forms, but nature will generate her energy nevertheless, and pent up in the human system it will boil over at a certain point.
The United States is by no means lacking in prosperity, sufficient for the maintenance of public musical instruction for the culture of a wage earning occupation. Our financial reports speak for themselves. In comparing our prosperity and our neglect of musical culture with the activities along this line as carried on by other countries, great and small, the following letter from ex-President Taft may be of interest:
The White House,
Washington.
July 3rd, 1909.
My dear Sir:—
I have your letter and I do not think it possible to secure from the American government any appropriation for the promotion of musical schools. This must be done by private munificence if at all.
Sincerely yours,
WM. H. TAFT.
America is mad for Music. The moving-picture shows are saving our sanity with their rhythmic combinations of light and sound waves, their daily audiences amounting to 5,000,000 people in 14,000 picture theaters, and 4,000 subjects annually placed upon the American market.[38] By this means we retain our rhythm, but the higher remedies of the orchestral concert, opera and chamber Music performances are denied the people who have no wealth, while the hundreds of thousands of paying positions in the bodies which compose these forces, are likewise prohibited to our native talent, because there are no free schools in which such talent can be developed. Only the well-to-do may study Music in the United States and, strangely enough, our real talent often lies not in this class, but outside of this charmed circle, down among the elements of our foreign-born and the natives of foreign-born, whose ancestral nerves have been fed upon nationally provided musical rhythm.