Why We Love Music

by Carl E. Seashore

General Principles

(1) Music should function early in the life of the child. (2) The primary grades should constitute a period of orientation. (3) By the end of this period talent should have been discovered and analyzed.

Questions to Consider

(1) Why is development of the love of music the principal objective at this age? (2) What voice training, aside from rote singing and speech, should be offered in the grades? (3) Should the piano be favored as the first instrument? (4) Is it possible to have a primary-grade "orchestra"? (5) What is the function of achievement tests in music at this age? (6) What factors have been most effective in putting love of music into the public schools? (7) How can progress in music be enhanced by children's opportunities for performing among themselves? (8) Should any children be excused from participation in musical instruction offered in the primary grades?

Discuss These Situations

(1) Here is a gifted young woman, well trained in music and in psychological and educational methods, zealously devoted to her art, who desires to establish a career as a private music teacher for children. Characterize her procedure in contrast to the procedure of her professional forbears. (2) Here is a young man or woman, similarly gifted, and well trained and critical. What pitfalls of prevalent tendencies in public-school music of today should he or she avoid?

Chapter IV
MUSIC AND YOUTH

There is a distinctively musical period in life: the period of youth. Youth is the age of emotional response and of social awakening, the age of serious play, the age of decision and elimination, the dominant learning period, and the age of freedom and leisure. Before this period the life of the child has been relatively tranquil. After this period the occupational affairs of life are more exacting. Before this period most children participate in music in a routine way without professing it. After this period large numbers of those who have had training or have expressed their enthusiasms in rich participation in the musical life cool off, as it were, and continue their musical activities in a more or less perfunctory way, except for the few who have taken up the art professionally or continue as enthusiastic amateurs.

YOUTH, THE AGE OF MUSIC

The emotional age. For the present purpose we may think of youth as represented by the age of the teens, usually beginning in the high school. It is a brief period of storm and stress, emotional awakening and emotional struggles, in which the various emotional drives, more or less latent before, assert themselves, often to cool off or to be attenuated in later life. The older psychologists spoke of it as a period of rebirth, the passing from the period of protected and directed life into the emergence of a self-asserting personality. At the time of this awakening, life is largely emotional; it is the period of ardent love, of social awakening, of sports and play of all kinds, of fortes and faults, of artistic efforts, of devotion to ideals, of awakening and emergence of controlled imagination, of the development of the great enthusiasms for life. Poetry, conversation, dancing, heroic stunts, emotional adventures of all kinds have their fling. This emotional tendency finds its expression in the language of emotion, of which music is one.