There is no reason in the nature of things why our colleges and universities should not also be the centers of a concentrated and intensive activity, directed upon research and philosophic generalization in the things of music as in other fields of inquiry. For this they must provide libraries, endowments, and fellowships. Such works as Mr. Elson's History of American Music, Mr. Krehbiel's Afro-American Folksongs, and Mr. Kelly's Chopin as a Composer should properly emanate from the organized institutions of learning which are able to give leisure and facility to men of scholarly ambition. The French musical historian, Jules Combarieu, enumerates as the domains constantly open to musical scholarship: acoustics, physiology, mathematics, psychology, æsthetics, history, philology, palæography, and sociology.[[100]] Every one of these topics has already an indispensable place in the college and university system—it is for trained scholarship to draw from them the contributions that will relate music explicitly to the active life of the intellect.
But not for the intellect only. Here the colleges are still in danger of error, due to their long-confirmed emphasis upon concepts, demonstrations, scientific methods, and "positive" results, to the neglect of the imagination, the emotions, the intuitions, and the things spiritually discerned. "The sovereign of the arts," says Edmund Clarence Stedman, "is the imagination, by whose aid man makes every leap forward; and emotion is its twin, through which come all fine experiences, and all great deeds are achieved. Youth demands its share in every study that can engender a power or a delight. Universities must enhance the use, the joy, the worth of existence. They are institutions both human and humane."[[101]]
The test of effective teaching of music in the college: Does it enrich the life of the student through the inculcation of an æsthetic interest?
Institutions which exclude the agencies which act directly to enhance "the joy and the worth of existence" are universities only in name. Equally imperfect are they if, while nominally accepting these agencies, they recognize only those elements in them which are susceptible to scientific analysis, whose effects upon the student can be tested by examinations and be marked and graded—elements which are only means, and not final ends. The college forever needs the humanizing, socializing power of music, the drama, the arts of design, and it must use them not as confined to the classroom or to any single section of the institution, but as the effluence of spiritual life, permeating and invigorating the whole. In the mental life of the college there have always ruled investigation, comparison, analysis, and the temper fostered is that of reflection and didacticism. Into this world of deliberation, routine, mechanical calculation, there has come the warm breath of music, art, and poetry, stirring a new fire of rapture amid the embers of speculation. The instincts of youth spring to inhale it; youth feels affiliation with it, for art and poesy, like nature, are ever self-renewing and never grow old. It works to unify the life of the college whose tendency is to divide into sealed compartments of special intellectual interests. It introduces a life that all may share, because men divide when led by their intellects, they unite when led by their emotions. Among the fine arts music is perhaps supreme in its power to refine the sense of beauty, to soften the heart at the touch of high thought and tender sentiment, to bring the individual soul into sympathy with the over-soul of humanity. It is this that gives music its supreme claim to an honored place in the halls of learning, as it is its crowning glory.
The whole argument, then, is reduced to this: that with all the scientific aspects of the art with respect to material, structure, psychological action, historical origins and developments and relations, of which the college, as an institution of exact learning, may take cognizance, music must be accepted and taught just because it is beautiful and promotes the joy of life, and the development of the higher sense of beauty and the spiritual quickening that issues therefrom must be the final reason for its use. At the same time it must be so cultivated and taught that it will unite its forces for a common end with all those factors which, within the college and without the college, are now working with an energy never known before in American history for a social life animated by a zeal for ideal rather than material ends, and inspired by nobler visions of the true meaning of national progress.
Among the worthy functions of our colleges there is none more needful than that of inspiring ardent young crusaders who shall go forth to contend against the hosts of mediocrity, ugliness, and vulgarity. One encouragement to this warfare is in the fact that these hosts, although legion, are dull as well as gross, and may easily be bewildered and put to rout by the organized assaults of the children of light. So may it be said of our institutions of culture, as Matthew Arnold said of Oxford, that they "keep ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side."
Edward Dickinson
Oberlin College
Footnotes:
[[94]] Arthur L. Manchester: "Music Education in the United States; Schools and Departments of Music." United States Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1908, No. 4.
[[95]] Papers and Proceedings of the Music Teachers' National Association, 1907; report by Leonard B. McWhood.