For eight years, then, in our public schools children are taught—as far as may be—to sing at sight. Is there a fine song which presents a certain difficulty, it is placed in the book at the point where that difficulty arises, and is treated as a sight-reading test. It is subjected to analysis as to its melodic progressions, each of which is taken up as a technical problem. This is precisely the method so often and so fatally used in connection with poetry. The Skylark’s wings are clipped; the Grecian Urn becomes an archæological specimen; the Eve of Saint Agnes a date in the almanac.
This brings me to the most important part of the whole matter. If expert sight-singing is not only a false ideal, but one impossible of general attainment in public schools under the conditions at present existing, what does justify our expenditure of such large sums of money? The sole justification for it is to bring children to love the best music, and so to train their taste for it as to make them capable of discriminating between good and bad. Now a thorough test of the children in the kindergarten or the lower primary grades of any public school anywhere will surely reveal that such children start life with the makings of good taste in music. Nature is prodigal here—prodigal and faithful. In the most remote villages in this country, in purely industrial communities, among the poor and among the rich (both having forgotten), children love good songs. It is their natural inheritance. No excess of materialism in the generations affects it in the least. This is the primitive endowment; deep down in human character there lies a harmony of adjustment with nature. Overlay it as you may with custom or habit; sully it with luxury; it still persists, for without it human life cannot be. This idealistic basis of human life, which is never destroyed, appears fresh and unstained in children, and in their song it bubbles up as from a pure spring.[5]
It has been a matter of frequent comment that there has been no such increase in choral singing either in town or city as our public school music teaching should lead us to expect. In fact the countless young people who graduate from our schools seem to make almost no impression on choral singing. It still remains the least of our musical activities. It is as difficult as ever to secure people who care enough for the practice of singing to come to rehearsals. Voluntary choir singing, for the pleasure to be derived from it, is rare. Are not our public schools partly responsible for this condition? Is not that natural taste and love for good music, to which I have just referred, allowed to lapse and finally almost to disappear? And is not this largely the result of too much technical instruction, and too little good music? I know that there are many more distractions for children than formerly; I know that the home influence in music is slight, and that parents assume less responsibility for their children than they used to do. But, granting all this, the musical instruction in public schools does not fulfill its proper function, nor can it hope to do so until it changes its ideals.
There is no doubt whatever that, speaking generally, the best music with which to train the taste of young children is that known as “folk-song.” The supposition that any musician is capable of composing a fine enduring song suitable for children is false in its very essence. The constant appearance of new songs for children and their inevitable disappearance in the next generation is evidence enough that this is so, apart from the unmistakable evidence in the songs themselves. In reality the good tune is right, the poor tune wrong; the good tune conforms to, is a part of nature; the poor tune is false in quantity and in sentiment, and not a part of nature. The fine tune is straightforward, honest, and genuine in sentiment; the inferior tune professes to be so, but it is not. Fine simple tunes of the kind suitable for children to sing have been composed,—“Way Down upon the Suwanee River” is an example,—but they are very few in number. The only safeguard is to keep chiefly to the old melodies whose quality has been proved. And since the number of fine folk-tunes is more than sufficient for our purpose, and since most of them are not copyrighted, there would seem to be no reason whatever why they should not constitute the larger part of the music we give our children to sing in their early years of school life.
I have said that children like real tunes in preference to false ones. We have therefore a perfectly sound basis upon which to build. But it must not be forgotten that singing is in itself an agreeable pastime to children and that their taste can be lowered as well as raised. With their fundamental good taste to build on, we can be reasonably sure of accomplishing our purpose if we provide them all through their school life with the best music and no other. This is not done and the failure of our school music to justify itself can be attributed chiefly to this.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the very place where it will do the most harm—namely, in the kindergarten. And this is true of kindergartens generally. In the process of providing very young children with suitable words for their songs—which in the kindergarten are considered of first importance—the effect of inferior music seems to have been entirely ignored. In other words, the one sense through which young children receive their most vivid impressions has been systematically and persistently violated. I have examined a great many song books used in American kindergartens and I have never found one that was really suitable for the purpose of training the musical taste of young children. Our craving for a complete pedagogical system is characteristic; it is our refuge, our bulwark. Instead of facing actual problems as they are, we take some ready-made system—which some other perplexed person has made for a shelter—and proceed to adopt it in toto. I mean by this that the custom of kindergarten authorities is to buy a book in the open market—a book whose sole guarantee is that it is for sale. It probably contains inferior music, but the purchaser asks no questions. Now an enterprising and well-equipped teacher could gather together during a summer holiday twenty-five simple folk-songs, could have suitable words written for them, and could have them mimeographed (if more copies were needed), and put into use in her school. I say nothing of the benefit to her of doing this.
It is obvious, then, that our public school music labors under great difficulties. The classes are too large,—sometimes forty-five children in a room,—the music lesson period is too short; the music teacher visits each room at too great intervals; the grade teacher is perhaps not properly qualified to teach music and the head master’s interest in it may be perfunctory. The study itself is, therefore, irregular, as must be the case when such conditions as these exist. Yet we are trying to produce expert results. Why not say to ourselves that since our population as a whole is not yet actively interested in the best music, and since the children are unlikely to hear much of it outside the school, and since by nature and habit and association there is really nothing in our musical life to justify spending our money on teaching expert sight-singing to children—the undertaking being in a sense anomalous and detached; why not say to ourselves: “We must first of all teach our children to love the best music, and then we must train them to read it, not necessarily ‘at sight,’ but to read it well enough to satisfy all the demands likely to be made in that direction in after life.”[6] I would sweep away half the pedagogical paraphernalia of our public school music teaching. I believe much more valuable results could be secured by constant contact with the best music, and continued observation of it, with a minimum of technical exercises. I believe the processes of music to have no significance whatever except as they appear in great compositions, and that constant contact with and observation of fine music is more valuable than the study of the rules by which it is made, or the technique by which it is produced. In music as in poetry we deduce the rules and laws from the artistic objects themselves. The composer and the poet are to us what nature is to them.
V. ATTEMPTS AT REFORM
I have drawn the foregoing conclusions from an extended observation and experience of public school music, and I ought to add—lest the record seem too despairing—that in a considerable number of places intelligent and open-minded men and women have been doing their best to stem the tide of inferior music and of artificial methods of teaching. During the last two years I have been serving on an unpaid advisory committee appointed by the School Committee of the City of Boston to improve the teaching of music in the public schools. The School Committee of Boston consists of five people elected by the people. They became aware of the inefficiency of the teaching through an independent investigation carried on by Dr. A. T. Davison, of Harvard University (who is chairman of our committee), and they asked him to form a committee to help them. Boston was spending some forty thousand dollars for public school music. During one school year the members of our committee visited schools, taking note of what they heard and saw, and finally each member submitted a written report to the chairman. These were made the basis for a general report to the School Committee by whom it was accepted.