In Europe men and women share more equally in the love and cultivation of music, and the emotional and personal attitude of the women is offset by the more impersonal and mental attitude of the men. The result of this is shown in audiences in which neither sex predominates and, above all, in the cultivation of chamber-music at home in which professionals and amateurs, men and women, participate to their mutual pleasure and development. Nothing more charming can be imagined than such family evenings of music, during which the players indulge themselves in the string quartets and piano trios of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, with perhaps a small audience of enthusiasts composed of other members of the family and half a dozen friends who afterward all join in a jolly supper of bread and cold meats, together with a good bottle of wine or beer.
My father carried this lovely custom into the New World, and I owe almost my entire education in chamber-music to the Sunday afternoons at his house, the tranquil and spiritual atmosphere of which is unforgettable.
A few years ago a meeting was held in the mayor’s office at City Hall at which I had been asked to speak in behalf of good music for the people on Sunday afternoons and evenings. A clergyman from Brooklyn had made a tremendous appeal against any Sunday recreations and wanted the aldermen to revive the old blue laws of two hundred years ago. The room was crowded with people, and when I spoke of what the chamber-music on Sunday afternoons at my father’s house had meant to me as a boy, this audience broke into such enthusiastic applause that there was no mistaking the general attitude, and my Sunday symphony concerts, which I was the first to inaugurate in New York, have only once been interfered with by municipal authorities.
Some American women have realized the false and one-sided condition of musical culture in our country and have sought to remedy it by encouraging their sons to take up the study of some musical instrument, but it has been up-hill work, as the general sentiment of the country has not yet been sufficiently awakened. Plato considered the study and appreciation of music an educational necessity for the young Athenian, but such schools as Groton, Saint Paul’s, and Saint Mark’s, for instance, have not yet admitted music to their regular curriculum, and in so far as it is studied there it is considered rather an outside privilege with which the school course has no official connection. Among the boys the necessity for excelling in football or baseball is so carefully and consistently insisted upon that almost the entire time left from school hours is devoted to these sports, and the boy who wants to continue the study of a musical instrument, which a fond mother has perhaps begun with him before he entered the school, is looked upon by the other boys as a sissy. The standard of personal conduct set in these schools is high, but the tendency seems to be to make the boys as like each other as possible. Many of them, if not discouraged, would develop decided artistic talent, but individuality and independence of thinking, which should be the end and aim of all teaching, is often frowned upon, and the results only contribute still further to the monotony of our social life, in which the courage to be one’s self is submerged in the desire to be exactly like every one else.
The public schools of our country, however, show a much more intelligent attitude than formerly; and, while the time allowed for singing and the study of the beginnings of music is still all too short, music is taught to the boys as well as to the girls. The singing of the children has greatly improved, and in many cities school orchestras have been formed, which the boys and girls enjoy immensely and in many of which music of good character is studied.
In Los Angeles and Berkeley, California, I heard some excellent school orchestras, and in Dayton, Ohio, Mrs. Talbot has interested herself personally in this movement with great enthusiasm and excellent results.
In New York, my brother Frank, while supervisor of music in the public schools, effected a complete reform in the teaching of the children and succeeded in interesting the authorities to give music a more important position. The singing improved immensely and since his retirement Mr. Gartlan, his successor, has continued the good work. I have several times used choruses of a thousand school children at the music festivals of the Oratorio Society in the production of such works as Pierné’s exquisite “The Crusade of the Children” and “The Children of Bethlehem,” and the children sang the three-part harmonies of their music with such purity and exquisite quality of tone as to bring happy tears to the eyes of the audience.
School orchestras have been formed all over the city, and once a year I take my entire orchestra to one of the large auditoriums of the public high schools and for two thousand little would-be orchestra musicians we play a programme composed of the music they have been studying during the winter. We never play before a more enthusiastic and delightful audience.
Thirty-one years ago I gave the first orchestral concert for children, and twenty-five years ago my brother Frank founded the Young People’s Symphony Concerts, which were designed to introduce the beauties of orchestral music to children, and in a short explanatory talk to unravel its mysteries of construction and demonstrate the tone colors of the different instruments of the orchestra. These concerts have proved an enormous success and of great importance for the education of the coming generation. When my brother retired from public work in order to devote himself exclusively to the direction of the Institute of Musical Art I took over these concerts, and have since added another course intended exclusively for little children from seven to twelve years of age. The audiences are truly remarkable. The faces of the children are aglow with interest and excitement, and when I sit down at the piano after playing an overture with the orchestra and, repeating some melodic phrase from it, ask them, “Which instrument played this melody?” their little voices ring out from all over the hall in high, shrill accents, like little pistol-shots, “The oboe! The oboe! The trumpet!” Then I let all those who think it was the oboe raise their hands, and if they are right great is their triumph, and if they are wrong equally great is their chagrin. Generally they are right!
On my orchestral tours I have several times given such children’s concerts on the afternoon preceding the regular evening symphony, and while two such concerts in one day are a great exertion, the children’s especially demanding a great output of vitality in order to keep their interest, I have felt more than repaid by the results; in many of the cities my work in this direction has been continued by the local orchestras or musical clubs (again the women!), and with the happiest results.