MUSIC AND LIFE

MUSIC AND LIFE

A STUDY OF THE RELATIONS
BETWEEN OURSELVES AND
MUSIC

BY

THOMAS WHITNEY SURETTE

AUTHOR OF
“The Development of Symphonic Music”
AND (WITH D. G. MASON) OF
“The Appreciation of Music”

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press
Cambridge 1917

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THOMAS WHITNEY SURETTE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published March 1917

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author desires to express his thanks to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly for permission to use, as a part of this book, material from a series of articles that appeared in his magazine.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

During the last twenty or thirty years there has been an enormous increase in the United States of what may be called “institutional” music. We have built opera houses, we have formed many new orchestras, and we have established the teaching of music in nearly all our public and private schools and colleges, so that a casual person observing all this, hearing from boastful lips how many millions per annum we spend on music, and adding up the various columns into one grand total, might arrive at the conclusion that we are really a musical people.

But one who looks beneath the surface—who reflects that the thing we believe, and the thing we love, that we do—would have to do a sum in subtraction also; would have to ask what music there is in our own households. He would find that in our cities and towns only an infinitesimal percentage of the inhabitants sing together for the pleasure of doing so, and that the task of keeping choral societies together is as difficult as ever; that the music we take no part in, but merely listen to, is the music that flourishes; that our operatic singers, the most highly paid in the world, come to us annually from abroad and sing to us in languages that we cannot understand; that, in short, while music flourishes, much of it is bought and little of it is home-made. The deduction is obvious. This institutional music is a sort of largess of our prosperity. We are rich enough to buy the best the world affords. We institute music in our public schools and display our interest in it once a year—at graduation time. We see that our children take “music lessons” and judge the result likewise by their capacity to play us occasionally a very nice little piece. Men, in particular,—all potential singers, and very much needing to sing,—look upon it as a slightly effeminate or scarcely natural and manly thing to do. Music is, in short, too much our diversion, and too little our salvation.

And to form a correct estimate of the value of our musical activities we should need also to consider the quality of the music we hear; and this, in relation to the sums we have been doing, might make complete havoc of our figures, because it would change their basic significance. For if it is bad music, the more we hear of it the worse off we are. If a city spends thirty thousand dollars a year on bad public-school music, it is a loser to the extent of some sixty thousand dollars. If your child is painfully acquiring a mechanical dexterity (or acquiring a painful mechanical dexterity) in pianoforte playing and is learning almost nothing about music, you lose twice what you pay and your child pays twice for her suffering. What is called “being musical” cannot be passed on to some one else or to something else; you cannot be musical vicariously—through another person, through so many thousand dollars, through civic pride, through any other of the many means we employ. Being musical does not necessarily lie in performing music; it is rather a state of being which every individual who can hear is entitled by nature to attain to in a greater or less degree.

Such are the musical conditions confronting us, and such are the possibilities open to us. My purpose is, therefore, to suggest ways of improving this situation, and of realizing these possibilities; and, as a necessary basis for any such suggestions, to consider first the nature of music itself. Is it merely a titillation of the ear? Are Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert merely purveyors of sweetmeats? Does music consist in an astonishing dexterity in performance? Is it, as Whitman says, “what awakes in you when you are reminded by the instruments”? Or has it a life of its own, self-contained, self-expressive, and complete? These questions need to be asked—and answered—before we can formulate any method of improving our musical situation.

They are not asked. We blindly follow conventional practices; we make little effort to fathom the many delightful problems which every hearing of music presents to us; we submit to being baffled every time we hear an orchestra play; we take no forward step on the road to understanding. Beethoven was a heart, a mind, a will, and an imagination; we, in listening, absorb his emotion and hardly anything else. His grotesque outbursts make us uncomfortable, as would a solecism of behavior. His strange, bizarre, uncouth, and extraordinary themes, every one of which fits perfectly into his plan, leave us wondering what he intends. His sentiment, which is always relative to his humor or his roughness, we understand only by itself.

Our children, after years of conventional music study, are finally taken to hear an orchestral concert. A great man is to speak to them. He does not use words. What he has to say issues forth in a myriad of sounds, now soft, now loud, now fast, now slow. This that the child hears is what is called music, seemingly a mere succession of sounds, really a vision of what a great man has seen of all those inner things of life which only he can truly see. These sounds are formed into a perfect order. Their very soul may hide in the peculiar tone of the oboe or horn; they change their significance a dozen times in as many moments; slender filaments of them run through and through as in a fairy web. The child gapes. “Is this music?” it says; “I thought music was the black and white keys, or holding my hand right, or scales, or the key of F or G, or sonatinas, or something.” No one has ever told her what music really is. She has only her delicate, tender, childlike feelings as a guide What she has been doing may have been as little like music as grammar is like literature.

Both the child and the adult must be brought into contact with music; with rhythmic movement in all its delightful diversity; with great musical themes and the uses to which they are put by composers; with musical forms by means of which pieces of music are made coherent; with harmonies in their primary states, or blended into a thousand hues. They must learn to listen, so that, as the music unfolds, there takes place within them an unfolding which is the exact answer to the processes going on in the music. All this cannot be brought about save by intention.

It is the purpose of this book, then, to lead the reader by what capacity he possesses to such an understanding of the art of music as shall make every part of it intelligible to him. And since some readers may have little knowledge of music, this book also attempts to set forth the common grounds upon which all art rests, and to tempt those who are interested in the other arts to become inquisitive about music. Curiosity is a necessary element in human intelligence.

MUSIC AND LIFE

MUSIC AND LIFE

CHAPTER I WHAT IS MUSIC?

I. DISTINCTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND THE OTHER ARTS

Any discussion of the art of music,—of its significance in relation to ourselves, of its æsthetic qualities, or of methods of teaching it,—to be comprehensive, must be based on a clear recognition of the one important quality which is inherent in it, which distinguishes it from the other arts and which gives it its peculiar power. Painting and sculpture are definitive. It is not possible to create a great work in either of these mediums without a subject taken from life; for, however imaginative the work may be, it must depict something. In painting, for example, the very soul of a religious belief may shine from the canvas,—as in the Sistine Madonna,—but that belief cannot be there presented without physical embodiment. And when the physical embodiment is reduced to its simplest terms, as in some of Manet’s paintings, there is still the necessity of portrayal; Manet’s wonderful light and opalescent color must fall on an object. Turner paints a mystical landscape, a mythological vale, such as haunts the dreams of poets, but it is impossible for him to produce the illusion by itself; the vale is a vale, human beings are there. Sculpture, which makes its effects by the perfection of its rhythms around an axis, and by its shadows,—effects of the most subtle and, at the same time, of the most elemental kind,—it, too, must portray; the emotion must take form and substance, and that form must be drawn from the outward, visible world.

In poetry the same limitations exist. It, too, must deal in human life with a certain definiteness. But the greatest poetry is continually struggling to slough off the garment of reality and free the soul from its trammels. It trembles on the verge of music, seeking to find words for what cannot be said, and attaining a great part of its meaning by a sublime euphony. The didactic is its grave.

Before I attempt to describe the peculiar quality which distinguishes music, it will be well to state quite clearly what it cannot do. This can best be understood by a comparison between it and poetry, which of all the arts is nearest to music, because it exists in the element of time, whereas painting and sculpture exist in space. Poetry is made up of words arranged in meaning and euphony. Each of these words signifies an object, idea, or feeling; the word “chair,” for example, has come to mean an object to sit upon. Now, while notes in music are given certain alphabetical names indicating a pitch determined by sound waves, the use of these letters is arbitrary and has no connection with their original hieroglyphic and hieratic significance. The musical sound we call a, for example, means nothing as a sound, has no common or agreed-upon or archæological significance. Combine the note a with c and e in what is known as the common chord and you still have no meaning; combine a with other notes and form a melody from them, and you have perhaps beauty and coherence of form,—a pleasing sequence of sounds,—but still no meaning such as you get from the combination of letters in a word like “chair.” Combine a with a great many other notes into a symphony, and this coherence and beauty may become quite wonderful in effect, but it still remains untranslatable into other terms, and without such definite significance as is attained by combining words in poems. So we say that notes have no significance in themselves; that musical phrases have no meaning as have phrases in language; that melodies are not sentences, and symphonies not poems.

If we compare music with painting or sculpture we find much the same contrast. Just as music does not mean anything in the sense that words do, so it has no “subject” in the sense that Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire has, or Donatello’s David. It does not deal with objects. It cannot portray a ship or a star. It may seem to float, it may flash for a moment, but it does not describe or set forth. Furthermore, it cannot, strictly speaking, give expression to ideas. It may be so serious, so ordered, so equable—as in Bach—that we say its composer was a philosopher, but no item of his philosophy appears. Above all it is unmoral,[1] and without belief or dogma. Too much stress can hardly be laid on this negative quality in music, for it is in this very disability that its greatest virtue lies. I shall refer later to the frequent tendency among listeners to avoid facing this problem by attaching meanings of their own to the music they hear. I need only note in passing that these so-called “meanings” seldom agree, and that the habit is the result either of ignorance of the true office of music, or of mental lassitude toward it. “It is not enough to enjoy yourself over a work of art,” says Joubert; “you must enjoy it.”

Now the one distinguishing quality of music is this: it finds its perfection in itself without relation to other objects. It is what it is in itself alone. It is non-definitive; it does not use symbols of something else; it cannot be translated into other terms. The poet seeks always a complete union of the thing said and the method of saying it. Flaubert seeks patiently and persistently for the one word which shall not only be the exact symbol of his thought, but which shall fit his euphony. The painter so draws his objects, so distributes his colors, and so arranges his composition as to make of them plastic mediums for the expression of his thought, and the greatness of his picture depends first of all and inevitably on his power of fusing his subjects with his technique. In sculpture precisely the same process takes place. Neither of these arts actually copies nature; each “arranges” it for its own purpose.

In music this much-sought union of matter and manner is complete; the thing said and the method of saying it are one and indivisible. It is, as Pater says, “the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression.”

II. THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC

The primal element in music is vibration. Sound-waves in some ordered sequence—silent till they strike our ears—are formed by our ingenuity and sense of order into patterns of beauty. They exist in time, not in space. They are motion. And these vibrations are the very substance of all life; of stars in their courses, of the pulse-beats of the heart, of the mysterious communications from the nerves to the brain, of light, of heat, of color. The plastic arts are static. Painting has the power

“to give

To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time

The appropriate calm of blest eternity.”

Sculpture is motion caught in a moment of perfection. Music is motion always in perfection. This rhythm exists also in literature and the other arts. Poe would be nothing without it; Whitman uses it in long swelling undulations which are sometimes almost indistinguishable; the composition in a great painting is a rhythm; the Apollo Belvedere is all rhythm. But in music rhythm is a physical, moving property; rhythm in being, not rhythm caught in a poise. The possibilities of rhythmic play in music far exceed those in poetry, for in the latter the sense or meaning would be clouded by too much rhythmic complication. It would be impossible to do in poetry, for example, what Beethoven does at the beginning of a movement in one of his string quartettes,[2] where the ’cello, entirely alone, repeats one note fifteen times in two rhythmic groups; there is no melody and no harmony—merely one reiterated rhythmic sound. It is also impossible for poetry to present three or four different rhythms simultaneously, as music often does; nor can poetic rhythms carry across a complete rhythmic disruption whose whole æsthetic sense lies in its relations to a permanent rhythm which it momentarily violates, as is the case in the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In short, rhythm in music has a diversity, a flexibility, and a physical vigor quite unparalleled in any other art.

Melody in music consists in a sequence of single sounds curved to some line of beauty. Whereas rhythm is conceivable without any intellectual quality,—as a purely physical manifestation,—melody implies some sense of design, since it progresses from one point in time to another, and without design would be merely a series of incoherent sounds. In this design rhythm plays a leading part, and the themes having the most perfect balance of rhythms are the most interesting. Examples of diverse but highly coördinated melodies may be found in the slow movement of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata, Opus 13, and in Brahms’s pianoforte quartette, Opus 60, the synthetic quality of which is like that of a finely constructed sentence. Melody, being design, gives conscious evidence of the personality of its creator. Schubert, for example, is like Keats and represents the type of pure lyric utterance. Bach, on the contrary, is essentially a thinker, and his melodies are full of vigorous and diversified rhythms.

Folk-song was the beginning of what we call “melody,” and the best specimens of folk-songs are quite as perfect within their small range as are the greatest works of the masters. Their contour and rhythm are sometimes as delicately balanced as the mechanism of a fine instrument. And when we remember that these melodies were the spontaneous utterance of simple, untutored peoples who, in forming them, depended almost entirely on instinct, we realize how intimate a medium music is for the expression of feeling. People who could neither read nor write and who had little knowledge or experience of artistic objects could, nevertheless, create perfect works of beauty in the medium of sound.

Harmony is an adjunct to the other two elements. It is in music something of what color is in painting. As contrasted with the long line of melody and the regular impulses in time of rhythm, harmony deals in masses. Melody carries the mind from one point to another; harmony strikes simultaneously and produces an immediate sensation. Its effect upon us is probably due to a subtle physical correspondence within ourselves to combinations of sounds that spring direct from nature. The whole history of music shows a gradual assimilation by human beings of new combinations of sounds, and it is probable that only the first chapters of that history have been written.

We have spoken of the synthetic quality of melody, and it is obvious that the larger the scope of music the more important this quality becomes. When a composer creates a sonata or symphony he must so dispose all his material—rhythms, melodies, and harmonies—as to give to the work perfect coherence. A work of art expressed in the element of time needs this synthesis more than one expressed in space. For although there is in music no “subject,” yet beauty is being unfolded and the need of a cumulative and coördinated expression of it is quite as great as it would be were the music “about” something. There are various ways of arranging musical material so as to attain this end. The chief principle of its synthesis is derived from the volatile nature of sound itself. It is this: that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or at least some reminder, of the first. The result of this is that in the early music there was an alternation of one phrase or one tune with another; and this in turn was followed by all sorts of experiments tending to bring about variety in unity. (These simple forms somewhat resemble what is known in poetry as the triolet.) The most common form in music is threefold. It is found in folk-songs, marches, minuets, nocturnes, and so forth, and—expanded to huge proportions—in symphonic movements. In folk-songs this form consists in repeating a first phrase after a second contrasting one. In minuets, nocturnes, romances, and the like, each part is a complete melody in itself. In a symphonic movement the first part—save in such notable exceptions as the first movement of the “Eroica” of Beethoven—contains all the thematic material, the second contains what is called the “development” of the material stated in the first, and the third part restates the first with such changes as shall give it new significance.

It is in this synthetic quality that much of the greatness of symphonic music lies. No other quality, however fine in itself, can take its place. Schumann, for example, created interesting and beautiful themes in profusion, but his compositions in the larger forms lack a complete synthesis. Bach was the greatest master in this respect. So perfect is the ordering of his material that it gives that impression of inevitability which distinguishes all great art everywhere. It is obvious enough that parallels to this form will be found in literature, for it is a part of life and nature. It is youth, manhood, and old age; it is sunrise, noon, and sunset; it is spring, summer, and winter. So it must be; for art is only life in terms of beauty, and human life is only nature expressing itself in terms of man and woman. This then is the thing we call music: rhythm, melody, and harmony arranged into forms of beauty, existing in time. It is without meaning, it is without “subject,” it is without idea. It creates a world of its own, fictitious, fabulous, and irrelevant—a world of sound, evanescent yet indestructible.

III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC

Music deals first of all with feeling or emotion. But since emotion may be guided by the mind and transfused by the imagination,—since emotion is not a separate and isolated part of our being,—so music may be so ordered by the mind and so transfused by the imagination as to become intellectual and imaginative. It is true that the greater part of the music produced and performed deals only with emotion, but this is equally true of literature. The popular novel is nine tenths emotion, one tenth mind, and the rest imagination. So it is with music, though such illogical invention as one constantly finds in many popular novels would be intolerable in any music. Since there seems to be an incongruity between the statement that music has no definite meaning and the statement that it is intellectual, let us take a specific illustration and see if we cannot reconcile the apparent confliction.

We must first of all distinguish between the quality itself and the expression of the quality. A person may have a mind stored with wisdom and be completely what we call “intellectual,” without ever expressing himself by a spoken or written word. His wisdom exists by itself and for itself, entirely separated from its expression. If he expresses himself, and with skill, we call that expression literature, but, in any case, it remains wisdom. And what is wisdom? It is what Mr. Eliot describes a liberal education to be—“a state of mind”; it is the fusion of knowledge with experience, with feeling, and with imagination.

Now words are symbols which diminish in their efficacy as they try to compass feeling and imagination. If the wise man is cold, he can say, “I am cold”; but if he wishes to tell you of his idea of God, he has no words adequate for the purpose, because he is dealing with something which is not in the domain of knowledge alone—which he can feel, or perhaps imagine, but cannot define. The reason alone never even touches the far-away circle of that perfection which we believe to exist, and the subtle inner relations between man and the visible and invisible world refuse to be harnessed to language. For these he finds expression in some form of beauty. “The beautiful,” says Goethe, “is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.”

So we say that in wisdom the qualities we call insight, feeling, and imagination must find for themselves some more plastic medium of expression than language. And when that plastic medium, though non-definitive, has those qualities of coherence, continuity, and form which are essential to all intellectual expression, we are justified in calling it “intellectual.” Let us take for our specific illustration the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. It is impossible to imagine this as an expression of feeling only, untouched by thought or by imagination. The inevitable conclusion arrived at by any person who understands it is that the feeling is absolutely controlled by the mind, and that it is imagination that gives it its extraordinary effect. Compare it with the first movement of Tschaikovsky’s “Pathétique Symphony” where emotion runs riot; the difference is as great as that between “Victory” and “The Deemster.” Compare it with a symphony by Mendelssohn, and the contrast is as vivid as that between a novel by Meredith and one by Miss Braddon. Beethoven’s music contains, in the first place, themes whose import all completely receptive persons feel to be profound. (That these themes do not so impress others is due either to atrophy of the musical faculty, to mental lassitude, or to lack of experience of great music.) These themes are presented in such design as not only to make the whole movement entirely coherent, but to give it a sense of rushing onward to an inevitable conclusion. So intensive is their treatment that almost the whole five hundred or more measures grow out of the original theme or thesis, some fifteen measures long. So imaginative is it that it seems to gather to itself all related things in heaven and earth and fuse them into one. In short, we must say that this music emanates from the mind of a great man, who has subjected emotion to the control of the will and who has exercised that highest function of the mind that we call imagination.

May we not say, then, that this is wisdom? Shall we deny it because it cannot be spelled out word by word? Shall we not rather say that music is a means of expressing the deepest wisdom, that which defies categorical expression? May we not accept Schopenhauer’s saying: “Music is an image of the will”? Are we not justified in stating that music is even an expression of the deepest relation with the visible and invisible world which the soul of man is capable of experiencing, and that these relations, inexpressible in more concrete manifestations, are expressible in music? The pathos and resignation and courage in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven are not his or yours or mine; they are the qualities themselves in their infinite being, more true, more noble, more pure than his or yours or mine. May we not, then, even go so far as to say that music tells us the deepest truths of human life; that “it comes,” as Symonds says, “speaking the highest wisdom in a language our reason does not understand because it is older and deeper and closer than reason?”

IV. “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY”

I have already stated that the other arts have for their ideal that fusing of subject and expression which in music is complete, and I have further stated that the purpose or object of music is to present emotion ordered and guided by the mind and illumined by the imagination. In this latter respect all the arts are alike. It is in the very nature of their being that they seek to find the heart of the great secret. The purpose of painting and sculpture is not to present objects as objects, but to set them forth in such harmonious perfection of line and color and rhythm as will reveal their deepest significance. The greatest examples of the plastic arts cannot be understood through sense-perception of objects. Rembrandt is a greater painter than Bougereau, not only because he has superior technique, but because he has deeper insight. This is why the “subject” in painting is comparatively unimportant.

It is the same with literature. In “Jane Eyre” the “subject” is more tangible and vivid than in “Villette,” but the latter is the finer book, because the technical skill is greater, the insight deeper. “There are no good subjects or bad subjects,” says Hugo; “there are only good poets and bad poets.” Any subject is interesting when a master-mind presents it in full significance. A custom-house is a prosaic thing, and a custom-house that has neither exports nor imports, but only a few sleepy old pensioners dozing in the sun, might be thought a dull subject for a writer; but Hawthorne’s imagination and subtlety of literary expression clothe it with both beauty and significance. Even the noblest and most tragic deeds find their best justification in a sublime harmony of beauty. The Greeks knew this well. Euripides, in “The Trojan Women,” puts on the lips of Hecuba these words:—

“Had He not turned us in his hand, and thrust

Our high things low and shook our hills as dust,

We had not been this splendor, and our wrong

An everlasting music for the song

Of earth and heaven!”[3]

Deeds, monuments, cities, and civilizations fade into nothingness, but a few words, or a strain of music turned by an artist, will live on forever. The battle of Gettysburg will become merely a paragraph of history, the causes for which it was fought will be as nothing, but the words spoken by Lincoln will be preserved for all time, not because they were wise, but because they were wise and beautiful.

There is no escape from this condition. An occasional great writer has railed at beauty, only to prove finally that his own permanence depended on it. Carlyle, for example, was more caustic than usual when he discussed poetry. His comment on Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” ran thus: “A wonderful book, one of the most wonderful ever written. I re-read it all through—all made out of an ‘Old Bailey’ story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting.” Yet the best part of “Sartor Resartus” is its beauty, and there are in “The French Revolution” many passages of quite perfect poetic imagery and characterization without which it would lose much of its value. What we call “Carlyle” is no longer a man; nor is it a philosophy, or a history; it is nothing but a style, a manner of saying things—an individual, characteristic, and strange blend of hard and soft, of high and low, of rugged and tender, all struggling with a Puritanical conscience. So we say that beauty is the lodestone by which all life is tested.

No game can be perfectly played unless the physical motions are timed in beauty; no machine will act save in perfect synthesis; no character is strong until it attains a harmony within itself. Beauty is the matrix in which life shall be finally moulded.

All forms of artistic expression, then, require that we shall see the object not as fact but as art. If it is fact—that is, merely an isolated object or event—it remains insignificant until some artist catches it up into the wider realm in which it belongs and sets it forth in some form of beauty. If we accept this conception of all the arts as seeking the inner sense of things, as portraying life in its essence rather than in its outward manifestations, we shall be able to understand the peculiar power of music. It becomes then, not merely a series of sounds arranged so as to be euphonious and pleasing to the ear, but a book of life which contains the ultimate expression of our instinct and of our wisdom. The Third Symphony of Beethoven, for example, gives us a more convincing presentment of heroic struggle than is to be found in the other arts or in literature, first, because it has the power to present it in the element of time, which is an essential part of any heroic deed; second, because it presents it as a quality disassociated from a particular heroism and therefore elevated into a type and made eternal; and third, because it presents it in conjunction with those other qualities without which there can be no heroism at all. (For no quality in life or element in nature exists for us save as the opposite or reverse of something else. What we call light is comprehensible only as the opposite of darkness; love is the opposite of hate, cold of heat, and so forth.)

Each of the other arts has one or two of these qualities; none has all of them. The novelist, for example, can use the first and last but not the second. Meredith’s “Vittoria” is an ideal presentment of the struggle for Italian unity, but the heroism which constitutes the essence of the book has to find expression through actual persons. So the greatest virtue of music lies not alone in its peculiar unification of matter and manner, its artistic perfection, but in the power which that gives it to create a world not based on the outward and the visible, but on that invisible realm of thought, feeling, and aspiration which is our real world. For if there is any one certain historical fact, it is that from the earliest times until now man has continually sought some escape from reality, some building up of a perfect world of ideal beauty which should still his eternal dissatisfaction with the imperfections and inconsistencies of his own life. It is in the very nature of his situation that he should seek some perfection somewhere. So he has tried to paint this perfection on canvas, idealizing life and nature into a satisfying form of beauty; or he has carved a physical perfection in marble to deify himself and give himself a place in nature; or he has built up for himself a world of magical words in which all his noblest dreams strive for expression. Everywhere and always he has had this dream, which has saved him when all else failed. And the noblest of his dreamers have been those whose imaginations have transcended the limitations of the actual and brought it into relation with the unknown.

Music, obeying the great laws that underlie all life and to which all the arts are subject, having for its means of expression the most plastic of all media, depending on intuitive perception of truth, not compelled to perpetuate objects, dealing with that larger part of man’s being which lies hidden beneath both his acts and his thoughts,—that which Carlyle calls “the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious,”—music is the one perfect medium for this dream of humanity. In its expression of human emotions it enjoys the inestimable advantage of entire irrelevance. It does not have to develop a character or person, but only an attribute or quality. The “Eroica” symphony, for example, has all the force of a mythological epic in which the heroes are pure spirit-types of humanity, of no age or time—gods, if you will, and above human limitations.

This is the quality of music that makes it precious to us. It builds for us an immaterial world—not made of objects, or theories, or dogmas, or philosophies, but of pure spirit—a means of escape from the thralldom of every day.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It may, of course, be used with molds of definite meaning; but we are speaking of pure music.

[2] The Scherzo of Opus 59, no. 1.

[3] Gilbert Murray translation.

CHAPTER II MUSIC FOR CHILDREN

I. TRAINING THE SENSE FOR BEAUTY

In what I have to say about music for children I am not unmindful of the diversity of American life, and of the prevalent idea that Americans do not pay much attention to music (or to any other form of beauty) because they live in a new country in which the greater part of their energy is devoted to subduing nature and carving their fortunes. As a nation we are said to be too diverse to have evolved any definite æsthetic practice, and we suppose ourselves too busy with the practical things in life to pay much attention to it.

While it is doubtless true that there are numberless prosperous American families in which the words “art” and “literature” mean nothing whatever, this condition is due, in most cases, not to lack of time, but to lack of inclination. We, like other people, do what we like to do. No real attention is paid in childhood to the cultivation of a love of the beautiful; very little attention is paid to it in the educational institutions where we are trained; so we grow up and enter upon life with a desultory liking for music, with a distinct lack of appreciation for poetry, and with almost no interest in painting or sculpture.

And this condition is likely to increase rather than diminish as time goes on, until, having finally arrived at moments of leisure and finding that neither our money nor any other material possession gives us any deep or permanent satisfaction, we turn to beauty only to be confronted with the old warning: “Too late, ye cannot enter now.” For we have arrived at the time when, in Meredith’s phrase, “Nature stops, and says to us, ‘Thou art now what thou wilt be.’” For this capacity for understanding and loving great books and paintings and music has to grow with our own growth and cannot be postponed to another season. The average American man is supposed to have no time for these things. He has time, but he refuses to turn it into leisure,—leisure which means contemplation and thoughtfulness,—though he very likely knows that this has been accomplished over and over again by men who have saved out of a busy life for that purpose a little time every day.

One recalls Darwin’s pathetic statement wherein he describes his early love for poetry and music, and the final complete loss of those “capabilities” through neglect. “The loss of these tastes,” he says, “is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

The intellect of man, in itself, is never supreme or sufficient. Feeling or instinct is half of knowledge. “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy,” says Whitman, “walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.” Of any man, American or otherwise, who lives his life unmindful of all beauty we may justly say, as Carlyle said of Diderot, “He dwelt all his days in a thin rind of the Conscious; the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious whereon the other rests and has its meaning was not under any shape surmised by him.”

Must not the education of children in beauty begin, then, with their parents? Must they not be aroused, at least, to an intellectual conviction of its value, even though they have missed its joy? Can the matter be safely left to the jurisdiction of the schools themselves whose curricula are already overcrowded with methods of escape from this very thing? Does not the school answer the general conception of education obtaining among the fathers and mothers of the school-children? Can it be expected—is it possible for it—to rise far above that conception? My object is therefore to suggest, first, that the perception of beauty is, in the highest sense, education; second, that music is especially so, because it is the purest form of beauty; and, third, that music is the only form of beauty by means of which very young children can be educated, because it is the only form accessible to them.

Need I point out that there has never been a time in the history of mankind when human beings have not paid tribute to beauty? In their attempt to escape what may be called the traffic of life and to rise above its sordid limitations, have they not always and everywhere created for themselves some sort of detached ideal by means of which they justified themselves in an otherwise unintelligible world? This ideal may have been a god of stone, but it figured for them a perfect absolution. Surrounded by brutal forces about which they knew nothing, subject to pestilence, to war, to starvation, to the fury of the elements, unable safely to shelter their bodies, they built for their souls a safe elysium. This ideal was always one of order and beauty; every civilization has possessed it, and it was to each civilization not only religion, but also what we call “art.”

I referred in the first chapter to that quality in art which consists in its “holding a mirror up to nature,” and thus focusing our attention. Browning expresses this in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” where he says,—

“For, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.”

But the highest office of art is not so much to attract our attention to beautiful objects as to make us realize through the artist’s skill what the objects signify. It is the artist who so depicts life as to make it intelligible to us; it is he who sees all those deeper relations which underlie all things; he, and he only, can so present human aspirations and human actions as to lift them out of the maze and give them order and sequence. Through all the welter of political theories, of philosophies, of dogmas insisted on at the point of excommunication; amid the discoveries of science and the tendency to make life into a mechanically operated thing, the still small voice of the poet rises always supreme—supreme in wisdom, supreme in insight, the seer, the prophet, the philosopher; when all else has passed he remains, for beauty is the only permanence. To eliminate beauty from education is to destroy its very soul.

From the law of gravity to Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” beauty is the central element. In physics, in mathematics, in astronomy, in chemistry, there is the same perfection of order and sequence, the same correlation of forces, the same attraction of matter which, operating in the fine arts, brings about what we call “painting,” “sculpture,” “poetry,” and “music.” The whole of nature is a postulate of this doctrine, and there is no subject taught from kindergarten to college which may not be taught as in accord with it. There is a rhythm of beauty in all things animate and inanimate—an endless variety around a central unity. The individuality in nature and in human life is as a rhythmic diversity to a divine and central unity. The leaves of a maple tree are all alike and all different; the difference between the mechanical arts and the fine arts is a difference of rhythmic flexibility: one is fixed in rhythm in accordance with physical laws, and acts in perfect sequence and regularity; the other is a free individualized rhythmic play around a fixed center. The painter may not dispose the objects on his canvas as he pleases—nature allows him only a certain freedom; the sculptor may distribute his weights and his rhythms around the axis with only so much freedom from the demands of nature as his particular purpose justifies; even the strain of music, which seems to wander so much at will that it is often called a “rhapsody,”—it, too, is merely a play of rhythms and contours around a fixed center, and conforms to a common purpose just as a maple leaf does. A machine acts in mechanical synthesis, a melody acts in æsthetic synthesis; neither is free. So we say there is no such thing as an isolated fact, or subject, or idea.

Thus everything taught to children can be taught as beauty, and if it is not so taught, its very essence must dissolve and disappear. “The mean distance from the earth to the moon is about two hundred and forty thousand miles”; “two and two make four”; “an island is a body of land entirely surrounded by water”;—so a child learns his lesson in what are called facts (the most deceptive and soulless things in the world). To him “the moon” and “a mile” are little more than words; 2 + 2 are troublesome hieroglyphics; “an island” is, perhaps, merely a word in a physical geography book; but to you all these objects and quantities are, perhaps, beautiful; for you

“The moon doth with delight

Look around her when the heavens are bare”;

for you numbers have come to have that significance which makes them beautiful; an island may have touched your imagination as it has Conrad’s, who calls it “a great ship anchored in the open sea”; you have seen that beauty which lies behind facts when they fall, as with a click, into the mechanism of things. So must children be taught to realize at the very beginning something of that great unity which pervades the world of thought and of matter. Some comprehension must be given to them of that marvelous sense of fitting together, of perfect correspondence, which all nature reveals and which is ultimately beauty. It is this quality, residing in every subject, which constitutes the justification for our insistence on beauty as a part of education.

With our present systems of education all ideality is crushed, for this ideality is a personal quality, whereas all we are, we are in mass. “You are trying to make that boy into another you,” said Emerson, some fifty years ago; “one’s enough.” Modern education, subject to constant whims, has become a capacious maw into which our children are thrown. Everything for use, nothing for beauty; for use means money, while beauty—what is beauty good for?—(a question which Lowell, in one of his essays, says “would be death to the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage”). This is indeed an old thesis, but never has it more needed stating than now. It applies everywhere. Literature taught as beauty is uplifting and joyful; taught as syntax it is dead and cheerless. All other forms of instruction lose their force if they are detached from that poetic harmony of which they are a part. Numbers, cities, machines, symphonies, the objects on your table, you yourself,—all these are to be seen as belonging to this harmony, without which the world is Bedlam.

American children are musical, American adults are not, and the chief reason lies in the wasted opportunities of childhood. If the natural taste of our children for music were properly developed, they would continue to practice it and to find pleasure in doing so, and thus would avoid the fatal error of postponing their heaven to another time—the great mistake of life and of theology.

I desire therefore to deal here with the possibilities which music offers to children, not to a few children in playing the pianoforte, but to all children in love and understanding. It is obviously desirable to make them all love music, and, since few of them ever attain satisfactory proficiency in playing instruments, our chief problem lies in trying to develop their taste and thereby keeping their allegiance.

II. THE VALUE OF SINGING

In the first chapter I discussed the qualities and properties of music as such—music, that is, in its pure estate, unconnected with words as in songs, or with words, action, costume, and scenery, as in opera. And now, in writing about children’s music, it is still necessary to keep in mind that, even when music is allied to words, it has the necessities of its own nature to fulfill, and that the use of suitable or even fine words in a child’s song does not change this condition.

In beginning this discussion I propose to ignore for the moment the effect in after life of what we advocate for children, and I also discard (with a certain contempt) the common notion—true enough in its way—that music is for them a rest and a change after burdensome tasks. For we must see music, in relation to children, as it really is. I go behind the psychologist[4] who says, “ ... the prime end of musical education ... is to train the sentiments, to make children feel nature, religion, country, home, duty, ... to guarantee sanity of the heart out of which are the issues of life”; for I say that music, by itself, cannot make children feel nature, religion, country, home, or duty, and that these sentiments are aroused by the heightened effect of words set to music, and not by the music itself. The prime end of music—and of the other arts—is beauty. Song is not story, melodies have nothing to do with morals, and all the theories about music—such as those of Darwin and Spencer—are wrong when they attribute to it any ulterior purpose or origin whatever. Music is an end, not a means.

Now this beauty which the soul of man craves, and always has craved, cannot be brought to little children in literary form, because they cannot read or because their knowledge of words is too limited; nor can it be brought to them in the form of painting, because they are not sufficiently sensitive to color-vibrations; nor of sculpture, for their sense of form is not sufficiently developed. In fact, their power of response is exceedingly limited in most directions. They can neither draw nor paint nor write nor read, so that this beauty which we value so highly seems shut out from them. This were so but for music.

By singing, and by singing only, a little child of five may come in contact with a pure and perfect form of beauty. Not only that, but the child can reproduce this beauty entirely unaided, and in the process of doing so its whole being—body, mind, heart, and soul—is engaged. The song, for the moment, is the child. There is no possible realization of the little personality comparable to this. Here, in sounds, is that correlation of impulses in which the stars move; here is the world of order and beauty in miniature; here is a microcosm of life; here is a talisman against the cold, unmeaning facts which are driven into children’s brains to jostle one another in unfriendly companionship. Through this they can feel a beauty and order which their minds are incapable of grasping. The joy which a child gets in reproducing beautiful melodies is like no other experience in life. It is absolutely a personal act, for the music lends itself to the child’s individuality as nothing else does. Music, in this sense, preserves in children that ideality which is one of the most precious possessions of childhood, and which we would fain keep in after life; which loves flowers and animals, which sees the truth in fairy stories, which believes everything to be good and is alien to everything sinister, which sees the moon and stars, not as objects so many millions of miles from the earth, and parts of a great solar system, but as lanterns hung in the heavens.

The prime object, then, of musical education for children is so to develop their musical sensibilities as to make them love and understand the best music. Does this bring up the question, “What is the best music?” By the “best” music I mean exactly what I should mean if I were to substitute the word “literature” for “music”—I mean the compositions of the great masters. And if you say that the great masters did not write music suitable for little children, I reply that such music has nevertheless been produced by all races in their childhood, that it exists in profusion, that it is commonly known as “folk-song,” that it is the basis upon which much of the greatest music in the world rests, and, finally, that it is the natural and, indeed, the inevitable means of approach to such great music.

This basis, to which I refer, is both actual and ideal. Many great composers have used actual folk-melodies. The chorales in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” for example, are based on traditional melodies. In Haydn’s instrumental compositions folk-songs are often used verbatim, and the total number of them to be found in his works is very great. Notable examples may be found in Beethoven—as in the “Rasoumoffsky” quartettes, and the Seventh Symphony—while Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikovsky used folk-melodies freely. Dvořák and Grieg are essentially national in their idiom and style, and folk-music may be said to be the basis of the music of each. Ideally the debt of music to folk-song is greater still. Any typical, Adagio of Beethoven (such as that in the so-called “Pathétique Sonata”) springs from folk-song, and, in spite of the long process of development through which music had passed, reflects—in a more mature form—the same sentiment one finds in the original. How could it be otherwise? Is there any art, or any other intellectual activity of man, of which the same thing cannot be said? Were not Keats and Shelley waiting to be born of Coleridge and Wordsworth? Is there such a thing as a fruit without a vine; a blossom without a stem; an end without a beginning? There have been composers, poets, and painters who have lived detached from the common consciousness—like those strange organisms in nature that float in sea or air and draw nothing from the earth’s native soil; but all the greatest minds have been rooted in the past and have drawn their inspiration from common human experience. Keeping in mind, then, that our object is to train the taste of children so that they will love the best music, let us examine what is actually taking place in the teaching of music to children.

III. CURRENT METHODS OF TEACHING

The most common fallacy in our teaching consists in putting knowledge before experience, or theory before practice. Children are taught about music before they have had sufficient experience of it. They are taught, for example, to pin pasteboard notes on a make-belief staff; they are told that one note is the father-note and another the mother-note (one supposes the chromatics to be irascible old-maid aunts); all sorts of subterfuges are resorted to in an attempt to teach them what they are too young to learn and what, in any case, can have no significance whatever except when based on a long process of actual experience. One might as well try to satisfy a hungry child with a picture of an apple as to show a child notes before it has dealt with sounds.

This, then, is our great fallacy. It is impossible to expect children to be musical if they begin with symbols of any kind. Furthermore, in the teaching of songs without notation, the whole stress can be laid on fundamental things. What are these? First, a sense of rhythm. In the development of music rhythm came before melody, as melody came before harmony. Rhythmic freedom and accuracy are essential, not only to a child’s musical education, but to his physical well-being. Now there is one thing certain,—namely, that freedom and accuracy in rhythm can be brought about only by actual bodily movement. (It is unnecessary to dwell on the fundamental difference between actual rhythmic movement and any symbol of it, such as a half or quarter note.) And the beginning of the musical training of children should consist in marching, or clapping hands to music played by the teacher. Following this the actual notes of simple folk-song may be expressed in bodily motion—as in running or dancing—the chief point being to engage the whole body. The beginnings of Eurhythmics as evolved by Dalcroze serve this purpose excellently, the meter of the song (4/4 or 3/4) being expressed with the arms, while, at the same time, the rhythms (or actual notes) are expressed by the movement of the feet with the body in motion. It must always be kept in mind, however, that this training is for the mind and the æsthetic sense, and that the bodily motions are for the purpose of giving children an exact sense of rhythm. Too great stress cannot be laid on the necessity of always using good music. Furthermore, I wish to avoid the pitfalls that are spread at every hand in the form of schools for self-expression in which children and adults are taught so-called “æsthetic” movements to music. Æsthetic dancing is one thing; a musical education is another. The cry for self-expression is characteristic of out attitude toward education. A child or an adult is asked to listen to a piece of music and then to express in motion or pose what it feels. Undisciplined by experience, incapable—as we all are—of fathoming the mystery of great music, uneducated in those immutable laws that underlie all æsthetics, what can such a person express—save that idiosyncrasy which he at that moment is? So, ultimately, one expresses a Beethoven sonata or symphony by poses and movements—in a Greek dress, against a curtained background and under a calcium light! This delicate, transitory, elusive, and impenetrable thing we call music is something more than motion; yes, more even than motion, melody, and harmony together, for they are but its body; its spirit can neither be fathomed nor expressed save in terms of itself.

On every side this sort of instruction goes on. One hears glib statements on the lips of uninstructed persons about child psychology, “second” brain, and so forth. A pupil is asked to listen to a phrase of music and then tell the teacher what “comes through.” We must remember that art is discipline and that there is no real liberty except under law. We want children to use their minds accurately and to have control of their bodies, but this use and this control can only come through definite and regulated effort. Gropings in the dark, detached and illusive pursuits of the will-o’-the-wisps of education will never accomplish our purpose.

IV. WHAT SHOULD CHILDREN SING?

But even these artificial and false methods are less harmful to children than are the poor, vapid, and false songs by means of which their taste is slowly and surely disintegrated. Now the nature of music is such that many people are unable to see why one child’s song is better than another. There is a considerable number of people having to do with children’s music who seem quite incapable of distinguishing between a really beautiful folk-song and a trivial copy of one. Long association with the latter has produced the inevitable result. Only one argument can be brought to bear on such persons, an argument having nothing to do with æsthetics—namely, that the current music for children of one generation is inevitably displaced by that of the next, whereas the same folk-songs are continually reproduced, and are sung by increasing generations of children the world over. Any musician can string together in logical sequence a series of notes to fit a verse of simple poetry—almost every musician has; any poet can put together simple and easily understood verses; but the hand of time sweeps them away to oblivion. Out of the depths of simple hearts, in joy or sorrow or privation, as a balm to toil and labor, as a cry from a mother’s heart, in battle, in moments of religious exaltation—wherever and whenever the depths are stirred, song springs forth. A composer can express only what is in him; his limitations are as confining as are those of every other artist. Dickens could no more create a Clara Middleton than could Tschaikovsky a theme like that at the opening of the Ninth Symphony; and to suppose that the creation of a child’s song is a simple matter of putting notes together in a correct and agreeable sequence, is to misconceive the whole creative process.

It is our cardinal error that we think any tune good enough which is attractive at first hearing. In the music-books provided for kindergarten and for home singing there is an endless series of poor, vapid, over-sweet melodies which children, hungry for any music, will sing readily enough for lack of better. Some of these tunes smack unmistakably of a Broadway musical comedy; many of them are full of mawkish sentiment and affected simplicity. No real progress can be made until we reach definite conclusions on this point and act on them. Our taste and that of our children is never stationary,—we continually advance or go backwards,—and the subtle disintegration of the taste of children by bad songs results inevitably in indifference to good music in later life. The road branches here; one leads the way we know too well, the other leads to a real love of fine music, to a real happiness in it, and to a real respect for it. Let me say, also, that children love good songs, and that, as a part of their natural or normal endowment, they possess in this respect, and to a remarkable degree, that quality which we ignobly call “taste.” (I recall an old Egyptian manuscript in the Bodleian Library containing a letter which ran thus: “Theon to his father, Theon—Greeting. It was a fine thing that you did not take me to Alexandria with you. Send me a lyre, I implore you! If you don’t, I won’t eat anything. I won’t drink anything. There!”)

The number of musical nostrums for children is legion, and I have no desire to enumerate them. Their effects are in inverse relation to their extensive and—sometimes—expensive paraphernalia. But I will quote a single sentence from a popular song-book for children as an illustration of the tendency which they represent: “Understanding as we do the innate fondness of children for rich harmonies, we have given special attention to the harmonization of the melodies; and although it is occasionally necessary for children to sing without accompaniment, yet such a lack is to be deplored, as the accompaniment often serves as the rhythmic expression of the thought.”

The foregoing specimen is almost a compendium of what children’s songs and the teaching of them should not be. If children are fond of “rich” harmonies, the fact is to be regretted. (I do not believe that the average child is.) The best possible thing for them, in that case, would be to hear no harmonies at all for some time, but to sing entirely unaccompanied (just as you would deprive them of sweetmeats if they had been made ill by them); special attention given to the harmonization of children’s songs is given in an entire misconception of their character and their uses; for the essence of a child’s song lies in its own rhythmic and melodic independence, and if it depends on an accompaniment for its rhythm, it is by just so much a poor song. There is no harm in a simple accompaniment to a folk-song, but in teaching them to children an accompaniment does for them precisely what we want them to do for themselves, namely, reproduce correctly the metre and the rhythm, the pitch and the contour of the melody.

Such training as I have advocated, if carried on through early childhood, brings with it a natural desire to continue singing and makes learning to sing from notes much easier than it would otherwise be. The capacity to sing music at sight is a valuable acquisition for children, for it enables them to take part in choral singing and provides them in after years with a delightful means of access to some of the finest music. The advantage to the individual of this acquired technique is that it is of the mind and not of the muscles; it does not desert its possessor as finger technique deserts the player who ceases to practice. To sing part songs with friends, or to be one of a larger number singing a composition by Bach or some other great composer, in which each singer is contributing to reproduce a noble work of art—this, in itself, is a highly desirable experience. But the process of learning to sing at sight has sometimes led far away from true æsthetics and has resulted in a certain debasing of the taste through singing inferior music. Vocal exercises for sight singing are necessary, and we can accept them as such, for they do not evoke the æsthetic sense; but bad songs taught to illustrate some point of technique are unnecessary and inexcusable.

V. THE FALLACY OF THE INEVITABLE PIANOFORTE LESSON

But the majority of the children who have private instruction in music take lessons in pianoforte-playing. It has become a custom; the pianoforte is an article of domestic furniture (and a very ugly one); pianoforte-playing is a sort of polish to a cursory education. But the reason is chiefly found in the fact that this is the line of least resistance: there are plenty of teachers of pianoforte-playing but few teachers of music, so parents accept that which is available.

There is here a confusion between performing music and understanding it. Learning to perform seems (and is) a tangible asset—something definitely accomplished; while merely learning to understand music seems to parents a vague process likely to have somewhat indefinite results. They want their children to produce tangible results in the form of “pieces” well played. Here again we find the same misconception. Music in this sense is half titillation of the ear, and half finger-gymnastics. Such music instruction consists in finding the right key, black or white, holding the hand in a correct position,—patented and exploited as the only correct method,—putting the thumb under, and finally, after going through an almost endless series of evolutions covering many years and carried on at fearful cost of patience to every one within hearing, in dashing about over the glittering keys with an abandonment of dexterity positively bewildering. Nine tenths of the aspirants, however, fall by the wayside and some time later look back grimly on a long procession of endless hours almost wasted. One pictures to one’s self a little girl of seven or eight seated before that ponderous and portentous mass of iron, steel, wood, wires, and hammers which we call a “pianoforte” (sixty pounds of tender, delicate humanity trying to express itself through a solid ton), her legs dangling uncomfortably in space, her little fingers trying painfully to find the right key, and at the same time to keep in a correct position, struggling hard the while to relate together two strange things, a curious black dot on a page and an ivory key two feet below it, for neither of which she feels much affection. And then one pictures to one’s self the same child at its mother’s knee, or with other children, singing with joy and delight a beautiful song.

I do not advocate the abolishment of pianoforte-teaching to children, but I do advocate the exercise of some discrimination in regard to it, and particularly I insist that it should not be begun until the child has sung beautiful songs for several years and has developed thereby its musical instincts,—and even then only when a child possesses a certain amount of that physical coördination which is absolutely essential to playing the pianoforte. For pianoforte-playing is by no means a sure method of developing the musical instinct in children. In the first place it lacks the intimacy of singing, and in the second place the playing itself demands the greater part of a child’s attention, so that often it hardly hears the music at all. Any method of teaching music is, of course, wrong which attempts to substitute technical dexterity for music itself.

The foregoing is not typical of the most intelligent instruction in pianoforte-playing, for there are many teachers who reason these matters out, and there are some parents who see them clearly enough to allow such teachers a reasonable latitude. But it is true of pianoforte-teaching in general, as doubtless almost every one of our readers has had some evidence. It is obvious that even a slight capacity to play the pianoforte is useful and delightful provided one plays with taste and understanding, for one gets from it a certain satisfaction which mere listening does not give. I deplore only an insistence upon playing as the only means of approach to music; I question the wisdom of forcing children to play who are not qualified to do so; and I think playing should, in any case, be postponed until the musical faculties are awakened by singing.

It is doubtless the conventional and domestic character of the pianoforte that leads us to train our children to play upon it rather than upon the violin. The pianoforte is available for casual music, for accompaniments to songs, for dance music, and so forth. The violin is, perhaps, only useful to one person. But how much more intimate it is! Tucked under the chin it becomes almost a part of the player—as the sculls used to be to the Autocrat when he went rowing. The tones of the violin are yours and have to be evoked through your own patient effort; the pianoforte stands glistening and repellent, almost impervious to your personality. I would have children taught to play the violin, or violoncello in preference to the pianoforte, and I look forward to the time when we shall train our young people to play other orchestral instruments as well. This is being successfully done even now in the public schools. My own observation leads me to believe that talent for pianoforte-playing is quite rare, and that the average child is more likely to be able to play the violin. What more delightful than a quiet evening of chamber music in a small room, young and old playing together? Each person has his own interesting part to play. Each expresses himself and at the same time conforms to the ensemble. This would be true self-expression under the best kind of discipline.

It is perhaps too much to expect to stem the tide of bad pianoforte music. Here, as elsewhere, the home influence counts for much. Is it not the duty of parents to satisfy themselves that the teacher of music is giving their children the best and nothing else? The teaching of music in this country has suffered enormously through being detached from the highest professional standards, and, on the other hand, the professional standard suffers in being disconnected from the common life and thought. In other words, anybody who plays the pianoforte a little can set up in business as a teacher, while, at the same time, the highly qualified professional teacher often forgets that he is dealing with a human being who wants to understand music and whose happiness in dealing with it must ultimately depend on that understanding.

When children show an aptitude for playing the pianoforte there exists still the important question of developing their taste. Playing loses much of its value if there is any lack of musical taste and judgment on the part of the teacher. An examination of the programmes of what are called “pupils’ recitals” will reveal how lax some teachers are in this respect. There is no excuse whatever for giving children poor music to play, for there is plenty of good music to be had and they can be taught to like it—but the teacher must like it also. Children are quick to discover a pretense of liking, and it is difficult to stimulate in them a love for something which you do not love yourself.

VI. THE REAL GOAL

These questions now inevitably arise: “How can children be taught music itself?” “By what process is it possible for them to become musical?” Obviously through personal experience and contact with good music, and with good music only, first by singing beautiful songs to train the ear and awaken the taste, second by learning how to listen intelligently, and third (if qualified to do so) by learning to play good music on some instrument. Intelligent listening to music is obviously such listening as comprises a complete absorption of all the elements in the music itself. It is not enough to enjoy the “tune” alone, for melody is only one means of expression. The listener must be alive to metric and rhythmic forms, to melodies combined in what is called “counterpoint,” to that disposition of the various themes, harmonies, and so forth, which constitutes form in music. The groups of fives, for example, which persist throughout the second movement of Tschaikovsky’s “Pathétique Symphony” constitute its salient quality; the steady, solemn tread in the rhythm of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony defines the character of that piece; the weaving of the separate, individual parts in a composition by Bach is his chief means of expression, and his music is unintelligible to many people because they are incapable of answering to so complex an idiom; the latitude in melody itself is, also, very great, and one needs constant experience of the melodic line before one can see the beauty in the more profound melodies of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

What we are seeking to do is to make ourselves complementary to the music. We need to see that æsthetic pleasure is not by any means entirely of the senses, but rather of the imagination through training of the feelings and the mind. We want our listeners to assimilate all the elements in a piece of music and then to re-create it in the imagination. It is the office of art to create beauty in such perfect form as shall make us reflect upon it.

This principle applies, of course, to the appreciation of any artistic object whatsoever. One cannot appreciate Whistler’s portrait of his mother by merely realizing that the subject looks like a typical Victorian dame, any more than one can appreciate Whitman’s “To the Man-of-War-Bird” by locating Senegal. Whistler’s idea is expressed through composition, drawing, and color, and each of these qualities has a subtlety of its own; the pose of the figure is a thing of beauty in itself; the edge of the picture-frame just showing on the wall, the arrangement of curves and spots on the curtain, the tone of the whole canvas—all these make the picture what it is, and all these we must comprehend and take delight in. Whitman’s poem is a thing of space and freedom; the sky is the wild bird’s cradle, man is “a speck, a point on the world’s floating vast”; the poet’s imagination ranges through the whole created universe and flashes back over vast reaches of time as if to incarnate again man in the bird. So this music, which reaches our consciousness through rhythms, melodies, and harmonies, through form and style, through the delicate filigree of violins, or the triumphant blare of horns; which says unutterable things by means of silence; which means nothing and yet means everything,—this Ariel of the arts,—this, in all its quality,must find echo within us.

Observation, discrimination, reflection; cultivating the memory for musical phrases and melodies, disciplining the senses, enlarging the scope of the imagination, nurturing the sense of beauty—these are the means and the objects of musical education for children. By such a process we attain in some measure to that joy which is one of the chief objects of art, and of which our present situation almost completely deprives us.

So let me say finally that I wage war here against patent nostrums, against enforced and joyless music-teaching, against the development of technical proficiency without taste or understanding; and that I uphold here a process of musical education which has for its object “being musical,” and which takes into its fold every child, boy or girl, and keeps them there as man and woman.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] G. Stanley Hall.

CHAPTER III PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC

I. IDEALS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION

It is characteristic of our compliance in matters educational that of late years we have seen subject after subject added to the curricula of our public schools, and have cheerfully voted money for them, without having much conception of their value or of the results attained by introducing them. Education is our shibboleth, our formula. The school diploma and the college degree constitute our new baptism of conformity. We do not question their authority or their efficacy. They absolve us. Our public schools have become experimental stations for the testing of theories, until the demand for more and more specialization has resulted in an overcrowding of the curricula and a consequent superficiality in the teaching. “That any man should die ignorant who is capable of knowledge, that I call a tragedy,” says Carlyle. But there is a greater tragedy still, which is that our capability for knowledge may be so overburdened by irrelevant information that it becomes worthless to us. We study everything and we know nothing. Our schools become detached from the realities of life because we pursue so diligently the semblance of those realities.

Our objective is definitely practical. We expect education to fit boys and girls to cope successfully with the everyday affairs of life, we frown on anything that savors of the unpractical, and we instinctively distrust the word “beauty.” We are like Mime who thought that courage lay in the sword itself. We, too, have the pieces of the broken blade, and they are as useless to us as they were to him. Of what avail all this information which we so slowly and painfully acquire? Can it be put together Mime-fashion? Or is there something that can fuse it? Has it not all a common source, and is not that source in nature? “Every object has its roots in central nature and may be exhibited to us so as to represent the world.” This unity in things, to which Emerson refers, gives order and sequence to all objects, persons, and ideas; they become significant and potent, for we see them as they really are. No one can be said to be educated who fails to apprehend that unification of all matter, of all thought, of all sensation—that harmony in things which brings into relation a speck of dust and a star, the individual and the cosmos. The very thing we fear most in education is the one thing that tempers all the others—namely, beauty. For in education, as in everything else, beauty means sequence, order, and harmony; beauty relates things to each other, multiplies arithmetic by geography, objects by sounds, acts by feelings. If there were a world with one human being in it, and only one, his sweetest, gentlest, and most inevitably perfect act would be to leap-into the mother sea and rejoin nature. An isolated fact or an unrelated piece of information only differs in this respect from the human being in that it never was alive.

We pay lip service to beauty. We study poetry, but we deal chiefly with poets—with their being born and their dying, with the shell of them, whereas the poet is only valuable for what beauty he brings us. We even try to extract morals from him, or to find in him codes of conduct, philosophies, and the like, forgetting Swinburne’s fine saying that “There are pulpits enough for all preachers in prose; the business of verse writing is hardly to express convictions; and if some poetry, not without merit of its kind, has at times dealt with dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and all the weaker for that.” One of the prime objects of the study of English should be to instill in the student a love of English poetry. But we are afraid of it; we distrust it, or we think it effeminate. (It means nothing that we are now praising “free verse,” for we are only interested in the first half of the term, and that is not applicable to poetry, since no verse worth having ever has been or can be free. We nibble.)

But poetry does, at least, express itself in words, and words can be punctuated, and spelled, and parsed and scanned, and, above all, words provide material for examinations. You cannot do any of these things with music, for it consists in mere sounds meaning nothing that any one can find out. We do allow music to enter a corner of our educational sanctuary, and then we slam the door on her and leave her there until June when we expect her to come forth garlanded for the graduation exercises. The taxpayer attends these exercises and listens to the singing of the children in that complacent mood which he commonly assumes when he thinks he is getting his money’s worth, although he very likely knows that his own public school education in music did nothing whatever for him.

What are the claims of music as a means of educating the young? To some educational administrators it seems to have almost no justification. “What can be accomplished by it?” they ask. “Singing is not necessary as a factor in life.” “Music is of little importance in a work-a-day world.” So argue the school men who want “results” as they call them. But the real object of education should be first to make human beings capable of hearing and seeing intelligently, and of using their hands skillfully, and then to train the mind so that it can receive and assimilate knowledge and turn it into wisdom. There are a few school authorities who see music as an important part of such education, but most of them—being in themselves unconscious of its power and of its value—only accept it because other people similarly placed have done so, or as a relief from other studies, or as a means of enlivening public school exhibitions. That there is something in our natures which music fulfills and satisfies; that great men have given expression to their ideas through it; that the understanding and appreciation of their utterances depends on the training of the ear and of the imagination, and that, when this training has been completed, a man or woman has access to a whole world of beauty—all this the average school man does not see. Nor can he be expected to see it, for he has never experienced it in himself. But he should be convinced by the phenomena; by the large number of people who derive enjoyment and stimulation from great music; by the persistence of the love for it; even, perhaps, by the colossal sums spent on it. But he cannot dispel his distrust of a study whose results are illusive; he often sees it badly administered, and is unable to remedy the condition, so he leaves it to its fate. The one medium of human expression that is universal, that transcends language, that knows no distinctions save such as it seeks out itself in our own souls; that speaks to the tiniest child and to his grandfather in common terms; that does not deal in beliefs, or in dogma, or in events, or things, or persons, or localities—this he suspects! Put all this on his educational scales; a few lessons in arithmetic will outweigh it. The passion for categorical facts, arranged in methodical sequence term by term, year by year, and culminating in a sky-rocket burst, every fact blazing up separately for an instant as though it really were alive, and then going out while the charred embers fall far apart on a patient earth—this is called Education! But this passion is almost ineradicable—is, indeed, one of the most common of human failings. It is what is called in these days “efficiency”: that is, a sort of nose-on-the-grindstone persistency in detail entirely oblivious of those larger aspects of any case which really decide its destiny. Systems, categories, precedents; these are safe. Why wander from beaten paths? Individual aspiration, a desire for beauty—these are dangerous. We have ceased memorizing the names of rivers, or the capitals of Patagonia and Bolivia, but we still cling tightly to “useful” subjects, and we still test our education by weighing it in June.

I propose, then, first, to examine the claims of music as a subject to be taught in our public schools; second, to examine into prevailing methods of teaching it; third, to investigate the results now obtained; and finally, to suggest ways of bettering our situation.

II. THE VALUE OF MUSIC IN PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION

In the last chapter I referred to the qualities in music which make it especially valuable for children, and what I said there applies with equal or even greater force here. Any one who has compared town or city life in this country and in Europe, and has seen what a pleasure, and what a civilizing influence music may become when it is properly taught in childhood, must realize how great a loss our people sustain by the neglect of singing. We are only now beginning to realize how long it takes to weld a diverse people into one by means of an intellectual conception of nationality. The thin bond of self-interest, the advantage of “getting on” in the world—these keep us together in ordinary times, but in a great crisis these bonds break. The leaven of sentiment is needed. We want a common sympathy; we want above all some means of expression for that sympathy. There have been of late numerous great meetings at which the feelings of men and women have expended themselves in shouts, in cheers, in the clapping of hands, and in other inarticulate methods of expressing emotions. What would not a song have done for these thousands—a song they all knew and loved? Are we forever to be dumb?

Our hope is in the children, to whom music is of inestimable value. In the first place (as I have already pointed out) music supplies the only means of bringing young children into actual and intimate contact with beauty. In the kindergarten or in the early grades of our public schools children are capable of singing, and love to sing, simple songs which, within their limited scope, are quite perfect, whereas their capacity for drawing, or for appreciating forms and colors is comparatively slight. In music children find a natural means of expression for that inherent quality of idealism which is a part of their nature. When children sing together their natures are disciplined while each child at the same time expresses its own individuality. Activity of ear, eye, and mind together tends to cultivate quickness of decision and accuracy of thinking. In the matter of rhythmic coördination alone music justifies itself. Rhythmic movements to music have long since come to be recognized as a means of mental and physical development. All sorts of interesting and stimulating exercises can be used in connection with the teaching of songs to little children, and any one who has ever watched a child’s development through intelligent instruction in singing and in rhythmic exercises must have realized how keen its perception becomes and how valuable to its general intelligence the training is. So important is training in rhythmic movement that it should be a part, not only of all musical education, but of all primary education everywhere.

Singing beautiful songs prepares children by the best possible means for an intelligent understanding of the compositions of the great masters which, for lack of this preparation, many adults never comprehend. The educational administrator who denies a great composer the distinction he gives to a great writer is going against the testimony of generations of cultivated and educated people all over the world, and, moreover, is tacitly acknowledging that he believes greatness to be a matter of mere outward expression. The element in Shakespeare’s writings, for example, which reveals his greatness is the same element that reveals Beethoven’s—namely, an imaginative, beautiful and true concept or idea of human life. Beethoven is as true as Shakespeare. The same fancy, the same daring, the same grandeur, the same extravagance of imagination, and the same fidelity to life are found in each. That one uses words and the other mere sounds affects the case not at all, or if at all, in favor of music, since these elements or qualities of life are expressed more directly and more intensely in music than in words.

Yes, there is every reason for giving music a real place in the curriculum save one, and that is this: you cannot give an examination in it. Fatal defect! No A + or A - for the child to take home proudly to its parents; on a certain day at a certain hour you cannot find out by a set test what, of the beautiful thing we call music, a child has in its heart and soul. The result you hope to gain consists chiefly in a love of good music, and a joy in singing it—a result that is likely to affect the happiness of the child all its life long; the whole tendency of singing in schools has been to civilize the child, to make it happy, and to help its physical and mental coördination; yet you deny the value of such training, you refuse to give it a real place in your curriculum, you call it a fad or a frill. What an extraordinary attitude for an educational administration to assume! The world is, then, merely a place of eating and drinking, of mechanical routine, of facts. There are to be no dreams; the flowers and brooks and mountains, the sky, birds’ songs and the whole fantasy of life—these are nothing. Beautiful objects in which the eye delights, beautiful sounds that fill the soul with happiness and create for us a perfect world of our own, these are useless because they won’t submit to an examination in June and can’t be made to figure in a diploma. How many young people, I wonder, graduate from our institutions of learning with nothing but a diploma? Would it not be of great value to the children if they were taught to see and to hear vividly and intelligently, to be alive to all beautiful objects, to love a few beautiful poems, to have the beginnings of a taste for literature, to be able to sing fine songs, to take part in choral singing, and to know well a few pieces by Mozart or Schubert? Do not all great things establish relationship and do not all little things accentuate differences? What education is better than that which unifies the individual with the universal? Is not this whole world of fine literature, painting, sculpture, and music in the very highest sense, then, an education to the individual?

We march in endless file along a hard-paved way out of the sun, our goal a place where use holds sway. To reach the goal and begin our labors under the lash, catching a glimpse only now and then of stars, of flowers, of brooks, of green fields—only a glimpse, for use holds us fast. After a time we forget them altogether as use fastens its grip upon us more securely. We plod onward, machine-like, until all sense of beauty is dead, and the world is a treadmill of money-getting and of trivial pleasures. Then our blindness reacts on our children. We have forgotten the impulse of our childhood. The love for beautiful things has left us, and we have no longer a sense of their value. Must our children continue to suffer for this? Must they, too, become the slaves of use?

III. FALSE METHODS OF TEACHING

That compliance of ours to which I have referred is nowhere more evident than in the large sums we spend on the teaching of music, and in our ignorance of the results. School boards and school superintendents usually possess little knowledge of the subject and have no means of knowing the quality and the effect of music teaching save by such evidences as are supplied by the singing of the children at the end of the school year. No one asks what the one thousand or the fifty thousand dollars spent by the school board earns. The money is appropriated and expended on salaries, music books, etc., and there the matter is left hanging, as it were, in the air, and not to be heard from again until the end of the school year. No committee supervises the selection of the books or the methods of teaching. The supervisor is in autocratic control. The system is like an inverted pyramid propped up by an occasional show of singing, by the fallacious excuse that singing is a relaxation after burdensome tasks (fallacious because such relaxation by singing could be carried on without the expensive paraphernalia of a school music system), but most of all supported and fostered by the equally fallacious belief that reading music “at sight,” so called, is an end in itself. So completely divorced is it from such control as is exercised over other subjects that it has become the prey of theorists who have accumulated around it a mass of pedagogical paraphernalia quite unknown in any other form of music teaching, and essentially artificial and encumbering.

I have attended conventions of teachers where all the interest centered in pedagogical methods, and in the discussions of artificial terms and theories. I have met teachers who say they discourage the children from singing—because it ruins their voices! and who confine their instruction to the theory of music. The fetish of sight-singing has cast its blight over the teaching of little children so that instead of letting them sing by ear simple and beautiful songs,—which nearly every child loves to do,—they are taught at the age of five or six years the mysteries of intervals, etc. And since the time divisions of music present difficulties too great for their young minds, the vertical measure lines are discarded, thus obliterating the accents and taking away from music one of its most fundamental elements. This makes necessary the substitution of purely empirical terms to describe the time values of quarter notes, eighth notes, and so forth, such as “type one,” “type two”; or artificial syllabic terms are piled up one upon another until such a monstrosity as tafate-fetifi results.

It is obvious that a long experience of music through singing should precede any instruction as to the time values of notes, and that if a child has sung many times by ear the sounds represented by these artificial terms, and has continued to sing by ear for two years or more, and has stored up a series of musical impressions that have developed its musical taste and instinct, and has mastered the rudiments of numbers, the teaching of the notes becomes a much simpler and more natural process, involving no other terms than those ordinarily in use in music. You can then call a note by its generally accepted name—“half,” “quarter,” “eighth,” etc.

How did this all come about? Primarily through the indifference of the public, and through the incapability of the school authorities to control the teaching. Never having been so educated in music as to realize that it contains the highest kind of educational possibilities, parents take little interest in the music their children learn in school. The connection between music and life is lost. The supervisor may, or may not be a good musician; he may be entirely indifferent to the higher possibilities of music as a factor in education; his taste may never have been properly formed. He is likely to be helpless even though he feels the need of reform because he needs music books, and has to take what he can buy. The making of music books for schools has become too much a matter of commercial competition, and particularly of commercial propaganda, and this latter condition is fostered by the summer schools for supervisors controlled and operated by the publishers of school music books. The result of all this is that a cumbersome pedagogical system has become firmly entrenched in many American towns and cities.

One of the greatest difficulties connected with public school music teaching is the inability of some of the grade teachers to teach music. The daily lesson is given by her. The music teacher visits each room once in two, three, or even four weeks. It is not necessarily the grade teacher’s fault if she cannot teach music well, because the training given her in the grade schools and normal school may have been quite inadequate. But teach music she must—as a part of her regular duties. My own observation leads me to believe that a good many grade teachers are capable of doing this work well, that few do it as well as they might do if they were given more training, and that some teach so badly that it results in more harm than good. In any case I am opposed to any transference of the daily lesson from the grade teachers to an expert, not because I think the expert would not do it in some ways better, but because it would mean a very large increase in the expense of our schools and because I believe that only a few grade teachers are incapable under proper training of giving a satisfactory music lesson. Furthermore, I believe in keeping the music lesson as a bond of sympathy between the grade teacher and the children. Singing is an entirely natural art for any human being who begins it in childhood and pursues it through youth. I look forward to the day when we shall all sing. I object to the displacement of the grade teacher in the one function of school life which is intimate, free, and beautiful, in which facts, members, places, events, names are forgotten, and in which the spirit of each child issues forth under the discipline of beauty. (I place these words in italics because I am constantly being told that the great thing in the education of children is to give them self-expression; to which I reply that self-expression except under discipline—using the word in its larger sense—has never helped either the individual or the race.) We must look to the normal schools for this improvement in the ability of our teachers to teach music, and the normal schools, in turn, must expect our high schools to send forth their graduates, properly taught in music, so that normal schools will not have to spend time (as they often do now) supplementing the imperfections of the earlier training.

At present we are moving in a vicious circle. Many of our normal schools still preserve something of that artificial pedagogy to which I have referred, and still send out teachers who are, humanly speaking, ill-fitted to lead the children in music. (I refer to the human element in the matter because it is impossible to teach music properly if you have not had experience with the best of it, and if you do not love the best more than any other. So long as our normal schools lay too great stress on the technique of teaching music at the expense of the greater thing, just so long will our schools suffer. And it is easily possible for the normal school authorities to be deceived as to what is the best music, as well as by a brave showing of musical performance.) The real failure in the administration of music is due to a false ideal. And it is in this mistaken ideal or purpose that the crux of the whole matter lies. Nearly the whole stress of teaching is laid on expert sight-reading of music. Go into a schoolroom with a supervisor to hear his class sing and he will almost invariably exhibit to you with pride the capacity of the children to sing at sight. He will ask you to put something impromptu on the blackboard as a test of their proficiency. He will exhibit to you classes of very young children who have already learned to read notes and who can sing all sorts of simple exercises from the staff.

What is meant by the term “sight-singing”? It means, if it means anything, that a person shall be able to sing correctly at the first trial his part in any piece of vocal music which he has never seen or heard before. And this, which we spend our money for, is an entirely artificial attainment, since in real life we are almost never required to do it. “Sight-singing” has become a shibboleth. What we want is a reasonable capacity for reading music, for that is all we are called upon to do in actual life. In choral societies and choirs all over this country the number of singers who can read music at sight is negligible, and there is probably not one of them who could master at once the intricacies of modern choral writing. Let us then teach children to read music by giving them as many trials as is necessary, and let them gradually acquire such a familiarity with intervals and with rhythmic figures as will make it possible for them to sing with other people, and enjoy doing so. We shall then get rid of an artificial ideal and have just so much more time in which to cultivate music for its own sake. It goes without saying that the vast majority of the children in our public schools never attain to that expertness which is the present objective of the teaching. So we have a double failure—in ideal and in practice. (This is not the place for a discussion of the various methods of teaching sight-singing. The method commonly used in this country is derived from English practice and we have ignored the much more accurate and scientific systems of France and Germany.)

The supervisor, who takes so much pride in the capacity of his pupils to sing at sight, ought to be chiefly interested in something much more important—namely, their ability to sing a beautiful piece of music and particularly their joy in doing so, for that is the only real justification for his presence there. Many supervisors seem to have almost forgotten that music is a thing of beauty and that the only way to keep it alive in a child’s heart is to teach the child to sing beautiful songs. Constant contact with inferior songs for children may, indeed, have so affected the supervisor’s taste that he himself can no longer detect the difference between good and bad.

IV. GOOD OR BAD MUSIC?

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.

The Boston teaching was especially weak in dealing with rhythm, and for a perfectly simple reason. Rhythm was taught, not as action, which it is, but as symbol, which it is not. The various rhythmic figures were taught, in other words, through the mind instead of through the body. These rhythmic figures were given arbitrary names (to which I have already referred), and the children, looking at the symbols, were told the strange name given to them, and, sitting quite still, produced the required sounds. The teachers did not even beat the time. The usual answer we got when asking about rhythm was, “Oh, they feel the rhythm.” This may have been true, but, if it were, the children were extreme individualists! This sort of rhythmic teaching is common in the United States and the defect is a grave one. The arithmetical complications of rhythm in music should never be taught to little children at all. Just as they should sing the melody by imitating the teacher, so they should be taught the rhythm by imitating, in action, the time value of the notes. A child who has sung a simple folk-song many times, and has danced, or marched, or clapped his hands in exact time and rhythm with the notes, can be taught later the pitch names and the time names of those notes without the slightest difficulty and without any subterfuge whatever. In a schoolroom containing some forty children, and with the space largely occupied by desks and seats, it is, of course, impossible to carry on any extended exercises in rhythm. But every effort should be made to teach musical rhythms as action before they are taught as sounds. Whenever possible classes should be taken to the assembly room, where there is a sufficiently large open floor space, for such exercises.

But the most distressing condition in the Boston schools—and this would be more or less true everywhere in our country—was that all the children in the kindergarten and primary grades were learning such songs as would eventually destroy their natural taste for fine music. This is the one great indictment against public school music in the United States—that it has been made to order for schoolbooks, and to fit technical problems, and that it consequently fails to keep the allegiance of children. Nothing but the best will ever do that, and until we supply the best our school music is bound to fail. Our committee, as a preliminary step toward reform, recommended that all instruction in reading music should be postponed until the last half of the third grade. This allowed us to institute singing by ear and at the same time to teach rhythm by beating time, clapping hands, marching, etc. A book of folk-songs was compiled by Dr. Davison and myself and was adopted and published[7] by the School Committee. The greatest difficulty here has been to get suitable verses for the simpler songs. We have spent much time over this one matter and have not, even then, always been successful. Good verses for very young children are difficult to secure, and—to instance how painstaking the process of making a book of such songs is—we have sometimes received half a dozen sets of verses for a simple melody without finding one that we thought suitable.

It is perhaps too soon to draw very definite conclusions from the results of these reforms in the Boston schools. One thing is certain: a very large number of children five, six, and seven years of age are now singing really beautiful songs without seeing any music at all and without being told anything whatever about the notes, rests, intervals, etc., which occur in them. Upon the experience of these two and one half years of singing by ear we shall build up skill in singing by note and this skill will be acquired with much greater ease than would be otherwise possible. It is also worth noting that the expense of music books in these grades (and the same will be true of later grades) is more than cut in half. In the kindergarten and the first primary grades the children sing without a book; in the second and third grades they use a simple and inexpensive book of words, while the teachers in these grades use the small collection of folk-songs already referred to.

In the Boston schools ninety minutes a week is given to drawing, and sixty minutes a week to music. It is obvious that a daily lesson in music twelve minutes long is entirely inadequate for proper instruction. An increase to twenty minutes a day, or to three half-hours a week is highly desirable. In many schools entirely too much time is devoted to preparing music for the graduation exercises. Failing an examination, what is there left but an exhibition?

It is a task of real difficulty to reform any strongly entrenched system or method of education. What is conclusively demonstrated as a more sensible method runs against self-interest, tradition, intellectual immovability (to use a moderate term!), and other even more violent opposition. The reforms we are instituting in Boston need the combined force of all the persons in authority, of all the teaching staff, and of public opinion. No one of these forces is being fully exerted owing to circumstances over which we have no control. But we have accomplished something, for we have reduced the expense and we have simplified the teaching; and each of these improvements was sadly needed.

VI. OTHER ACTIVITIES IN SCHOOL MUSIC

One of the encouraging signs of our advancement is in orchestral playing. School orchestras have become important features of school life, and the excellence of some of the orchestral playing is remarkable. It often outshines the singing, and it is frequently self-contained, being under the direction, not of the music teachers, but of the head master or one of his assistants. In this department of music teaching, as in the singing lessons, much depends on the attitude of the head master. In our Boston schools there are notable examples of fine music fostered and sustained by enthusiastic head masters who lay great stress on that as contrasted with mere technical expertness. Credit toward the high-school diploma is now given in Boston for study of the pianoforte or an orchestral instrument outside school hours and with independent teachers. Lists are issued to indicate the standard of music and of performance for each grade, and certificates of hours of practice are required of parents. This system of credits depends for its success on securing competent examiners not otherwise connected with the schools, for by this means poor teachers are gradually eliminated. Many schoolrooms are provided with phonographs which may be a powerful factor in building up or in breaking down the taste of children. An approved list of records for the Boston schools is in course of preparation in order to eliminate undesirable music and to increase the usefulness of the instruments.

Singing by ear spontaneously and without technical instruction, but rather for the joy of doing it, and for the formation of the taste on good models, is the proper beginning of all musical education. Such experience, coupled with proper rhythmic exercises, constitutes a real basis, not only for sight-singing, but for performance on any instrument. No child should be admitted for possible credit in pianoforte playing or be allowed to enter violin classes until so prepared in singing and in rhythm. The pianoforte neither reveals nor corrects the defective ear; the violin, on the other hand, does reveal it, though it does not necessarily correct it. Defective rhythm can be properly corrected only through actual rhythmic motions of the body.

Many high schools now offer courses in what is called “The Appreciation of Music.” The success of such courses depends to a considerable extent on the quality of music used in the primary and grammar grades. If the children have been singing inferior music for eight years, the difficulties of teaching them to appreciate the best is correspondingly increased. If, on the contrary, their taste has been carefully formed on good models, the introduction to great music has already been made. In studying symphonies, for example, one would begin with Haydn whose symphonies and chamber music are largely based on folk-melodies. In short, courses in appreciation should be the culmination of the musical education of our young people. Such courses should have for their object, first and foremost, the cultivation of the musical memory, for this is an absolute essential to anybody who hopes to listen to music intelligently. After this has been accomplished, the student should listen to simple instrumental pieces whose style and form should be explained, and the explanation should be as untechnical[8] as possible. Each of the properties or qualities of music is susceptible of treatment on the broad grounds of æsthetics, and one’s success in teaching young people to understand it depends considerably on the ability so to present it. The instructor and an assistant should play on a pianoforte all the music studied, or, failing that, a mechanical piano-player should be used.

And now let me say that the most important and beneficial step any community could take toward improving its school music would be to secure a supervisor who is untainted by current American pedagogical theories of sight-singing, who will not attempt to teach little children something they cannot possibly understand, and who will use nothing but the best music from the kindergarten to the high school. No community is really helpless if it will bestir itself. If our public school music teaching were well devised and properly administered and if our children were taught to sing nothing but the best music, we might look forward to a time, not far distant, when a generation of music-lovers would take the place of the present generation of music-tasters. Our young people would gravitate naturally into choirs and singing societies. Groups of people would gather together to sing; families would sing together; there would be chamber music parties; we should pass many a quiet domestic evening at home listening to Mozart and Beethoven instead of playing bridge or going to a moving-picture theater. The whole body of American music would be affected by the influx of those young people who would want the best. In course of time, perhaps,—although one must not expect the millennium,—the vapid drawing-room song would disappear along with the tinkling pianoforte show-piece. ’Cellists would play something better than pieces by Popper; the thirteenth concerto by Viotti and the thirtieth Hungarian rhapsodie would be relegated to that limbo where now repose (we hope in death) the “Battle of Prague” and “Monastery Bells.” This cannot be brought about casually. We must set about it; and the place to begin is in our public schools.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] A certain small proportion of children are backward in music, but the possibility of teaching them to sing has long since been satisfactorily demonstrated. They need special attention which it is difficult to give in public schools. They should, I think, never be taken from their seats in the room and placed at one side, but should be asked to listen to the other children, and occasionally to sing with them, the teacher standing near for help and encouragement.

[6] I do not mean by the foregoing that I consider a fair degree of expertness in reading music “at sight” an impossible attainment for children. What I have said has been entirely in reference to our public schools as they are at present constituted, and to the arrangements now made for the teaching of music. The teaching of sight-singing requires the services of an expert, more time than our schools now give, and a more scientific method than that now employed.

[7] Now published by the Boston Music Company, 26 West Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

[8] Counterpoint, for example, is, strictly, note against note, two melodies parallel to each other; æsthetically, counterpoint consists in illuminating, illustrating, or developing, a phrase or theme by parts of itself—what in architecture would be described as making the ornament grow out of the structure.

CHAPTER IV COMMUNITY MUSIC

I. MUSIC BY PROXY

In the preceding chapters I have dealt with special musical subjects, and have constantly referred to music as a distinct and independent art having its own reasons for existence. I have dealt, also, with some of its special functions as well as with its relation to the education of children. In the present chapter it is my purpose to discuss music in its relation to communities large and small, and this necessitates treating it on the broadest possible grounds.

By community music I mean, first, music in which all the people of a community take part; second, music which is produced by certain members of the community for the benefit and pleasure of the others; and third, music which, while actually performed by paid artists, is nevertheless somehow expressive of the will of the community as a whole. I shall take no refuge behind generalities or theories of æsthetics. I want to reach everybody, including the person who says, “I don’t know anything about music but I know what I like,” and that other extraordinary person who says, “I know only two tunes, one of which is ‘Yankee Doodle’”—each of these statements being quite incomprehensible, since it is a poor person indeed who doesn’t know what he likes, and anybody who knows “Yankee Doodle” has no excuse whatever for not knowing what the other tune is, or, so far as that goes, what any other tune is. I am, in short, appealing on common grounds about a common thing. My only question is this: If there is a means of interesting, delighting, and elevating a large number of people at very small expense, by something which they can all do together and which brings them all into sympathy with one another, and if the result of this coöperation is to produce something beautiful, is it not worth doing? I intend to make as full an answer to this question as space permits.

It is in the “doing” and the “doing together” that the crux of the matter lies, for a purely external connection with music never brings about a complete understanding of it. It is no exaggeration to say that our connection with nearly all artistic things is largely external. We do not draw; we do not train the eye to see or the hand to feel and touch, and artistic objects remain in a measure strange and unintelligible to us. The whole tendency of modern life and of modern education is to delegate those functions which have to do with our inner being. We delegate our religion to a preacher or to a dogma; we delegate our education to a curriculum smoothed out to a common level; some of us even delegate the forming of an opinion on passing events to a leader who presents them to us in a “current events” class. The religion, the knowledge, the opinion of many a person belongs to some one else. Many a man prefers an inferior novel because the author not only writes it, but reads it for him, whereas to the wise man the author might almost be called an amanuensis. In any case, a writer of genuine power never does more than his share. He depends on us to complete him. And in like case, if we expect to understand and love music we must use it; the composer depends on us as much as the author does.

This external connection with music and this lack of intimacy with the thing itself naturally leads us to lay stress on the performance of it. We revel in technique and we exalt the personalities of players and singers. In our opera houses we are satisfied only when we have an “all star” cast by whom we expect to be astonished rather than delighted and elevated. Now, fine singing, as such, is of little importance save as a means of reproducing fine music. If fine singing means a sacrifice of the musical effect; if it destroys the ensemble; if it limits the repertoire—then it is not worth the sacrifice. Why should it ever do so? Simply because opera-goers suffer it, and for no other reason in the world. One merely needs to mention a reasonable plan of opera—such as has been carried out for generations in French, Italian, and German cities—to be laughed at by those devotees who have sat for years at the feet of magnificence warming themselves in the effulgence of gilt and jewels. So it is with solo recitals and orchestral concerts. One continually hears people discussing the technique of pianists and violinists, or the comparative merits of our various orchestras. Local pride—the last thing in the world to connect with artistic judgment—asserts itself in favor of one orchestra or another, until it would almost seem that the only purpose of having an orchestra was to excel all the others. How often, on the contrary, do we hear the music itself intelligently discussed? In short, we are trying to be musical vicariously by means of an occasional performance by other people of music the greater part of which is unfamiliar and, therefore, unintelligible to us. This is like trying to be religious through going to church once a week and, sitting passively, being preached and sung at! The most musical communities are not those where all the music of the year is crowded into a festival of three or four days, but those where there is the most real music made at home. A German musical festival used to be the culmination of a whole year of healthy musical activity, and the occasion for the production of new works and a wide variety of old ones. An English or an American festival is, first of all, an opportunity to hear “The Messiah,” and secondly, to hear a famous soloist. The attendance on those two occasions is always much larger than at any others. Is it not true that all the higher functions of the soul of a man or a woman or of a community can be preserved only by being exercised?

In what follows I shall try to show how we may escape from the conditions in which we now too complacently rest. The material for the change is abundant, for there is in every community much more love of music than ever appears; the means are simple and inexpensive, for only a few dollars worth of good music are needed, with a room in which to practice, a piano and a leader. Let us make a start toward a sincere and intimate understanding of music through making it ourselves. Let us give up criticism of other people and begin to construct. Then shall we learn to see music as it is and to value it accordingly.

II. OUR MUSICAL ACTIVITIES

As a preliminary to this discussion it will be well to look at the present status of music among us, and to see how near we come to this necessary intimacy with the art.

In any small American community the first impression one gets about music is that it is useful to fill up gaps. At the theater, before public meetings, at social affairs of one sort or another, music is performed to a ceaseless hum of conversation or while people are entering and leaving. The art becomes, in consequence, like the cracking of the whip before the team starts, or like the perfunctory speeches and gestures of social amenities; it is nothing in itself, and falls in our estimation accordingly. It is true that, at such times, only trivial music is usually played, but this only makes the situation worse, because, after all, it passes as music. A bad piece of music at the theater or while one is dining in a restaurant is merely an annoyance; a good piece beats its head against a flood of conversation, tinkling glasses and other disturbances, and is lost; one feels as though its composer had been insulted. All this incidental music must be partly due to the decline in conversation. We are relieved of all responsibility save an occasional “yes” or “no” shouted above the din.

Real musical activity in the average small community is limited to a very small number of its inhabitants. Only a few people sing; a much smaller number play some musical instrument. There are, here and there, choirs made up of volunteer singers, but the spirit that animated the old choirs—the spirit which Hardy has celebrated so lovingly in “Under the Greenwood Tree”—has disappeared. Hymn-singing in church is often distressingly bad, and with good reason, since the composers of modern hymn tunes seldom take into consideration the needs and wishes of congregations. Church music has been delegated by us to paid singers, and our church music becomes a thinly disguised concert, or, when the really abominable vocal quartette supplies the music, a concert outright.

What days those were when old William Dewey and Dicky, and Reuben and Michael Mail played in the Mellstock church! What a fine personal character such music had! How they loved to play—these simple rustics, and how intimate was the relation between their music and the people and the place! Read the early chapters of “Under the Greenwood Tree” and listen to the ardent discussions between the players before they go out on their Christmas rounds. “‘They should have stuck to strings as we did, and keep out clar’nets, and done away with serpents. If you’d thrive in musical religion, stick to strings, says I.’ ... ‘Yet there’s worse things than serpents,’ said Mr. Penny. ‘Old things pass away, ’tis true; but a serpent was a good old note; a deep rich note was the serpent.’ ... ‘Robert Penny, you was in the right!’ broke in the eldest Dewey. ‘They should ha’ stuck to strings.’ ‘Your brass-man is a rafting dog—well and good; your reed-man is a dab at stirring ye—well and good; your drum-man is a rare bowel-shaker—good again. But I don’t care who hears me say it, nothing will spak to your heart wi’ the sweetness o’ the man of strings.’”

In the preface to his book Hardy speaks of the advantage to the village churches of that time of having these volunteer players and singers, and how their displacement by the harmonium with its one player “has tended to stultify the professed aims of the clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the interest of parishioners in church doings.” This holds good in our own village churches to-day, for we consider music more a means of entertaining the church-goer than of enlisting his interest in the services.

Women’s clubs provide a certain sort of musical life to small communities. They foster the performance by members of rather variegated programmes of pianoforte pieces and songs, with an occasional concert by a paid performer from abroad, and they sometimes make a study of a composer or a period of music. Many of them lose sight of the only possible means of vitally influencing the musical life of their own members and of the community at large.

In some of the communities of which I am writing there are choral societies. In very few is there any well-sustained and continuous choral organization giving concerts year after year supported by the general public. The record of choral singing in America shows a constant endeavor to attain grandiose results rather than to foster the love of choral singing for itself. Singing societies are continually wrecked by the expense of highly paid soloists, and are continually striving for something beyond their reach.

This statement would not be complete were we to omit the instruments which play themselves. The educational possibilities of these instruments have not been realized, for they are used chiefly for amusement. In spite of the extraordinary selections of music which one finds in people’s houses, and in spite of the seemingly incorrigible propensity to hear singing, as opposed to hearing music,—I mean the exaggerated and grotesque singing of certain famous people who care chiefly for sensation,—the graphophone, which has the practical advantage of being portable and inexpensive,—it has transformed many a lonely farmhouse,—and the mechanical piano-players have become so popular that one can but conclude that there are multitudes of people whose desire for music has never before been satisfied. Would that this desire could be turned into proper channels; that these instruments could be used systematically to build up taste and develop understanding of great music. The larger number of people using them have no means of knowing what to buy. If they could hear the best music their allegiance would probably be secured. How many parents ever think of the responsibility laid upon them of preserving or improving the musical taste of their children by a careful supervision of the records or rolls used with these instruments?

This completes the list of our own personal activities in music. And we have to admit that the most discouraging item of all comes at the end. For we make little music of our own, by our own firesides where all good things should begin, and where we should find the community in embryo. What a delightful element in family life is the gathering together of young and old to join in singing! How few families cultivate this custom! How few parents, whether they themselves care for it or not, realize that their children would enjoy it and be helped by it! Why should not such parents begin at once and be encouraged, or even taught by their children until all can sing together heartily and well? Is it not worth while preserving the musical sense of children, so that when they reach your age they will not be helpless as you are? Are you satisfied to have your child’s music merely bought and paid for outside the home? How can you expect it to flourish under such conditions? Let the children teach you, if need be. Copy them, learn their songs by ear, and find out what music really is!

This somewhat meager showing of musical activity does not completely represent our connection with the art, however, for nearly all but the smallest communities spend considerable sums for concerts by paid performers from abroad. But it is doubtless true that the majority of the people in any small community hear very little real music at all save at occasional concerts, and if a fine composition is performed they seldom hear it again, so that it is clearly impossible for them to understand it. In towns of from five to twenty thousand people all over the country there is very little consciousness of what music really is. Highly paid performers occasionally appear, and local pride asserts itself to provide them with the adulation to which they are accustomed, but real musical activity or musical feeling is confined to a few.

In large communities these conditions are duplicated and even exaggerated. There nearly all the music is bought and paid for, and very little is home-made. Nearly all choirs are composed of paid singers. In cities, as in the country, choral societies are struggling to find men who care enough about singing to attend rehearsals. There, too, children go their rounds of “music” lessons. The only possible way to estimate the state of music in our cities is to look at the population as a whole. By counting up the number of fine concerts in fashionable halls one arrives at no significant conclusions. Do we sing at home, or when we are gathered together in friendly converse? Are there small centers in cities where good music can be heard? Is there any good music within reach of people of small means? The millionaire regales his friends with the playing of his private organist (in imitation of the old patron days of art, but generally without the love and understanding of music which was the sole justification for the proceeding), but does the dweller in the modest flat ever have a chance to hear good music? These are questions we need to ask if we want to estimate the state of music in our great cities. Is not all this grand music, as I have said, merely a largess of our prosperity?

The most grandiose and disconnected form of our musical activity is the opera. And when we consider the love of drama which finds expression in nearly every small community in a dramatic club, we cannot but deplore the almost complete detachment of opera from our natural thoughts, feelings, and instincts. Of this detachment there is no doubt whatever; the whole plan of American operatic productions is exotic, aristocratic, and exclusive.

It is quite true that we are continually improving our musical status. The effect of all our fine music may indeed be observed, but our progress is undeniably slow, particularly when we remember with what a liberal endowment we start. That endowment is very little less than other peoples possess. Our children are musical, and there is no reason why we should not be. Moreover, the strain of ideality which runs through American life, however naïve it may be, would seem to make us especially qualified to love and understand music.

III. WHAT WE MIGHT DO

I have indicated in a former chapter something of our needs as regards the musical education of children. The problem before me now is how to persuade American men and women into active coöperation in making music. It is obvious that there is only one way of doing this, and that is by singing. Only an infinitesimal number of people can play musical instruments, but nearly everybody can sing. To play requires constant practice. Singing in groups does not. In their right estate every man and every woman should sing.

Now my urgent appeal for singing does not mean that every village, town, or city should turn itself bodily into a huge singing society. Some people will sing better than others and will enjoy it more, or have more time for it. But there are constant opportunities for large groups of people to sing—in church, on Memorial Day, at Christmas time, at patriotic gatherings, or at dedications. Nothing is more striking on such occasions than the total lack of any means of spontaneously expressing that which lies in the consciousness of all, and which cannot be delegated. What a splendid expression of devotion, of commemoration, of dedication, of sacred love for those who died in our Civil War would a thousand voices be, raised up as one in a great, eternal, memorial hymn! What do we do? We hire a brass band to be patriotic, devout, and commemorative for us. This inevitably tends to dull our patriotism and our devotion. To live they must spring forth in some sort of personal expression. In a village I know well, this custom mars an otherwise deeply impressive observance of Memorial Day. The “taps” at the soldiers’ graves in their silent resting places, the sounds of minute guns booming, the long procession of townspeople, the calling of the roll of the small company of soldiers who marched away from that village green half a century ago, with only an occasional feeble “Here” from the handful of survivors, the lowering of the flag on the green with all heads uncovered, all eyes straining upward—these make the ceremony fine and memorable. It needs to complete it only some active expression on the part of every one such as singing would provide.

“I know not at what point of their course, or for how long, but it was from the column nearest him, which is to be the first line, that the King heard, borne on the winds amid their field music, as they marched there, the sound of Psalms—many-voiced melody of a church hymn, well known to him; which had broken out, band accompanying, among those otherwise silent men.” So relates Carlyle, in “Frederick the Great,” of the march of Frederick and his army before the battle of Leuthen. “With men like these, don’t you think I shall have victory this day?” says Frederick. Is not such singing a wonderful thing? Those soldiers, with a common dedication to duty, and a common disdain of death, send up to some dimly sensed Heaven, from the very depths of their being, a song. How otherwise could they express the thoughts and feelings that must have been clamoring for utterance in their sturdy breasts? Their bodies were marching to battle. What of their souls? Shall the very spirit of them slumber on their way to death?

And we? We watch from afar; we are dumb; we look on this profoundly moving ceremony, this simple pageant, and utter nothing of what we feel and what we are. Why do we not sing? Is it not partly because of that self-consciousness which hangs about us like a pall, and partly because we were never made to like singing well enough to pursue it? The former difficulty we could overcome easily enough if the right opportunity continually offered itself. The latter, too, would disappear as occasion arose when we could sing something worth singing. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a candle-snuffer on the flame of patriotic feeling; never was there an air more unsuited to its purpose. Since we have almost no indigenous national melodies, why should we not sing the old songs, chorals, and hymns that have survived all sorts of national changes and belong to every people? The tune for “America” is not an American tune, neither is it English. It originated in Saxony. There is no nationalism to stand in the way of such music, because it speaks elementally and universally. There are scores of fine melodies which we could well use.

The one place where singing might be fostered is in church. But where the worshipers are asked to sing a hymn pitched too high for them, or one that moves too quickly, or is full of unfamiliar and difficult progressions in both melody and harmony, what other result can be expected than poor singing and the gradual abandonment of all music to a paid choir? The real purpose of the hymn tune has been lost. It was intended to serve the needs of all the people, and to do this it must be simple in both melody and harmony, and within the range Of every man, woman, and child in the congregation. The sturdy old hymns and chorals of our forefathers were so. Nothing is finer in church music than good unison singing in which every one takes part. No skilled choir singing can ever take its place.

Even the manner of singing hymns has changed. Many of them are raced through at a pace which leaves one half the congregation behind, and totally eclipses the other half! In many of the old hymn tunes there is a pause at the end of each line, during which the members of the congregation had a reasonable chance to take breath. Even these pauses have often been eliminated, thus destroying the sense of the music and giving a colder shoulder still to the musical and devotional aspirations of the congregation. (If space permitted I should like to dwell here on the genesis of some of these old tunes. They were deeply embedded in the common life of our remote forefathers, and had no taint of self-consciousness in them. Springing from the soil, they survived all changes of dogma and custom. And they will survive. We shall come back to them when we have survived our present attack of prettiness.)

The decline in hymn-singing is evident enough. Save in churches where the liturgy restrains the ambitions of the choir, almost anything is possible; and even under that restraint there is a constant tendency toward display. What is the office of church music? Is it to astonish or delight the congregation? Is it to supply them with a sacred concert or fine singing? To take their minds off the situation in which they find themselves? To ease the effect of a dull sermon, or obliterate the effect of a good one? To serve as a bait to catch the unwary non-church-goer, or as a means of retaining the waverer within the fold? Or is it to induce devotion and religious feeling, to keep the moment sacred and without intrusion? If the choir is to sing alone, why should we accept from it display pieces, or arrangements from secular music, or silly “sacred” songs overburdened with lush sentiment, or anthems of a certain fluent type composed by anybody who can put a lot of notes together in agreeable sequence? Why should we tolerate the solo in operatic style, or contemptible solo quartette music, suitable (and hardly that) for the end of a commercial “banquet”? Is there, then, no reality behind church music? Is it merely any music set to sacred words? He who has ever studied any art knows that this cannot be true. The finest church music—of which Palestrina and Bach are the greatest exponents—is based on something more than a casual association with sacred words. In the Protestant churches of our cities the music is very largely derived from modern English sources, and I count this an obstacle to our progress. Beginning with the last half of the nineteenth century, English church music has been dominated by a school of composers whose music is charming, or pretty, or melodious, or what-you-will, but is not either profound or devout. Nearly all our organists are, musically, of English descent, but they treat their forefathers with but scant respect. There is no difficulty whatever in procuring good music for choirs. There is a supply suitable for solo singing or chorus, for small choir or large, to be purchased at any music shop. There are a dozen fine composers whose music is never heard in most American churches; composers such as Palestrina, Vittoria, and others of the great period of church music; or Bach, or Gibbons, Byrd, and Purcell, whose music is in the true idiom, an idiom now almost entirely lost; or John Goss, Samuel Wesley, and Thomas Attwood in the early part of the nineteenth century, before the decadence had fairly begun. The earliest of this music is written for voices unaccompanied, and is therefore too difficult for any but a highly trained choir; but there are plenty of simple anthems with organ accompaniment by the early English composers named above, and there are a certain number of Bach’s motets suitable for choirs of moderate ability.

Let me mention “O Thou, the central orb,” by Gibbons, as an example of a fine anthem in the old style, and “Oh, Saviour of the World,” by Goss, as an example of the simpler and later type. These are beautiful, simple, and dignified anthems suitable for city or country choir. If the city choirmaster will give over for a time trying to provide the congregation with brilliant music which is chiefly notable for its extravagance of technique and its striking effects, his listeners will, perhaps, be able to revert to that state of quiet devotion which the rest of the service has induced. Many choir directors would doubtless like to use simpler and more devotional music, but are hindered from doing so because they feel upon them the weight of the opinion and taste of the congregation, and perhaps of the preacher. Everybody, regardless of his qualifications for doing so, feels at liberty to criticize the music he hears in church.

Social and musical clubs for women exist in great numbers all over the United States. They are often useful in practical ways, but their contact with artistic matters is, on the contrary, often ineffectual. They offer their members continual sips at different springs, but no deep draught at one. The average member of a women’s club, if she is to be helped in anything, must be helped from the position in which she then is; and this is particularly true of music. But she is torn out of her natural environment and asked to listen to a recital of, say, modern French music, not one note of which answers to her intelligence or her feelings. The passion for the last thing in music without any knowledge of the first is fatal to any one. And when one considers the enormous membership in clubs for women in this country, one can but wish that more effort were made to help the individual to progress simply and naturally step by step. It is not to be expected that the average woman, whose time is very likely occupied with domestic cares, should make an extended study of music; but it is possible to give her a chance to hear a few simple, good compositions, and to hear them several times during a season, so that she may learn to understand them. The more experienced and more advanced members of women’s clubs are apt to dominate in these matters and to forget the needs of the others, and there is certain to be a few rare souls who dwell entirely in the rarefied atmosphere of the very latest music, and who look down on the common ignorance of the mass. Some women’s clubs purvey only the performance of great players or singers, and pride themselves on their lists of celebrities, all too forgetful of those delicately adjusted scales which demand equal weight in kind. If a women’s club in a small town (or in a large one, for that matter) should abjure for the moment pianoforte and vocal recitals of the latest music, and should proceed to devote a little time to singing, in unison, some fine old songs in which every one could take part, a fair start would be made. I am not attempting to belittle the musical capabilities of these clubs, nor am I decrying expert performances; I am merely speaking for the average woman who has had little opportunity for musical education or musical experience, and who is usually left far behind as club programmes run, yet who is capable of understanding music if it be brought to her in the proper manner. Ask her to sing with you and she is brought into the fold instead of straying blindly outside. Every meeting of a women’s club (why qualify?—of any club, save, perhaps, a burglar’s, where silence would be desirable) should begin with a hearty song. Step by step—not a violent leap to a dizzy height; we cannot become musical by the force of our aspiration even though it be quite sincere; nature unrelentingly exacts of us that same slow growth which she herself makes. There is no to-morrow.

If all the people in a community expressed themselves at appropriate times and seasons by singing, it would naturally follow that a goodly number of them would form themselves into a singing society. This society would satisfy the desire of the community to hear such music as can be performed only after considerable practice. I cannot emphasize too strongly the connection between the community and the singing society. The latter should be the answer to the community’s desire, and not be a spectacle—if I may mix my metaphors to that extent.

IV. AN EXPERIMENT

I live in a town of some six thousand inhabitants which about answers to the description given near the beginning of this article. There was a singing society in the place about thirty years ago, but since then there has been little choral singing. Two years ago I asked some thirty people to come together to practice choral singing. I then stated that I should like to train them if they would agree to two conditions: first, that we should sing none but the very best music, and second, that our concerts should be free to the townspeople. These conditions were at once agreed to and we started rehearsing. We found it possible to get the use of the largest church containing a good organ, and we found four people who played the violin and two the violoncello. Our little orchestra finally grew until we had some eight or ten string players. We borrowed kettledrums and one of our enthusiasts learned to play them.

We have given three concerts, at each of which the church was more than filled—it seats about six hundred people. Our programmes have contained Brahms’s “Schicksalslied” (Song of Fate) and parts of his “Requiem,” Bach’s motet, “I Wrestle and Pray,” arias from the “St. Matthew Passion,” and similar compositions. Our soloists have been members of our chorus, with little previous experience of such music as we have been singing, but with a profound sensibility to it brought about by continued practice of it. The townspeople who have come to hear our music have given certain evidence of a fact which I have for many years known to be true, namely, that when people have a chance to know thoroughly a great composition it invariably secures their complete allegiance. We have therefore repeated our performance of these various works, sometimes singing one piece twice in the same concert. We have given, for example, the “Schicksalslied” three times in two years, and both singers and audience are completely won over to it.

Our singing society is supported by the payment of fifty cents each by any individual who cares to subscribe. We give two open concerts a year, at which six hundred people hear the finest choral music at a total annual expense of about seventy-five dollars. Every one connected with the project gives his or her services free. Our concerts take place on Sunday afternoons. At the last one I tried an interesting experiment. Bach’s motet, “I Wrestle and Pray,” is based, as is common in his choral pieces, on a chorale which is sung by the sopranos in unison, with florid counterpoints in the other parts. At the end the chorale is given in its original form, so that the congregation may join in the singing of it. It was a simple matter for us to get six hundred copies of this chorale reproduced by mimeograph, and these were distributed in the pews. The result was almost electrifying to one who had heard the feeble church singing of feebler hymns in our churches. The second time the motet was sung—we performed it at the beginning and at the end of this concert—nearly every one joined in and the echoes rolled as they had never rolled before in that church. Why? These very same people send up feeble, timid, disorganized, slightly out-of-tune sounds every Sunday morning in their various churches. Has a miracle happened that they are lustily singing together? Not at all. They have merely been offered an opportunity to do what they are all quite capable of doing, namely, singing a hymn suited to them. This chorale has a range of but five tones—from f to c; it is largely diatonic, proceeding step by step of the scale, and it is noble and inspiring. How often had such an opportunity been presented to them before? Why not?

The members of our chorus are such people as one would find in most American towns of the same size. Perhaps we are more than usually fortunate in our solo singers and our orchestra. I believe the chief reason why a project like this might be difficult in many places is because it might not be possible to find a leader who cared more for Bach and Brahms than for lesser composers. The technical problem is not extreme, but the leader must have unbounded belief in the best music and tolerate nothing less. The moment this latter condition lapses, choral singing will lapse—as it would deserve to do.

There are many small communities where choral concerts on a large scale are occasionally given. Great effort and great expense are not spared. Several hundred voices, a hired orchestra, and hired soloists make the event notable. But the music performed is of such a character that no one wants to hear it again; neither the singers who practice it nor the audience who listen to it are moved or uplifted. There have even been systematic efforts in some middle western states to establish community singing. The effect of such efforts depends there, as here, on the kind of music which people are asked to sing, for this is the heart of the whole matter. No advance in music, or in anything else, can be expected without constant striving for the very best. And it is quite within bounds to say that most of these efforts are nullified by lack of a really high standard. Finally, let me say that a concert of good music by a local choral society is, to the people of any community, immensely more valuable than a paid musical demonstration by performers from abroad which costs five times as much money.

V. MUSIC AS A SOCIAL FORCE

Leaving this actual experience and its effects on the community, let us ask ourselves what this singing means to the individuals who do it. In the first place, it makes articulate something within them which never finds expression in words or acts. In the second place, it permits them to create beauty instead of standing outside it. Or, to speak still more definitely, it not only gives them an intimate familiarity with some great compositions, but it accustoms them to the technique by means of which music expresses itself. They learn to make melodic lines, to add a tone which changes the whole character of a chord; they learn how themes are disposed in relation to one another; they come into intimate contact with the actual materials of the art by handling them. This, we do not need to say, is the key to the knowledge and understanding of anything. You cannot understand life, or love, or hate, or objects, or ideas, until you have dealt in them yourself. Singing has the profound psychological advantage of giving active issue to that love of beauty which is usually entirely passive.

The artist has two functions: he draws, or paints, or models; he uses language or sounds. This comprises his technique. But he also possesses imaginative perception. Now, nothing is more certain than that our understanding of what he does must be in kind. We learn to understand his technique by actual experience of it. So, also, we learn to enter into the higher qualities of his art by the exercise of the same faculties which he uses. Our feelings, our minds, and our imaginations must take a reflection from him as in a mirror. If the glass is blurred or the angle of reflection distorted we cannot see the image in its perfection. The light comes from we know not where.

Let any reader of these words ask himself if the statement they contain of the qualities of music and of our relation to it could not with equal force be applied to his own business or occupation. Is not his understanding of that business or occupation based on these two essentials: first, familiarity with its methods and materials, and, second, some conception of the real meaning, significance, and possibility that lie behind its outward appearance and manifestation?

I have not laid sufficient stress on the advantage to men of singing. Not only does it enable them to become self-expressive, but it gives them the most wholesome of diversions, it equalizes them, it creates a sort of brotherhood, it takes their minds off per cents, and gives them a new and different insight. This is, of course, not accomplished by the kind of music men now sing, which is chiefly associated with sports and conviviality. So long as music is only outside us, so long as we educate our children without bringing them into actual contact with its materials, giving them little real training in the development of the senses, just so long will it remain a mystery, just so long will its office be misunderstood. What a perplexity it is now to many of us! How it does thrust us away! We have got beyond being ashamed to love it, but we love it from afar.

From a sociological point of view this discussion has thus far been somewhat limited. Now, the possibilities in music to weld together socially disorganized communities have never been fully realized in America. Were we to set about using it directly to that end, we should find out how valuable it is in breaking down artificial barriers. By choral singing, people in any one locality can be brought into a certain sympathy with each other. Groups who attend the same church, the fathers and mothers of children whom the settlements reach—wherever there is a “neighborhood” there is a chance for singing. It needs only a person who believes in it, and who will rigidly select only the best music. And where neighborhood groups have been singing the same fine music, any great gathering of people would find everybody ready to take part in choral singing. This would make community music a reality, and would doubtless so foster the love of the art as eventually to affect the whole musical situation. Any one who has ever had personal experience of bringing fine music to those who cannot afford to attend concerts knows that such people are as keen for the best as are those who can afford it. There is no one so quick to appreciate the best as the person who lives apart from all those social usages of ours which constitute our silk-spun cocoons. There we lie snugly ensconced, protected from sharp winds, completely enshrouded, while these other folk are battling with life itself. We may be satisfied with a gleam or two through the mesh; they are not. They meet reality on every hand and know it when they see it. No make-believe can deceive them.

And when I say this I mean that the experiment has been tried over and over again. In what are called “the slums” of the greatest American and English cities I have seen hundreds and even thousands of poor people listening to the music of Beethoven, and to a few simple words about it in rapt and tense silence, and have heard them break out into such unrestrained applause as comes only from those who are really hungry for good music. Put a good orchestra into any one of these places and you will find the best kind of an audience. Such people have no taint of hyper-criticism, no desire to talk wisely about the latest composer. They have not constructed for themselves a nice little æsthetic formula which will fit everything—a sort of protective coloring; their minds are not “made up.”

Let us not misunderstand this situation. I am not writing about painting or sculpture, for I know that these arts involve certain perceptive and selective qualities of the mind which require long training. I am writing about music, which appeals to a sense differentiated and trained long before the sense for color-vibration or for beauty of form was developed, a sense which we possess in a highly developed state in very childhood.

Imagine a small opera house in the lower East Side of New York or in the North End or South End of Boston, which the people there might frequent at sums within their means; imagine a small Western city with such an opera house; and compare the probable results with those now attained by our gorgeous and needlessly expensive operatic performances which, whether at home or abroad, leave little behind them but a financial vacuum, and a dim idea that somehow opera means famous “stars” singing in a highly exaggerated manner in a strange language, in stranger dramas, where motives and purposes are stranger still. Concerts and operatic performances such as I have advocated would supplement and complete our own musical activities. These paid artists would be playing and singing to us in a language we ourselves had learned by using it. Music would be domestic; we should understand it better and love it more.

I am familiar with the old argument that concerts and operas so conducted would not pay. To this I reply that it is probably true. Does settlement work pay? Does a library pay? Does any altruistic endeavor anywhere pay? No; nothing of this sort ever shows a money balance on the right side of the ledger. But we do not keep that column in figures. It foots up in joy, not in dollars. The best kind of social “uplift” would be something that made people happier. The real uplift is of the soul, not of the body. Let a rift of beauty pierce the dull scene. Let us have a taste of heaven now; and let it be not yours or mine, but theirs. In music everybody makes his own heaven at the time.

But it is not money that is lacking. Hundreds of thousands are annually spent to make up the deficits of our symphony orchestras. Millions are spent for the physical well-being of our poorer people. Beauty for the well-to-do, who are, like as not, too well-to-do to care much for it; materialistic benefits for the poor and unfortunate, who are fairly starving for something bright and joyous. What would it not mean to these latter were they able to go once a week to a hall in their own part of the city, to hear a fine concert at a fee well within their means, and to know that there would be no chairman there to tell them “what a great privilege,” etc., but that they would be let alone to enjoy themselves in their own way. These, after all, make up the great body of our city populations; from these humble homes come the future American citizens; in some ways they are superior to us, for they survive a much harder battle, and preserve their self-respect in face of enormous difficulties. Why should we dole out to them what we think they need? Why not offer them something that puts us all on the same level?

The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from an investigation of our musical situation is that we need only opportunities of expressing ourselves. Every village contains a potential singing society, every church contains a potential choir, every family in which there are children might sing simple songs together. There is a singing club hidden away in every neighborhood. Every city might have, on occasion, thousands of people singing fine songs and hymns. What is the present need? Leaders: educated musicians who have learned the technique of their art and have, at the same time, learned to understand and appreciate the greatest music, and who prefer it to any other. Our institutions for training musicians are sending out a continual stream of graduates, many of whom begin their labors in small towns and cities. Nearly every community has at least one man who has sufficient technical knowledge of music to direct groups of singers, large and small. What kind of music does he, in his heart, prefer? The answer is to be read in programmes here and there, in the record of unsuccessful singing societies, in the public performances of “show pieces.” Should not our institutions pay more attention to forming the taste of their students? Is it really necessary to teach them technique through bad examples of the art of music? Can they safely spend several years dealing with distinctly inferior music for the sake of a facile technique? Is rhetoric or oratory superior to literature? There is no such thing as teaching violin or piano-playing and teaching music. If the violin or piano teaching deals with poor music which the pupil practices several hours a day, no lessons in musical history, theory, form, or æsthetics can counteract the effect of that constant association. We cannot advance without leaders. We look to the training schools for them. And these schools cannot expect to supply them to us unless they so conduct their teaching as to develop in students a love and understanding of the best.

This article, then, expresses my conviction that the average American man or woman is potentially musical. I believe the world of music to be a true democracy. I am convinced that our chief need is to make music ourselves. I believe that under right conditions we should enjoy doing so; I think all art is closely related to the sum of human consciousness. And just as I see great music based on what we are and what we feel, so I see the expert performance of music as being merely our own performance magnified and beautified by extreme skill. I see, in short, a necessary and natural connection between ourselves and both composer and performer. I believe that all the great pictures and sculpture and music lay first in the general consciousness and then became articulate in one man. I believe no statesman, no philosopher, no, not even a Christ, to be conceivable save as he lies first in men’s hearts. What they are in posse he is in esse. That we all are more musical than we are thought to be; that we are more musical than we get the chance to be—of this there is no doubt whatever.

CHAPTER V THE OPERA

I. WHAT IS OPERA?

The form of drama with music which we loosely call “opera” is such a curious mixture of many elements—some of them closely related, others nearly irreconcilable—that it is almost impossible to arrive at any definite idea of its artistic value. A great picture or piece of sculpture, a great book or a great symphony represents a perfectly clear evolution of a well-defined art. You do not question the artistic validity of “Pendennis” or of a portrait by Romney; they have their roots in the earlier works of great writers and painters and they tend toward those which follow. The arts they represent grew by a slow process of evolution, absorbing everything that was useful to them and rejecting everything useless, until they finally became consistent and self-contained. The development of opera, on the other hand, has been a continual compromise—with the whims of princes, with the even more wayward whims of singers, and with social conventions.

Its increasing costliness (due sometimes to the composer’s grandiloquence and sometimes to the demands of the public) has necessitated producing it in huge opera houses entirely unsuited to it; and, being a mixed art, it has been subject to two different influences which have not by any means always been in agreement. Its life-line has been crossed over and over again by daring innovators who, forgetting the past, have sought to force it away from nature and to make it an expression of excessive individualism. Methods which would find oblivion quickly enough in any pure form of art have been carried out in opera, and have been supported by an uncritical public pleased by a gorgeous spectacle or entertained by fine singing. All the other art-forms progress step by step; opera leaps first forward, then backward; it becomes too reasonable, only to become immediately afterward entirely unreasonable; it passes from objectivity to subjectivity and back again, or employs both at the same time; it turns a man into a woman, or a woman into a man; it thinks nothing of being presented in two languages at once; it turns colloquial Bret Harte into Italian without the slightest realization of having become, in the process, essentially comic: in short, there seems no limit to the havoc it can play with geography, science, language, costume, drama, music, and human nature itself.

Any attempt, therefore, to deal here with the development of opera as a whole would be an impossible undertaking. We should become at once involved in a glossary of singers (now only names, then in effect constituting the opera itself), an unsnarling of impossible plots, an excursion into religion, into the ballet, into mythology, demonology, pseudo-philosophy, mysticism, and Heaven knows what else. We should see our first flock of canary birds,—released simply to make us gape,—and we should hear a forest bird tell the hero (through the medium of a singer off the stage) the way to a sleeping beauty; we should hear the hero and the villain sing a delightful duet and then see them turn away in different directions to seek and murder each other; we should find the Pyramids and the Latin Quarter expressible in the same terms; our heroines would include the mysterious and demoniac scoffer, Kundry, the woman who doubts and questions, the woman who should have but did not, and the woman who goes mad and turns the flute-player in the orchestra to madness with her; we should see men and women, attired in inappropriate and even unintelligible costumes, drink out of empty cups, and a hero mortally wound a papier-mâché dragon; we should have to shut our eyes in order to hear, or stop our ears in order to see; if we cared for music, we should have to wait ten minutes for a domestic quarrel in recitative to finish; if we cared for drama, we should have to wait the same length of time while a prima donna tossed off birdling trills and chirpings. We should, in short, find ourselves dealing with a mixed art of quite extraordinary latitude in style, form, dramatic purpose, and musical texture.

It will be sufficient for our purposes, therefore, to state that both sacred and secular plays with music have existed from the earliest times, and that their development has tended toward the form as we now know it. The introduction of songs into plays was, in itself, so agreeable and interesting that their use continually increased until some vague operatic form was reached in which music predominated.

But there are two great revolutionary epochs to which proper attention must be paid if we are to understand opera at all. The first of these is the so-called “Florentine Revolution” in the years 1595 to 1600, and the second is the Wagnerian reform in the middle of the last century.

II. OPERA IN THE OLD STYLE

The “Florentine Revolution” was an attempt to create an entirely new type of opera in which all tradition was thrown to the winds. To “Eurydice,” the best known of these Florentine operas, its composer, Peri, wrote a preface, from which we quote the following: “Therefore, abandoning every style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation (of speech) demanded by this poem.” (Is this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck, or Wagner, or Debussy?) In any case, the abandonment, in any form of human expression, of every style known hitherto is a fatal abandonment, for no art, or science, or literature can throw away its past and live. The Florentine Revolution was not revolution, but riot, for it undertook to tear down what generations had been slowly building up, and to substitute in its place something not only untried but (at that time) impossible. It was an attempt to found a new art entirely detached from an old one. Beethoven without Haydn and Mozart, Meredith without Fielding, the Gothic without the Classical, a Renaissance without a birth, daylight without sunrise. It was an entirely illogical proceeding from first to last, but opera came forth from it because opera can subsist—it has, and does—without logic or even reasonableness.

There had been composed before the year 1600 the most beautiful sacred music the world possesses—that which culminated in the works of Palestrina. A style or method of expression had been perfected, and this style or method was gradually and naturally being applied to secular and even to dramatic forms. There were at that time, also, songs of the people which had been often used in plays with music, and which might have supplied a basis for opera. But the creators of the new opera would have none of these. They had a theory (fatal possession for any artist): they wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they believed that, in opera, music should be subservient to the text. It was Peri and his associates who first saw this will-o’-the-wisp, which has since become completely embodied into a fully equipped and valiant bugaboo to frighten and subdue those who love music for music’s sake. All that one needs to say on this point is that there is no great opera in existence, save alone “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Debussy, in which the music is not supreme over the text (and Debussy’s opera is unique in its treatment and leads nowhere—or, if anywhere, away from opera). Peri’s reforms were artistically unreasonable, but the composers who followed him gradually evolved what is called the aria or operatic song and did eventually make a more or less coherent operatic form, although a long time passed before opera unified in itself the various elements necessary to artistic completeness.

It was only a short time, however, before opera attained the widest favor all over Europe, a favor which it has enjoyed from that day to this. The reasons for this never-waning popularity are found first in the natural preference on the part of the public for the human voice over any instrument. For whatever facility of technique or felicity of expression musical instruments may have, they lack the intimate human quality of the singing voice. The voice comes to the listener in terms of himself, whereas an instrument may be strange and unsympathetic and awaken no response. So complete is this sympathy between the singer and listener that almost any singer with a fine voice (she is, very likely, called a “human nightingale”) is sure to attract an audience, no matter what she sings or how little musical intelligence she shows. (It is this sympathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawing-room song, the last word in utter vacuity.) Coupled with this is the delight the public takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility. The singer vies with a flute in the orchestra, or sings two or three notes higher than any other singer has ever sung, and the public crowds to hear her. But it is useless to dwell on this: the disease is incurable; there will always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready for any vocal gymnast who sings higher or faster than anybody else, or who can toss off trills and runs with a smiling face and a pretty costume, and in entirely unintelligible words. And, second, when this singing, which the public dearly loves, is coupled with the perennial fascination of the drama, the appeal is irresistible.

I do not need to dwell here on the quality in the drama which has made it popular from the remotest time until now. One can say this, however: that to people who are incapable of re-creating a world of beauty in their own minds—although nature surrounds them with it, and imaginative literature is in every library—the stage is a perpetual delight. There they behold impossible romances, incredible virtues and vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted but inevitably triumphant, impossible scenes in improbable countries, everything left out that is tiresome and habitual and necessitous, no blare of daylight but only golden sunrise and flaming sunset: the impossible realized at last. These qualities are in all drama to a greater or less extent, for they embody the essence of what the drama is. Æschylus and Shakespeare divest life of its prose as completely as does a raging melodrama, for a play must move from one dramatic and salient point to another; and while those great dramatists imply the whole of life,—whereas the ordinary play implies nothing,—they do not and cannot present it in its actual and complete continuity.

Now the drama is subject more or less to public opinion and to public taste, because in the drama we understand what we are hearing. On the other hand the opera, considered as drama, is almost free from any such responsibility, because it is sung in a foreign language; or if, by chance, in our own tongue, the size of the opera house and the disinclination of singers to pay any attention to their diction renders the text unintelligible. So the libretto of the opera escapes scrutiny. “What is too silly to be said is sung,” says Voltaire.

Let us note also that when an art becomes detached from its own past, when it is not based on natural human life, and does not obey those general laws to which all art is subject, it is sure to evolve conventions of one sort or another and to become artificial. This is to be observed in what is called the “rococo” style of architecture, as well as in the terrible objects perpetrated by the “futurists” and “cubists” (anything that is of the future must also be of the past, no matter whether it is a picture, or a tree, or an idea). Opera was soon in the grip of these conventions from which, with a few notable exceptions, it has never escaped. Even the common conventions of the drama, which we accept readily enough, are in opera stretched to the breaking point. For many generations operas were planned according to a set, inflexible scheme of acts; a woman took a man’s part (as in Gounod’s “Faust”); characters were stereotyped; the position of the chief aria (solo) for the prima donna was exactly determined so as to give to her entrance all possible impressiveness; the set musical pieces (solos, duets, choruses, and so forth) were arranged artificially and not to satisfy any dramatic necessity. There is some justness in Wagner’s saying that the old conventional opera was “a concert in costume.”

An example of this conventionality and lack of dramatic unity may be found in the famous quartette scene in Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” an opera which is typical of the Italian style (in which, in Meredith’s phrase, “there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish”). In this scene there are two persons in hiding to watch two others. The concealment is the hinge upon which, for the moment, the story swings. But the exigencies of the music are such that, before the piece has progressed very far, all four are singing at the top of their lungs and with no pretext of concealment—in a charming piece of music, indeed, but quite divested of dramatic truth and unity. And then, naturally enough, the thin veneer of drama having been pierced, they answer your applause by joining hands and bowing, after which the two conceal themselves again, the music strikes up as before, and the whole scene is repeated.

But one of the most artificial elements in the old operas was the ballet. Its part in the opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and great sums were lavishly spent to make it as gorgeous as possible. It had usually nothing whatever to do with the story, but was useful in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who did not take opera seriously. Once upon a time, in London, by an extraordinary unlucky stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to hear an opera containing a ballet; whereupon he fulminated as follows: “The very ballet girls, with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of miraculous; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right great toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety degrees—as if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jumping and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open blades, and stand still in the Devil’s name!”

One remembers, also, “War and Peace,” with its scene at the opera—and Tolstoï’s reference to the chief male dancer as getting “sixty thousand francs a year for cutting capers.” So, looking over the older operas which still hold their place in the repertoire, we think of them as rather absurd, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that to-day opera has outgrown its youthful follies and has become a work of art.

III. WAGNER AND AFTER

Then came the second great operatic reform,—that of Wagner,—which was supposed to free us from the old absurdities and make of opera a reasonable and congruous thing. This, Wagner’s operas, at the outset, bade fair to be. In “Der Fliegende Holländer,” “Tannhäuser,” and “Lohengrin” there is a reasonable correspondence between the action and the music; we can listen and look without too great disruption of our faculties. Wagner’s librettos are, with one exception, based on mythological stories or ideas. His personages are eternal types—Lohengrin of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by fiat, Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic and noble womanhood. He adopted the old device by means of which certain salient qualities in his characters—such as Siegfried’s youth and fearlessness, Wotan’s majesty, and so forth—were defined by short phrases of music called leit-motifs; he made his orchestra eloquent of the movement of his drama, instead of employing it as a “huge guitar”; he eliminated the set musical piece, which was bound to delay the action; he kept his music always moving onward by avoiding the so-called “authentic cadence,” which in all the older music perpetually cries a halt.

But by all these means Wagner imposed on his listener a constant strain of attention: leit-motifs recurring, developing, and disintegrating, every note significant, a huge and eloquent orchestra, a voice singing phrases which are not parts of a complete melody then and there being evolved,—as in an opera by Verdi,—but which are related to something first heard perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act (or a week before in another drama): we have all this to strain every possibility of our appreciative faculty, and at the same time he asks us to watch an actual combat between a hero and a dragon, or to observe another between two heroes half in the clouds with a God resplendent stretching out a holy spear to end the duel as he wills it, while a Valkyrie hovers above on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under water, with Undines swimming about and a gnome clambering the slippery rocks to filch a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even this, and more; for he asks us to witness the end of the world—the waters rising, the very heavens aflame—when our heart is so torn by the stupendous inner tragedy of Brunhilde’s immolation that the end of the world seems utterly and completely irrevelant and impertinent.

After all, we are human. We cannot be men and women and, at the same time, children. We should like to crouch down in our seat in the opera house and forget everything save the noble, splendid, and beautiful music, seeing only just so much action as would accord with our state of inner exaltation. An opera must be objective or subjective; it cannot be both at the same time. The perfection of “Don Giovanni” is due to the exact equality between the amount and intensity of the action and of the musical expression—or, in other words, to the complete union of matter and manner, of form and style. The “Ring” cycle is objective and subjective; it is the extreme of stage mechanism (and more), and, at the same time, everything that is imaginatively profound and moving. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Wagner in those great music-dramas lost sight of the balance between means and ends, and the proportion between action and thought. His own theories, and the magnitude of his subject, led him to forget the natural limitations which are imposed upon a work of art by the very nature of those beings for whom it was created. The “Ring” dramas should be both acted and witnessed by gods and goddesses for whom time and space do not exist, and who are not limited by a precarious nervous system. No one can be insensitive to the great beauty of certain portions of these gigantic music-dramas,—every one recognizes Wagner’s genius as it shows itself, for example, in either of the great scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde,—but the intricate and well-nigh impossible stage mechanism and the excursions into the written drama constitute serious defects. (For the scene between Wotan and Fricka in “Das Rheingold” and similar passages in the succeeding dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.)

One would suppose that Wagner had made impossible any repetition of the old operatic incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case. One of the latest Italian operas is, if anything, more absurd than any of its predecessors. What could be more grotesque than an opera whose scene is in a mining camp in the West, whose characters include a gambler, a sheriff, a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose language is perforce very much in the vernacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards,—an “Outcast-of-Poker-Flat” opera,—and this translated, for the benefit of the composer, into Italian and produced in that language? “I’m dead gone on you, Minnie,” says Rance; “Ti voglio bene, Minnie,” sings his Italian counterpart.

“Rigoletto” does entrance us by the beauty and the sincerity of its melodies; it is what it pretends to be; it deals with emotions which we can share because they derive ultimately from great human issues. The Count, Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types; we know them well in literature—in poetry, novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept the strained convention of the scene as being inevitable at that point in the development of the opera. But after Wagner’s reforms, and the influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the greatest of the Italians, it would seem incredible that any composer could lapse into a “Girl of the Golden West.”

Nearly all Puccini’s operas are a reversion to type. The old-fashioned lurid melodrama appears again, blood-red as usual; as in “La Tosca,” which leaves almost nothing to the imagination—one specially wishes that it did in certain scenes. “Local color,” so-called, appears again in all its arid deception—as in the Japanese effects in the music of “Madame Butterfly”; again we hear the specious melody pretending to be real, with its octaves in the orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It is the old operatic world all over again. When we compare any tragic scene in Puccini’s operas with the last act of Verdi’s “Otello,” we realize the vast difference between the two. It is true that Puccini gives us beautiful lyric moments—as when Mimi, in “La Bohème,” tells Rudolph who she is; it is true, also, that we ought not to cavil because Puccini is not as great a composer as Verdi. Our comparison is not for the purpose of decrying one at the expense of the other, but to point out that the greater opera is not called for by the public and the lesser is; that we get “La Bohème,” “Madame Butterfly,” and “La Tosca” twenty times to “Otello’s” once, and that we thereby lose all sense of operatic values.

The most trumpeted operatic composer of to-day is the worst of operatic sinners. Nothing could be more debasing to music and to drama than the method Strauss employs in “Electra.” In its original form “Electra” is a play of profound significance, whose art, philosophy, and ethics are a natural expression of Greek life and thought. It contains ideas and it presents actions which, while totally alien to us, we accept as belonging to that life and thought. In the original, or in any good translation, its simplicity and its elemental grandeur are calculated to move us deeply, for we achieve a historical perspective and see the meaning and significance of the catastrophe which it presents. This great story our modern composer proceeds to treat pathologically. Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every passion, every fearful deed with a personal and immediate significance which entirely destroys its artistic and its historical sense. The real “Electra” is an impersonal, typical, national, and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and Strauss have made it into a seething caldron of riotous, unbridled passion.

The lead given by Strauss in “Salome,” “Electra,” and, in different form or type, in “Der Rosenkavallier” has been quickly followed. “The Jewels of the Madonna” is an “Electra” of the boulevard, in which the worst sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege are flaunted openly in the name of drama. It belongs in the “Grand Guignol.” Let any reasonable person read the librettos of current operas and form an opinion, not of their morals,—for there is only one opinion about that,—but of their claims on the attention of any serious-minded person.

I refer to the moral status of these stories only because many of them stress the abnormal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks the truth wherever it be, but the truth is the whole truth and not a segment of it. A novel may represent almost any phase of life, but it must keep a sense of proportion. Dostoïevsky pushes the abnormal to the extreme limit, but on the other hand he is “a brother to his villains” and he gives us plenty of redeeming types. The hero in “The Idiot” is a predominating and overbalancing character. The object of all great literature is to present the truth in terms of beauty. “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is as moral as “Emma.” But the further one gets from a deliberate form of artistic expression like the novel, the less latitude one has in this respect. An episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky would be an impossible subject for a picture. So opera, which focuses itself for us in the stage frame and within a limited time, must somehow preserve for itself this truthfulness and fidelity to life as it is. “The Jewels of the Madonna” might serve as an episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky, or of Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity.

IV. WHEN MUSIC AND DRAMA ARE FITLY JOINED

I have referred to these various inconsistencies and absurdities of opera, not with the idea of making out a case against it; on the contrary, I want to make out a case for it. This obviously can be done only by means of operas which are guiltless of absurdities and of melodramatic exaggeration, which answer the requirements of artistic reasonableness, and are, at the same time, beautiful. This cannot be said of “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry—Heaven save the mark!), “La Bohème,” “La Tosca,” “The Girl of the Golden West,” “Thaïs” (poison, infidelity, suicide, sorcery, and religion mixed up in an intolerable mélange), “Contes d’Hoffman” (a Don Juan telling his adventures in detail)—these are bad art, not because they are immoral, but because they are untrue, distorted, without sense of the value of the material they employ.

Operas which are both beautiful and reasonable do exist, and one or two of them are actually in our present-day repertoire. The questions we have to ask are these: Can a highly imaginative and significant drama, in which action and reflection hold a proper balance, in which some great and moving passion or some elemental human motives find true dramatic expression—can such a drama exist as opera? Is it possible to preserve the body and the spirit of drama and at the same time to preserve the body and spirit of music? Does not one of these have to give way to the other? We want opera to be one thing, and not several. We want the same unity which exists in other artistic forms. We want to separate classic, romantic, and realistic. If opera changes from blank verse to rhymed verse, so to speak, we want the change to be dictated by an artistic necessity as it is in “As You Like It.” We want, above all, such a reasonable correspondence between seeing and hearing as shall make it possible for us to preserve each sense unimpaired by the other. A few such operas have been composed. A considerable number approach this ideal. From Gluck’s “Orfeo” (produced in 1762) to Wagner’s “Tristan” (1865) the pure conception of opera has always been kept alive. Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Wagner, and Verdi are the great names that stand out above the general level.

Gluck’s “Orfeo” is even more interesting since the dark shadow of Strauss’s “Electra” has appeared to throw it into relief. Once in a decade or two “Orfeo” is revived to reveal anew how nobly Gluck interpreted the old Greek story. And it must be remembered that Gluck lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when music was quite inflexible in the matter of those dissonances which are considered by modern composers absolutely necessary to the expression of dramatic passion.

After Gluck came Mozart with his “Don Giovanni,” preserving the same balance between action and emotion, with an even greater unity of style and the same sincerity of utterance. Mozart possessed a supreme mastery over all his material, and a unique gift for creating pure and lucid melody. In his operas there is no admixture: his tragedy and his comedy are alike purely objective—and it is chiefly this quality which prevents our understanding them. We, in our day and age, cannot project ourselves into Mozart’s milieu; the tragedy at the close of “Don Giovanni” moves us no whit because it is devoid of shrieking dissonances and thunders of orchestral sound. Our nervous systems are adjusted to instrumental cataclysms. (We are conscious only of a falling star; the serene and placid Heavens look down on us in vain.) Could we hear “Don Giovanni” in a small opera house sung in pure classic style, we should realize how beautiful it is; we should no longer crave the over-excitement and unrestrained passion of “La Tosca”; we should understand that the deepest passion is expressible without tearing itself to tatters, and that music may be unutterably tragic in simple major and minor mode. Don Giovanni is a type of operatic hero,—he may be found in some modified form in half the operas ever written,—but Mozart lifts him far above his petty intrigues and makes him a great figure standing for certain elements in human nature. (It is the failure of Gounod to accomplish this which puts “Faust” on the lower plane it occupies.) The stage setting of “Don Giovanni,”—the conventional rooms with gilt chairs, and the like,—the costumes, the acting, the music (orchestral and vocal), are all unified in one style. And this, coupled with the supreme mastery and the melodic gift of its composer, makes it one of the most perfect, if not the most perfect, of operas.

Beethoven’s “Fidelio” (produced in 1805) celebrates the devotion and self-sacrifice of a woman—and that devotion and self-sacrifice actually have for their object her husband! It is a noble opera, but Beethoven’s mind and temperament were not suited to the operatic problem, and “Fidelio” is not by any means a perfect work of art. The Beethoven we hear there is the Beethoven of the slow movements of the sonatas and symphonies; but we could well hear “Fidelio” often, for it stands alone in its utter sincerity and grandeur.

The romantic operas of Weber tend toward that characterization which is the essential equality of his great successor, Wagner, for “Der Freischütz” and “Euryanthe” are full of characteristic music. Weber begins and ends romantic opera. (Romantic subjects are common enough, but romantic treatment is exceedingly uncommon. Scott’s “Bride of Lammermoor,” for example, in passing through the hands of librettist and composer becomes—in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”—considerably tinged with melodrama.) There is evidence enough in “Der Freischütz” and “Euryanthe” of Weber’s sincerity and desire to make his operas artistic units. Each of them conveys a definite impression of beauty and avoids those specious appeals so common in opera.

Meanwhile, in the early part of the nineteenth century, opéra comique was flourishing in France. Auber, Hérold, Boieldieu, and other composers were producing works in which the impossible happenings of grand opera were made possible by humor and lightness of touch. The words of these composers are full of delightful melody and are more reasonable and true than are many better-known grand operas.

Then comes the Wagnerian period, with its preponderance of drama over music. In “Tristan und Isolde” Wagner, by his own confession, turned away from preconceived theories and composed as his inner spirit moved him. “Tristan” is, therefore, the work of an artist rather than of a theorist, and although it is based on the leit-motif and on certain other important structural ideas which belong to the Wagnerian scheme, it rises far above their limitations and glows with the real light of genius. In “Tristan” the action is suited to the psychology. It is a great work of art and the most beautiful of all recantations. In it we realize how finely means may be adjusted to ends, how clearly music and text may be united, how reasonable is the use of the leit-motif when it characterizes beings aflame with passion; how the song, under the influence of great dramatic situations, can be expanded; how vividly the orchestra can interpret and even further the actions; how even the chorus can be fitted into the dramatic scheme—everywhere in “Tristan” there is unity. This is not true of most of Wagner’s other operas. “Die Meistersinger” comes nearest to “Tristan” in this respect. May we not say that of all the music-dramas of Wagner, “Tristan” and “Die Meistersinger” lay completely in his consciousness unmixed with philosophical ideas and theories? In them the leit-motif deals chiefly with emotions or with characteristics of persons rather than with inanimate objects, or ideas; in them is no grandiose scenic display; no perversity of theory, but only beautiful music wedded to a fitting text.

Wagner’s reforms were bound to bring about a reaction, which came in due season and resulted in shorter and more direct works, such as those of the modern Italians. No operas since Wagner, save Verdi’s “Otello” and “Falstaff,” approach the greatness of his music-dramas, and the tendency of many of these later works has been too much toward what we mildly call “decadence.” But there is a great difference between the truthfulness and artistic validity of “Carmen” and that of “La Bohème” and “La Tosca.” The former is packed full of genuine passion, however primitive, brutal, and devastating it may be; and its technical skill is undoubted.