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.