Our Public Education in Music

NERO, it is said, believed that music, unheard by others than the performer, was valueless ; that appreciation and receptivity were much less important than execution. Our public education in music proceeds along the same lines, inculcating performance and creation in music from first to last, and scarcely recognizing the non-performer as a factor in art at all. In the primary school classes, all are taught to join in singing, and this choral activity is continued as the chief element of public musical instruction until the end of the high school or academy work. In the college, if any change is made, it is generally in the direction of harmony, counterpoint, and composition.

Yet it may be taken as an axiom that nine tenths of the graduates from all classes of educational institutions, excepting conservatories of music, will not be actively musical in subsequent life ; they will enjoy music, so far as they are able, from the passive side. Surely these submerged nine tenths have some rights in the domain of music and some claims for an education fitted to their needs ; classes in musical appreciation are a more crying necessity than the omnipresent classes in singing.

In some of the large colleges and universities a study of fine arts is recognized as a necessary part of the curriculum. In Harvard, for example, Professor Charles Eliot Norton has broadened the culture of many hundreds, possibly thousands, by teaching how to understand the subtleties of painting, the influence of one school upon another, the characteristics of each school, the outcome of each theory. He has never attempted to teach a single student how to mix colors or how to handle the brush ; he has taught the comprehension of the art, not the practice of it. Something of this kind is needed in the musical department of our schools. We cannot make a nation of musicians (even if it were desirable to do so), but we can permeate the educated classes with musical culture, and in producing many intelligent musical auditors we are giving the most practical uplift possible to the creative musicians of America.

It is probable that a few teachers will exclaim, against this impeachment, that they are already doing something akin to this, by giving some talks about the art, by causing essays to be written, by questioning the singers about the choruses they have sung; but the work of a course, such as is here pleaded for, means something far more definite and extensive than such sporadic attempts. It does not mean an appendix to a chorus, or a pleasant chat about a solfeggio exercise. It means a presentation and explanation of every class of music, it means the creation of a class of listeners during the musical exercises, the establishment of intelligent audition, and the awakening of an enjoyment of music without the eternal necessity of making it.

How many of the thousands of pupils, who have been singing all the way from kindergarten to college, know what a fugue is trying to tell them ? How many can comprehend even the simplest orchestral composition ? How many understand the architecture of music in any degree ? Yet these points would be only a small part of a public course intended to teach appreciation of music. Let us then examine, in definite detail, what such a course should attempt and what product it would bring forth. It should by no means interfere with the vocal training which forms the present sum and substance of public school instruction in music (it ought to supplement that), but it should allow some unfortunates, who now howl dutifully twice a week, to really enjoy music which they are no longer to be obliged to assist in making.

In the primary school and in the lower grammar school classes the musical appreciation class ought to begin its work. A very simple course of musical acoustics might awaken the child’s interest in the symmetry of tone and chord. The Chladni plate might be exhibited to prove to the eye that noise is unsymmetrical and that tone is symmetrical. A few simple experiments in showing the overtones, in demonstrating how Nature builds her chords, might follow. The more complicated musical acoustics should come only in the higher grades of tuition.

The children should sing our national songs as an adjunct to their history lessons, and each of these songs should be made pregnant with meaning by having its story told before a note is sung, –or listened to ! What a wealth of history there would be in connection with Yankee Doodle, for example. Not of the origin of the melody, for that is unknown, but of the Colonial war and of the New England troops marching into Albany and being lampooned to this tune by Dr. Shuckburgh, the English surgeon ; of the British bands playing it on Sunday mornings, in Boston, to irritate the church-going New Englanders ; of the ribald words sung to it by the English against John Hancock, during the siege of Boston ; of its sounding forth during Lord Percy’s hurried march toward Lexington to relieve Major Pitcairn, –thus beginning the Revolution ; of the American bands playing it at Yorktown, at the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, –thus ending it. The mutations of the Star - Spangled Banner from English drinking-song to “ Adams and Liberty,” to praise of Jefferson, and to its present shape, might be explained. The rollicking naval songs of the war of 1812 might find their place here, and many another bit of historical music. This, however, deals rather with repertoire than with system, yet it deserves momentary notice as the fittest beginning of an American music course.

The architecture of music ought to be studied, at least in its elementary phases, even at this stage. Schlegel has said that architecture is frozen music (and Madame de Staël has generally been credited with the idea), but few laymen have understood that music is tonal architecture. Wing balances against wing in architecture ; theme is in equipoise against theme in much of the best music. There are many simple choruses which illustrate this fact, and many more which show the practice of the composer of ending a composition with its opening idea. After fitting explanation, part of the class should sing such a song and part of the class should listen.

The scale-construction which constitutes the language of a composition might be approached at a little higher grade. The students would of course be familiar with the conventional major and minor, but they would now be taught that other languages exist, that there was a musician’s Tower of Babel, when the nations began to speak different musical tongues. The simplest of these, the pentatonic scale (our diatonic scale with the fourth and seventh notes omitted), might be explained as belonging chiefly to China, but that it is understood and used by European nations might be demonstrated by allowing the class to analyze Auld Lang Syne and Bonnie Doon, and both sing and listen to them. Many other compositions might be mentioned that would illustrate the six-toned scale, the Hungarian scale, and others.

Arrived at a little higher grade the instrumental side of music begins to claim the student’s attention. A reasonable familiarity ought to be sought with the different orchestral instruments. Should there be a band or small orchestra connected with the school, as is frequently the case, the working of each instrument might be colloquially explained by its student-performer, and each band concert should become in some degree an object lesson. But eventually there should follow an explanation of the shape and technique of each orchestral instrument and its function in the concert room.

The mere hearing of a fine pianist or vocalist in the schoolroom, as has sometimes been brought about, is not to the purpose here, but the audition of a bassoonist, an oboist, a French horn player, etc., would be a practical lesson.

The tone-color of each instrument should now be studied. The brooding character of the viola, the portentous and sometimes grotesque style of the contrabass, the feverish brilliancy of the piccolo, the rustic vein of the oboe, the comic character of the bassoon, the baleful tones of the muted horns, the suspense that can be pictured upon the kettledrums, –all these and many more effects should become recognizable to the student-auditor.

Just as the student of fine arts knows that the oil painting speaks a different language from the etching, the pupil ought now to comprehend that the orchestral work demands more of its auditor than the piano composition, and as the art-student anticipates white in a winter landscape, or green in a picture of spring, our music auditor should understand that a melancholy orchestral work would imply English horn or viola, a picture of country life would call for oboe, a military sketch for trumpet, a celestial scene for harps, or violins with flutes.

And now a very definite phase of music as a language ought to be taken up. By the development of figures an instrumental composition can often be made as logical as a sentence of words. The figure grows and is transformed into larger forms and sometimes into an entire composition. The auditor must be trained to watch the seed growing into a harvest. The entire first movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony is reducible to three figures of which one is very important; the sixth symphony begins with a movement that is derived almost wholly from a phrase about three measures long; the beautiful fugue in D major, Bach’s Welltempered Clavier, Book II., No. 5, is entirely made of transmutations of its first nine notes, a fine example of the mathematics of music. This figure-language (“ development,” the musician calls it) is as unknown as Chaldaic to the student of music in the schools, yet it is the foundation of almost all classical instrumental music. Even in vocal music one finds much use of this figure-formation, and some songs by Robert Franz might readily be arranged as choruses and give the public school student his first induction into this attractive field of musical intellectuality.

Of course the Wagnerian treatment of figures of definite meaning, the Leitmotiven, which causes the orchestra to speak as definitely and somewhat in the same manner as the Greek chorus in the old tragedies, must come in for its share of attention, but the full study of the theories of the different schools of composition might be reserved for college education.

It would belong to the highest studies of this course, also, to analyze the shape of sonata and symphony, to study counterpoint, not in practical composition, but in its analysis. The comprehension of the pattern of a fugue might turn much music that is now considered dry by the student into a luxuriant garden of intellectual beauties. The connection between poetry and music as exemplified in strophe-form and art-song music would bind musical study of this kind very closely to literature in these highest branches.

The above may give an idea, but in a slight degree, of what may be studied by the intelligent pupil who never expects to produce a note of music in his life. The vocal studies of the present should be supplemented by more of instrumental work, and the songs and choruses themselves should yield more to the classes than they are at present doing.

And, in the midst of so much study of vocalism, another query is pertinent. What is being done for the pupil’s conversational voice ? Are we to train hundreds of singers who are not to sing, and send out still greater numbers whose unpleasant quality of speech is to be a handicap to them through life ? A pleasant voice is as important in the everyday affairs of life as a pleasant face or a well-groomed appearance. Yet between the millstones of vocalism and elocution the speaking voice of the average American comes forth twangy, irritating, unimpressive.

Here we merely state a fact, but dare make no suggestion. Is education in this branch feasible ? We do not know. The subject of natural voices is veiled in mystery, and the scientist has not yet informed us why Russia should be the land of basses, England of altos, France of mezzo-sopranos, why the Swiss should yodel naturally, and why high tenors are copious in North Spain. Whether this is a racial, climatic, or food question is not yet certain, and whether national voice characteristics will yield to treatment has not yet been demonstrated.

But as regards the main topic of this article there ought to be no such doubt. Let the public schools aid in training an intelligent musical taste, and the American composer will tread a much less thorny path.

Noble compositions and possibly a great American national anthem (our most noticeable musical lack) will soon follow. At present not one pupil in a hundred understands the gentle art of listening to music.

Louis C. Elson.