A Neglected Language

I

IN 1597 Thomas Morley —the composer of that delightful song ’It was a lover and his lass ’ — published a little book entitled A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, near the beginning of which he tells the following anecdote: —

Supper being ended, and Musicke bookes (according to the custome) being brought to the table, the mistresse of the house presented me with a part, earnestly requesting me to sing. But when, after many excuses, I protested unfainedly that I could not, every one began to wonder. Yea, some whispered to others, demaunding how I was brought up; so that, upon shame of mine ignorance, I go now to seeke out mine old friend master Gnorimus, to make my selfe his scholler.

Just why, in the history of the civilization of different nations, there have been different fashions in music would be an interesting subject of inquiry. In Morley’s day it was the fashion for cultured people to sing and play together, not for an audience to hear, but solely for their own pleasure and musical experience. Music was to them a form of speech, another language, used informally every day to supplement words in expressing emotion. So it was, too, for a hundred years after Morley. Perhaps the most vivid recollections of Pepys, to a music lover, are the trios and quartettes in the garden in which the maid, the cook, or the manservant took a part. Indeed, Pepys would not hire a new girl until she had demonstrated her ability to take an intelligent part in the family music.

A hundred years after Morley, Handel started England singing his oratorios and developed the great choruses. Still another hundred years later, Paganini and Liszt, with their followers, set the whole world agog over virtuosity. Other nations have had other varying musical experience, now engrossed with one musical fashion, now with another.

While in the United States we have as yet no such important musical history, within the past generation, at least, one musical fashion has changed for the better. It is no longer considered ‘sissy’ for boys, or queer and infra dig. for men, to take a serious interest in music, as was true when I was a boy; we can now hear superb performances of the best music by college glee clubs. Our present fashion in music, however, is to listen to bigger and better orchestras. During the past thirty years America has had a veritable orgy of listening. Orchestras, opera companies, and soloists, the greatest in the world, have flocked to our shores and played before packed houses. Our musical taste has thus been immeasurably improved — witness the present popularity of Bach and Brahms; but how many of the thousands of intelligent men and women who attend all the concerts use music themselves as a means of self-expression, or even realize the possibilities of doing so?

With music as a form of passive entertainment at its zenith, music as a language, a form of speech available to the ordinary man and woman, is generally neglected. In Wales and in parts of England, the people all sing together as part of their daily lives and can read from the score as readily as could the guests at Morley’s dinner party; in Germany and Austria and other parts of Europe, the average cult ured person can usually both sing and play an instrument; but in America the performance of music is generally regarded as a thing apart, for the elect alone, the mysteries of which it is impossible for anyone to delve into except those possessing a special gift or talent. Although there is now an enormous demand for music for the listener, there is relatively little organized effort to enlarge popular participation in the performance of music. Its avowed patrons mistakenly suppose that the fundamental human need for emotional expression through music can be adequately satisfied by mere listening. People seem unable to believe that music can be as simple, direct, and personal as it really is. Accordingly, they persist in clothing it with unnecessary mystery and complexity.

Clearly, our present general failure to participate in music making is not due to any national lack of the musical faculty or to the absence of a desire by people to play or sing. We are directly descended from any number of musical nations; among the scores of persons to whom I have talked of this, I do not remember one intelligent adult, classed as ‘non-musical,’ who did not envy those lucky ones who are able to make their own music together. While the radio and the gramophone have perhaps contributed to the discouragement of some amateur virtuosi, these devices can no more eliminate permanently the fundamental need for the individual adventure in music than the movies can eliminate that for the individual adventure in love. On the contrary, by spreading the knowledge of music they will greatly stimulate the desire for general music making.

The fashion of listening is thus but a habit, engendered and perpetuated by a widespread misapprehension of the purpose and function of music in its relation to life and of the possibility for the direct participation in music by the average person. Music is too often associated with solos and virtuosity, amateur music making being considered a mere parlor trick. Instead, it should be regarded as a delightful new language, for the personal use of each one of us. If only our growing host of music lovers could be made to realize that they themselves can learn to take part in group music as easily and as well as they learn to play bridge or golf, — some better, some worse, but all well enough to get along and enjoy it, — we Americans would in a decade become the really musical nation which our genuine interest in music entitles us to be.

II

Doubtless performances by amateurs are greatly inferior, from an artistic point of view, to those of the professionals. Our present concern is not, however, for the effect of amateur music on the listeners, but for that on the performers themselves, whose musical development can be adequately achieved in no other way. By actually singing or playing together a great musical composition, the performers attain an intimate conception of its beauties and of the art of reproducing it which enables them, when they next hear it perfectly done by experts, both to understand the composition and to appreciate the performance in a way that no amount of mere listening could accomplish.

Practically everyone who has experienced the delight of singing or playing a great work of music with a group of serious and enthusiastic colleagues will, I believe, agree that the pleasure realized from a very mediocre performance far exceeds that from listening to the most perfect rendering by others, unless it be of a work which they have sung or played themselves. Since history began, our ancestors have used music — the song and dance, melody and rhythm — to release their supercharged emotions. Playing and singing together are a means of individual emotional outlet for which there is no substitute. To participate, with a group of reverent enthusiasts, in the performance of a work like the Bach B Minor Mass constitutes a spiritual experience which it is utterly impossible to attain vicariously, and which has the effect of smoothing out the participant’s soul.

Games like golf, in which normally the players far outnumber the spectators, are what make Anglo-Saxons an athletic nation; not football, baseball, boxing, wrestling, and similar sports, in which practically all participation by persons past the prime of youth is by looking on. Probably 90 per cent of the spectators at a golf or tennis match are there to see how it is that the experts do, so easily and perfectly, what they themselves do so badly, though with continued enthusiasm, pleasure, and physical benefit to themselves.

In musical education far too much attention has been devoted to the brilliance and technical perfection of the individual performance, too little to fitting the pupils for an effective part in group music. There has resulted an undue proportion of amateur soloists, whose knowledge of music is limited to the few selections which they have struggled to master. Many such beginners become discouraged and drop their music before they reach the period in life when they need and can enjoy it the most. If but a fraction of the time, effort, and talent required to turn out a poor soloist were devoted to teaching the pupil to read music easily at sight and to acquiring a first-hand acquaintance with the treasures of musical literature, most of these disheartened virtuosi would become capable and devoted ensemble singers and players, and so continue for the balance of their lives.

There are, also, it is to be regretted, some music teachers, particularly of singing, who are apparently more interested in exploiting their pupils for the benefit of the teacher than in fitting them to lead fuller and richer musical lives. These teachers unduly emphasize virtuosity and discourage group music, which they naturally fear as a menace to the continuance of the kind of music in which their profit lies.

III

While the general familiarity with music in America has vastly increased during the past thirty years, it is still far below our general familiarity with literature. On a recent trip abroad my family and I had, during one of the first meals, a short argument on a musical subject, which was apparently overheard by the passengers at the next table. When, after two or three days, we established the usual Atlantic intimacy with them, we found that I had been classified as the conductor of an orchestra in the Middle West, whereas I am simply a Philadelphia corporation lawyer. No one but a professional pianist or violinist is supposed to know how many violin sonatas were written by Beethoven, or to be able to recognize any of them. Even among professionals the general knowledge of music is often astonishingly narrow. The singers know only their songs and are for the most part interested principally in voice production. Comparatively few instrumental soloists have any extensive familiarity with chamber music, much less with the great works for voices.

Our growing generation is taught literature, not with a false hope of discovering or developing new Shakespeares or Thackerays, but to enable the average citizen to write an intelligent letter, to turn a neat phrase in conversation, to be able to make or recognize an apt quotation; above all, to develop a real love for literature which will persist and grow as it nourishes itself through life, attaining its maximum of pleasure and satisfaction only with ripe maturity. What would be thought of a graduating class in English, however cleverly its members were able to recite a few poems or orations, if the greater part were unable to read aloud and understand a new page of ordinary prose, or if the reciters of Hamlet’s soliloquy had never heard of the Sonnets and had no general knowledge of literature? The end of a musical education should not be the static ability to sing or play a taught repertoire, but the dynamic development, on a sound and broad foundation, of the power to use the tools and materials of music for the enrichment of the pupil’s further musical life.

At present, musical education is, on the whole, perhaps better in the public than in the private schools, which are apparently held back more by tradition. The weakest spot is in the secondary schools, where the excellent training from the primary grades is lost because no time can be allowed for a subject which receives no college entrance credit. This cannot be remedied until the college authorities are convinced that an applicant who is able to play a four-voice fugue at sight on the piano, or to read intelligently a tenor part in a vocal quartette, evinces at least as much mental power and application as one who is able to translate 61 per cent of a page of Cæsar, or to solve the required percentage of problems in plane geometry. In its potentiality for cultural development in modern life, which accomplishment would appear to offer the greater promise?

At this very moment we are on the threshold of an era which promises a veritable musical renaissance, provided only we make intelligent use of that part of our new-found leisure which we devote to the fine arts. If we employ this leisure as did the Romans after Cæsar, — lookers-on at amusements provided by others, — we shall have an Age of Nero or of Caligula. If, however, we use it in the direct expression of beauty through the fine arts, we shall produce an Age of Pericles, of Raphael, of Shakespeare, Purcell, and Reynolds, or of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

The master genius in sculpture, in painting, or in architecture, has sprung only from a race whose blacksmiths and cutlers embellished their anvils, their swords, and their knives with basreliefs, whose merchants decorated their warehouses with frescoes, and whose guilds vied with one another to provide the most beautiful window or niche in their cathedral. So the great composer can come only from a people who, not in formal concerts, but as part of their daily lives, as naturally as they talk and work and play, expend a share of their leisure and of their surplus emotional energy in making music together. The production of the genius in music is but a by-product of something far more important — the re-acquisition by the people themselves of the neglected language of music.