Music and the School Board

I

OUR school stands not far from Germantown Avenue. The bustle of the town moves around it, but in the spring the magnolia blooms above the Burying Ground, and the eaves of the Meeting House, throw a protective shadow. A Friends School, in the full sense of the word. Quakers founded the school, teaching their children that mathematics, English, science, were of equal importance, and belief in God most important of all. Here children are still taught to have liberal views, to practise tolerance and social justice. The school’s attitude on all subjects has been for generations eager, receptive, critical — on all subjects, that is, except music. Only a Quaker half-century ago, music sprang from the devil. A couple of years ago, music was something to listen to occasionally, something children ‘took’ once a week. Music was considered easy for a few, impossible for most.

The truth is that music is easy for no one, and possible for everyone. Parents spend fat sums for music lessons — vet, as the pressure of school and outside activities increases, music is the first thing to be dropped. Now, music is an exact craft, as difficult to master as the Latin declensions. Children have to be forced to practise — most of them would be either geniuses or psychiatric material if that weren’t true. But practice at home fast becomes an impossibility. Glorious in theory, of course, to rise with the dawn and stumble through a Ševčik exercise; ghastly in reality. Hopeless to practise at the end of the day when hands and mind are exhausted. Children must be allowed to practise in school hours, while they are fresh. They must feel that they, and their musical efforts, are as important a part of the school as the football team. The eager, hard-working, not necessarily talented child, possessed with a real desire for music, must be fed the stimulation of playing and singing with other children. Music must be fun. Music must be considered a major subject.

We have found in our school, step by step, that this can be made a workable truth. It began with thinking about the Fine Arts courses — at least as far as I was concerned, it began there. An ‘Art Course’ used to be something to be avoided at any cost. In all schools, these days, a child gets more or less adequate instruction in painting, or modeling, supplemented by Art Appreciation courses. It was possible in our school, for example, to take an Art Major. But — if our Friends School now taught and recognized the Fine Arts — what place and importance was the school giving to music? What about a Music Major?

Our school had no orchestra. The general student had one music period a week. There was no shared musical experience. The instrumental student had no position; he was an outcast, playing alone. That mattered personally to me because in our family we have a trio: my husband, piano; myself, violin; and Jimmy, aged thirteen, cello. Our son enjoys playing with us, but not nearly so much as playing with his own friends, or making new friends through his playing. Some Sundays boys and girls flock to our house because they want a chance to play with people their own age. We could fill the parlor with children. Music for fun! Not for careers and platforms — just for everyday, long-enduring fun.

Jimmy has no desire to be a professional musician. He plays his cello moderately well — just an ordinary boy who likes music. But gradually, inexorably, he was being forced to give his music up because of the slow squeezing process on time inflicted by school activities and school schedules and — school attitude. It is increasingly difficult these days to find space to inject any homemade æsthetics into a child’s life. The schools, though they deny it, have taken over. I for one regard this with equanimity and confidence. But, because it is true, I felt the music problem was up to the schools, too.

So I began. I began with Mr. Barton, head of our Upper School, a determined man with a clear blue eye and a direct manner — a Quaker, and a competent Quaker. To Mr. Barton falls that complicated task, the arranging of schedules.

How, I asked him, could we get more music, and more time for music, in the school? How could we give recognition to our now solitary instrumentalists? How about my own son’s music? Wasn’t there some minor subject on Jimmy’s schedule we could eliminate? The quality of music in our school was of the best, I admitted. But how could Miss Denny, talented though she was, do much with the slow-starvation diet of one music period a week? Music is a relationship, and, like all relationships, needs to be developed by contacts.

Mr. Barton, year on year, deals with the ticklish business of school schedule versus parents’ demands. He eyed me in a detached way.

‘Would you rather do without Latin, Mrs. Rex?’ he asked.

I suppose I was red-faced and excited. ‘I don’t have to do without Latin — or French, either — or algebra. I want time for them all, and for music, too.’

Mr. Barton answered, quite equably, ‘Then you find a place, Mrs. Rex.’

So I said, all right, I would.

II

It is always foolhardy to attack an institution single-handed. I needed someone to work with me — someone with an impressive number of children in the school — someone who saw eye-toeye with me on this music business, and who wanted music for her children as much as I did. I wanted someone whose backbone would stiffen under opposition, one who at the same time could charm headmasters. I found her. We made a pretty good team.

First we talked to the parents. They were all polite and attentive. They remarked, mildly, that there was a goodly quality of music in the school already. It could be favorably compared with near-by schools. Hadn’t the Glee Club recently given The Mikado with outstanding success? The school — didn’t we remember? — had tried an orchestra many years ago, and it had failed miserably. . . . Interest had just faded out. . . . The schedules were so full, as it was. . . .

We knew the School Board was our eventual goal. We had seen those Friends work miracles, and knew their calibre. Our School Board is shrewd, cautious, alert, and curious. Its members deal in terms unusual to such boards. They have a rigid concept of their duty, and they speak of spiritual values. Surely, we thought, they will recognize music as a spiritual value.

But we knew that we must have facts. We were two parents who, cherishing a healthy respect for the Latin School tradition, yet believed music could be made an integral part of it. But, no matter how much we believed it, we had to prove that it could be done, and that it already had been done. We must have schedules from other schools showing pupils with three music periods a week in the lower grades, schedules of highschool students earning musical credits towards college. We must know what the colleges thought about this, and where the successful orchestras were, and how firm a position the instrumentalist held. The Parents Auxiliary gave us permission to make a survey of music work in other schools.

So we set out. Everybody said private schools were more progressive than public schools, so surely in them music would be flourishing. We were considerably taken aback to find most of the near-by private schools more than satisfied with their music departments. A Music Appreciation course for the upper grades, they told us, plus one period of music a week and a little Glee Club on the side, was most ample. Neither parents nor pupils had ever asked for more. Music was a minor subject, and was treated as one. Thus a series of suave, distinguished school heads slid smoothly away from us. Desperate, we ferreted out a few parents of musically gifted children who were pupils in those schools. There we got an answer. Music, they said, seemed impossible to arrange. It meant ‘special courses.’ It meant isolating their children, making them seem odd. In these expensive, exclusive schools the Parent-Teacher organizations are far from potent. The schools had no desire to find out what was in the parents’ minds. And the parents had given up.

We were pretty much discouraged. Where was there music for children? Where a school with vision? It turned out to be just across the river from us — a vast gray public school with the music for which we were searching: the finest a cappella choir we had ever heard anywhere; rooms full of horns, base viols, drums, cellos and violins and violas; enormous orchestras of boys and girls playing Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner, and playing well; free lessons; free instruments; free sound-proof practice rooms; and Music Majors flourishing on every side.

‘Trouble?’ the music director smiled. ‘I had trouble. But in the end the School Board agreed. This is a movement — don’t forget that. You ought to see what the schools in California are doing!’

Our traveling budget didn’t run to California. But we did get to Boston. And as we drove we made concise, careful entries in our notebooks: facts and more facts for our School Board. In a private school outside of Boston we found music periods, children composing and conducting, and music a major subject. Here was a school with two hundred and fifty pupils and two orchestras! Here fourth-grade pupils came to school at eight-fifteen in the morning, so that they could have Recorder lessons, and here little children piped the tune while the whole school filed in to Assembly. More important still, they played classical music. No ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ for this band.

In another private school we saw twenty-two pianos and fourteen soundproof practice rooms. Here twelve teachers of instruments were giving lessons in school time. (We noted this down under ‘Mr. Barton. Schedules.’) Here was a Music Major that worked. Pupils were carrying three music units into Smith and Radcliffe, and the attitude was ‘But colleges are eager for musical students!’ Here, at last, a school was guaranteeing music and marking it identically with Latin or mathematics.

We began to get sketchy bits of information about how the colleges regarded music. We found that Vassar, Smith, and Holyoke allowed two or three music units for admission. Yale’s music school offered B. A. courses. Harvard and Princeton and Mills had elective music courses. We wrote it all down. We sent for dozens of college catalogues.

We came home and added another heading in our notebooks. ‘For Our School,’ it read. An orchestra to be established immediately. Two full-time teachers (requisite of any first-class music department). Enough music in the eleventh and twelfth grades to meet requirements for one college entrance credit (entering wedge for a Music Major). Supervised practice rooms. And — hardest of all to catalogue neatly, most important of all to us — a change in the school’s attitude toward music. Music must be as important as Latin. Music must be something that mattered as much as science on Mr. Barton’s schedules.

The Music Committee was kind to us. The headmaster was receptive. Miss Denny gave us full support. But — wise heads shook thoughtfully. . . . The average parent . . . The necessary outlay of money . . . The School Board . . .

We tackled the parents again — at their houses; at meetings; sitting on kindergarten chairs with our knees touching our chins. . . . ‘Music is a craft ... A satisfaction a child carries into youth, into age . . . Something these boys and girls can never lose, no matter what the state of the world. . . .

III

It was a raw windy morning when our orchestra gathered for the first time. Children ran into the schoolyard, hurrying against the cold, lugging instruments. Jimmy hauled the case off his cello, and the dust blew on it while boys crowded around to look. The flutist was tootling someone’s clarinet. One of the older boys beat out a fine staccato on his drum, and a mother was struggling, with the help of two small girls, to unload a harp from the family car. A boy who had never had an instrument in his hands before cradled a trumpet with awkward pride. Children touching instruments, twanging strings . . . music for fun.

We had our orchestra, and a couple of makeshift practice rooms. And Mr. Barton’s schedule showed three practice periods a week for Jimmy. Miss Denny’s new assistant smiled from the doorway, and the Headmaster smiled too. Solid fruits of victory were three new boys who had transferred from a near-by school where there was no orchestra. They had come to play flute and oboe and viola with us.

The time was ripe to face the School Board. Now we could point with pride. Now we could make it clear why we needed money. ‘Conductor,’ it said in our notebook, and ‘Ensemble.’ We must have a conductor, because an orchestra needs watching. Here were eager children, fine, excited ambitions that wouldn’t last forever without expert help. The players were unevenly talented, unevenly trained. A little girl who had developed a raging case of poison ivy on her left hand, after two cello lessons, remarked firmly that she could finger just as well with her right hand, ‘if not maybe better.’ A first violinist with great talent played distractedly next to a beginner who missed six notes out of ten. The conductor must be someone with unbounded energy, a good nervous system, and an understanding of amateurs; a person not above transposing three notes for our new trumpeter and remembering to yell ‘Blow!’ at the right instant; someone, preferably, who had had experience with other school orchestras; and ideally, of course, someone who could also teach the ensemble players. For behind the orchestra we needed an ensemble. The beginner must be able to hear his own sourness in a small group, not to be fooled, as he is in an orchestra, by the full blare of sound. The competent player must have a chance at the fun of quartet and trio playing. An ensemble would train our beginners, hold the interest of our good instrumentalists. Interest was important, for we had no intention of making music compulsory. Make a school orchestra compulsory, and your players die off like flies in a frost.

Our conductor must be a teacher, not a technician; someone who would work with the school, with Miss Denny, with us; someone in contact with other schools and colleges, who could arrange ‘exchange music.’ Schools playing together — not for concerts, just for fun.

So, at last, we faced the School Board — with accomplishment behind us, and our now battered notebooks in our hands. We wanted money. We wanted music as a major subject.

Nobody on our School Board plays an instrument. Meeting that night, these men and women spoke softly to each other. ‘I’m glad to see thee . . .’ ‘How is thee . . .’ Kindly, intelligent, peaceful faces. These men and women had run our school successfully through many hard years. We put our case. We talked statistics, schedules, money. I remember that we talked our feelings, too. ‘Children and music . . . Boys and girls playing together, singing together, carrying all through their lives this music you give them ... In time of stress ... In time of fear . . .’

The Board granted us the money. ‘A growing demand for music,’ their statement said in part, ‘has undoubtedly arisen. The Friends School must meet it. . . . We believe in the spiritual value of music in the lives of the pupils in the Friends School. . . . We consider music a major subject. . . .’

This fall the new teacher arrives. We are buying two more pianos. Horn players have group lessons. There is a movement on foot to make the practice rooms free. Our instrumentalists are important children in the school, to be looked up to, even to be envied. We consult frequently with the Curtis Institute of Music. Eventually we shall establish a music school within our school.

Mr. Barton, with sardonic cheerfulness, juggles study periods and music periods, squeezes time here, expands it there. Jimmy won’t have to give up his cello. My neighbor’s boy takes fiddle lessons at school now. Our valiant poison-ivied cellist plays ensemble, fingering with her left hand exclusively, and is about to tackle the flute on the side.

It can be done. Good strong Quakers administer our school, teaching the children that mathematics, English, science — and music — are of equal importance.