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 carriedon 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 theBoston 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 timeover 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 gradesthey 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 tocircumstances 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.
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 norcorrects 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 highschool. 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 tothat 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.
[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 bypartsofitself—what in architecture would be described as making the ornament grow out of the structure.
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 connectionwith 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 naturallyleads 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 theensemble; 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 favorof 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 acommunity 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.
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 oranother, 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 spiritthat 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. Theyfoster 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 ofthe 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 musicalactivity 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 roundsof “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 ournatural 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.
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 playmusical 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 villageI 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. “Withmen 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 andchorals 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 evidentenough. 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 directorswould 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 effortwere 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 weightin 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 whichevery 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 thedesire 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.
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 playedthe 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 theend 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—fromftoc; 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 unboundedbelief 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 valuablethan a paid musical demonstration by performers from abroad which costs five times as much money.
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 conceptionof 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 weldtogether 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 thosesocial 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 ofprotective 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 whatwethink 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 potentialsinging 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 theysafely 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-playingandteaching 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 ownperformance 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 arein possehe isin 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.
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 theLatin 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.