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Title: Why We Love Music
Author: Seashore, Carl E.
Language: English
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Why We Love Music
BY
CARL E. SEASHORE
Professor of Psychology
and
Dean Emeritus of the Graduate College
The State University of Iowa
OLIVER DITSON COMPANY
THEODORE PRESSER CO., DISTRIBUTORS
BRYN MAWR, PENNSYLVANIA
Copyright MCMXLI by Oliver Ditson Company
International Copyright Secured
Printed in the United States
of America
PREFACE
The magazine, _Time_, commenting on my new book, _The Psychology of
Music_[A], spoke approvingly of the scientific contributions to music,
but gibed that, "psychologists have not explained why we love music." As
a reply to that I wrote a note, _Why Do We Love Music?_[B] This seemed
to call for a wider excursion implementing the views there taken, as in
the present Chapter I. That, in turn, led to the writing of the
remainder of this volume, in which each chapter deals with some of the
salient factors involved in the development of feeling for music.
These ventures digress from my habitual style of writing, as a technical
psychologist, in that I frequently indulge in generalizations and
predictions in a practical and popular vein. The attempt to interpret
and evaluate present tendencies in the region of forward movements in
music naturally takes me into unexplored territory and will stimulate
questioning on the part of promoters of various interest in the field. I
hold no brief for infallibility of the positions taken, except to say
that they are my convictions at the present moment. While they are not
direct reports of scientific experiments in the laboratory or the
studio, they may be regarded as an extension or interpretation based
upon scientific experiments and observations. It is hoped that they may
serve as hypotheses or at least a challenge for investigation and
practical trial. The reader must judge what is new and what is true from
his point of view. Many of the things I advocate are in an experimental
stage and in advance of current prevailing practice. This is the reason
for presenting them. My aim has been to tease out those elements in the
musical situation which help to make music function in our lives and be
appreciated.
The following chapters have appeared in magazines: Ch. I, _The Etude_
(brief summary); Ch. II, _The Parents' Magazine_; Ch. III, _National
Parent Teacher_, under the title, "On Their Musical Way"; Ch. IV, _The
School Review_; Ch. VI, _The Scientific Monthly_. For permission to
bring these chapters into this volume I herewith express my appreciation
to the publishers.
CARL E. SEASHORE,
Iowa City, Iowa,
March 1, 1940.
-----
Footnote A:
McGraw-Hill, 1938
Footnote B:
Music Educators Journal, Sept. 1938
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I Why Do We Love Music? 1
The Musical Medium 2
Organic response, 2; Sounds in themselves, 3;
Music proper, 3; Music with words and action,
3; Symbolism, 4.
The Musical Motives 4
Musical knowledge, 5; Musical feeling, 5;
Musical action, 6; Music as play, 7; Musical
imagination, 8; Who loves music?, 8.
Thought Review 10
II Music Before the Age of Six 12
From smile to music, 12; Music in play, 14;
Environment, 15; Music and speech, 16;
Musical talent, 17; Musical education, 18.
Thought Review 19
III Music Between the Ages of Six and Ten 21
A broadened conception of music, 22; The
analysis of talent, 23; Group instruction,
24; Formal lessons delayed, 25; A sympathetic
listener, 26; Music lovers vs. virtuosi, 27.
Thought Review 27
IV Music and Youth 29
Youth, The Age of Music 29
The emotional age, 29; The age of serious
play, 30; The age of decision and
eliminations, 30; The educational age, 30;
The age of leisure, 32.
Music For Youth 34
Music, an academic subject, 34; Orientation
in the grades, 35; Group activities in voice
and instrument, 35; Contests, 36; The hearing
of music, 37.
Thought Review 39
V The Musical Temperament 41
Physiological irritability, 43; Tonal
sensitivity, 43; Artistic license, 44;
Ear-mindedness, 45; Affective response, 45;
The esthetic mood, 46; Exhibitionism, 46;
Symbolism, 47; Precocity, 47.
Thought Review 48
VI Musical Inheritance 50
Essential Premises 50
Psychophysical Measurements 54
Thought Review 59
VII The Future of Musical Instruments 62
Possible Lines of Development 63
The improvement of existing instruments, 64;
New substitutes for existing instruments, 65;
New ensembles, 66.
New Music 67
Playing 69
Specifications for Instrument Construction 70
Pitch, 70; Loudness, 70; Time, 71; Timbre,
71.
Thought Review 72
VIII Praise and Blame in Music 74
Vantage Grounds 75
Artistic insight, 75; The scientific
attitude, 76; Terminology, 76; Musical
talent, 77.
Parties Concerned 77
The pupil, 77; The teacher, 78; The critic,
79; The public, 80.
Thought Review 81
Chapter I
WHY DO WE LOVE MUSIC?
Why does a person love his sweetheart, his food, his safety, his social
fellowship, his communion with nature, his God, approaches to the
ultimate goals of truth, goodness, and beauty? The answer to each of
these is a long story, involving not only common sense and scientific
observation but a profound intuitive insight, a self-revelation. In all,
it will be found that love is a favorable response, a reaching out for
the satisfaction of a fundamental human need, an effort to secure
possession, and a willingness to give an equivalent, indeed a more or
less unconditional surrender.
In all efforts to describe and explain, we reach out for specific
reasons or at least rationalizations. Modern science has made great
strides in revealing and describing all sorts of reasons for such
emotional experience and behavior. The theory of the evolution of man,
the anthropological implementation of this in the history of the rise of
mankind, the psychology of the mental development of the individual, the
comparison of this with animal behavior, and the inspired interpretation
of these motives in literature, especially biography, autobiography, and
poetry, are sources to be drawn upon. We have the adage that the
explanation of one blade of grass involves the explanation of all the
forces of nature. This aphorism certainly applies in the attempt to
explain any particular human love.
It is therefore evident that any attempt to account for a specific
affection, such as the love of music, must be fractionated, placing
responsibility in turn upon the scientist, the artist, and the
self-revelation of the inspired music lover at each culture level. It
has become the recognized function of the psychology of music to
integrate the contributions from all scientific sources, such as
anatomy, physiology, anthropology, acoustics, mental hygiene, and logic,
in their bearings upon the hearing of music, the appreciation of music,
musical skills, theories, and influences. To account for the emotional
power of music, the psychologist must consider the taproots of the
artistic nature of the individual in relation to the nature of the art
object, music. He must trace the unfolding of the organism as a whole
from inherited reflexes, instincts, urges, drives, and capacities in an
integrated pattern; he must consider the function of the art in human
economy and especially the goals attained by the pursuit of the art. In
this task there is room for intricate specializations and division of
labor. It is my purpose here to present merely a rough skeletal outline
of some of the outstanding features which underlie the love of music
from the psychological point of view.
Every impulse has two aspects: attraction and repulsion. All of us love
music in some degree; all of us hate some music; and most of us in the
economy of nature are comparatively indifferent and extravagantly
wasteful to the role that music might play in our lives. Hatred and
indifference to music are important realities in life worthy of serious
consideration; but our topic restricts us to the positive side of
musical response, the love of music.
THE MUSICAL MEDIUM
_Organic response._ Man is born with a psychophysical organism which
registers sounds and responds to them somewhat like a resonator, which
selects, amplifies and aids in the integration of auditory impressions.
Our whole organism responds to sound involving the central and
peripheral nervous system, all the muscles, all the internal organs, and
especially the automatic nervous system with its endocrines, which
furnish the triggers in the physical generation of emotion. Experiments
from various sources have shown that sound acts physiologically on
nervous control, circulation, digestion, metabolism, body temperature,
posture and balance, hunger and thirst, and in general, the groundwork
of pleasure and pain. The physical organism as a whole responds to
sounds in specialized functions.
Thus, man comes into the world tuned to music. The organism responds to
sounds from earliest infancy. Back of all conscious awareness, back of
all musical feeling, even back of subconscious assimilations and
elaborations is the purely physiological response which is a function
and a condition of well-being. This physiologically beneficent response
of the organism to sound underlies all musical experience; without it we
could not love music.
_Sounds in themselves._ Like colors, sounds may be beautiful in
themselves, quite apart from music. A single sound in nature or art is
capable of appearing in endless variety in terms of pitch, dynamic
value, duration, tone quality, and noise. It may be an object of beauty
in itself in thousands of ways quite apart from its utility in music or
musical perception. We find the tonal world in which we live full of
beautiful and useful sounds which we love because we are capable of
intellectual and emotional response to their beneficent influence. They
play a large role in our feelings of attraction and adjustment. They may
be beautiful to the untutored and intuitive mind as well as to the
intellectually and esthetically cultured mind in the same way that
flowers may seem beautiful to a child because they arouse an immediate
pleasurable feeling; and yet they are not music but merely the raw
material from which music is made. These raw materials from which the
musical structure is raised are themselves beautiful, quite apart from
musical experience or behavior. They play a large role in the love of
nature.
Thus, before the beginnings of music, primitive man responded
affectionately to the sounds of nature and was guided by them in his
daily life. Even before language took form, single sounds carried
meaning and gave satisfaction. Man took pleasure in his own vocal
utterances or mechanically produced sounds which played a large role in
his human economy and development.
_Music proper._ Sounds may be woven into beautiful patterns. This is
music. We admire the melodic progressions, the rhythmic patterns, the
harmonic structure, and the qualitative modulations in the flow of
beautiful sounds. Harmony, balance, symmetry, contrast and fusions
become embodied in musical form. Here the object of our affections is
the artistic creation. The place of the musician is quite analogous to
the astronomer's feeling of the sublime as he looks into the heavens in
the light of his knowledge of the nature and movement of heavenly
bodies.
_Music with words and action._ Much of the charm of music lies in its
association with words which carry the message, as in song. The center
of interest in much of the vocal art lies in the meaning conveyed by the
words where the music serves as an artistic embellishment. This is true
of the lullaby, the cowboy song, the lover's plea, and grand opera.
Likewise, much of the charm of music lies in its association with overt
action as in dances, work songs, marches, and games, where action is
rhythmic. This added power of the music lies not only in the dance steps
but more conspicuously in the suggestive rhythms divided into intricate
patterns often far surpassing the score or the physical performance.
That is what we mean when we say music carries. In such situations the
musical appeal may lie for one person in the verbal message or the overt
action and for another, purely in the musical appeal. Yet both words and
action on the one hand and music on the other are enriched through the
association.
_Symbolism._ Music finds its highest and most universal expression in
symbolism. Music is primarily a way of expressing moods, attitudes,
feelings, and longings in generalized form. The listener tends to live
himself concretely into the feeling suggested. In the esthetic mood he
is not aware of the mechanics of the symbolic suggestion, for which the
art has many resources, and he may not be aware of the music as such;
but he lives realistically within his own personal realm of interests.
Thus, music sounds the keynote on great festive occasions in the
powerful forms of festive music, as in the great sacred oratorios and
simpler but beautiful forms of church music or in triumphant marches and
other festive celebrations in major form. But minor forms, as in tone
poems and haunting melodies, work on the same principle and perhaps
fully as effectively. From the grandeur suggested by the sonata to the
serenity arising from the simplest bit of improvization in voice or
instrument, music has unlimited power to seize the individual for some
form of dreamlike realization of the subjects of his longings.
THE MUSICAL MOTIVES
What we are called upon to explain then in the attraction for musical
art is essentially the motives which drive man to the creation,
appreciation, and performance of music. One of these motives is the love
of knowledge as a thing in itself, the understanding of what is, and the
power of passing from vantage ground to vantage ground in the logical
creation, appreciation, and execution of art forms.
_Musical knowledge._ This love of music for its cognitive value can be
traced from the earliest musical achievements, as in the growing
acquaintance with song, sight reading, qualifications for participation
in music, and appreciation of art forms, throughout all stages in the
musical development of the individual up to that of the highest
interpreters and creators of music. While music is a play on our
feelings and appeals primarily to our emotional life, an intellectual
mastery of the process, the ability to understand artistic meanings, the
ability to construct beautiful art forms, the ability to analyze
elements in the power of music, the ability to see the relation between
musical art and other forms of art, and the ability to comprehend the
unity of all the arts, are basic in our love of music. Even in the cool
and logical pursuit of the science of music, foundations are laid for
the deepening of insight and the revelation of artistic values. Glimpses
into the vistas of unexplored resources intensify the admiration, the
feeling of awe, the glimpse into the infinite which is love of the
object pursued.
The role of intelligence in music is well illustrated in recent
experiments in which vocabulary was measured in three groups; namely,
ten nationally well-known composers, ten of the most successful students
in a large class in composition, and ten of the least successful
students in the same class. It was found that the master composers and
the successful students of composition ranked in or near the top in a
test of general vocabulary; whereas, the unsuccessful students ranked
near the bottom. Since knowledge of words is an index for the possession
of ideas, it is significant to note that successful composers are
persons who have a large and discriminating command of ideas.
_Musical feeling._ It must be recognized that the love of music is
essentially an unanalyzed feeling. Countless people feel the esthetic
appeal in music without understanding anything about it. It may be like
the notorious puppy love, which is frequently blind, but nevertheless a
deep love. This is particularly true in the earlier stages of the
development of musical interests. But it is occasionally in evidence in
the successful singer on the stage who may be blissfully ignorant of the
principles underlying his art, the media he seeks to mold, or the
significance of his message. There is much justification for the
performer's forgetting what little he knows and indulging in
self-expression in a state of abandon in which he deeply feels his
message and expects to convey this feeling to the listener.
We must distinguish between two attitudes in listening to music and in
the performance of music: the critically analytical and the purely
emotional. An intelligent musician is capable of both and loves both. In
the learning stages he pursues the former attitude primarily until
techniques are mastered and habits are formed which operate
automatically in the musical situation. This is also the dominant
attitude of the music critic. But in seeking the enjoyment of music and
in the unified expression of a thing beautiful, the musician takes the
other attitude. Paderewski would be hopelessly lost and ineffective if,
at the moment of performance, he should be consciously aware of all the
art forms of which he is master. The successful performance comes in an
inspirational attitude, the semi-ecstatic feeling of the beauty one
seeks to convey, a state of forgetfulness of self and concrete facts.
Thus music is a language of emotion. Through it the composer and the
performer convey their own emotions to the listener. It is a message and
a means of communication which enable the performer and the listener to
live for moments in the same tonal world of pleasure. Our muse is
jealous and seeks to exclude all intruders at the moment of her artistic
appeal.
_Musical action._ On a par with the intellectual and emotional approach
is the role of action in music. Consider for a moment the central place
of rhythm. The composer presents a hierarchy of rhythms: the measure
rhythm, the phrase rhythm, the sentence rhythm, the movement rhythm, all
moving into a unified beautiful artistic structure. The performer takes
this as a cue and adds or detracts, as the case may be, by his personal
interpretation. Modern psychology has shown that all musical listening
is action, a constructive response on the part of the listener.
All rhythm is primarily a projection of personality. My rhythm flows
from what I am. A large part of the pleasure in music comes from a
satisfaction in what rhythm does. Rhythm facilitates perception by
grouping; rhythm adjusts the stream of attention; rhythm gives a feeling
of balance; rhythm gives a feeling of freedom, luxury and expanse;
rhythm gives a feeling of power, it carries; rhythm, as in the dance,
stimulates and lulls, contradictory as this may seem; rhythm finds
resonance in the whole organism; rhythm arouses sustained and enriched
associations; rhythm reaches out in extraordinarily detailed complexity
with progressive mastery; the instinctive craving for experience in
rhythm results in play, which is free self-expression for the pleasure
of expression; rhythm plays not only with temporal but also with dynamic
and qualitative aspects of tone. Subjectively, rhythm in music is a play
within a play: The composer anticipates it, the performer gives the cue,
and the listener expresses himself in it.
_Music as play._ All art is play, and the charm of music, the purest
form of art, lies fundamentally in the fact that it furnishes a medium
of self-expression for the mere joy of expression and without ulterior
purpose. It becomes a companion in solitude, a medium through which we
can live with the rest of the world. Through it we express our love, our
fears, our sympathy, our aspirations, our feelings of fellowship, our
communion with the Divine in the spirit of freedom of action.
Note the fundamental characteristics of play and observe how in these
lies the power of attraction in music as play. Play gives a feeling of
self-realization; it is the experience of growth. It expresses the
racial life and in many respects is a reversion to type: It has been
said that we are all of the same age--millions of years. Play is a
realization of the sense of freedom; it attracts, engages and fascinates
by the very satisfaction which it engenders and which supports it; the
dance, when it is real play and not mere social labor or conformity,
carries the dancer in so far as he falls into a state of diffuse and
dreamy consciousness, intoxicated by the sense of pleasure, lulled by
the automatic rhythmic movements, and soothed by the melodious and
measured flow of music. Play gives satisfaction in the feeling of being
a cause, of having creative power. Play is essentially social and finds
its highest realization in good fellowship. Play is positive, an
expression of the joy of life. The unrestraint and spontaneity of play
result in strenuous and whole-hearted exertion; the seriousness of play
is one of its fascinations. Success in play lies in its fictitious
nature; it rests upon make believe; liberated from realities, it accepts
the ideal and lives it as real. In the possibility of playing with the
ideal lies a fundamental charm of music.
_Musical imagination._ Music is by no means limited to what is composed,
performed and listened to in the objective situation. Its main field of
operation lies beyond the sensory impressions and overt actions. Its
principal domain is the tonal world of memory, imagination, thought, and
pure feeling. Millions of people are today under the spell of _Over the
Rainbow_, as rendered in _The Wizard of Oz_, a simple, compelling thing
which takes possession of us in the dream, and in the humdrum of daily
activities; it lives within us realistically, quite apart from actual
sounds so long as it is novel. This is especially true of the higher
forms of art with all their intricacy and refinements in artistic form
which the trained musician can re-live or create. _Over the Rainbow_,
the expression of our freedom and self-realization in the spirit of
adventure, lies within the power of music.
_Who loves music?_ The love of music is not universal. Deep, warm, and
poised devotion to music is comparatively rare. Much of music is plain
work, sheer drudgery. Much is climbing toward a goal never to be
attained. Many who ply the art of music can hardly be said to love it in
the long run. There are aspiring artists who devote a lifetime to the
mastery of the skills, but become hypercritical and sour when they fail
to feel the esthetic glow or gain the command of public acclaim. Many an
aspiring amateur suffers a similar defeat. To the masses, music is but
fleeting incidents, occasional whiffs of the overflow from the wealth of
human appeals to a latent artistic nature. It is a notorious fact that
many who profess a love of music do not have it, but are mere pretenders
and imitators, conscious or unconscious, and that many who disavow it
are merely dying with all their music in them.
For such failures and inadequacies there are many possible explanations.
One of the impediments to the love of music is the absence of the
"gift", a naturally musical mind. In this there are enormous differences
in kind and degree. It follows that there will be corresponding
differences in the kind and degree of love for music. While music
springs spontaneously in the gifted child and youth, education is as
essential for music as it is for science or language. One might as well
attempt to acquire learning without study as to acquire music without
training. Then again, as is a person's intelligence, so is his music.
And creative imagination is a tool with which music is fashioned from
childhood to the heights of artistry. Furthermore, we must recognize
that for really expressive love and devotion to music we must look to
the often justly or unjustly maligned musical temperament.
Yet the company of music lovers is great. Music is the most universal
avocation. This has been true of all races throughout all times and at
all culture levels. Only a fraction of one per cent of persons who hear
music or practice it do so vocationally. We, the people, preserve it
primarily as an avocation, an activity purely for pleasure and cultural
enrichment. The love of music abounds at our time and in our country;
yet we are but at the beginnings of a dawning musical era. The increase
of leisure time, high educational level, and the astounding invention of
instruments for the production and transmission of musical sounds
forecast its rise.
Why then do we love music? Among other things we love it because it
creates a physiological well-being in our organism; it is built from
materials which are beautiful objects in themselves; it carries us
through the realms of creative imagination, thought, actions, and
feelings in limitless art forms; it is self-propelling through natural
impulses, such as rhythm; it is the language of emotion, a generator of
social fellowship; it takes us out of the humdrum of life and makes us
live in play with the ideal; it satisfies our cravings for intellectual
conquest, for isolation in the artistic attitude of emotion, and for
self-expression for the joy of expression.
THOUGHT REVIEW
General Principles
(1) Music is pursued primarily for the pleasure of the pursuit without
ulterior purpose.
(2) When music renders service, this service is essentially the giving
of pleasure.
(3) The depth and the quality of a person's affection for music vary
significantly with the degree and kind of musical inheritance.
(4) If the natural urge toward music is there, it will be readily
molded through training and facilitation of the environment.
(5) It is psychologically possible to present a natural history of the
origin and development of the love of music in terms of its
objects and motives.
(6) The inceptive psychology of musical experience and behavior can be
pursued in the laboratory and the studio through experiment and
measurement.
(7) There is a charm in knowing _that_ we love music but even more so,
_why_ and _how_.
(8) It is also worth knowing why some people _do_ not and others
_cannot_ love music.
Questions to Consider
(1) Is the play attitude in music opposed to hard work?
(2) Why is high intelligence essential to the composer?
(3) Can a moron love music genuinely?
(4) Is the musical temperament essential for the love of music?
(5) How can the adrenal glands affect the love of music?
(6) Is the love of rhythm primarily inherited or acquired?
(7) What hereditary factors may block the development of the love of
music?
(8) What factors in musical talent are most telling for the
development of the love of music?
(9) What educational motives are most effective as a means of
enhancement of the love of music?
(10) What is the nature of musical ecstasy?
Discuss These True Situations
(1) The typical "house" for the season's performance of the symphony
orchestra is arrayed in festive attire and poses in attentive and
festive mood. Make an estimate of the relative proportion of the
audience there (a) to see and be seen, (b) to perform a social
obligation, (c) to satisfy curiosity, (d) to learn something about
music, (e) to thoroughly enjoy the orchestral music.
(2) A primitive savage lives close to nature and observes sounds
produced by man and beast, by wind and sea. May he feel musical
affection for these sounds apart from their utility and apart from
knowledge of man-made music?
(3) In an aristocratic family there are four children, all manifestly
lacking in musical talent, but intelligent and co-operative in
education. They are all given excellent advantages of musical
education and environment and pursue them as a matter of course.
Are they likely to come into a warm love of music?
(4) It has been observed that when one listens to very beautiful music
he tends to swallow saliva by gulps, as the young lover does in a
state of infatuation; and that when he hears vile music, there is
a tendency to want to spit. In other words, there are two ways of
disposing of saliva under emotion: Attraction, indicated by
swallowing; and repulsion, indicated by feeling the need of
spitting. Can you verify that?
Chapter II
MUSIC BEFORE THE AGE OF SIX
The psychology of music and the psychology of the child are giving us
new vital conceptions of the nature and role of music in child life. To
understand this fully is to understand adequately the nature of the
child mind and the nature of music.
_From smile to music._ All mental development begins with some inherited
form of behavior and gradually differentiates into richer and richer
meanings and forms of expression. The taproot of all music is the smile.
This in its first appearance is a pure reflex, expressing the well-being
of the organism.
Observe some typical steps in its history in high lights. When the
infant has had its fill from its mother's breast, its head falls back
and the mouth puckers as a result of withdrawal from the nipple. The
mother looks at this and says to herself, "He is satisfied." The child
has thus acquired one means of communication--the expression of
well-being. This rapidly radiates into many situations. When the infant
is patted on the back, is bathed, is rocked in the arms, or feels the
waft of comfortable air, the same puckering of the mouth seems to convey
to the mother a sign of well-being, and the meaning of this puckering is
thus enriched.
It gradually radiates from the lips through more general expressions of
comfort in the face as a whole, and we have a clearly developed smile.
Gradually it becomes associated with sounds--inceptive gurgling, simple
droning, light chatter, and other inceptive forms of vocalization,
always accompanied with a smile, which thus develops new meanings, and
mother and child acquire mutual understandings, because from the first
the mother tends to respond sympathetically in like language.
As this association grows it takes the form of audible laughter which,
at a comparatively high stage of development, becomes a "ha-ha-ha" with
musical inflections. This is a form of language, still not expressing
specific ideas, but the general attitudes of well-being, comfort,
satisfaction of young life as a whole. The mother knows it, loves it,
and responds accordingly; and this mother's response draws from the
infant a growing hierarchy of new types of responses, meaning the same
thing.
Gradually these infantile sounds develop inflections and modulations in
pitch, in loudness, in rhythm, and in tone quality. These inflections
are the beginning of beauty in voice, and each new conquest gives a new
form of satisfaction to the child and mother.
The mother may stimulate natural forms for expression of mutual feeling
by her own musical laughter. Gradually the playing with these sounds
becomes an object in itself, the making of a particular sound for mere
pleasure. This is the beginning of singing and the appreciation of
musical sounds.
We observe the child playing with modulations in pitch, in loudness, in
duration, and in different kinds of tone quality. This is the beginning
of musical experiment, of musical creation, and musical appreciation in
the child. Blessed is the mother who can appreciate the music thus born.
She then sees the significance of the rhythmic patty-cake as music which
gives pleasure to mother and child alike. She then begins to understand
that the jingling of a bell is sweet music to the child. She can see how
the appreciation of rhythm is gradually revealed through the progressive
development of means of making sounds and hearing varieties of sound.
Perhaps unconsciously she sets patterns for a musical inflection which
the child begins to imitate. To the child, noise is music, and the
discovery of noises and the mastery of various noises play an immensely
rich and important role, even in the highest forms of adult music.
Thus, the recognition and feeling of pleasure in sounds, and the power
to make agreeable sounds, reveal to the child an unfolding musical
world. His whole organism responds to it. This is an element of musical
feeling.
Let me digress for a moment to say that the beginnings of mental life
tend to develop from two fundamental needs: attraction and repulsion,
likes and dislikes, approaching and getting away from--these being
respectively the positive and the negative aspects of adjustment. The
smile is the sign of the positive side. The companion piece of the smile
as a taproot is the frown, which gradually develops through crying and
is the reciprocal of laughter. The history of the frown and crying is
quite parallel to the history of the smile and laughter in mental
evolution and in the development of the individual.
_Music in play._ While it does serve a purpose as language in social
adjustment, the musical activity of the young child is expression for
the love of expression itself. This play aspect early differentiates
itself from the use of sounds to convey meaning in language.
The child composes, rapidly revealing new melodic progressions, new
rhythms, new kinds of sounds, and new patterns in the durations of
sounds for his own delight in self-expression. Through them he wins
manifestations of appreciation from those around him who constitute his
audience. He repeats each new achievement as the momentary goal of play
until new patterns progressively take their place. In these actions of
musical composition, the same mental faculties that we see in the active
adult composers are at work, but limited to the child's natural level of
successful achievement.
He early reveals command of the four elements of all music, as such;
namely, pitch, loudness, time, and kind of tone or tone quality; and we
observe the unfolding of melody, dynamic expression, rhythm, and
richness of tone. Through these he imitates the sounds of nature,
speech, music, and noises at his level in the surroundings. In terms of
these he develops memories, indulges in fantasy and creative
imagination, and gradually begins to think about music. These are the
avenues through which the child expresses his needs and urges vocally or
instrumentally; but they are music in so far as they are indulged in for
the pleasure of the hearing or the making of the sounds themselves.
Note that the child composes by performing; therefore, each musical form
that he develops is clearly at his command in performance. Notice also
that the repetition of achievement is limited by the play attitude of
always demanding something more difficult. Composition, performance,
appreciation, body response form interlocking steps. That is what makes
the procedure natural. The joy of conquest, characteristic of play, is
the dominating motive. Here nature has her way in the development of
knowledge, appreciation, and skills.
Musical activity is normally a form of play, expression for the
satisfaction in the expression itself without ulterior motive, and this
attitude may be carried through life. A person who cannot take a play
attitude toward music perhaps has no music in him. The play attitude
does not free one from effort, even systematic and arduous effort, in
the acquisition of the art. Witness all the sports at all stages of
growth. There is nothing to relieve us from understanding facts involved
in music; but the driving motive is found in the play attitude, and the
result is pleasure in play. On these observations of nature's ways in
play, the future pedagogy of music will be built.
_Environment._ It is astonishing that the child is often treated as
unmusical unless he can sing or play adult compositions or show an
intelligent appreciation of high art forms. How pitiful it is for a
mother to say that her child is not musical because he does not sing her
songs and understand her artistic playing. How vastly could a mother's
appreciation of the child be increased if she realized what constitutes
music at his level and how fundamental the musical reactions at his
level are to the development of music in the adult!
To be musical, the child must be musical in response to his environment.
There are natural laws of evolution in the race and in the development
of the individual for types of reactions to the music that abounds
around us in nature and for the various means at our command of
expression through imitation of them. To the primitive tribe, the drum
is a powerful, thrilling musical instrument. So are all forms of
drumming to the child. He imitates the whistling, tooting, rattling,
banging sounds in his environment, sometimes until he becomes noisily
tiresome. He feels in harmony with the clock that ticks, the birds that
sing, the dog that barks, the cat that mews. He loves to bang on the
piano and blow his horn.
This craving for pleasure in sounds radiates through the sense of rhythm
into graceful movements, the beginnings of dancing and dramatic action,
even from the crudest rhythmic kicking and tapping movements of the
infant. His speech becomes rhythmic, melodic, dynamic, beautiful. His
whole body becomes reverberant in response to the sounds of nature.
Laughter progressively acquires new and beautiful forms. Even crying may
give satisfaction of an artistic sort. The swinging of the pendulum of
the old clock on the wall is music. The patter of rain, the splashing of
water have musical elements.
The child does not think of the artistic forms as does the musician; but
like the canary which, even if grown in isolation in a soundproof cage,
in due time produces his natural tours in repertoire, the child
instinctively comes out in melody, dynamic modulation, and rhythm. But
all these are modified by the environment.
_Music and speech._ Speech has the same media as music; namely, pitch,
loudness, time, and timbre which result in such musical forms as tonal
and dynamic inflection, rhythm, articulation, and vowel quality. A child
is, of course, not conscious of any of these as such, and yet, under
favorable circumstances, will quickly develop beautiful speech, which
means that it is well inflected, well modulated in loudness, beautifully
rhythmic, rich and clear in vowel qualities. If the child has a good
ear, instinctive liking for these aspects of speech will develop
surprisingly early.
To give the child musical environment means therefore not only exposure
to formal music but rather a motivation for hearing musically all sounds
around him, for acting rhythmically, and feeling the rhythmic impulse in
all forms of activity, for responding by imitation or other forms of
appreciation to all sounds beautiful. These acquisitions naturally take
the form of beautiful speech. Musical education in the nursery,
therefore, comes most effectively through informal education toward
beautiful speech.
The child becomes proficient in speech long before he becomes
correspondingly proficient in musical performance and appreciation. It
is therefore very important to recognize that music and speech employ
the same medium; namely, sounds which vary in pitch, loudness, duration,
and kind. The child reveals flexibility, richness, rhythm, and all other
forms of meaningful inflection in speech earlier than he does in music.
Indeed, by the time the child leaves the nursery, even at the age of
five, his characteristic form and command of speech are fairly
crystallized. The command of elements of beautiful speech is the first
step in a beautiful singing voice.
Speech is an index to character, and the means for the development of
character. Beautiful speech is musical speech. Genuinely beautiful
speech is a revelation of beautiful character. Let the mother who
worries about early piano or violin lessons first give thought to formal
sympathetic cultivation of a beautiful speaking voice.
Unfortunately, the child's speech is very largely determined by
imitation of those around him. How few mothers and fathers, how few
teachers, how few older children have beautiful speech! The young child
as a rule, therefore, encounters unfavorable speech environment. The
civilized world is just awakening to the possibilities and significance
of beautiful and effective speech.
Train the young child to the appreciation and development of power in
beautiful and effective speech, and you will have laid the best
foundations for musical appreciation and formal entrance upon musical
training.
_Musical talent._ Children differ in musical talent, both in degree and
in kind. One normal child may be twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred
times as sensitive as another normal child in matters of time, in
matters of pitch, in matters of loudness, and in matters of tone
quality. The normal child may be very high in one of these four musical
traits and low in another. Let me illustrate how these traits may be
observed very early in a very highly musical child.
Playing with a little girl eleven months old, I noticed that she
responded to the music over the radio. I put a simple two-step on the
victrola, and she marked the time correctly by a free sympathetic
swinging of the arms. I changed this to waltz time, and she picked up
the rhythm. As she could not yet stand on her feet, I held her on all
fours, and then she shimmied with her trunk. Was that child musical? I
could give one positive answer. She had a splendid sense of rhythm and
urge for rhythmic action. As I watched her in succeeding years, she very
early developed original dances, and at the age of four gave delight in
original "shawl dances." Her speech very early was beautifully
inflected. Her speech was also very early characterized by fine and
meaningful modulations in loudness for emphasis and meaning. She gave
early evidence of power to imitate different sounds.
Of course, the less musical a child is by nature, the more difficult it
is to find early evidences of this sort. We do not need measuring
instruments so much as we need training of teachers and parents to an
understanding of what constitutes musical capacities so that we can
observe the child critically in his early natural responses. By the age
of eight or ten these specific capacities will become more conspicuous,
and at that age the competent psychologist in music can analyze and
measure talents reliably.
_Musical education._ When and how should musical education begin? It
should begin in the earliest infancy by giving the child a musical
environment suitable to elicit his response. This means not simply the
hearing of formal music, but, far more significantly, a sympathetic
response to the child's natural vocal expressions at each level, even to
the making of sounds of all kinds.
The child from the first needs a sympathetic audience. It is not so much
how beautifully the mother sings as how sympathetically she responds to
the beginning croonings of the infant; and this sympathetic enjoyment
includes recognition and encouragement for the hearing of all sounds
around, whether animate or inanimate. The mother's first task is to be a
good listener.
The first elements of formal musical training should be devoted to
speech. Ideally this would come most effectively through the child's
opportunity for hearing and imitating the beautiful sounds and speech of
those around him. Even if the mother and other associates cannot set the
model for the child, they can do a great deal to further musical
development by showing their appreciation of the instinctive
outcroppings of the musical qualities of the child's speech.
During the first six years there should be no formal musical
instruction; but, by the end of that period, the musical child should
have gradually acquired a sense of appreciation for musical sounds,
pleasure in self-expression in musical intonations, confidence in his
ability to compose a tune, some proficiency in singing and good speech,
and some degree of satisfaction in free playing with an instrument.
The principles here developed for early childhood have profound
implications for later musical education. Let the emphasis lie upon the
broadness of the meaning of music to the child, upon the child's
learning by doing, at his natural level of successful achievement, and
upon the utilization of natural motivation in place of formal
instruction.
THOUGHT REVIEW[C]
General Principles
(1) Musical activity is always a form of play.
(2) To be musical the child must be musical in response to his
environment.
(3) To the child noise is musical.
(4) Musical education for the preschool child comes most effectively
through formal education toward beautiful speech.
(5) Musical education should begin in infancy by giving the child a
musical environment suitable to elicit his response.
Do the above statements by the author modify your own theories in
regard to the musical education of your children?
Questions to Consider
(1) What may we be doing when we say to our husky two-year-old, "Oh,
Johnny, don't make so much noise?"
(2) Why is it that children so quickly lose their lovely childish
intonations and inflections?
(3) How does Doctor Seashore endeavor to help us recognize music in
our children?
(4) In our efforts to develop musical ability and response in the
child, what errors do we, as adults, commit?
(5) Is it ever too late for adults to cultivate a beautiful speaking
voice?
(6) Do you agree with Doctor Seashore that "genuinely beautiful speech
is a revelation of beautiful character"?
(7) What methods are you using with your young child to elicit musical
responses? Are they in accord with Doctor Seashore's advice?
(8) Do you think that the radio is helping to encourage musical
speech?
(9) What practical steps can the adults in the family take toward
improving their own influence upon the child's musical
development?
Discuss These True Situations
(1) I listened to the droning voice of a mother reading to her small
son. Would it be better for the mother to tell the story with
animation?
(2) Mrs. Brown is what is termed "high-strung." She has much to do
with household duties. Her three toddlers ask many questions, over
and over again. She finds herself speaking louder and louder with
each repetition. What would you suggest? (In a similar situation a
five-year-old said, "Mother, why don't you relax a little?" C. E.
S.)
(3) In the Black household the radio is on continuously. Is this
helping the musical education of the older and younger children?
(4) "I simply can't get Johnny to practice his music lessons unless I
sit down with him and make him do it," says Mrs. Young, who voices
the complaint of many ambitious parents. What would Doctor
Seashore say?
(5) A mother, musically talented, said to me, "I simply can't help my
children at all with their music. I get frantically impatient with
them."
(6) In a crowded railroad station I was admiring a lovely looking
woman who held an equally lovely looking child by the hand. Then
she spoke to the woman sitting next to me and it was with great
effort I kept a look of consternation from appearing on my face.
Her voice was harsh, metallic, unmodulated. Is it possible for her
to help herself?
-----
Footnote C:
This outline was prepared by May E. Peabody, Supervisor, when it
appeared in _Parents' Magazine_. It seemed to me so stimulating for
thought about the reading that I have adopted this general plan for
all the chapters in this volume. C. E. S.
Chapter III
MUSIC BETWEEN THE AGES OF SIX AND TEN
The question "_When_ should music education begin?" is now coming to be
"_How_ should music education begin?"; because we now recognize that
music should play a large role in the first five years of child life.
Soon after six the child enters school. Here the principles of
educational psychology, now so effectively applied to other primary and
elementary school subjects, have revolutionized the presentation of
music. This has of course been favored by the recognition of music on
the level of the three R's. Music has come to function in the school not
only as something to be learned but primarily as something to be lived.
Primary teachers are, or will be, trained specifically for this subject.
The old conflict between enthusiasts for rote singing, on the one hand,
and for technical sight reading, on the other, is vanishing. The
approach to music is following new avenues involving diversified action,
creative imagination and thinking in music, recognition of individual
differences, freedom for individual expression of musical feeling,
opportunity for sampling various avenues of choice in expression, the
association of music with play, dance, and dramatic action, opportunity
for hearing music at the child's level, avoidance of the fostering of a
narrow precocity, and recognition that there is music everywhere--in
speech, in play, in nature.
Parents who now aim to provide private lessons for formal training in
some aspect of music must lay their plans in the light of all these
facts which have come into view so strikingly in the school. They must
understand and evaluate the significance of this movement in the school,
the new status of music, the new role of private instruction in music,
and the availability of a private teacher who can dovetail with these
new facilities and responsibilities. In the hope of giving some helpful
suggestions in regard to this planning, I wish to present some
psychological considerations which are, at the present time,
reconstructing the theory and practice of private lessons in music at
this age.
_A broadened conception of music._ In Chapter II I pointed out that
children coming out of a favorable music situation in the home, the
preschool, the kindergarten, and other school and playground activities
have attained rather astonishing achievement. Let me repeat, for
emphasis:
"During the first six years there should be no formal musical
instruction; but by the end of that period, the musical child should
have gradually acquired a sense of appreciation for musical sounds,
pleasure in self-expression in musical intonations, confidence in
his ability to compose a tune, some proficiency in singing and good
speech, and some degree of satisfaction in free playing with an
instrument."
This achievement now accomplished in many preschool communities presents
a challenge to the primary teacher and the supervisor of music in the
public schools. And, where pupils come without such preparation or
background, they must begin from scratch and offer a substitute for it
in more concentrated form.
Private lessons should be built upon this background and designed to
carry this type of program forward during the next four years with
progressive enrichment of opportunities on the basis of talent thus
revealed and with these types of activity as a goal in the beginnings of
formal training.
This point of view turns a large part of the job of the private music
teacher over to the primary school where it is favorably developed;
because only in the group activity and in the avocational attitude with
the avocational atmosphere under technically qualified teachers can this
program of musical education find its best fruitage for children in
general. The private teacher is falling from her high pedestal of the
power to cast the child's musical mind in the pattern of her own image
within a limited musical skill at this age. On the other hand, the ideal
of the school situation which I have pictured will play happily into her
hands by furnishing a background for a systematic study of voice or a
particular instrument.
In this procedure, the child's interest may well concentrate around a
single instrument. Furthermore, we are just awakening to the fact that
voice development should begin in this period. New techniques for the
development of a beautiful voice are coming in, and are adapted to this
age. They should play an important role in this orientation period, and
the child's interest may concentrate around this, as well as around an
instrument, especially through the association of artistic forms of
speech with song.
_The analysis of talent._ Music educators are coming now to a
recognition of the principle that musical education, public and private,
should be given in proportion to the possession of natural talent and in
the direction for which the most favorable indication is found on the
ground of specific talents. Such talents reveal themselves through the
daily activities of the schoolroom, where the alert teacher understands
their significance and directs them wisely. There are certain basic
abilities which are favorable to a musical life. Some of these can be
measured accurately with the _Seashore Measures of Musical Talents_ in a
revised edition now available through the RCA Victor agencies. They are
concerned with the senses of pitch, loudness, time, timbre, and rhythm,
together with tonal memory. These may be given individually to children
between the ages of six and ten if administered with good judgment and
the child is not required to write the answers. However, if the teacher
is trained in the musical analysis of talent and the critical
observation of children's behavior, inceptive achievement, and interests
in the musical situation, it is possible to proceed without instruments,
since the teacher will know what to listen for and will be competent to
observe with sufficient accuracy for the purpose in hand. After the
fourth grade, "measures of talents" may be given either as individual or
as group tests. They may furnish a key to the most natural development
of musical type; such as, the tonal, the dynamic, the temporal, or the
balanced types, on the basis of degree of responsiveness to each of
these factors as well as on other specific adaptations for voice or
instrument. The teacher who has such concrete facts in hand will observe
and plan the child's development more critically. Every private teacher
should have a conception of the significance of individual differences
in talent, and might well utilize measurements of this kind in the
studio. The progressive private teacher should also be able to serve
parents in an advisory capacity on such matters.
It is not necessary that the teacher should be an expert in testing; but
it is essential that she should understand the nature of musical talents
and have the sort of insight into child life which has been developed so
splendidly in recent scientific studies of child behavior, especially
with reference to the recognition of natural abilities, the early
fostering of these, the devising of effective motivation, the awarding
of praise and blame, and the setting up of standards of achievement
recognizable by the child. It is, furthermore, reasonable to demand that
the teacher herself should present a good voice in song and speech, have
some proficiency and ingenuity in the manipulation of simple
instruments, and feel deeply the love of music.
_Group instruction._ The old-fashioned piano lesson was at fault in
various respects. First, time was taken to tell the pupils,
individually, the elements of musical notation; second, the main
function seemed to be to make the pupil "get" his lesson; and third, the
child was expected to acquire a love of music through the technical
approach. These things are now changing. The pupil now coming from the
respectable primary school already has acquired the elements of sight
reading, both from ear to eye and eye to ear. Any new element in
notation can certainly be picked up incidentally as needed, without
waste of time. The position of the teacher as a taskmaster is also
disappearing. True, that eliminates many a pupil, but probably without
much loss to the musical life of the community. The child comes to the
private teacher already motivated with a feeling and urge for music.
Musical achievement is no longer counted in terms of the number of
lessons taken.
The function of the teacher is far more to motivate than to teach. The
thing that counts is how long and faithfully the pupil works to acquire
the proficiency which can only come through practice. What can be taught
in one lesson should suffice for several times as much practice as is
ordinarily expected. Better than having the teacher crack the whip for
many periods would be to give the time available for lessons to the
pupil for practice and use more remunerative rewards, even a percentage
of the teacher's fee, to encourage self-help in a larger assignment
through adequate practice.
One of the significant advancements in private instruction for children
of this age lies in the direction of class or group instruction. No
effort is made to force all children into the same cast. Small groups
are formed on the pattern of chamber music, taking children of matched
abilities and interests and using music progressively adapted to their
level. Many forms of class instruction have failed on the ground of the
teacher's inability to use informal procedures in some form of project
method. Duets, trios, quartets, all in the competitive and play mood,
can accomplish great things, even with the youngest children. Few
private teachers have awakened to a realization of the fine
possibilities in that approach. This method is especially adapted to
primary instruction in private music schools in which there are enough
pupils to make competitive promotions from group to group. Most of the
musical information and the motivated drill can be accomplished through
the group. The recognition of this principle may lead to the development
of extracurricular and private organizations under an inspiring teacher
or group of teachers for private instruction.
_Formal lessons delayed._ The principal point I wish to stress is that
musical education should not begin with formal lessons on one
instrument. Except in the case of rarely-gifted children, such
specialized instruction should come naturally after the general musical
interests have been awakened and the natural abilities have been
revealed. Technical private lessons for children in general should
therefore be begun considerably later than has been customary. In this
there is a threefold saving: First, except in rare cases, rigid
technique of instruction can be responded to much more economically
after the age of eight or ten than before. A ten-year-old will acquire
more than twice as much in a single lesson as a six-year-old. This will
apply even to the much "touted" necessity for early finger development.
Second, during this period the child should have the freedom to try
himself out spontaneously with diversified encouragement in the
development of specific interests; and third, it will take the aspect of
drudgery away from the music lesson. To these may be added the fact that
this liberal procedure helps to give the child a feeling that he is
living music rather than learning it. It involves the play attitude in
the acquisition of an art. The attitude of feeling the necessity for
hard work, which is a very real necessity in music, can best be
cultivated formally after the age of eight or ten.
_A sympathetic listener._ Although circumstances may alter cases,
facility in piano playing might well be regarded as a foundation work in
the approach to other instruments. The child's preference for a
particular instrument is generally childish and will change in the
normal course of development. An analysis of case histories would make
an interesting study on this point. The development of skills in a
particular instrument should always be accompanied by opportunities for
sharing the pleasure in this skill with other children and the presence
of a sympathetic listener in the teacher and the parents. What the child
of the primary-school age needs is more a sympathetic and critical
listener than a task-driver. This type of approach will discredit the
now so prevalent artificial ways of symbolizing music by attempting to
force the teacher's affected and stilted imagery upon the child's
musical mind, which may run naturally in much more effective channels.
It is a notable fact that the great musicians who emerged as very
precocious made their early and distinctive progress far more through
freedom for self-expression than through instruction from the masters.
In brief, the private lesson to the child should pattern, at the child's
age level, after the procedure followed in adult instruction in music at
its best; namely, that of sympathetic and inspiring criticism and
guidance rather than the dealing out of predigested pellets of
interpretation and technique. The general attitude to be cultivated in
the child should therefore be freedom for self-expression rather than
mere willingness to absorb set tasks. In this attitude the problem of
scales, exercises, and calisthenic techniques will come in the natural
course of events without being forced.
_Music lovers vs. virtuosi._ One of the first essential steps in
training at this level is to educate the mother to the notion that only
in very rare cases will the child become a virtuoso or a professional
musician, and that she has no right to pose as an exhibitioner. The
normal child is richly endowed with powers for diversified development.
By too early emphasis upon a "gift" it is possible to produce
monstrosities and pathological temperament. True, a gifted child
beginning, for example, by taking lessons at five and being effectively
motivated, may produce extraordinary results before ten, but generally
at the expense of a normal development of the child as a person. An
ill-guided enthusiast can make of the bright normal child a mathematical
freak or a contortionist before the age of ten; but who wants that for
the welfare of the child? It is a form of human sacrifice. The time for
intensive specialization should normally come after the age of ten.
Parents and teachers should shun the development of precocity as they
shun disease. Indeed, in ninety cases out of a hundred, excessive
precocity is a form of disease, a distortion of the normal personality.
The goal in musical education in this period should be to recognize
individual differences, natural capacities, and native interests and
urges in their natural stages for the development of a well-rounded
personality. We have long since abandoned the notion that every girl
should play the piano. What we need to learn now is that we should not
allow the musically-gifted child to die with all the music in him, and
that the musically gifted should not be exploited. The middle ground is
that all children who have musical ability should learn to love music
and live it naturally, each according to his ability.
THOUGHT REVIEW
General Principles
(1) Music should function early in the life of the child.
(2) The primary grades should constitute a period of orientation.
(3) By the end of this period talent should have been discovered and
analyzed.
(4) Voice training should be given a permanent place in all the grades
for both boys and girls.
(5) Music is a skill which should be learned and lived rather than be
taught.
(6) Wise motivation should replace much teaching.
(7) Nomenclature, sight reading, and musical information should be
taught in classes, not by individual instruction.
(8) The principle of rivalry should be encouraged.
(9) For most children formal music lessons may be begun most
effectively about the age of ten.
(10) Forced precocity and exhibitionism should be discouraged.
Questions to Consider
(1) Why is development of the love of music the principal objective at
this age?
(2) What voice training, aside from rote singing and speech, should be
offered in the grades?
(3) Should the piano be favored as the first instrument?
(4) Is it possible to have a primary-grade "orchestra"?
(5) What is the function of achievement tests in music at this age?
(6) What factors have been most effective in putting love of music
into the public schools?
(7) How can progress in music be enhanced by children's opportunities
for performing among themselves?
(8) Should any children be excused from participation in musical
instruction offered in the primary grades?
Discuss These Situations
(1) Here is a gifted young woman, well trained in music and in
psychological and educational methods, zealously devoted to her
art, who desires to establish a career as a private music teacher
for children. Characterize her procedure in contrast to the
procedure of her professional forbears.
(2) Here is a young man or woman, similarly gifted, and well
trained and critical. What pitfalls of prevalent tendencies in
public-school music of today should he or she avoid?
Chapter IV
MUSIC AND YOUTH
There is a distinctively musical period in life: the period of youth.
Youth is the age of emotional response and of social awakening, the age
of serious play, the age of decision and elimination, the dominant
learning period, and the age of freedom and leisure. Before this period
the life of the child has been relatively tranquil. After this period
the occupational affairs of life are more exacting. Before this period
most children participate in music in a routine way without professing
it. After this period large numbers of those who have had training or
have expressed their enthusiasms in rich participation in the musical
life cool off, as it were, and continue their musical activities in a
more or less perfunctory way, except for the few who have taken up the
art professionally or continue as enthusiastic amateurs.
YOUTH, THE AGE OF MUSIC
_The emotional age._ For the present purpose we may think of youth as
represented by the age of the teens, usually beginning in the high
school. It is a brief period of storm and stress, emotional awakening
and emotional struggles, in which the various emotional drives, more or
less latent before, assert themselves, often to cool off or to be
attenuated in later life. The older psychologists spoke of it as a
period of rebirth, the passing from the period of protected and directed
life into the emergence of a self-asserting personality. At the time of
this awakening, life is largely emotional; it is the period of ardent
love, of social awakening, of sports and play of all kinds, of fortes
and faults, of artistic efforts, of devotion to ideals, of awakening and
emergence of controlled imagination, of the development of the great
enthusiasms for life. Poetry, conversation, dancing, heroic stunts,
emotional adventures of all kinds have their fling. This emotional
tendency finds its expression in the language of emotion, of which music
is one.
_The age of serious play._ Youth is the age of serious play. Before this
period the child has spontaneously played much and hard enough, but now
youth enters into specialized sports, finds a play outlet in one or more
of the arts, and with the play attitude takes up serious roles in social
responsibilities. All these are comparatively new and are, therefore,
entered on with fresh enthusiasm. Emotion has a way of burning itself
up. Toward the end of the college course, youth, having had its fling,
feels fed up on sports and after that may not even sit on the bleachers
or the side lines. The same is true of many of the artistic outlets.
When youth comes of age, the ventures into poetry, music, dramatics, and
various other forms of art cool off for the majority. This loss of
interest is especially noticeable in the social activities, in which the
vocal arts, the dance, and other instruments of wooing play so large a
role. It should, however, be said that the better our education, home
life, and vocational activities are organized for right living, the less
is the break at the beginning of this period of youth, as well as at the
end.
_The age of decision and eliminations._ The persons exceptionally gifted
in music are precocious in that their artistic awakening comes earlier,
and yet the real assertion and the serious functioning of their musical
inspirations appear most characteristically and pass through their
crucial period in the teens, after which large numbers of those who have
gone through the fire of struggle for survival and mastery pass out of
the picture.
_The educational age._ Youth is the dominant educational period. Those
who in this period qualify for higher education can and should continue
their studies with organized effort and with confidence in success; but,
on account of the American popular demand for higher and higher
education, many of those who should be eliminated during this period
float on, ill-motivated, ill-directed, floundering through college or
professional education without regard to the worth-whileness of the
procedure. Unfortunately American education has not made adequate
provision for the diversifying of training, especially in the practical
outlets at this age.
This educational dominance of the period of the teens is particularly
true for music. Unfortunately, large numbers of youth naturally endowed
with the power of enjoying music have not even been discovered up to
this time, either by themselves or by others, and they may pass through
this last stage of opportunity without being discovered and often
without realizing what they are missing. At this age the prospective
musician will begin to try himself out, will discover the necessity for
untiring and well-directed work, will concentrate in the field of his
most natural musical outlet, and will work hard in the face of the
imminence of the decision as to success or failure in his own judgment,
in the judgment of his teachers, and in the judgment of his companions
and public. If successful here, he may continue his musical education in
specialization, since music is essentially a body of skills. At the same
time he may show a due regard for the necessity of a broadening
education under larger horizons. Fortunate are they who follow these
sound procedures.
However, many students overlook the fact that, if their music is to be
an avocation, it is to be pursued merely for the pleasure inherent in
it. They may struggle along simply because they have had initial
training in this field, but without adequate motivation or anticipation
of significant results. Achievement in music is an artistic performance,
and we should not add recklessly to the large group in society who feel
that their early efforts were wasted and who have to go through life
apologizing for their failure or mediocrity in the artistic sense. At
the same time we must bear in mind that satisfaction in musical
performance for the great majority of persons comes from the pursuit of
the cruder forms of music, especially singing. Group singing, ordinary
piano accompaniment for singing, dance music, and ragtime of all sorts
should not be discouraged in so far as they form a natural outlet for
those who pursue them. After all, "high-brow" music plays a very small
vital role even in high society.
Unfortunately, as in academic subjects, the real elimination of the
unfit is not accomplished effectively, and there are masses of music
students dribbling along with at best a low mediocrity as the
destination in sight. Since music, to be of service in later life, must
be either professional or eminently satisfying as an avocation after
advanced work in the subject, the necessity of making discriminating and
wise eliminations before a youth is of age cannot be stressed too
strongly. A wise selection and guidance at this stage should, however,
in no way discourage those who get a genuine satisfaction out of music
and are wisely motivated, especially for the keeping of an avocational
interest alive with a modest degree of attainment.
We must face the fact that most of those who are highly gifted in music
and are deeply devoted to it will not enter the profession of music and
may be engaged in such exacting occupations as to limit the time that
they can devote, avocationally, to their favorite art. Yet of all the
lovers of music, these are perhaps the ones who get the greatest
enjoyment out of music and contribute most happily to the musical life
of the community.
It is not sufficient to get children started in musical education. They
must also be motivated and given the outlets for self-expression which
tend to have lasting value in their lives. A drab picture is drawn by
comparing the number of those who, through high school, have had the
privilege of good training with the number of those in the best social
groups of our cities today who actually contribute, and take pleasure in
contributing, to the musical life of the community and to their own
personal moments of leisure. Here is a challenge to adult education: a
challenge to find and encourage self-expression in music in adult life.
Nevertheless, a strong argument can be made for musical education even
if it functions only during the period of adolescence.
_The age of leisure._ Youth is, in a sense, the age of leisure. We think
of a gentleman of leisure as a person who, by virtue of his being a
gentleman, is active in pursuits which are not necessary for the earning
of his bread and butter. If he is not active, he is not a gentleman. If
his activity does not add to a genuine enrichment of his own life and
the life of the community, he is not a gentleman. If he does not know
how to play, he is not a gentleman. The same ideas apply in principle to
the concept of a lady of leisure. The adolescent youth has many of the
characteristics and the opportunities of a gentleman of leisure. These
opportunities do not mean an easy life, but a life characterized
especially by the freedom to do just the things that he likes to do.
These opportunities include, for many happily adjusted personalities,
the development of the art of loafing: the substitution for mere
sitting, for mere gossiping, for mere eating and drinking, and for
degrading pastimes, an active life of restful, satisfying, wholesome
self-expression in the play attitude.
The high-school or beginning college student is not, as a rule, working
for a livelihood, is not held down to the specific demands of a trade, a
business, or a profession. He is in a period of preliminary skirmishes,
and the public school programs provide liberally for these. He may spend
his leisure time in the strenuous work of athletics or of any
intellectual, artistic, or social pursuit lying outside the demands of
the curriculum; he has time for such excursions.
One of the happiest ways of spending his leisure time may be in the
enthusiastic pursuit of musical activities. When he gets into college,
these opportunities are more restricted; when he gets into his job, they
are still more limited. Whatever the line of pursuit, these
extracurricular activities are indulged in as a form of play. Nobody,
however, can express in play all his intellectual, artistic, and social
dreams or urges. Therefore the gentleman of leisure in the high school
is forced to make a selection, and, in doing so, he rightly follows his
natural bent of mind. If he casts his lot with music, he will train
hard, and have the social satisfaction of supporting his musical group.
Music becomes a game, involving contests with defeats and victories. It
becomes a topic for conversation in social leisure. While the
high-school program and the junior-college program do not emphasize
rigorous technical training as a part of the academic curriculum, the
majority of students get their musical satisfaction from the way in
which they utilize their leisure for music. It is significant that at
this age the stress is not on the hearing of music but rather on
participation in musical performance. This period is the age of action,
perhaps the best type of preparation for the listening stage since it
follows the educational principle of learning by doing.
MUSIC FOR YOUTH
During the present century most extraordinary progress has been made in
the provision of musical facilities for youth by the recognition of
music as an academic subject, by the early and vital training in the
grades, by the development of group activities in voice and instrument
as a dominant extracurricular activity, by the motivation of training
through opportunities for public performance and contest, and by the
popularization of music through phonograph and radio.
Up to the end of the past century youth had had no significant
opportunities for music in the scheme of things. Music had to come
through the taking of private lessons, often a drudgery without regard
to likes or dislikes. The approach was purely technical. The mastery of
the scales, though technically significant, was not inspiring to the
emergent musical mind and did not reveal the vast vistas of opportunity
for self-expression in music. Music lessons were limited to those who
could afford to pay for them. Few people had heard any good music. It
had no significant status in the program of public education. Youth had
no chance. _Music for youth has been discovered in the past forty
years._
_Music, an academic subject._ When music gained recognition on a par
with the three R's in primary and elementary education, America entered
on a new era. National music organizations of teachers developed. These
began with the slogan, "Music for every child at public expense."
Realizing the futility of making every child musical, they modified this
slogan to, "Music at public expense for every child in proportion to his
natural ability." The market was flooded with educational music books
and systems. Time for musical training was set aside in the regular
curriculum of the schools. It was recognized that only a person who has
musical ability and training can teach music effectively. Scientific
principles from other subjects were adopted. Specialized training for
musical supervisors was provided in teachers' colleges. Teaching was
improved. Groups of children were segregated into vocal and instrumental
organizations, both for curricular and extracurricular activities.
Instruments were furnished at public expense. Credit for music gained
current coinage on a par with history and chemistry. The introduction of
principles of educational psychology led to selective admission and
elimination and gave the teachers a basis for the administration of
praise or blame in achievement. Few public school subjects can point to
a similar epoch-making stride. These achievements today give youth a
chance in music.
_Orientation in the grades._ For the musical life of youth at and soon
after the high-school age, the training in the grades was most
significant, and that, in turn, was rooted in a national awakening to
the possibilities and the responsibilities of music in the earliest
years in the home and the kindergarten. This awakening was strengthened
by the recognition given art in general. Music early became associated
with the speech arts, the dance, and other games. The development in the
graphic and the plastic arts, though slow, was somewhat parallel with
music for these early years. In the eight years in the grades there
developed a process of selective opportunities for the pursuit of music
so that freshmen entered the high school as a group fairly
differentiated on the basis of abilities, opportunities, likes and
dislikes, and ambitions for music.
This differentiation had a twofold effect on the high school: First, the
elimination of pupils who, on various legitimate grounds, did not
qualify for musical training at public expense at this stage and,
second, the beginning of specialization for those who had previously
found themselves or who at this stage made a happy decision. Thus the
development of music in the high school has followed logically on the
early development of music in the grades, and in like manner the
development of music at the college level is now beginning to follow the
development of music in the high school.
_Group activities in voice and instrument._ Youth is the age of learning
by doing. This principle has been implemented in high-school education
by the development of group activities, both in theoretical and in
practical music, both in the curricular and in the extracurricular
activities. Throughout, the emphasis has been on action. Instruments are
supplied at public expense; opportunities are given for participation in
programs of entertainment; and a stimulus has been climaxed by the
introduction of local, state, and national contests for groups and for
individuals.
The adoption of the principle of group instruction at this level has had
many significant advantages. It draws large numbers of pupils into group
activities for the social value of the activity in itself and for the
social value of participation in public life. It has lessened the cost
of musical education many times over by training ten or a hundred pupils
in a group as effectively, in many respects, as they could be trained by
individual instruction. Group instruction has, perhaps, been the
strongest leverage for the motivation of musical pursuits in the school.
It has increased the pursuit of individual instruction on the basis of
discovered needs, for example, in the mastery of a particular instrument
for participation in the band or orchestra or in the development of a
voice discovered in the group. The individual instruction has thus been
motivated and made to fit into particular niches in the musical groups
or in the choice of vocational pursuits in society.
_Contests._ The development of contests both in individual and in group
performance has had a profound effect on the development of music in
youth and is destined to serve in large part as a clearinghouse.
Educators recognize many drawbacks in the plan of contests. Preparation
for the contests requires excessive time and highly trained teachers. A
contest becomes an occasion for the revelation and the objectifying of
differences in individuals and groups. It involves some little expense.
It tends to discourage the pupils who cannot qualify.
But let us look at the other side. In the state of Iowa, for example,
the state-wide contests, which have been conducted for about the past
ten years, have done far more than anything else to vitalize music
education in the high school. Four years ago I became acquainted with a
group of ten girls who came from a little town three hundred miles away.
They had not placed in the contest; they had had no chance. I supposed
that this contest would be the last that we should see of them, but the
next year they appeared in a body--happy and optimistic, in a fighting
mood--and won honors. I asked how they accounted for their success, and
they said, "When we got home and reported that we had had no chance in
the state contest, the commercial club of our town raised a purse and
employed a teacher to come into the high school and train us in music."
When the commercial club goes into its pockets in the interest of
putting music on the map in its community, music is beginning to
function in that community.
Nobody cares to tune a fiddle for four years; but, if he has the
opportunity to play a tune, he will gladly keep the fiddle tuned. This
fact has been shown on a large scale as a result of the contest plans.
Not only have the final local, district, and state contests become
goals, but every daily practice has gained an objective and is a topic
for social conversation. The contests have made each participant
critical of his own performance and the performance of the group and
have also made each ambitious for improvement. They have raised
standards of selection in musical material. They have resulted in the
giving of higher musical education to large numbers of gifted persons
whose talents would not otherwise have come to the serious attention of
parents or educational interests. The methods of judging these contests
have been greatly improved in the direction of offering encouragement
where encouragement is due without discouraging more modest attainments
where they are indicated.
Educators used to think that football was the only thing that would
arouse enthusiastic support in the field of avocational activities for
youth; but, as I have witnessed the attitude of high-school pupils in
training for musical contests, heard reports of the attitudes of the
parents and the backers, and watched the culmination of enthusiasm at
the annual contest, I can say that there can be, for youth, as
substantial enthusiasm in contests of music as there is in football. In
other words, the youth of the state have entered into music in the
spirit of play, with determination to train well, play hard, and win if
possible. Enthusiasms for a center of interest in public and in private
have been found in this music.
_The hearing of music._ Within the past forty years, also, America has
for the first time begun to hear music, good, bad, and indifferent. When
the first phonograph came to our city, the host at an evening reception
furnished music in a mysterious way. He had installed the phonograph in
a niche curtained off in the hallway so that the direction from which
the sound emerged was difficult to detect. He played three or four songs
by a male quartet, which were richly applauded by his audience on the
supposition that he had stationed a male quartet somewhere in the house.
Music had come into the social group in a mysterious way.
Throughout the foregoing discussion I have stressed musical performance
because action is the way of youth, the way of education, and the way of
any preparation for the listening mood and critical attitude. The
development of the opportunities for listening has, of course, been
unparalleled in the history of the world. The masses are given the
opportunity of hearing good music. Many have taken the attitude of
sneering at the music offered by phonograph and radio on the grounds of
quality of rendition and of choice of type; but it is safe to say that
what is offered is what people want, and there is some basis for saying
that to a great extent what people really want is what is good for them.
On the other hand, the furnishing of music at all levels has
unquestionably had the marked effect of raising the American level of
musical appreciation step by step. People can be educated to listen, and
in a marvelous way the radio has really taught people to listen. You
cannot learn to swim without going near the water. Radio has had the
effect of discouraging some persons from the development of musical
skills in performance, because they realize that what they can hear is
so superior to anything that they can do. On the other hand, radio has
stirred the musical interests of the masses into appreciation of the
possibilities of music at their respective levels and not only has made
them whistle the tunes but has encouraged them to participate in various
modes of performance. Listening to the "canned" music has certainly gone
far to develop the ability for listening to legitimate music on the
stage.
Some years ago I had the privilege of being the guest of the city of
Copenhagen for a week. Among the entertainments offered by the city was
a grand opera. The invitation came in the form of a large, beautifully
engraved card of marked distinction and good taste. Attached to it was
the actual ticket to one of the best seats in the house, and the price
printed on this ticket was, in American money, twenty-three cents. It
can be said almost literally that, when grand opera is played in
Copenhagen, people of all classes come out and tend to listen with
appreciation and more or less discrimination. The people have been
educated to hear music. It has been brought down to their level.
Therefore music functions in the social and home life of that city.
Music of a very high order furnishes the entertainment in the parks and
the public halls. That tradition is fast coming to this country, and the
effective training of our youth will do much to hasten the day.
THOUGHT REVIEW
General Principles
(1) The high-school age is the most significant period for the
development of an avocation.
(2) With the coming time for leisure, education for avocation is a
sound educational policy.
(3) It is fortunate that musical education at this age is elective.
(4) Education for musical taste must be gradual, not by leaps.
(5) Expansion of high-school music may advantageously be
extracurricular in large part.
(6) Music contests have greatly aided in the promotion of musical
education.
(7) The radio and the phonograph have in recent years been the most
effective media for the dissemination of musical information.
(8) It is quite natural and well that the fervor for music should cool
off for many at the end of the teens.
Questions to Consider
(1) Should the schools supply musical instruments at public expense?
(2) If so, what selective procedures and restrictions should be set
up?
(3) Is the author's conception of the characteristics of adolescence
generally accepted by educators?
(4) What are the evils of music contests?
(5) What are some of the unfavorable musical effects of the radio?
(6) What problems arise in connection with the change of voice in
boys?
(7) Should the high-school _a cappella_ choir exhibit the vibrato in
singing? (See the author's _The Vibrato in Voice and Instrument_,
University of Iowa Press.)
(8) How can high-school musicians render larger religious, social, and
patriotic services in the community?
Discuss These Situations
(1) Last fall (1939) I saw seventy-eight marching high-school bands
with over 6000 instruments in a two-mile parade on the morning
before a football game at the University of Oklahoma. Here was a
cross-section of the youth of the state, many of them Indians; all
in uniform in dancing march for musical display. Consider pro and
con the implications of this phenomenal outbreak of music from (a)
the musical, (b) the social, (c) the educational, and (d) the
economical points of view.
(2) There is a splendid tendency at present to integrate the school
with social life, community services, and part-time employment.
What features in such integration seem most promising for music?
Chapter V
THE MUSICAL TEMPERAMENT
What makes a musician temperamental? Tell a musician he is
temperamental, and he will take offense. Yet perhaps the thing in his
personality of which he is most proud is the possession of a musical
temperament. This characteristic inconsistency has a basis in
psychological fact; namely, that the exhibition of artistic temperament
frequently leads to attitudes and actions which the rest of the world
may criticize and view with amusement; but, on the other hand, the
finest expressions of musicianship would perhaps be impossible without
the possession of an artistic temperament.
Many persons who pass as musicians are neither temperamental nor
musical. A great many of those who ply the art of music do not have
musical minds in any basic sense. Their art consists in certain skills
often built into a purely matter-of-fact organism. I therefore see no
reason why such people in the musical world who do not show any artistic
temperament have any reason to boast of the fact.
The highly temperamental musician is a species of genius in some degree.
As such, he has been described by musicians, scientists, and
psychiatrists in a very copious body of literature on the subject,
especially that dating since the time of Lombroso, who regarded all
geniuses as degenerates. The modern psychiatrist has frequently
presented a picturesque view of the temperamental person in terms of the
rising science and art of psychiatry, which is supposed to explain all
deviations from normal behavior in terms of psychopathology. The old
saying was that we are all more or less sane; the psychiatrist today
says we are all more or less psychopathic. The current literature on
mental hygiene is characterized by this point of view. Another point of
view has proved fascinating since the coming in of Freud, in that
deviations of this sort are accounted for in terms of suppressions,
defense reactions, and other manifestations of the libido. Much light is
thrown on the problem by the great musician's exaltation of the artistic
mind in action, thus revealing essential temperamental traits on the
basis of first-hand experience and artistic theory. A temperamental
musician is the most merciless portrayer of his own species. Since the
temperamental person is always an interesting person, all of these
accounts are lively and each revealing from its own point of view,
giving us much genuine insight into the nature of the temperamental
person in all fields.
Descriptions of the musical temperament are, as a rule, vivacious and
luminous, thrillingly interesting. If a competent analyst would follow
Stokowski for one day during the season and picture in high lights, full
of concrete examples, the experience and behavior of this great
conductor from the whirl of emotional enthusiasms and conflicts into
which he awakens in the morning to the convivial abandon during
refreshments after the evening performance, we should have a spicy and
animated picture of the musical temperament. If written by the smart
commentator in the columns of _Esquire_, it might even be racy. Such
pictures have often been drawn in fragments. A similar picture might be
made exclusively by direct quotation from biographies, autobiographies,
and letters of great musicians, such as Beethoven and Wagner, whose
lives are now on record. The temperamental musician is not competent to
analyze himself because he does not see himself as others see him.
Literary chats about musicians are full of quirks and eccentricities
giving realistic examples of a temperamental life. These might be
organized into a fairly complete characterization of a distinctive
musical temperament.
All such exhibits would be of the emotional type, dramatic
extravaganzas, interesting and significant, and there are many such
extant. The inceptive science of the psychology of music takes a
different point of view, aiming to account for the highly temperamental
person partly in terms of heredity and partly in terms of inherent
elements in the situation in which he lives and performs. The music
psychologist must content himself to deal in a cold analytical way with
verifiable and orderly facts in order to contribute something toward a
scientific foundation for a systematic and functional psychology of the
musical mind. In attempting this approach, I realize how tame and
stilted such an effort must seem to the fiery musical temperament; and
even at its best the psychologist will regard the account as
speculative, because it is seldom based upon experiment. I have delved
into musical biography and autobiography of great musicians with an eye
toward the discovery of their outstanding mental characteristics from a
psychological point of view. On this basis I must make a bold venture by
attempting to trace the elements in a musical situation which lead to
the development of temperamental behavior and thus contribute toward the
answer to the question, "What makes a musician temperamental?"
_Physiological irritability._ The highly-gifted musician responds
physiologically to sound stimuli to a very high degree because he has
inherited a genetic constitution which is anatomically and
physiologically exceptionally responsive to sound. In other words, quite
apart from consciousness of sound or thought of music, his physical
organism responds to acoustic stimuli of all kinds which keep nerve and
muscle in a state of tension. This tends to create a state of unrest and
irritability. Without leading to actual hearing, it may arouse
associations of a sort of dreamlike or dramatic nature which may play a
very large role in the conscious life. It may create a state of
well-being and happy associations, but perhaps more frequently
irritation and noxious day-dreaming associations and emotional
eruptions. The sounds may come from a squeaking chair, the sizzling of a
kettle, the song of a bird, the cry of an infant. Most frequently sounds
affecting the organism in this way are inconspicuous and commonplace in
the environment; but they may often be strong; such as, the rattling of
a train or the chattering in a crowd, of which the musician does not
become conscious, although physiologically irritated.
_Tonal sensitivity._ All great musicians are highly sensitive to sound
in all its elements. A physiological irritability acoustically leads to
a profuse awareness of sounds. This sensitive and selective hearing
gives the musician a richness of material in the musical medium. He
becomes intolerant and rebellious to disturbing sound stimuli which have
no such effect upon unmusical persons. To him, the world of sounds has
infinite richness of resources for musical pleasure, but equally
exceptional resources for the suffering of musical pain.
_Artistic license._ To the trained musical individual sounds are heard
as different from what a matter-of-fact listener hears. The hearing of
pitch, loudness, time, and timbre is not in the ratio of 1:1 with the
physical sound, but always runs into artistic analysis and
interpretation with artistic license. The musical interval, the dynamic
phrasing, the rhythm, and the tone quality are always heard in relation
to their artistic setting. Here we find auditory illusions operating in
their fullest glory. The pitch value varies with the quality of the
sound. Time may be a substitute for stress and vice versa. A subjective
rhythm is richer and far more realistic than the physical rhythm. The
quality of tone is heard in relation to its musical meaning. To the
musician, the hearing is not so much a question of true pitch, formal
accent, temporal rhythm, or vowel quality as it is a matter of musical
balance and a recognition of artistic deviation from the true.
Meticulously exact performance of a Bach score would be musically
intolerable. Notes are frail symbols. The performer must interpret even
the shortest measure rhythm or single note value. Thus, while fine
sensory discrimination in all the aspects of sound is essential for
correct hearing and tone production, the more essential thing is his
ability to play with artistic power and impulse in hearing and producing
artistic balance and artistic deviation from the rigid. In this artistic
balance and deviation, he may be guided by certain artistic rules, but
his direct emotional interpretation is far more significant. In this
lies individuality. He is constantly tempted to be extravagant.
Thus, in all the variants, combinations, and modulations of pitch,
loudness, time, and timbre, the musician hears, feels, and gives meaning
to fine and subtle distinctions, many of them quite divergent from the
physical tones. At this level, temperament shows itself in exceedingly
fine responsiveness to tones which may be a matter of utter indifference
or impossibility to the unmusical. This capacity is largely inborn, both
in the way of sensitivity to sound and a general nervous, if not
neurotic, disposition, and is in itself enough to make the musician
different from other people. Artistic license as a medium for
self-expression is, therefore, clear evidence of a musical temperament.
_Ear-mindedness._ The successful musician is ear-minded as distinguished
from the painter who is fundamentally eye-minded. This ear-mindedness
grows out of his genetic auditory constitution at birth and develops
through the practical use that he makes of the various attributes of
sounds. Fundamentally, it is the tonal image which, in the great
musicians, is practically as vivid, stable, and complete as the ordinary
perception of the actual physical sound. His memories, his imagination,
his creative work practically all operate in terms of his powerful
auditory image, usually supplemented by strong motor and visual imagery.
This makes him different from the businessman, the objective scientist,
and the man on the street. The fact that he can live subjectively in
this tonal world gives him a type of isolation in which he feels the
superiority of his power and becomes disposed to assert his rights,
privileges, and dominance in a domain in large part separated from
ordinary affairs. Thus, the powerful imagery becomes one of his richest
and most fundamental resources for exclusiveness as a musician and, when
cultivated in the field of artistry, tends to set him apart from the
rest of the world.
_Affective response._ Since the business of the musician is to hear and
produce beautiful effects in sound, he differs from the ordinary
listener in that sounds of all kinds not only have intellectual
orientation value but are habitually responded to in terms of beauty or
ugliness, pleasure or pain. They give him warmth or chills, both of
which create feelings of unrest. Instead of identifying a sound as the
rumbling of a train, he identifies it as ugly--something which disturbs
and irritates him. Instead of identifying the sound as the song of a
bird, he responds vigorously in terms of likes and dislikes.
Emotional pursuits are usually sexually stimulating, and persistent
emotionality is likely to manifest itself in love "scenes", good or bad.
As a mate, the temperamental musician may be a most ardent and exquisite
lover or a most irritable person to live with. This is aggravated by the
fact that the artistic behavior is worshipped by the opposite sex, often
to an annoying degree. Hence, love, self-defense in love, and a sense of
superiority in love are keynotes to the temperamental musician's life.
_The esthetic mood._ The musician is in search of the beautiful and
therefore, conversely, responds unfavorably to the ugly. His
professional life is, in the main, emotional as distinguished from the
intellectual life of the scholar in other fields or the action-patterns
of men of affairs. Whether he is a virtuoso, a creator of music, or a
director, he is working on emotions through emotions, trying to
re-create for the listener the feelings with which he himself is imbued.
He lives so intensely and habitually in this activity that he becomes
recognized as highly and persistently emotional. This extreme
emotionality in his daily work sets him off against the matter-of-fact
mind. We say of the intensely artistic person in action that he burns
himself up. The emotional life is expensive and flitting; it flashes and
explodes and is in danger of running out of control.
This emotionality tends to transfer not only to other forms of art but
to ordinary things and situations; such as, money, raiment, or social
amenities. Sometimes this takes the form of the characteristic bohemian.
He may spend his wages on payday and starve the rest of the month in
utter complacence. All his life tends to be set at high tension. He
lives dominantly in a mood and therefore often becomes objectionally
moody through his impulsive behavior.
_Exhibitionism._ There is an accretion to the musical temperament in a
sort of hierarchy of defense reactions which may be characterized as
exhibitionism. The musical mind is pulling on one end of a leash, as it
were, trying to drag the more or less resistant and incapable into his
own beautiful emotional life, and he feels the drag. Therefore, he
becomes impatient and uses ways and means of exclusiveness in withdrawal
from the world, or he takes the opposite attack--display. To him,
countless means of personal display justify their end, the glorifying of
his noble art. Therefore, we see the musical temperament in this
artistic form in the manner of living, eating, dressing, and sleeping,
and in the demand for hero worship. We see this in the extreme form in
the conductor who feels that he must have his choir, his orchestra, his
band members each individually at his command. He is like a general in
action. For this purpose, he must pose as a great authority, as a hero
standing for something superior in the way of personal interpretation,
as a critical judge of the beautiful, as having undisputed power,
feeling the necessity of imposing his own emotional individuality on a
comparatively cool and often resistant group. This is true on a smaller
scale in all musical leadership, composition, performance of the
virtuoso, musical criticism and passionate listening.
_Symbolism._ The main function of the great musician is to make his
music symbolic. He must take the listener out of the humdrum attitudes
of life through the avenue of musical feeling into a state of abandon,
which, in its extreme form, approaches ecstasy and obliviousness to
material surroundings and facts. Even the devices of program music give
but remote and stilted aid. His function is to enable the listener to
live the art as he himself lives it symbolically. In this respect he
differs from the sculptor and the painter who, while cultivating this
symbolic attitude, are clearly held to the necessity of utilizing
objective realities. It is not easy for the musician to take himself out
of this mood. At the moment that he talks shop and business, the
symbolizing habit is constantly pressing in upon him. Through his
mastery of the symbolic life he feels rich, exclusive, powerful, and
self-contained. Some people think that is queer.
_Precocity._ Since, as a rule, the musically gifted are proportionately
precocious, they begin early in childhood to realize their peculiar gift
for musical appreciation, individual interpretation, and often fabulous
child performance as more or less child prodigies. This tendency to
become a prodigy is inherent in musical precocity and starting early
makes him conspicuous as a child, interferes with his adaptation to the
behavior of the common man, and leads to a specialization and
intensification of those elements which gain for him the approbation of
his constituency, a following for the hero, and towering admiration. On
the other hand, it makes him an object of ridicule.
Usually it is the narrowly-educated musician that is strikingly
temperamental. To excel in his art, supreme effort has often centered
upon that goal at the sacrifice of a broadening education and the
development of a well-rounded and healthy-minded personality. Current
academic recognition of music and improved facilities for training will
decrease the number of temperamental musicians. After all, temperament
is not all a gift: it is largely acquired through learning in the school
of hard knocks. It is often a cheap imitation.
What then is the musical temperament? It is a species of the artistic
behavior found in all artistic pursuits, arising partly from heredity
and partly from training, environment, and simulation; intensified by
high sensitivity, highly-strung disposition, dominant ear-mindedness,
emotional strain, lopsided education, pursuit of esthetic goals,
leadership and hero worship, and often a forced precocity.
This type of analysis could be carried much farther, but these items may
suffice as fair samples to show that the artistic temperament in music
is an essential gift demanded by the nature of the art. It may be good
or bad, inborn or cultivated, genuine or simulated, and often runs into
eccentricities so that we frequently view it in a superior attitude of
amusement. But let us thank all the gods in the Kingdom of the Muses for
their great gift, the potentially good musical temperament.
THOUGHT REVIEW
General Principles
(1) The musical temperament may be good or bad.
(2) It is inherent in the intensive music situation.
(3) The musical temperament generally has a hereditary basis in a
highly-strung nervous disposition.
(4) It has large common elements with the artistic temperament of the
painter and the poet, but is more eruptive.
(5) It is often of strategic advantage in musical performance.
(6) In many respects it is a defense reaction.
(7) It may be either extrovert or introvert.
(8) It is most fascinating when artistic and serenely serious; most
ludicrous when affected; and most abominable when it takes the
form of tantrums and exhibitionism.
Consider These Questions
(1) Can you name ten musicians who exhibit a "charming" musical
temperament?
(2) Can you name ten musicians who exhibit a "noxious" musical
temperament?
(3) Can you recall ten practical jokes which exemplify temperamental
behavior, good or bad?
(4) What are some of the first evidences of temperamental behavior in
the musically precocious child?
(5) Should the musical temperament in a child be cultivated?
(6) Why is the current music supervisor rarely temperamental?
(7) Was long hair a temperamental trait?
(8) Is temperamental behavior proportionate to excellence in music?
Discuss This Situation
When the director of the professional symphony orchestra faces a group
of temperamentally hardened performers in rehearsal it is war to the
finish--victory or defeat. Recall some characteristic historical
instances of artistic strategy in such a situation.
Chapter VI
MUSICAL INHERITANCE
The whole problem of mental inheritance is in the air, both in the sense
that it is current and in the sense that it is relatively intangible.
The struggle is best illustrated in the current approaches to the
problem of inheritance of intelligence. In this the geneticist has not
got far from base, but much has been learned in regard to the nature of
the issues involved. In the field of music the geneticist has approached
the subject experimentally without understanding the musical life; and
the musician has approached the matter practically without being a
competent experimenter. The psychologist has certainly not done his duty
in clarifying the issues. The most pressing need at the present time is
for such clarification. This can not be the work of one man or one
generation, but must be achieved through co-operation of both sides in
order to clear the way for valid experimentation.
In order to indicate the character of the problem we are now facing, I
shall first venture to state some fundamental assumptions upon which
probably all competent investigators agree and, second, venture a little
way in the direction of identifying concepts of musical life which can
be dealt with experimentally.
ESSENTIAL PREMISES
The mechanism of heredity lies in a single germ cell carrying the
character-determining chromosomes which consist of organized chains of
genes. In the character and organization of these genes in the
fertilized cell we find the complete "blueprint" for the future
individual in so far as it is to be determined by heredity. In the
twenty-four pairs of chromosomes in the fertilized human germ cell we
find the long and diversified heritage of each parent represented
through the union of the sperm and the ovum. The selection and the
organization of the genes in these chromosomes adequately represent what
the future individual can be.
This genetic constitution is modified by the cytoplasm, the supporting
part of the cell which is its first environment, and further by the
entire embryonic environment. Any changes that take place after the
launching of this cell, whether before or after birth, are regarded as
environmental. In the embryonic life, this germinating cell develops by
processes of cell division and specialization into the complete human
organism ready to function more or less immediately after birth. This
heritage has fabulous resources in the form of possible facilities for
future development. As nature was prolific in the storing and
transmission of countless hereditary characters in the genetic
constitution, so the equipment of the child at birth is astonishingly
prolific in the provision it makes for diversified development of the
individual. Development from this stage on must, therefore, of necessity
take place through a process of selection and specialization in which
certain characters are given right of way and many are subordinated or
inhibited by conflicting interests, but the great mass remain relatively
latent or dormant. We may assume that superior musical talent is
determined in large part by superior musical heredity, and that inferior
musical talent or lack of talent may be determined in large part by a
correspondingly defective heredity.
The science of heredity in the strictest sense focuses upon the study of
the identification and organization of the genes in relation to the
determination of characters which shall appear in the genetic
constitution and determine future structures and functions of the
individual. When the geneticist deals with specific anatomical
structures, this relationship is traceable with comparative ease; but
when he comes to deal with more or less complicated physiological or
mental functions, the tracing of this relationship becomes rather
baffling on account of the complexity of the final product.
Turning then to the issues involved in the interpretation of musical
inheritance, we must face certain theoretical assumptions. One of them
is that a scientific study of musical heredity cannot be pursued on the
assumption that mind and body are two distinct entities, each inherited
independently. Nor can we hold the old doctrine of psychophysical
parallelism. All human genetics proceeds on the assumption that the
human individual is one psychophysical organism. Our musical experience,
observation and measurement will therefore represent views from the
mental side; our organic studies may be views of the same things from
the physical side.
Furthermore, musicality is not one specific human trait but an infinite
hierarchy of traits running through the entire gamut of the
psychophysical musical organism. To make any progress whatever, the
scientist must make the supreme sacrifice of attempting to deal only
with specific isolable factors apparently small and remote in
themselves. The situation is analogous to that of purely physical
features. It is generally admitted that the structure of the physical
organism is heritable. But when we show that the color of the eyes of
the fruit fly is heritable and that this inheritance takes place in a
very complicated way, as has been adequately shown, we have simply
identified parts of the structure and function of the genes in one
specific feature in the vastly complex physical organism, however
fundamental and characteristic this particular feature may be. This
analogy applies in principle to the genetic study of the musical life.
The crux of the difficulty lies in the identification of heritable
factors.
Again we must remember that the musical mind is first of all a normal
mind, a normal psychophysical organism ready to begin to function
immediately after birth. What we shall look for then in a psychophysical
organism is the presence of certain resources especially favorable or
especially unfavorable to the normal functioning of the musical mind. We
may assume that an average capacity present in the genetic constitution
may be adequate for musical purposes but that exceptionally gifted
persons require these traits in a correspondingly exceptional degree and
that exceptionally unmusical individuals lack essential elements. The
most wonderful thing is that a person can come into the world with a
musical constitution at all, but the problem of heredity centers around
individual differences, and these are more easily approachable than the
total function. As in genetic studies of the inheritance of color
blindness it has been possible to identify types, so in musical hearing
we may look forward to the identification of types of defect and types
of superiority deviating markedly from the normal.
Common observation and reasoning convince us without question that
musicality is inherited in some mysterious way and this follows also
from general considerations of current theories of biological
inheritance. But when it comes to the scientific determination of laws
of such inheritance, we face high barriers. Biological laws of
inheritance must be established in terms of the genes; a specific
biological structure or function must be related to gene organization.
Let us call this measurement of the first order. Such measurements are
most readily applied to anatomical structure and physiological function
in the neuro-muscular organism. This is notably clear in the anatomy and
physiology of the ear and its connections. It is equally applicable to
the anatomy and physiology of the vocal organs--the bellows, the
vibrators and the resonators for voice. It is conceivable, for example,
that the length, the mass, the mode of attachment, and the general
position and shape of the vocal cords and the mounting of the voice box
are heritable characters traceable to genes and referable to musicality
as the physical organs for voice.
We can also find relationships to the endocrines, which are in large
part the determinants of musical emotionality. Electro-physiology is now
giving great promise for the identification of functions in the ear and
the brain and its central connections and is establishing
interrelationships. Many of the laws of heredity established by
measurements of this order probably refer to fundamental biological
principles of inheritance in the psychophysical organism as a whole. By
a physiological analysis of the sensory, motor, and central factors
which operate most significantly in music, the systematist can set up a
respectable body of biological facts in regard to musical inheritance
which are antecedently probable in terms of the functions of genes and
result in the structure and function of the musical organism.
Since the medium of music is sound, we shall look first for an
exceptionally responsive or unresponsive ear, including not only the
physical ear but the central organs in the nervous system through which
it functions. This is basic for two reasons: First, because it
determines what stimulation from the world of sound shall enter into the
experience of the musical individual to a high degree; and second,
because the purely physiological receptivity or organic response to
sound acts upon and modifies the state of well-being or ill-being
according as the auditory impression is beneficent or noxious in so far
as its acts upon our circulation, metabolism, temperature and other
organic processes. Such well-being or ill-being is, of course, in part
the foundation for the feeling of musical pleasures and pains.
If we would gain a true and comprehensive insight into the nature and
extent of role of environment in musical life, we must start with some
established facts or reasonable assumptions of what is "given" for
environment to act upon. The heritage is the capital fund which the
environment invests or squanders. Only by knowing the hereditary
contributions can we appraise the environmental contributions. In the
study of the fruit fly, for example, the revelations of factors which
must be regarded as environmental are quite as significant and essential
as the revelations about the original organization of genes. The
determination of the limits of heredity is the best means for revealing
the functions and possibilities of environment. The music geneticist
will therefore learn fully as much about environmental influences as he
will about hereditary influences in studying heredity.
PSYCHOPHYSICAL MEASUREMENTS
The music geneticist can approach many significant aspects of the
subject through psychophysical experiments for which we now have fairly
standardized procedures. For the present purpose, we may call this
measurement of the second order as compared with the anatomical and
physiological measurements. It proceeds out of, and is a complement to,
the anatomical and physiological foundations and probably represents the
most fundamental approach from the psychological and musical points of
view. These measurements deal primarily with sensitivity and
discrimination on the sensory side and the corresponding processes on
the motor side. Among them we may recognize two levels: The simple or
elemental, in which a specific mental process is related to a relatively
specific organic basis; and the complex, which relates to co-operative
functions of the elemental capacities. Of the former we have four;
namely, the sense of pitch, the sense of loudness, the sense of time,
and the sense of timbre--each of which is correlated with a specific
attribute of the sound wave, which is the musical medium. We have basic
measurements of the hearing of rhythm, consonance, volume, and
sonance--all of which represent relatively complex patterns. Each of
these complex functions has a unitary character. Rhythm, for example, is
not merely time plus intensity; it possesses a unitary character.
Because of the difficulty of dealing with the complex patterns,
precedence should be given to the four elemental or basic capacities.
Excellence in these capacities contributes toward ear-mindedness, of
which the auditory image is the most specific characteristic; but at the
present time we have no adequate objective method for the measuring of
auditory imagery.
On the motor side we have corresponding measurements of speed and
accuracy in the motor control of each of these factors represented in
the sound wave; namely, frequency, amplitude, duration, and form.
The term elemental should be used with caution because we never
encounter a purely elemental state or process. Even in the very simplest
form they are merely more or less specific phases of the mental
organism; and at any level at which they are observable they probably
involve environmental accretions. It is the old story: We never
experience pure sensation but meaningful perception. Yet under the most
careful experimental control the identification of such specific
functions may be reasonably reliable and have considerable validity.
Adequate measurements of the sense of timbre are new and therefore have
not been employed extensively up to date. But the sense of pitch, the
sense of time, and the sense of loudness, together with the sense of
rhythm and immediate tonal memory, have been used extensively.
The significance of such measurements depends upon the rigidity of the
scientific technique and the selection of subjects for experiment.
Reliable measurements have been made on a variety of groups and for
different purposes more or less related to the problem of inheritance.
Studies have been made upon musically precocious children to determine
to what degree they were gifted in each of these capacities. All the
available blood relatives of six of the foremost musical families in
America and a number of such families in European countries have been
investigated. These capacities have been measured in selected virtuosi
in various fields of music. The measurements have been used for the
determination of qualifications for musical organizations and for the
analysis of admissions to music schools. Simplified forms of the
measurements have been made upon very young children in musical
families. Numerous cases of failure in musical education have been
investigated and often explained on the basis of presence or absence of
these basic capacities. Surveys have been made on groups representing
highly-privileged or under-privileged children in the matter of musical
facilities. Some of these measures are now a part of the standard tests
and measures administered in the public schools so that comparisons can
be made with blood relatives, and data are becoming cumulative for
scientific comparison of successive generations. Numerous racial studies
have been made on a large scale, comparing these capacities, for
example, in different degrees of race mixture--as in the transition from
pure blacks through mulattoes to whites in a large Negro community, or
the comparison of racial groups in Hawaii, the school children in
different European countries, Indians with whites, and distinctive races
and primitive peoples in different parts of the world.
From this large array of facts certain findings seem to be significant,
taking these measurements as a group. First, the sense of pitch, the
sense of loudness, and the sense of time reveal no distinctly
significant differences in racial groups, in culture-levels, or at
age-levels, when adequately measured. In many cases this holds also for
the sense of rhythm and tonal memory. This is probably indicative of the
fact that the basic capacities for hearing in individuals now living and
capable of being tested adequately are physiologically at the same
level. This conclusion is in harmony with the observation that these
capacities which function in music, function also in the vast varieties
of orientation through sound at all levels of man now living. It is also
analogous to what has been found in vision. Second, it develops that in
each and every one of the groups studied there are enormous individual
differences in each of these capacities and that the extent and
distribution of these differences do not differ significantly from what
we find in the public school children of the United States. Third, where
comparisons of capacity and achievement have been made reliably, it has
been found that those who have achieved distinction in music have these
capacities in a significantly corresponding degree; but much larger
numbers of those possessing superior capacity who have not been
discovered as musical, either by themselves or in their environment, are
revealed. This fact rules out many of the statistical studies of
heredity in terms of musical achievement. Fourth, these capacities
represent relatively independent factors in hearing. Fifth, marked
superiority or inferiority in these capacities is of predictive value
for musical achievement and guidance in education.
On the motor side but little progress has been made. Principally because
the measurements are laborious, significant elements have not been
identified, and moderate motor capacities in speed and action are
adequate for most musical achievements. Daily observations reveal that
children may be slow and accurate, slow and erratic, fast and accurate,
or fast and erratic in various degrees and combinations. It would,
however, be of musical significance to discover to what extent and in
what manner these traits are inherited from generation to generation.
In view of these discoveries, it is evident that there is some material
available for technically rigid genetic interpretation in terms of
currently recognized principles of inheritance. All the records on the
six foremost musical families of America are available in the
confidential files of the Carnegie Institution, at Cold Spring Harbor.
Highly reliable measurements on all the students in the Eastman School
of Music for the last fifteen years are available. Various public
schools have vast cumulative data, and elaborate collections are being
worked upon in the Winderen Laboratory, at Oslo. But with the exception
of the Carnegie Institution and the Oslo collections, adequate
measurements of whole families are absent.
What is needed now is a thoroughly reliable series of measurements on
entire musical families and the interpretation of these by a thoroughly
competent geneticist in terms of established biological principles of
inheritance. It is especially important that both parties shall be
competent to take into account the numerous lessons which we have
learned from the extensive efforts that have been made in the attempt to
measure the inheritance of any mental trait, such as human intelligence.
In the human situation we cannot breed successive generations rapidly,
as in flies or mice, for experimental purposes. We must, therefore,
economize time and effort by taking the most readily available material.
For this purpose I have suggested three possible methods (_Psychology of
Music_, McGraw-Hill, 1938). The first is that we start with the highest
10 per cent and the lowest 10 per cent in an adequate sampling of
fifth-grade children in a school system and work back by making the same
measurements on the available blood relatives of these two groups. In
effective organization much time can be saved by making group
measurements in a co-operating community, such as a city ward. A second
procedure would be to secure an adequate sampling of musicians and
measure forward and backward to cover three generations in which the
matings of musical and unmusical parents could be traced. A third
procedure would be a systematic collection of measurements on school
children for a generation or more giving special attention to the
showing of blood relatives. We cannot, however, stress too strongly the
importance of having these measurements made throughout by an
experimenter thoroughly competent in this field and the equally thorough
biological treatment of data by scientists thoroughly competent in that
specific field. If a biologist wants to start the ball rolling from his
point of view, the records in the Eugenics Record office of the Carnegie
Institution furnish a fair and reliable sampling.
In proposing this conservative approach through psychophysical
measurements, I do not wish to belittle the insight, common knowledge
and theories of inheritance which have been obtained by observation and
statistics in terms of musicality as a whole--as in biography,
autobiography and letters of great musicians or in the study of musical
families. But we are confronted with the fact that these deal largely
with unanalyzed situations so completely covered by factors of
environment and training as to make them useless for strictly scientific
purposes. Nor would I belittle the significance of general traits, such
as musical intelligence, creative imagination and the artistic
temperament, or facilities for specific skills, such as sight reading,
and the memorizing of repertoires. We know a great deal about these and
unquestionably have the right to assume that they have an hereditary
basis. But scientific studies in heredity may be more properly
approached through the simpler and more elementary capacities.
For scientific purposes, we cannot, of course, mix basic measurements
and current ratings of musical achievement. There have been numerous
approaches to this subject from the musical-achievement point of view,
and these have furnished many suggestive leads and probably point to
unquestioned facts about the inheritance of musical talent. But the
science of genetics rightly rests upon and demands the isolation of
specific factors which can be measured; and for that purpose the musical
geneticist must, for the present, sacrifice many otherwise interesting
approaches from the point of view of rated achievement and be willing to
await the laying of foundations of rigidly conducted measurements which
can be described, interpreted, and verified.
THOUGHT REVIEW
General Principles
(1) The question is not whether or not musical ability _is_ inherited,
but _how_ it is inherited.
(2) The musical heritage through each parent is transmitted through a
single germ cell.
(3) The mechanism of musical heredity lies in the organization of the
genes in the twenty-four pairs of chromosomes found in this
fertilized germ cell.
(4) Scientific principles of musical inheritance can be established
only through experiment and measurement of specific capacities;
they cannot be derived from studies of musical achievement alone.
(5) We come into the world a fully-equipped organism which is evolved
from the germ cell before birth.
(6) This hereditary equipment is prolific in possibilities; at best,
the musical life can develop only through a small part of these
inherited resources.
(7) Defects in the inherited equipment set corresponding limits to
musical achievement.
(8) The scientific approach to the problem of musical inheritance can
be made through psychophysical measurements of musical capacities
with biological interpretation in terms of genes.
(9) There is a considerable body of general biological principles of
heredity which probably apply to the inheritance of musical
talent.
(10) Scientific study of the nature and the role of musical environment
must begin with knowledge of what is "given", the original
hereditary stock.
Consider These Questions
(1) What bad effects in education come from overemphasis of (a)
heredity, (b) environment?
(2) What educational advantages will accrue to the child from a sound
and balanced recognition of the role of (a) heredity, (b)
environment?
(3) What would be the advantage of knowing scientific laws of musical
inheritance?
(4) What is new to you in the author's proposal?
(5) Do you accept the author's theory of the relation between body and
mind?
(6) Why can we not derive laws of musical inheritance from statistical
studies of musical achievement?
Discuss These Situations
(1) A music teacher says "Give me a normal child and I will guarantee
to make him musical." What qualifications would you suggest?
(2) A teacher has measured a child's sense of pitch and found it
superior. Should she say "You are highly musical," or "You have a
superior sense of pitch?" What is the difference?
(3) An investigator has recently collected interesting material by
interviewing (a) thirty-six of the outstanding musicians of the
world, (b) the entire cast (thirty-six) of the Metropolitan Opera
Company, and (c) fifty selected graduate students in the Juilliard
School of Music, about their parents, and other blood relatives
and has attempted to interpret the findings in terms of genes.
Granting that his theory of genes is correct, what is it that
limits or invalidates the procedure?
(4) Long ago the author investigated the musical ability of three
children in a minister's family and found that the oldest daughter
rated very low on basic capacities and that she had not made
satisfactory progress in eight years of musical training. The
younger sister rated very high in musical capacities and had made
splendid progress with but a few lessons. The brother, the
youngest of the three, was like the younger sister. The minister
held that where the great Creator had made the children unequal,
it was his business to make them equal, and so he sent the eldest
daughter to the New England Conservatory of Music where she was
accepted and graduated and now holds a diploma, though, in her
community, a musical nonentity.
(5) Richard Bach Smith is a musical prodigy according to his mother.
At the age of five he plays, sings, composes, and is an
accomplished sight-reader. Is this heredity, environment, or both?
How would you order his musical education?
(6) Miss Jennie Lind Jones has a musical father and an unmusical
mother, lives in a fine musical environment, and has enjoyed
fourteen years of excellent training; but she "has no rhythm," her
piano phrasing is "cold", and her music is a "drudgery." What do
you predict for her? What would you have done for her?
(7) Subject for debate: Given both, resolved, that inherited talent is
a larger factor than musical education and environment in the
development of a great musician.
Chapter VII
THE FUTURE OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
Are we nearing the end of the "horse-and-buggy" stage of musical
instruments? Can the possibilities for revolutionary procedures now
looming up in the construction of musical instruments be as strategic
for music as were the principles embodied in the coming of the
automobile and the airplane for transportation? Those of us who remember
that faithful animal and servant of man, the horse, and the conveyances
he served, look back with fond appreciation upon what amounted to a sort
of fellowship with a fine-performing animal and the luxury of being
conveyed by him in saddle or on wheel. So future generations may look
back upon the past in fond memories of the companionship they have
enjoyed with their favorite instruments, which may be destined to a
niche in the historical museum. But in spite of competition, the horse
has survived, and so probably will the fiddle and some of its companion
instruments.
It is now safe to predict that the future instrument maker will be able
to produce any sound now known in nature or in art that may possibly
have musical significance. We already have at hand the means by which
any such sound can be adequately defined, described, specified,
measured, analyzed, and reconstructed. And there is reason to think that
with the conquest of new and marvelous resources for musical media,
musical composition will move with strides in step with instrument
building.
The musical devotee is, therefore, facing new issues, thrilling and
possibly heart-rending. Can a musician adapt himself to these changes?
Will he tolerate modifications of old instruments, radically new
creations of instruments, revolutionary new types of ensembles, and
radically new types of musical creation? Can musicians adapt themselves
to these new musical media and musical forms as rapidly and completely
as we have adapted ourselves to the transition from horse and buggy to
automobile and airplane within the span of less than half a century? The
answer is probably "no", for good reasons. Yet, sooner or later, the
transition will come in the form of new musical media, new musical
composition, and new types of musical appreciation and attachment.
POSSIBLE LINES OF DEVELOPMENT
We can now foresee that musical instruments will be submitted to
critical analysis, with improvements even on the very best; that
substitute forms in great variety may be developed for any now available
musical instrument; that new instruments will be designed for the
production of new tone qualities and other musical effects; that new
ensembles may be built for any number or kind of instrument, so that it
is within the bounds of possibility that the entire performance of the
symphony orchestra, the symphonic band, and the grand opera may be
performed through a single instrument operated by less than half a dozen
persons; that the transmission of music by remote control of the
instrument has extraordinary possibilities; that a vastly superior
control of tone for precision and modulation can be realized; that the
cost of musical instruments may be greatly reduced; that the number of
players needed in ensemble performance may be reduced, since, on the
analogy of the pipe-organ player, one individual may perform for an
entire orchestra; that current music which has been hampered by
limitations of the instrument may be perfected and new types of music
may be introduced; that the musical instrument may become a medium for
the production as well as the reproduction of song and speech; that the
musical tone may be associated with other esthetic appeals, such as
visual presentation of color, relief, and dramatic action--these are all
within the realm of possible predictability.
The range of possibilities may be illustrated in the case of a generator
for a single tone. A few years ago a graduate student came to me and
said that he wanted to take as the subject for his doctoral dissertation
the building of an electrical organ. I told him that if he would build a
generator for a single key I would assure him a stipend for three years
and all the needed facilities of the Iowa acoustical laboratories. He
accepted and made good to an extraordinary degree. The tone generator he
built is composed of the first sixteen partials, _i. e._, a fundamental
and fifteen overtones in harmonic series, each virtually a single pure
tone. The number of partials, the form of distribution of partials, the
amount of energy contributed by each partial, the phase relationships of
the partials, and the fundamental pitch are under control and may be set
up in any combination. With this number of variables, mathematicians
will say that any desired tone quality of harmonic structure up to more
than a million kinds of tone can be produced. The ear cannot hear all
these differences, but the instrument provides keys for as many steps in
the entire series as may be musically significant, and the tone at each
of these steps can be specified for production, described, and repeated
indefinitely. Thus, it is possible to make the instrument speak any
vowel in so far as it involves harmonic structure, and the harmonic
composition of any musical instrument may be imitated. Provision for
inharmonic elements and noise accessories which are necessary both for
vowels and instruments can, of course, be installed with this generator.
Given one tone with such a range of possibilities, it is but a series of
logical and fairly simple steps to provide a complete musical instrument
by simply multiplying notes of this kind. This is the type of
development we see now in a variety of electronic instruments.
_The improvement of existing instruments._ Musical instruments now in
use can be improved. We now have the means for the technical analysis of
the character of the tone produced by any instrument as a whole or by
any particular feature in its construction, so that faults and
limitations can be definitely allocated. Recent investigations have
revealed faults in the best of violins. Some of these faults or
limitations may be corrected by change in construction. For practical
purposes, a 1939 violin of American make may approximate the good
qualities of the Stradivarius, and there is no doubt that improvements
could be made upon the famous old instrument. The same is true in
principle of all individual musical instruments now in use. One of the
obstacles, however, will be the unwillingness of many musicians to face
the innovation of change in the looks of their beautiful instruments so
tenderly loved and guarded.
The piano, as we now have it, has limitations and defects, some of which
can be reduced or eliminated by the adoption of new principles of action
and activation, and by construction according to acoustical
specifications, based upon the measurement of the effect of each feature
upon qualitative and dynamic values of tones. For example, the
characteristic tone of the piano as distinguished from most other
instruments comes to a dynamic peak immediately after the hammer stroke
and falls off rapidly. We have learned to make allowance for this so
that in hearing music we have a tendency to hear a quarter note as of a
given even loudness although the sound fades off sharply during that
period. It is well known that with the drop in the loudness of the tone
there is a corresponding change in the quality of the tone, which change
again we have, of necessity, practically learned to ignore. If it should
prove desirable, it is now quite easy to provide a mechanism which will
sustain the piano tone at even loudness, and therefore uniform tone
quality, during the time value assigned to it. The distribution of
resonances of the instrument can be greatly improved by balancing. The
necessary mechanical noises which accompany the production of tone in a
piano may be largely eliminated if that should prove desirable. The
acoustical engineer can now point out dozens of features in the piano
which might be improved in future construction based upon analysis of
the output in sound. In the same manner the organ, the king of
instruments, if it is to maintain its pre-eminence in competition with
substitutes, demands improvements in the light of new facilities. The
more complicated the instrument, the more possibilities there are for
improvement. During the last hundred years there has been a steady
betterment in the mechanisms of practically all the leading musical
instruments; but this movement will rise to great heights in view of the
new tools for investigation and new materials and principles of
construction.
_New substitutes for existing instruments._ Substitutes for all
instruments now extant may be expected to come mainly through the
development of electrical construction, although many forms of
mechanical devices may be used independently or with the electrical.
There is no question at all but that with such resources, substitutes
for a stringed instrument, a wood wind, a horn, and many varieties of
traps and accessories can be built so as to embody increased musical
resources. The principles for the construction of such a violin, flute,
trumpet, or any other single instrument are already in hand. The
construction may embody such mechanical devices as strings, membranes,
and pipes; but if so, these will be electrically energized. We may
predict that substitutes for single instruments will increase in great
variety and that very simple forms adapted to age and advancement in the
playing of specific instruments can be supplied. The variety of means
for stunt performances may be increased to an alarming degree.
_New ensembles._ Another significant line of development will
undoubtedly appear in the matter of ensembles. By the utilization of
electrical construction, a single series of generators may supply the
harmonic structure of a tone from each and every instrument now in use.
Thus, a bank of sixteen violins may be supplied from this single source
and sixteen individual violin tones may be played in identical pitch,
even dynamics, equal temporal movements, and uniform tone quality. Such
uniformity would however be of limited musical significance. The
important thing musically is the fact that in such a bank any desired
form of artistic deviation or differential enrichment may be provided
for. The same would apply to wood winds, horns, bells, drums and other
percussion instruments in large part. Where further representation of
mixed tone, inharmonics, or noises are demanded, they may be added. The
substitute for a drum can increase the precision and range of the drum
sound without the use of the drum, as, for example, in the present
"Novachord". Thus, it is conceivable that with the exception of certain
unforeseen limitations, the instrumentation of an entire orchestra or
band can be built into a single unit operated from a single console.
From what we have seen in the way of marvelous demonstrations in recent
years it is reasonable to suppose that entirely new types of complex
instruments will be invented, bringing to music hitherto unknown
resources. Furthermore, with the instrumental music as such, provision
may be made in the instruments for words in speech and song, and the
visual presentation of dramatic action in color, relief, and movement
which may be controlled from the console. The goal of embodying in a
single instrument or coupling units of instruments the means of
performing chamber music, orchestra, band, and the grand opera, is
without doubt no wilder prediction than was the prediction of radio or
airplane a few years ago.
NEW MUSIC
The improvement of old instruments and the introduction of new ones will
call for an unprecedented revision of old music and a creation of new.
When music was written for the well-tempered clavichord it was limited
to the resources of that instrument. The same is true of music for all
instruments. The music had to be limited to the available resources of
the instrument. It is reasonable to suppose that composers will respond
from time to time with up-to-date adaptations and new creations, taking
advantage of each of the new resources for range of pitch and loudness
and new resources for variety in harmony and richness of tone. It is
equally conceivable that the composer may set up new demands to which
the inventor and instrument maker may respond on call. It is difficult
to realize what extraordinary enrichment in musical resources may spring
up under the impetus of new instrumental resources. There will be new
treatments of scales and intervals, since the pitch control will be far
more flexible than it has been. Perhaps one of the largest innovations
will be in the freer use of intonation not built on any particular scale
but soaring with the greatest freedom on an instrument as we now hear
it, for example, in the singing of Negro spirituals. Performance scores
show that these natural singers defy scales, but produce beautiful
effects through their free and soaring pitch inflection. Stringed
instruments have been hampered by accompaniment and by tradition and
theory. We can anticipate significant developments outside of our
diatonic scale which has come to be a sort of strait-jacket, at least
theoretically. It has been shown, for example, that a quarter-tone
instrument is not of much use unless music is written not only for these
intervals but in modes, themes, and atmosphere adapted to such purpose.
The pitch range of the composition will be extended; so also will the
dynamic range. Countless new features can be introduced for enrichment
of tone and variety of harmony. Nomenclature will develop so that the
composer may not only think in definable terms but may be able to inject
new elements of terminology into the score. For various types of
ensembles the music will, of course, have to be written or adapted
specifically. Stunt music will here find unlimited opportunities for
novelty and escape from conventional tone. This may give us relief from
the limitations of jazz and swing, which have been so boring in recent
years. There will undoubtedly be great bewilderment as to the limits of
tolerance for new media and new forms for musical creations. History has
revealed clearly that the adaptation of taste and tolerance requires
time, and conservatism is often a beneficent safeguard.
The most fundamental recent achievement in the building of new
instruments is that of producing pure tones as well as rich tones in
perfect harmonic structure without accessories. But for various reasons
music has always utilized more or less inharmonic structures and has
imitated, or at least tolerated, noises in the forms of hisses, twangs,
and all kinds of inharmonic and noisy distortion. Recourse to discord
will always be demanded in music; but it is a question as to what extent
aperiodic sounds or noises are necessary. We have learned to accept the
hisses, scratches, rattles, thuds, and bangs of countless varieties in
musical tone. Some such accretions are present in the tone production of
every instrument now in use. They have arisen as impediments in
construction, but have come to be accepted as characteristics of the
instrument and therefore have added greatly to the individuality of each
instrument. Will the future musical public insist on having these or
will there be a feeling of relief when we can get rid of them? The
answer is probably in the middle ground because music, at least as we
know it now, calls for a great variety of noises in the interest of
realism. Possibly in the future, noise may be given a chastened and more
honorable place in the family of tone qualities.
The significant thing to note here is that in new types of instruments
any kind of crude sound or noise can be introduced at will. This will
answer the purpose of program music in that perfectly realistic
reproductions can be made of the sound of steps in marching, the slam of
a door, the squeal of a pig, the bleat of a lamb, the crow of a rooster,
the roar of an airplane, the sigh of the wind. A comparatively small
outfit of sources for accessory noises can serve a great variety of
purposes in the hands of the artist. New responsibilities for the
composer in these respects may be foreseen.
PLAYING
As in the automobile, for example, the tendency is to make everything
automatic and relieve the human control of effort, we are moving fast in
the direction of creating automatic devices in musical instruments. It
is safe to predict that a variety of instruments for children will be
more easily played than at present, and that even for the virtuoso a
number of the factors which have been difficult to control will be
simplified and mechanized. This will be particularly true in ensemble
instruments where a single player may control a large number of
instruments or where three or four players, of whom one is the
conductor, may render the equivalent of an orchestral performance.
Barring the limitations of the instrument it is significant that in such
performance the conductor will have vastly superior control of the
situation in that he is in direct manual control of all those factors
which in the present orchestra he tries to control through the medium of
the individuals and masses of players with the baton as a sort of whip.
In the new orchestra, he will sit at a panel with levers and buttons
through which he will be able to control the interpretation he desires
to make.
This conducting may be done with meticulous precision and apparently
magical result through remote control, as was illustrated, even with the
use of present instruments, when Stokowski sat at his panel in
Washington, D. C. and controlled the performance of his orchestra in
Philadelphia.
SPECIFICATIONS FOR INSTRUMENT CONSTRUCTION
The musical medium whether in art or nature has four, and only four,
elements; namely, pitch, loudness, time, and timbre. These are four
characteristics which may be expressed in terms of the sound wave, as
frequency of waves, intensity of waves, duration of waves, and form of
waves. The recognition of this fact vastly simplifies the mastery of
tone production in musical instruments. Let us consider the factors
which may be classified under these four heads.
_Pitch._ New devices for the control of pitch make possible very
superior control of the pitch in pitch precision, flexibility,
linearity, range, varieties of scale, and harmony. Instruments can be
tuned to a higher degree of precision, retuned more quickly, and kept in
tune longer by the new means of tone production. Therefore, intervals
can be made more exact, the pitch can be sustained with precision, any
pitch aspect can be described, desired effects can be specified, and
artistic adjustments can be made for musical effect.
Any desired type of flexibility may be introduced, such as the gliding
attack and release, periodic or progressive changes in a sustained tone,
as in the vibrato, or rise and fall in tone required during the sounding
of a single note. The glide, the portamento, and a variety of other
pitch ornaments may be produced. Adjustments from any size of intervals
for artistic effect, such as a quarter tone or enlarged or diminished
intervals, may be produced. In short, the pitch inflection can be
controlled either within a single note or a sequence of notes, and just
intonation or tempered scales of various sorts may be produced. The
possibility of combining individual notes in harmony is unlimited. The
pitch range of the instruments can be carried to any height above the
present gamut of instruments, even into the region of supersonics, which
may possibly have physical effects on the feeling of well-being or
ill-being of the musical organism.
_Loudness._ The range of loudness can be extended both in the direction
of increased loudness and perfectly controlled softness. The loudness of
tones throughout the entire range can be equalized. All forms of dynamic
shading and fading and differential steps of loudness can be introduced
for artistic effect. The dynamic linearity, as in the organ, can be
sustained and the fading effect, which distinguishes the piano from the
organ, can be adjusted to any degree. All present pedals as well as new
pedals may be introduced.
_Time._ Through the precision made possible for various forms of
automatic action in the instrument, all temporal aspects of tone can be
enhanced by precision, controlled tapering at the beginning and end of
the tone, various forms of synchronization, and the balancing of the
roles of time and stress in rhythm may be achieved.
_Timbre._ The most significant new feature is, of course, the extension
and control of richness in timbre and sonance, which constitute tone
quality. The range of timbre changes may extend from a pure tone to the
inclusion of even more partials than the ear can hear, possibly thirty
or forty, with an infinite variety of harmonic forms of distribution
between these extremes. Great innovations through inharmonic and
aperiodic sounds are coming. It is now possible to maintain a uniform
timbre which gives an element of dignity and stability to the tone in a
sustained note. But since deviation from the regular is of far greater
importance, flexibility of tone quality is even more desirable. This
flexibility in timbre for the duration of the tone which determines tone
quality, technically called sonance, may be provided for by various
devices. For example, in the present "Novachord", the various forms and
degrees of vibrato are at the command of the player and are based on
scientific investigation leading to specification for this musical
ornament. Given the mechanisms for harmonic structures and inharmonics,
we need only the addition of rough noise of various kinds to make the
tone realistic. The timbre available in the musical instrument will
therefore run from the pure tone to the roughest noise.
In the above I have attempted to present a picture in rough outline
indicating present trends and predictable futures for music through the
improvement of musical instruments. The instrumentalist can point out
many features not here mentioned. The musician may yearn for new
resources in his musical medium for which he can now lay down
specifications. The listeners must be prepared for startling innovations
and thrilling new sources of pleasure in music. It will take generations
to finish the theoretical picture I have here sketched in bold
outline--but let us look forward to a progressive unveiling and
revelation of possibilities. But take no alarm--the horse, if not the
buggy, will survive.
THOUGHT REVIEW
General Principles
(1) We are entering upon a new era for musical instruments.
(2) Present instruments will be improved, new instruments will be
innovated, new ensembles will be achieved.
(3) Conforming to this progress, present music will be adapted and new
types of composition will appear.
(4) In this changing order musical tastes will undergo significant
changes.
(5) The composer may now specify new conceptions of desired features,
and the technicians will provide them.
(6) Instrument makers will be able to produce or reproduce any musical
sound in nature or art.
Consider These Questions
(1) If the violin strings are mounted on a perfect resonator with
different shape from the present violin, will that be a violin?
(2) If the piano can be built so as to eliminate all accessory noises,
will pianists like it?
(3) If the playing of new instruments will be made easier and better,
will that tend to increase the number of students in music?
(4) If all the good characteristics of present musical instruments can
be reproduced in a much smaller number of instruments, will that
be welcomed by the musical public?
(5) If we are to have quarter-tone music, which is now possible, why
will this demand new music aside from the size of the interval?
(6) If an electronic organ could be built to do all that the best pipe
organ now does, if the visible part were reduced to the appearance
of a little writing desk, and if speakers were concealed in the
walls throughout the building, how would the worshipper in church
react to that situation?
(7) Children now build their radios from purchased or home-made parts.
It will be still easier for them to build a variety of musical
instruments. Will they do it and with what effect?
Discuss These Situations
(1) At the Riverside Laboratory, Colonel Fabian built an organ with
the pipes distributed throughout the three stories of a large
building. The effect was as if the whole building were one grand
organ. No matter how many sources there were for the same note,
the tone of that note would always be heard as coming from a
single source, the location of which depended upon the relative
distances and intensities of the various sources. The result was
"magical". Discuss the possibility and the significance of using
this principle of installation in a house or in a cathedral.
(2) It is possible to build a comparatively simple instrument which
can yield pure tones throughout the musical register. Consider
what role such an instrument might carry in an orchestra.
CHAPTER VIII
PRAISE AND BLAME IN MUSIC
Music is unique among esthetic appeals in that it demands immediate
response in the form of praise or blame. The orator demands immediate
response; but his appeal is to reasoning, not to feeling. The painter,
sculptor, and poet demand esthetic response, but this response is
delayed and does not keep the artist on the tip of his nerves to receive
it. The musical appeal is all the more emotional because it is not only
an appeal for personal recognition but for the aggrandizement of the
noble art. The musician at all ages and all stages of advancement can
perform for his own pleasure in isolation, but even here the demand for
praise or blame on the spur of the moment is emphatic and essential.
It is, of course, fully recognized that at his best the musical
performer is not conscious of making a direct appeal for approval by
others. His objective is rather that of self-expression and experiment
in the execution of an artistic skill. He is often aware of a negative
attitude in his audience, and he may take an attitude of aloofness or
superiority toward the audience, recognizing its incompetence. Yet back
of it all, there may be even a distant hope of approval in a coming
generation or the critical judgment of the select few; but the attitude
of the immediate audience or the public toward his performance plays
heavily upon his unanalyzed feelings and moods.
The bases for musical praise and blame are notoriously inadequate, be
they meaningless approval, empty flattery, or censorious criticism. A
general attitude of spontaneous approval without knowing or giving
reasons among listeners in general is praiseworthy as an expression of
good will; but for serious purposes we must question the competence of
the listener for the response manifested. The fault may lie in the
listener's ignorance of the art of music, his incompetence in
recognizing elements of merit, his failure to credit the performer in
relation to natural ability or purpose. Praise or blame may also carry
or miscarry in so far as it may wisely serve to motivate or discourage
the performer on the specific issues involved in the performance. With
the sudden popularizing of music, the incoming tendency is to associate
music with the beginning of a scientific approach to the understanding
of the music and the musician. This situation is changing at a
gratifying rate for the good of music. It is worth while to consider in
some detail the factors in this progress.
VANTAGE GROUNDS
_Artistic insight._ The extraordinarily rapid introduction of real music
education in the grades and in the high school and college curricula,
and even in graduate study, is changing the attitude of the listener by
increasing his competence. Children and youth now hear more good music
and hear it presented in such a way as to increase their understanding
of it. At the college level music is presented as an academic subject,
with primary emphasis upon the art of hearing music together with some
knowledge of history and content of music. The training of high-school
teachers of music has changed radically in a generation from the mere
development of proficiency with an instrument or voice to a deeper
insight into the nature of the art, its history, and its roles. At many
levels well-developed courses in music appreciation have acquired a
permanent status and have proved a good foundation for further
penetration into the art of the appreciation of music. This implanting
of points of view and development of esthetic attitudes in the academic
instruction in the schools is hastened to fruitage by the popularizing
of music for the masses through radio and phonograph as well as through
the penetrating of the skills acquired in school into the home and
social institutions. The popularizing of good music, where public
entertainment in the parks and other public places is of good musical
quality and furnished free or at popular prices, is a great help in
developing a critical attitude even among those in other respects quite
uneducated. Therefore, we may say with great satisfaction that training
in the art of hearing music has come upon the educational horizon in
America in a very promising way.
_The scientific attitude._ We are constantly impressed with the analogy
between scientific insight into the nature of music and the
corresponding insight in other sciences, such as botany or astronomy. A
child starts out with an inborn capacity and urge for the love of
flowers; but as a student of flowers he soon encounters many marvelous
revelations. On the one hand his horizon is broadened by acquaintance
with larger and larger classes and varieties. He learns to see
relationships to habitat. He learns to trace scientifically the laws of
their evolution, the methods of artificial breeding and development of
new plants, and even the beauty in their usefulness. On the other hand,
he turns to his microscope and discovers not only the external parts
visible to the naked eye but the internal structures, their modes of
evolution and development, even down to the discovery of the mechanisms
of heredity through the genes, which are so small that we know them only
by inference from what the microscope reveals. The natural history of
music is analogous to that of such a material science.
This scientific insight into the structure and function of music goes
hand in hand with the development of the artistic insight into the
nature of the esthetic values from the point of view of the art of
music. Thus the student of music is now furnished the facilities for
increasing his power of appreciation of music and a critical awarding of
praise or blame from two complementary points of view: a study of the
art and a study of the science of music.
_Terminology._ The mere matter of terminology here plays a very
important role, as is now being demonstrated so successfully in the
recent developments in the field of psychology of music and acoustics.
Take, for example, the concept of tone quality. Until a few years ago
there was probably not a single adequate statement of the nature of tone
quality in the entire literature on music; and yet this is the most
important element in music. In the past the listener and the student
have generally approached the subject in an attitude of acceptance or
rejection of the unanalyzed impression, but often with no more
competence than that with which the ignorant shepherd appraises the
grandeur and meaning of the heavens above on a starlit night. The
teacher, as a rule, said "This is beautiful," or "This is ugly," without
being able to give the reasons why, for want of a tangible terminology.
The teaching and development of tone quality therefore has wallowed in a
slough of despond. Recent researches in the field of musical acoustics
are ushering in a new era. The structure of tone quality has been
dissected, and its parts have been adequately described and defined.
This is leading to an improved musical language. The same is true for
other musical concepts. Thus, through the systematic development of
musical terminology, there will gradually develop a scientific
classification of the various aspects of the musical medium which is
essential not only for the learning of music but also for the awarding
of praise and blame.
_Musical talent._ With this development of a knowledge of the nature of
music, the scientific student of music has turned to the analysis of the
nature of the musical mind attempting to assign specific roles to
musical heredity and musical training and environment. Hazy concepts of
the gift of music have been subjected to scientific analysis,
experiment, and measurement. From this, it is being demonstrated that it
is impossible to award praise or blame without taking a reasonable
account of the innate fortes and faults of the performer which determine
in large part the direction and limits of achievement or failure. The
recognition of this fact, of course, plays its fundamental role in the
early encouragement or discouragement of the inceptive musician, in the
recognition of the purpose of his education, and in the motivation
through training.
PARTIES CONCERNED
_The pupil._ Modern education has revealed the importance of a
student-centered and student-originated learning process as opposed to
the traditional and institutional direction of development of the
individual. The question of self-praise and self-blame, satisfaction or
dissatisfaction on the part of the child or youth, is of course of first
importance both in the initial stages of orientation and throughout the
course of specialization and achievement. Instead of imposing
regimentation, the home, the school and the private teachers tactfully
aim to assist the child in the discovery of his natural interests,
resources and promises which aid him in the building of his personal
convictions. But emphasis is laid upon the principle of
self-determination in the light of progressively available reasonable
facilities for self-appraisal. This refers both to the appreciation of
music and to the development of musical skills. This principle of
self-determination has frequently run amuck in the hands of progressive
educators, capital _P_. But it is a fundamental and permanent principle
for the development of personality and motivation in specific pursuits.
The child will soon discover that in order to pursue his interests and
satisfy himself in performance he may have to work hard, conform to
requirements, be patient, and make sacrifices; but his first goal is to
feel satisfaction in what he is getting and in the worth-whileness of
the pursuit.
For these things he will find an analogy in any form of play, physical
or mental, into which he enters in a wholehearted way. This feeling of
self-approbation comes easily in the musically talented where the urge
for music is clearly manifested; but with moderate talent this attitude
of self-reliance needs cultivation. And in the assumed absence of
talent, there is need of assistance in the real verification of this
absence. The greatest danger lies in the intrusion of prejudice and
social pressures. This principle of self-determination is of most
importance in those fields which are to be pursued primarily as a source
of self-expression and pleasure in the pursuit as distinguished from the
pursuits which are essential for the earning of bread and butter and the
maintaining of social status.
_The teacher._ The recognition of this principle of self-determination
and the sustained will to achieve has revolutionized the art of
teaching, or we may say better, has laid the beginnings for an art of
teaching. One of the greatest obstacles the teacher encounters is the
traditional social demand, and often the recognized objective in the
profession, to make everybody musical. Finding that there is no adequate
natural interest and no marks of gratifying achievement are developing,
the teacher settles down to the sledge-hammer method of forced
development. We must therefore bespeak for the live music teacher the
right to refuse to make gold out of iron. The private teacher's fee and
the tuition of the school are, of course, the temptations of the devil
to face the situation with complacence. The constituency granting
lenience in this respect has the right to expect that, in turn, the
teacher understands and has exercised the effective means of
self-discovery, self-orientation, self-determination, and
self-motivation on the part of those who are on the border line. In this
art, the profession has made but little progress so far. The
constituency also has the right to impose the obligation upon the
teacher to respect the individuality of the gifted and to give all types
of freedom to the pupil commensurate with his natural line and degree of
successful achievement in developing appreciation for various types of
music.
In breaking with the traditional routines of musical drill, the teacher
must first of all give up the attempt to cast the musical mind of the
child in the mold of his or her own pattern. This principle has acquired
its greatest significance in dealing with the highly gifted, where it is
clearly substantiated by the musical history of precocious children. The
public must acquire tolerance for the principle of giving musical
facilities to child and youth in proportion to this self-determination
and demonstrated ability to achieve. The great musician and the musical
virtuoso are not fostered by educational or social conformance but
primarily by the enjoyment of the principle of free determination and
development of divergent personality.
_The critic._ The music critic unfortunately, as a rule, is a newspaper
man and must conform to the pressure methods of efficiency in writing
down. This newspaper ability has often been the basis for the
unfortunate selection of musical critics. On the other hand, the
thoroughly competent musical critic, if he were to ply his art as a
technician, would find but small outlet for publication and a negligible
constituency of readers. He would face, most discouragingly, the fact
that many of the performers on the stage do not have critical knowledge
of what they are doing and are not interested or even capable of reading
the highly technical and critical analysis of their performance. So we
must be tolerant with the musical critic.
If music were a simple thing or had a specific goal, such as the
development of a logical proposition, the task of the critic would be
easier. But, as it is, he is dealing with a highly fluid and chaotic
state of affairs when he is supposed to aid the common reader in
assigning praise or blame to the performance. One of the most striking
faults of the work of the musical critic is his lack of words--lack of
concepts which are discriminating and logically definable. We tolerate
his splashing of his personal likes or dislikes as if he were competent
to boil down our feelings of the situation into a fair assaying of
praise or blame of the performance. One difficulty lies in the demand
for writing in smart and emotional style. Among critics there are rare
individuals who have a fine artistic insight and a balanced esthetic
judgment in regard to what is good or bad in music. But we seldom see
their names in the musical-review columns.
Phonophotographic recordings reveal art principles which had not been
discovered in the musical world through hearing, and yet functioned very
largely. They enable the critic to use scientific language in the
description of achievement and assign praise or blame on the basis of
identifiable and describable grounds. We can now photograph the sound
waves of a performance at any distance from the source of sound and
convert this into an analyzable performance score. As a whole, this
principle cannot be available to the musical critic who must render an
immediate opinion. But we have a right to expect that he should have a
scientific knowledge of the types of facts which are revealed in such
objective records. He is living in a new musical era in which the
qualifications for the critic are as new as they are for the artistic
and scientific orientation of teacher and performer.
_The public._ I can recall the time when the possession of a piano and
piano lessons for the darling girl represented almost the sole ambition
of the mothers in our state aside from the spontaneous and untutored
self-expression in song. The public demand has changed. Instruments have
changed. Methods of teaching have changed. Understanding of the art has
increased. Cosmopolitan tastes have spread. Knowledge of the science of
music has become aligned with knowledge in other sciences. The public
rapidly learns to demand all these things and take the right for
granted. The ambition of the mother, the objective of the teacher, and
the expression of the youth of fifty years ago are coming to be
historical curiosities. The art of music in America is coming to a
wholesome fruitage and is becoming associated with present-day academic
learning. For the first time in history it reaches out into the remotest
corners of the land and many of the technical aspects of the art and new
concepts of the musical medium are fast becoming common-sense knowledge
and therefore add in the just awarding of praise or blame.
THOUGHT REVIEW
Principles
(1) Music is designed to give pleasure when heard, and therefore calls
for immediate affective response.
(2) Capacity for esthetic response varies with natural talent and
training, both artistic and scientific.
(3) It is important to know "where to laugh and when to laugh."
(4) For scientific description of likes or dislikes we need a
discriminating terminology.
(5) As every scientific discovery and invention gradually becomes
common-sense knowledge when popularly known, so artistic judgment
tends to crystallize into common-sense feeling.
(6) Musical criticism may be chastized and chastened into balanced and
critical judgment, relatively free from emotional explosions.
(7) The spontaneous and natural smile or frown is often more
eloquently telling or cutting than words.
Consider These Questions
(1) Is the conventional response to music affectedly temperamental?
(2) Why is listening intently to a major musical performance more
exhausting than listening to an equally engrossing lecture on
"International Relations?"
(3) Was the English visitor right when he said, "You have no art,
because whatever you have you display"?
(4) Does insight into the nature and structure of the thing beautiful
tend to lessen or to strengthen the artistic appeal?
Discuss This Situation
(1) During the last twenty years in a Midwestern city of 30,000 people
music has "come to town." Curricular and extracurricular music in
the schools has been tenfold what it was during the foregoing
twenty years. Music clubs and other musical activities have
greatly increased. The community often takes as strong an interest
in local, district, state, and national contests in music as
ordinarily attaches to football. Discuss the effect of this upon
(a) the musical, (b) the social, (c) the recreational and (d) the
educational life of the community. Evaluate the change in interest
and capacity for assigning fair praise and blame to music.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber's Note
Where hyphenation occurs on a line break, the decision to
retain or remove is based on occurrences elsewhere in the
text.
The errors deemed most likely to be the printer's have been
corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the
page and line in the original text.
8.2 Play is essentially social and find[s] its added
highest
21.13 The old conflict be[t]ween enthusiasts for added
rote singing
38.11 has, of course, been unparall[el]ed in the added
history of the world.
39.48 generally has a[n] hereditary basis in removed
66.30 for example, in the present "Novac[h]ord" added
71.23 flexibil[i]ty of tone quality is even more added
desirable.
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