BARNETT HOUSE, OXFORD Visitor: VISCOUNT BRYCE, CM. Honorary Associates: The Akchbishop op York. Viscoukt Milxer. The Bishop of London-. " Sir Horace Plunkett. The Bishop or Oxford. George Cadbury. The Bishop or Wikchesteh. Miss Jane Addams. Mrs. S. a. Barnett. Mrs. S. Ball. President of the Association : The Master of Balliol. Vice-Presidents : The Provost of Oriel. The Wardkw of Wadham. Hon. Secretaries: Dr. a. J. Carlyle. Miss A. W. Thackeray. Hon. Treasxirer: Miss M. Venables. Hon. Auditors: Messrs. Price, Waterhodse 6f Co., 3 Frederick's Place, Old Jewry, E.C. Bankers: Messrs. Barclay & Co., Old Bank, Oxford. COUNCn.: Professor W. G. S. Adams. The Warden of All Souls. The Master of Balliol. Mrs. S. a. Barnett. Miss C. V. Butler. Db. a. J. Carlyle. Professor F. Y. Edgewohth. Professor W. M. Geldart. Dr. W. W. Jackson. The Provost of Oriel. Miss A. M. A. H. flocERs. Rev. W. Tejiple. Miss A. W. Thackeray. Professor E. J. Urwick. Miss M. Venables. The Warden of Wadham. Librarian and Secretary: Miss Margaret Deneke. BARNETT HOUSE PAPERS. No. 3 «." ■ THE NEEDS OF POPULAR MUSICAL EDUCATION BY SIR W. HENRY HADOW, D.Mus. PRINCIPAL OF ARMSTRONG COLLEGE NEWCASTLE-ON-TVNE WITH FOKEWORD / BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE H. A. L. FISHER, DXitt., M.F. PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY 1918 hf-h PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFOED UNIVERSITY PRESS • *■ rf # • FOREWORD I AM not so prGsiimptiioiis as to suppose that any words of mine can add weight to an address given by one of our most accomplished musicians upon a theme which he has made his own. Sir Henry Hadow speaks upon musical education with an authority which no wise man will challenge, and with the wit, grace, and knowledge calculated to commend his message to a wide audience. I trust, indeed, that his audience will be wide. I could wish that every teacher, every body of school managers, every local edu- cation authority would ponder the sul)stance of this pregnant allocution, holding, as I do, that in no way can the general refinement of life in this country be more effectually furthered than ])y the restoration of music to its proper place in the scheme of our common education. H. A. L. FISHER. 43631S NOTE This Address was delivered at Oxford on June 27, 1918, by arrangement with Barnett House, and is here pubhshed from shorthand notes taken down on that occasion. Sir Henry Hadow's original intention of writing it out more formally could not be fulfilled, owing to his departure to tnke up the appointment of Director of Education with the Y.M.C.A. on the lines of com- munication in France. ''I'l THE NEEDS OF POPULAR MUSICAL EDUCATION I AM going, as far as is possible, to avoid anything which is of a controversial nature, and I am afraid that the few things I have to say will seem so olj- viously true that it is hardly worth your while to listen to them. There is one word in the title which has been chosen for this lecture which may seem to want a little explanation, and that is the word ' popular '. For some reason, we nearly always use the word ' popular ' with some sense of depreciation, as though an appeal to the people had some taint. According to an article in the last number of The Spectator^ a poi:)u- lar essay means one which contains no reference to mathematics. No doubt popular prices are prices which all people are glad to pay ; but a popular enter- tainment is one the very name of which warns off any one who has any diwcrimination, and a i^opular book is the kind of book which everybody reads except those who are studying the su])ject. Now I do not mean ' popidar ' in that sense at all. The error has sunk so deeply into the minds of English people that it has become much more than a matter of nomenclature. Not very long ago — just before the war — a friend of mine and I gave a reception in the north of England. I had to choose the music. I sent to a local orchestra, and asked them to submit me a programme. They sent back the most dreadful list of rubbish which it is possible to conceive. I said a few eloquent words to them over the telephone, to which they replied, ' We did not know that you wanted it to be high-class'. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, applying that to the 6 THE NEEDS OF ilowers on the table, the fruit on the dishes, or any- thin/r except the aitistic part of the entertainment. No, 1 do not believe in the use of the word ' popular ' in that sense at all. I have always been convinced that the taste of English j^eople in music is sound. The only reason why bad music flourishes is indifference. But since, after all, an address has got to be about some- thing, and I have barred out one possible discrimina- tion in this wide topic, I should like to say at once that what I do propose to talk about is not so much the musical education which is to be a preparation for a professional career, but rather the place that music can hold in a general liberal education — the part that music can play in the training of the intellect and minds of all of us. That part has not been played hitherto to anything like the extent which seems to me possible or desirable. We have been too much in the habit of looking upon music as audible confec- tionery, instead of being the best analogue of all that is finest in great literature and poetry. We have not always believed this. If you look back to Elizabethan times, wherj, after all, the intellectual life of England was at its highest, nuisic was part of every educated person's career. Morley, in his Plame and Easic Intro- diidion,^ tells how a scholar, who betakes himself to a teacher of music, describes how he was out at a su^jper party, madrigals were handed round, and he was asked to take his part. When he explained that he could not read music, the whole company drew away from him, and discussed in knots wliere he had Ijoen ]jrought up. That is wliat our Elizabethan an- cestors thought of nuisic as part of a hberal educa- tion. 1 dare not ask how many of the company here asseml>led could acquit themselves satisfactorily under a like oidcal. There is no need to enter into the reasons why music dropped into the background in the reign of Anne. 1 believe the greater part was the accident that the social and intellectual life was con- ' Published 1597. POPULAR MUSICAL EDUCATION 7 fined to London, and that its leaders happened to be unmusical. If you look at the different ways in which music was treated by Shakespeare and his contempo- raries and by Swift and his contemporaries, you will see that the music which was the very breath of our nostrils has become, by Queen Anne's reign, a remote and rather costly exotic, for which a few people profess an admiration which is not always genuine. And that bad tradition, which was set in the eighteenth century, has gone on almost to our own time. Look at the difference in Oxford between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the diaries of Wood we find keen appreciation, in those of Hearne ^ I do not think that I remember any allusion to music except the disdainful reference to Handel's visit : ' Handel with his lousy crew of fiddlers.' And to come down even to later times, it is, I think, even within living memory, or, if not, only just out of living memory, that an undergraduate of Christ Church called upon the Dean with a request to have the use of the Hall for a concert., The request was not considered, tlie sole response being to order Mr. Ouseley out of the room. Think of the change nowadays. Think of the position which music occupies here and now, and you will see that the change is coming, and that we have already progressed considerably along the way. What then remains to be done ? The answer to that question is — 'A good deal.' We want to give music much more of a place in our schools, fi-om the elemen- tary schools upwards, and in our universities. First of all, we must rid oiu- minds absolutely and altogether of the belief that music is something apart from the rest of our intellectual life. We have got to treat music as a language ; its grammar must be studied like the grammar of a language, its classics as those of a literature, its composition as that of a language. That does not mean adding further burdens to an already overcrowded curriculum of subjects. It means 1 Anthony Wuod, 16^2-95 ; Thomas Hearne, 1678-1735. 8 THE NEEDS OF teaching subjects in a different way from that in which they have been taught hitherto. It is not so much a matter of hours as the way in which those hours are spent. Looking back over a period of forty years, I do not remember a very hirge number of hours — either as teacher or learner — which could not have been packed a little fuller with advantage. I do not think I ever learnt any history at school— any history of England. What passed under that name was an account of the disputes in which the people of England were from time to time engaged, and the bloodthirsty way in which those disputes were usually settled. When I was fifteen I could have told you the date of every battle fought in the Wars of the Roses, but I certainly could not have told you of any single invention during that period wliicli had done anything to ameliorate the lot of man. How many of us have ever studied the civilization of our country in such a way as to put the musicians or artists into their proper places ? It does make a dif- ference to one's knowledge of a composer's personality to know what was his provenance, what were the cir- cumstances in which he lived, what was the general history of the civilization into which he came, how was his life, work, and art connected with tliat of his contemporaries or with the great political movements of his time, and to what extent is this iiitiuence found to throw a Hood of light over the music itself. That is one reform that can take [)lace. Let us see to it that the text-books shall be written from a diiferent perspective, and that they shall find i-ooni for the achievements of the great composers. Let us try to remodel our conce})tion of literature and histojy so as to bring music into some kind of relation with the rest of human life. It has played a very large part in the civilization of our country, and it is not right that we should be brought up in such entire ignorance of what it has done. JNow for another point. We want an almost complete POPULAR MUSICAL EDUCATION 9 change in the way in which miLsic i,s taught in our schools at present. For a long time the teaching of music meant teaching a certain numl^er of reluctant individuals to play the piano l)adly. There were also visiting teachers, generally with little or no status, and the estimation in which their work was held may be gauged from the school prospectuses, in which, long- after the other subjects, you had music and singhig as ' extras '. The dissociation of music and singing is ominous in itself. The first thing we have to do is to see to it that the children, when quite young, are taught musical dictation. There are a great many people in this country who regard the reading of music as some- thing miraculous. You will remember in Lorna Boone the old Devonshire servant had exactly the same view of people who professed to read the newspaper. It ought to be no more difficult for a child to bo brought up to read music than for a child to be brought up to read French. I say advisedly, ought not to l3e. It is at the present so, and the great obstacle is our preposterous system of musical notation. All that can be remedied. If we could get a more logi(;al scheme of notation, we should have cleared away one great obstacle from the progress of music in general. Even now, with that difficulty in the way, it is astonishing how quickly children in a school will pick up musical dictation. I have visited one or two schools where the teacher has written a passage on the blackboard and the children have read it out at once. The correlation between eye and ear is complete, so that the two work in with each other just as perfectly as they are accustomed to do in reading the prin^ted page. After all, it is a very low order of education which does not enable a person to read a page or write a letter without reading out the words aloud. The same degree of education which enables us to read a page of Shakespeare to ourselves would enable us equally well to read a page of Beethoven. Thirdly, we want to make music very much more a part of the 10 THE NEEDS OF corporate life of the school than has hitherto iDeen done. Here again there has l)een a very great advance, notal^ly in some of our public schools, such as Harrow, Clifton, Rugby, &c., where the music has really been made an actual part of the school life, and where the whole education has immensely profited in consequence. For one thing, there should be a certain amount of class-singing. I should like it for at least ten minutes or a quarter of an hour each day. Get the pupils together in classes and make them sing first-rate English songs, such as ' The Vicar of Bray '. I have sometimes heard people say that they cannot under- stand how any one who professes to Hke classical music can like anything so 'tuney' as a folk-song. I remember once in Oxford meeting a lady who was up here on a visit, and who engaged with me in a musical conversation. ' I adore Bach,' she said. ' He is so far above the common herd.* I remarked that most of my friends seemed to enjoy his music. She replied, ' Ah, but do you think they really under- stand him ? Because there is no tune in him.' What can you make of people who adopt that attitude ? They are in tlie same chapter of hrtise as those who suppose that to be fond of good music means being fond of serious music. (I have heard a good deal of serious music which was not good at all.) There is plenty of room in Shakespeare for Touchstone as well as Lear. There is room in music for both grave and gay, provided you get the best in both kinds. ])ut there is no room for the second-rate. There is no kind, however simple, which cannot ])e good in its way, and have a place in the hierarchy of the arts. One of the reasons why people feel a little misgiving at the teaching of the best music in schools is because they are afraid it will be too heavy for children to take an interest in. Let it be properly and carefully chosen. Do not give children the Fourth Symphony of Brahms to start with. Give them something of transparent structure, liroad molody, and effective I'hytlini. I S])oko just now POPULAR MUSICAL EDUCATION 11 about history text-books, and the need of replacing them by something which would give the artistic life ot the country a much fuller place. In every school there should be a certain number of books gn the history, the aesthetics, and biography of music. These should not be treated so much as part of lesson-time, but put into the school library for any one to study who will. I should not be surprised to find a large proportion of the boys and girls who would like to take these books out and read them. If you begin by making them read the actual text of the music, as they would of a foreign language, you have increased their horizon, and given them a whole set of new opportunities, both of emotional and intellectual train- ing. I say ' intellectual ', and that is the j3oint upon which I wish to close. It is not in the least true that any fortuitous concourse of notes will make a tune. One of the surest tests between good and bad music is that the bad music does not mean anything ; it has no significance. I remember once Professor Tovey executing an extraordinarily brilliant and extremely amusing burlesque of Richard Strauss. It was an admirable parody. There was no musical meaning to it whatsoever, and when he had finished playing he said, ' That is what music sounds like to people who do not understand it '. If we do not try to understand it, it will sound like mellifluous nonsense-verses. Now may I qualify that for a moment lest it be misunder- stood ? The meaning of music, the meaning of a great tune, does not consist in referring to anything outside music- It is no use asking a musician what the tune in the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven means in words. The meaning of music is inherent in the music itself, and can be expressed in terms of music, and of that alone. One cannot translate a cathedral into Greek prose. Programme music, where the succession of harmonies is intended to represent something outside, if it represents sounds in nature, may do so without any great sense of failure, although even there I think most 12 NEEDS OF POPULAR MUSICAL EDUCATION people would rather have it away. Those musical thunderstorms (in which the thunder almost invariably j)recedes the lightning) do not fill us with the awe in- spired by that phenomenon of nature. Beethoven has done one ; Wagner has done one ; but they are failures. Beethoven knew perfectly well what he was about when he said that the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony was more an impression of emotion than a landscape. He knew the limitations of his medium. We have been, in recent years, confronted with a somewhat incongruous musical form called the sym- phonic poem, in which the music is only intended to give part of the impression, and the programme gives the rest. I do not doubt that this is a legitimate form, and that it is likely to develop further in the future, but I am quite sure that, at any rate to my own idea, it does not compete in beauty or power to touch the heart with a Beethoven quartet, the whole significance of which is its o\ni musical significance. By saying music is not translatable into another language, we do not lower or undervalue music, but raise it to a higher plane. That power of direct com- munion between the artist and the hearer seems to me to be more exj^ressed and felt in music than in any other art. In music, the beauty of form is identical with the beauty of meaning. The rise and fall of the phrase and its rhythm is the meaning of the melody, and therefore I believe that great music has even more 1)0 wer to touch the heart than great poetry itself. A study of the way in which it has come down to us is at least as well worth while as the study of any other asjDect of history. If we do give a fuller atten- tion to this, we shall be better able to put music into its proper place in our intellectual life, and then we shall come back to that sense of the value of music which was one characteristic of our Elizabethan fore- fathers. BARNETT HOUSE PAPERS Already Published: No. 1. ' The Problem of Juvenile Crime.' By C. E. B. Eussell, H.M. Chief Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools. Price Fourpence. No. 2. ' Development of the Education of Wage-earners.' By Spukley Hey, Director of Education, Manchester. Price Fourpence. No. 3. 'The Needs of Popular Musical Education.' By Sir W. Heney Hadow, D.Mus., Principal of Armstrong College, Newcastle-on-Tyne. Price Sixpence. THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW B AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. 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