Using Music To Cure CHILD DELINQUENCY

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 35, 11 February 1939, Page 8 (Supplement)

Using Music To Cure CHILD DELINQUENCY

ByPhilip Inwood -—Copyright

THE leader's baton rose and fell. Hie strings, the brasses, the wood-winds came alive, pulsed with beauty. The large audience, crowded into the auditorium and set to listen patiently, listened instead with incredulity, with delight. Many of them knew well the art of the world's greatest orchestras. Most of them had heard better music played. But this was different. It was different because the leader himself had written the composition that so astonished everybody and the leader was a lad of 14. His orchestra, furthermore, was composed of boys of 14 and less—much lees. It was noted by some who smiled at the baibyish hands of the flautist. They were all of a stamp, the orchestra members, all with the mark of New York's lower East Side upon them, but of many nationalities. On a hundred teeming streets outside the building the audience had seen youngsters like these congregated on corners, learning uncharted ways, springing up in and nurtured by one of America's most fertile breeding fields of crime. Yet no player in the orchestra which fascinated and astonished everybody with its concert of original compositions, and no other student at New York's Music School settlement has been taken before a juvenile Court in the entire 44 years of the school's existence. "And that," says kindly white-haired Melzar Chaffee, the director, "is 'because music forestalls crime! Beethoven and Bach are the surest antidote for juvenile delinquency. Give an idle boy a concerto instead of a Court and you have a model citizen in the making!" And to the quite thoroughly proven theory of Mr. Chaffee is added the endorsement of Mr. H. Maurice Jacquet, the famous French composer and conductor, who goes a step further to declare that crime can be cured 'by music. The therapeutic effect of music in the treatment of nervous and mental diseases long has been recognised by scientists, but it remained for Jacquet, a protege of Massenet, a pupil of the great Guilmant and at present musical director of the Academy of Vocal Arte in Philadelphia, to assist in founding a movement in Pans for reclaiming criminals through music. Commenting upon

some of the cures effected by this agwtem, Mr. Jacquet explains:— "It is through vibrations of musk that cures are brought about, both in cases of insanity and of crime (which is a form of insanity). Melody is heard not by the ear only, but by the entire body, which absorbs the vibrations. "But for beneficial effects," Mr. Jacquet warns, "music must be good. There are compositions in the so-called popular field very harmful for the mental health of defective persons which, by their own unlawful propaganda, even may bring about disintegration. Good music may express the highest idealism, and this sort soothes and relaxes and makes the subject susceptible to good influences." It is this type of music on -which Mr. Chaffee depends at the Music School Settlement to bring the "Dead End" children into the fold of happy childhood and successful citizenship.' He tells proudly of the changes in youngsters who come to the school:— "Sometimes our new boys are the toughest little roughnecks you could imagine, products of the streets, ripe for influences that might eventually turn them into habital criminals. But deep down they all have a saving grace a racial love of music. An hour a day with bow or keys brings that 10. ato the surface, and crime potentialities begin to recede. After a time they become imbued with the ambition which grounds them in self-respect. As a result, they go out of here fine young men and women as well as musicians. There is not a major orchestra you can't think of—the Philadelphia, the Boston Symphony or the Philharmonic —which does not boast at least one of our graduates, and many of them have won wide renown as soloist*." In Mr. Chaffee's opinion, the Music School Settlement is the answer to the recent alarming increase in American juvenile delinquency, calculated by the Washington Children's Bureau as 1.5 per cent in a single year, and declared to be due the economic situation which results in the breaking of many homes, unemployment among youth, and the inability of parents to care for their children.

Hard times, insists Mr. Chaffee, fe Te cut into the musical education of youth in America and turned it loose to Idleness and "wrongdoing. Onto, he points out, there were 100 institutions like the Music School Settlement in the United State*. Now there are onlfSQ, Foremost among these 50 lithe Settle- - ment Music School of PhiladeMi*, under the direction of the distinguOted Johan e Grolle. _ Established 30 jeaiiago, this i institution grew so steadily tat in 1917 i it was moved to its preset # L quarters at 416, Queen StreetT > The Music School SettbLnt of which Mr. Chaffee and hi« «tnL,f n 4re '3c ■ justly proud vu founded in 'nine- ! ties by Emily Wagner, a stimT Wonde - New England girl, who ventuM into I Kew York with 50 dollars in hetpoeket r and a great desire to help tlTnoor i child. In slightly lees than l*if a century it has grown to a mdhnwn. > eOMbnent of 1200 pupils, 100 teJ&ere | orchestras and two chorusesi»jtli' l departments of violin, piano, 'cell^Ljee and theory. '\ T-,JU : The growth of the Phikdelphia SAfe. . ment Music School bu been quitXju spectacular with, its present total olfio students, 35 teachers, a ( chestra and a chorus of 275. yft always, the problem of money ial difficult one in both schools, wideE 1 though not charity institutions, matt every effort to help worthy Younesteri In New York, says Mr. Chaffee, mSte) than one-third of the. students tome from families on relief. Fees mee \ from 50 centa (about two shillings flvepence) to two dollars (about eig.t shillings) and represent only one-thii* ■ of the actual cost of the lessons. Anothei 1 third is supplied by the school's endow- ' ment fund, and the final third comse 11 , from public subscription. In addition, \.( promising children are given free achol- %: arships. \ The school, furthermore, does not limit activities to musical instructions. A social welfare department, under the direction of Miss Suella Krocl, keeps an e ye_ on home conditions, and gives advice and aid. Further check is kept on the school work of students since it has been found that many are inclined to neglect ordinary study for music. Thus what otherwise well might be problematic American youth is marching toward achievement to the strains of music. "For," says Mr. Chaffee, "you cannot at the same time hold a bow and • gun!"