MILLIONS FOR MUSIC

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2646, 27 October 1919, Page 2

MILLIONS FOR MUSIC

Recently a great fund, to an amount variously estimated at from •j,0U0,0()(Idol to 111).(>()(),OOOdol, was bequeathed to the cause of music, says the ‘ Outlook.’ To the man who regards music as a form of entertainment, like vaudeville or tin' circus, it may seem a waste of money to will a fortune for the encouragement of music in America. To such a man the qestion might naturally arise: If people want music, why tint lot them pay for it as they pay for acrobatics? Since the experience of the past two years, however, a great many Americans who never thought of the matter before have come to see that music is something more than entertainment. It lias proved to he of enormous value to a lighting army. It has been like ammunition and weapons to the soldier. It lias been a part of his training. It has given him heart. It has made it easy for him to train, to inarch, and to fight in rhythm and unison with his comrades. In this sense music is certainly more than an entertainment; it is a utility. There are, however, men who sec tliat it is something still more. They understand, perhaps, some of them only dimly, others more clearly, that it is an art, and as such that it has a function of the very highest kind. As an art the function of music lias been compared (as, for example, in the last chapter of D. G. Mason’s ‘ From Grieg to Brahms ’) to tho function of science, philosophy, and religion. The scientist encounters a universe that seems capricious; lightning seems to strike whimsically; living things devour one another ; disease spreads like magic; but tho scientist experiments and, by observation and study, discovers in all this apparent lawlessness tho basis of law. The philosopher sees the world at sixes and sevens ; he observes the misery and pain and evils of mankind ; superficially tho world seems a chaos, hut the philosopher delves into his own mind and into tho minds of other men to find an explanation in terms of order and unity. The religious teacher sees all this evil and chaos, but by faith and hope ho enables men to conform their lives to the hidden unity and order. Tho artist encounters the same confusion ; hut instead of trying to search out the law and discover it as the scientist docs, or to frame in his mind a system of orderly thought as tho philosopher does, or to find resource in a serene and untroubled life based on faith as tho religious teacher does, he takes out of the confusion material with which ho proceeds to erect a structure of order and beauty. If ho is a painter, he uses the pigments that lie all about, and ho brings them into order and beauty upon canvas. If he is an architect, ho finds in the stones scattered about in confusion on the earth’s surface or in the iron ore hidden in the earth materials out of which ho builds his creation of order. And if he is a musician, he takes his material from the confused sounds of tho earth, from tho noises that can be made with striking or with blowing or with scraping, and nut of these con--1 fused noises ho creates a structure of harmony. The scientist finds a chaos, but be searches in it for the laws of a cosmos ; the philosopher finds a chaos, and ho thinks out a cosmos; tiie religious teacher finds a chaos, and ho reaches out for faith in a cosmos; while the artist, seeing the chaos, says: “Go to! 1 will build me a comos.” Men do not expect science or philosophy to he self-supporting. They believe that the scientist and the philosopher are doing the world a service which cannot he bought and paid for, and which cannot he bartered in the market, and so men, and even States, have endowed universities. Men, too, believe that the religions teacher and prophet renders a service which cannot make him self-supporting in the ordinary sense, and so men endow' churches or unite to support institutions of religion by their common contributions. The time has already

come in America, as it has come in other and older countries, when men see that art, too, cannot be made a

matter of commerce, that it cannot be left to the competitive struggle of the market place, but must be supported out of the larger reservoirs of accumulated wealth. America has been

lavish in its support of schools, colleges, and universities, and has supported churches by the thousands; so America has been awakening to the need of giving similar support to institutions of art.

This is the significance of the generous bequest recorded in the will of Augustus 1). JulHard. The terms of tin’s gift were recently made public when the will was filed for probate at Goshen, Orange County, New York. According to the statement made on behalf of the executors and trustees of the estate.

“ Ihe general scope of the Jnilliard .Musical Foundation, as stated in the will, is to aid all worthy students ot

music in securing complete and adequate musical education, either at appropriate institutions now in existence or hereafter to he created, or from approprmte instructors in this country or abroad; to arrange for and to give, without profit to it, musical entertainments, concerts, and recitals of a character appropriate for the education and entertainment of the general public in the music.-il arts; and to aid the Metropolitan Opera Company in the city ol New York for tbc purpose of assisting it in the production of operas. Ample discretion is vested in the trustees to provide that the Jnilliard Musical Foundation shall have the necessary powers to carry out the expressed wishes and general scheme as expressed by the testator.” In no respect docs the wisdom of Mr Jnilliard in making this bequest show itself more evident than in the freedom which lie grants to the trustees of the foundation. No man can foresee the peculiar needs or tin; peculiar opportunities of the generation that is to follow him; and to recognise that limitation upon foresight is a sign of foresight itself. By his very restraint Mr Jnilliard has made his gift the inert' expansive, lit' Inis enabled genius yet unborn to rise and grow and Jionrisb. He has put at the disposal of boys and girls endowed with native gifts opportunity to gain the training without which those gifts would remain hidden and lost. He has, as it wort', already put out the talents of coming Americans to usury.