CHILD WHO CANNOT SING

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 259, 29 July 1937, Page 7

CHILD WHO CANNOT SING

New Zealand Schools Should Adopt More Sympathetic System of Instruction

"•ATTENTION is being focused upon educational matters by the visit of conference delegates to New Zealand: Isn’t it time something was done in this Dominion for Children Who Cannot Sing?” asks a correspondent. Parents, and all who feel that for them music holds less joy than it should, ought to read his article carefully. He pleads for better and more sympathetic instruction of the younger generation, in the schools particularly.

fpHERE are children who find music not a memorable experience, but something of a'tragedy. Are they, I wonder, completely tone deaf, or is their disinterest due mainly to inadequate instruction in the art of listening? I believe that proper teaching can give even the unmusical the ability to derive pleasure from good compositions, although they may always fall short of the richest appreciation.

The difficulties encountered by children totally ignorant of music—and their number, is not small—are not of particular account in the earlier years of life. In fact, the child who has no concern with music is probably happier than the one forced to practise interminable scales and to assault daily, under the brooding zeal of parental wrath, the strings of a violin or the keys of a piano. After adolescence, however, and sometimes before, those with strict parents invariably find, if their application has not been too stringently enforced, that the weary hours of childhood practising have been well spent. Those, on the other hand, who were given no instruction, in discovering their ignorance, discover their loss.

The fault often lies. I think, in the system in our schools by which all children, the musically talented and the tonally deaf together, are taught singing and music according to exactly the same rules. Mass instruction is impossible of success when the raw' material is so extraordinarily varied in capacity. It is hopeless to put the tonally deaf through a gruelling routine of class singing, individual singing before a class and so on. For them, teaching should aim almost entirely not at manual competence but at understanding by listening. Disastrous Inferiority Complex; T ACK of sympathy can cause in the particularly highly strung child who is tonally deaf, a disastrous inferiority complex. I knew one girl, physically unable to sing in tune, who attended a school where periodic, tests of each child’s voice were made before the assembled class. Most of the pupils accepted the rule philosophic-* 1 ally, but this girl was so nervously upset merely by thought of the experience that she incontinently fainted before her turn came. Ever afterwards, she played truant from school when a sing'ng bee was to be held. And today, although now a young woman in her' twenties, she rarely attempts a song even, in the solitary retreat of the bathroom. There was another girl, more stolid by nature, who somehow was included in the school choir on the strength of her general record. But not even the favouritism of the singing mistress could countenance the succession of dismally fiat notes she produced. She was ordered to move heA lips soundlessly. but soon even that was unavailing and she was ignominiously dismissed from the choir. She was not sorry, but the experience has left its psychological mark on her. too. in a painful diffidence with any person or about anything musical. Tone-Deaf Cfin Enjoy Music. rpHESE two isolated cases could be 1 duplicated many times. Both girls were tone-deaf. Yet it is no great fault to be congenitally tone-deaf and, in the words of the coroner’s verdict. “No blame is attachable.” My concern is that no attempt was ever made for those girls, and for others like them, to show them that despite their handicap they could master at least a superficial understanding of music. I can quote a third case, this time of a tone-deaf girl who associated frequently with people to whom music meant a great deal; not that they were capable of fully understanding all types of music, but they were capable of extracting from the better works an emotionally valuable serenity. Occasionally they took her in hand. They showed her how, during an opera, the composer will provide themes for' the orchestra to herald the approach of ' a celebrated aria; how Wagner’s leit J motifs can be identified and remem I mr- ; ed ; how the incredible grace and beauty 1 of Mozart and Schubert can be heard , scores upon scores of times with peculiar pleasure at each hearing. During this time the tone-deaf girl was receiving no -instruction in musical notation. Her friends’ explanations were not so much instruction as a leading along the outer paths which ! eventually converge to travel straight to complete musical understanding. The guidance had some value. It taught the girl to recognise a melod.v after two hearings; it taught her to sit through Tschaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony without rustling her programme or coughing, or thinking of the best way to make her new evening frock. It taught her, in fact, that music, properly listened to. is unique. That same girl derived nothing at all from school musical instruction. Like many others, she did not know even the names of ordinary orchestral instruments when she left school. Tympani might be cymbals, and French horns a kind of pastry. Look to the Schools. POSSIBLY I am attaching too much importance to music for its own sake. But I consider, nevertheless, that musical instruction for children is a problem which must be faced if the cultural level of New Zealanders is to be raised. The Government has plans for a conservatorium, and the Director of Broadcasting, / Professor Shelley, avowedly wishes to change radio into an instrument of gentle instruction rather than a medium of pure entertainment. There still remains much to be done in the schools. A celebrated conductor who visited Wellington not long ago—it was not Dr. Malcolm Sargent—told me in deadly earnest, that New Zealand's pursuit of musical culture was doomed unless provision was made for the proper instruction of the young. Visits of eminent singers, pianists and violinists, he said, were useless if the cultural level could not be first raised in the schools. I am certain that conductor was right. In my days at school, not too long ago, music was limited to classsinging of not very good songs. The use of the gramophone on wet days was a joyous surprise. I was told nothing about the greater composers or the quality and characteristics of their

' work—though this is done to a small extent now—the various instruments were unexplained mysteries. It was not until I left school that I realised what I had been missing. I set to work, but valuable years had been lost. Possibly it is not the charge of schools to turn out row upon row of little Szigetis, proudly brandishing their fiddles and filling the welkin with the strange and melancholy sounds of ill-played violins. Notwithstanding, I believe it is the duty of schools to cater for children whose parents cannot afford the cost of additional musical instraction; to cater for them in such a way that they can acquire some general knowledge of music; to cater for them in such a way that they can perceive for themselves that jazz, at its best, is ephemeral and the classics, at their best, incomparable. When that day -comes, I think New Zealand’s musical culture will no longer be a taunt for the visitor to fling in our faces. —M.T. !