MUSIC IN THE SCHOOLS

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 32, 6 August 1921, Page 6

MUSIC IN THE SCHOOLS

MISTAKE THAT PARENTS MAKE.

Dr. Walford/Davies,. Director of Musio for Wales, presiding at the British Musio Society's Congress at the Molian Hall, London, recently, when the subject !under discussion was "The place of music in education," said that in elementary schools a system of teaching music was urgently necessary. .• He pleaded for the inclusion of weekly concept? given by the school for the school. It would be folly for that meeting to concern itself with teaching children harmony, or to Slay the piano, violin, or 'cello, until they ad cleared up the startling fact which lay behind the average parent's attire for the i child "to have good music lessons." That probably meant that the, parent wished their child to learn to play the piano, with the result that the student learned the instrument without ever learning the language.' It was very much as if a father who wished his child to be a thorough master of literature set that child to learn the typewriter. Was it not true that melody might be the child's mother-tongue? ' It took only half an hour ,to teach a class to build tunes and to- release the musical intuition of the scholars. Music did not consist of. babbling off on the piano something that, Beethoven had said, anymore than literature consisted of copying Gray's "Elegj" by means of the typewriter.' Music meant the releasing in the child of its own native understanding of melody. Dr. Ernest Dv Selincourt said that music was the most democratic and the most social of all the arts. He was far from proposing that every man should be his own composer or his own performer. It was the privilege of genius to express the incoherent aspirations of the nation as a whole, but a very little training would enable the ordinary individual to master the language of music, so that if he could not speak it he could understand it. Mr. Sydney Nicholson, organist of Westminster Abbey, gave it as his experienco: as a judge in musical competition that certain schools were head and shoulders above the others. The differenco was not in the material, but entirely in the teachers, and the competitions very largely resolved themselves into competi* tions between teachers.

A resolution was carried expressing the view of the congress t'nat the formation of a national council of music as recommended by Dr. Selincourt was urgently needed; and that such council should be composed of authorities both in music and in education.