Can Music be Learned Late?

Evening Star, Issue 7341, 13 October 1887, Page 3

Can Music be Learned Late?

“ A Scholar and Musician,” writes “Music and Morals," is, in my opinion, entirely wrong in asserting that musical execution, like the knowledge of Greek, can be easily and more quickly acquired in maturity than in ycuth. I can hardly conceive any practical musician maintaining such a proposition. In the first place, anyone who knows anything about the technique of musical execution knows that only in a child are the fingers, joints, ligaments, and muscles sufficiently supple to “put on” the almost automatic ease and swiftness required in pianoforte playing, as a kind of second nature. With violinists this is of course a well-known axiom; but no good pianist, previously trained in the practice of any instrument, was ever formed after the age of puberty. Your “musician” friend who learned the piano late in the middle life may play creditably—l don’t want to hear him—but he will never be at home on his keyboard as he might have been had he learned young. I have heard scores of these people—and they are all alike; a good musician who knows what is what can never listen to these qud players with common patience. I shall be glad to know if any musician of any known standing will deny my general proposition, and give his name, and cite a case in point. No one deplores more than I do the time wasted by children in learning the piano, but on no account let any child defer learning the technique young - -six or seven is not too young—under the impression that the art, like a knowledge of Greek, can be acquired later. There is something to be said, too, for teaching all children within certain reasonable limits the rudiments of music and pianoforte playing. The young mind may be trained in this way as well as in any other. Habits of attention, self-control, observation, and manual dexterity are all excellent things for a child to acquire, and music lessons are from this point of view veiy excellent things. If there is no real taste for the art, by all means let it be abandored towa-ds the age of twelve. But if there is it is sure (unb'ke the love of Greek) to mar’fest itself long before the age of twelve ; aid if your chi’d is ever to play like a real musiVan he must be put to his piano or violin and kept to it for at least an hour a-day long before twelve. The love of the arts, unlike the love of learning, belongs to the region of perception and sensibility; it is akin to instinct intuition, inspiration ; it blossoms with the dawn of youth; and although there have been rare cases where, owing to exceptional conditions, great artists, musicians, and poets have flowered only in maturity, their cases have to be separately considered and explained, and they are quite exceptions to the rule.