Laying the Foundations

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 68, 17 October 1930, Page 5

Laying the Foundations

EDUCATION L\ MUSIC. SOME VALUABLE ADVICE TO TEACHERS. ADDRESS BY DR. BORLAND During his stay in Stratford,* Dr. J. E. Borland, F.R.C.0., lion, A.R.C.M., examiner for Trinity College of Music, delivered an address to local music teachers under the title "Foundations of Musical Education" Dr. Borland said, inter alia: The immediate object in learning music may he a mixed one. *** Some do it for the pleasure of producing more or less agreeable sounds, melodious tun'es which cheer, or soothe, or stimulate. Some do it for display of dexterity, like the small boy who came to the teacher and said he wanted to play louder thapi this brother and quicker than his sister. But behind such, ephemeral motives there probably exists a fragment of realisation that music does mean something greater as well, and can lead to a noble goal. Having spent a good many years as a teacher and conductor, those kinds of work were dropped almost entirely for twenty years in order to undertake the supervision of the music in the three thousand or so schools and colleges of London. Here one realised that the teaching of music would be revolutionised if it were built on foundations such as are laid in the best of these schools. But the average music teacher makes little or no use of such.

MISLEADING STATEMENT. It is commonly asserted that a considerable proportion' of children fail in their music lessons because they are not naturally musical, but this is a misleading statement. Many a child comes from a home where there is little music to be heard, and is put to a complicated machine —the pianoforte—"to learn music." How can' he get any real impression of what music is hy such a method? He has all the physical, mechanical and notational problems involved in pianoforte playing put before him at one fell swoop. But there is really no object in bothering a child with pianoforte playing at a very early age, for one who is