THE TONIC SOL-FA NOTATION AS A FACTOR IN MUSICAL

EDUCATION.

BY THEODORE F. SEWARD, OF NEW YORK.

Man's relation to music is twofold. It may be objective or it may be subjective. He may be a mere listener, or he may be a participant. It is the latter characteristic which gives music a unique place among the We may receive an impression-an uplifting-from a musical performance as from a painting. But the painting must ever remain an outward and separate object, while, with music, we may enter into and become a part of that which delights and inspires us.

But the distinction goes much farther than this. While all people can be trained to a degree of appreciation of painting, sculpture, or fine architecture, the great majority of mankind cannot themselves be painters, sculptors, or architects. Music is the one art that may enter into the personal experience of every individual. Music is keyed to the whole range of human faculties. On the side of nature its simple melodies may be on the lips and in the hearts of the humblest. On the side of art its symphonies rise to a colossal height of bewildering complication that taxes the appreciation of those who are most richly endowed by nature and cultivation.

It is with nature's side of the art that we, as teachers of the rising generation, have to do. A great awakening has suddenly become apparent on all sides with regard to the value of music as a factor in education. As a nation we are unquestionably taking a new start in the history of music as related to our school system. How important it is that this new departure should be on the soundest possible basis. As a teacher of thirty years' experience, as one who has been led by editorial work for more than half that time to look upon music in its broadest aspects, as one who has made an earnest study of the school methods of the various European countries, I wish to present certain considerations which have been proved to be vital to the interests of popular music.

I have said that man's relation to music is twofold: the relation of a listener and the relation of a participant. But beyond that division there is a subdivision which has never received a proper consideration till the present day, although it is based upon the most marked distinction that is to be found in the whole constitution of our nature. The distinction that

I refer to is the one that grows out of the difference between the human hand and the human voice.

A curious statement, you will say. But it will not take you long to realize that the distinction, so far from being fanciful, leads directly to one of the greatest reforms in method and result that has ever been witnessed in the history of education.

Have you ever duly considered the almost supernatural qualities of the human voice? Think of its capacities. It has the gift of speech. It has the gift of song. It can lament. It can rejoice. It can imitate all other sounds. The aim of all musical instruments is to reproduce as nearly as possible its godlike tones. And in the art of music itself how it towers above all our puny inventions. The little bundle of muscles and cartilages in the human throat produces almost without conscious. effort that which in the piano or organ requires a hundred or a thousand pieces of mechanism. We see on the key-board of a piano a complicated array of black and white keys-sharps, flats, and naturals. Has an examination of the vocal apparatus ever brought to light any sharps or flats in that marvelous piece of mechanism? This question seems to you almost an unpardonable absurdity. Yet such is the slow progress of human development, in the direction of simplicity, that it has taken a thousand years to discover that this vital distinction between the voice and the hand in the expression or production of music should also be made the foundation of a system for studying it.

After a natural method of treating music is established, the world will look back with amazement upon the artificial period, and will never cease to wonder that it should have been so long continued.

Let us review the musical history of a child. The mother begins the unconscious training of its musical perceptions by her soft lullabies, while it is still in her arms. Soon it tries to imitate her. If the nature is inclined to be musical, it will gradually join its voice with hers, and will thus use correctly the language of music before it gains the power of speech. This is a common experience. It is not possible to overestimate or to describe extravagantly the simplicity, the grace-in a word, the naturalness of the language of music.

At length, in childhood, in youth, or in maturity, it begins to study the laws of this language of nature. But the moment it does so, all simplicity disappears. Why this sudden change? It is because the written language of music is a language for the hand, and not for the voice. The staff representation of music is an outgrowth of instrumental complications. Musical instruments require separate mechanical appliances for twelve different keys. Therefore the staff has varying signs to correspond. Musical instruments cannot give out the scale-the alphabet of nature—at different ranges of pitch without mechanical variations-that

is, each scale has tones that are foreign to all other scales. This is unavoidable. It is a part of the divine order. It is something to admire and not to criticise. We look at the key-board of a piano and are filled with wonder at the thought that the utmost range and possibility of the art of music are represented within that sweep of a man's hand.

But we must not carry our admiration too far. We must not be led by it to forget that God has written another law of music in our members, and one that is a more direct expression of His order and method than the cunning instrument of man's invention.

Human methods are invariably complex. In God alone is absolute simplicity. He came to the earth two thousand years ago, gave to mankind a few plain rules for living, and showed by His own life how they could be carried out. Human nature took possession of those simple laws of love to God and man; manufactured vast theological systems out of them; tortured them into excuses for persecuting and killing each other; did everything but use them as a plain way to happiness on earth, an abundant entrance into eternal life.

Do not imagine that I am wandering from my subject. I stand here to plead for a restoration of divine order to the heavenly art of music. It is necessary for me to show that the principles I advocate are as deep as the human soul itself, and that they lie at the very foundation of our being.

I have said, and you all agree, that song is a simple language. Being emotional and moral in its first elements, rather than intellectual, little children can receive and use it with delight, and minds of the humblest capacity are not hindered from enjoying it. Now, since you concede that point of the simplicity of music, how do you account for the fact that so few people understand it? Why do you, representatives of the highest culture of our land, know less about music than of any other subject to which you have given even a small degree of attention? +

The burden of the proof lies with you. It belongs to you either to show that this state of things is necessary and unavoidable, or, if you cannot make it so appear, to cordially greet a movement that proposes to "reform it altogether." At least, it is clear that you have no right to treat such a movement with indifference till you have thoroughly examined its credentials.

I can show you, by a very simple illustration, why the mass of the people cannot understand music.

Suppose the values of the numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., were continually changing. After teaching your pupils to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, you would be compelled to say, "When you see two crosses at the beginning of an example, it shows that two now means 1, 3 means 2, and so on.

After working the problems in that way for a time, you

and so

announce another change, in which 3 shall stand for 1, 4 for 2; with the whole nine integers. I do not need to ask you how the subject of mathematics would prosper in our schools on that basis.

Friends and fellow-teachers, this is the simple gospel truth with regard to the staff representation of music. Most of you are aware of it, although you have never realized its educational significance.

The staff begins by presenting certain signs for the tones. The tone 1 (so named, usually by elementary teachers) on the first added line. below, 2 of the space below, 3 on the first line, etc. But after a time the teacher is obliged to say, "When you see two crosses (sharps) or five flats at the beginning, it shows that 2 has now become 1, 3 has become 2," and so with the rest. After puzzling their brains over that a while, the pupils are informed that four sharps or three flats indicate the change of 3 to 1, 4 to 2, and thus throughout the scale. Every unfortunate sign is required to exchange meanings with its equally unfortunate fellows. And there is not the slightest alteration in the appearance of the notes to indicate or suggest their altered meaning. If the signature at the beginning is concealed, the notes are chaps. They may mean anything, and therefore they mean nothing. The complications and perplexities of this scheme are so vast and overwhelming that many musicians have sought refuge in the fixed Do plan. At first sight this would seem to be a solution of the difficulty. But never was there a greater delusion. The movable Do is difficult; the fixed Do is, to the average human mind, impossible. To continue the mathematical comparison, while the movable Do changes the powers of the numbers, the fixed Do gives perpetually changing results: 2 is always 2, but 2 and 2 sometimes make 4, sometimes 5, sometimes 6. Nothing less than an inborn musical genius will enable one to grapple successfully with the problems of music through the unnat-' ural fixed Do process.

Let us not lose sight of the aim of our discussion. I will restate it in a word. Music is simple. Yet most people cannot understand it or read it. Why this discrepancy? I have shown that it arises from the complexity of its representation, or written signs. You may meet me at this point with the question, "Do not the signs correspond with music as it is? Music is simple as a language, but as an art it is complicated. There are different keys, and in the changes of those keys, 2 actually does become 1, and so through the variations you have described. Can the representation of music be more simple than music itself?"

This brings us back to nature again. It is true that there are different keys, yet it is also true that to the voice they are all alike. You cannot, if you try, make yourself conscious of any difference between singing in the key of D, two sharps, or the key of D flat, five flats. With musical. instruments, and with the hand, each change of key involves a change of

constituent tones and a change in the manner of performance. With the voice the various keys bring no change of mental impression, and call for no different powers in the manner of execution. Yet, as I said before, it has taken the world a thousand years to realize that there must be a method of writing music corresponding with the simplicity of the vocal method, before the human race, as a race, could understand it.

The first suggestion of this thought is always startling. It occasions a sort of shock. The mind shrinks from it as something too revolutionary. But as we continue to dwell upon it, the reasonableness of the theory begins to take possession of us, and we soon come to realize it as inevitable. Then we are led to exclaim, "How strange that such an obvious idea should have remained concealed to this late day!" And truly, it is a mystery that is not easy of solution. It can only be accounted for by the disinclination of the human mind to follow the laws of simplicity. It is not only the "heathen Chinee" who is inclined to ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,-it is a universal tendency of the human race. Hence it is found that although every word we Tonic Sol-faists say on the subject is merely the statement of a demonstrated truth, as much so as if we asserted that the three angles of a triangle are equivalent to two right angles, yet our words are doubted by the mass of the people, and strongly opposed by a majority of the musical profession. With the former the people—it is merely a case of inertia. They are slow to move on the same principle that all large bodies are slow to move. As to the method itself, they are merely indifferent. With the music teachers another element comes in. A new method seems like an encroachment on their rights. Their first instinct is to regard it as an enemy, and to oppose it on that ground. What points are they able to make in opposition to it? Not one, that I have ever heard. The burden of their argument, if such it may be called, is to assert that the staff is not so complicated as we claim it to be, and that, with proper teaching, the ability to understand and read music can be gained in connection with the lines and spaces, clefs, flats, sharps, naturals, transpositions of the scale, and all that catalogue of sweet simplicity.

We do not pretend to deny this. What folly to do so when thousands have become proficient musicians by that method. But you perceive that that does not really touch the question at all, which is, "May there not be an easier and better way of doing it?"

I rejoice that the question is made a direct issue on this platform. The most active champion of the staff notation, acknowledging that the musical education of the masses of the people has not yet been accomplished, asks you to consider whether the failure is due to the difficulties of the old symbols orto the imperfect teaching that has hitherto accompanied, them. The title of his essay, as given in the Educational Bulletin, is