Show I 1 MUSICAL CULTURE WELL MEANING HINTS BUT NOT TOO KIND FOR THE AMATEUR music 12 I 1 homicidal and suicidal idal it detours its ita own children and slays itself radical changes concerning instruments and ana sex 1 As speech to thought as pictorial art to external nature is practical music to music the element and for this outward and audible art form music is dependent on human mediums medium and those human mediums require a certain preparation to fit them for the reception and the transmission of t their heir message to some people in whose natures musical sympathy is strong this pre preparation parati ion comes easily and almost unconsciously but ant the great majority need a kind of acclimatization before they can breaths breath 3 and move freely lin in an element more oz or less strange to them and this acclis acclimatization a tiza tion is what we know as musical culture most people have some latent musical faculty and this is capable of development tho the notion has at any rate died out that it was effeminate for a man to play the piano and impossible for a woman to play the violin it is not so long since in the upper classes no girls education was considered even approximately i complete without a large amount of piano forte drill music it shall not be called while a certain proficiency in in this respect was too often held to atone for the absence of all other culture the violin on the other hand was held to be good only for men perhaps we should restrict the term and say for fiddlers fidd lers boys now and then learned a little of the instrument at school a knowledge soon to be dropped and forgotten tho the difference now scarcely needs to be pointed out boys and girl cirlo in numbers and not a few who are no longer boys or girls are learning to play on the violin and other stringed instruments the discovery has been made that though a virtuoso mua ayt begin early it is not necessary to practice uce half the iday day at four or five years old in order to be a good useful player at twenty ensemble classes and school orchestras show that on our amateurs the truth is at last dawning that unlimited bolo performance is not the ultimate aim of all music training that while only a gifted few can attain to high individual excellence and finish the combination of many atoms of good too small to be of any use singly may result in an effect which is not only good but great so EO long as music not self display is the object sought after it may bo be roundly stated as a general truth that musical study proclaims itself on the house housetops tok without ceasing for an instant to assert itself in the garret in the basement and at sundry intermediate points the students friends assist at every stage of his progress they are involuntary and mostly unwilling gators in his difficulties his perseverance his triumph and his despair well for them if two or three such dramas are not going on in the house bouse at once to say nothing of probable puffs of melody and harmony from next door or over the way that the character of musical practice is far superior to what it used tobe to be avails these helpless ones but little to them it is an insignificant fact compared with the fact that for every victim of coercion who formerly pounded a wiry piano for a couple of hours a day there now aren are a dozen students of various instruments and singers T galore all practicing away for dear life should any link be missing in the continuous chain og of sound it is filled up by barrel organs street bands wandering ballad stagers singers solos on the whistle and other peripatetic instruments good very good no doubt the musical ern crusader looks on the work and congratulates himself there must bie be means to all end music requires machinery and the machinery for music music is is being brought into a most forward state of efficiency but the music itself in the future is that to come the eu enraged ragged composer and his troubles have long iong been a favorite theme for the efforts of humorists yet the fact thus comically represented is no joke and in the present condition of things it threatens to resume ugly proportions music is homicidal suicidal it devours vours its own children and slays itself silence the absence or cessation of musical sound is an absolute necessity for musical thought but putting on one side the troubles of composers who after all ara are comparatively few and far between the born bom poor things to be ishmaels Ishm aels their hand against every man and every mans hand against them what on the rest of the world is the effect of this unceasing often incongruous sound it is easier to complain than to cure and far easier to point out ont these evils than to suggest an any effective remedy for them if architects and builders would take into consideration the diffusion of noise and would do something to make walls and partitions music proof it would be much there aro are continental towns both in franco france and germany where practicing is prohibited by law except at certain stated hours for a large and enviable portion of mankind the remedy against the evil lies in getting used to musical sound and so unconscious of it nineteenth century |