1. Blunders in music study !
Unless disabled by physical defects, every child displays some sense of
musical sound and rhythmic motion. It is a constant occurrence for
children, without a word of direction, to mark the time of a stirring
tune with hands, feet and swaying motions of the body. A lullaby will
almost invariably soothe a restless infant, and most children old enough
to distinguish and articulate groups of tones will make some attempt at
singing the melodies they have often heard. The average child begins
music lessons with evident pleasure.
Many a mother when advised to direct her child's practicing, or at least
to encourage it by her presence, has excused herself on the plea that it
would bore her to listen. If the work bores the mother it is not
surprising that the child attacks it with mind fixed on metal more
attractive and eyes seeking the clock. Occupations which are repellent
in early life leave behind them a memory calculated to render them
forever distasteful. It is therefore a grave mistake not to make music
study from the outset throb with vital interest. An appeal to the
intellect will quicken the aesthetic instincts, be they never so slender,
and almost any one will love work that engages all the faculties.
It should be no more difficult to strengthen the musical instincts than
any other faculties. On the contrary, it too often chances that a child
whose early song efforts have been in excellent time and tune, and not
without expression, who has marched in time and beat time accurately,
will, after a period of instruction, utterly disregard sense of rhythm,
sing out of tune, play wrong notes, or fail to notice when the musical
instrument used is ever so cruelly out of tune. Uneducated people,
trusting to intuitive perceptions, promptly decide that such or such a
child, or person, has been spoiled by cultivation. This is merely a
failure to trace a result to its rightful cause, which lies not in
cultivation, but in certain blunders in music study.
These blunders begin with the preliminary course on the piano or violin,
for instance, when a child, having no previous training in the rudiments
of music, starts with one weekly lesson, and is required to practice a
prescribed period daily without supervision. To the difficulties of an
introduction to a musical instrument are added those of learning to read
notes, to locate them, to appreciate time values and much else. The
teacher, it may be, knows little of the inner life of music, still less
of child nature. Manifold perplexities arise, and faltering through
these the pupil acquires a halting use of the musical vocabulary, with
other bad habits equally hard to correct. A constant repetition of false
notes, wrong phrasing, irregular accents, faulty rhythms and a
meaningless jumble of notes dulls the outer ear and deadens the inner
tone-sense. Where there is genius, or decided talent, no obstacle can

2. wholly bar the way to music. Otherwise, it retreats before the
blundering approach.
Those pupils are fortunate who come under the influence of a teacher
with strong, well-balanced personality and ripe knowledge, and are
treated as rational beings, capable of feeling, thinking and acting. Too
many music teachers learn their business by experimenting on beginners.
It has been suggested as a safeguard against their blunders, and all
ignorance, carelessness and imposture, that music might be placed under
the same legal protection accorded other important factors in social
life, and that no one be permitted to teach it without a license granted
by a competent board of judges after the applicant had passed a
successful examination, theoretical and practical. This would be well if
there was any certainty of choosing suitable persons to select the
judges.
Many times a child who can readily explain the relative value of every
note and dot will stumble in the time movement when confronted with a
mixture of the same notes and dots. This is because no mental
connection has been established between the mechanical time sign and its
sound, which is the outgrowth of instinctive impulses. Time confusion
may also be caused by confiding too implicitly in loud and persistent
counting, instead of trusting to the intelligently guided rhythmic
pulse.
Sounding notes, even sounding them smoothly, clearly, and rapidly, is
not necessarily making music, and a succession of them without warmth
and coloring is truly as inartistic as painting without shading. If it
were more commonly realized that it is an essential part of the music
teacher's vocation to train the mind and the emotions and through them
the will and the character, there would be a higher standard for the
music pupils' recital. No one would be permitted to play, or sing in
public who could not give an artistic, as well as a technically correct performance.
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