MUSICAL COURIER
10
June 7, 19 23
able fashion and music in all forms in quantity and quality developed and flourished as never before. The war has disclosed the full force of the appeal which music has for the people of the United States.
Musical taste is growing and developing here in many remarkable ways. The public and high schools are encouraging musical study and giving credit marks for music studied With outside teachers of repute.
According to a pamphlet, The Present Status of Music Instruction in Colleges and High Schools, issued by the United States Bureau of Education, there are now 194 colleges that allow entrance credit in some form of music. In 190, theoretic music is recognized for entrance credit; 154 grant it for appreciation; and Applied Music, meaning performance on piano, violin, etc., is given recognition in 88 institutions. Two hundred and three colleges now offer the degree of Bachelor of Music.
Community singing has sprung up in all sections of the country. High school, community and city orchestras abound.
And developing quietly for the last thirty years, comes one of the most constructive and interesting features of this movement in the United S.tates—the Music School Settlement. It is essential that music be made a part of family and community life if it is to become really effective. This means that there must be an opportunity in the home and in each neighborhood for self-expression through music. And this opportunity has been found in these music schools —eighty of them located in twenty cities, in nineteen States. Often a school will number as many as ten nationalities among its students. In an average school the student pays approximately one-third of the running expenses of the school. This gives a fine dignity to the movement, removes it from the class of charity, and places it alongside of other educational institutions.
The great majority of these schools are still departments of social settlement. A group of the larger ones, due to the great expense in carrying on the work, have, however, been forced to separate from the mother settlement and are separately incorporated schools of music. In a representative school of the more developed type the student pursues a definite course of study, and in many of them a full conservatory training may be obtained.
The United States has always done things on a large scale and of course one of its fundamental principles is for every child to have its chance.
The music school movement gives such a chance and I believe it to be one of the greatest opportunities given to the citizens of America to bring to fruition an important seed of her faith. Nothing of the sort has been attempted abroad. It is a community activity making its appeal to a broad variety^ of citizenship, and everyone who is engaged in art is beginning to recognize its influence. No one is too rich or socially prominent to take part in the direction of these music school settlements and no one is too poor or even too unpromising at first to come within the range of their fostering care. A craving for music is all that is required and the student will have his chance to get lessons at prices within his reach.
It is no small thing that the natural musical intuition of our people should thus find its outlet and it is gratifying to notice that here and there fine talent has stepped forth from the ranks and its possessor has achieved good position.
As the world gradually emerges from the disaster of the last years, anything which is calculated to smooth over racial and political differences is to be looked upon as a salvation. And what can better represent one nation to another than the musicians who speak the one universal language? In the olden days it was the troubadours who carried the songs of one province to another until what had been a hundred dialects became a common language enriched by a hundred contributions. If, today, our musicians bear the traditions and the message of our country to an audience abroad, there our kinship will be recognized and these musicians will be the future vehicles of international understanding.
In conclusion may I be permitted to state that there are very few things I would not do in preference to delivering an address in public. I avoid such things in the same way that I should always try to escape from an embarrassing or painful situation, and if I could say what I have to say with flowers or by playing a Beethoven sonala, I would do so with joy.
. A convention of this kind, however, is liable to have such important consequences for the whole cause of culture in this country that I could not but agree that it was fitting for some performing artist to join the gathering of distinguished personalities, scholars and educators which is assembled here. On such occasions personal inclinations must give way to a sense of duty and, this duty having fallen upon me as an unworthy but warmly sympathetic representative of that special branch of musical activities, it remains only for me to assure you of the deep interest with which the movement of the Settlement Schools is being watched by my colleagues, and to thank you for the attention you have given me.	Harold Bauer.
Nyiregyhazi Plays for Ship Charity
Nyiregyhazi gave a concert on board the S. S. Pittsburgh for the benefit of the Ship Charity and supplied his hearers with thrills and memories that will stay with them for many a day. He will devote a large part of the summer months to composition. Nyiregyhazi already has to his credit a large volume of published works—comprising piano, orchestral, and vocal compositions.
Pattison Conducting Master Class in Chicago
Lee Pattison has postponed his usual summer trip to Europe in order to conduct a master class at the Glenn Dillard Gunn Music School. Chicago, between .Tune 25 and July 28. Mr. Pattison’s fox trot song, The Land of Bye and Bye, which in a two-piano arrangement has won popular approval on recent Maier-Pattison programs, has just been published by Harms, Inc.
Bertha Yocum at Pennsylvania State Normal
Bertha Yocum, pianist and teacher, has been incapacitated since last November as the result of an automobile accident. She has now recovered her health, however, and will teach during the summer session at the Pennsylvania State Normal.
THE GROWTH OF MUSIC IN AMERICA
dirty face, behind the most offensive type of so-called “popular” music.
If art itself cannot therefore be said to grow, what is capable of growth is the taste for art. The need for self-expression is instinctive in all human beings and insofar as art must be recognized as the most indispensable vehicle for self-expression, so may it be said that everyone is a born artist. Owing to lack of opportunity and specialized talent, this instinctive desire is in most cases thwarted or stifled, although most women are able to find an outlet for the expression of their personality through dress or personal adornment. Those people, therefore, who have not the time or the gift necessary for introspective searchings and subsequent outgivings, turn naturally to individuals whose lives. are concentrated on art study and production, in order to find through the imagination of others the revelation of their own thoughts and feelings.
It is a common experience in reading a book to discover that the author is expressing in clear language our own imperfectly formed thoughts, while in music, the composer creates a picture made up of states of emotion, so that when we hear a fine composition well performed, we say to ourselves : “This is what I have always felt, but never could express!” And so it happens that the taste for art grows and develops. When one set of feelings has been satisfied through external expression, another set arises and claims recognition. Comparison is established, the less worthy things are gradually discarded and the fittest survive and endure.
Achievement in music, while measured by individual talent, bears the closest relation to the sum of art culture in the place and period where that individual lives.
No matter how original they may be, the greatest musicians absorb the cultural conditions and traditions of their own time before making their most valuable contributions to the edifice of art. They are thus dependent on their surroundings, for they reflect and sum up the emotional aspirations of their community. And those men and women who are sensitive and intelligent listeners are doing more than they realize in creating a soil favorable to the growth , of musical taste and the production of musical compositions.
The constantly heard clamor in America for a national movement in music may be, therefore, considered as an indication not only of a growing musical taste and a recognition of music as a cultural force, but likewise as a stimulus of the greatest value and importance to ■both interpreters and composers in this country. For their performances and productions must necessarily be colored by the cultural conditions they find here.
It is, however, the peculiarity of movements of this kind that they are more or less unconscious. They are not organized like a military procession but can better be compared with the scenes which took place in Paris after the armistice when anyone walking down the street might at any moment find himself at the head of a parade.
In past history movements in art have been directed by heads of governments who did not really know the significance of what they were doing. Music was largely an apanage_ of the State and the Church, and prominence, recognition and reward came from the princes and the priesthood. Tendencies were, then as now, subjected to the needs of the time and place but also very frequently to the individual caprice of the ruler or patron of art.
In this democratic age, however, there no longer exists the condition which made it possible for control of art to be vested in a few powerful personages, and there is now in America a new movement which has its own prefatory forces and which is the result of a fusion of common interests and desires. Artists who are in the habit of traveling from one country to another obtain interesting and illuminating glimpses into the feelings of different audiences and are constantly impressed with their distinguishing characteristics.
The principal difference between American and European listeners seems to be that in Europe it may be said that people do not go to concerts before they have some kind of musical education and here they go in the first place from a feeling of curiosity and natural inborn intuition for^ music, which is stimulated by what they hear and the desire and determination to acquire a musical education follows as a result.
It is this fact which makes an American audience so stimulating to artists who feel this condition and recognize the responsibility which it brings.
Before the war it would have been difficult to say whether the United States was more of a theater-loving or music-loving nation. But the great question which economic conditions forced upon all countries at that time had to be answered: namely, what could the nation dispense with, what was it necessary to keep?
In England, for instance, all activity was concentrated upon the immediate operation of the war and practically all art was set aside. In France, music became negligible, but the theater, the natural expression of the French nation throughout history, survived and flourished as before. In Germany and Russia it may be said that all art went on as usual, and in America, the choice was made in unmistak-
[This is an address delivered before the Music Division of the National Federation of Settlements, at its annual conference, Washington, D. C., May 16, 1923.—The Editor.]
When I undertook to speak about the Growth of Music in America I thought it would be a comparatively easy task in view of my long experience of musical conditions in this country. But I soon discovered that although I knew something about music and a little about America, my ideas as to what growth really meant were extremely hazy, and the more I tried to bring this word into connection with art the more difficult it seemed.
Suddenly it occurred to me that the matter had been definitely settled a very long time ago, and that the answer to my problem was to be found in the mythological story of the birth of Athene, patron goddess of art and wisdom,^ who is represented as emerging full-grown front the brain of the ruler of the Olympian universe. This is a profound and noble allegory and I for one see no reason to question its truth.
Art does not grow, in the sense of progress, anywhere. The term “Primitive Art” is a misnomer. When we speak of the art of primitive peoples we are compelled to admit that their art is perfect inasmuch as it faithfully and completely reveals the degree and kind of their emotional and intellectual capacities and no art can do more.
Art becomes complex as life becomes complex through the development of civilization which involves close and constant contact between different peoples, but it is a total fallacy to suppose that art grows better or more complete for that reason. Neither, for that matter, does it necessarily grow worse or less complete. It merely becomes more complex.
Of all the arts, music is the most universal, the most spontaneous and immediate expression of human emotion; the most sensitive and elastic medium.
The sense of music is innate in every human being. The beginnings of music are to be found in the satisfied gurglings and the temperamental screamings of the infant in arms, and no composer, even of the greatest genius, did he wish to express such simple emotional reactions could do so otherwise than through the employment of those elements of pitch, rhythm and dynamics which appear at the very dawn-ings of human consciousness and which remain unchanged in the most elaborate of musical compositions.
Negro folksongs are simple and beautiful, and jazz is complex and hideous, but both are perfect reflections of emotional states, pure in one case, stupid and vulgar in the other, and we may dimly discern the figure of Pallas Athene, clad though she may be in shabby rags and with a very
MANAGEMENT: HAENSEL A JONES AEOLIAN HALL, NEW YORK
SAMUEL DUSHKIN
Violinisi:
AMERICAN DEBUT Aeolian Hall, New York, January 6, 1924
Assisting Artist
New York Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch First Recital Appearance Aeolian Hall, New York, January 20, 1924
For Terms and Dates Addre-ss GEORGE ENGLES, Aeolian Hall, New York