Music in educationdevelop a sense of rhythm; music education during the period when
the voice breaks; school curricula; musical training from early child-
hood; textbooks.
Before concluding, I should like to say how much I hope my country
may achieve a high standard of music education within the shortest
possible time, and that very close cultural relations may be established
between Japan and all the other nations, in accordance with the best
traditions of universal culture.
[Translated from the Frencb]
SCHOOL MUSIC EDUCATION
IN ITALY
bY
Virgilio MORTARI, Director, Santa Cecilia Music Academy, RomeThe great lesson of universal love and human fellowship which was
given to the world by the music dramas of the nineteenth century has
been followed by a development of musical form along rather different
lines. Only one section of the public has broken away from the rest
and followed this development. This is a small, middle-class group,
sophisticated, decadent, and extremely hard to please. But the general
public, too, is expressing a desire for new experiences with which to
supplement, if not to replace, its old nineteenth-century idols.
In 1637, music, hitherto confined to the salons of Venetian palaces,
shook off this restraint and entered the wider and more accessible realm
of the public theatre (Teatro San Cassiano, Venice). It is therefore not
surprising that the music of our own times is no longer satisfied with
languid and spoilt audiences of middle-class intellectuals, and wants to
be understood and appreciated by the vast theatre-going public of
today. The seventeenth-century aristocracy, like the middle classes of
the present day, attended to their own musical education and that of
their children. In the second half of the seventeenth century it was the