SCHOOL MUSIC EDUCATION
IN ENGLAND
bY
J. W. HORTON, Her Majesty’s Inspector for Schools in EnglandThe wise music specialist views his particular tasks in relation to the
entire process of education in all its branches: not only because he is
conscious of the need to maintain a sense of proportion, but also be-
cause educational principles, if sound, must be universal and capable
of being applied to any subject that is taught and learnt.
One of these basic principles that must be observed in teaching mu-
sical skills is that there can be no successful attempt at intellectual ana-
lysis, formulation, and recording in graphic symbols until a mass of
sense impressions has been acquired. In the teaching of number we
defer the construction and memorization of arithmetical tables until
the children have gained plenty of concrete experience of number
through counting, grouping, and measuring objects. The reading and
writing of the mother tongue is preceded by several years of continuous
listening to the language spoken and read, and of learning to reproduce
its sounds through imitation. Reading and writing come much later;
for as the sounds of speech are, with the unimportant exception of
imitative words, entirely conventional, the written language is twice
removed from sense-experience. The written symbol represents a
sound, and the sound represents an object or an idea.
Music is likewise a sort of language, its written symbols denoting
scale divisions and rhythmic groupings that are themselves arbitrary.
It must be self-evident, therefore, that children should not be expected
to analyse the language of their musical culture, with its fundamental
rhythmic divisions and groupings, its accepted system of scales and
intervals, before they have spent a great deal of time, indeed several
years, in listening to the language being sung and played to them and
in trying to use it themselves. And yet this is where our musical edu-
cation most often errs. The error arises from the fallacy of identifying
the visual with the concrete, the aural with the abstract; of supposing
that the symbol of a crotchet (quarter note) is concrete because it can
be seen and drawn and cut out of paper, as a nursery tune (played or