Music in edwationall the time through listening and active participation to the enjoyment
of vocal and instrumental music appropriate to the stages of their
technical and intellectual development. He will help them to realize
that notation is a golden key made to unlock the treasure house of
music with its special gifts to the adolescent of being able to sing and
play part-music and follow a score. This is an aim which, kept firmly
in view, prevents that regrettable separation of theory from practical
music-making which has sometimes stultified musical education. At
the same time, the leader will be showing his pupils how to strive in
their own performance towards ever higher standards of technique
and interpretation, and will be training them to listen to and judge
their own efforts and those of others. It follows that the specialist’s
technical standards must be high and his knowledge of musical lite-
rature must be broad and deep.
I believe that the real significance of the ‘musical appreciation’ move-
ment lies in the growth of a new relationship between the music of
the school and the larger world of music outside it. The best of our
school music specialists are now fully conscious of the resources avail-
able to them in the music of the past, much of which can be performed
effectively by their pupils, and also of the need for young people to get
into direct touch with the music that is being written in their own day.
It is heartening to find that in many schools, dull, trivial so-called
‘education’ music, written down to children, is being crowded out by
some of the finest musical literature, past and present, that can be
brought within the scope of the young performer. Going about from
school to school in only one district of England, I have heard during
the past year or so pupils’ performances of madrigals by our Tudor
composers, Purcell’s Dido and Aenas and King Arthur, Handel’s had
in Egypt, cantatas by Tunder and Buxtehude, concertos by Teleman
and Vivaldi, Bach chorales, string quartets by Haydn and Mozart, a
violin sonata by Tartini and a cello sonata by Beethoven, songs by
Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, songs by English composers from
Dowland to Warlock, parts of the FaurC Requiem, choral works by
Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten and Bax, a multitude of folk songs
and carols-the list might be prolonged interminably. The gramo-
phone, the radio and the sound-film have helped enormously in this
process and by their means, and by the increased facilities for hearing
‘live’ performances by professional artists, the school pupil of today
can become acquainted with music that is out of the range of his own
performing skill but which is nevertheless related to what he can and
does perform. Properly understood and carried out, the whole process