THE SITUATION AT PRESENTThe Specialixed StHdeent
It is disturbing to have to record that even nowadays, in many coun-
tries, there is a complete absence of courses in the history of music.
In others, again, these studies have been inaugurated only in a frag-
mentary and quite inadequate way. Indeed, it is surprising to observe
that in a country like Italy, with such a rich and glorious musical past,
only one single course in the history of music has been arranged! This
solitary professorship, transferred recently from Milan to Florence,
allows Italian youth practically no opportunity of undertaking musi-
cological studies. In Spain also, the University of Barcelona is the only
one to include a course in the history of music. In France, even now,
only the University of Paris has arranged a relatively complete cur-
riculum of musicological studies. Yet such countries, much more than
others, should have the privilege of ensuring that the history of music
is widely taught.
It is hard to say whether one should rejoice at the situation to be
found in several countries, where the university teaching of music is
more or less indistinguishable from the technical musical training pro-
per to conservatories. Yet this is a regrettable confusion. Just as aca-
demies of fine arts are. called upon to train draughtsmen, engravers,
sculptors and painters, it is the essential and even exclusive task of the
conservatories to train musicians : composers, singers and instrumen-
talists. As for the universities, their role is limited to the scientific pre-
paration of future historians of art or music.1 The best way to attain
this last goal seems to be the creation of a department of music within
the institute of the history of art, which is itself attached to the faculty
of arts. This would offer many advantages, since the curriculum would
necessarily include several general courses in philosophy and literature,
and in the history of art. It would be understood that practical courses
in composition, piano and so on, would be excluded from the special-
ized courses in musicology. It would be desirable, even necessary, for
students of the history of music to have a clear general knowledge of
harmony, fugue and counterpoint, and to be capable of playing some
instrument. But it is not for the university to provide this technical
- We developed this point at length at the International Congress of Religious Music at
Rome in 1950. A summary of that statement appeared in the Atti del Congress0 Interna-
@onale di Musica Sacra, Roma 19~0, Rome-Tournai-Paris, 1953.