Music education itt socieoexpression is fast disappearing, and it is the duty of teachers of music,
art, dancing, etc. to see that it is fostered and developed.
The first consideration we should bear in mind is the kind of com-
petition we encounter. The average person has a routine occupation,
and for entertainment, the cinema, the radio and television where he
may find oblivion but very seldom artistic satisfaction. These types of
entertainment and the modern way of living in appartments have made
social gatherings of families and friends more infrequent.
Yet modern man remembers with pleasure the songs his mother sang
for him, the singing games he played as a child, the school singing or
playing of instruments, the dances. He has, moreover, latent sources of
further artistic expression and these should be developed.
The most natural musical expression for man is that of group sing-
ing although usually people approach a music teacher with the com-
ment: ‘I don’t know a thing about music’. The attitude towards books
is different. Almost anyone after reading a book expresses his opinion
freely. Perhaps we music teachers have been too dogmatic, have made
learning music so difficult that most laymen approach it with an in-
feriority complex. It is for this reason that we must meet the layman
half-way, reassuring him that there will be no complicated music teach-
ing where talent, a good ear, and voice are given as the elementary
necessities for joining in the singing. In one group of singers I was
asked what the requirements were. I answered: ‘To sing the National
Anthem, and if you don’t want to sing it you can whistle it!’
The music teacher must realize that group singing is not the work
of specialists, that there is no comparison between the music teaching
of our schools and conservatories where programmes have to be com-
pleted and certain results obtained, and that of informally guiding a
group of people to participate joyously in a collective activity, singing
the folk and popular song with which they are familiar. We should
forget about rudiments of music, sight reading, part singing or any
other restrictive condition and let the group develop naturally. If any
help at all is given it should be just with the idea of starting and finish-
ing a song together, keeping the general beat, and at times introducing
softer and louder singing as a natural development of the type of song
interpreted.
For me, the most important point in a succesful development of
group singing is not to try to imitate what has worked for other coun-
tries before having studied all the possibilities of the characteristics in
your own country. What may work for Thailand might be completely
different from what is being done in Turkey. Once you have started