Music in education
Universities, whose remarkable work is now appreciated in all quar-
ters, certain men with a keen sense of their social responsibilities organ-
ized choral and musical societies in an endeavour to help raise the
general standard of culture among the working classes.
Societies founded in 1804, 1817, 1826, 1831 and 1850 are still in
existence in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. What purpose had
these good men in view? For them, music and singing were simply an
excuse: their real object was to enable men who had previously been
cut off from their fellows to work side by side, to give them wider
cultural interests and help them to lead a fuller life. They succeeded so
well that thousands of amateur societies for choral and instrumental
music were formed, reaching a peak in the first decade of the twentieth
century. At that time, in Belgium alone, there were nearly 600 choral
and 2,500 instrumental music societies. Some places had two or three
choral societies and about the same number of brass and brass-and-reed
bands, with 100 to 200 performers. The period from 1850 to 1910 was
the golden age of the male voice choir.
A whole body of music, specially written for these groups, then
sprang into being. Distinguished composers, winners of the Prix de
Rome, men like Radoux, Tilman, Gevaert and Gilsen, to mention only
a few of the legion of Belgian musicians who played a prominent part in
this movement, wrote magnificent choral compositions, some of them
bristling with difficulties, bursting into glorious hales or displaying
a rich sweep of remarkably brilliant and controlled orchestration.
Under the impulse of romanticism, this movement developed to an
extraordinary degree, and hundreds of thousands of music lovers were to
be found among the working classes in European countries. Hundreds of
competitions were held in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany,
the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Switzerland and even in Algeria. The
standards of the competing societies steadily improved and government
support was accorded to them as nowadays to sport. In that happy era,
too, there were still rich patrons prepared to encourage the arts-a race
of men which has since disappeared in our country and indeed elsewhere.
Now, alas, young people are little interested in male voice choirs
and, without going into the many reasons for this falling off, it is
nevertheless rather significant that the introduction of jazz after 1918
should have had a serious effect not only on public taste but also on
our amateur societies.
This situation leads me to conclude that the problem of music edu-
cation for the ordinary man and woman is a permanent one, and that
the first necessity is to root out the canker which is corrupting popular