arily limited. In some cases, there had been only two-tenths of a point
between them at the last national contests.
This is the sort of work that is being done in our European countries.
It is going on, in varying degrees but everywhere with remarkable
success, in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark,
England, France, Germany, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Hun-
gary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Rumania, Sweden,
Switzerland, and U. S. S.R.
It is regrettable that those great nations, of undoubted musical
genius, whose choral and instrumental societies have won so great a
reputation and have such an extraordinary feeling for music, are not
represented among us, as they have been at the Olympic Games, in
which teams and specialists from all over the world take part. There
is no doubt that the information and advice they could have given
would have been of very great value.
The problem must be examined not only in the light of the results
already achieved, but also in the light of the future. Generally speaking,
it can be said that music is not always properly appreciated in official
quarters. Governments seem to hold it in low esteem, reserving all
their favour for sports.
Sport offers easy pleasures calling for little or no mental effort, and
anyone, provided that he is well set up, can become a champion. The
same cannot be said of the things of the mind and heart and, as the
number of people interested in intellectual pursuits is relatively few,
politicians are less concerned about their votes. The same sort of cal-
culation is general in the press, which finds it possible to devote whole
pages to the Tour de France and similar sporting events, but squeezes
the news about our international meetings into small paragraphs or
narrow columns.
We must therefore win a hearing for ourselves everywhere by our
numbers as well as by our merits and, from this point of view, the
formation of national confederations of popular music societies, con-
sisting of hundreds and thousands of societies in our various countries,
can enable us to carry on the struggle and win the victory under the
aegis of a resolute and determined Unesco, which can urge all govern-
ments to give moral and, above all, financial support to the national fede-
rations of popular music societies and to the societies themselves. For
it is in these societies that music education for adults really flourishes.
In conclusion, I should like to draw attention to an urgent and fun-
damental need. In his masterly paper, Georges Duhamel has stressed
the importance of the school in the musical education of the masses.
singke
(singke)
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