Mwic in edrrcativri
still necessary to use records and these are widely employed. In either
case there is a commentary prepared which is usually delivered by a
prominent, experienced music teacher.
In the national school broadcasts, music appreciation is dealt with
in a rather different manner. In these broadcasts the aim is to provide
the boys and girls of Canada as a whole with outstanding musical
experiences which they would be unlikely to enjoy through the re-
sources of their own province alone. For example, symphony concerts
have been broadcast by the Toronto,Vancouver and Montreal orches-
tras. Programmes with commentary introducing children to the in-
struments of an orchestra have been given. Performances of operas,
such as Gluck’s Orpheas, Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera and Gilbert and
Sullivan’s Pirates of Penxance have been presented in a form suitably
adapted to classroom use. A feature of these has been an attempt to
make it possible for students to learn some of the principal songs
and so participate together in the classroom in the performances
themselves.
Primarily, the school broadcasts are designed for group listening in
classrooms. And today they are listened to by more than half a million
students in more than 8,000 schools from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
But there is one broadcast for children of pre-school age which I feel
should be mentioned in any discussion of music education by radio.
It is called ‘Kindergarten of the Air’. This is one of the most successful
programmes we do and it is designed to give pre-school training to
children between the ages of 31/2 and 6 in their homes. This programme
is also used extensively in Grades I and I1 at school, and in kinder-
garten and nursery school groups. Music plays an important part in
these daily programmes, each of them including songs which the
children learn to sing with their radio teacher, and rhythmic move-
ments and dances which they are also taught to perform. They are
trained to listen for very short periods of one or two minutes to what
the teacher calls ‘quiet music’ played on the piano. In this way, these
very small youngsters are made familiar with the pleasant aspects of
hearing simple but good music.
This is the work that is going on in Canadian radio through the
coast-to-coast English-language networks of the CBC, and much the
same aims as I have described are being carried forward by the French
network of the CBC.
Television in Canada has been in operation for only a few months,
and since I have not yet had the opportunity of making a complete
study of this medium in other countries, I do not feel qualified to ex-