Methods and aids in music educationpress an opinion on its value to music appreciation and education. The
possibilities it opens up are as great for good as they are for evil; and
the challenge it presents to the programme planners will, I hope, be
well met for the cause of music.THE GRAMOPHONE RECORD: AN AID
IN MUSIC EDUCATION
by
Antoine E. Cherbuliez de SPRECHER, Professor, Zurich University, SwitzerlandThe gramophone record, as an auditory aid in music education, has
certain advantages and certain disadvantages.
Among its qualities is the exact reproduction of timbre, tessitura,
tempo and nuances. In addition to ensuring almost complete identity
with the original, ever greater efforts are now being made to see that
recordings have an artistic quality consistent, so far as possible, with
the style of the music recorded. Thus, a modern record can possess a
number of qualities which are not found in the acoustic, stylistic and
aesthetic setting of an ordinary concert.
The possibility of repeating, almost indefinitely, a model perfor-
mance of this kind by means of the gramophone record provides new
educational resources for developing the listener’s musical memory
and capacity to absorb music.
One of the shortcomings of the record is that it supplies merely
frozen music, as it were-mechanized, preserved music; for it gives
a ‘one-time reproduction’ of a certain performance, in a form that
remains forever unchanged. We feel that this conflicts with our
inherent conception of music, as something living, a musical score
being rightly fated, moreover, to die and be reborn a thousand
times, an idea reflected in Goethe’s words ‘... dieses Stirb und
Werde... ’.