Mufic in educatiorz
Another disadvantage of the record is that it imposes on listeners
an interpretation which might well be challenged as in the case
of ancient music dating from a period (particularly that between
the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries) whose way of performing
it has not yet been established in sufficient detail by musicological
research.
The educational potentialities of the gramophone record can be listed
briefly :
- Total or partial reproduction at will, of the work concerned.
- The development of comparative methods, enabling the listener to
follow, in actual sound, the origin and evolution of all types and
styles of music of all the elements which together go to make up a
musical work of art-the melody and its accompanying chords; the
sequence of chords; the various forms of rhythm, the metric struc-
ture, the architecture and tectonic structure of the composition, the
different ways in which folk music is handed down or transcribed,
the evolution of the practical science of timbres, nuances, tempi, the
traditions of interpretation and execution, the technique and playing
of musical instruments, the different characteristics of the human
voice, etc.
- The broadening of ideas through revelation of the common factors
is, but also the fundamental differences between the European
musical idiom and non-European musical forms, a subject of the
greatest importance when problems of music education are con-
sidered on an international, supra-national or even world plane.
- However, recording has one special characteristic. When we try to
separate out the elements of music (as a whole) for educational pur-
poses, we find that the record does not enable them to be dissociated
since they remain closely bound to each other in sound reproduction.
We have therefore to separate them mentally or in our imagination,
by a conscious and voluntary effort of the mind, concentrating our
mental and spiritual attention on a particular aspect, at the same
time as we listen to the music as a whole.
This involves two processes : perception and apperception. Perception
is reception by the senses-something, therefore, physiological- with-
out the object perceived being subjected to conscious examination or
critical appreciation by the mind. Apperception is perception in fact
submitted to this examination by the mind, and hence classified,
rendered conscious, and permitting of associations with other forms
of perception or phenomena 'perceived', etc.
