The training of the teacherand experience. Although I shall enumerate certain topics and aspects
of the work, there is nothing rigid, static or fixed about my course:
I could not be so immodest as to prescribe a hard and fast syllabus,
unchanged from year to year. Rather is there a core of aspects which
I believe every group must consider (e.g. the essentials of choral
singing and of music reading), and the rest is adapted to the specific
needs of the students, and modified as my own knowledge and expe-
rience increase.
Here then are some of the topics we discuss through seminars and
lectures; owing to the limitations of space I must give you these as
briefly as possible: the scope and possibilities of music in schools;
suggested schemes of work for primary and secondary schools; class
and choral singing; music in school worship; aural training and music
reading (the principles underlying these, a study of the tonic sol-fa
and staff notations in relation to pupils who are not instrumentalists is,
I feel, important because of the poor standard of reading frequently
encountered in schools, and because most of my students have studied
music primarily through an instrument and fail to appreciate the diffi-
culties of their school pupils, the majority of whom are not instrumen-
talists) ; external examinations-the G.C.E. syllabuses and papers are
examined and discussed and we consider the effect of these examina-
tions on the planning of the music of a grammar school; the problems
of running a school orchestra; recorders and percussion bands-a
practical survey of their possibilities, not only with very young children
but even in the secondary school; the use of the gramophone and radio
in school; musical ability-methods of group testing, with special
reference to the tests of Seashore and Wing; the teaching of harmony;
the teaching of the history of music. I also introduce a few guest
lecturers to speak on their own particular branch of work in music.
So much for the topics normally covered in lectures and seminars.
In addition there is a considerable amount of practical work. I haye
tutorials as required in such keyboard work as transposition, score
reading, and song accompaniment. Further, by arrangement with the
university Department of Music, at least one period weekly is devoted
to individual tuition in, for instance, a second or third instrument, in
singing, or occasionally in more harmony and counterpoint.
Then again, all students, including those who have not previously
played a stringed instrument, attend a course on teaching the violin
in class. Players are thus equipped to teach the violin to groups of
children; and others will know something of the methods which can
most successfully be applied by their assistants in schools, they will be