Music in etillcation
showing that the salvation of civilization depends on our mobilizing
the creative powers of mankind which, in the last few centuries, have
been so criminally neglected. These powers can be brought into full
play only in association with art; and art, like any other complex
whole, is patently something more than the sum of its parts, something
more than the combination of philosophy and psychology, of biology
and sociology.
Art in education presupposes a universal and sublime sense of
freedom and emphasizes the creative powers latent in every individual,
for evil as well as for good. Hell-the urge to evil, destruction and
nihilism-is certainly a creative power. But even more the will for
life, for construction and for art in all its forms is an infinitely higher
creative power. It is not simply a question of recognizing artistic
inspiration as such, and affording the necessary scope for artistic
powers; it is primarily a question of educating for artistic appreciation,
of giving art its rightful place as a decisive liberating force in all
possible forms of education. The realm of art today is the realm of
metaphysics, as distinct from the so-called ‘reality’ which finds satis-
faction in technology, economics and the mechanical sciences. This is
the time for artistic education to become an elevating, organizing
force, capable of developing all forms of creative power throughout
the human race.
In the 1890’s the surgeon Billroth first raised the question of what,
in fact, constitutes a musical person. This question was taken up and
investigated by music psychologists such as Kurth and Revesa. This
has led to the crux of the problem, on the one hand artistic creativeness
and on the other technical musicianship, the antithesis with which we
are concerned. The ‘musical person’ is a characteristic phenomenon of
an age that has seen the triumph of the natural sciences, in which
technology predominates; so much importance is attached to the
‘musically-gifted’ in this age of the virtuoso that the ‘music-lover’ is
merely regarded as a ‘dilettante’.
This line of development, with its emphasis on rational explanation
and a materialistic, mechanistic attitude is very largely responsible for
the fact that music has been made into a public thing, so that playing
and singing to an audience-with the consequent element of compe-
tition-has taken the place of intimate music in the home.
About 1900 Busoni made mock of the idea of ‘musicianship’, em-
phasizing that this idea had been accorded recognition only in the
German language. Nevertheless the idea exists, and we must therefore
recognize that, in the last 200 years, we have gradually come to place