Music in edrrcation
Let us then, as bearers of the burden, make our way through the
centuries.
We begin with the Middle Ages, commonly called. the Golden Age.
The Middle Ages were the period of our beginnings, our ‘original’
period in, among other things, music and musical education-our
keynote, so to speak, our ‘DO’. We must not forget that Europe, too,
went through a colonial phase, in which the pioneers and colonists
were the monks in the cathedrals with their singing-schools for church
music. Schools of this type, in cathedrals or abbeys, were founded in
Italy, Switzerland, France, England, Germany and Austria. The prac-
tical training for singers of Gregorian chant and for hymn-choirs, for
the first singers of part-music, must have been of the highest order.
This was the period of the Italian monk Guido d’Arezzo, the first
renowned teacher of music. He, with his genius, created or applied
every material aid that we need in music teaching today-solmization
with do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, etc., the signature, and the system of musical
notation with lines. His object, almost a thousand years ago, was the
same as ours is today-to teach people how to sing from written
music. It could indeed be said that we are no further advanced today
than the monk Guido, who incidentally taught the Pope himself to sing
from written music by means of solmization. It was really the same
method as that revived in nineteenth-century England-the ‘tonic sol-fa’
method, so widely used for teaching children how to sing from a score.
In the Middle Ages, music was not merely a form of art; it was also
a science, and stood high in the realm of ‘theory’. In this field, indeed,
the Middle Ages laid the foundation for all our teaching. One need
only read the works of Saint Augustine, Boethius or Thomas Aquinas
to realhe what the concept of education with, and in, music was. Music
is the basis for a better human existence. To praise God it is necessary
to sing and to play, and prayer is essential to life in this world. This
is the ethical background for our musical education, and it stems from
the Middle Ages. We know that music can excite and stimulate our
feelings, but also that it can calm and soothe us. In this second even-
tuality music sets our moral existance truly at rest, and provides a
‘consolation of life’ in a philosophical sense. Philosophers, from Des-
cartes to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, have recognized in music ‘the
sole object of apperception and apprehension, the prototype of the
universe, of the absolute, of the “thing in itself”’. And Europe’s fore-
most composers, Bach and Beethoven, as well as all other musical
‘moralists’, worked in the same spirit; they were teachers through the
medium of their compositions.