iMlcsic in educationpar excellence, that surpasses our understanding. At this period music
and education seem almost synonymous ; the best composers wrote
music for practice and training purposes. Nor was there any difference
between music as an art and the music of everyday life; the conception
of ‘art for art’s sake’ was still unknown. As examples of the highquality
of this music and this exercising of the feeling, the soul and the mind,
it is enough to mention Bach, Couperin, Purcell, Scarlatti and Haendel.
No wonder that, in such an age, school music was one of the major
elements in the curriculum. The music instructor was at once a talented
musician and an accomplished teacher. He, or the preceptor, was there-
fore also, often, the headmaster. The children in the grammar schools
were given music lessons daily; the day began and ended with music.
Even if we reject as exaggeration much that we are told, it is still true that
in those days school choirs sang Orlando di Lasso; and it seems to me
that this music is rather above what was intended for such performers.Bach‘s death marked the end of an age, and thereafter the importance
of music declined. As we said before, Europe was a continent of wars
and revolutions ; it was and is a region of unrest, of doubt about all
things and, surprisingly enough, especially about the most natural
things. In every time of peril, however, Europe has also been granted
men of genius able to save their country. Thus, in a period of deep social
revolution and the ‘complete reassessment of allvalues’, Rousseau, Pesta-
lozzi and Goethe introduced a new pattern of education and civilization.
Three books are noteworthy as landmarks of classical education in
general and of musical education in particular: Rousseau’s Emile,
Pestalozzi’s Lienhard and Gertrtlde and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. All
three speak of music as nature’s gift for the ordering of our society.
To Rousseau we owe the finest thinking on the natural psychological
development of children and young people. Goethe combined the idea
of a live individual education with self-education through ‘natural’ life.
As for Pestalozzi, he was the first modern teacher-one who knew
the child mind through and through, who understood how to build
up the sound moral core of our wretched human existence, and who
verily lived his teaching. His influence spread throughout Europe and
America and started something like a revolution in pedagogic practice.
Pestalozzi begins with a straightforward belief in the creative force
in the child; according to him, it is the child, not the teacher, who
determine all activities in the classroom. Incidentally, Pestalozzi was
a new pathfinder not only in musical education, but in the ‘modern’
music of his time. He proclaimed that simplicity, both in teaching and