General exposhsparticularly all forms of musical interest and practice that tend to
restore the use of music to the home and neighbourhood life as a
rewarding activity for daily living’. But on the whole, the accent is
rather on listening. The rise of orchestral music has somewhat lessened
the interest in choral activities, in Canada at least. The long-playing
record, so speedily adopted by all American manufacturers, has become
a kind of music museum which satisfies the needs of many. Twenty
years ago the Anthologie Sonore was exceptional in its presentation of
ancient music; today there is hardly a score from Perotin to Prokofliev
that has not come to life on a long-playing record. Movies, radio and
television are also enemies of home life and of active music making-
but one wonders whether this is peculiar to the Americas, whether it
has not become a general condition everywhere.
To summarize the foregoing, it can truthfully be said that during the
last three decades music education in America progressed faster and
further than anywhere else at any time in history. That sounds almost
ridiculously like a variant of the well known credo of ‘bigger and
better’; but it is a fact nevertheless. The growth was swift and strong.
It was made possible by a rapid increase in population, by an unpre-
cedented economic development, by an unshaken belief in education
on a democratic basis, by a peculiar aptitude (a passion almost) for
organization, administration and mass production.
Certainly there are dangers and disadvantages connected with such
a development. Speed leads often to superficiality. Education has its
limits, it is no universal panacea. Organization, as such, has a tendency
to become an end in itself. It takes time to digest the musical heritage
of many lands and of a thousand years; it takes wisdom ro realize that
the value of art depends neither on quantity nor on variety but solely
on the intensity of artistic experience.
These shortcomings exist, they can easily be discovered and pointed
out. That they do exist is far less remarkable than the astonishing fact
that such a development was possible at all. Older countries started
with a locally conditioned repertory which slowly expanded and gra-
dually grew into the international repertory of our own day; for cen-
turies they lived in close contact with the source and fountainhead of
all art music, the composer; they had ample time to develop musical
taste and to transmit it from one generation to the next, thereby
acquiring what is commonly known as musical tradition. America, on
the other hand, imported Western music as a finished product and
wholesale, convinced that the American peopIe could be suficientIy
educated to enjoy its blessings. That showed perhaps ‘that peculiar