M~lsic irr education
the preservation of the music tradition of India; thereby we would
have started at the right end, by watering the roots and not the leaves.
The distinction of professional and non-professional music educa-
tion is not so clearly kept in our country; at any rate, the latter has not
so distinctly and extensively developed through our modern educa-
tional institutions as in the West. In the past, our non-professional
music interest was cultivated by private or self-instruction. When the
new educational set-up came, and schools and colleges were started.
the curricula of studies neglected for a long time the arts. A few sepa-
rate art schools were established but these dealt with only painting and
sculpture. But modern education brought with it a rediscovery of
India’s past and a critical appreciation of the cultural contributions of
the country. On one side appeared the expositions of Indian music by
non-Indian music savants and historians, Captain Dey, Fox Strange-
ways and others, and on the other, native musicologists arose like Raja
Saurindra Mohan Tagore and Pandit Bhatkhande in the field of North
Indian music and Vidvan Subbarama Dikshitar and Mr. Chinnaswami
Mudaliar in the field of South Indian music, who collected and publish-
ed all that was available of the theory and practice of Indian music
in its two schools. The stage was now set to think of organizing music
institutions and courses of study in music. The development took two
forms, the pure music school or college, independent or affiliated to
university or local state authority and music as a course of study in
general schools, colleges and universities.
Today the new bifurcated courses of study at the school stage pro-
vide for music being taken as a subject but only a very small number
of schools have thought of introducing music. A few colleges have
music as an optional subject but in both these cases, it is only institu-
tions for women that have this provision. Regarding the syllabus and
method of this type of music education, the course provides for in-
struction in theory, history and practice, but the aim is to create a great-
er critical awareness of the several aspects of the art, its many-sided
development and long history; consequently there is a bias in this
scheme towards musicology.
There are also a certain number of private music schools which bring
up students to government music examinations, successful candidates
of which take to further courses of study in music if they so desire.
Thanks largely to the initiative of enthusiasts connected with the
Madras Music Academy, which I have the honour to represent here,
music was intrduced as a subject for graduate and post-graduate study
in Madras. In the Madras University to which I have the privilege to