Music in educationthe music required for our music library; the need is imperative for
music enthusiasts and institutions to launch their own programme
of preservation of this music on records. While the society for the
recording and preserving of classical South Indian music which we start-
ed in Madras is stillborn, I am glad to say that in Bombay a young
enthusiast, Mr.P. R. Bhide, has gone ahead in this line in his institution
for Indian culture and has already done many sound-pictures of Vedic
recitals and classical North Indian music. Mr. Alain Danielou has made
many recordings of sacred, folk and dance music.
This medium of recording is particularly fruitful in the realm of folk
music whose role in music education has been put down among subjects
for discussion here. Apart from stray folk songs being used at the
elementary stage, and apart from a general knowledge of their character-
istics as part of the theory and musicology portion of the syllabus in the
higher study, there is no specific place as such assigned to folk songs in
our music studies. Many of our appealing classic modes(ragas) originated
from folk melodies and South Indian raga-names like Chenchz+-Kambhoji
and Yergkala Kambhoji bear express reference to their origins in the music
of tribal folk. Folk music and tribal music form yet another department
requiring special work and herein lies rich material for our music re-
search scholar. How fruitful the pursuit of this study can be is best illus-
trated by a fact which Mr. Alain Danielou recently brought to light,
namely the existence of a Himalayan tribe whose singing employs a des-
cending series, which suddenly lights up the statement in our ancient
books that the oldest form of our music, the samans, took a descending
series. Professor 6. H. Ranade of Poona, with the help of the Bombay
University, has collected a large amount of data on folk music.
The extent to which musicology should be incorporated in a music
course has been the subject of dispute. Essential historical, biographi-
cal and theoretical information is necessary; but the tendency of musi-
cology is to expand merely on the information plane and to encroach
and even displace the practical side of the art which is after all the more
important thing. A mass of such information can hardly be a substi-
tute even for substantial musical criticism, not to mention the impart-
ing of the art itself. Wherever practical musicians or professionals
have taken the lead, they have as for instance in the recently formed
State Central College of Music in Madras, reduced the overloaded
musicological part of the syllabus, to prevent the attention of the stu-
dents being turned away from intense practical training. Actually the
new music graduate, despite his or her store of varied information, is
not a very competent music teacher, except where he or she has had