Scan 14
Musical Courier 1894-06-20: Vol 28 Iss 745, 1894
94 lines. Read by computer on 20 September 2026. Printed page 15. See the scan on archive.org.
1MUSICAL PROGRESS.
3A SALUTATORY.
5IN claiming the credit of an enterprise, how little people realize the force of an occult wave of thought underlying action! It seems sometimes as if one man stirs this wave into motion, when in reality, the wave it is which stirs the man. One man alone is not sufficient to plant a banner of success in a new cause. He only receives bruises for his pains, and dies wondering if he were not mistaken. Later on, two or three get together and roll the thought into size and notice. Later an organization takes hold and stamps the cause with success. Thus Progress is born. But first the wave, like a still, small voice. And where does it come from?
7No one can read history and remain a cynic as to tendency.
9Following the earth's revolutions since the days when the whole world was one slaughter house—men butchers of each other, and of women their creators—every turn has been into the light, and the "pruning hooks of first Peace" have become wheels within wheels, outpassing Time itself in the upward flight.
11The last great battle was when Reason throttled Force, when the god of Peace cursed the stream of blood flowing through the nations and it was turned into ink, and when the hero, shamed, hid behind the student's cloak. Plans for savage attack were turned to dreams of invention, the frown of vengeance gave way before the gnarl of thought upon the brow. Passion for war became passion for posterity, and the jangle of Arms' discord resolved into the harmony of Peace. The Music of human Progress was born.
13Not arts but hearts have progressed. Human mind has been made over by the coming of the Moral Sense; the divine melody of Love echoes through the souls of men, and is the keynote of latter-day Art theme.
15At once the most subtle and the most human of the arts of expression. Music has made the greatest progress of all the arts. The others have rolled around and around; Music has rolled around and on and up!
17All the great works in sculpture, painting, &c., are in the far past. We search in vain for a duplicate Vandyke, Rubens, Raphael. Such composition as the Wagner drama of our day has never been given to the world. The ancients had great musical souls. Purity, power and passion in sentiment have ebbed and flowed with the changing features of civilization, but the means of expression were not at hand. Never in the history of music has there been such limitless riches of means of expression as to-day.
19Listen one moment to any one of the great orchestras of Europe or America. Does it not seem as if the very "Music of the Spheres" were at work? What color, what flavor, what infinite diversity, what unity, what power! Listen to an unaccompanied four part song of Vittoria or Palestrina and then to an orchestration of Saint-Saëns, Goldmark or Wagner!
21Nay, more, compare the orchestration of any opera with its libretto, and what a poor, meagre, limited medium the latter! In no instance, even in the case of Wagner himself, who created his own librettos, can the subject compare with its musical expression. The means are not there to be employed.
23Music has not alone moved on as an art, but has kept abreast of civilization itself. Other arts depend on age for their flavor. Modern music is best of all. Other arts are found in certain places, under certain conditions; music environs human living as do its necessities. With the adaptability of the air that people breathe and the sunlight that is to them health music permeates all corners of existence and mingles with all classes of thought and feeling.
25To realize the progress that music has made as a necessity of modern life, we have but to remove it from the face of the earth for one season. All the other arts could be spared before it, even by the least musical of human beings.
27Music is a necessity in schools, in prisons, in kindergartens, in churches, in the salon and the saloon, on the sea, on the ranch, at the dance, at the wake, in insane asylum, hospital, camp, club, in quarantine ship, at the wedding, baptism and at the grave.
29Workman, lover, merchant, professor, rector, belle, farmer, miner, soldier, sailor, teacher, baby, dotard, millionaire, broomseller and pugilist, all depend more or less upon the influence of music. The sad heart and the happy one alike appeal to it for sympathy, and there is no emotion that has not its song.
31Music is the bait by which the worldling is caught in the churchly net of to-day. Music in the park is the poor man's holiday. Theatre, opera and café are alike filled by it. Music must be on the race course and ball ground, fair ground, beach, mountain side, street, alley and boulevard.
33Soirées' vapid gabble would fall flat on ennuied ears but for the sweet strains that envelope the place with an atmosphere of enchantment. Music mingles with wine at the festal board. Rites, savage and Christian, are accompanied by it. The campaign song, bugle call and battle march are the inspiration of their respective scenes. Concert and opera feed amusement to thousands of people night after night, year after year, with ever increasing power of attraction.
35Do eating and sleeping form a greater part in human living than does music?
37It is not for us to say why music has had such an impetus in the last fifty years, what part it is to play in spirit evolution or how much is based upon it now that we know not of. Enough that there is not another art that so ministers to the demands of all classes and conditions of people and that has made such enormous and universal progress.
39It is not only composition and instruments that have advanced, but audiences. Trained by hearing good music, hearing and intelligence are improved. The ear is keen, taste is turned toward correctness, and thought is engaged. People have become discriminating, they know when they are hearing what is good and true; they demand more than a tickling of the ear drum. The advanced mind wants to think its pleasure, not only to feel it. Audiences are active artists, not passive listeners.
41To realize the progress that music has made in quantity one has but to watch an audience being treated to concert or opera program of 1840, or to compare the receipts of an old-fashioned season with one of modern stamp.
43Do not say this is a mere change of fashion. Music has moved on and up as well as around. The new school is a union of the old, and of Truth with Modern Idea for priest. Past taste is to the present as the taste for the yellow novel library to that for Hugo romance. There are people who read the yellow library yet, but theirs is not the representative mentality of the century.
45For this progress, thanks first of all in our country to the few staunch souled orchestral leaders who in the face of loss have stood by right, fought prejudice, and with tact and foresight, by including little by little the new and the classic in their programs, have educated taste unconsciously.
47People do not realize how much they owe to men like this, especially the first pioneers.
49Also great praise is due our organists for having so tactfully employed their resources of organ, church and congregational sympathy in the training of popular taste. They had the public ear through religious observance, and they made the most of it. All praise to them!
51Our choirmasters likewise with persistent fidelity have successfully steered a large percentage of our boys toward musical lore and good taste, while training their vocal organs for church service.
53We are indebted, too, to the remarkable organ inventions which have made that instrument all but alive, giving to musicians resource and possibility, and stirring hearers to interest and ambition.
55Also to the excellence of musical journals like THE MUSICAL COURIER, which, fearless, free and independent in thought, with a head of enterprise and a soul of art, have made musical reading so forceful, interesting and valuable that not only musical circles but people generally are steadily perusing its columns and becoming wise in art.
57Then what appliances for study—clavier pianos, dumb pianos, organ pianos and pedaliers, keyboards and machines of all sorts to facilitate the study of harmony! Teachers are becoming wise and thoughtful, teaching harmony to children, making them artist students, not parrots. Music in our public schools, though far from what it might be, has kept on doing a little, and much will yet result from it. Thanks to St. Cecile that it is allowed in the public schools as a study.
59We are indebted more than we know for our excellent musical condition to the influx of Germans among us. Their music lore, traditions, ideas and blood, mingling with ours, have done much toward making us respect music. Would that we could have a similar course of instruction from France!
61In England the choral societies and cathedral choirs have been great promoters of musical progress. The new bill pending for the registration of music teachers (if by registration is meant a compulsory preparation of musicians for the special work of teaching) is a splendid measure and ought to pass. Everyone who wants to make money ought not to be allowed to experiment with talent. Anyone who has followed the work of vocal instruction finds in Paris as well as in New York ample cause for regret that all sorts of musicians are permitted to teach—which is and should be kept an art in itself.
63A powerful agent in the creation of good taste has been the reduction in price of music publications, placing the best writing, ancient and modern, in the hands of the poorest students. This applies to instruments as well, and is a result perhaps, not a cause of musical demand.
65It is to be noticed that all concert and symphony work has gone very far ahead of theatre and operatic music, no doubt from the fact that the latter are held back by the lead weights of poor librettos. That music is best which appeals to the imagination without the aid of scene and words. "The Damnation of Faust" is a much more savant production than "Faust" itself and fully as strong in appeal.
67Who knows but that the opera of the future will be a sceneless one, with libretto to follow only as a text or subject, the imagination left alone to unite the two!
69The spirit of good, plain, practical advertisement has done much for the progress of music.
71Musicians and musical instrument makers have learned that this age of pressure is too charged with novelty and selfishness to permit merit to penetrate of itself. Life is too short for patience and modesty. The success of the unmeritorious through announcement was a hint to the meritorious how to be happy before death instead of after. First-class musicians, teachers and makers are no longer ashamed to advertise. They advertise judiciously, constantly, extensively. Results follow, as day to night, and progress goes rolling forward.
73Vocal as well as instrumental art is far ahead of where it ever has been. True, there is not a Jenny Lind in the field, nor a Patti successor in view; but there are 100 good, almost faultless singers to one in the days of those prima donnas. People are well taught. Genius is genius—rare now as then, but all training helps toward genius and the better—the better.
75The peculiarity of the musical condition to-day is its monotony of excellence.
77There are whole planes of merits which would have been geniuses in earlier days. Think what the mountains that rise from them must be! It is a student era. Talent is crouching for a spring. Research is rife, and Truth is the leader. The tranquility is not lassitude. Art is alert and experimenting. The air is charged with spiritual influence, and wonderful children are being born. The march of Progress is sure and steady and rapid as never before.
79"Arise, let us go hence, for the end is not yet!"
81***
83What America needs at this crisis are:
851. A national conservatory, founded by the Government, not in the interest of commerce, but of art.
872. Some method for the winnowing of chaff from the wheat of music teachers. All who want to make money should not be allowed to experiment with talent.
893. That people should pay respectful attention and listen to music whenever and wherever played, and teach children to do the same. If people want a background to conversation, have a mandolin and a school girl make it. The music of to-day is too difficult of attainment and too well written to be used as a "background."
914. That the people who report musical performances for the papers should be thorough and conscientious musicians.
93France needs the spirit of "annonce," of advertising, of
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