for the
music pupils' recital. No one would be permitted to play, or sing in
public who could not give an artistic, as well as a technically correct
performance.
Music students should lose no opportunity to hear the best music, both
vocal and instrumental. Heard with understanding ears one good concert
is often worth a dozen lessons, yet many students know nothing in music
beyond what they have practiced themselves, or heard their
fellow-students give at rehearsals or recitals. If they attend concerts
at all, it is rather to observe some schoolmaster method in their own
particular branch than actually to enjoy music. Trying to gain a musical
education without a wide acquaintance with the literature of music is
like attempting to form literary taste without knowing the world's great
books. To bathe in the glow of the mighty masterpieces of genius
neutralizes much that is evil. In music they are the only authoritative
illustrations between notes and the ideals they represent; they form the
models and maxims by means of which we approach a knowledge of music.
In view of hearing good music, breathing a musical atmosphere and being
glorified into artists, vast numbers of American girls seek foreign
musical centres. They are apt to go without suitable equipment, mental
or musical, and with inadequate pecuniary provisions. They expect to
attain in a few months what they are doomed to discover would take years
to accomplish, and cannot fail to suffer for the blunder. Many of them
return home disappointed in their aims, and ruined in health. Many of
them are stranded in strange lands. A crusade should be started against
indiscriminate going abroad for music study, without thorough
preparation in every respect.
The fact is, a free, true, fearless hero, such as Wagner found in his
Siegfried, is needed to slay, with his invincible sword, the dragon of
sordid materialism, and awaken the slumbering bride of genuine art. A
storm-god is wanted to swing his hammer and finally dissipate the
clouds that obscure the popular vision. Some one has called for a plumed
knight at the literary tournament, with visor down, lance in hand,
booted and spurred for the fight with prevalent errors. One is equally
needed at the musical tournament.
III
The Musical Education That Educates
There is a musical education that educates, a musical education that
refines, strengthens, broadens the character and the views, that ripens
every G
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