died October 31st, 1907.

XVII

SYSTEMATIC MUSICAL TRAINING

ALFRED REISENAUER

"I can never thank my mother enough for the splendid start she gave me
in my early musical life. She was a wonderful woman and a veritable
genius as a teacher. See, I have here to-day on my piano a copy of the
Schumann Sonata in F sharp minor which she herself used and which she
played with a feeling I have never heard equaled. There is one thing in
particular for which I am everlastingly grateful to her. Before I was
taught anything of notes or of the piano keyboard, she took me aside one
day and explained in the simple and beautiful tongue which only a mother
employs in talking to her child, the wonderful natural relationships of
tones used in making music. Whether this was an inspiration, an
intuition, or a carefully thought out plan for my benefit, I cannot
tell, but my mother put into practice what I have since come to consider
the most important and yet the most neglected step in the education of
the child. The fault lies in the fact that most teachers at the start do
not teach music, rather musical notation and the peculiarities of the
instrument.

Nothing could possibly be more stultifying to the musical instinct of
the child. For instance, the plan generally pursued is to let the child
grope over the white keys of the piano keyboard and play exercises in
the scale of C, until he begins to feel that the whole musical world
lies in the scale of C, with the scales of F and G as the frontiers. The
keys of F sharp, B, D flat and others are looked upon as tremendously
difficult and the child mind reasons with its own peculiar logic that
these keys being so much less used, must, of course be less important.
The black keys upon the keyboard are a '_terra incognita_.' Consequently
at the very start the child has a radically incorrect view of what music
really is.

"Before notation existed,--before keyboards were invented,--people sang.
Before a child knows anything of notation or a keyboard, it sings. It is
following its natural, musical instinct. Notation and keyboards are
simply symbols of music--cages in which the beautiful bird is caught.
They are not music any more than the alphabet is literature.
Unfortunately, our system of musical symbols and the keyboard itself are
very complex. For the young child it is as difficult as are Calculus and
Algebra for his older brother. As a matter of fact, the keys of F sharp,
B, and D