In the preceding articles in this series I have dealt with special musical subjects, and have constantly referred to music as a distinct and independent art having its own reasons for existence. I have dealt, also, with some of its special functions as well as with its relation to education. In the present article it is my purpose to discuss music in its relation to communities large and small, and this necessitates treating it on the broadest possible grounds.

By community music I mean, first, music in which all the people of a community take part; second, music which is produced by certain members of the community for the benefit and pleasure of the others; and third, music which, while actually performed by paid artists, is nevertheless somehow expressive of the will of the community as a whole. I shall take no refuge behind generalities or theories of aesthetics. I want to reach everybody, including the person who says, 'I don't know anything about music but I know what I like,' and that other extraordinary person who says, 'I know only two tunes, one of which is "Yankee Doodle "- each of these statements being quite incomprehensible, since it is a poor person indeed who does n't know what he likes, and anybody who 'knows' 'Yankee Doodle' has no excuse whatever for not knowing what the other tune is, or, so far as that goes, what any other tune is. I am, in short, appealing on common grounds about a common thing. My only question is this: If there is a means of interesting, delight

ing, and elevating a large number of people at very small expense, by something which they can all do together and which brings them all into sympathy with one another, and if the result of this coöperation is to produce something beautiful, is it not worth doing? I intend to make as full an answer to this question as space permits.

It is in the 'doing' and the 'doing together' that the crux of the matter lies, for a purely external connection with music never brings about a complete understanding of it. It is no exaggeration to say that our connection with nearly all artistic things is largely external. We do not draw; we do not train the eye to see or the hand to feel and touch, and artistic objects remain in a measure strange and unintelligible to us. The whole tendency of modern life and of modern education is to 'delegate' those functions which have to do with our inner being. We delegate our religion to a preacher or to a dogma; we delegate our education to a curriculum smoothed out to a common level; some of us even delegate the forming of an opinion on passing events to a leader who presents them to us in a 'current events' class. The religion, the knowledge, the opinion of many a person belongs to some one else. Many a man prefers an inferior novel because the author not only writes it, but reads it, for him, whereas to the wise man the author might almost be called an amanuensis. In any case, a writer of genuine power never does more than his share. He depends on us to complete

him. And in like case, if we expect to understand and love music we must use it; the composer depends on us as much as the author does.

I

As a preliminary to this discussion it will be well to look at the present status of music among us, and to see how near we come to this necessary intimacy with the art.

In any small American community the first impression one gets about music is that it is useful to fill up gaps. At the theatre, before public meetings, at social affairs of one sort or another, music is performed to a ceaseless hum of conversation or while people are entering and leaving. The art becomes, in consequence, like the cracking of the whip before the team starts, or like the perfunctory speeches and gestures of social amenities; it is nothing in itself, and falls in our estimation accordingly. It is true that, at such times, only trivial music is usually played, but this only makes the situation worse, because, after all, it passes as music.

Real musical activity in such a community is limited to a very small number of its inhabitants. Only a few people sing; a much smaller number play some musical instrument. There are, here and there, choirs made up of volunteer singers, but the spirit that animated the old choirs- the spirit which Hardy has celebrated so lovingly in Under the Greenwood Tree has disappeared. Hymn singing in church is often distressingly bad, and with good reason, since the composers of modern hymn tunes seldom take into consideration the needs and wishes of congregations. Church music has been delegated by us to paid singers, and our church music becomes a thinly disguised concert, or, when the really abominable vocal quartette supplies the

music, a concert outright. Women's clubs provide a certain sort of musical life to small communities. They foster the performance by members of rather variegated programmes of pianoforte pieces and songs, with an occasional concert by a paid performer from abroad, and they sometimes make a study of a composer or of a period of music. Many of them lose sight of the only possible means of vitally influencing the musical life of their own members and of the community at large.

In some of the communities of which I am writing there are choral societies. In very few is there any well-sustained and continuous choral organization giving concerts year after year supported by the general public. The record of choral-singing in America shows a constant endeavor to attain grandiose results rather than to foster the love of choral-singing per se. Small societies are continually wrecked by the expense of highly paid singers, and are continually striving for something beyond their reach.

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This statement would not be complete were we to omit the instruments which play themselves. The educational possibilities of these instruments have not been realized, for they are used chiefly to amuse. In spite of the extraordinary selections of music which one finds in people's houses, and in spite of the seemingly incorrigible propensity to hear singing, as opposed to hearing music, I mean the exaggerated and grotesque singing of certain famous people who care chiefly for sensation, the graphophone, which has the practical advantage of being portable and inexpensive and has transformed many a lonely farmhouse, and the mechanical piano-players have become so popular that one can but conclude that there are multitudes of people whose desire for music has never before been satisfied.

This completes the list of our own personal activities in music. And we have to admit that the most discouraging item of all comes at the end. For we make little music of our own, by our own firesides where all good things should begin, and where we should find the community in embryo.

This somewhat meagre showing of musical activity does not completely represent our connection with the art, however, for nearly all but the smallest communities spend considerable sums for concerts by paid performers from abroad. But it is doubtless true that the majority of the people in any small community hear very little real music at all save at occasional concerts, and if a fine composition is performed they seldom hear it again, so that it is clearly impossible for them to understand it. In towns of from five to twenty thousand people all over the country there is very little consciousness of what music really is. Highly paid performers occasionally appear, and local pride asserts itself to provide them with the adulation to which they are accustomed, but real musical activity or musical feeling is confined to a few. In large communities these conditions are duplicated and even exaggerated. There nearly all the music is bought and paid for, and very little is home-made. Nearly all choirs are composed of paid singers. Choral societies there, as in the country, are struggling to find men who care enough about singing to attend rehearsals. There, too, children go their rounds of 'music' lessons. The only possible way to estimate the state of music in our cities is to look at the population as a whole. By counting up the number of fine concerts in fashionable halls one arrives at no significant conclusions. Do we sing at home, or when we are gathered together in friendly converse? Are there small centres in cities where good music

can be heard? Is there any good music within reach of people of small means? The millionaire regales his friends with the playing of his private organist, in imitation of the old patron days of art, but generally without the love and understanding of music which was the sole justification for the proceeding; but does the dweller in the modest flat ever have a chance to hear good music? These are questions we need to ask if we want to estimate the state of music in our great cities. Is not all this grand music, as I have said, merely a largess of our prosperity?

The most grandiose and disconnected form of our musical activity is the opera. And when we consider the love of drama which finds expression in nearly every small community in a dramatic club, we cannot but deplore the almost complete detachment of opera from our natural thoughts, feelings, and instincts. Of this detachment there is no doubt whatever; the whole plan of American operatic productions is exotic, aristocratic, and exclusive.

It is quite true that we are continually improving our musical status. The effect of all our fine music may indeed be observed, but our progress is undeniably slow, particularly when we remember with what a liberal endowment we start. That endowment is very little less than other peoples possess. Our children are musical, and there is no reason why we should not be. Moreover, the strain of ideality which runs through American life, however naïve it may be, would seem to make us especially qualified to love and understand music.

II

I have indicated in a former article something of our needs as regards the musical education of children. The problem before me now is how to persuade American men and women into

active coöperation in making music. It is obvious that there is only one way of doing this, and that is by singing. Only an infinitesimal number of people can play musical instruments, but nearly everybody can sing. To play requires constant practice. Singing in groups does not. In their right estate every man and every woman should sing.

Now my urgent appeal for singing does not mean that every village, town, or city should turn itself bodily into a huge singing society. Some people will sing better than others and will enjoy it more, or have more time for it. But there are constant opportunities for large groups of people to sing in church, on Memorial Day, at Christmastime, at patriotic gatherings, or at dedications. Nothing is more striking on such occasions than the total lack of any means of spontaneously expressing that which lies in the consciousness of all, and which cannot be delegated. What a splendid expression of devotion, of commemoration, of dedication, of sacred love for those who died in our Civil War would a thousand voices be, raised up as one in a great, eternal, memorial hymn! What do we do? We hire a brass band to be patriotic, devout, and commemorative for us. This inevitably tends to dull our patriotism and our devotion. To live they must spring forth in some sort of personal expression. In a village I know well, this custom mars an otherwise deeply impressive observance of Memorial Day. The 'taps' at the soldiers' graves in their silent resting places, the sounds of minute guns booming, the long procession of townspeople, the calling of the roll of the small company of soldiers who marched away from that village green half a century ago, with only an occasional feeble 'Here' from the handful of survivors, the lowering of the flag on the green with all heads uncovered, all eyes straining upward—these

make the ceremony fine and memorable. It needs to complete it only some active expression on the part of every one such as singing would provide.

'I know not at what point of their course, or for how long, but it was from the column nearest him, which is to be the first line, that the King heard, borne on the winds amid their field music, as they marched there, the sound of Psalms-many-voiced melody of a church hymn, well known to him; which had broken out, band accompanying, among those otherwise silent men.' So relates Carlyle, in Frederick the Great, of the march of Frederick and his army before the battle of Leuthen. 'With men like these, don't you think I shall have victory this day?' says Frederick. Is not such singing a wonderful thing? Those soldiers, with a common dedication to duty, and a common disdain of death, send up to some dimly discerned Heaven, from the very depths of their being, a song. How otherwise could they express the thoughts and feelings that must have been clamoring for utterance in their sturdy breasts? Their bodies were marching to battle. What of their souls? Shall the very spirit of them slumber on their way to death?

And we? We watch from afar; we are dumb; we look on this profoundly moving ceremony, this simple pageant, and utter nothing of what we feel and what we are.

At Plattsburg, last summer, where so many patriotic and fine spirits gathered for military instruction, it seemed a futile thing that they should, as they marched, whistle a fine military tune. Whistling seemed entirely inadequate and inappropriate in comparison with the fine ringing song they might have uttered. Why do we not sing? Is it not partly because of that selfconsciousness which hangs about us like a pall, and partly because we were never made

to like singing well enough to pursue it? The former difficulty we could overcome easily enough if the right opportunity continually offered itself. The latter, too, would disappear as occasion arose when we could sing something worth singing. 'The Star Spangled Banner' is a candle-snuffer on the flame of patriotic feeling; never was there an air more unsuited to its purpose. Since we have almost no indigenous national melodies, why should we not sing the old songs, chorals, and hymns that have survived all sorts of national changes and belong to every people? The tune for 'America' is not an American tune, neither is it English. It originated in Saxony. There is no nationalism to stand in the way of such music, because it speaks elementally and universally. There are scores of fine melodies which we could well use.

The one place where singing might be fostered is in church. But where the worshipers are asked to sing a hymn pitched too high for them, or one that moves too quickly, or is full of unfamiliar and difficult progressions in both melody and harmony, what other result can be expected than poor singing and the gradual abandonment of all music to a paid choir? The real purpose of the hymn tune has been lost. It was intended to serve the needs of all the people, and to do this it must be simple in both melody and harmony, and within the range of every man, woman, and child in the congregation. The sturdy old hymns and chorals of our forefathers were so. Nothing is finer in church music than good unison singing in which every one takes part. No skilled choir singing can ever take its place. The decline in hymn singing is evident enough. Save in churches where a liturgy restrains the ambitions of the choir, almost anything is possible; and even under that restraint there is a constant tendency toward display.

What is the office of church music? Is it to astonish or delight the congregation? Is it to supply them with a sacred concert or fine singing? To take their minds off the situation in which they find themselves? To ease the effect of a dull sermon, or obliterate the effect of a good one? To draw people to the church who would not otherwise go? Or is it to induce devotion and religious feeling, to keep the moment sacred and without intrusion? If the choir is to sing alone, why should we accept from it display pieces, or arrangements from secular music, or silly 'sacred' songs over-burdened with lush sentiment, or anthems of a certain fluent type composed by anybody who can put a lot of notes together in agreeable sequence? Is there, then, no reality behind church music? Is it merely any music set to sacred words? He who has ever studied any art knows that this cannot be true. The finest church music of which Palestrina and Bach are the greatest exponents

is based on something more than a casual association with sacred words.

There is no difficulty whatever in procuring good music for choirs. There is a supply suitable for solo singing or chorus, for small choir or large, to be purchased at any music shop. There are a dozen fine composers whose music is never heard in most American churches: composers such as Palestrina, Vittoria, and others of the great period of church music, or Bach, or Gibbons, Byrd, and Purcell, whose music is in the true idiom, an idiom now almost entirely lost. Many choir directors would doubtless like to use such music, but are hindered from doing so because they feel upon them the weight of the opinion and taste of the congregation, and perhaps of the preacher. Everybody, regardless of his qualifications for doing so, feels at liberty to criticize the music he hears in church.