476
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
During the week the children collect from the newspapers any clippings in regard to music that interest them and these are pasted by the secretary in a scrapbook.
The spirit shown by the children toward each other has always been most generous and friendly, and I have often trembled for fear that their simple unconsciousness might be disturbed. For this reason we continue with our work, whatever it may be, no matter how many visitors enter the room. In pursuance of this idea, I did not tell the children of my plan to bring them to the Woman’s Building, but in their search for clippings they discovered the announcement and brought it with mingled surprise and delight to the scrap-book when they met, as they supposed, for a lesson. I have discovered accidentally that several of them are teaching pupils in their own neighborhood, an excellent illustration that their studies are not irksome; a proof of the point they care but little for light music is the fact that they have exhausted the entire stock of classical music of a music dealer near the Hull House; thirty-three pieces of six-cent music being the first music, the club has been able to buy itself. It has heretofore had no choice of music whatever, having been obliged to use any that could be secured for merely a song, because of its being soiled or otherwise unsalable. However, in spite of every obstacle, at the end of six months they were playing as well as many children supposedly practicing two hours a day.
As one of our musical papers said not long ago: “ Many of the mistakes of the pupil are directly attributable to the teacher’s inability to see things from the pupil’s standpoint.” This is one reason so many of the world’s distinguished men were considered failures at school. The eminent teacher, Albrechtberg, said of Beethoven: “ He will never come to anything,” simply because Beethoven could not study music from his standpoint.
Rubinstein expressed a belief not long ago that music is passing through a crisis of deterioration in composition, though he admitted at the same time that technic has taken gigantic strides; and that technical training is in the ascendency is to be deplored, as many composers and otherwise talented musicians are driven from their field of labor through failure to appreciate that virtuosity is not the most essential element in the development of musicianship. Miss Caruthers illustrated this point in a most interesting manner at the Woman’s Musical Congress of the World’s Congress Auxiliary, which convened recently at the Art Palace.
It is the musical intelligence that makes expression and guides technical ability, and music is not found through weary hours of struggling with technic. As one of our greatest American poets has said:
“ The infinite always is silent,
It is only the finite speaks;
Our words are the idle wavecaps On a deep that never breaks.
We question with wand of Science,
Explain, decide and discuss;
But only in meditation,
Doth music speak to us.”