2. Every teacher regrets that in individual lessons. there is "not time to do everything"; and in consequence the most elementary questions on keys, time signatures, meaning of terms, etc.-all points in which understanding is essential to good playing-will "floor" the best players in most schools. But all these things can be taught as well-and probably, owing to the class-feeling or team-spirit, better to a number of pupils taken together; and the private lesson would have an appreciable fraction of time set free for other needs.

3. Many schools have, and more might have, an orchestra. But the music which such orchestras play is too often of a deplorable kind. When it escapes being either fourth-rate rubbish written by publishers' hacks to the standard required, or easy arrangements of the popular indiscretions of better-known composers, it generally takes the form of a long and tedious work, such as a Haydn symphony, serving mainly to strengthen the universal suspicion of the young that classical music is invariably dull. Some one once put a great truth into epigrammatic form by saying, "What is worth doing at all is worth doing badly"; and an average school orchestra, helped out by one or two teachers and a piano, can, with reasonable success and an amazing amount of pleasure, cope with a great deal of modern music of the front rank. Here and there an occasional passage may, from want of skill, be roughly handled, but the practices will be exhilarating and alive, and the deeply-rooted belief that "good music is dull will find one more nail driven into its coffin.

(c) Every school should have a class for the inquiring mind, and many already have a "Harmony

Class." The members of this class are, as a rule, a few enthusiastic souls who, realizing that there is something "behind" music, want to get at its deeper meaning. It seems almost intentionally humorous that, until quite recent years, the initiation offered invariably took the form of a course of exercises on a figured-bass-as perfect a stone as could be offered to any beggar for bread. Where the old traditions have lost their sway these classes are now replaced by "Appreciation Classes" whose power for good, in the hands of an able teacher, is beyond calculation.

(d) Other subjects which are taught in classes are also gradually coming under the sway of the new ideas. The History of Music, for instance, was taught until recently as a compendium of names and dates, occasionally enlivened by personal anecdotes. It was possible to satisfy the most exacting examiners as to one's knowledge of Palestrina, or of the quarrels between the Gluckists and Piccinists, without ever having heard a note of the music of any of the composers concerned; but it is now becoming gradually, if a little reluctantly, accepted that biographical data posing as historical knowledge are a barren and fraudulent substitute. But the most far-reaching reform lies in the slow but sure recognition, already referred to, of the vital importance of ear-training as the fundamental condition of musicianship and the inevitable preliminary to theoretical work. No child is fit to begin a literary training until he can read what he sees and write down what he hears; and training in harmony and counterpoint is sterile and contemptible until the pupil also can write what he hears and hear what he writes.

(e) Finally, the importance of reading at sight is at last being admitted. It is dawning on teachers that

the average pupil, when given a new piece whose technical difficulties might be mastered in a week, takes a preliminary fortnight to reach that state of familiarity with the actual notes at which real technical practice can be said to begin. And during that fortnight any given passage has been played wrong so many times that a fourth week becomes necessary for the elimination of stuttering. Reading music is, like reading words, almost entirely a matter of eye-training; and just as we can prophecy with certainty that the querulous child, puzzling over C A T, will in time read fluently, so we know that any pianist, puzzling over the common chord of C, will ultimately read well if the practice is consistent.

But it has not yet dawned on teachers, even on some of those most enthusiastic over sight-reading, that the subject should be taught in a gradation as logical as that whereby language-reading is taught. In language the eye proceeds definitely from unit to unit; at first the letter, then the syllable, then the word, then the group of words, until the expert reader finds that he is always looking some inch or more to the right of the word his tongue is saying. So the psychologist would proceed in music-reading; from the note unit to the chord unit, the two-chord unit, and the phrase unit, until the expert finds himself looking an inch or more ahead of the notes his fingers are actually striking. But even in books written by specialists for the express purpose of teaching sight-reading it is not easy to find any real comprehension of the above obvious facts, nor any truly logical gradation beyond the general principles that the early examples should be "easy" and the rest gradually more "difficult."

Few things, it is notorious, are easier than to launch

a list of complaints against the methods of any body of workers in any line of life. A writer need only enumerate the blunders he himself has made, and is probably still making, and he will have at hand a jeremiad which can be worked up into a formidable indictment. But in the present chapter the real object has not been to point out errors, but rather to try to analyse that new feeling of responsibility and thoughtfulness which is beginning to permeate music-teachers as a body, and to trace the origin and nature of the particular traditions that form the object of attack. And the reason why such new ideas do not make more rapid progress is not, it may be claimed with confidence, that teachers are slow to accept them, but that other outside considerations are at present too strong. Examinations estimate results by definite performances, and parents estimate progress by examinations; and so long as examinations (and inspectors) continue in their present demands, so long will the teacher have to concentrate on technique and leave musicianship to struggle for itself. But a campaign for a change in the methods of estimating results should not be hopeless, for England is, curiously enough, the one country which claims (and in her Public Schools puts the claim into practice) that the end of education is not learning but character; and where such a belief is held it should not be impossible to convince thinkers that the proper end of all teaching in Art is the raising of the standard of taste and not the manufacture of executants. For every one who thinks for a moment will confess that Ruskin spoke the simple unsophisticated truth when he said, "Tell me what you like, and I will tell you what you are."

(b) MUSIC IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

BY JOHN E. BORLAND, Mus. D.

THE teaching of Music in Elementary Schools offers a striking contrast to what is commonly known as musicteaching, which, until recently at least, concerned itself almost entirely with the externals of notation and instrumental mechanism, and ignored the real thing, Music. One cause of the contrast was the absence of pianofortes from Elementary Schools in their earlier years. The teachers had to depend upon their voices, tuningforks, blackboards and pointers for such results as they achieved, and these results were by no means despicable. The very disabilities of the schools proved to be their musical salvation, for where the teachers had no pianos to assist in learning songs in that laziest of all ways, direct imitation, they were led, and indeed were compelled, to give a reasonable amount of training of the ear and eye in order to secure any results at all. It is no exaggeration to say that much of the improvement of music-teaching in high-grade schools, in musicschools, and in private, which is one of the most marked features in the education of to-day, is due to the influence of the Elementary Schools, working upwards, rather than to any artistic force proceeding from the Secondary Schools downwards. It is a common experience to find higher-grade schools of all types just beginning to introduce the kind of Voice-training and Ear-training that the best of the Elementary Schools have used for years. It will be within the recollection of readers of these lines that a recent revival of interest in music in some of the great Public Schools was due to impressions received by a head master who heard