gested above. Into this field then, not the other, do our pupils go for study. And the whole motley gang of our fame and money-seeking studenthood, wholly unprepared, are taken in pell mell to study opera and to become Melbas and de Reskés in a year or two-paid in advance. Thus has the inartistic trend of our people and our private teaching at home been propagated abroad, instead of having been directed, admonished, and shown the way to go by those who should have been their teachers and guides in art.

It must always be recognized and remembered that there are, in all bands and camps and in all countries, exceptions, good people and true, and able and efficient ones as well. But we are not studying exceptions. We are studying principles. Education in music, no more than in any other study, must be left to the hazard of exception, and chance, and defeat. And it shall not be.

WHAT MAY BE DONE ABOUT IT?

It now remains for the real educator who is a musician, and the musician who is a trained educator, to institute a new order of things in music-teaching. It is for such to show by actual result and demonstration what is the failure in such endeavor, why it is, and how to do differently. Such educators are to be found now, and the class is steadily growing in strength and in power-in the public-school music field.

WHAT CAN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS DO?

Had our people been by nature artistic, as they are intellectually intelligent, they would have instituted a system of free musical education at the same time and as a twin with the free intellectual system. They would have realized at the commencement that such was a necessity of the music art of our nation. Lacking this we have drifted to the third century of our life, without definite organized fashion for education in music. We have done the best in allowing music to occupy a place, the place of an orphan, a foundling, to be sure, but still a place, at the fireside of the nation's public schools. Placed there by faithful musical souls of educational insight, it has there existed, under protest, dependent for sympathy and interest, not to speak of actual sustenance, upon the strenuous personal effort of chance music-lovers in the school field. These have succeeded in keeping her there till now, by her own beauty and by her proven necessity to our civilization, she has conquered for herself a place in the nation's regard second to no other study in the curriculum today. That music may stay in the public schools and become a definite factor in that curriculum is the prayer of all who know what is going on there. Those who do not know cannot conceive of the growth and value of such effort, nor of the influence for good upon, not only our own children, but upon the foreign element pouring into the country. One of the remarkable features of the musical effort in the public schools here is that the system of activity already arrived at, has come almost directly in line with that of the traditions of the French free system in use for over a century. And this without the benefit of tradition, for few of our school music-workers ever even knew that such a system

existed. They have laid their own tracks, hewn their own timber, brought their own steel, iron, and wood, and created a system which now lacks but the unifying influence of organization to make it one of the most practical and advanced in the whole world-up to a certain point.

The public schools must now serve as example in regard to the necessity for educational law governing art study. They must be a corrective influence for the present, fulfill the traditions of the past, and serve as indication for the future of national music art in the country. They must not remain separate from the private or specializing fields. They must teach these fields and bridge the chasm between the two. They must teach these people that altho music is in itself an art, its teaching (up to a certain point) must be according to pedagogic law; that the technical departments or "means" must be separated from the emotional or interpretative "ends" in view. This latter is but little understood in the United States, even in the schools themselves as yet. The old-fashioned idea that because music is "somehow inspirational" it must therefore be taught "somehow inspirationally" has sifted into the conventional, even into the educational thought of the day and become a blight in the progress of music art in our ultra-progressive country. The public schools, being educational and free to dictate principles, must demonstrate away from this fallacy.

Then they can prove that "giving lessons" is not necessarily "teaching," even when accompanied by a big artistic name, or a big fee. They can show up the fruitlessness and loss of time that goes on in the name of lesson-giving. They can show the necessity for fundamentals as a foundation, and for the precedence of foundation to superstructure. They can show that pupils in music may be taught in classes in many essential features, and that it is not necessary to have one pupil in a room alone with a teacher at a fabulous price per half hour in order to learn what thirty pupils may accomplish in half that time. They can show that examination must be there to bound result. They can prove and demonstrate that nine children out of ten may be taught valuable musical instruction which private studio people from the beginning to this hour have denied to them as impossible. They can bring death to the "born, not made" cant.

They can prove that fluent sight-reading, the keeping of time, the sense of rhythm, of phrase, of memory, and other ordinary intelligence, are possible to all normally constituted children, and that the studio epithets of "stupid,” "dumb," "idiotic," belong to the teachers, not to the pupils, when result is not forthcoming. They must indicate to parents the crime of an attempt to teach a young man or a young woman an aria who does not know time, tune, language, phrase, and cannot read one strain at sight, or without it. They can show up in garish light the poverty of imparting power of the ordinary "music-teacher" who has not been trained to teach. And so may they prevent as in no other way possible, the self-establishment of people ignorant of the first elements of the music-teacher, and fated to work much disaster to pupils by such ignorance.

But before and above all things else, the public schools must show to the public, the parents, and the nation, that a teacher must be free from pecuniary obligation toward pupils in order to be in a position to properly educate those pupils. This is one of the primal laws of our music art success, and the public must gain its understanding thru the results in the public schools.

But the public schools must not themselves try to do all. The public schools are limited, and must ever be so, by the existence and demands of other studies, by inevitable lack of time, by lack of organization if never so well organized, by lack of artistic education of the best trained music-teachers there employed, and by difference in life and object and gift, of the pupils there assembled. The public school must not even seem to try to do it all. The public must not get the idea that all of musical education ever could be possible under any circumstances, to the public school field. In fact, the great danger in the schools at this present moment is of their falling into that evil of the outside studios, of placing the spectacular before the essential, of pleasing by the superficial, leaving the fundamental half done, of producing attraction instead of knowledge and science, of confounding the means with the end, of mixing the inspirational with the technical, to the extinction of both.

Too much of the expositional-the concert, the recital, padded out by extraneous attraction, carries danger. Even when preparation is carried on outside of school hours, it may be made to distract and weary young children, satiate them of performance before being at all ready for it, make the other education seem more tedious and difficult, while producing but crude and inefficient music result. We have not need of more mediocrity in the country, but of better quality in what is done. Knowledge, science, and power must be made to precede the spectacular. Attraction must be made subsidiary to benefit. Anyone can sing and play and show off. To point right standards, and to properly prepare to study for perfect performance is the province of public-school work.

The public schools are doing marvelous things in regard to musical education. There is not time to commence to enumerate them. Praise and credit have been in some measure accorded them in a series of articles upon the subject printed in the Musical Courier for now over one and a half years.

But after all, beyond what the public schools may at best ever be able to perform, the great musical educational endeavor of this nation must come thru the federal government. There must come here, as in France, a distinct free national system of musical education, analagous to that of our public schools themselves, where from A to Z of all that underlies true musicianliness must be laid as a foundation, together with the fitting reverence, taste, perception, and desire to attain, which come only thru the true, real culture.

We must stop top-dressing and get at the depths of values. We must stop grafting and plant seeds. We must stop music trade and commence to exalt true music art. We must stop exhibiting and learn how to live and to love art. We must make our musician's nature at home. We must learn

reverence and standard and desire for perfection, instead of mad race for accumulation of material resource thru an art avenue. And this must all come about thru national music education, established by the government and cared for by the government to this end, for the glory of the government and of the nation and of art, as in France.

Only so may we ever have proper musical education, national musical education, national musicians, national music art. For as the great emperor Napoleon said and publicly decreed:

"A free national system of musical education is a necessity to the music art of a republic. Arise, let us go hence. For the end is not yet."

MUSIC TERMINOLOGY REFORM

CHARLES I. RICE, SUPERVISOR OF MUSIC, WORCESTER, MASS.

It gives me the greatest pleasure to be here today as spokesman, and bring to you this initial message from the newly appointed Committee on Terminology Reform.

I accepted chairmanship of this committee with what I believe to be a full realization that its path is beset with many and great dangers.

Anyone who has observed the teaching of school music in any considerable number of places in this country cannot fail to have remarked the great diversity of statement employed by different teachers regarding the facts which we are engaged in teaching and the equal diversity of terminology used in teaching the symbols by which musicians seek to record these facts. To the teacher of exact sciences our picturesque use of the same term to describe two or more entirely different things never ceases to be a marvel.

Isolated individuals have from time to time raised their voices in protest against the use of this or that term, but this year of grace, 1907, in which the desirability of reform in music terminology is first recognized by such an organization as the National Education Association affords us who are here an opportunity of promoting the early stages of a good work. We can do little more than make a beginning at this session but I am very solicitous that this beginning be made under favorable conditions.

I am sure that this campaign, if carried on with wisdom, will in the course of time work out some reforms which will be to the everlasting advantage of everyone. I say if carried on with wisdom, for it is the easiest thing in the world to get into an argument in which the main issue is lost to sight. It must be apparent also that one, two, or three years will be necessary if the committee is to do anything of value.

We are all apt to be jealous of any attack on our own methods and this is exactly as it should be. I believe no one should be blown about by every shifting wind and I also believe that there is not one person here but what if shown two different ways of saying the same thing, would gladly choose the better. A true statement is just as easily made, just as easily understood, and

just as easily acted upon as a false one and it has this fundamental difference— it is true instead of false.

Grove's Dictionary of Music says: "A sharp raises the pitch of a note, etc." Is this true? and has a note any pitch? Another music dictionary published in 1905 says of this character: "It raises the pitch of a tone one chromatic semi-tone;" and of the double-sharp: "It raises a note a whole tone." Now is this free and interchangeable use of note and tone evidence of a breadth of belief wide enough to take in both words and say that note and tone mean the same? I think not. What I do think is this: The definition of the sharp got in because it did not seem quite bad enough to be excluded, but the author, on coming to the double-sharp could not persuade himself to be consistent and say that it "raises a tone a whole tone" and instead of going to the bottom of things and starting right, he side-stepped the whole matter and put another stumbling block in the way of a clear comprehension of the facts. But someone will say: "Nobody teaches it that way," and, I reply that for some years I have been interested in finding out how different people teach these things and that for the past nine months as chairman of the Committee on Terminology Reform, it has been my special business to collect statements from a large number of people scattered all over the United States.

As a result I am convinced that the theory of pitch and pitch representation is erroneously taught to many, many thousands of pupils in the schools of our country, and let me say also that we teach it as well as it is taught in any country under the sun.

This discreditable state of affairs will continue until we who know a better way make ourselves felt with our own fellow-teachers thru institute and convention addresses, and also with the authors of textbooks and dictionaries.

Dr. Calcott was one of the early reformers, for in his Musical Grammar, published over one hundred years ago, he says (p. 22, sec. 47):

The greatest care must be taken not to misunderstand the words note and tone. A note is the sound which is heard, or the mark that represents it on the staff; but a tone is the difference between two notes, etc.

After showing how far away he was from present-day ideas, I will point out that he was right on another matter. Speaking of bar, he says: "In common language, the word bar is used improperly for measure." Lowell Mason in the second edition of the Boston Academy Manual of Music, published 1836, says (p. 41, sec. 38), “Observe the difference between a measure and a bar. Do not call a measure a bar." Opposition to the report of this committee, if any develops, can probably be classified under two heads. There is one class of teachers which believes in inventing new nouns. This we will call the revolutionary party. Another group believes that we should seek for a better understanding and clearer teaching of existing terms. This is the reform party.

To the first class, I would like to say that progress in any line which looks