CHILD-SONG-ITS VERSE MRS. ALICE C. D. RILEY, EVANSTON, ILL. The poet tells us that "Knowledge is power;" power over the objective world about us, power of self-control, power to make objective the inner world gained in that self-control. All of our education should give us one of two things-power to understand the thoughts of others or power to express our own. Modern education has occupied itself much with the cultivation of the power of self-expression, and many branches have felt the stimulus of new methods developed from this viewpoint. It seems a little curious that music, drawing, modeling, and all the manual-training branches should have developed along creative lines, leaving verse still asleep in the bonds of the old conventions. Whatever may be the value of classic methods of scansion for college students, it is self-evident that they are not available in first grade. It is also evident that, if we should develop creative work in verse, we should begin at an age when children have not outgrown their natural fondness for it, which alas! they are only too prone to do under present conditions. Therefore, with children, the analysis, which is always a necessary part of creative work, must be done after some other plan than that of classic scansion. Is there any other available means? Yes, that of musical scansion, one with which the children are already getting acquainted in first grade. When Lanier published his book on The Science of English Verse, he cleared away at one stroke all the thicket of trouble which had surrounded the analysis of English verse. He established it once for all on a musical basis. Here we have a method to our hand! One perfectly fitted to its purpose and equipped with a symbol for every least variety in rhythm. A set of symbols, moreover, with which the child is daily becoming acquainted in his music lesson. By teaching these two arts, music and verse, hand in hand, the child will gain in comprehension of each and also in command over the form necessary for creative work in either study. In all our knowledge, we find that we are more developed in our power to recognize and appreciate than in our power to perform. This is true from the lisping infant, who understands much that is said to him but can only utter a few words, to the musical critic at a symphony concert who can write columns of learned criticism about the performance of the symphony and who cannot, perhaps, play a single instrument nor yet write a simple musical composition. The moment, however, that we begin to do creative work in any line we find that we must know the parts which go to make up the whole and their relation to each other. Thus a child may have recited verses and sung songs for years, and may be quite capable of recognizing and appreciating either verse or song, without one thought given consciously to form, to parts, to pro portion, etc.; but let him try to create a verse or a song and he at once must learn something of form, and his knowledge must not be unconscious, as it has been during the period of appreciation, but conscious. He must know the parts and their relation to each other before he can use them in creative work. What are the parts of verse over which he must gain control? Briefly, they are rhythm, rhyme, and other ornamentation. Of these the first is perhaps the most important, since all verse, whether rhymed or blank, has some measure of rhythm. What is rhythm? "Rhythm is measured motion." In the motion, or vibration, which produces sound, this measuring is done by accent which falls recurrently with perfect precision. The same conditions prevail when this sound is used in forming words, as is illustrated by the following examples: 2/4 Pe-ter/Pe-ter/Pe-ter/Pe-ter// 3/3 An-na-bel/An-na-bel/An-na-bel/An-na-bel// When words are combined in phrases and sentences and are so combined that the logical accents of the words and phrases fall as a regularly repeated accent, occurring at regular intervals of time, we have verse with rhythm. 2/4 A-/down the/vale and/up the/hill The/laughing/maids run/silver/shod// And when these lines are further bound together with some rhyme scheme into a stanza, we have some form of rhymed verse, as: 2/4 A-/down the/vale and/up the/hill The/laugh-ing/maids run/silver/shod Here our rhyme scheme gives us the verse form known as the quatrain and our rhythm scheme may be either groups of two's or groups of four's according to our desire, said groups being weak-strong, weak-strong, etc., for the first and weak-strong-weak-weak, weak-strong-weak-weak, etc., for the second. Here we find exactly the same groups, and divisions of groups, as in music and in using musical notation for all purposes of rhythm analysis we shall find a symbol ready to hand for any possible rhythmic groups we may wish to use. The following examples will illustrate some possibilities of musical scansion: 1. 2/4 There/was a/man in/our/town// 2. 3/4/Rock-a-bye/hush-a-bye/bees in the/clover// The/beg-gars are/going to/town// In example one we have one word which demands two pulsations to satisfy our rhythmic sense. In example two, in three beat rhythm we have one syllable which demands two pulsations /clo - ver/. In example three we have the evenly divided beat and in example four we have the unevenly divided beat. The children are becoming familiar with these identical rhythmic quantities in their music lesson, and therefore such analysis is easily understood by them. Of course the work is presented little by little, one step at a time, and in such a way that the work in the two branches deals at any given time with the same rhythmic problem. In the matter of measuring silences, so important in many rhythmic schemes, the musical scansion gives the only satisfactory method. In the following example see how necessary the silences are to the rhythmic scheme and how perfectly the musical notation indicates them. /Break/break/break/ On thy/cold gray/stone, O/sea!/ And I/would that my/tongue could/ut-ter/ These examples will show some of the possibilities of musical scansion. Anyone who will take the trouble to scan any of the poets in this way will find more and more proof of its complete adaptability and practicability. In presenting the work to the child it is necessary that the teacher should have as complete a mastery of her subject as in teaching any other branch. She should know exactly what results she is trying to accomplish and just what methods she may use to accomplish them. There is no time within the limits of this paper to go far into the manner of presentation, but the teacher should always bear in mind the two main branches of the work: the critical and the creative. Knowledge of form is gained in the critical work. Through musical analysis the rhythmic forms are brought to the child's conscious knowledge. The particular rhyme scheme in use is pointed out and its effect upon the verse appreciated. Other ornaments of verse such as alliteration, onomatope, music of line, etc., and their office and effect are brought to the child's attention. Careful work in this department will do much to give one command of material when attempting creative work. In the creative work it is well to let form be self-selective, growing naturally out of the thing the child has to say. Once the form is sufficiently defined to decide its nature, the teacher should devote herself to the perfection of that form. No training in either verse-writing or in self-control is gained if the child be allowed to create at random without regard to form. He may create in any form he choose, or, more strictly speaking, in any form in which his thought clothes itself forth; but, once having defined a form, he should complete his work strictly within the bonds of that form and according to its rules. The value of creative work in verse is many-sided. Its power to develop a sense of form is equal to that of creative work in painting or sculpture, albeit these appeal wholly to the sense of sight or touch, whereas verse and music cultivate an appreciation of form as it appeals to the sense of hearing. Inasmuch as the eye has been better trained than other organs of sense by most educational methods, it is especially valuable to cultivate those arts which appeal to the other senses. There is not only aesthetic but character training in a study which teaches us to express our own ideas through a form which has been perfected and polished by the masters of the past, and any system which would abandon the forms developed by centuries of patient evolution and force each child to develop spontaneously all his own forms, ought, in order to be consistent, to do the same in all other studies, writing, arithmetic, spelling, etc. By this plan each farmer should begin with the forked stick and develop his own implements, and each artisan his. It is easy to see that in this way we should get more original results but it is doubtful if the world would have made much advance by such methods. Brander Mathews says that it is the privilege of each generation to stand upon the shoulders of its predecessor. From this viewpoint, we need not be afraid of teaching forms, since to the artist they are as truly the tools as are implements to the artisan. As a method of developing good taste and appreciation in English, creative work is unequaled. Critics have always claimed that writing verse was one of the best methods of acquiring a good English style, since the need of choosing exactly the right word becomes greater within the limits of a narrow form. There is also a valuable training given the imagination in creative verse-work unsurpassed by any of the other arts, and no child who has done creative work in verse consistently through eight grades and high school will be ignorant nor unappreciative of the beauties of the masterpieces of poetry. Nothing so increases our appreciation of great work in any field as working experience in that field. Here we approach the line which marks off mere verse from poetry. The great poet, like every other great artist, is born, not made. The divine fire is a gift of the gods which no educator pretends to be able to bestow. All we can do is to give the tools, the training, the technique; fate and the gods must do the rest. But to have gained in self-control, in power to handle material (and above all such material as one's native tongue), in power of self-expression, in mastery over form, in power of imagination, and in appreciation of the masters, surely this is an end worthy of our efforts. CHILD-SONG-ITS MUSIC MRS. JESSIE L. GAYNOR, ST. JOSEPH, MO. The study of music has long since ceased to be work for the specialist only. People are beginning to wake up to the fact that not only will those who intend to become players, or singers, or composers, find profit in the study of music, but that as a factor in the general educational scheme, there is no subject which can serve better in mental development than the study of music. No other study teaches such exactness of hearing and such nice appreciation of comparative tonal values. The steps in the development of the musical side of a child are very much the same as those which mark his general mental development. As he grows from within, desiring to express himself, the musical language may serve him in exactly the same way as his mother tongue. Music is a foreign language to many a child, since he may not learn it in his home, and from the lips of his parents. Given a child born into a musical family, where he hears constantly singing and instrumental music, he comes early into the realization of the fact that thought may be expressed in music, as well as in words. To such a child there comes an unconscious appreciation of tone and rhythm. On the other hand, a child who hears little or no music at home will be as deaf to its meaning, and as little appreciative of its beauty, as he would be of a story told to him in a foreign tone. The one side of music which is most universally appreciated, and that because of its close relationship to its sister art of poetry, is rhythm. The appreciation of rhythm comes to a child with his earliest recollection, with babyhood, with his mother's lullaby, with his first Mother Goose rhymes, and with the games and jingles which make up so great a part of a child's life during his first four or five years. Teachers are apt to forget the great value of these childish games and plays, and to think that the study of music should begin with notation and scales, and the various dry symbols which to the teacher mean much, and to the wee pupil are merely a source of confusion. Many children in this day and generation are growing up without their rock-a-bye songs, and without the Mother Goose rhymes, and many of them without the old games and old songs of their grandmothers, and the dear old fairy stories and the old-fashioned songs. Teachers of music find themselves confronted with a problem that is very serious-that of teaching an art which deals with the imagination, and with an appreciation of tone and rhythm, to children who have had absolutely no opportunity to develop even the first ideas of these elements. Educators sometimes forget that an appreciation of tone and rhythm may not be learned about by the intelligence, but must be experienced through the feelings. Music teachers are beginning to appreciate these difficulties, and all over the country methods and systems are being developed to do this beginning work, which should have begun in the nursery. What the kindergarten has done for color and form, the musical kindergarten must do for tone and rhythm. To hear with accuracy, to conceive music-thought with exactness, and to express intelligently through notationthese are the things which the teacher expects to develop. To perceive, to conceive, and to express music; about these three we must construct the whole system of music-education. The symbols of music should be presented as they are needed to express the musical idea. For instance, the bar will be presented when attention is first called to the difference between strong and weak impulses, whether in music or verse. As the note symbol varies in form according to the time-duration which it expresses, it is well to present first that note symbol which expresses one impulse. The most natural note to nse for this purpose is the quarter note. From the beginning, it be |