It has been insinuated, if not broadly asserted, that some supervisors have no more sense than frogs. If the insinuations and accusations are unjust, so much the worse for their author; if true and well deserved, let the guilty members of the profession tremble. Justice and right will eventually prevail. The senseless manner in which school music is handled must go to the wall, and with the downfall will go the schoolmusic supervisors who are wanting in common-sense. If music is so

poorly managed that it brings little or no lasting results, the methods, or lack of methods, must and will be supplanted. The school-music supervisor who hears this paper and has not in mind an instance of one or many supervisors held in the clutch of some baleful influence that tends to the fattening of his salary at the expense of the best interests of the school children is blissfully ignorant of the machinations that predominate in school-music circles, today.

The battle is on, and tho the men and women of ability, fixedness of purpose, lion hearts, and breadth sufficient to lead the van are few and far between, God will raise up more of this sort, and school music will be emancipated. The fight for every vacancy will not be made by everyone who hears of it. Church solo singers, pianists, violinists, and orchestra leaders will discover that they need special training for the supervision of school music, and must not compete without the necessary preparation. Common-sense will prompt those within the circle, who mean to remain, to change their course and apply a small amount of this scarce commodity to their teaching. At this particular moment, could you have the opportunity of talking back, someone might inquire: "What do you mean by all this? At whom are you hurling these remarks?" They are intended for whomsoever they fit.

Let us inquire into the reasonable expectations and the actual results of music in the public schools. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are paid for the support of music teaching in the schools. This would be. cheerfully done, and as much more appropriated, if results were apparent. In the aggregate the amount of precious time devoted, supposedly to the study of music, is something appalling, when it is realized that it gives so little in return. Compare music with other studies: Children come out from their school lives with the ability to read, write, and figure; with a knowledge of geography more or less extensive; and to these are added. many accomplishments. When 90 per cent. will prove their ability in all these directions, will not the same percentage assure you that they cannot read music? Would not plain common-sense prompt every supervisor to shudder upon discovering that the results in his special line were so far below the average? It is something fearful to contemplate.

Full well I realize how roughly the heavy sleeper must be shaken if he is to be awakened. In fact, the majority of school-music supervisors seem to be in a sleep so deep that they are virtually dead. We well know

that it is God's prerogative to awaken the dead. Our hope lies in arousing those who do not sleep so heavily. If the men and women who make up the rank and file of school-music supervisors will rub their eyes and make a desperate effort to arouse and take an honest look at the method which they employ, or realize the lack of method in what they do, and the utter lack of results from their work, things will change. The shackles which many a supervisor has allowed some undue influence to bind upon him will become too galling, the blanket mortgages will become irksome, and the profession will make a mighty effort to emancipate itself. School music will sing a new song; a song of redemption from senseless teaching. Wherever music is taught in the public schools, results, and mighty results, can be obtained. It need not take years to show the results of common-sense teaching. When common-sense is allowed to aid the supervisor, the parents-even the children will display enough common-sense to recognize a change for the better, and will enter upon a

new era.

Musicians outside the ranks of school-music supervisors will hail the improvement and stop throwing stones in order to use both hands in congratulating the supervisors for the preparatory work done in the schoolroom, thus lightening the task of advance teaching along all lines. Until such time as the general run of school-music supervisors employ common-sense, music will languish. The only substantial hope of America ever becoming a musical nation lies in educating the masses thru the public schools.

The foregoing arraignment of the profession is based upon results actually obtained. To leave the matter in this way is simply to have uttered words of bitterness which only stir up strife. The very heading of this paper assumes that the root of the evil is a lack of common-sense in teaching music in the public schools. Its author begs leave to show some of the things commonly done that are utterly devoid of commonsense, leaving the decision with you.

Attention is first called to the senseless use of books and charts. Does any teacher need to be told that the chart exercise, or song from the book, loses all its virtue as soon as sung thru a few times? Is it any wonder that supervisors meet in convention and discuss the problem of how to keep up the interest of the singing classes? How many singing lessons in the public-school room amount to more than a number of pages which are sung over by the class while the supervisor sings with them and for them, lugging them over all difficulties, then leaving these same pages to be sung daily until his return? Why was this particular lesson given to the class? Alas! simply because the pages designated were the next in regular order as given in said book. If the lesson be given from a chart, can any plausible excuse be given for the constant use of a pointer to lead the class along? Are the children learning anything but to lean

upon the strong, never-failing voice of the teacher and the point of that stick? Is it not combination of children's voices and teachers' brains?

Oh! that a huge bonfire might be made of the thousands of sticks, or pointers, or indexes-call them what you will-that are employed in pointing the notes, or in pounding the schoolroom desks to keep the time for the class. They might well be called "independence killers." Is it a good principle to lug rather than direct? As to the vital interest of the class in the lesson, can a class be expected to have a keen interest in the song that has been sung until it is worn threadbare? Where the same set of books is used from year to year hundreds of children come up to the room with songs all stowed away in their memories. How long would the grade teacher be able to hold a position who was unable to give countless illustrations of the subject in hand? How about the supervisors, to say nothing of the grade teachers under their charge? How many supervisors, with a lofty air of mock modesty, will tell us they "make no pretensions as composers; hence they never write exercises for their classes, but select music from the masters"? Is it necessary for such modest supervisors to explain that they should not pretend to be teachers? Nothing in connection with school music looks so utterly ridiculous as to see the pious way in which supervisors purchase books containing rows of figures representing the notes of simple exercises, these to be tranferred to the blackboards for daily drill. Think of a grade teacher who buys a book containing mathematical problems like, 2+2=4, 3+3 = 6, and uses it to copy from. Would not a grain of common-sense suggest to supervisors that they prepare themselves so well that their minds will be storehouses of apt illustration, and prompt them to fit the grade teachers to write correctly and rapidly?

And now a reference to the subject of time. Here we find a condition of long standing, which, if squarely faced, should make music teachers, whether in or out of school, so astounded that they will lose their senses, both common and uncommon.

Ask a hundred music teachers the greatest difficulty they ever met in teaching music, and they will all tell you, "The time." In fact, many a music teacher will tell certain pupils that they have no natural sense of time and can never learn to keep time.

Shame on such teachers! I should honestly suppose they would be afraid to go to bed in the dark. When we realize the indisputable fact that a sense of time is as natural as breath, yet admit the difficulty of making the pupil sense the notation, thus interpreting the meaning of the notes, it would seem as tho common-sense would get a hearing and common-sense methods of teaching time would prevail. Nothing stands so squarely across the pathway of every music pupil, in his early stages, as the enigma of time, yet the methods of instruction commonly employed only serve to make utterly dark that which was not clear.

Nothing in connection with teaching the rudiments of music so much. demands a common-sense change of method as time-teaching. The teacher who attempts to analyze a ten-year-old boy into an appreciation of the fact that two eighth notes equal a quarter ignores the fact that this same boy at two years of age easily imitated the motion of these notes as drummed by the father upon the child's toy drum. The supervisor who employs a stick to point the notes, or to pound the desk, and imagines that the children are learning time, is easily fooled. Pupils of private teachers are being finished off, prepared to fill positions as performers or teachers, sent out to battle for themselves, with ability to read music and to execute, but having been distinctly taught that they have one weakness that will haunt them forever; that is, no correct time-sense. Do you know of such cases? I do. How shocking to hear an ambitious man or woman, who has spent years in the study of music, tell of teachers of national repute who told them they could not learn to keep time! Asylums should be founded for musicians who are constitutionally weak in time, and the teachers who tell their pupils such twaddle should constitute the first class to enter such asylums.

Tune is taught by imitation, but time is largely taught by analysis. Why not teach time as we teach tune? One learns to read his mothertongue by grasping the endless variety of groupings of letters upon the printed pages, and all learn to read.

Musical characters are always to be read in groupings which are governed by rhythmical swing. The fingers of one hand will count the sum total of the different groupings.

Rhythmical swing is as natural as breath; still many a pupil is told that he cannot learn to interpret the notation. He never will as long as the interpretation is never taught. The teacher carries the pupil over all rough places and mistakes imitation of the song for the sensing of the printed characters.

With an honest belief that all the matters thus far touched upon are teeming with faults that forbid the rapid growth of school music, I leave them to touch upon a stupendous blunder which has been made, is being made, and, alas! for the lack of common-sense on the part of the schoolmusic supervisors, is going to be made for some time to come. In the aggregate, how many millions of lessons in sight-singing have been given, not one of which gave results of value to the majority of the class? To expect results from a class lesson is as senseless as to expect the Almighty to controvert his unchangeable laws and have the heavenly bodies pause in their orbits.

It is God's decree that everything grows by individual effort; yet school-music supervisors seem to think that God's laws will be suspended. in the matter of teaching school children to sing. The few who have acknowledged the necessity of individual singing have rendered an account

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of their stewardship by making pleas like the following: "No time during the singing period;" "Children never have sung alone;" "Children are nervous and easily frightened;""Large boys are ugly and would refuse to sing alone." Some supervisors go so far as to say that the ability to read music is not worth the cost; that it is of more importance that children should develop the emotional, should study the artistic, should learn to sing with deep expression, and so on.

It is trying to listen to such senseless argument; yet we hope that eventually such supervisors may be awakened from their deep sleep, or be pronounced dead and be given a speedy burial. Who dare affirm that 25 per cent. of their school children, after nine years of chorus singing, can read ordinary, plain music at sight? More than 75 per cent. can learn to read music at sight, and no more time be given to singing than is now allotted for its study. This is no fairy tale, for it is being demonstrated every day in public schools where individual singing is compulsory.

To have individual singing is simply to apply the same commonsense to music that is applied to every other study. The old complaint of inability to keep the children interested will lose all its force, and the next generation will rise up and call supervisors of school music blessed.

The masses will not, as formerly, say, "Our school-music supervisor was a fine musician, but we did not learn to read music;" but they will say, "Our supervisor had a fund of common-sense which prompted him to give his pupils a thoro rudimental training, and we learned to read music when in the schools."

With the masses able to read music, the interest in music will be a vital part of life in America.

SHOULD MUSIC IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS BE TAUGHT FROM THE SONG TO THE EXERCISE?

C. H. CONGDON, CHICAGO, ILL.

I shall not attempt to prove that every music lesson should conform to the set process of first singing a song by rote and then a related exercise by note.

The philosophy of music teaching in the public schools is not usually presented in a single lesson. It takes a series of lessons to reveal the object for which we are working. Lessons are oftentimes only fragmentary parts of a complete plan. I desire to prove that in music, song is the basis of the child's study. It first arouses his interest, and then fills his mind with musical forms and melodic concepts, which are the necessary foundation to his musical growth.

Sight-singing is largely an act of the memory. The reader discovers, thru the notation, melodic progressions with which he is already familiar, The notes suggest to the mind musical concepts already