The Road to Music

I

IT has become an irresistible temptation, with me, to ask musicians by what road they came home. Some, like Henry, achieve music by rebellion; their innate musicality flourishes upon negation; a wall to kick against, far from breaking their shins, only fattens their artistic marrow, strengthens their artistic muscle. Patience, my little Quaker pupil, is like that. Once I abandoned her altogether. ’I cannot teach you, Patience,’ I told her, ‘because you do not learn anything.’ After some months she called me on the telephone to ask if I would object to her playing for assembly, at school? She had, she assured me, been practising; the violin did not sound badly at all, and would I like to hear her play ‘Cinquantaine’ some day? Tuesday, perhaps, at her old lesson hour?

‘Cinquantaine’ emerged from under her bow with an actual lilt — the first lilt ever achieved by Patience. She must, in her vacation, have practised her fingers callous; I sat down and pondered, but I knew I should never dare this method with a soul less hardy than Patience. Not every fiddler has a Quaker genius for stubbornness.

Every year, on Cynthia’s birthday, Anton Horner comes to play the Brahms Horn Trio with Cynthia and her father. For twenty years Horner played first horn in the Philadelphia Orchestra; it was Cynthia who asked him how he happened to choose his instrument. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘for the same reason every German boy in my day wanted to learn the horn. We all had to be soldiers, sometime, and the army brass has a good place in the rear.’ But Horner’s name tells his true story; his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather were master horners. It is miraculous what Tony can do with a horn; he can sing you to sleep or he can march you to battle, but he says it was not always so. His father had to beat him to make him practise; he used to be locked in his room, first with a violin, then with a horn. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ Tony said, looking benevolently round at our family assortment of young fiddlers. ‘ Keep ’em at it, whether they like it or no!’

We used to be afraid to ‘ keep ’em at it,’ afraid of our own parental enthusiasm and the possible mistake of overemphasis. How much music could be pushed down a child’s throat without fatal indigestion? But we fear this no longer; we have seen our young revolt; around the piano of an evening we have mourned the loss of one child and another from the fiddlers’ ranks — and then, eventually, they have come back. All but one, and him we await with confidence.

Even Cynthia tried to desert us — tried passionately, when she was fourteen. She practised with a scowl upon her face. ‘What good does music do me?’ she asked me one day in fury, holding her violin at arm’s length as if it were a serpent and would bite her. ‘Playing the fiddle won’t get me into Omega Tau. It won’t get me partners at dances. It just interferes with all those things. I hate music. What good can music do me?’

Nobody in her senses would try to put off a young and healthy Cynthia with middle-aged comfort, with ‘You wait. When you ’re older, you ’ll know.’ I hesitated, and Cynthia looked full at me.

‘You!’ she said belligerently. ‘Aunt Kay, you play more music than anyone I know, except Father. I suppose you’ve always been like that? I suppose you never wanted to throw your fiddle in the sink?’

I never did, and no possible expediency of auntly compromise could make me say so. I felt suddenly, ridiculously, as passionate as Cynthia. ‘You’re spoiled,’ I said. ‘Put your fiddle in the sink and go sing Omega Tau. You’re not worthy of a violin.’

II

And then I went home and tried to remember what it was like to be fourteen. . . .

At fourteen, three brothers flooded our house with members of the team (John had by then passed beyond teams). Large, muscular youths eyed my violin with curiosity, requested me to play upon it, and, as I played, lay dreamily upon their stomachs before the fire, smoking their cigarettes. Thus far, good. Song, melody, they could understand — but if I attempted to talk about music they fidgeted. They looked embarrassed and slunk away in search of easier game, of companions less intense, more comfortable. I saw this,— what girl could help seeing it? — and I learned to keep silence when silence was in order. That I hated this restriction and rebelled against it in my heart made me no less the traitor. This was a decade before the word ’highbrow’ had been coined to crown the confusion of those whose blood leads them — flings them, willynilly — into embarrassing and lonely passions for Bach fugues. By the time that dread word was born, I was safe in music school.

Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty; I was fortunate in that my years of self-deception were short, my disloyalties brief. The largest of these took place, I remember, at Cynthia’s exact age of rebellion — fourteen. There was a choice between playing in a recital at the Acorn Club, in Philadelphia, and going to a hometown affair called the ‘Prep Dance.’ After weeks of musical preparation I told my mother I could not play well enough for the recital, I told my music teacher I could not endure the Wieniawski Minuet, and I went to the dance. My teacher, who had come up from Philadelphia every Saturday for five years to give me a lesson, shook me from his list, spurned me eloquently in a letter to my parents, and I never saw him again.

Recalling these things, I wondered if all adolescents rebel against art, as they rebel against everything of parental instigation. If there were some way they could discover music for themselves, and not be pulled to it, sulking under the harness! Never to mention music, never to urge one’s son to the piano — and then to have him come, suddenly and alone, upon beauty! Impossible; by the time his emotional apparatus was ready for music, his muscles would have grown too old to train.

Horner was right; we have to keep them at it. I have seen children pass through months of violent rebellion against music and months of warm devotion to it; the bridging periods of lukewarm tolerance are due, I think, to habit. Once in a while fortune aids the despairing parent by presenting the child with a new deskmate or roommate who can or cannot play, but who loves music. In the very nick, the very crack and needlepoint of time, Cynthia acquired a beau — transient as summer, but as welcome — who thought a violin more engaging even than curls, and said so.

I know not how it may be with genius; I have had no traffic with genius or even with superior talent; my children and my nieces and nephews are intelligent and ambitious, but without musical gift. No perfect pitch, no golden voice, no limber wrist of magic is ours for the showing; we exist merely as examples of how far the normal person may come into possession of music. Perhaps ‘average’ is a word less offensive to the gods — do they, having created us in their image, look upon perfect pitch as the norm? However that may be, here upon earth I have found but one key to a child’s heart, musically speaking, but one bait to which he will rise eagerly, repeatedly: active participation in ensemble performance.

III

How many mothers have said to me, ‘My little Freddy is only two years old,’ — or five or six, — ‘ but I am sure he is going to be very musical because he will sit for hours listening to really good music on the radio’ — or the victrola or whatever. With difficulty I suppress the reply, ‘Yes, my dear madam, and I have seen cretins in the asylum do the same for even longer hours, with the identical expression of sleepy wonderment displayed upon the face of your Freddy. And cretin and Freddy would enjoy the same sensation if stroked gently on either side of the backbone.’

And this raises the question of cheap music, jazz, the radio, and all the competitions and comparisons that good music meets to-day. It is of no use to outlaw cheap mechanical music from the home; it is, indeed, dangerous. If the age decree jazz, let our defense lie not in prohibition but in education; let us teach the young to differentiate, to know that ‘Hello, Beautiful,’however tickling to the palate, bears no more relationship to music than does soda pop to vintage wine. Verbal persuasion is unwise; exposure, repetitive exposure, to good music is what turns the trick; but the exposure must include more than listening. Children — I cannot say it too often — cannot prove things in the abstract; they think with their bodies. Do not ask them, therefore, to listen to Haydn; ask them to play Haydn, no matter how unskillfully. Children are savages — more difficult still, they are savages thrust by us into a sophisticated society, and they have prepared for themselves defenses against this society. Tell a modern child that Beethoven is beautiful and he will not believe you — until he has proved it by the repeated testimony of his own finger tips.

Cynthia has a victrola in her room; often, passing her door, I have heard her caroling to the tune of ‘A Dream Walking,’or the most recent and appealing torch song. She invites me to listen. ‘Is n’t that tune,’ she will demand, ‘simply divine?’ But invite her to play the divine tune on her fiddle and she will turn up her nose. ‘Too thin,’ she told me once. ‘Those tunes, they’re boring to play.’ Cynthia still thinks Handel is boring to play, too. ‘It’s too smooth. Father, let’s do the Horn Trio. There’s some excitement to Brahms.’

I never saw a child that was not bored by soloism — his own performance as well as somebody else’s. What boy wants to sit on a piano stool and play pieces for mother’s visitors? He is shy and uncomfortable, and his resentment has a solid psychological foundation. A child detects instantly a false situation; in the name of music or culture or the acquisition of poise, he is being sacrificed to his mother’s vanity; is it any wonder he only bides his time before flinging off music forever ?

Once I had a violin pupil, a little girl of eleven whose talent was equaled only by her powers of resistance to pedagogy. A fond mother had set up a flourishing case of musical hatred (‘Mother says music is beautiful as prayer, but I only practise because I get a dollar an hour for it’). One day I asked Mary if she would care to come to our house next Sunday evening. She eyed me suspiciously and asked if there would be music. I said that there would be some children her age and we might sing a little. ‘There will be,’ I said, ‘a string quartet and you can double with Cynthia on second fiddle if you think you can keep the place. But nobody has to play. We just do it for fun.’

At home the bets were five to one against Mary’s arrival, but on Sunday the stroke of six announced her — silent, very much on the defensive. She refused to take part in the singing and wandered about the room with a fine show of indifference, but from the corner of my eye I saw her pause by the fire and reach up a furtive hand to touch the old French horn on the mantel, saw her pause again to pluck a string on the cello in the corner. When we stopped singing she had come to anchor by the cupboard which holds the fiddles. ‘Is this the Maggini violin?’ she asked. ‘That boy,’ nodding coldly toward John Junior, ‘sang off key.’

Quickly, before John Junior could pick up this gauntlet, I replied that yes, it was the Maggini and we were going to play a Haydn quartet. I told her I was sure she would be wanting to go home before we began. Avoiding that sharp childish eye, ‘Will you please,’ I said rapidly, ‘get the Maggini ready for me while I answer the telephone?’

I left the room. The telephone had not rung and my lie had emerged from the larynx in a silly falsetto; did Mary know I was playing my last card? When I came back she was sitting comfortably before one of the quartet stands, John’s Maggini on her knee. ‘I tuned it,’ she said, ‘and I dusted off the rosin. It sounds fine on the G string. I’ll stay if you’ll let me play it.’

Even very small children love to handle a violin; its glossy smooth surface, the vibration of its plucked strings, exercise the fascination — but in superlative degree — of a perfect conch shell found upon the seashore. I honestly believe the privilege of dusting the Maggini has won more childish converts to music than many an endured symphony concert. All the radios in the world playing ‘Cock-aDoodle-Doo,’ all the tickets for all the Youth Symphonies, would not have availed against Mary’s rebellion. . . . Perhaps it is not so complicated as this. Perhaps any two-legged, deep-hearted creature fashioned by the Lord, if he held a fiddle in his hands, would know beneath his chin a cold emptiness, would itch to unfurl his right elbow in the balance of a long, strong bow.

This exercise of musical participation cannot begin too early. Let the child sing nursery rhymes with his mother, turn pages for the pianist as soon as he can read music, or sound A for the visiting fiddler to tune. Also, it can do no harm to leave the nursery door open when there is music. Music that drifts upstairs to a child’s dark bedroom possesses a peculiar potency. Going to sleep to music at night, waking to music in the morning — absurdly enough, these experiences are, in some unaccountable way, musical participation; they define music, for the child, as a thing natural and homely, as much a part of the day as breakfast, dinner, and supper.

IV

There are people who hate radios, and people — I say it with regret — who hate pianos and violins. Most families possess a well-rounded example of each species, and this is something we melomaniacs must acknowledge or see our family music crash dissonantly into family dispute. We who practise upon the flute are so taken up with making a wrong noise into a right one that we forget the persons to whom even a right noise upon the flute is maddeningly wrong. But there is a way to solve this problem.

When my brother John built his new house the architect said, ‘I understand the main feature of this residence is to be the music room? That is why you are building the house?’

John shook his head. ‘I want a room big enough for two pianos and at least a hundred people in comfortable chairs singing Bach. That will be the music room. But that is not at all what you call the main feature of the residence, and it is not at all the reason’ — he turned to me and grinned — ‘why we are building the house.’

Over his blueprints the architect raised the patient inevitable eyebrows of architects in conference with clients. ‘We had a music room in the other house,’ I explained, ‘and in the house before that, too.’

Impossible for me to speak of John’s houses in any but the possessive case, although I have never actually lived in any of them. A house in which one’s fiddle and one’s children’s fiddles repose under the piano can be spoken of in no other case than the possessive.

‘In all of the houses,’ John was saying with a large gesture of impatience, ‘ in all the houses we had music rooms. Pianos, fiddles, flutes — Lord, yes. But what good did it do us?’ He turned to me again. ‘There was no place to sit downstairs except the music room and a library that opened off it with double doors. Every time we wanted to play, the family had to stop talking or roll those sticky doors shut or go somewhere else. When we had people for dinner we could n’t play or sing because the Browns did n’t like music. Wasted evenings,’ — his voice grew indignant, — ‘ wasted Saturday afternoons. And as likely as not a batch of newly published trios just arrived from Breitkopf and Hartel’s.’

John’s eye was gloomy with remembered wrongs.

‘So what we want,’ I began helpfully . . .

‘Is a retreat,’ finished the architect, ‘for musicians.’

‘Nothing of the kind!’ John shouted. ‘We are n’t going to retreat. We’re going to play music. It’s the audience that’s going to retreat. The people that don’t play. . . . Look here!’ John’s finger was on the blueprint. ‘You see those steps? Well, they lead up from the music room to the hall. I want that hall a mile long. I don’t care how it looks. It can look like a public school or a hospital or a lunatic asylum — I don’t care. Then away down here at the end of the hall I want a room, nice and cheerful, with books in it, and a fireplace. Card tables, easy-chairs — anything in it,’ said John, ‘as long as it has a door that will stay shut.’

‘ With a keyhole,’ interrupted the architect, suddenly inspired, ‘on the outside?’

‘That’s it,’ John said, in his voice a rich and eager satisfaction. ‘That’s why we are building this house.’

Speaking practically, I know of nothing more fatal to the musical progress of a growing family than a piano in the common sitting room. Particularly if grandparents live in the house, or a husband who, however sweet-tempered, is not sufficiently interested in music to endure those loud bleating sounds produced by a piano under striving small fingers. Sounds even more excruciating can be achieved by beginning violinists. I myself battled with such a situation until so lately as a year ago, when, against vigorous protest, I had the piano moved upstairs. I put it — hideous but well-used upright — into one of those rooms possessed by every sizable family and known by such titles as the sewing room, Aunt Eliza’s (deceased) room, or Uncle Jim’s (deceased) study. I did this in secret, when the children were at school and their grandparents taking their afternoon siesta. Three large, grimy, pleasant men appeared at my door and with astonishing rapidity took the piano apart and flourished it up the stairs. In husky Irish whispers they requested a duster and delicately dusted its insides until the sewing room was dim with dust, after which they put the instrument together again and, with no more disturbance than three sneezes, took their pay, grinned, and disappeared.

I may call this one of the two major strategic musical victories of my life. The other was achieved when I moved the radio into the kitchen. Radios in the right place are as welcome as pianos in the right place, but in the wrong place, radios are . . . Let me tell a story.

On a boat going from Philadelphia to Boston I met a large genial man of middle age. He was the kind of man who carries a heavy elaborate camera and takes pictures of everyone on the boat — the very person I should have thought would love a radio. Upon the second evening of our voyage, a warm, soft summer night, I put my children to bed and went forward to enjoy the stars. As I hurried along the lighted deck a spirited raffle was taking place in the main saloon, with three radios as prizes. No one was on the bow deck; I stood alone by the rail thinking with satisfaction of my children tucked into starboard bunks and my automobile tucked into cavernous places below deck. Broken water slipped gently, monotonously past our bows; a mild contented revery possessed me, and I wondered why all the people who must go from Philadelphia to Boston in summer, instead of screaming through the night on heated wheels, do not tread thus softly upon the starlit wave.

A voice at my side said, ‘What more could anybody want?’ — and I recognized the camera man. ‘Why,’ he continued, ‘don’t people who have to go places remember about boats — and why are n’t you down there buying chances on radios?’

I inquired if the gentleman so much wanted to win a radio, and he replied with gusto that he certainly did. To which I asked a little wearily why he wanted to win a radio.

He turned on me quite ferociously and said with a bitter, startling distinctness, ‘So I can carry it up here and drop it over the bow.’ His voice was exultant. ‘So I can watch myself drop a radio, brand-new and shiny, over this rail — splash! — into that black, irrecoverable grave. Into that bourn,’ he continued with a large gesture, and with magnificent disregard of the triteness of the quotation, ‘from which no traveler . . .‘

‘Returns.’ I finished, and extended my hand. He shook it gravely, and we resumed our starry watch.

It was that moment which told me Music in the right place is what domestic America needs — and it was that moment which, cherished all summer, inspired me to move our radio from living room to kitchen. The kitchen — is it not the hearth, the altar, the very sanctum of domestic life? Does it not deserve, therefore, as ornament, the very cream of modern invention? Also, is it not the room farthest from fiddledom and the piano bench? Since that night, peace has graced our home.

V

To revert to the fascinating query, ‘ By what road do men come to music ? ’ I advise against asking this question of a singer. The answer lies too wide of the mark. Fate, or God, or the circumstances of heredity shaped Fiorella’s vocal chords with a beautiful physiological exactitude of proportion: Fiorella opens her mouth and a lark flies forth. But, we may ask, what has this to do with music? Seven toes on each foot would lead home as surely. Many a Fiorella have I met with throat of bird, brain of wax, and heart of putty.

On the other hand, I have seen more converts made, more unbelievers brought to Jordan, by singing than by any other blandishment of the muse. I have watched Sarah lead in the baptized by the dozens, and I have admired her technique, which is compounded less of enthusiasm than of an unshakable conviction that anybody in the world, if he will open his mouth wide enough, can sing — more important still, that he will like it. Sarah herself learned singing long ago — wise Sarah, who would have been drowned, deafened, lost completely in the vociferation of husbandly arpeggios, the urgent fiddle strings of her progeny. She had no voice; she could not, indeed, stay on the tune; but ten years ago an idea seized her, and with Sarah an idea is fait accompli no matter how long the way. At that time, no one in the family sang; John went about in trains and buses with Magnificats and B Minor Masses under his arm, but he never sang. It had not occurred to him.

Sarah sat down and trained — not her voice, but her ear. She began with ‘Three Blind Mice.’ Eventually she induced seven other women to sing with her once a week, on Wednesday morning. After a decent interval they procured a professional leader; the chorus now numbers ninety members, few of whom ever miss a Wednesday. The chorus does not sing in public; its aim is to read the literature of choral music. Sarah is herself astonished at the direction in which the wind of music has blown her straws; John,¹ whom one would surely never think of as a straw, has become as enthusiastic a singer as his wife. Sarah and he hold Sunday-night singing parties; sometimes twenty people come, sometimes a hundred and twenty. John takes off his coat and leads the chorus; Sarah sits in the front row, singing, and somehow her very presence seems to balance the affair.

John has a very useful loud voice; while he conducts, he sings bass or tenor, whichever seems to need support at the moment. He does not know if the room is hot or cold; half of us could faint from exhaustion and John would notice nothing save an annoyingly reduced volume of sound. It is Sarah to whom we turn in extrcmity. ‘ We have sung enough,’ she tells John. ‘ We must rest awhile. It is time for supper.’

Sarah and John are themselves surprised at the choice of persons who elect to sing with them. Professional instrumentalists of the first water, not to speak of singers. Magic flautists from the Philadelphia Orchestra, harp pluckers, fiddlers, and pianists of glittering fame sit modestly sharing a Brahms Gypsy Song, a Palestrina Mass, with a red-cheeked, golf-playing importer of sisal hemp, a singing grandmother, or somebody’s nephew who happens to be home from school for the holidays. . . .

We sing from six to seven-thirty; then, conversing in whispers, — only the professional singers seem to know how to use a voice without losing it, — we have supper. After supper some hardy soloist entertains us until we are recovered sufficiently to sing again. Names of these soloists — no matter how renowned — never appear on the invitations, but only the music to be sung and the names of the composers. This leads to occasional misunderstanding. One day Sarah, hurriedly preparing invitations, instead of writing out Beethoven, Opus 132, wrote at the end of the programme, ‘An early and a late Beethoven quartet’ — phrases as familiar to musicians as ‘three-minute egg’ to a cook. A group of people, arriving at nine, said they had come late because they were especially fond of Beethoven and understood it was to be played later.

To us it is a matter of enormous pleasure that our one persistent rebelto-music, my nephew David, the real musical talent in the family, who in his teens did fling his cello, so to speak, down the sink — David sometimes sings with us at these parties. He never talks about music; like my brother’s friends when I was young, he would strangle rather than admit he likes it, but, an infallibly correct sight reader, he sits with the basses and breathes deep, and we pretend not to know he is there.

Sarah’s peculiar method of learning to sing is, I think, what fascinates everybody; perhaps I had rather say, her very individual outlook upon the arts. Sarah was not reared, as were the rest of us, in a school which lets go, which roars its enthusiasm, turns red in the face, and pounds its feet when pleased. Sarah takes art for granted in the same calm, extremely practical way that she takes life and dinner time.

One Sunday we were singing a Handel duet with the children, and Sarah read the alto part at sight. John was playing our accompaniment; he turned and stared at his wife. ‘ Got that D natural, by heaven, did n’t you? Where did you learn to sing fourths? I never heard you practise them.’

Sarah replied easily that she had learned them driving the automobile. ‘Every time I turn a right-hand corner I sing a fourth, and every time I turn a left-hand corner I sing a fifth. I’ve been doing it for months.’

Not a child in the room, upon hearing this, but wanted to try the vocal leap of one-to-four, with all its variations. Perhaps it is not art, that kind of effort, perhaps it is not even music. But it is a game, and a good game.

One winter afternoon another fiddler and I were playing sonatas with Pamela at her house in Bryn Mawr — old sonatas for two violins and piano. Tea was laid before the fire; between movements we snatched at buttered toast and conversation. Pamela was at that time a candidate for the state senate; present was an enthusiastic young man who had called to discuss political matters with her. His enthusiasm concerned not music, but the autumn elections, and what he wanted was talk; it was obvious he neither knew music nor cared to know it. As I played I could see him where he crouched by the fire, a look upon his face half exasperation, half puzzlement. What, he was wondering, is Pamela up to now? Why do these people fling themselves so violently from the attainable concrete to the unattainable abstract?

After an hour he got up and, walking over to us, stood watching closely until we played the last chord. We played it — bang! — with a ring and a smash, and all three rose laughing — I do not know exactly why from — our seats. The young man laughed too. ‘Well, I ’m damned! ’ he said. ‘ It’s fun, doing that, is n’t it?’

Fun! I remember one child who played second violin with us at home for years. ‘It’s fun,’ she would say, as she put up her instrument when we were done. ‘Mozart is fun to play. I had to count sixteen measures rest, and I got back exactly on time. And I’ll bet nobody saw my foot move, either.’ (Like the indignant Briton, this child — who was not Cynthia — belongs to the school which thinks rhythm should be felt, not tapped with the foot. Cynthia herself counts, she says, all andantes with her stomach.) ‘ Let’s try a new Mozart, next Sunday,’ the child would say — and then one night when she was sixteen she laid her fiddle on her knee and looked at me wide-eyed across the stands. A long adagio cadence trembled on the air; the child’s eyes were bright, bewildered. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said softly. ‘That Mozart — why, it’s beautiful.’

The long road or the short, the straight or the crooked, — as æsthete, poacher, or as sportsman, — I care not how nor by what road men come home to music. I care only that they come.