Copp: Musical Ability 
are accustomed to doing. We carry 
them around with us everywhere, but 
we really pay very little attention to 
them. We let our children speak in a 
slip-shod, indistinct way and we listen 
carelessly. We leave good talking and 
singing to the professional musicians 
and orators, which is just as unreason- 
able as to leave: good seeing to the 
professional artist and poet. We are 
only just beginning to learn what the 
normal ear is capable of, for instance 
in the matter of Positive Pitch, that is, 
ability to recognize and name musical 
tones. The lay public has been accus- 
tomed to consider Positive Pitch as a 
gift wrapped in the exclusive tissue of 
genius and doled out to the ultra 
musical only. One who can enter a 
room where a musician is singing or 
playing and say, “He is singing high C, 
or baritone B,” has hitherto been looked 
upon as a prodigy. This is by no 
means necessarily true. By proper 
training this power may be acquired, 
speaking very conservatively, by 80% 
of normal children. Children who have 
been thought to be entirely lacking in 
musical ability, some of them appar- 
ently tone deaf, after a few months of 
training are able to sing “‘Center C”’ on 
demand and to recognize it when it is 
played or sung and they soon become 
equally familiar with the other musical 
tones. 
HUNDREDS OF CASES STUDIED 
I base this statement on the experi- 
ence of having taught some hundreds 
of children; the corroborative experi- 
ence of the teachers I have trained 
would add hundreds more cases. Cer- 
tainly I do not say that every one ‘can 
acquire, by training, this once mysteri- 
ous gift of Positive Pitch, but I know 
that most people can do so, if they 
begin at an early age. 
This surely indicates that musical 
talent is much more widespread than 
has been thought and that the cases we 
have quoted of the appearance of won- 
derful ability in the children of seemingly 
non-musical parents, may be merely 
instances of the inheritance of latent 
characters. 
299 
Some children will, of course, not 
acquire Positive Pitch as quickly as 
others. There are children who dq not 
so easily learn to write English from 
dictation as others; but do we therefore 
allow them to give up and say that they 
cannot be taught? By the time he is 
ten or twelve any normal child can 
learn to write correctly from dictation 
five hundred words or more. Now, 
taking every white and black key on 
the piano there are only eighty-cight. 
Given a fair chance and a mind unmes- 
merized by the idea that reading music 
and Positive Pitch are difficult and 
require special gift, a child may as 
easily see mentally the sign for any 
sound as he sees the words that he 
hears you dictate to him in English. 
That the results of music study have 
hitherto been so meagre is due to 
parental indifference and the faultiness 
of the methods of teaching music. 
Teachers have insisted that the child 
should not be allowed to play the piano 
by ear, claiming that this will ruin his 
musical ear and make reading by sight 
impossible! Fancy a mother fearing 
that if her child speaks English first 
by ear, he will never learn to read it! 
As music is primarily an art making its 
first and greatest appeal through the 
ear, it is unreasonable to suppress the 
interest and initiative which naturally 
appear first through the ear and then, 
later on, by laborious ear training 
lessons to try to get back the interest 
and power which we have ignored during 
the most formative period of the child’s 
life. 
MUSIC EASILY ACQUIRED 
The acquirement of musical education 
is or should be comparatively easy, not 
only because of the smallness of the 
musical vocabulary (consisting as we 
have said of only eighty-eight tones), 
but also because of the universality of 
its notation. The present system of 
musical notation, though perhaps not 
perfect, has this great advantage, that 
it is the same all over the civilized 
world, so that when one learns it in 
America, the musical thoughts of 
France, Spain, Germany, Italy or Rus- 
sia are equally accessible. A child 
