304 The Journal 
occurs to him to place the symbols thus 
and so and then to find out on the 
piano what the symbols so placed by 
himself will express when sounded. 
We, therefore, give the child notes of 
heroic size to play with and a loose-noted 
key board to take to pieces and become 
familiar with by putting together again. 
We have further invented games which 
call into play qualities of mind the lack 
of which has wrecked many a musician 
in the past; games which cultivate the 
ability to think calmly, coherently and 
quickly before others, games which 
require rapidity of thought and action 
and which develop unselfishness, gener- 
osity and balance, mental, emotional 
and technical. It was not music which 
made for the lack of these qualities as 
has often been insinuated; it was a lack 
of the most valuable traits of a true 
musician, missed by acquiring a certain 
musical veneer without real, scientific, 
educational growth. 
In the past to be a musician was 
almost a synonym for being character- 
ized by nervousness, lack of balance, 
general peculiarity and uselessness in 
practical life; but, to repeat, these 
deficiencies were not because of music 
but rather proved a lack of musical 
development in its entirety. 
If we will consider music as a lan- 
guage, not so much of the intellect, as 
of that finer, higher, more spiritual part 
of us, a language which this soul of ours 
needs; and if we will then consider all 
the sensible things we do to acquire 
other languages and try these same 
things for the attainment of the musical 
language, we may make some interesting 
discoveries. When a 5-year-old child 
speaks English it is because he has 
thought it and has his own thoughts to 
express. First in music, then, a child 
should be led to think his own music, 
to speak his own music before he is 
taught to copy. He cannot become an 
independent thinker by first being 
wholely and solely a copyist. Impro- 
vising and modulation in music are 
equivalent in English to power to express 
the sense contained in a prose paragraph 
or in a verse. It is like taking six 
adjectives, three nouns, two verbs, and 
three prepositions and making a sentence 
of Heredity 
out of them. These rudimentary exer- 
cises in English lead to more or less 
freedom in the art of expression of 
ideas if we have any to express later on. 
We do not say at the outset that there 
is no earthly use in having the child 
participate in such and such exercises 
because he will never be an author; the 
being an author is submerged in the 
practical usefulness of self-expression. 
Precisely the same attitude should be 
taken in regard to music if it is to be 
allowed to do the good and be the good 
to us that it may be. When we take 
an idea from a poem or an essay and 
express it in our own words, we are 
improvising in English. Are we never 
to do this in music? Can we get 
nothing except the literal thought word 
for word as we read it? 
THE VALUE OF MUSIC 
The value of learning music is not in 
the number of pieces one may play, but 
in the musical thoughts one can think. 
Real music is self-expression and, far 
from making the child self-centered, it 
should make him most sympathetic of 
the efforts of others. A child who has 
made his own Reverie or dream has the 
keenest appreciation of a “real com- 
poser.’”’ We know that to trim a hat 
does not cause one to be unappreciative, 
but the reverse, of a well-trimmed hat. 
So it is with cake-making, dress-making, 
story-making, poem- and music-making. 
We do not complain because so few of 
the boys and girls, who during their 
school days wrote essays on ““The Dog,” 
“Our Country’s Flag” or “A Visit to 
Grandmother,” fail to become authors 
or authoresses. We are satisfied if they 
are able to express themselves well in 
spoken or written language as required 
by the demands of every-day life. But 
there are times when every human being 
feels the need of a language beyond the 
power of words. Plato said, ‘‘Music is 
to the mind what air is to the body.” 
Now air is a necessity but we moderns 
have not believed music to be a neces- 
sity. We have considered it merely an 
accomplishment. How much more it 
might be! Just the other day a boy of 
13 brought to me the little composition 
which is reproduced in Fig. 7. He had 
