CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



melody? And what would he hear if he suc- 

 ceeded ? which melody ? '* 



It would be useless to attempt any description 

 of Wagner's music ; it must be heard ; and it is 

 a healthy sign that as yet neither the Verdi opera, 

 nor the utterly bad opera bouffe of Offenbach and 

 his followers, have taken very deep hold of our 

 people ; that whenever Wagner's music has been 

 performed within the last few years even though 

 it has been shorn of all scenic accessories it has 

 been enthusiastically received. Wagner's greatest 

 work, on the completion of which he is now 

 occupied, is to be performed in 1875 at a special 

 theatre erected for the purpose at Bayreuth in 

 Bavaria. It is a gigantic music-drama, founded 

 upon the old Nibelungen-lied, and is in the form of 

 a trilogy, with an introductory evening, so that its 

 performance will occupy four consecutive nights. 

 It is only right to add, that the idea that Wagner 

 considers himself to have produced the ' work of 

 art of the future ' is as unfounded as many other 

 statements made about him. He hopes to have 

 laid a foundation for others to build upon, but 

 never asserts that he has perfected, as well as 

 created, the musical drama. 



THE TONIC SOL-FA SYSTEM. 



It would be impossible to conclude a sketch of 

 the history of music, however slight, without some 

 allusion to the rise and progress of the Tonic Sol-fa 

 method, a system which has done as much to popu- 

 larise music in our own country during the last 

 twenty years as had been done without it for 

 the previous half-century. The central principle 

 of this system is that of key relationship, that the 

 relative position of the different notes in a scale 

 to each other is precisely the same, no matter what 

 the key-note of the scale may be. There is here 

 nothing novel in itself : but in the working-out of 

 the idea, and the development of a complete system 

 founded upon it, there is much that is new, and 

 of which the credit belongs to the Rev. John 

 Curwen of London, who has lived to see the ideas 

 which he originally taught to a small class of 

 children become in a few years the means of 

 bringing music within the reach of many hundred 

 thousand of his fellow-countrymen. 



The movement of which Mr Curwen is the 

 head was at first the laughing-stock of musicians 

 and newspaper critics, and it has made its way 

 not only without any powerful or influential 

 patronage, but in the teeth of the keenest opposi- 

 tion and ridicule, in a way which would have been 

 impossible had the system not been founded upon 

 an incontrovertible basis. Mr Curwen's Sol-fa 

 notation has all along formed no unimportant 

 part of his method. In it, the absolute pitch of 

 a piece of music is determined by the name of 

 the key in which it is to be sung being printed at 

 its commencement. The notation itself is a purely 

 relative one, each note being represented by the 

 initial letter of its sol-fa name in the particular 

 key in which the music is written, t The con- 

 sequence is, that the same phrase is always repre- 

 sented by the same signs, no matter in what key 

 it may be ; and what is true of phrases is equally 



* Dannreuther"s translation of The Music of the Future, p. 48. 

 f The various details of this notation have been already de- 

 scribed in the preceding number. 

 720 



true of chords. The advantages of this scarcely 

 need enlarging upon ; and that they are practical, 

 and not merely theoretical advantages, is shewn 

 by the results. 



It is in the National Schools, and among the 

 middle classes, that the sol-fa movement has 

 taken firmest hold, and it is this that has given 

 it the national importance which it really pos- 

 sesses. Over three hundred thousand pupils pass 

 i through sol-fa classes every year, and of these it 

 may be safely said that but a very small portion 

 j would otherwise have had any musical educa- 

 j tion whatever. The musical education of the 

 | majority of these pupils is no doubt limited, 

 i and it is also certain that in many cases the 

 i teachers themselves have more enthusiasm than 

 knowledge, but the choice in these cases is not 

 between a high and a low degree of culture, but 

 between some culture and none at all. This 

 being the case, we most heartily commend the 

 sol-fa movement, as having been the means of 

 giving the elements of musical knowledge to very 

 large numbers of our people. It is strengthening 

 and enlarging the foundations of the same edifice 

 as that on which Beethoven worked, and to which 

 even now the poetic school are striving to add 

 new beauty. The different workers do not come 

 in contact, do not even seem, at first sight, to 

 have much in common, but none the less they 

 j are working for a common cause the progress of 

 musical art 



The sol-fa movement has been greatly helped, 

 and its permanent usefulness much increased, by 

 an elaborate system of graded certificates (to be 

 obtained by examination) issued by the Tonic 

 Sol-fa College. Of these, we see that nearly 

 130,000 have been issued since 1859. An 

 immense mass of music, including Handel's and 

 Mendelssohn's oratorios, and, in fact, all the stan- 

 dard choral works, is now published in Mr 

 Curwen's notation, and there is also a sol-fa 

 musical magazine issued fortnightly. The system 

 has been adopted exclusively by the governments 

 of New South Wales and Victoria, and also by 

 the School-board of London. It is almost uni- 

 versally adopted in Wales ; and in Scotland 

 seems to have received the preference from most 

 of the Boards that have interested themselves in 

 music at all. 



The following is a short list of books bearing 

 upon the subject of this article which may be 

 studied by those who wish to pursue the subject 

 further : Lectures on the History of Music (two 

 courses), by John Hullah (Longmans) ; History 

 of Music, by Joseph Schliiter (Bentley). It will 

 be seen that we disagree in some respects with 

 the conclusions of these two writers, especially 

 those of Dr Schliiter, who consistently rails 

 at and misrepresents Wagner. The Mitsic of 

 the Future, by Wagner, translated by Edward 

 Dannreuther (Schott & Co.). This pamphlet, 

 in which Wagner gives his own ideas in a con- 

 densed form, is worthy of special attention. 

 Richard Wagner, his Tendencies and Theories, 

 by Edward Dannreuther (Augener & Co.). The 

 Music of the Future, by Franz Hueffer (Chapman 

 and Hall). This book contains criticisms on 

 Wagner, Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, and Franz, 

 and, although somewhat diffuse, is quite worth 

 reading. The Story of Tonic Sol-fa, by J. Spencer 

 Curwen (Tonic Sol-fa Agency). 



