Bernarr Rainbow

THE RISE OF POPULAR MUSIC
EDUCATION IN NINETEENTH-
CENTURY ENGLAND

IN THE YEAR OF VICTORIA’S SUCCESSION TO THE THRONE, THOMAS WYSE, A vigorous advocate of educational reform in the House of Commons, drew attention to the longstanding neglect of music teaching in the nation’s schools:

Music, even the most elementary, not only does not form an essential of education in this country, but the idea of introducing it is not even dreamt of. It is urged, that it would be fruitless to attempt it, because the people are essentially unmusical; but may not they be anti-musical because it has not been attempted? The people roar and scream, because they have heard nothing but roaring and screaming — no music — from their childhood. Is harmony not to be taught? . . . No effort is made in any of our schools; and then we complain that there is no music amongst our scholars. It would be as reasonable to exclude grammar and then complain that we had no grammarians.¹

The national struggle to reverse that position took place during the queen’s reign in conjunction with gradual acceptance by the state of responsibility for popular education as a whole.

Such limited educational progress as in fact occurred in Britain between 1800 and 1837 was largely due to private endeavour. Much of it concerned elementary education, was purely local in effect, and found its inspiration in some particular individual’s awareness of continental developments. The rival monitorial systems introduced by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, each administered by opposing religious bodies, first received a meagre government subsidy to support them in the provision of elementary education in 1833. But the state still failed to accept responsibility for the education of its subjects along lines similar to those of most northern European countries.

The first major effort to readmit music teaching to the elementary curriculum in England since its virtual banishment at the Reformation had occurred in 1790 when Bishop Porteus of London advised the clergy of his diocese that the provision of singing lessons in the nation’s many Sunday Schools would go a long way toward correcting the deplorable standard of singing in parochial churches.² On the other hand, the first stirrings of an awareness that music deserved a place in its own right in every child’s general education can safely be traced to Robert Owen and the model for infant education first presented in his experimental school at New Lanark on the Clyde before its disbanding in 1824. Though evidently unaware of the writings of Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi on education, Owen had formed ideas of his own virtually identical with many of theirs. In his school, memorization and “book-learning” were replaced by deliberate exercise of the senses. Practical experiment and observation, play, physical drill, dancing, and singing all became essential features of his little pupils’ daily programme; and among the wall charts enlivening their classrooms were found not only pictures of exotic animals and plants, but copies of the tunes they sang written out in musical notation.³

Owen’s educational experiment was shortlived, and though his ideas were taken up elsewhere in Britain by such disciples as David Stow and Samuel Wilderspin, enlightened teaching received its next important stimulus more directly from Pestalozzi through the activities of enthusiasts who had travelled to Switzerland to work under his direction before setting up private schools of their own in Britain. Charles Mayo at Epsom and J. P. Greaves at Ham, are best known among those who brought Pestalozzian methods — including recreational song — into currency. And in his Letters on Early Education Addressed to J. P. Greaves Pestalozzi expressed his regret that in spite of its beneficial influence music did not form a more prominent feature in general education in England.⁴

But before music could earn a place in subsidized schools run by the supporters of Bell and Lancaster middle class scepticism had to be persuaded. Hard-headed school governors who failed to respond to Pestalozzi’s declaration that music was “beneficial” were more readily convinced when it could be shown that music teaching was “useful.” And the first school music textbook to appear in England in modern times was careful to underline this functional aspect on its title page. John Turner’s Manual of Instruction in Vocal Music (1833) was subtitled chiefly with a view to Psalmody. Its immediate successor, Sarah Glover’s Scheme for Rendering Psalmody Congregational (1835), was even more specifically titled. And only when W. E. Hickson’s The Singing Master (1836) followed, was the connection between singing in school and singing in church less heavily emphasized, to be replaced by the argument that something more was required “to improve the mind, and hearts, and promote the happiness of the rising generation than has hitherto been attempted.”⁵ All three books were soon enjoying local use in a few areas.

Each of the pioneers concerned in these prime ventures, from Bishop Porteus onward, sought (often unwittingly) to restore music teaching to the place it had held in popular education before the Reformation swept away the song schools, chantry, and monastic schools providing it. As Thomas Wyse’s statement suggests, early efforts in this direction remained little known nationally. But in the warmer educational climate that followed the passing of the first Reform Bill, it is no coincidence to find three school music textbooks making their unprecedented appearance within as many years. For when the first state grant for education was belatedly approved by Parliament in 1833, a turning point had been reached. Subsequently, governmental apathy in such matters steadily gave place to reluctant awareness that educational provision in Britain was shamefully inadequate. The situation was slowly corrected during Victoria’s reign.

I

One striking feature of the century’s educational advance was its initial polarity. At the outset, reforming energy was centred upon schools catering to extreme elements in the population: the children of the labouring poor and of the aristocratic rich were its principal beneficiaries, leaving the sons and daughters of a rapidly growing middle class largely unprovided for. Religious differences complicated the situation. According to whether their parents subscribed to Prayer Book or Dissent, the children of the poor went to “National” or “British” elementary schools; the sons of the wealthy folk either to ancient public schools or those nonconformist academies established during the previous century. The curriculum content, religious instruction, and methods of teaching in these schools varied greatly, and no music was taught in any of them.

An increase in the government grant subsidizing voluntary elementary schools heralded the appointment in 1839 of school inspectors whose reports were soon exposing conditions of scandalous neglect and incompetence in existing schools and their teachers. Six years previously a special committee of the Privy Council had been appointed to consider educational provision; and in 1835 £10,000 was voted for the building of a state training college for teachers. But it was not until the true scale of educational shortcomings was revealed during 1839 that urgent remedies were sought and the new Committee of Council on Education braced itself to undertake substantial reform of elementary education. An indirect consequence was the reinstatement of the music lesson in schools for the children of the poor. Meanwhile, following the example of Thomas Arnold at Rugby, reform began from within the almost equally ill-conducted schools of the wealthier classes. But it required the courageous unorthodoxy of another famous headmaster, Edward Thring of Uppingham, before music was admitted to the curriculum of a public school a generation later.

Although much of the substance of the Education Bill of 1839 may be traced to earlier proposals made by Wyse, the principal architect of the policy implemented by the Committee of Council on Education was its secretary, James Kay. A medical man rather than a teacher and later to become Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, he owed his influential appointment to his known devotion to progressive educational ideals and the success with which he had applied them in his capacity as assistant poor law commissioner to improve the lot of pauper children immured in the workhouses of rural England.

The members of the committee itself — Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, John William Ponsonby, John Russell, and Thomas Spring Rice — relied heavily upon their secretary for the formulation of educational strategy. To prepare himself for the responsible task of advising them, Kay undertook in 1839 a three-months’ tour of Holland, France, Prussia, and Switzerland, to examine for himself the methods and conditions prevailing in the schools of the four countries which had already introduced state systems of education. On his return, armed with a substantial collection of the primers and manuals employed in those schools, Kay’s belief in the automatic superiority of continental teaching methods was reinforced, and his faith in Pestalozzi as the inspired fount of educational wisdom confirmed.

During Kay’s absence abroad, however, Parliament again deferred the establishment of a national training college for teachers. No compromise could be reached between Church and Dissent upon their differences over religious instruction in the proposed institution, and the issue was shelved. Faced with this obstacle, Kay promptly and boldly decided to found a private institution himself, to demonstrate how such an establishment could be conducted without sacrificing religious principles. With the financial backing of his friends he set up a small-scale training college to accommodate a dozen youths in what was then the Thames-side village of Battersea. There he put into practice the lessons learnt during his recent educational tour and laid the framework of a model curriculum for the elementary schools of the future. No longer restricted to religious instruction and the three “Rs,” Kay’s enlarged syllabus included both music and drawing, taught according to methods which he attributed to Pestalozzi. At that time Kay’s conception of the nature of Pestalozzian teaching was summarized by him as “leading children from the known to the unknown by gradual steps.”⁶ Valid so far as it went, that definition failed to recognize the method’s sensory and synthetic characteristics. As a result Kay often tended to attribute to Pestalozzi teaching methods which owed little or nothing to his tenets.

An example of this misconception can be seen by comparing the methods adopted at Battersea for teaching reading, writing, drawing, and music. The reading primer was an English adaptation of the German method devised by a pupil of Pestalozzi named Lautier. The writing primer was by another of his pupils named Mühlhauser. Both were authentic applications of the Swiss educationist’s principles.⁷ But drawing was taught using Alexandre Dupuis’ geometrical objects, and this had no connection with Pestalozzian theories, though Kay justified their use as allowing the student “to proceed by gradual steps through a series of combinations until he was able to draw faithfully any object, however complex.”⁸ And music was also taught by a French system, devised for use in the monitorial schools of Paris by Guillaume Wilhem and owing nothing at all to Pestalozzi’s principles, in spite of Kay’s confident declaration that “the method of Wilhem is simply an application of the Pestalozzian method of ascending from the simple to the general through a clearly analyzed series” (Minutes, 1842-43, p. 226).

To staff his training institution, Kay relied for the most part upon volunteers among his friends; but the choice of a musician able to teach by means of an unfamiliar continental method presented a very real problem. Eventually, however, Kay met John Hullah, a young composer who had for some time been attracted to the idea of setting up in London a series of public singing classes similar to those which were then enjoying remarkable popularity in Paris.⁹ Begun in 1836, two rival courses for adults were attracting hundreds of aspiring singers from the Parisian labouring classes. One course was directed by Joseph Mainzer, a German ex-priest who had formerly taught music in the seminary in Trier. The other was run by Wilhem, employing the monitorial system which he had already introduced for teaching music in the commune schools of Paris.¹⁰

Hullah had first become aware of the singing classes in Paris from an article in the Athenaeum, London’s leading journal treating the arts, late in 1837. Written by H. F. Chorley, the paper’s music critic, it spoke of Mainzer’s classes with sufficient enthusiasm to make Hullah decide to visit Paris to witness so unusual an educational venture for himself. Chorley had written: “I was present at one of the meetings of M. Mainzer’s singing class of workmen and artizans, at a room in the Place de l’Estrapade. This gentlemen’s success should encourage all those who wish to diffuse a musical taste among the humbler orders.”¹¹ Making Chorley’s acquaintance, Hullah sought further details; and in 1839 the two men journeyed to Paris to enable Hullah to see Mainzer at work. They were disappointed because Mainzer’s classes had just been discontinued; but they were able to visit those of Wilhem instead (F. Hullah, p. 25).

It was thus through accident rather than design that Hullah became acquainted with the Wilhem system which was to occupy his labours for the next forty years. Soon after his return home he was introduced to Kay, presented with the challenge of adapting Wilhem’s system to English use, and invited to instruct the apprentice teachers at the new institution in Battersea. Hullah’s own description of these events is revealing:

Shortly before this the Normal School for schoolmasters had been opened at Battersea — the only school for schoolmasters then existing in England. It consisted at first of some ten or twelve youths, two or three of whom only had any knowledge of music, and as many any voice or apparent knowledge of the subject. Any beginning less encouraging could hardly be conceived. I remember, after walking some time before the gates of the establishment, at length summoning up courage to make my appearance . . . and I found myself, for the first time in my life, called upon to give a lesson in music. In this, I believe, I was considered to have been fairly successful.

(F. Hullah, pp. 25-26).

Completely inexperienced as a teacher, at the age of twenty-seven Hullah was able to rely on a combination of charm, enthusiasm, and a natural talent for exposition for his early success. His pupils, handpicked boys just rescued from the workhouses where their future had seemed without hope, reacted eagerly to his kindly instruction. Visitors to Battersea, many of them eminent, expressed their surprise at the efficiency with which these youngsters were soon performing the exercises from Wilhem’s course. The boys were soon called upon to demonstrate their powers to the public at large. On witnessing these unsophisticated lads displaying musical skill beyond that of most adults, delighted audiences in London and the provinces responded with incredulous applause. The Battersea Boys, clad in their green uniforms, were soon known nationally as “Hullah’s Greenbirds.”¹²

Encouraged by this early success, Kay urged the Committee of Council to approve the foundation of a singing school for schoolmasters where the teachers of London might be taught the secrets of Hullah’s triumph. Sanction was given, and on 1 February 1841 the first class was enrolled at London’s largest public arena, Exeter Hall. Two further classes were formed in the following March, when the first course for schoolmistresses also began. Each class met twice weekly for sixty nights under Hullah’s personal tuition; the course cost fifteen shillings, thus making the venture self-supporting.¹³

The Minute of the Committee of Council on Education that announced the formation of the Exeter Hall Singing School was a substantial document designed not only to publicize Hullah’s classes, but to justify the inclusion of the music lesson in schools generally. In it Kay summarized the arguments employed to sway influential opinion in government circles and public debate. He reiterated them in a single sentence when he declared that vocal music was an “important means of forming an industrious, brave, loyal, and religious working class” (quoted in J. Hullah, Method, p. iv). He also emphasized the merit of song as a promoter of patriotism, civilizing agent, innocent pastime, counter-attraction to the beerhouse, and the means of making attendance at public worship more attractive to the uneducated. “A relish for such pursuits,” Kay’s Minute went on, “would in itself be an advance in civilisation, as it would doubtless prove in time the means of weaning the population from debasing pleasures, and would associate their amusements with their duties” (quoted in J. Hullah, Method, p. v). It was with this moralistic preamble — in itself a seasoned foretaste of the high Victorian manner — that Hullah’s adaptation of a French method of teaching music was first presented to the public at large.

Just how warmly it was received may be discovered from the way in which the initial success of the classes for teachers at Exeter Hall promptly led to the formation, at vigorous public demand, of additional classes “wherein the working classes, and the apprentices and foremen of shops and handicraft trades” might acquire this innocent and useful recreation (Minutes, 1841-42, p. 75). By the end of 1841, according to a contemporary estimate, at least 50,000 children of the working classes in London had also begun to receive instruction at school in singing from notes (Minutes, 1841-42, p. 75). Just as their teachers had so recently been, those children were led through the pages of Hullah’s Method, slowly learning to find their way up and down the scale and to sing such edifying ditties as:

II

Some witnesses of this apparent triumph for Kay’s idiosyncratic musical policy were less than enthusiastic. Few professional musicians were persuaded that Hullah’s singing school would achieve worthwhile results. Ultra-conservatives among the upper classes clung to their conviction that any attempt to educate the humbler members of society must lead to an increase in discontent and subversion. Even staunch advocates of the development of popular education, and of music education in particular, voiced their disapprobation of the Committee of Council’s haste in putting Kay’s recommendations into practice without first consulting informed opinion as to the suitability of the French method he had chosen. Soon after the publication of Hullah’s adaptation of Wilhem’s manual, a stern but well-informed criticism of it appeared in the Westminster Review:

In our visits to continental schools we have accumulated among other school books, a great number upon singing, but we have not one in our collection so overlaid with the technical pedantries of the science, so abounding in difficulties insuperable to children, so little of the character of a work adapted for the self-instruction of an adult, as this English adaptation of Wilhem’s method. Indeed without a master to explain it, the book is perfectly useless.¹⁴

The writer was W. E. Hickson, the vigorous promoter of the cause of national education whose Singing Master has already been mentioned. Since its publication, however, Hickson’s wider philanthropic and educational activities had included service on a government commission to examine the circumstances of unemployed handloom operators (1837) and an educational tour of North Germany and the Low Countries (1839).¹⁵ These pursuits had increased his stature as a public figure, lending added authority to the pronouncements on educational matters which he published in the Westminister Review, a journal he had purchased in 1840 as a vehicle for his utterances.

Hickson’s detailed criticism of Hullah’s singing manual took exception to several of its essential features and was restated in subsequent articles in the Spectator in 1841 and the Illustrated London News two years later.¹⁶ For Hullah’s natural talent as a teacher Hickson spoke with unqualified approval; his objections were wholly against the government for overlooking indigenous methods within their reach while prepared to occupy themselves in “rambling researches” in Switzerland, Holland, the German States, Prussia, Austria, and France. And contrary to the Committee of Council’s declaration that no method had previously existed to simplify the teaching of vocal music in elementary schools, Hickson pointed out the existence of many such works, “fully as clear and quite as useful as the one now adopted,” not a few of them native products. There were, moreover, other treatises of a more authentically Pestalozzian cast in use both in Germany and America.

Perhaps the most radical of Hickson’s objections was directed against Hullah’s adoption of French nomenclature for the degrees of the scale. Instead of employing the customary alphabetical note-names, in his manual Hullah justified the continental usage in these terms: “In England the eight sounds of this scale are called C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C; and it may be useful, at some future time, to become familiar with these names. The syllables . . . (commonly used in France and Italy) have, however, many advantages over the letters, and will therefore be used throughout this method. . . . Thus, by using the syllables Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and Si over and over again, we find names for as many sounds as we need” (J. Hullah, Method, p. 6). Hickson justifiably questioned this policy, pointing out that a pupil taught in this way would “begin and finish his course of lessons without being acquainted with the names of the notes as they are universally used in England” (“Singing Classes,” p. 77). He would be unable to sing or understand anything but the contents of his own singing manual.

Later experience was to expose an even more damaging disadvantage of the use of this continental system. The whole of the first course of lessons in Hullah’s manual was limited to the key of C, where the sol-fa names established a sense of note-relationships. And the marked success of his early teaching occurred while pupils were at this initial stage. But when keys other than C were introduced in the second course of lessons, the sol-fa names no longer identified familiar note patterns, and pupils grew increasingly confused as a result. Thereafter, only the naturally talented were able to progress.

In undertaking his search on the continent for the means to redeem England from her educational sloth, Kay more than once exposed his own limited understanding of technical considerations. Nowhere was the discrepancy more obviously revealed than in his choice of Wilhem’s system of teaching music. Because he had selected in Hullah a man with no previous teaching experience to introduce the new method, its most obvious shortcomings were left unexplained to him before he sought for it the government’s approval. The chosen method was to prove deficient; and Hickson’s castigation of it was more than justified by the consistent failure of the Hullah-Wilhem system to develop real competence in either the average child or his teachers. After its first dramatic success, the survival of Hullah’s manual was assured only by the official backing of the Committee of Council on Education who insisted on its being taught to teachers in training. Twenty years after its first introduction, most practicing teachers had abandoned using it in their classrooms. Yet the importation of Wilhem’s method to the schools of early Victorian England should not be hastily dismissed as heralding a false dawn. However misguided the policy formulated by Kay and followed by his lieutenant, Hullah, their joint efforts were to prove far from fruitless. Ten years after the first lessons at Battersea and Exeter Hall had begun to arouse unprecedented public interest in learning to sing at sight, Dickens’s Household Words recorded the appearance of a new attitude toward music in the school curriculum: “Music is becoming a regular branch of popular education. . . . Already its effects are striking and encouraging. Music — well, badly, or indifferently taught — forms a part of the business of the great majority of schools, national, public, and private, throughout the country.”¹⁷

By 1850 — when those words were written — a considerable number of alternative methods of teaching music were employed. The annual reports issued by government inspectors of schools during the 1840s reveal that in spite of the official recognition accorded to Hullah’s manual, outside the metropolis itself individual teachers were still using one of the earlier primers published by the three native pioneers in the field: Turner, Glover, or Hickson (see Minutes, 1841-42, p. 179). The accepted aim of the music lesson in all these primers was to teach children to sing melodies at sight while acquiring a growing repertory of moral texts. But examination of their books shows that Turner and Hickson both assumed that by explaining the meaning of the symbols of notation to children they were automatically enabling them to read music. Only Sarah Glover made use of movable sol-fa, anglicizing the syllables as Doh, Ra, Me, Fah, Sole, Lah, and Te, and using those initial letters as an ancillary form of notation from which her pupils gradually learned to sing with confidence.

Elsewhere, individual teachers who chanced to be members of church choirs made what use they could of the methods by which they themselves had been trained. The most common of these was the traditional “fasola” system which named the notes of the scale fa, sol, la, fa, sol, la, mi, and consequently presented the beginner with ambiguities likely to baffle all but the brightest child.¹⁸ Another more straightforward method then being taught nationwide to nonconformists by one of their ministers, the Reverend J.J. Waite, used numerals as a form of notation, representing the degrees of the major scale by the figures 1-7, as Rousseau had recommended.¹⁹ A third system, the “interval method,” introduced no ancillary notation but attempted to reduce the element of chance in reading from standard notes by drilling the pupil in striking different intervals from a given keynote. This was the method favoured by most professional singing teachers and the one also adopted by John Turner in his Manual.

The range of possible approaches to teaching sight-singing in schools was yet further increased in May 1841, when Joseph Mainzer — whose singing classes in Paris appear to have been regarded as potentially treasonable assemblies and were thus closed by the police — crossed to London and started classes in rivalry to those which Hullah had then been holding for four months at Exeter Hall. Mainzer’s classes were held in assembly halls in various London districts under the catch phrase “Singing for the Million.”²⁰ They each attracted hundreds of devotees and contributed decisively to producing the “singing mania” which was to become one of the most remarkable social phenomena of early Victorian England.

Mainzer used the same catch phrase as the title of his teaching manual, Singing for the Million (1841), a much less pedantic treatise than Hullah’s and one clearly based upon many years’ practical teaching experience. Mainzer summarized his policy as follows:

To impart a general knowledge of the principles of music, a different method of teaching is indispensable to distinguish it from a purely musical education; and it is a great error to apply to elementary schools, or public classes, methods which are not founded on this rigorous distinction. ... In the latter, it is only necessary to communicate a general knowledge of the art, to incite a taste for it, to prepare the physical organs, — the ear and the throat, — to awaken the intelligence and the heart, and to afford to infancy and youth a participation in the attractions and noble sentiment inspired by its mysterious power. To attain this object, it suffices to study the few rules applied to the reading of music, explained in this little work. . . . These are the simple and only means I have employed in gratuitious classes opened in Paris in favour of workmen.

(Mainzer, Singing, pp.i-ii).

The straightforwardness of Mainzer’s early lessons and the simple vocal exercises they employed made encouraging progress possible for the beginner. But as the course continued and the singer began to meet sharps, flats, and key signatures, the French background to Mainzer’s method and its consequent use of fixed sol-fa no longer provided a reliable method of pitching intervals correctly. It was at this stage that enthusiasm began to wane and attendance at Mainzer’s classes began to fall off. As with Hullah’s method (and for precisely the same reason) Mainzer’s Singing for the Million encouraged many thousands of ordinary folk to become aware of the pleasure that choral music could afford, without enabling them to take more than the first steps into mastering its demands. Hullah and Mainzer both depended more upon their own enthusiasm, natural aptitude for teaching, and personal charm for their success than upon the merits of their systems of instruction. Yet it was natural for schoolteachers attending their classes to attempt to pass on to their own pupils what little skill they had managed to acquire themselves.

By 1846 the number of alternative methods of teaching sight-singing had grown so profuse that James Turle, the organist of Westminster Abbey, and Edward Taylor, Gresham Professor of Music, joined forces to produce The Singing Book (1846) which emphasized that there were no short cuts to proficiency, that once the essentials of musical rudiments had been acquired by a pupil, practice must do the rest, and that the existence of so many different systems led to nothing but confusion.²¹ There were few subjects, their preface declared, which the wit and ingenuity of man had encumbered with more needless words and presented to a young mind in a less attractive form than the art of singing from notes. Instead of removing gratuitious obstacles to progress, individual teachers seemed determined to multiply them — not least by the addition to the regular musical alphabet of a host of arbitrary and unmeaning syllables. Usually called, and often supposed to be, “the Sol-fa system,” no description of it could be more incorrect. For scarcely any two writers in modern times had used the system in the same way. The Italians and the French had their own ways of handling it; the English were not only at variance with both but with each other.

Examination of various elementary works on singing showed that far from being founded upon any well-established and universally accepted principle, the details and application of sol-fa varied in different countries and were “altered according to the fancy of individual instructors” (p. iv). Recent attempts (such as Hullah’s) to substitute sol-fa names for the alphabetical names of the notes simply exasperated Turle and Taylor: “The alphabetic notation must be known by every musician, because it is of universal employment. No other is used in any choir or orchestra in the kingdom. The student may add to it some other, but he must learn this” (p. v). For all these reasons The Singing Book dispensed with sol-fa altogether, adopting instead, for its preliminary exercises numerals together with alphabetical note names printed beneath the staff. In this way, it was claimed, “a correct idea of distance” was developed in the mind of the beginner (p. v). Thus the multiplicity of methods was further increased.

III

In the hands of a talented and musical teacher each of the methods that have so far taken our attention offered a possible approach to teaching sight-singing. But it seems evident today that something more specific was required to enable the teacher to overcome personal musical limitations and then satisfactorily guide pupils. What was needed was not so much a textbook prepared by an expert musician as one prepared by an expert teacher. Only then would the accomplished musician’s innate tendency to underestimate the learner’s problems be avoided and recent advances in the techniques of teaching other subjects be applied to music also.

Even so earnest a music teacher as John Turner, the pioneer who produced the first school music text in English in 1833, had underestimated the task he was undertaking, as this summary of his aims makes clear: “It is proposed that the children should be taught the names of the notes, and other marks of music, their nature and their use; that they should be practised in singing the scale, and in the proper use of the voice; that they should learn to pronounce words so as to preserve the organs of the throat in free exercise, and be by these means instructed in the rudiments of melody and harmony” (Turner, p. 26). Faith in rote-learning of facts had long dominated all teaching in schools. Understandably, it dominated most early attempts to teach music there. Indeed, Sarah Glover alone among those whose work has been considered revealed an awareness of the need to organize her teaching along other than factual lines: “In teaching children music, I think it best to instruct them on the same principle as they are taught speech; viz., by deducing theory from practice, rather than practice from theory.”²² She also deliberately chose to employ movable sol-fa (which emphasizes the regular pattern of tones and semitones in the major scale whatever the key) instead of fixed sol-fa, the continental counterpart adopted by both Mainzer and Hullah. As the name implies, the latter system attached the sol-fa names permanently to the key of C, thus robbing them of their value in other keys. It fell to John Curwen, a young man in his early twenties already known in Congregationalist circles for his remarkable skill in teaching young children and his insight into educational theory, to contrive a method of teaching music which made it available to musically inexperienced teachers and their pupils. The fact that when he undertook the task he was equally inexperienced himself was to prove an advantage rather than a handicap in the long run.

Even as an undergraduate at London’s new University College in 1833, Curwen’s intense interest in teaching children impressed his fellow students. Every Sunday he taught in a school held in the Barbican for children obliged to work on weekdays, developing there his “Look and Say” method of teaching them to read words as a whole instead of spelling them out letter by letter. This ability to analyze the processes of instruction and then plan teaching procedures to accommodate them was partly instinctive and partly the result of conscious study of the writings of the progressive teachers of his day. Perhaps above all he was indebted to Pestalozzi for his radical views on teaching; but that influence came to him at first indirectly through the books of Elizabeth Mayo, David Stow, Horace Grant, and Jacob Abbott.²³

In 1838 Cɩ rwen was appointed assistant minister at the Independent Chapel at Basingstoke, Hampshire, where once again it was his remarkable powers with children that impressed local people. The amazing success of a deliberately simple storybook for children which he now published soon made his name widely known among parents and teachers. As a result he found himself invited to address meetings and conferences of teachers in many parts of the country. On one such occasion in 1841, when the rival classes of Hullah and Mainzer were first attracting general public interest, a conference chairman, impressed by Curwen’s evident grasp of educational values, commissioned him to review existing methods of teaching singing and to “recommend some simple method to the churches which should enable all to sing with ease and propriety.”²⁴ Aware of his own musical limitations, Curwen accepted the task with misgiving. But he regarded it as a solemn undertaking and, though he could not anticipate the consequences, it was to become his life work.

A year later Curwen published the first results of his investigation in a series of “Lessons on Singing” in a Congregationalist journal, the Independent Magazine .²⁵ Utterly unlike the standard music primer which traditionally began by defining the difference between “noise” and “music” and then introduced the symbols of notation, Curwen’s approach was essentially practical, dispensed with rote-learning, and was couched in the simplest language.

He presented his lessons in the form of “letters to a friend who had undertaken to train a class of children”:

I must suppose you, with your blackboard and chalk at your side. ... I shall enclose your words in inverted commas, and where I suppose a pause while anything is done, I will mark it by an asterisk.

“Now, children, we are going to learn the art of singing in tune. What are we going to learn? First, then, you must remember that any musical sound is called a note. What is a musical sound called? This is a note.” (I hear you singing to the sound ah any note you please.) “I will sing another note. • Now I will sing another note. • Could not some of you sing a note? Hold up hands — those who can sing a note. Do you — • and you. • I want you now to distinguish the same note from a different one. Sing the same note as this. • Sing the same note as this. • Hold up hands — those who will sing me a note, and I will sing the same. Do you — • and you.

(J. Curwen, “Lessons,” pp. 23-24).

Curwen had found so many shortcomings in existing methods — particularly in Hullah’s — that he decided to develop one of his own. For its basis he chose Sarah Glover’s “Norwich Sol-fa” with its simple notation of sol-fa initial letters and movable do. But he amended many of its details before incorporating further material from other methods which his own experience — first as learner, then as teacher — showed to be valuable. Curwen acknowledged indebtedness for “borrowed” teaching devices and other intrinsic matter to his fellow countrymen, J.J. Waite, and W. E. Hickson; to the Irish teacher, R. J. Bryce; to the Frenchmen, Jue de Berneval and Aimé Paris; the American, Lowell Mason; the Swiss, H. G. Naegeli; and the Bavarian, M. T. Pfeiffer. Thus began the process of synthesis by which, over a period of thirty years or more, Curwen’s Tonic Sol-fa system was engendered.²⁶

Following its first tentative introduction to the limited readership of the Independent Magazine early in 1842, the Tonic Sol-fa method slowly became more widely known through meetings and classes for Sunday school teachers and temperance workers. Evening classes for adults were also started and, as a result, Curwen was invited to contribute a series of articles on music to John Cassell’s new magazine, the Popular Educator, in 1851. The magazine’s enormous circulation among readers anxious for “self-improvement” brought Curwen’s first article, published in April 1852, into thousands of homes, marking a welcome upward trend in his affairs. Further classes were soon begun in London’s Crosby Hall attended by many teachers and educationists; and though Curwen’s solitary crusade had neither the government support accorded to Hullah nor the resources of Exeter Hall at its disposal, during the following three years he had attracted some twenty thousand pupils.²⁷ By 1860 Tonic Sol-fa had eclipsed both the Hullah and Mainzer methods to stand alone in public estimation as the humble person’s method of learning to sing from notes. Following the passing of the Forster Education Act of 1870 and the introduction of compulsory elementary schooling, Tonic Sol-fa became the accepted method of teaching singing in the nation’s new Board Schools.

The testing ground where the viability of music as a subject in the modern school curriculum was first demonstrated and the merits and disadvantages of alternative methods of teaching it were gradually assessed was thus found in the elementary schools established and developed during the first half of Victoria’s reign. And although the apparent success of Hullah’s early teaching encouraged the headmaster of Eton College to invite him to teach there experimentally in 1842, the venture was shortlived and not repeated in other independent schools. No doubt partly because the boys at Eton lacked the docility of their humbler counterparts, once the novelty of learning to sing faded, the pedestrian progress of Hullah’s lessons quickly lost their interest. Nor was the opportunity taken to link the singing lessons with the music of the college chapel. The services there were sung by the choir of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, the youthful congregation — like their highborn parents — convinced that it was “not genteel to sing in church.”²⁸

IV

The first successful attempts to introduce music teaching in secondary education came with the development of a new type of boarding school for the sons of middle-class parents during the 1840s. The new energy in educational matters which had first given rise to the establishment of schools for the children of the poor was now turned to the provision of others where less expensive secondary education was made available, particularly to the sons of the clergy. Founded as boarding schools, both Marlborough (1843) and Rossall (1844) were sufficiently influenced by the model of Arnold’s Rugby to attach great importance to the influence of well-chosen prefects and the sobering impulse of daily worship. But at Radley (1847) the daily chapel service was made a central feature of the school’s life. The chapel building was furnished with elaborate care and contained “one of the finest organs in the country.”²⁹ One of the first four members appointed to its staff was E. G. Monk, the chapel organist and school music master, under whose direction a musical tradition was steadily built up in which the whole school shared in choral worship whether from choirstall or pew.

This new ideal, further stimulated by the liturgical reforms associated with the Oxford Movement, was taken up in other new boarding schools at Lancing (1848), Hurstpierpoint (1849), Bradfield (1850), and elsewhere, to establish a generally accepted view of music in the curriculum of a Victorian boarding school as the natural adjunct to well-ordered communal worship.³⁰ Because music was taught in such schools by specialists rather than novices, the lengthy struggle to select and test teaching methods which had complicated the introduction of music lessons in elementary schools was avoided. Much of the chapel repertoire, however, was learned by rote, natural ability rather than systematic coaching having to provide the sight readers necessary to maintain the choir. Far less attention was given to formal teaching of music in class than was the case in elementary schools.

In the older public schools there was no similar call to entrust the choral element in worship to the boys and masters. At Eton, as we have seen, visiting choristers from Windsor Castle sang the chapel services; at Winchester the cathedral choir sang in the college chapel; at Westminister the boys of the school attended services in the Abbey; at Harrow they went to the adjacent parish church; at Rugby the simple congregational service familiar to Thomas Arnold was jealously preserved. There was thus no immediate demand to introduce music lessons in these schools as a means of enhancing choral worship. Moreover, social snobbery played its part. The popular enthusiasm aroused by the massed singing classes at Exeter Hall and elsewhere in London seemed to make simultaneous instruction in singing a pursuit appropriate only to the labouring classes. When music eventually came to be taught in the public schools, both the motivation for it and the form were quite different from music instruction in the elementary schools. The first move in that new direction was made at Uppingham in 1856.

When Edward Thring was appointed headmaster in 1853, Uppingham was an unremarkable rural grammar school of twenty-five boys. He left it it thirty-five years later among the foremost of English public schools, transformed by a new attitude toward the curriculum which widened it beyond the Classics to embrace a range of pursuits designed to meet the needs and aptitudes of every pupil. Part of every day was devoted to French, German, chemistry, lathework, drawing, carpentry, or music; each boy was required to choose one or more of these besides the traditional range of classical studies.

One of Thring’s biographers has emphasized the fact that though he was the first to introduce music teaching into a public school, he was himself quite unmusical:

The importance of musical teaching was probably brought under his notice by his wife, who had brought from her German home a warm love of music and interest in it. The refining and elevating influence of serious music on those who were able and trained to appreciate it could not escape Thring’s rare powers of observation. An art which appealed at least as much to feeling and imagination as to the intellect, that bugbear of his, could not fail to attract him greatly. And furthermore, the power of vocal music to enhance and emphasise the meaning of words appeared to him of great value. It was with a view to their being set to music and sung, and thus brought forcibly home to a large number of performers and listeners, that he wrote his school songs.³¹

Yet the school songs which Thring introduced were not, as one might expect today, designed to be performed by the whole school. From an entry in his diary describing a school concert in 1873 we learn that a performance of the school song was encored “again and again, and all rose and stood while it was being sung.”³² It was performed by a trained group of singers whose attendance at rehearsals was made compulsory once they had joined the singing class, while Thring would often be present to demonstrate his support for the activity. The rest of the school did not join in.

Instead of basing music teaching in the classroom, as a discipline common to all and centering on vocal activity, Thring chose to foster an instrumental approach dependent on individual coaching and made available only to those who chose it. The school as a whole, however, was invited to share the experience as listeners by attending concerts given by the school choir and orchestra (stiffened by the instrumental coaches themselves) as well as by visiting soloists. To effect this policy Thring appointed Paul David, son of the eminent German violinist, Ferdinand David, to direct music teaching throughout the school.

The model presented at Uppingham was not immediately imitated elsewhere. But as former bias against musical performance as a time-wasting activity and sign of degeneracy gave way to a more balanced opinion among public school headmasters, Thring’s policy was slowly adopted in other schools of similar calibre. The school song and the school concert both became generally accepted features of the life of a superior boarding school as the century progressed. Some part of the influence prompting their acceptance came also from Harrow, where the introduction of music teaching was not first instigated by the headmaster.

The circumstances of John Farmer’s appointment to teach music at Harrow are not fully documented. Tradition has it that he was invited to teach the piano there by individual boys themselves in 1862; and that he was not made a formal member of staff for some years after that. However that may be, his influence upon the school during the next twenty years was indelible, involving a lasting tradition of house-singing and a collection of school songs which eventually came to enjoy immense circulation. At Harrow under Farmer’s direction the whole school sang. Gradually his “wonderful power of making nearly everyone with whom he came into contact enthusiastic for music” turned many of the boys formerly brought up to scorn music into music-lovers (Scholes, p. 626).

That the admission of music to the curriculum of these two leading schools for boys took place at this particular time was a reflection of the changed attitude toward it in society generally. From an 1863 article in the Cornhill Magazine we find clear evidence of the broader acceptance of music at all social levels:

The cultivation of music as a recreation is not now confined in England to one class. While striking its roots down lower in the social scale, its topmost branches have also widened and strengthened. The study is not alone more general, it is also better understood and more seriously undertaken. ... A reaction set in some years ago; yet not so long since but Lady Blessington could venture in one of her books to pronounce openly against a man’s occupying himself with music. . . . It is a great gain that all the barriers of prejudice against music have been broken down; that boys are permitted to be taught the art; and that it is now generally held to be a rational and humanising occupation for men of all conditions.³³

The steady growth of music teaching in independent schools for boys fostered by this new tolerance owed its character to a combination of the methods adopted in the types of boarding schools already examined. In general the pattern adopted, and largely retained today, included the provision of music in the school chapel by both choir and congregation, the performance of works by a voluntary choral society, individual instrumental coaching for those who sought it, and the consequent establishment of a school orchestra. House-singing was allowed to develop into music competitions between houses where the spirit of rivalry found on the sports field might be brought into play. In general, music was not treated as a classroom discipline, no doubt partly because most boys lost their singing voices early in their secondary school career.

Hitherto the daughters of the well-to-do had received their education at home before going on to a “finishing school.” But after mid-century a new pattern for their education was established with the foundation of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and the North London School for Girls under the pioneer headmistresses, Dorothea Beale and Frances Buss. Modest musical proficiency had long been regarded as a desirable accomplishment in a young woman. In addition to the lessons in history, geography, grammar, writing, arithmetic, and needlework specified in the entrance rules for the girls’ school attended by Charlotte Brontë in 1823, an additional charge of £3 a year was made for music or drawing.³⁴ What was provided under the heading of music was private tuition in playing the piano or harp, and singing. This was the usual pattern in similar schools at the time.

That this tradition was largely preserved in the new schools for girls as they came into being is evident from Dorothea Beale’s account of music teaching at Cheltenham Ladies’ College in 1865:

Music is taught in the usual way, by private lessons; but there are also classes for the practice of concerted music, to which only advanced pupils are admitted. There may be from 4 to 12 performers, two to each piano; thus the pupils are enabled to obtain an intimate acquaintance with those works of the great masters (as Cherubini, Bach, Haydn, &c.) which are usually performed by an orchestra, and this promotes, also, decision, accuracy, and facility in reading. Twice a year we have a musical examination, i.e., each pupil is required to play some piece in the presence of her companions and as many parents as wish to attend; no strangers are admitted.³⁵

Just how far instrumental teaching in the new schools fell short of thorough competence was emphasized at a meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences which took place in Cheltenham in 1878. During the discussion which followed a paper on music in schools, one speaker claimed that “the musical instruction in ladies’ schools was in a most deficient state. He had often found ladies who could play a piece well, but when asked what key it was in were unable to give any answer” (Transactions, 1878, p. 675). The tendency in such schools, he claimed, was to concentrate on empty display. And it seems obvious today that the accepted image of the drawing-room pianist who dazzled suitors with empty technique or earned their affectionate indulgence with faltering execution obliged every young lady to learn to play the piano whether she had aptitude or not. The failure of many girls to benefit fully from their lessons must cause little surprise.

Yet this was a time of remarkable advance in the provision of educational resources for young women and girls. The foundation of Girton College, Cambridge in 1869, of Anne Clough’s residential house for women students there in 1871, and of the first high school for girls in 1880 marked a decade of unprecedented progress. It was in the new high schools that class singing was first consistently developed. Maintained by the body later known as the Girls’ Public Day School Trust (GPDST) and noted for its enlightened attitude toward music teaching, several of the schools appointed John Farmer to supervise this side of their activities, with results which earned the attention of the Musical Times in 1890: “Perhaps the Girls’ High School Company does more to encourage the study of singing than other schools of this class. This Company has now nearly 4,000 pupils attending its numerous schools. To place themselves well in evidence before the public, they have arranged to hold a great demonstration at the Crystal Palace. ... Mr John Farmer, who is to conduct, has decided to include only unison songs” (quoted in Scholes, pp. 627-628). A subsequent report of the occasion, published in the same paper, found the programme “decidedly monotonous” though the “sweetness and purity of tone of the voices” afforded a redeeming feature. Yet the editor doubted whether these high school girls would have been as successful as their board school counterparts in singing at sight.

The editor of the Musical Times was W. E. Barrett who also held a post as inspector of music in schools and training colleges between 1871 and 1891. As such he was unusually well placed to comment on existing standards. His comparison of the differing potential of high school and board school pupils in the field of sight-singing pinpoints what was perhaps the most remarkable and ambivalent aspect of popular musical education throughout Queen Victoria’s long reign.

Among tokens of the class distinction which led Disraeli to speak of the queen’s subjects as comprising Two Nations, none seems more bizarre than the opposing interpretations placed upon the content of the music lesson in schools catering for different classes. We have already noticed the “improving” benefits that music teaching was designed to bring to both old and young among the “lower orders” of Victorian society. Their social superiors, it seems, were not in need of singing lessons on this account. But as Sarah Glover pointed out in 1835, the reform of congregational singing — that other purpose of the singing class movement — required the participation of all branches of society:

Amongst the superior orders of the community, singing is at present very rarely cultivated at all by gentlemen; and few ladies have such an acquaintance with intervals, as to venture to sing the simplest psalm tune, unprompted or unsupported by an instrument. Psalmody is therefore usually abandoned to the care of the illiterate . . . most of whom are accustomed, in their youth, to strengthen their vocal organs in various ways which would be deemed unseemly in nurseries and academies for the children of gentlefolk. . . . [But] let singing become a branch of national education, not only in schools for the children of labourers and mechanics, but in academies for young ladies and gentlemen, and the main point will be attained towards rendering psalmody truly congregational.

(Glover, Scheme, pp. 5-6).

Her injunction, however, met with small response, though a few new boarding schools for boys began to encourage singing in their chapels a decade or so later. When a more general drive to introduce music teaching in similar schools took place toward the end of the century, it favoured instrumental activity.

That this choice was influenced by the occurrence of the boy’s changing voice early in his secondary school career draws attention to another reason for the differences in music teaching in different types of schools: the widely differing ages of their pupils. The school-leaving age for elementary school pupils was fixed at ten years in 1880, rising to eleven in 1893 and twelve in 1899. Only in 1918 — as a new wave of reform began — was school attendance made compulsory between the ages of five and fourteen. The leaving age for a boy in an independent secondary boarding school, on the other hand, was normally eighteen.

An influence quite as great was the kind of musical training which the teachers in each of the two types of school had received. Music was taught in elementary schools by general class teachers whose musical knowledge and skill were commonly limited to basic matters included in a general teachertraining course. On the other hand, specialist teachers of music appointed in independent secondary schools (never in grammar schools for boys at this time) had generally received their training at a college of music or a university. Invariably instrumentalists — usually organists — they carried with them into their schools the unconscious bias of the instrumental performer.

The comparative weakness of secondary school pupils in the field of sight-singing, to which W. E. Barrett referred, was one consequence of their teachers’ instrumental outlook. That this was a longstanding circumstance and not a by-product of the times is apparent from a discussion of music teaching published in France in 1818: “One thing that constantly puzzles observers is that among the vast number of those who have learned music, so few can sing at sight. Most of them have to consult their violin, their pianoforte, or their flute, in order to learn a new tune; and it is actually the instrument which does the reading for them. It is as if, in order to read books, one learned to operate a machine designed for the purpose instead of adopting the more direct medium of the words themselves.³⁶ In that passage from his Exposition d’une nouvelle méthode pour l’enseignement de la musique Pierre Galin laid bare, perhaps for the first time, a fundamental shortcoming in the average instrumental performer’s musical equipment: an inability to “hear” a written melody before playing it. It was his contention that this skill had come to be regarded as rare only because teachers failed to concentrate on training the beginner’s ear before training the eye to identify the symbols of music. Other, later teachers were to share his belief that by encouraging singing from sol-fa their pupils developed a more accurate sense of relative pitch than instrumental experience alone could afford.

Most of those who came to share Galin’s belief also shared his amateur status. Few of the attempts to reform musical instruction which occurred during the nineteenth century were made by professional musicians; almost all were the work of amateurs with sufficient understanding of children to question traditional methods which presented obstacles to all but the talented. Foremost among such pioneers in England was John Curwen whose Tonic Sol-fa was designed specifically to ease the beginner’s path.

But Curwen’s amateur status, and his temerity in presuming to “interfere” in the jealously guarded field of music teaching, incensed professional musicians. The situation was not eased by his being a nonconformist minister of known radical sympathies whose massive popular following embraced the unfashionable, the teetotallers, and the poor. Above all, the ancillary notation of sol-fa initials used in Curwen’s vocal scores was anathema to the orthodox; and the resulting combination of outrage and musical snobbery was enough to outlaw Tonic Sol-fa — even after the professors of music at Oxford and Cambridge both commended its usefulness (Scholes, p. 16). It is thus unsurprising that specialist teachers of music in independent schools were not anxious to introduce Tonic Sol-fa, or that general standards of sight-singing there were as relatively disappointing as Barrett had suggested.

In spite of such differences, the state of music teaching in schools at the close of Victoria’s reign presented a very different picture from the desolation prevailing when the queen came to the throne. Then, it had proved necessary to justify music teaching to the nation and Parliament on other than purely musical grounds. Now, the choice of school songs no longer depended principally upon the message of their words, and a wide array of national and folk songs were being brought back into currency through children’s participation. Then it had seemed politic to summon patriotic support by comparing native sloth with Prussian achievement. Just how far that situation had changed by the end of the century is shown by an article published in Child Life in 1899:

It is the belief that only in Germany is there any musical education worth the name. This was true once upon a time, but nobody who knows anything about it could say that it is so today. “England,” writes my German friend, “needs another twenty years of musical education before the teaching will be efficient.” Most true! And when she has had it, Germany will need another twenty in which to catch her up. For during the past half-century England has been making strides, while Germany has been living on her reputation.³⁷

Nor was this outspoken reproach just a reflection of the growing animosity between the two nations which marked those times. The “myth” of German supremacy in popular musical education had been under attack since the publication of Hullah’s formal report on Musical Instruction in Elementary Schools on the Continent in 1880. After visiting schools in Württemberg, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, Saxony, and Prussia, Hullah dismissed the generality of the teachers’ achievements as “the poorest conceivable.”³⁸ Indeed, the decline of musical instruction in German schools was shamefacedly acknowledged by Hermann Kretzschmar in his Musikalische Zeitfragen (1903) and a policy of reform proposed.³⁹ At the same time, the two types of English school whose different interpretations of musical education had hitherto been so distinct now began to experience a process akin to cross-fertilization. The first example of the trend appeared when classes in violin-playing were introduced in a number of elementary schools in 1905. The venture was made possible by an astute London music firm which supplied instruments by hire-purchase at a low rate, boosting the enterprise by organizing the attendance of private teachers in urban schools throughout the country. By 1910 a massed “orchestra” of several thousand elementary school violinists trained in this way performed impressively at the Crystal Palace (Scholes, p. 623), and the beginnings of a new tradition of instrumental playing appeared in state schools which was to continue and develop to our own day.

A movement also began in the same decade to improve aural training and sight-singing in secondary schools. The prime mover was Mary Agnes Langdale, whose challenging articles on “A Plea for Broader Treatment of Music in our Schools” appeared in a little-known Roman Catholic educational journal, The Crucible, in 1908.⁴⁰ Recommending that the teaching of music should more closely resemble the teaching of literature, Langdale urged the teaching of intelligent listening in addition to class singing. Piano and violin teaching would continue to rank with other optional studies, but obligatory lessons should be provided to “ensure to all pupils the benefits of a sound musical training.” No amount of individual instrumental teaching or practice should be allowed to interfere with this regular class work so as to afford those who took up an instrument the general musical knowledge which was essential to intelligent performance. Lessons in musical rudiments and aural training for juniors would lead to the teaching of “Musical Appreciation” for seniors.

That policy was first formally implemented by Stewart Macpherson, a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, who obtained permission to try out the scheme at Streatham Hill High School (GPDST) with gratifying success. The school soon became virtually a normal school where would-be teachers studying at the Royal Academy could practice teaching under Macpherson’s supervision, while other girls’ high schools were not slow to imitate the Streatham pattern. The creation of the Music Teachers’ Association under Macpherson’s leadership in 1908 “to promote progressive ideas upon the teaching of music, especially with a view to the more educational treatment of the subject in schools,” accelerated the process.

As a result of these developments, by the first decade of the present century music had found a place in the curriculum of a wide variety of schools whether independent or maintained by the state. Only the academically slanted, examination haunted grammar schools for boys generally failed to admit music teaching. They continued to do so until the implementation of the Butler Education Act of 1944. Elsewhere syllabuses attempting broader treatment of the subject were consistently introduced to encourage greater musical understanding and wider familiarity with the masterpieces of the art than singing lessons alone could afford. Efforts of this kind were at first necessarily limited to the playing of pieces on the secondary school piano; the pianola, the gramophone, and the radio would enlarge the scope of this work in the future. But within the resources available at the time, well before Victorian self-confidence and earnestness had evaporated, a pattern of music teaching had been developed in schools nationally which was recognizably the fore-runner of the scheme existing today.

______________________

¹ Thomas Wyse, Education Reform (London: n.p., 1836), p. 186; quoted in J. Mainzer, Music and Education (1848; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1985), p. 106. Wyse uses the term “harmony” here to indicate “music,” not the skill of chord writing.

² Beilby Porteus, Works, 6 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1811), VI, 243.

³ H. Silver, ed., Robert Owen on Education (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 162-163.

⁴ Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Letters on Early Education Addressed to J. P. Greaves (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1827), Letter 23, 18 February 1827, pp. 93-99.

⁵ W. E. Hickson, The Singing Master (1836; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1984), p. 3. John Turner, Manual of lnscruccion in Vocal Music (1833; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1983); Sarah Glover, Scheme for Rendering Psalmody Congregational (1835; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1982).

⁶ James Kay-Shuttleworth, The Training of Pauper Children (London: Clowes, 1839), p. 5.

⁷ James Kay-Shuttleworth, Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education (London: Clowes, 1841), pp. 33-51.

⁸ James Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of Public Education (London: Longmans, 1862), p. 345.

⁹ Frances Hullah, Life of John Hullah (London: Longmans, 1886), p. 25.

¹⁰ F.J. Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens 8 vols. (Paris: Fournier, 1835-1860), “Mainzer,” VI, 231; (Brussels: Meline, Cans et Cie, 1844), “G. B. Wilhem,” VIII, 563-566.

¹¹ Henry Fothergill Chorley, “Foreign Correspondence,” Athenaeum no. 527 (2 December 1837), 881.

¹² T. Adkins, History of St. John’s College, Battersea (London: National Society’s Repository, 1906), p. 80ff.

¹³ John Hullah, Wilhem’s Method of Teaching Singing adapted UJ English Use (2d. ed. 1842; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1983), p. xiv.

¹⁴ W. E. Hickson, “Music, and the Committee of Council on Education,” Westminster Re11iew 37 no. 1 (January 1842), 29.

¹⁵ Dictionary of National Biography, 2 vols. (compacted., London: Oxford University Press, 1975), I, 969.

¹⁶ W. E. Hickson, “Wuhem’s Method of Teaching Singing,” Speclalor 14 (10 July 1841), 667-668; “The Singing Classes of Exeter Hall,” Illuslrated London News 1 (11 June 1842), 76-77.

¹⁷ [George Hogarth?], “Music in Humble Life,” Household Words I (1850), 164.

¹⁸ B. Rainbow, English Psalmody Prefaces (Kilkenny: Boethius, 1982), pp. 4-6.

¹⁹ J. J. Waite, The Hallelujah (London: Snow, 1852), preface.

²⁰ J. Mainzer, Singing far the Million (1841; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1984), introduction, pp. 4-5.

²¹ James Turle and Edward Taylor, The Singing Book (London: Bogue, 1846), pp. i-vii.

²² Sarah Glover, A Manual of rhe Norwich Sol-fa System (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1845), p. 66

²³ B. Rainbow, John Curwen: A Short Critical Biography (London: Novello, 1980), pp. 10-13.

²⁴ John Curwen, The Teacher’s Manual (1882; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1986), p. 153.

²⁵ John Curwen, “Lessons on Singing,” Independent Magazine I (January 1842), 23-24.

²⁶ B. Rainbow, The Land Without Music (London: Novello, 1967), pp. 139-155.

²⁷ J. S. Curwen, Memorials of john Curwen (London:). Curwen & Sons, 1882), p. 153.

²⁸ John Hullah, The Psalter (London: Parker, 1843), preface.

²⁹ E. Bryans and T. D. Raike, History of St. Peter’s College, Radley (London: Blackwell, 1925), chap. 1.

³⁰ B. Rainbow, The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church, 1839-1872 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1970), pp. 220-242.

³¹ G. R. Parkin, Life and Letters of Edward Thring, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1898), II, 306-309.

³² Quoted in P. A. Scholes, The Mirror of Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 627.

³³ “Amateur Music,” Comhill Magazine 8 no. 43 (1863), 93-98.

³⁴ Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857); quoted in A. F. Scott, An Age of Elegance (Waking: Gresham Books, 1979), p. 97.

³⁵ Dorothea Beale in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Science (London: n. p., 1866), p. 285.

³⁶ P. Galin, Rationale far a New Way of Teaching Music (1818), cd. and trans., B. Rainbow (Kilkenny: Boethius, 1983), pp. 41-42.

³⁷ A. J. (Curwen, “Should All Children Be Taught Music, or only the Gifted?” Child Life (October 1899); rpt. in A. J. Curwen, Music and Psychology (London: J. Curwen & Sor.;, 1901), pp. 291-296.

³⁸ J. S. Curwen and J. Hullah, School Music Abroad (1880; rpt. ed. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1985), p. 18.

³⁹ Hermann Kretzschmar, Musikalische Zeitfragen (Leipzig: Peters, 1903), throughout.

⁴⁰ M. A. Langdale and S. Macpherson, Early Essays in Musical Appreciation (Kilkenny: Boethius, 1984), contains both articles in facsimile.