The purpose of the present study is to point out that radio, at its »benevolent« best, in a nation-wide, sustaining program of purely educational character, fails to achieve its aim – namely, to bring people into an actual living relation with music. This will be demonstrated by an investigation into the printed material for 1939–40, issued by the broadcasting network itself. That material bears the title NBC Music Appreciation Hour Conducted by Walter Damrosch, and includes the Teacher’s Guide^a and four Student’s Worksheets,^b published by the Columbia University Press, New York, 1939. Although the broadcasts do not follow the printed text in every little detail, the texts still provide a definite and authoritative statement of the viewpoint and method of the Hour, and a judgment of the Hour may be based upon them as representative of the broadcasts.

It will be shown that not only is the purely musical part of this program insufficient musically and pedagogically, but that it also leads to a fictitious musical world ruled by names of personalities, stylistic labels, and pre-digested values which cannot possibly be »experienced« by the audience of the Music Appreciation Hour, since the program presents the material in a way designed, wittingly or unwittingly, to foster conventional, stereotyped attitudes, instead of leading to concrete understanding of musical sense. We are aware that this analysis may be taken as petulant annoyance of musical expertise and as hypercritical. We are not, however, impervious to certain excellent ideas which the Music Appreciation Hour contains. We may mention here the following passage in Charles H. Farnsworth’s »Introduction to Series C«:

The basis of all music is the feeling of movement that the rapid passing from one tone, or chord, to another produces in us, called »ideal motion«. The way this ideal motion is put together produces what we call form in music. In other words, it gives sense to music. The mind must tie up, as it were, what we have heard with what we are hearing.

The four series of the Hour manifest some sound experience, if not always of actual musical understanding, at any rate of the behavior of young people toward music in general, and it is beyond doubt that much energy and thinking have been expended in its preparation.

But its failure is due to deeper causes. We regard as the most important of these causes the ideological trend mentioned in the paper »On a Social Critique of Radio Music«. Radio, as an economic enterprise in an ownership culture, is forced to promote, within the listener, a naively enthusiastic attitude toward any material it offers, and thus, indirectly, toward itself.^c This »promotional« bias of radio is a permanent obstacle to achieving an adequate relation with the material, and, preeminently, with serious musical material. How this operates will be shown more concretely in the following study, and is not always mentioned explicitly. It will be easy for the receptive reader to construct the links between the general social critique and the findings of this special analysis. It should be reiterated, however, that we do not blame particular individuals for the failure of an undertaking such as the Music Appreciation Hour, but rather the system within which it works; a system, which, in this particular sense, exercises a devastating influence by using its own putative unselfishness and altruism as an advertising medium for selfish purposes and vested interests. If, in addition, we cannot conceal that in certain matters of actual musical competence serious deficiencies here turn up, we do not wish, even in this circumstance, to score the persons involved. They fall victim to an institution which, for reasons of »representation«, must first think in terms of famous names or men in executive positions, instead of estimating their quality distinct from any social considerations of institutional aggrandizement, and which is particularly hampered by the necessity, actual or presumed, of placing in the radio limelight the well-known name of a musician who, whatever his merits in the past, cannot today be expected to be sufficiently equipped to deal with the totally new questions arising in the field of radio musical education.

The nature of the material itself prescribes the following main divisions: I. An investigation of the purely musical and pedagogical qualities of the Damrosch Music Appreciation Hour. II. A study of its cultural implications from the standpoint of what may be called the promotion of musical Babbittry.¹ Naturally, these divisions overlap in many cases. In general, one may regard the cultural deficiencies as being closely linked with the musical and pedagogical wants and conversely.

I Pedagogical and Musical Analysis

The general pedagogical aim of the four courses is to lead the students from the outside of music to the inside.

To sum up the music study in the four courses: we can call the A series, dealing with the orchestral family, the physical aspect; the B series, the imaginative aspect, because of its accompanying ideas and activities; the C series, the intellectual aspect, as in it we observe the structure and forms of pure music; while in the D series a spiritual aspect appears and our attention is focused on the meaning of music as expressing the life and times of the composer.^d

Although much can be said against such a procedure, and although a mental »approximation« of art experience is not ultimately a firm foundation for music education, but rather the understanding of an art work is a sudden, spontaneous, and fundamentally new attitude, nevertheless it is not essential for our criticism to call this procedure into question. It may suffice to mention that a person who is in a real living relation with music does not like music because as a child he liked to see a flute, then later because music imitated a thunderstorm, and finally because he learned to listen to music as music, but that the deciding childhood experiences of music are much more like a shock. More prototypical as stimulus is the experience of a child who lies awake in his bed while a string quartet plays in an adjoining room and who is suddenly so overwhelmed by the excitement of the music that he forgets to sleep and listens breathlessly.

Without entering upon the discussion of the psychology of the genesis of response to music, the pragmatic validity of the »outside-inside« process of musical education emphasized by the Music Appreciation Hour is here granted. Even accepting it as a learning tool, it is still necessary to set up a number of postulates with which a pedagogical enterprise of this kind must comply in order to avoid defeating its own purpose. These postulates would, no doubt, be accepted by the sponsors of the Hour, too. They may be summed up as follows:

1.) If one accepts pedagogically the way from »outside« to »inside«, the principle must be qualified so as to provide safeguards against the means becoming substituted for the end. The means, in the case of the Hour, largely coincide with the »outside« of music; for instance the musical instruments which, according to the Teacher’s Guide,^e are to be shown on cards »for eye preparation«. The external features of music must not become obstacles to real understanding.

2.) If the pedagogical purpose is avowedly serious, that is to say, if actual musical understanding is meant to be developed, as opposed to mere dissemination of information about music, an education from the simple to the complex, step by step and well-planned, must be achieved. Any planless juxtaposition of divergent or non-cohering materials is strictly to be avoided.

3.) The theoretical explanations must bear a direct, clear-cut relation to the concrete musical examples. In particular, the examples must not contradict the explanations in their very essence. Otherwise confusion is promoted.

4.) The explanations must be characteristic as well as specific. That is, each item of material must be chosen in such a way as to allow for full articulation of particular musical characteristics specifically distinguished from such characteristics of other material. This requires, on the one hand, distinguishable musical examples and, on the other hand, musical concepts that are definitively and not accidentally correlative.

5.) If, for pedagogical reasons, the whole truth cannot be told, at least nothing but the truth should be told. In other words, erroneous information, faulty or partial explanations, and inadequate or forced examples are, under no circumstances, justifiable.

6.) The course must not employ notions or associations contradicting the essence of the musical material or the background of the material.

How does the Music Appreciation Hour comply with these postulates?

1.) The Procedure from Outside to Inside

The procedure from outside, that is to say, from things of the external world from any given descriptive content of music, to the inside of music, namely, to its structure and its »meaning«, recommends itself as in keeping with what is known of child psychology. But since, in music, the visible tools are of no value in themselves, and since music has »content« of sense imagination only incidentally, which content, even in many obvious examples of »program« music, remains somewhat ambiguous and arbitrary, the essential structure of music offers stiff resistance to the psychologically recommendable procedure. Only the utmost tact can combine at one and the same time the psychological desideratum of programmatics and the structural requirements of musical language. The Music Appreciation Hour, in spite of some compensating remarks, has failed utterly, by its almost exclusive emphasis on external objects, to achieve a well proportioned combination. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that Dr. Damrosch’s musicianship stems from the »neu-deutsche« tradition and suffers from that school’s unbridled exaggeration of the descriptive side of music. The dangerous implications of this procedure are evident from four examples selected from totally different fields:

a.) The preface to the Teacher’s Guide contains the following statement:

Irrespective of the order followed, however, the attractiveness of Series A depends to a large extent on the degree to which the children can become familiar with the various orchestral instruments as personalities, and not merely disembodied sounds. Hence the importance of using large colored cards of instruments or even partly bringing actual instruments into the classroom whenever possible.

As a matter-of-fact, the overwhelming majority of orchestral music actually uses the instruments as »disembodied sounds« and not as »personalities«. Cases where instruments figure as »personalities«, either imitating something (as the E flat clarinet may imitate a donkey), or as a symbol for an individual, are rare, random phenomena. Beyond that, the discovery of the »personality« of the instruments, of each instrument having its own voice and speaking for itself is a late development. Although instrumental characterization occurred occasionally already in Gluck’s time, it has gained headway only since the days of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.

In serious music the instrumental sound is a mere function of the structure of the whole with no intrinsic value as an individual sound. To shift attention from the outset of a music education program to the personality of the instruments, means to distract pedagogy from the important to the subsidiary. The contradiction between the anticipation and the material presented makes itself felt very soon. In a Haydn symphony the instruments do not talk as personalities, but function within the coherence of parts. A child waiting for the individual voice of the flute and its »message« will necessarily be disappointed or strive to hear it by eliminating all musical sound »extraneous« to what can appropriately be termed the fetishistic attitude toward music.

The prevalence of »technique-mindedness« is a problem which has been posed by Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey in this country, namely that the extravagant development of technical productive powers has outstripped present institutional capacity to control and master them socially. This is reflected psychologically by men becoming emotionally more closely bound to the tools themselves (the means) than to their human function (the end), which latter, in a great many cases, is obscured and gains no overt expression. There is a grave danger to the psychological development of young people involved here, and music education should face this threat and consciously grapple with it. It cannot make inexpedient concessions to technique-mindedness without impairing its social value. Education must attempt to counterbalance the hegemony of the tool.

b.) Section 2 of the Teacher’s Guide quotes from a bulletin issued in October, 1931 by Miss Susie L. Williams, Supervisor of Music in the Dallas public schools, which contains the following statements:

Occasionally test class out on the themes. Themes should be frequently played and followed. Let children point to notes and hum (where possible) as the theme is played.^f

We may point here to the analysis contained in the study of The Radio Symphony concerning the over-emphasis placed upon the theme by radio and the general habit of quotation and atomistic listening. The theme being the »outside« of music and the structure its »inside«, the tendency toward atomistic listening (which is a major problem for the social critique of radio music) is here expressely furthered by the Music Appreciation Hour. The idea that the theme is the »easiest« in music, leads again to a shifting of the attention from the whole to the part. It might be argued here that this is a procedure which commends itself to common sense, and that it would be a high-brow postulate to expect elementary musical education to lead to an understanding of a complex form from its totality and not from its themes. To this objection the reply is that the difficulty can very easily be overcome. The following method is suggested: Play or sing some well-known nursery rhyme such as »London Bridge is Falling Down«: The children are able to follow the tune as a whole and to memorize it very easily. It probably would never occur to them that it has a »theme« as distinguished from the development. The next step is to analyze the tune and show that it is developed out of one fundamental motif which is repeated, varied, and so on, and show concretely how this is done. Then explain that a symphonic movement follows fundamentally the same line, and that a symphonic theme basically plays no other role than the motif does in the nursery rhyme. Of course the concept of theme from the very beginning would appear here too, but only as mere material of the movement and not as its aim or essence. What must be strictly avoided is the idea that serious music fundamentally consists of important »themes« with something more or less unimportant between them, and this idea is expressly furthered by the Music Appreciation Hour by testing students on themes.

The notion of theme should not disappear, but ought to be given its rightful place and thereby gain its true significance. The pupils should be made to feel, although in different terms, that a theme is a sort of »statement« which obtains its meaning only within a functional unity and not as a thing in itself. If this character of the theme were demonstrated by analysis of a folk tune, and if the similarity between the musical structure of the folk tune and the developed musical form were made clear, one could easily show the difference between them as well. That is, one could demonstrate that the unity of the folk tune is an »immediate« unity, a unity in which the parts do not dissociate themselves from one another, whereas the unity of serious music is an articulated unity consisting in the function of parts marked by contrast or, at least, by difference. This would explain the fact that while the theme in the symphony plays fundamentally the same role as that played by the motif in the folk song, the symphonic theme becomes conspicuous as such, while this is not true in the case of the motif of the folk tune. In other words, the analysis should lead to a dual postulate: that in listening to articulated music one ought to be able to distinguish the parts, and to build out of them a unity by becoming aware of their functional interrelationship. All this sounds fairly involved when explained in words only, but could be made clear to any child by the use of concrete examples. The Music Appreciation Hour, however, as soon as higher art forms are involved, insists only upon the articulation and overlooks the functional unity. In this way the articulation ceases to be articulation at all and becomes a disintegration of the work: The elements of articulation actually degenerate into mere atoms.

It should be noted that behind this urging of the atom or theme, there lies again a fetishistic concept of music, the cultural implications of which will be considered later. There is a strong suspicion that children are drilled on themes in order to »recognize« music by some outside sign, so that they may win music appreciation contests, victory in which is considered the acme of success in schools throughout the land. Although the instigators of the Music Appreciation Hour do not mention this idea as a leading force in their approach, it cannot escape attention that, in spite of many and enthusiastic words about music, the drill and contest idea plays a large part in the Hour’s activities. In any case, it is disastrous to promote »That’s it!« responses to symphonic music whenever the theme occurs. The theme is one element of the composition and an important one, but when this element is hypostatized as the composition’s »content« the stream of music is destroyed and replaced by the automatic recognition of what is, after all, one of the composition’s tools among others. This example, by the way, appears to us to illustrate most concretely what is meant by the »reification« of music.

c.) The second concert of Series B, called »Animals in Music«, includes Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, about which it has to say:

The Ride of the Valkyries describes the flight of the horses through the clouds. We hear their galloping hoof beats (horn and cello), their neighing (wood-winds), the battle song of the maidens (trumpets and trombones), and their weird battle cry (strings).

Here again the psychological approach clashes with the structure of the music. The Ride of the Valkyries, like all the corresponding parts of the Ring, is a piece of »nature symbolism«, an attempt to translate, as it were, phenomena of nature such as the rainbow, fire, the thunderstorm, into the language of the myth. The Ride of the Valkyries is what may be called a musical mythologizing of the thunderstorm. The Valkyries and horses are the mythical entities in which music tries to transfigure clouds, storm, and lightning. Only on this level, and not as a primitive naturalistic description, does the Ride of the Valkyries have meaning. The naturalistic features hinted at in the Hour appear continually in the composition, but only in the sense in which elements of waking life appear in dreams, not as straight-forward elements of a narrative. Therefore it is very difficult to identify them, and a child who would try to notice the neighing of the horses in any naturalistic sense would at once be at a loss. Of course, it might be too difficult to explain to children the actual implications of a piece like the Valkyries’ Ride, but by giving them the primitive, descriptive explanation, they are misled in a way not only jeopardizing the meaning of the music, but also raising a conflict between what they were told and what they are actually hearing. It would suffice to tell them something about the Valkyries in general and the ride rhythm. In attempting to make this more concrete and to interpret it in terms of »outside«, only the opposite is achieved. Moreover, it should be noted that the idea that Wagner’s aim approximates that of a musical circus director creates an atmosphere of workaday matter-of-factness which necessarily affects, most unfavorably, the whole complex of the child’s experience of the music, the nature of which is entirely incompatible with a matter-of-fact anticipation, »Now come the horses, and now the Valkyrie’s cry.« There is a fettering of the child’s imagination which is forced, at any cost, to associate certain prescribed pictures with the music. The artificial naïvete´ of such an approach is likely to annoy children rather than please them, and it would not be surprising if the more alert and less conforming children were to call any such attempt to interpret music in circus terms stupid.^g

d.) The second concert of Series D presents a Bach program preceded by a short biographical sketch of the composer. While characterizing him very aptly as »both at the end of one era and the beginning of another; for he was the last great composer of the polyphonic school and, at the same time, he laid the foundations of all modern music«, it goes on, »Bach was born in the little town of Eisenach, Germany, in the very shadow of the Wartburg Castle, which is also known to us as the setting for one of the great scenes of Wagner’s Tannhäuser«. Here again the attempt is to make the approach more concrete by some outside reference, and the attempt is perilous. The link, Bach–Eisenach–Wartburg–Tannhäuser–Wagner, is purely fortuitous and has no basis within the music of either composer; therefore it does not help the student to understand anything, but has the contrary effect. If we assume, as evidently the authors of the Hour do, that the pupil knows something about Tannhäuser and the Wartburg, then we must also assume that he has certain associations linked with the Wartburg, such as knights, medieval glamour and might, shining armor, and beautiful maidens. If the reference is to be of any assistance in understanding Bach’s music, the pupil will approach the music with these associations. He will, of course, be bitterly disappointed as there is absolutely nothing in Bach’s music to suggest any of these features.

There again the expectation of something which is not forthcoming may easily lead to disillusionment and to distrust of the whole approach. Incidentally, it betrays an astonishing lack of taste to introduce Bach, of all people, in terms, so to speak, of an operatic hero. The hero-worship fostered by the Music Appreciation Hour, appears to confuse the boundaries between the composer and his creatures. They all sleep in the same pantheon of greatness, indiscriminately adored from outside.

2.) The Pedagogical Procedure

a.) Each series has an introduction by Charles H. Farnsworth stating the fundamental concepts of the section. These introductions contain, as suggested before, the most valuable ideas of the Hour. But they contain them in the form of statements which are, for anyone not thoroughly familiar with musical structures, absolutely incomprehensible. Instance the following from the »Introduction to Series B«:

We often say we do or we do not remember how a melody goes. This »go« of music is called »ideal motion«. It is the real stuff out of which music is made, much as forms and colors are the real stuff out of which the beauty in the arts of painting, architecture, and sculpture are made. The study of how this ideal motion of music is turned into artistic musical forms is reserved for Series C.

This is an attempt to describe music as a structural unity, but it fails for two reasons. First, though it is very effective to start with »how a melody goes«, the transition from this obvious notion to the »go« of music in general remains totally obscure. It is very difficult for a child, or even an adolescent, to grasp that, in a definite sense, the most complex symphonic form »goes« in the same way in which one says that a melody goes.^h The practical issue for pedagogy is to show precisely in what way this occurs, as we tried to sketch above, instead of merely asserting that it does. Second, the term »ideal motion«, as it stands, does not convey any clear meaning even to an adult reader and cannot possibly be understood by a youngster. Probably what is meant here is that musical motions are motions taking place not indiscriminately in the external world but within their peculiar sphere of structured sound. This, however, ought to be explained. The term »ideal« carries with it totally different associations, such as the perfect, the Platonic pattern, which confuse the issue. The obscurity of this fundamental, and basically sound statement, proves doubly disastrous because the thesis about ideal motion is made the leading hypothesis of Series C, on which all the explanations of musical forms depend. Although the introductions may be sufficiently clear to the functionaries of the Music Appreciation Hour, the task of conveying fundamental notions by lucid terms has not even begun.

b.) The lack of pedagogical consistency is evident, not only in the conceptual foundation, but also in the actual explanation of music. A procedure which uses technical terms without even roughly explaining them, is pedagogically unsound. Specific examples of this are the use of the terms motet and madrigal, introduced in the first concert of Series D. It is also pedagogically unsound to make reference, when something is to be explained, to an explanation that is to follow later, particularly when the later explanation does not refer to the preceding case and remains vague in itself. This applies to the discussion of the relation between the overture and the sonata form. The worksheet for the ninth concert of Series C (»The Overture«) reads: »The sonata form will be treated fully in the work-sheet for the next concert of this series, which deals with the symphony.« In other words, in the overture concert young people are confronted with a musical form which is not explained to them as such, and the explanation is postponed to a later date without the relation between symphony and overture being shown. This is the more astonishing, as it is precisely the relation between the overture and the first movement of the symphony of the Beethoven type that offers one of the rare opportunities for making good use of the outside-inside approach. It is comparatively easy to explain, in terms of the plot, the dramatic character of the overture. Then one can point to the dramatic contrast between the two main subjects in an overture such as the well-known and structurally simple Beethoven overture to »Coriolanus« which, in form, coincides perfectly with the structure of a symphonic movement. After this has been achieved, one may go on to the symphony and seek to explain it as a drama without any external plot such as in an overture as a purely musical drama in itself. Insufficient as such an explanation would necessarily be in the light of a full and mature understanding,² it does lead along the right track in the early musical education of children and adolescents. It would underscore the dynamic character of the symphony.

The approach from the overture to the symphony falls into three distinct pedagogical steps: first, description of an overture in terms of its dramatic plots; then, translation of these terms into the specifically musical terms of the structure of the composition; and finally, explanation of a symphonic movement in the structural terms gained from this musical analysis of the overture. This opportunity is completely fumbled by the Music Appreciation Hour.

c.) Even more sorely trying to sound musical education is a sequel on musical forms as presented in Series C. It is evidently based upon the assumption that, by and large, this historical development of music coincides with the development from the simple to the complex, and that, therefore, historical review of musical forms leads step by step to actual understanding. This idea, however, is palpably absurd. From the standpoint of pedagogical inculcation the comparatively old form of the fugue is one of the most difficult, and the layman finds it a hard task to understand a fugue. In Series C, the fugue as a lesson topic appears as early as the third concert, preceded only by »Folk Melodies in Great Music« and »Round and Canon«. None of the elements necessary for an understanding of the fugue is provided by such antecedents. This deficiency becomes aggravated in that the whole fugue concert itself is a distortion.ⁱ The correct procedure is to discuss the form of the fugue in contrast to its counterpart, the sonata form; then to elaborate the similarities and particularly the contrast between the two most elaborate and, as they may be called, »integral« musical forms. Thus, light could be thrown upon both the fugue and the sonata forms. It could be made clear, for instance, that the fugue is a fundamentally static, and the sonata a fundamentally dynamic form, a point which is totally missed in the section about the sonata form, and which could be shown very easily by comparing the simple Bach fugue, or one of the short fugues by his immediate predecessors such as J. K. F. Fischer, with a simple Beethoven sonata. The pedagogical insufficiency of the fugue concert becomes the more striking because this concert does not present the fugue in its elementary and characteristic form (say, the Two-Part Fugue in E minor from Bach’s »Well-Tempered Clavichord«), but presents rather involved or uncharacteristic fugues. It is scarcely going too far to assert that no pupil who wants to learn something about the fugue is capable of getting any clear-cut idea about the form from a concert at such an early stage of the whole course. At that point it can lead only to academic talk and not to any true understanding.

d.) The same type of pedagogical inaptitude is in evidence in the Hour’s discussion of composers in Series D. It presumes an artificial, unilateral, evolutionary development of music serially in time, as the guideline for pedagogical development of the young.

The second concert of Series D is a Bach program, incidentally a very uncharacteristic one, consisting only of arrangements. The third concert is devoted to Händel. At such an early stage Bach is too difficult, and a concert devoted solely to Händel will bore the pupils. It is far more fruitful to start from what is known to be the actual standard of musical consciousness within the pupil – from what he, himself, considers as his »normal« musical language. So far as serious music is concerned, this »normal« musical consciousness of the mass of pupils is centered in a certain type of emotional, late romantic music, such as is represented by the works of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. If one does not want to take this approach – and we are cognizant of the grave objections that can be offered from an aesthetic point of view to such a procedure – then of the great composers, the one closest to the »normal« consciousness of the youngster undoubtedly is Schubert. He should, therefore, be given a Schubert concert at the beginning; one which would include certain symphonic Schubert pieces, such as the first movement of the B minor Symphony or of the big C Major Symphony. The pupils will have comparatively little difficulty in following the stream of this music. It is also very easy in these pieces, with their marked contrasts of themes, to illustrate their skeletal structure.

From this point it is easy to approach Haydn. One has to show how these forms work within Haydn, and at the same time that Haydn, while harmonically more primitive than Schubert, attains a higher degree of thematic density than we find in, say, the first movement of Schubert’s C Major Symphony. On the other hand, Haydn’s more complex structure is not difficult to grasp because of the simplicity of the harmonic and melodic elements involved.

The discussion of Haydn leads smoothly into Mozart, and the differences in their respective methods of composition can now be shown and understood. Mozart’s consists mainly of minimal contrasts, of very small elements, as against the straightforward type of development exemplified in Haydn.

Three concerts such as these are sufficient preparation for a Beethoven concert. Beethoven should be treated as the center of musical history with good conscience. His looking-backward can be demonstrated by some of the more polyphonic devices of his late period which constitute a good pedagogical transition to a discussion of Bach. A none too difficult example of this is the last movement of the piano sonata, opus 110. His tendency to simplicity should be noted and related to Händel as in the famous religious song, »Die Himmel rühmen des Ewigen Ehre«, whereas his expressive elements can be interpreted as being related to romanticism (and this is actually done by the Hour but unfortunately to the exclusion of much else), and ought to be demonstrated by references first to Weber and Schumann (who are omitted in the composers series), and then to Wagner.

Some mention should be made, at this point, of the presentation of a pedagogically suitable Bach program. One ought to play an instrumental piece such as the famous »Air« from Bach’s Third Suite for the Orchestra in D Major, which, from the outset, refutes the idea that Bach has »no melody«. Then Bach’s power of expression should be demonstrated. This could be done by some examples which are as striking as they are simple. They could be taken from Bach’s Passion After Saint Matthew, where he treats one choral tune (O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden) in different ways, according to the expression of the poetry in each verse. Particular emphasis should be placed upon the strophe, Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden. These chorals are entirely non-contrapuntal and cannot fail to impress anybody sensitive to music. The use of a choir in a Bach concert would be a good means of varying the presentation. Finally, one ought to offer one of Bach’s larger instrumental pieces, not in an inadequate orchestral setting through »arrangement«, but in its original clarity and economy of means. Here we suggest as particularly appropriate the first movement of the B minor Sonata for flute and piano, which combines the utmost melodic intensity with rich polyphonic work. It should be noted that in none of these suggestions here is the fugue mentioned.

3.) Explanation and Example in the Music Appreciation Hour

As to the adequacy of explanation and example, we need offer but one typical case, selected again from the fugue concert. It is particularly striking and shows the confusion which necessarily must be created if the relationship between text and example is not stringently controlled.

The introduction to the fugue concert places its main emphasis upon the difference between the fugue and the canon. The soundness of this procedure is moot. In any case the first thesis of the introduction reads: »The subject (that is to say, the theme of the fugue) is given out in full before the second voice enters.« The first example is the Fugue Number One from Bach’s »Well-Tempered Clavichord«, arranged (for some abstruse reason) for string orchestra by Dr. Damrosch. This fugue, however, is a canonic fugue; that is, a fugue where, throughout the whole movement, except for the very beginning, each part begins with the subject before it has been played in the preceding part (Engführungsfuge). In other words, it precisely contradicts the first thesis of the explanation of the concert. Whereas the explanation tries, with much ceremony, to make clear the difference between the canon and fugue and sacrifices every other consideration to this distinction, the very first example it presents destroys it, since it is a hybrid form between fugue and canon, being canonic in its details and fugal in its total setting. Naturally, the pupil becomes confused and unable to distinguish which is which.

4.) The Question of Characteristic Examples and Specific Explanations

As to the necessity of using characteristic examples and specific explanations:

a.) The material itself is very often uncharacteristic and, therefore, does not permit any specific explanation. Thus, the eleventh concert of Series B, »Dances of America«, only incidentally presents a syncopated piece and therefore fails to bring out what every American boy and girl certainly would like to know, that is, the principle of syncopation in American dance music. Moreover, in the fifth concert of Series C, the main example of the variation form is the prelude to L’Arlesienne by Bizet, which is only partly variations and is very unspecific for the purpose of making clear the variation principle. A clear and simple example would be the variation movement of the »Surprise Symphony« by Haydn. Further, the »modern suite« (eighth concert, Series C), has no specific form-idea at all and is, therefore, not at all suited for contrast, as a form type, with the »classic suite« (seventh concert, Series C), which is a more or less regular sequence of certain types of stylized dance forms.

b.) The explanations are unspecific, also, in the case of historical features such as the development of a composer. We offer the following example, taken from the Verdi program, the sixth concert of Series D:

The next twenty years accounted for eight more operas, ending with Aida, which is musically the far more imposing and is marked by a more elaborate and subtle use of the orchestra. Then after a gap of sixteen years, came his last two masterpieces, Othello, and Falstaff, which reveal a still more mature and complex idiom.

About the terms »more elaborate« and »more mature« nothing is said. Any attentive pupil must wonder what the changes in Verdi’s style actually consisted of; namely the shrinking of the flowing tunes to their very nucleus by elimination of any cheap repetition or continuation. The explanation of the Music Appreciation Hour strongly reminds one of the famous pamphlet issued by an imperial Austrian government about hydrophobia among dogs: The first day the dog is ill, it is sad and draws its tail between its legs; the second day, the dog becomes still sadder and its tail droops between its legs even more.

c.) Highly significant in all these several failures is that not only are the examples uncharacteristic, but the explanations of the most important individual musical forms employ a conceptual framework so unspecific and undifferentiated as to make it impossible to understand the differences between forms which are actually divergent. Thus the main point of musical education insofar as musical forms are concerned is missed.

The fourth concert of the Series C deals with the »Three-Part and Rondo Forms«. The explanation starts with a concept of structural symmetry and develops, as its most elementary form, the three-part song form or ternary form (A–B–C). The rondo form is explained as a logical extension of three-part form.

If we should think of two-part form as being similar in pattern to the cross-section of a piece of bread (A) with jam (B) and three part form is being like a sandwich (B representing the filling and A the enclosing slices of bread), then rondo form may be likened to double-decker and triple-decker sandwiches in which slices of bread are separated by various kinds of filling.(!) There are several types of rondo, but in each type there is a principal musical idea which reappears again and again in example: »A–B–A–C–A–D–A«–»A–B–A–C–A–B–A«.

This is a typical example of what we mean by unspecific explanation. It is not, in itself, wrong; that is, one can break down schematically the form of the rondo into the repetitions of one main section, A, interrupted by alternative sections, B, C, D, and so on; but one can explain, in this way, practically every form, not only the sonata form (which is actually called by the Music Appreciation Hour an »elaboration of three-part form«), but even a form which has nothing to do with the rondo, such as the fugue, which consists of sections where the same theme appears in different parts, and of interludes between these sections. It is obvious that a scheme that can be applied to such divergent forms does not help to explain anything. The specific characteristic of the rondo, which has been missed, is that the different sections of the rondo are essentially different in themselves and are, so to speak, on different levels. The literal meaning of the term »rondo« is round dance, and the idea behind the form is that of a refrain or chorus interrupted by »couplets«, »Gänge«, or alternative passing themes. Whenever the theme reappears in a rondo, it has the effect of a distinct refrain against which the other musical events are more or less incidental. Insofar as structural unity in the rondo form is not the main essential, and interconnection between the main events – namely, the recurrence of the refrain – is quite slack in order to emphasize the reentrance of the refrain, the rondo form may be called an »open« form. It is this looseness which accounts for the comparative ease with which the structure of rondos can be taught, as compared with »closed«, integral forms such as the fugue and the sonata. In this way one fosters real insight into the essential structure of the main musical forms. It is astonishing that the Music Appreciation Hour has failed to perceive this, since the rondo recommends itself as easy to convey to young Americans, particularly of high school age. The formal structure of all American jazz hits, which are well-known to youngsters, is primarily based upon the difference between the verse and refrain, particularly in the sheet versions for piano. The music educator can play any hit on the piano and point to the difference of weight, articulation, and of what may be called »definitiveness«, which exists between the chorus and the verse. Then he could proceed to the rondo and point out that between the rondo theme and alternate themes, there exists, fundamentally, the same relationship as between the chorus and verse in the jazz tune. He could go on to explain that in a hit the relationship between chorus and verse is mechanical and rigid, whereas in the rondo form it is highly flexible and yields to the necessities of the concrete composition. Thus the instructor can reach a point where it is possible for him to demonstrate [to] the pupils, step by step, in what sense present-day market music is primitive and undeveloped as against serious music, while, at the same time, there is nothing learned or scholarly in serious music which cannot be developed by a keen understanding of even the most trivial musical events of everyday life. It would be astonishing from the viewpoint of educational psychology (which is today so much to the fore in American normal schools and teacher’s colleges), as well as of musical education, in which field Dr. Damrosch and his collaborators are held to be pathfinders, that no such attempt has been made by the Music Appreciation Hour, were there not the apparatus of the social critique to explain the fundamental causes for this and other shortcomings.

The devastating effect of the unspecific explanation of the rondo becomes even more obvious when the Hour has to deal with the most important type of musical form, the sonata. As the sonata is again explained in terms of the three-part song form, no specific contrast with any other musical form, and particularly with the rondo, is made evident. On the other hand, the sponsors of the Hour feel that the sonata is something essentially different. Their lack of specific concepts, however, impels them to talk about the sonata form in a general way which explains little and is apt only to frighten pupils.

Pedagogically, nothing is more perilous than to employ in explanation the warning that the subject matter in question is difficult. This is what is done in the case of the sonata: »The intellectual movement,^j requiring the greatest amount of thinking on the listener’s part – and the greatest amount of ingenuity and skill on the composer’s part.« The danger in the use of the term »the intellectual movement« must be particularly noted. It is underscored later when it is contrasted with the second movement of the symphonic form which »gives our heads a rest and appeals to our hearts«. There is no such thing as a »head« part and a »heart« part. The »intellectual« is nothing but the necessity to »tie up«, as Mr. Farnsworth has it, what we have heard with what we are hearing, and, it may be added, what we are to hear, in immediate musical perception and by no means in any »intellectual« conceptual reflection upon the music.

To understand the sonata means to listen in the right way, nothing more and nothing less. How does the Music Appreciation Hour help to foster such listening? The sonata form is explained by the Hour in totally schematic terms such as, exposition, development, and recapitulation. One can only expect that when the highschool boy who first hears that the sonata form is so very intellectual, is told that its form is simply A–B–A, he will judge music to be much ado about nothing.

The instructor simply ought to take some easy, yet characteristic example of the sonata form, such as Beethoven’s little sonata for piano in G Major, Opus 49, Number 2. One can show that whereas in the rondo the refrain is marked and distinct from the other parts, here in the sonata all the parts are closely linked, no theme has a definite preponderance over any other theme, the slightest bits of motifical material are used, and nothing appears throughout the piece that has not been developed out of these small motifical units. This would lead to a coherent understanding of the principle of »development« which governs the whole sonata form and not only the middle section officially called development.

The recapitulation should not be explained in mechanical terms by the alteration of the exposition’s scheme of modulation. One should clearly show the function of the appearance of the second theme in the recapitulation, in the main key and not in the dominant key. It should be demonstrated that it serves to counterbalance the harmonic forces of the development and to establish an harmonic equilibrium which has been destroyed by the modulatory elements from the very beginning. After such an analysis, which sounds much more complicated in theory than it actually is in practice, one could introduce without any difficulty the notion of »dynamic« forms as against static forms, and thus achieve a real understanding of the sonata.

At least three points ought to be made perfectly clear in order to give the pupil a real understanding of this form, without which Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven must remain closed books to him.

1.) The principle of general development, or the dynamic principle, as underlining the sonata form.

2.) The closeness and complete motifical economy of the sonata form (which it has in common with the fugue but from which it differs in its fundamentally dynamic character).

3.) The sonata as the attempt to achieve musically complete unity within the manifoldness.

Instead of such insights, the pupil is bored by the formalistic scheme and, at the same time, fed empty phrases about intellectual effort and skill, which must either repel him or spur him on to erudite babbling.^k

5.) Misstatements in the Music Appreciation Hour

a.) So far we have dealt with uncharacteristic and unspecific explanations within the material of the Music Appreciation Hour. The instruction given by the Hour, however, is not merely unspecific; it contains gross errors and misstatements which jeopardize any value that it might otherwise have had.

It has been postulated here that if, for pedagogical reasons, the whole truth cannot be told, then at least nothing but the truth should be told. The following example shows how the idea that there are certain things one should not tell children, leads the Hour into misstatements which necessarily promote an effect opposite to what it is intended to achieve.

The ninth concert of Series D is devoted to Wagner. The third item on the program is the »Love Duet«, from Act Two of Tristan and Isolde. The term »love duet«, stemming from the older opera form, is a symbol of an operatic world against which Wagner struggled all his life and is a travesty of Wagner’s conception of the music drama. The part in question is, of course, »O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe«. The pedagogues of the Hour cannot resist giving a brief account of the plot of Tristan. The principal passage about the second act reads as follows:

There the unhappy pair meet to seek brief moments of joy in each other’s presence, while Isolde’s maid, Brangäne, stands guard in the watchtower above. But even such momentary happiness is marred by the knowledge that night conveys only fleeting oblivion, that the stark reality of the day will soon return, and that death alone can bring them liberation from those now-hateful bonds which they cannot honorably break – his as loyal liege of King Mark, and hers as Mark’s queen.

This is Tristan ad usum delphini – a purged Tristan. The lovers neither »seek brief moments of joy in each other’s presence«, nor have they any twinges of conscience about »breaking those now-hateful bonds«. The Music Appreciation Hour evokes the idea that they simply suffer, because for reasons of conventional morality they cannot get together. As a matter of fact, they do get together, and adultery is the presupposition of the whole Tristan plot. If one is afraid to speak about adultery, one should not speak about Tristan. One had better not even play it. The assumption, however, that an adolescent would not suspect the true story when faced with the plot of Tristan is absurd. But talking about Tristan in a coy, old-maidish manner, necessarily creates an atmosphere of giggling and dark staircases. The idea that young people would be »corrupted« by Tristan when they can get Film Fun³ at any newsstand, is preposterous as well as hypocritical. But this is only one consequence of the gerontocratic attitude which does not recognize children and adolescents as people.

b.) One can ascribe misstatements such as those about Tristan to a misconception of pedagogical function, but there are a great many points within the Hour which can be attributed only to inadequate knowledge in the field of music.

Misinformation begins in the elementary Series A. The introduction to the fourth concert there states: »The piano is not often used as a part of the orchestra, since its tone is quite different from that of the other instruments«. Neither statement nor the reason given is valid. The sound of the piano is no more alien to the »regular« orchestral sound than the sound of certain other orchestral instruments such as the kettle-drums, and certainly the big drum, which cannot give any definite tone.^l Every musical scholar knows that the function of the piano as an actual part of the orchestra rather than a solo instrument was discovered by Berlioz who treated it extensively in this category in his book on instrumentation. The authors of this introduction apparently do not know that the piano plays a vast role in the modern orchestra. Mention here may be made of three famous contemporary operatic works in which it fulfills this function: Richard Strauss’ Ariadne, Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, and Alban Berg’s Lulu.

The fifth concert of Series A contains the statement that, »In listening to orchestral music, it would be dull if all the planning were done by instruments of the violin family, since the ›voices‹ sound so nearly alike«. After this, any work for string orchestra, such as Mozart’s Kleine Nachtmusik, must be regarded as exceedingly dull, and string quartets as the most contemptible form of music, because they offer even less coloristic contrasts than the string orchestra.

In the sixth concert of Series A, it is said that the double bassoon is used only for special effects. This held good more than a hundred years ago, for instance, in Fidelio. Since then the double bassoon is to be found in every orchestral score, functioning within the woodwind family, which otherwise has no deep bass instrument at its disposal.

The eighth concert of Series A deals with the trombone and the tuba. The introduction states: »The trombone is the tenor instrument, and the tuba is the bass« of the brass section. As a matter of fact the trombones themselves are what Dr. Damrosch calls a family, with a bass of its own having a very definite character quite distinct from the tuba. The tuba’s function as the bass of the brass section cannot be accounted for by the trombone’s being a tenor instrument, but by the fact that the sound of the bass trombone does not merge with that of the other orchestral instruments and has therefore been replaced, from the viewpoint of orchestral mixture, by the less obtrusive sound of the tuba. A glimpse into the score of Wagner’s Ring would provide Dr. Damrosch and his assistants with sufficient information about the existence and function of the bass trombone.

In this context it should be mentioned that in the Beethoven concert of Series D, the theme of the last movement of the E Flat Major Piano Concerto is incorrectly quoted by the Hour. The theme has an up-beat which is noted by Beethoven before the double bar that separates the slow movement from the last movement which immediately follows it. This fact has been overlooked by the Music Appreciation Hour. By the omission of the up-beat, B-Flat, which determines the rhythmical structure of the whole theme, the theme becomes totally meaningless.

c.) All these items might be called minor points, although the sum total of errors of this sort means a considerable distortion of the material presented. But gross faults are to be found even where basic concepts are concerned, as in the following examples:

1.) The introduction of Series C attempts to develop the basic notions of polyphony and homophony. The principal passage reads as follows:

This method of combining melodies is more often used where, instead of repeating exactly what has been heard before, as in the round, modifications are introduced. The principle, however, is the same. It is well described as »continuous repetition« and is called »polyphonic« music.

In contrast to this, there is a second way in which music is combined to form a complete composition. In this we complete what we started with and then introduce entirely new or contrasting music, after which we repeat what we first heard. This is described as »alternating repetition« and is called »homophonic« music, because one voice has the essential melody while the other voices, or parts, supply the accompaniment.

These definitions are untenable. Continuous repetition, or, as it is called in musical terminology, imitation, is one of the means employed in homophonic as well as in polyphonic music. The classical Viennese school is certainly more homophonic than polyphonic and still largely employs the technique of imitation, as is obvious in the simplest examples such as the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. On the other hand, there is no necessity for using imitation in polyphonic style. Every course in counterpoint, on the contrary, teaches one to treat several simultaneous parts melodically developed and independent of one another, first without reference to imitation, and later introduces the principle of imitation, in what is called in German, Choralbearbeitung. Again, in advanced modern music, where the principle of imitation is largely excluded as being too mechanical, we find vast structures that are purely polyphonic and entirely devoid of imitation (e.g. Schönberg’s Erwartung). On the other hand, the principle of contrast by no means coincides with the principle of homophony. It is characteristic of certain homophonic composers such as Mozart, whereas in Beethoven we find compositions with practically no considerable contrast (for instance, the slow movement of the String Quartet, Opus 59, Number 2), as well as works full of contrasts. Above all, Wagner, who certainly was a homophonic composer, defined music as the art of transition, and his whole technique is based upon the principle of mediation, using contrast only upon rare occasions for decisive dramatic effects. These few references suffice to make clear that the pair of concepts arising from »continuous repetition« and »alternating repetition« can by no means be considered as respectively descriptive of the pair, polyphony and homophony.

In the introduction to the second concert of Series C, a much better explanation of polyphony and homophony is given:

Polyphonic – which means »many-voiced« and denotes music which is formed by two or more different melodies going on at the same time.The art of combining melodies in this manner is called counterpoint.Polyphonic music is also called contrapuntal music.

Homophonic – which means »one-voiced« and denotes music in which the different parts are blended into a single mass, called harmony, above which one melody alone stands out. Homophonic music is also spoken of as harmonic music.

It is doubtful, however, that it helps much after the confusion created by the general introduction.

2.) The worst misstatements occur in the program about the fugue, which, from any point of view, is most inadequate of all. The introduction contains the following passage: »An extremely simple illustration of the opening measures of a fugue, showing how subject, answer, and countersubject are related, is as follows:

These bars could not be, as it is asserted, the »opening« bars of a fugue. They are merely examples of free imitation. It is the most elementary requirement of the subject of a fugue, which a student of composition learns in his first lesson on the fugue, that a fugue theme as stated in the opening measures must end with a »complete cadence«, employing as its harmonic basis, the fourth, fifth and first steps (Stufe) of the key, or their substitutes.^m The example given by the Music Appreciation Hour, however, contains only the first and the fifth, instead of a full cadence and is therefore grossly in error. The beginning of a fugue based upon the material offered by the Music Appreciation Hour, would read correctly as follows:

It must be emphasized that these are not subtleties which are fundamental facts about the fugue only for the expert. It is all the more necessary to handle them correctly, as the Hour itself introduces the difference between a literally faithful (»real«) and »free« (»tonal«) answer to the subject of a fugue. These two ways of answering a theme of a fugue, however, obtain their meaning only from the harmonic implications of the fugue theme. The alternations fulfill the function of avoiding in certain cases the overlapping of the cadence of fugue themes upon melodic events which do not fit, namely in cases where the fugue theme begins with the fifth step. As the answer begins in the dominant key, the fifth step could not be brought together with the first step of the old key with which the theme must end. This, however, is not the case in the example given by the Music Appreciation Hour. If it were answered correctly, it could be answered literally and not in the arbitrary way given there. Our counter-example shows that the literal answer would be entirely adequate. In other words, the example is not only wrong but it is also musically senseless with regard to what it is supposed to show.

There is a final gross error in the fugue concert that leads to false expectation and therefore to confusion. The last example presented in the fugue concert is the riot scene of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. The Music Appreciation Hour says: »Into the music of this famous scene, Wagner has woven a fugue which admirably suggests the complexity of the action on the stage.« The fugue referred to is no fugue. We content ourselves here with quoting the greatest living authority on Wagnerian forms, Alfred Lorenz, who writes:

One word more about the riot scene. It is often incorrectly called a fugue, whereas, actually, it only opens with a fugato. If one insists upon a comparison of its form with polyphonous forms, it ought to be subsumed under the form of a choral fantasy, for the lines of the melody of this serenade… make a cantus firmus counterpointed by the other parts, as in a Bach choral.ⁿ

After the explanation of the fugue that the Hour gives at the beginning the pupils when listening will look for a fugue-like recurrence of the theme. As this does not occur in the »choral fantasy«, they will be at a loss, and the riotous confusion portrayed by the music will become their own. There is much talk about the fugue, but nothing is done which actually helps them to understand a fugue in its concrete musical logic.

6.) The »Background« of the Music Appreciation Hour’s Explanations

The last postulate concerning pedagogical tactics was that the course must not employ notions or associations contradicting the essence of the material and its background. Failures in this field are not quite so simple to spot as those already dealt with, but as far as the general educational effect is concerned they are more decisive than any examined so far. These failures are mainly a matter of formulation. Three extreme examples of a trend of thinking which virtually undermines the whole course suffice for illustration.

a.) The sixth concert of Series B is concerned with »Motion in Music«. One of the examples presented is Schubert’s »Cradle Song«. The commentator says: »Schubert was incredibly gifted as a writer of songs; when he was eighteen he had composed almost one hundred and fifty of them, and for the rest of his life, he averaged forty songs a year.« Although these statements are not incorrect, their tone is such as to promote an attitude toward music which can only be called barbaric. He speaks of Schubert’s songs in terms of the output of a factory, stressing the quantitative element. The fact that the young Schubert had already written one hundred and fifty songs means nothing; some Tin Pan Alley composers could outnumber him very easily at an age as comparatively youthful for this day as Schubert’s was for his, whereas Mahler, a great song composer, wrote, in his entire lifetime, no more than sixty songs. Particularly provocative is the term »averaged«, which necessarily carries the implication that it is a composer’s duty to write as much as possible and that his achievement can be measured by the »average« he reaches. The notion of average is completely antagonistic to art. One passage like the one about Schubert’s average, is liable to annihilate every notion of musical »giants«, musical sublimity, and so on, discussed in the course. As a matter of fact both means of appraisal, the quantitative way and the empty enthusiasm, are all too compatible.

b.) The fourth concert of Series D is a Haydn program. The introduction commits the following atrocity among others:

Haydn is often referred to as »the Father of the symphony«. He is that, and more. He developed and standardized the form which has been in constant use ever since, as the accepted form for symphonies, concertos, quartets, trios, and sonatas.

The allegation that Haydn »standardized« the sonata form, is a fatal blow to the life of musical forms. Standardization is a term applied to industrial mass production and not to works of art, but apparently the commentator is under the spell of the industrial age to such an extent that he does not even notice its inadequacy. Haydn crystallized the sonata form, not as a rigid standard, but as a highly dynamic framework responding to any impulse of the composer in the specific work he is writing. The standardized sonata form would cease to be a living form and would become nothing more than a schoolmaster’s set of prescriptions. The real danger in such statements is that they promote the idea that it is the task of a composer to »make things easier«, as if it were Haydn’s merit that after him it was easier to compose; actually and fortunately, it became more difficult after Haydn to write symphonies. Musical development is not like gadgeteering.

As long as the idea of making things easier prevails in musical education, no actual musical understanding can be expected to develop. Such understanding consists in the very spontaneity of the listener’s response that is jeopardized by the feeling that everything has been settled for him by other people who have standardized the forms.

c.) The sixth concert of Series D presents a performance of the entire second act of Verdi’s Aida by the Metropolitan Opera Company, certainly a good selection for presentation. In the introduction’s treatment of the text, however, one finds the suggestion that Rhadames »places his love for Aida above his social position as a national hero«. The term »social position« carries with it associations of the Social Register. Rhadames, in the opera, has no more »social position« than does Lohengrin or Tristan; he is a mythical figure symbolizing a general human conflict. The conventionality and stuffiness of the term kills the very »imagination« which the course so often attempts to summon. In the first place, what good it would be for a youngster to dream about the pyramids and mysteries in Egypt only to learn that even there it is social position that matters; further, a mythical notion such as that of a national hero is distorted when it is treated as a profession leading to »social position« which could be occupied by another person as well.

There is much talk about »background« of musical education. An involuntary slip such as that about Rhadames, shows the shallowness of the »background« of imagination and fantasy out of which the educators of the Music Appreciation Hour draw their categories. The world of Aida remains two-dimensional, as it were, when it is linked up with the notion of »social position«. But this is no longer a matter of purely musicological information and education. It leads to the broadest cultural criticism of the entire enterprise.

**II The Music Appreciation Hour as Promoter of Musical Pseudo-Culture**

We have shown in Section I the failure of the Music Appreciation Hour, pedagogically as well as musically, to establish any living relationship of actual, spontaneous understanding between the music it offers and its pupils. It even fails to convey any reliable information on musical matters. Even the basic concepts around which the instruction of the Hour is grouped, such as homophony and polyphony, the rondo, fugue, and sonata, remain obscure, and the pseudo-expert explanations provided by the Hour do not help to achieve clear understanding. What do they do instead?

a.) The notion of »appreciation«, as employed by the Music Appreciation Hour, is based upon the idea of music’s effect upon the listener, interpreted in terms of »pleasure« or even »fun«. These principles, borrowed from the sphere of commercialized entertainment and shallow in themselves, lead, even if excusable as pedagogically expedient in inducing people to listen, to distortions of musical sense and cultural absurdities, at least if they are handled in the way the Hour handles them.

b.) The Music Appreciation Hour conceives of the »fun« one gets out of music as being practically identical with recognition. Although recognition may contribute to musical understanding, it is by no means identical with such understanding. Otherwise anything profoundly new would be excluded a priori. Actually, what occurs in the Hour is a shifting of the »fun« from a living-relationship with music to a fetishism of ownership of musical knowledge by rote. The idea is that of the musical spelling bee; the contest winner looms large behind appreciation. By influencing the pupils to recognize the established, the principle of fun, supposedly a principle based upon the listener’s own needs and own spontaneity, is implicitly superseded by the desire for prestige attaching to recognition of the socially recognized.

c.) The authoritarian structure of this type of musical education, promotes a cult of persons instead of an understanding of facts. In the first place there is the name of Dr. Damrosch himself whose authority, at the same time, is a means of enhancing the prestige of NBC with the listeners of the Hour. The actual measuring rod for musical personalities in the Hour is success. The conformist attitude of veneration for the successful is closely allied, in musical matters, with a profoundly reactionary attitude. These features of the Hour virtually produce musical pseudo-culture: the ideal music appreciator, from the viewpoint of the Hour, would be a musical Babbitt.

d.) The tendency toward musical pseudo-culture becomes most striking at the very point where the Music Appreciation Hour apparently tries to »activate« its listeners: in the tests that are appended to each worksheet. These employ a mechanical technique, are not applicable to concrete listening phenomena but only to the instruction given by the teacher, and are as a whole fit to promote only highly questionable information about music and not actual musical understanding.

1.) »Appreciation« and »Fun«

The course defines itself as »instruction in the appreciation of music«.^o The notion of appreciation is commented upon by Dr. Will Earhart in the Teacher’s Guide: »To respond to rhythms and enjoy (which means ›appreciate‹) them as varied modes of motion.« The leading category of music appreciation is, in other words, the effect of music. Indeed, the Teacher’s Guide, particularly in Dr. Earhart’s comment on Series C, places an overwhelming emphasis upon the notion of musical effects, while totally omitting the notion of musical sense.

Appreciation would be the sum total of musical effects achieved within the listeners. It is a notion current in aesthetics since Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as an art-form aimed to produce the responses of pity and fear in the spectator. Goethe was fully aware of its danger when he wrote: »The perfection of the artwork in itself is the eternal and indispensable postulate. What a pity that Aristotle, who always had the perfect before him, should have thought of the effect!«

It is not necessary here to go into any detailed refutation of »effectaesthetics« which is bound up at least today with a market society, where every productive power is fettered by the necessity of being pecuniarily marketable and of exercising some desired effect upon a potential customer. Instead, we content ourselves with an analysis of the inherent inconsistencies to which this aesthetics leads the Music Appreciation Hour with regard to its conceptual framework as well as to the relationship which its theoretical aspects bear to the material presented by the concerts.

a.) The psychological effect of a work of art on a subject may serve to bring him into relation with the work of art. But it is never the underlying principle according to which the work is structurally organized. It is a basic misunderstanding of »appreciation« to postulate that the effect of the work of art is identical with its sense and that a work is understood as soon as it exercises a certain effect, or that it is the intention of the work to create such an effect.

The confusion between the pedagogical use of the effect as a point of departure and the interpretation of the work of art itself in terms of effect leads in a vicious circle. The effect of an artwork upon the potential spectator or listener is something given. Pedagogy tries to start from this givenness of the effect in order to lead up to an understanding of the matter itself; but how is this possible if the matter itself is defined only in terms of the effect? If one were to start from the effect, the process of understanding urged by the Hour would be spurious for understanding; that is, the end would be nothing more than the beginning – namely, the effect.

In the case of fully adequate art experience, something of this sort may occur; given an ideal listener, his immediate apperception and the full meaning of the work would coincide. But this coincidence cannot be presumed to exist at that point from which music education has to start. In other words, the Music Appreciation Hour must not treat its pupils as if they were ideal listeners for whom the meaning of the work of art coincides with the effect it has upon them. It is precisely this, however, which is the attitude. We have mentioned the anomaly of starting from the effect in order to lead up to the meaning of the work of art which, in turn, is defined in terms of the effect.

b.) If starting from the effect and, at the same time, aiming toward the effect leads in a pedagogical circle, the idea of effect, even if taken in its utter abstractness, produces a further insurmountable difficulty with regard to the subject upon whom the effect is supposed to take place. The Teacher’s Guide says:

The discussion may embrace […] whether the piece »hangs together« almost to the point of monotony, or whether it moves on and on as fancy leads, to nowhere in particular, or whether it has just enough of »same« and »different« (unity and variety) to please us.^p

Who are the »we«? Certainly to a youngster with no musical experience, a piece of advanced modern music will appear to »move on and on as fancy leads, to nowhere in particular«, just because he is unable to understand the subtle relationships which constitute the structure of such a piece or the complicated pattern of its form. Should the composer, therefore, be forbidden to write such a work? This would mean the inauguration of the line of least resistance as the ultimate quality of music and philistine self-satisfaction and ignorance would be the judge of its aesthetic value. It goes without saying that not only understanding but even pleasure, in the primitive sense urged by the Hour, vary with the subject and that something which »pleases us« as it is conceived by the Hour might repel a more highly developed musical consciousness and vice versa.

Behind the talk of the »we« who should be pleased is an untenable idea of »natural musical feeling«. This »natural musical feeling« does not exist; it is merely the veneer of historically changing attitudes and one may safely say that what is today called musically »natural« is mainly the residue of past convention.

c.) One does not know upon whom the effect is supposed to be exercised. Does the Hour regard effect itself as the desired effect as well as the actual one, between which it does not draw any articulate distinction? The Hour’s educators do not hesitate to identify this effect with enjoyment, pleasure, or fun. Here lies the connection between the categories of consumer goods, particularly commercial entertainment and the sort of practical aesthetic advocated by the Hour. Something must be pleasing and worth its money to be admitted to the market. On the contrary, the work of art really raises postulates of its own and it is more essential for the listener to please the Beethoven symphony than for the Beethoven symphony to please him. None of these questions appears within the categorial framework of the Music Appreciation Hour.

Instead the term fun appears at different instances.^q The introduction to Series A asks: »What can we do to get the most fun from what the radio fairy brings?« This is a compounded absurdity. The term fun, borrowed from the tritest spheres of everyday life, carries a touch of humor which, whatever its proper merits may be, is totally at variance with the serious music presented by the Hour. Moreover a fairy is supposed to be a being from a higher, spiritual world, who may bring elation, happiness, anguish, everything but fun. Finally, the phrase links the fairy with radio, a technical tool which is essentially scientific and by its very historical essence opposed to any »aura« such as that suggested by the use of the fairy – thus achieving association through anachronism.^r

Later the word »fun« is interpreted as follows: »Those who use their minds most actively are the ones who get the most fun.«^s Certainly it is sound to urge mental activity in music listening. But here again the term »fun«, while apparently simplifying the issue, actually makes it more obscure. For it is the listener’s very mental activity which dispenses with fun as envisioned by the Music Appreciation Hour. Any music which one listens to spontaneously, that is, with active comprehension of its context, ceases to be »relaxing« and no longer brings amusement. Beyond that, one thing is certain: that serious music, be it listened to actively or passively, is of such a nature as not to promote fun. To get fun out of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata or the C-sharp-minor quartet, would be more difficult than simply to understand them.

Even if one should take the term »fun« as a pedagogic exaggeration and substitute the more restrained term »pleasure«, it would not work more satisfactorily. It is interpreted by the Music Appreciation Hour in terms of gustatory listening: »The material of musical art is tone. It must be pleasing to us. Besides purity and beauty, tone has color, and the tone color affects us.« This type of attitude towards music is also found in Carl Seashore’s Psychology of Music,^t and in Deems Taylor’s Of Men and Music.^u Musical hedonism, if handled in the atomistic and primitive way suggested by the Hour, leads to the idea of a café concert gypsy violinist playing a Beethoven concerto. It appears doubtful to us that this necessary consequence is actually the aim of the educators connected with the Music Appreciation Hour. Every musician is familiar with the phenomenon of the »too beautiful« tone which carries with it wrong associations; it is comparable to paintings in which a sunset or a girl as »natural objects« can be too beautiful, in naturalistic terms actually to fulfill the artistic intention of being structurally beautiful.

d.) The full consequence of the Hour’s teaching in terms of effect and pleasure, in its inconsistency with the material offered in the programs, may be illustrated by the following quotation from the introduction to the eleventh concert of Series C, concerned with the symphony in general.

[…] the first movement makes us work in order to keep track of its complicated patterns, the second movement sets us dreaming, the third allows us to relax and play, and the fourth raises our spirits so that we are in a cheerful or exalted frame of mind at the conclusion of the work.

According to this view it is the idea of a symphony as a whole to make life more comfortable for its listeners. But why, then, go to the symphony at all? This aesthetics is certainly better served by Tin Pan Alley. Why, specifically, must the first movement »make us work in order to keep track of its complicated patterns«? Only to make the following dreams more pleasant to us. This is reminiscent of the famous recipe for happiness given to the poor: If one sleeps in a cold room, one has only to put one’s foot outside the blankets until it is chilled, the more to enjoy its getting warm again when it is put back. As to the second movement, the description in terms of effect, namely of setting us dreaming, is decidedly inadequate. In a great many cases, for instance the slow movement of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, the pattern of the second movement is no less complicated than that of the first and is by no means »relaxing«. Is this movement, then, only another attempt to prepare us, by its very contrast, for the relaxation to follow? But this relaxation does not eventuate: the rollicking Scherzo is very short and the final Passacaglia imposes a new burden upon the tired business man. Is Brahms’ Fourth Symphony therefore a bad work?

It should be added that the final reference to our »cheerful or exalted frame of mind at the conclusion of the work« is not only contradicted by a great many works such as the Brahms’ Symphony mentioned but also presupposes an identity between the »aesthetic« mood of a work of art and the »naturalistic« mood of its listener, which by no means exists. One may listen to a highly excited piece of music very attentively and fully understand it without becoming excited oneself. One of the main presuppositions for an understanding of art is the consciousness of the difference between art insofar as it is a world in itself, and the empirical reality of one’s own existence. This fundamental fact about art has escaped the attention of the Music Appreciation Hour. This question is too difficult to be discussed with the Hour’s listeners but the Hour itself ought to follow a procedure which would not lead to confusion of the aesthetic character of the work of art and the empirical reality of the pupil’s life. This very confusion is furthered by the Hour’s comments concerning effect and pleasure.

It might be objected that the elimination of terms such as »great work of art«, and their replacement by terms supposedly denoting the actual role of music for human beings, such as »fun« and »pleasure«, is progressive in itself. But this progress is spurious. The illusion of the sanctity of music is shattered by the Music Appreciation Hour, but it is replaced by the enchantment of the composers, conductors, and institutions that produce it.

Good musical education postulates respect for the work, evinced by the listener’s preoccupation with its musical sense per se. It is not loaded with inculcating maudlin respect for the composer, whose merits it judges in terms of the concrete meaning and concrete achievement of his work. The Music Appreciation Hour destroys respect for the work, its meaning, and its achievement, by transposing it into the effect it has upon the listener and inculcating in him composer-fetishes which become virtually identical with the »fun« he derives from viewing a World Series baseball game.

The Music Appreciation Hour first cheapens music and then teaches its pupils to adore musicians as spiritual leaders. This contradiction, basic to the whole approach, makes any destruction of fetishism impossible.

2.) Recognition and the Musical Spelling Bee

a.) To the Music Appreciation Hour, the pleasure of music appreciation coincides with the pleasure of recognition. »Music is not ours to enjoy until it is ›out of the air‹ and ›in our heads‹.«^v Or, as formulated even more recklessly, »Music that is known and remembered until it can be whistled or sung or can be reviewed silently in the mind, becomes loved and is heard with appreciation.«^w The reification mentioned in Section I becomes even more evident when the function of recognition of music is overemphasized. A theme isolated solely for purposes of recognition and identification, is no longer part of the living musical process but is a thing owned. Or, as the Teacher’s Guide states it characteristically in our last reference, it is »ours« or »in our heads«. »A piece of music, which has just at the moment come into our sensorium«, is compared by the Music Appreciation Hour to »a picture, a person, a building, a machine.«^x

Of course, as in all mental processes, recognition plays an important part also in musical experience. What is being called into question here is the emphasis. While apparently urging recognition in order to help people to »enjoy« music, the Music Appreciation Hour actually encourages enjoyment, not of the music itself, but of the awareness that one knows music. It becomes a deflected pleasure, not a spontaneous and immediate one. The pleasure involved consists of a fetishistic hoarding of information about music, which one enjoys as a miser enjoys the gold he has accumulated. This is closely related to the idea given passing mention in Section I, of the musical contest where the hoarded musical treasures of various individuals are, as it were, measured quantitatively against each other. They speak about pleasure, but they aim at identification. In a passage which we regard as the most significant of all, the Teacher’s Guide lets the cat out of the bag:

Familiarity with the principal themes and observation of their use in a composition should lead to a better understanding of the music. It should also assist in the identification and naming of the composition.^y

Identification and naming of compositions should be only a supplementary means of helping the listener understand music. Though seemingly underemphasized here, the very categorizing of identification and naming as on a par with understanding shows to what extent the pedagogics of a musical spelling bee pervade the thinking of the educators of the Hour. Miss Williams, the author of the statement, has, so to speak, a double standard of musical morality. She has to speak about understanding but she knows that it is merely a matter of ideology and that what actually matters for the purpose of the Hour is identification and naming. This ambiguity is reminiscent of that in general education, where children are taught the ideals they ought to follow in life but are led to understand that they are to become good businessmen, »adjusted« to conditions of practical living. The fact that musical knowledge is fostered as a by-product by this method is more than outweighed by the deterioration of music in functioning as a realm of »facts« about which one should be »informed«.^z

One consequence of this shifting of emphasis is that music, instead of being »lived« by the listener, is actually transformed into property, such as is suggested by the terms of »ours« and »in our heads«. We offer two more examples of this shifting of emphasis. They present themselves metaphorically but the frequency of the recurrence of this very metaphor throughout shows that it touches upon something fundamental: the property relation of men and music which is the main feature of »commodity listening«.⁶

The introduction to Series A states that the Music Appreciation Hour’s intention is to make people »musically richer for life«. Sir George Grove, quoted in the Student’s Worksheet of the seventh concert, on Beethoven, goes so far as to present Beethoven’s revolutionary achievement – the discovery of subjectivity as a constitutive category within the structure of music itself – in the smug terms of property which is enjoyed generation after generation, although by this very transformation the essence of Beethoven’s dynamics is distorted into its opposite. He called the Larghetto of Beethoven’s Second Symphony »the culminating point of the old pre-revolutionary world, the world of Haydn and Mozart« and adds that »it was the farthest point to which Beethoven could go before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man had before penetrated, of which no man had even dreamed, but which is now one of our dearest possessions«. Thus does Beethoven become transformed into a musical Daughter of the French Revolution.

b.) This shift from spontaneous perception to recognition, identification, and possession, makes illusory the preoccupation with the listener’s response and the apparent adjustment of music to the listener’s wants, as is urged by the Hour’s conception of music as pleasure or enjoyment: behind the fun is drill. Again Miss Williams makes a revealing confession: »Frequent drills on pronunciation of names should be given. Children should look at the pictures of instruments, composers, … while doing this.« This is no longer progressive education. While children are supposed to get the fun they want, they are actually being subjected to authority. Drill plays a larger role in the Hour than its humanitarian phrases would have one believe. The Teacher’s Guide knows from the outset the disciplinarian function of music, and there is reason to suspect that the teachers aim to stress this function even more than the hedonistic one.

Marches, which appear in generous measure throughout the programs, may be used for school marching; if the school has eurhythmics, some of the music can be used for that purpose.^aa

It is not clear how this »use« of music can be reconciled with the purpose of making us »musically richer for life«, for it certainly enhances the appreciation, not of music, but of mechanical order. Music itself is cast in the terms of such order: a feeling of social conformity is conveyed by the physical regularity of musical sound vibrations.

3.) Categories of Musical Babbittry

The authoritarian tendencies are accentuated in the cult of personalities fostered by the Music Appreciation Hour. As previously mentioned, the Music Appreciation Hour shows scant respect for the works themselves but exhibits continuous obeisance to composers and particularly to the conductor. The cult of personalities is, to be sure, nothing new in music. The history of music is studded with complaints against this cult. Formerly, however, the cult of personalities, particularly of singers and virtuosi, was concomitant with an unplanned musical life not governed by an agency which held itself morally responsible for musical welfare. In the Music Appreciation Hour the personality cult is not a mere concomitant auxiliary effect but is strictly congruous with the entire approach. The agency which prides itself as being responsible for the musical welfare of the growing generation pursues a line long considered adverse to true musical experience, and unfortunately in keeping with incorrect fundamental postulates of music education. The function of the personality cult in music, which in certain previous eras (for example, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century) had a progressive aspect, is today manipulated so as to fit in with a retrogressive cultural setting.

a.) The Music Appreciation Hour strives to cast a spell around the conductor. The elements of this spell, which are of vastly divergent origins, stem partly from a witchcraft notion of the mysterious powers of personality as such, partly from the seeming supernaturalness of a technical tool which weaves sounds from the ether. All this produces a false halo. The following statement from the »Introduction to Series A« is characteristic of an attitude which, by its very nature, must encourage a sort of advertising poetry in terms of hero-worship:

Mr. Damrosch […] turns to the orchestra, waves his baton like a magic wand and instantly beautiful music is heard in thousands of schoolrooms from Maine to California. No fairy story is more wonderful than this.

This magic of radio, which is no magic at all, is credited to the conductor.

The composers also have their rounds. They are called giants:

[…] our interest in the music of Bach and Händel, the two contemporary giants in music, is increased when we realize the contrasting differences in their lives.^bb

The same note is struck in the introduction to the twelfth concert of the same series:

While America has developed, so far as we can yet discern, no musical »giant« – no Beethoven or Brahms who stands head and shoulders above his fellow musicians […]

It is highly dubious that concepts such as that of the musical giant which presupposes a dogmatic conception of genius based on analogies to wrestling and other sports, which in turn are based on an analogy to fairy stories – »there were giants in the earth in those days« – have any pedagogical value. But if they are to be used, one postulate is indispensable: it is up to the educator to show why these rather than others are the giants, instead of taking their position for granted.

The entire last series, which is aimed at the most mature pupils, focuses on great composers. But none of the concerts attempt to show why any of these composers is great. It would be a good idea to open a program in this course by telling the pupils: »You hear that Beethoven is a great composer, and this talk probably gets on your nerves. At least you must wonder just why he is great as compared with other composers. Is it merely because he put a final chorus in his Ninth Symphony, or because the opera Fidelio is based upon humanitarian ideas? Is it because he introduced subjective expression as a basic element of music? This last is certainly his most conspicuous achievement but if we want to understand Beethoven’s music, we must get to know how it is realized within the structure of Beethoven’s work and how, in its specific elements, this music is superior to other music.« Then one could compare Beethoven’s music with that of his contemporaries. One should point out the specific elements of his technique, such as the strict economy of his compositions which utilize every bit of thematic material and present nothing which does not have a function within the whole.

One should show, further, how this music is inherently an attack upon the musical conventions of his time, and finally, by some characteristic examples, show what can be called Beethoven’s tone. In this way, people can be made to understand why Beethoven really is great and that his greatness is not an empty historical convention. When they have learned this, they will stop calling him a giant and will, instead, see his uniqueness in its due proportions, not only historically but also absolutely. It should be emphasized that his specific qualities are by no means impervious to analysis in plain and concrete terms, as against the qualities of other composers.

If Section D were devoted to such questions, one could also arrive at an exposition of the differences between composers whose principal value lies in the fact that they adequately represent their time (for instance, taking the composers mentioned in Series D: Lully, Corelli, and to a great extent, even Händel) and such a composer as Beethoven, whose achievements are fundamentally individual achievements. The term greatness, in the case of these two types, has a completely different meaning and requires very different interpretation.

If this idea were developed, it could lead to a real understanding of the decisive trend in musical history, the rise of »subjectivity« – that is, that casting off by music of the chains of convention, which involved obliviousness to the public. Insight into this process can be employed in inculcating an understanding of advanced, serious modern music, which can then be interpreted in terms of the inheritance from Beethoven as regards music’s immanent consistency.

Nothing of this sort is attempted by the Music Appreciation Hour. There is not even any discussion of the question »Why is this good music and this not?«, a question which can, within wide limits, be answered precisely and objectively. Instead, rubber-stamp values are accepted throughout the course.

A German philosopher named Rudolf Eucken once wrote a book called The Philosophies of the Great Thinkers.⁷ Georg Simmel said of this book, »Yes, they are great thinkers, but in raspberry syrup.« The Music Appreciation Hour presents great composers in raspberry syrup (regardless of nationality). To quote the »Introduction to Series D«:

What a glorious panorama of mountain peaks this series of concerts presents to us – heights of genius and aspiration, brilliant in undying forms of beauty, giving us of the musical planes those moments of quiet inspiration so needed in the hurry of everyday life!

b.) Above the mountain peaks, in the clouds, so to speak, dwells Dr. Damrosch himself. It is in particularly bad taste and closer to the circus tradition of showmanship than to »cultural education« for the Hour to indulge in high-pressure publicity for its own conductor. By shifting the listener’s interest to Dr. Damrosch, NBC credits itself with disinterestedness in bringing musical culture to America’s children. Throughout the discussion in the worksheets, a shrewd, propagandistic purpose prevails over the cultural veneer: the sponsors of the Hour are more interested in convincing the public of the brilliant job they are doing than they are in the job itself.

An important element in the Music Appreciation Hour revealed here by the social critique of radio is that while it functions as one of the few sustaining programs and, at the same time, as one of the few devoted to serious music, it is devised to show that NBC serves the public interest. In the setup of radio, not only the commercial programs but, indirectly, the sustaining programs as well, exercise an advertising function.^cc Dr. Damrosch is probably entirely unaware of this process.

The Teacher’s Guide contains two photographs of him, one a large frontispiece, the other with the orchestra. The emphasis this placed upon him is out of proportion to his actual achievement in the Hour. His musical performance is not of outstanding value (which fact is not necessarily detrimental in a prevailingly pedagogical enterprise). Moreover, as neither the Teacher’s Guide nor the Student’s Worksheet is his handiwork, his actual function in the preparation and execution of the Hour cannot be as substantial as the publicity makes out.

Each series of worksheets contains another photograph of Dr. Damrosch, accompanied by a biographical sketch. In all four series it bears the significant headline, »Your conductor, Walter Damrosch«. The implications of this heading are virtually inexhaustible. We know two of them: first, the attitude which may be called, in terms of a current song-hit, the »Especially for You «attitude –that Dr. Damrosch, this spleen did, great old man, this Wotan of classical music, descends from his otherworldly height to the classroom – perhaps even to the cradle – and gives all his loving energy to the little children whom he suffers to come unto him. Further, by being called »Your« conductor, he is, at the same time, made »your« leader, the man whose authority you must follow and in whom you must believe. It is an attitude which, again, can best be expressed in the Tin Pan Alley jargon, as found on the back cover of the hit, »Two Sleepy People«: »Follow your leader – Artie Shaw«.^dd

It is noteworthy that even in the worksheets for the smaller children, NBC does not forego the opportunity of advertising itself and Dr. Damrosch:

Then came radio. Mr. Damrosch saw that through this wonderful invention he could play to practically all the young people of the nation. With the aid of the National Broadcasting Company, he founded the NBC Music Appreciation Hour, and for eleven years he has been conducting these Friday broadcasts.

The same sort of statement is reiterated in a somewhat modified and less patronizing tone in the Introduction to the Series C and D for older children:

Realizing that through this wonderful new medium he might reach millions of listeners, whereas he had formerly played to mere thousands, he organized, with the cooperation of the National Broadcasting Company, the series of broadcast concerts known as the Music Appreciation Hour.

In this introduction, value judgments about Dr. Damrosch are foisted upon the pupils. In music education, evidently, no one is shocked by [a] statement such as: »Walter Damrosch has been, for many years, one of the truly great figures in the musical life of America.«

Finally there is the comment concerning Dr. Damrosch as a composer:

Because of his continuous activities as a conductor, Mr. Damrosch has had only limited opportunities to compose music.

If he hadn’t given up everything for his little pupils, Dr. Damrosch probably would have averaged even more songs a year than Schubert.

c.) The criterion for according significance to personalities whose merits are reiterated but not analyzed, is evidently nothing more than success. The idea of business competition, that the best man is the one who beats his competitors, economically or occupationally, is unashamedly borrowed as a standard in music. There is no composer in Series D who escapes judgment in terms of the degree of his success. This leads to false statements or to ludicrous contradictions between terminology and actuality.

The Introduction to the Beethoven program, Series D, Number 7, reads:

Beethoven’s genius did not have to wait for posthumous recognition. He rapidly rose to fame and became well-to-do. Long before his death, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he was considered the greatest composer of his time.

This satisfaction would have made Beethoven substitute for his criterion for estimating himself musically, the criterion of public approval and remuneration. Moreover, the eagerness to demonstrate Beethoven’s business success is not borne out by the facts. Although Beethoven never actually had to starve, he never became »well-to-do«. He lived on a small pension granted him by a group of Austrian aristocrats. Some of them died, part of the grant was cancelled, and Beethoven had to struggle through long and disagreeable litigation proceedings in order to get his money. Later he fell into great financial difficulties because of the escapades of his ne’er do-well nephew. In 1821 or 1822 (the year is not definitely established) Beethoven was arrested by the police because of his ragged appearance, which would seem to belie his being well-to-do. Of course, any romanticizing about his poverty would be as reprehensible as the glorification of his wealth. It may not be the task of music education to make eleemosynary studies in composer biography but it is certainly even less its task to spread false information.

The notion of success appears again in the case of Wagner.^ee Here, however, another bit of patter is applied: that of per aspera ad astra, of the man who must struggle in his youth and is remunerated in his mature years. This is patterned after the newsboy-to-millionaire success story. And again the patter distorts reality.

Wagner’s genius was slow in developing. His first two operas were total failures, and of little musical worth. At the age of twenty-nine, his Rienzi won him some recognition, but The Flying Dutchman, which followed, fared badly. Even his next two, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which today enjoy immense popularity, were unsuccessful.

Rienzi did not win him »some recognition«, but actually was a roaring success which immediately gained him the influential and well-paid job of conductor at the Dresden Opera House. The story about the failure of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin is a legend which has been destroyed with overwhelming evidence by Ernest Newman in the second volume of his biography of Wagner. While Wagner lived under refugee conditions after 1849 (conditions which, by the way, did not involve the hardships which they sometimes imply today) Tannhäuser, in particular, became tremendously popular in the very Germany from which he was exiled and Liszt’s first performance of Lohengrin in Weimar laid the foundation for the later recognition of Wagner as a reformer of the opera.

Wagner, who was a genius at borrowing money, never knew any real want throughout his life. These distortions are not important in themselves. They are important, however, as an index of habits of thought which are ever ready to alter the facts of history in order to establish present material values as past actualities – values which re-affirm only the ideology of contemporary ownership culture.

d.) The belief in career and success, since it is essentially belief in the justice of this world in rewarding merit, has its roots in a reactionary attitude. This attitude makes itself evident in the case of the Music Appreciation Hour in its standard of material values. The Hour fosters a bias against advanced modern music and adjusts its listeners to the musical juste milieu.

We cite three examples: First, the second concert of Series G, »Canon and Round«, gives as an example of the canon, an excerpt from the slow movement of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony.^ff Of all the music presented by the Music Appreciation Hour, this movement is as far as we can determine the only thing commented upon somewhat malevolently. This, without regard for the fact that this movement cannot be understood fragmentarily through an excerpt but only as a whole. It is a first and, so to speak, awkward attempt of an exceedingly original composer to mobilize the »trivial« as an expressive element within a highly articulate musical language. The comment of the Hour is:

Even today his music is a subject for dispute. Some musicians consider him a great genius, others merely a gifted eccentric.

If it is bad taste to publicize Dr. Damrosch as one of the truly great musical figures of our time, it is in no better taste to publicize the illiterate conception of Mahler as a musical eccentric while maintaining the mock-neutrality of the observer who merely quotes some musicians’ comments.

In contrast with the eccentric Mahler stands the real genius, Sibelius. According to the Introduction to the eleventh concert of Series D, he is »acknowledged to be not only Finland’s greatest composer but one of the greatest composers of modern times«. This acknowledgment is highly disputable; at least the assertion about Sibelius’ greatness ought to be substantiated.^gg But when the commentator of the Hour calls Sibelius »masterful in craftsmanship«, he must be pulled up short. If he were asked to show, in clear-cut musical terms, where the technical merits of Sibelius can be found, he would be unable to produce a satisfactory answer in musical terms. Even advocates of Sibelius among serious musicologists such as Ernest Newman concede that from the viewpoint of compositional technique Sibelius’ work is of highly dubious quality, and they try to justify him by reference to other characteristics. Anyone who lauds Sibelius’ craftsmanship shows that he either does not know what musical craftsmanship is or that he does not know Sibelius.

The third example, the last concert of Series D, is devoted to modern American composers and selects, as an example, the »Symphony in One Movement«, by Samuel Barber. The most significant sentence concerning this work reads: »His music is marked by appealing melodies, well-conceived formal design, moderation in the use of dissonance, and a sincerity and eloquence …« To cite a composer because he employs »moderation in the use of dissonance«, introduces a bias against advanced modern composition and even fosters the barbaric belief often found among non-musical persons that a musician who uses discords is one who is incapable of dealing with consonance or one who simply wants to make himself appear interesting. It is the latter belief, in particular, which is prompted by the linking up of »sincerity« with »moderation in the use of discords«. According to this point of view, a musician is sincere only if he speaks so-called musical common sense whereas one who does not bow to this requirement is virtually called dishonest.^hh

The Hour apparently gives no consideration to the structural necessity for »discord« in modern music (a notion which is anyhow senseless by itself because advanced modern music does not employ discords as opposed to concords but actually abolishes the idea of concord in the traditional sense and therefore makes the idea of discord meaningless). It makes no mention of the historical process that led to the prevalence of the discord in modern composition nor of the expressive function of the discord. To the Music Appreciation Hour, music must be as harmonious as they want people to pretend the world is. While the Hour’s proponents profess a desire to educate people musically, they actually reproduce the very prejudices which responsible musical education should seek to eradicate.

e.) The totality of these features of the Music Appreciation Hour is what we call the tendency to produce musical Babbitts – the promotion of a musical pseudo-culture that actually consists of some vague and largely erroneous information about music and the recognition of stiffly conventional musical values, instead of the promotion of a living relationship with music. Indeed, all the elements of this critical analysis fit within this musical pseudo-culture. Symptomatic of this are even elements nominally extraneous, such as the »drill« on »symbols for pronunciation«. The pseudo-cultural element here lies in the emphasis given to the pronunciation of names and, indeed, to their incorrect pronunciation: »Sanh-Sawnhss, Bahkh, and Bee-zay.« This instruction, of course, is intended to make the student capable of discussing music in drawing rooms (which he has never seen except in the movies). It has nothing whatsoever to do with music itself; one need not even pronounce Bach’s name correctly in order to understand his music.

Musical Babbittry celebrates its greatest triumphs when it enters the emotional sphere: no one is more sentimental than the tired businessman and there’s no one more willing to endorse such statements as »all of us are happy at times and sad at other times.«ⁱⁱ

The musical Babbitt has little forthright feeling for historical distance and for the inappropriateness of judging artworks produced at a different historical level in terms of contemporary values. To him everything can be measured and expressed in quantitative terms – the notion that everything can be expressed in terms of the money he spends for it. This attitude is evoked in the Music Appreciation Hour by benevolently patronizing statements such as, »Yet, in early times, much music was produced whose artistic perfection compares favorably with that of the great works of recent years.« Though there were no skyscrapers in Bach’s time, his music was, after all, not so bad. The complement of this idea is, of course, that any contemporary composer who actually dares to write skyscraper music – as it were – is an intellectual ultra-modernist. These gaucheries are characteristic of the thinking of the musical Babbitt. We cannot here discuss the results of this sort of instruction upon the Hour’s actual listeners. We can only say that if such philistinism crops up in the thinking of the musically-educated, then how can we hope that the musically-unaware will become better educated than their teachers? Of course, the Music Appreciation Hour may evoke a diametrically opposite response to what it purports to. But that is unlikely in a world where conformity is at a premium.

One last word about the problem of pseudo-culture as far as the material of the Hour is concerned. A disproportionately large amount of the programs is played in arrangements. Most of these are the work of either Dr. Damrosch’s late father ⁹ or of Dr. Damrosch himself. Probably the reason for this is that the Hour insists upon presenting only orchestral material, whereas its desire to teach music which is as simple as possible excludes the bulk of actual orchestral works and necessitates the scoring of music which is so simple that it was not conceived in orchestral terms. This means, therefore, that these works are presented largely in a form alien to their very essence. It is not inconsequential or a quirk of a composer that a composition has been written for the piano instead of for the orchestra. The presentation of such material in orchestral form means an artificial expansion of the music which, in many cases, is disastrous to its structure and its musical sense. Behind this practice there lurks the danger promoting the idea that »nothing is too expensive for our children«, and that therefore they must not content themselves with a piano piece but should have it rendered by the full orchestra. This nouveau riche attitude is an integral part of musical pseudo-culture.

The difficulties in the case of the sonata and the fugue would not have occurred if the Hour, instead of playing orchestral works, had been content with most elementary representations of these forms, which cannot possibly be orchestrated. We have cited the examples of Bach’s E minor Fugue from the first volume of the »Well-Tempered Clavichord«, and the Beethoven piano sonata, Opus 49, Number 2. Frequently musical structures are more obvious to the layman when they are played mono-chromatically, by only a few instruments, than when they are beclouded by the orchestral apparatus. Any constructive positive change in the Music Appreciation Hour must take this into consideration.

4.) The »Tests«

It is difficult to say anything definite about the Music Appreciation Hour’s effects without a large-scale program of student-listener research. Such an investigation would be of value only if it were carried through on a comparative scale, that is to say, if one were to compare the effects of music education of the type of the Hour with the behavior of non-educated youth, with the behavior of youth educated through private music lessons in the old-style, and finally with the behavior of youth who are given structural music education. This research should be carried on by subjecting these different groups to actual musical tests instead of to more questions concerning their »frozen« knowledge about music. A corresponding research procedure was used in England some years ago in the field of painting and proved the great superiority of the structurally educated even against those with general Oxford and Cambridge education. Educational research of this type would be prerequisite to any valid plan fundamentally to improve the system of music education as followed in the Music Appreciation Hour.

The Hour does try to overcome radio’s »one-way« structure and to activate its pupils. Each worksheet contains a set of tests whereby the achievements of the students are supposed to be appraised. But in no point is the danger of promoting musical pseudo-culture make itself felt more strongly than in these test sheets.

a.) There are insuperable objections to be raised against their very structure. Most of the tests apply the standard form of multiple-choice: »Check the correct phrase, then cross out the incorrect phrase.« This technique is a typical example of the transplanting of an administrative procedure to a field of human spontaneity to which it is essentially unsuited. It makes sense on a questionnaire for a survey of, let us say, the marital status of the population of the city of New York, to juxtapose the words »married, single, divorced«, with the instructions to check the correct word and cross out the incorrect ones. In music, where spontaneous behavior is everything and reflex-action nothing, any such procedure is absurd. Instead of providing space for the child’s spontaneous reaction, he is forced into pre-arranged patterns and is made to follow cliche´s from above in order to be marked »correct« which is the counterpart of being stamped as a social conformist.

Our second main objection has to do with the mere spreading of information about music instead of bringing people into a living relationship with it. Pupils are tested only on what they have been taught about music, not about their actual musical comprehension. The questions on the questionnaires are related exclusively to the introductions and comments. This is the more dangerous since the tests apply not only to knowledge about certain facts mentioned by the commentators (which, to a certain extent, may be helpful in music education), but also to value judgments fostered by them, thus virtually forcing the children to repeat pat value judgments and to adapt themselves to given norms instead of judging autonomously.

b.) Examples from the tests:

»Does Grieg’s Morning suggest dawn in Egypt only, or the break of day anywhere?«

(Series B, First Concert, question 1)

»Music that describes fairies is usually (light and graceful) (loud and noisy) (slow and clumsy).«

(Series B, Fifth Concert, question 2)

»Music adds to the beauty and meaning of words by making them (easier to pronounce) (appeal more strongly to our imagination).«

(Series B, Ninth Concert, question 1)

»Folk melodies are (seldom) (frequently) (invariably) employed by composers of concert music.«

(Series C, First Concert, question 2)

»Bach is famous today chiefly because he laid the foundations for (our modern music) (sonata form) (the orchestra).«^jj

(Series D, Second Concert, question 1)

»Haydn is called ›the Father of the Symphony‹ because he perfected the (form) (mood) (style) of the modern symphony.«

(Series D, Fourth Concert, question 1)

»Mozart’s talent (became evident) (began to decline) at an unusually early age.«

(Series D, Fifth Concert, question 1)

»His (Mozart’s) association with Haydn (affected beneficially) (influenced adversely) the art of both composers.«

(Ibid., question 2)

»Mozart’s G minor Symphony appeals to the listener chiefly through the (descriptive realism) (sheer beauty) (emotional power) of the music.«

(Ibid., question 4)

»Verdi’s career was notable for its (brevity) (length).«

(Series D, Sixth Concert, question 1)

»Throughout his career he (Beethoven) experiences (much sorrow and affliction) (constant happiness).«

(Series D, Seventh Concert, question 2)

»The development of his (Beethoven’s) personality (had no effect on his music) (influenced the development of his art).«

(Ibid., question 3)

»The Rosamunde Ballet Music is (somber and cynical) (bright and cheerful) (boisterously merry) in moods.«

(Series D, Eighth Concert, question 4)

»The first movement of the »Unfinished« Symphony is notable for its (ceaseless flow of melody) (brilliant and effective use of the brasses) (striking rhythmic effects).«

(Ibid., question 5)

c.) It is doubtful that any standardized test method is applicable to music, but if there must be tests at any price, they should at least be made intelligent. Everything should be done to make up for the »one-way« structure of radio which in itself tends to promote the rubber-stamp effect which is underscored by the rubber-stamped questions and the method of the Music Appreciation Hour.

We offer three examples of what we would regard as more sensible tests.

1.) One ought to play selections which one may safely suppose are not known to the majority of the pupils, without giving any information about these pieces. Then one should encourage the students to send written statements to the station concerning the formal structure of the works as well as the interrelationship between the structure and the concrete musical content of this very piece. In this procedure, especially when discussing characteristic answers of the students in the following session, particular care must be taken of one point which is totally missed by the Hour. That is that any given piece of music may be regarded as the resultant of two forces, namely, some pre-given form – however sublimated its pre-givenness may be, as in the case of modern music – and the concrete, subjective intention of the specific composition. The students should be taught to follow up both these sides of any composition and particularly to understand how closely they are interconnected and how they exercise and influence upon each other. This procedure should be applied – so far as most elementary types such as cradle songs, etc. are concerned – to the most elementary courses.

2.) Play less widely known compositions and have the students guess, in written answers, the composer, the period, or the style of the work; though this, of course, only in more advanced courses.

3.) Play various instruments over the air without announcing them, and have the pupils identify them. Play ensemble pieces and have them name the instruments employed. Such tests could provide a certain control for the effect of Series A, provided, of course, that the whole disposition of this basic series is not fundamentally altered, as appears necessary to us.

After the student’s answers have come in, the directors of the Hour should select characteristic ones, that is to say, answers which contain errors which recur particularly often, discuss them in the program following, point out why they are errors and explain what induced the student to make these specific ones. In this way the listener actually could be activated, to a certain degree. It should be noted, however, that these suggestions still remain within the framework of the Hour as it is and are therefore not sufficient to overcome its shortcomings in principle. A fundamental reform of the Musical Appreciation Hour would be faced with totally new problems in activating its pupils.

4 Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour

Contents

Introduction

I Pedagogical and Musical Analysis

1.) The Procedure from Outside to Inside

2.) The Pedagogical Procedure

3.) Explanation and Example in the Music Appreciation Hour

4.) The Question of Characteristic Examples and Specific Explanations

5.) Misstatements in the Music Appreciation Hour

6.) The »Background« of the Music Appreciation Hour’s Explanations

II The Music Appreciation Hour as Promoter of Musical Pseudo-Culture

1.) »Appreciation« and »Fun«

2.) Recognition and the Musical Spelling Bee

3.) Categories of Musical Babbittry

4.) The »Tests« 211

Introduction

I Pedagogical and Musical Analysis

1.) The Procedure from Outside to Inside

2.) The Pedagogical Procedure

3.) Explanation and Example in the Music Appreciation Hour

4.) The Question of Characteristic Examples and Specific Explanations

5.) Misstatements in the Music Appreciation Hour

6.) The »Background« of the Music Appreciation Hour’s Explanations

**II The Music Appreciation Hour as Promoter of Musical Pseudo-Culture**

1.) »Appreciation« and »Fun«

2.) Recognition and the Musical Spelling Bee

3.) Categories of Musical Babbittry

4.) The »Tests«