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Music Talks With Children

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<h2 id="id00173" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER VII.</h2> <h5 id="id00174">WHAT WE SEE AND HEAR.</h5> "You must feel the mountains above you while you work upon your little garden."—Phillips Brooks.[23] Somewhere else we shall have some definite lessons in music-thinking. Let us then devote this Talk to finding out what is suggested to us by the things we see and hear. Once a boy wrote down little songs. When the people asked him how he could do it, he replied by saying that he made his songs from thoughts which most other people let slip. We have already talked about thought and about learning to express it. If a person of pure thought will only store it up and become able to express it properly, when the time comes he can make little songs or many other things; for all things are made of thought. The poem is stored-up thought expressed in words; the great cathedral like the one at Winchester, in England, or the one near the Rhine, at Cologne, in Germany, is stored-up thought expressed in stone. So with the picture and the statue: they are stored-up thought on canvas and in marble.[24] In short, we learn by looking at great things just what the little ones are; and we know from poems and buildings and the like, that these, and even commoner things, like a well-kept garden, a tidy room, a carefully learned lesson, even a smile on one's face result, every one of them, from stored-up thought. We can consequently make a definition of THINGS by saying they are what is thought. Things are made of thought. Even if you cannot understand this fully now, keep it by you and as you grow older its truth will be more and more clear. It will be luminous. Luminous is just the word, for it comes from a word in another language and means light. Now the better you understand things the more light you have about them. And out of this you can understand how well ignorance has been compared with darkness. Hence, from the poem, the building, the painting, the statue, and from commoner things we can learn, as it was said in a previous Talk, that music is stored-up thought told in beautiful tones. Now let us heed the valuable part of all this. If poems, statues, and all other beautiful things are made out of stored-up thought (and commoner things are, too), we ought to be able, by studying the things, to tell what kind of a person it was who thought them; or, in other words, who made them. It is true, we can. We can tell all the person's thought, so far as his art and principal work are concerned. Nearly all his life is displayed in the works he makes. We can tell the nature of the man, the amount of study he has done, but best of all we can tell his meaning. The face tells all its past history to one who knows how to look.[25] His intentions are everywhere as plain as can be in what he does. Thus you see there is more in a person's work than what we see at the first glance. There are reflections in it as plain as those in a mountain lake. And as the mountain lake reflects only what is above it, so the work of the musician, of the artist, of any one in fact, reflects those thoughts which forever hover above the others. Thoughts of good, thoughts of evil, thoughts of generosity, thoughts of selfish vanity, these, and every other kind, are so strongly reflected in the work we do that they are often more plainly seen than the work itself. And with the works of a great artist before us we may find out not only what he did and what he knew, but what he felt and even what he did not want to say. We now know what music-thinking is. Also, we see why the young musician needs to learn to think music. Really, he is not a musician until he can think correctly in tone. And further than this, when we have some understanding of music-thought we not only think about what we play and hear, but we begin to inquire what story it tells and what meaning it should convey. We begin to seek in music for the thought and intention of the composer, and, little by little, even before we know it, we begin to seek out what kind of mind and heart the composer had. We begin really to study his character from the works he has left us. We have now taken the first really intelligent step toward knowing for ourselves something about common and classic music. Later on, as our ability increases, this will be of great value to us. We begin to see, bit by bit, what the author intended. That is the real test of it all. We do not want to find mere jingle in music, we want music that says something. Even a very young child knows that "eenty meenty meiny moe" is not real sense, though it is a pleasant string of sounds to say in a game. Thus we learn to look into what we hear and into what we see and try to find how much thought there is in it, and the kind of thought it is. We want to know if goodness is expressed; if the best work of the man is before us, or if, for a lower reason, his selfishness and vanity are most prominent. And let us remember that as we seek these things in the works of others, so others of thoughtful kind will watch our doings, our playing, our speech, our little habits, and all to see what our intentions are each time we express ourselves. They will look to see what thoughts we are putting into our doings, whether thoughts of goodness or of selfishness. And our actions will always be just as good as the thought we put into them. Now a great and a common mistake is, that sometimes we hope by some mysterious change, as in a fairy tale, that they will be better than what we intend. But in the first days let us learn that this is not possible. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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