Carl E. Seashore

“ The musical appeal is all the more emotional because it is not only an appeal for personal recognition but for the aggrandizement of the noble art. The musician at all ages and all stages of advancement can perform for his own pleasure in isolation, but even here the demand for praise or blame on the spur of the moment is emphatic and essential.
It is, of course, fully recognized that at his best the musical performer is not conscious of making a direct appeal for approval by others. His objective is rather that of self-expression and experiment in the execution of an artistic skill. ”

“ While music springs spontaneously in the gifted child and youth, education is as essential for music as it is for science or language. One might as well attempt to acquire learning without study as to acquire music without training. Then again, as is a person's intelligence, so is his music. And creative imagination is a tool with which music is fashioned from childhood to the heights of artistry. Furthermore, we must recognize that for really expressive love and devotion to music we must look to the often justly or unjustly maligned musical temperament. ”

“ It is a notorious fact that many who profess a love of music do not have it, but are mere pretenders and imitators, conscious or unconscious, and that many who disavow it are merely dying with all their music in them. ”

“ He loves to bang on the piano and blow his horn.
This craving for pleasure in sounds radiates through the sense of rhythm into graceful movements, the beginnings of dancing and dramatic action, even from the crudest rhythmic kicking 16and tapping movements of the infant. His speech becomes rhythmic, melodic, dynamic, beautiful. His whole body becomes reverberant in response to the sounds of nature. Laughter progressively acquires new and beautiful forms. Even crying may give satisfaction of an artistic sort. The swinging of the pendulum of the old clock on the wall is music. ”

“ Like colors, sounds may be beautiful in themselves, quite apart from music. A single sound in nature or art is capable of appearing in endless variety in terms of pitch, dynamic value, duration, tone quality, and noise. It may be an object of beauty in itself in thousands of ways quite apart from its utility in music or musical perception. We find the tonal world in which we live full of beautiful and useful sounds which we love because we are capable of intellectual and emotional response to their beneficent influence. They play a large role in our feelings of attraction and adjustment. ”

“ Descriptions of the musical temperament are, as a rule, vivacious and luminous, thrillingly interesting. If a competent analyst would follow Stokowski for one day during the season and picture in high lights, full of concrete examples, the experience and behavior of this great conductor from the whirl of emotional enthusiasms and conflicts into which he awakens in the morning to the convivial abandon during refreshments after the evening performance, we should have a spicy and animated picture of the musical temperament. ”

“ Play is positive, an expression of the joy of life. The unrestraint and spontaneity of play result in strenuous and whole-hearted exertion; the seriousness of play is one of its fascinations. Success in play lies in its fictitious nature; it rests upon make believe; liberated from realities, it accepts the ideal and lives it as real. In the possibility of playing with the ideal lies a fundamental charm of music.
Musical imagination. Music is by no means limited to what is composed, performed and listened to in the objective situation. ”

“ Can the possibilities for revolutionary procedures now looming up in the construction of musical instruments be as strategic for music as were the principles embodied in the coming of the automobile and the airplane for transportation? Those of us who remember that faithful animal and servant of man, the horse, and the conveyances he served, look back with fond appreciation upon what amounted to a sort of fellowship with a fine-performing animal and the luxury of being conveyed by him in saddle or on wheel. ”

“ Youth is, in a sense, the age of leisure. We think of a gentleman of leisure as a person who, by virtue of his being a gentleman, is active in pursuits which are not necessary for the earning of his bread and butter. If he is not active, he is not a gentleman. If his activity does not add to a genuine enrichment of his own life and the life of the community, he is not a gentleman. If he does not know how to play, he is not a gentleman. The same ideas apply in principle to the concept of a lady of leisure. ”

“ However, many students overlook the fact that, if their music is to be an avocation, it is to be pursued merely for the pleasure inherent in it. They may struggle along simply because they have had initial training in this field, but without adequate motivation or anticipation of significant results. Achievement in music is an artistic performance, and we should not add recklessly to the large group in society who feel that their early efforts were wasted and who have to go through life apologizing for their failure or mediocrity in the artistic sense. ”

“ It is therefore evident that any attempt to account for a specific affection, such as the love of music, must be fractionated, placing responsibility in turn upon the scientist, the artist, and the self-revelation of the inspired music lover at each culture level. It has become the recognized function of the psychology of music to integrate the contributions from all scientific sources, such as anatomy, physiology, anthropology, acoustics, mental hygiene, and logic, in their bearings upon the hearing of music, the appreciation of music, musical skills, theories, and influences. ”

“ Educators used to think that football was the only thing that would arouse enthusiastic support in the field of avocational activities for youth; but, as I have witnessed the attitude of high-school pupils in training for musical contests, heard reports of the attitudes of the parents and the backers, and watched the culmination of enthusiasm at the annual contest, I can say that there can be, for youth, as substantial enthusiasm in contests of music as there is in football. ”

“ MUSIC AND YOUTH There is a distinctively musical period in life: the period of youth. Youth is the age of emotional response and of social awakening, the age of serious play, the age of decision and elimination, the dominant learning period, and the age of freedom and leisure. ”

“ There are aspiring artists who devote a lifetime to the mastery of the skills, but become hypercritical and sour when they fail to feel the esthetic glow or gain the command of public acclaim. Many an aspiring amateur suffers a similar defeat. To the masses, music is but fleeting incidents, occasional whiffs of the overflow from the wealth of human appeals to a latent artistic nature. ”

“ How vastly could a mother's appreciation of the child be increased if she realized what constitutes music at his level and how fundamental the musical reactions at his level are to the development of music in the adult!
To be musical, the child must be musical in response to his environment. There are natural laws of evolution in the race and in the development of the individual for types of reactions to the music that abounds around us in nature and for the various means at our command of expression through imitation of them. ”

“ The ambition of the mother, the objective of the teacher, and the expression of the youth of fifty years ago are coming to be historical curiosities. The art of music in America is coming to a wholesome fruitage and is becoming associated with present-day academic learning. For the first time in history it reaches out into the remotest corners of the land and many of the technical aspects of the art and new concepts of the musical medium are fast becoming common-sense knowledge and therefore add in the just awarding of praise or blame. ”

“ YOUTH, THE AGE OF MUSIC The emotional age. For the present purpose we may think of youth as represented by the age of the teens, usually beginning in the high school. It is a brief period of storm and stress, emotional awakening and emotional struggles, in which the various emotional drives, more or less latent before, assert themselves, often to cool off or to be attenuated in later life. The older psychologists spoke of it as a period of rebirth, the passing from the period of protected and directed life into the emergence of a self-asserting personality. ”

“ At this age the prospective musician will begin to try himself out, will discover the necessity for untiring and well-directed work, will concentrate in the field of his most natural musical outlet, and will work hard in the face of the imminence of the decision as to success or failure in his own judgment, in the judgment of his teachers, and in the judgment of his companions and public. If successful here, he may continue his musical education in specialization, since music is essentially a body of skills. ”

“ Music proper. Sounds may be woven into beautiful patterns. This is music. We admire the melodic progressions, the rhythmic patterns, the harmonic structure, and the qualitative modulations in the flow of beautiful sounds. Harmony, balance, symmetry, contrast and fusions become embodied in musical form. Here the object of our affections is the artistic creation. The place of the musician is quite analogous to the astronomer's feeling of the sublime as he looks into the heavens in the light of his knowledge of the nature and movement of heavenly bodies. ”

“ Radio has had the effect of discouraging some persons from the development of musical skills in performance, because they realize that what they can hear is so superior to anything that they can do. On the other hand, radio has stirred the musical interests of the masses into appreciation of the possibilities of music at their respective levels and not only has made them whistle the tunes but has encouraged them to participate in various modes of performance. Listening to the "canned" music has certainly gone far to develop the ability for listening to legitimate music on the stage. ”

“ Glimpses into the vistas of unexplored resources intensify the admiration, the feeling of awe, the glimpse into the infinite which is love of the object pursued.
The role of intelligence in music is well illustrated in recent experiments in which vocabulary was measured in three groups; namely, ten nationally well-known composers, ten of the most successful students in a large class in composition, and ten of the least successful students in the same class. ”