Music In The Public Schools - March 1895 by Sterrie A. Weaver  

Taken from the March 1895 edition of "The Tabula" Newspaper of Torrington High School  

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No project, scheme, or reform ever goes farther than some one man pushes it.  Jacqueminot roses are not a spontaneous growth of the prairies, but the result of much care and study on the part of the florist.  To push a good thing requires confidence in the thing itself; to push a thing which has no merit requires cheek.  Nine years of music in the Torrington schools are nearly completed, and hundreds who have left the schools are happy in possession of a knowledge of its rudiments, yet the first time the School Board was petitioned to adopt it as a study, the request was not granted.  Anyone who measures the benefits derived from this study properly conducted, by the ability of the pupil to read music, and by that alone, makes a wholesale error.  It is hardly necessary for the profession to take up the cudgels in its defense, as it is fast becoming the expressed belief of nearly all-prominent educators that its value as a developer of the pupil mentally is equal to any, and superior to most of the studies of the curriculum.  The successful conductor must have the qualifications of a martinet, while the members of chorus or orchestra must have a sharp eye to grasp the characters of our murderous notation, a delicate ear to keep in touch with the others, muscles that respond with lightning rapidity to the command of the will, and a broad mind with wide culture to express the various emotions which swayed the soul of the composer.  Joy and grief, the two great chords of man's emotional being, always and everywhere seek expression through music.  It matters not whether it be the strains almost divine which fill the halls of royalty, or the minor wail of the Indian maiden whose untutored song mingles so harmoniously with the rustling breezes of her forest home.  

Talents not used shrivel until they die.  Hard-fisted New Englanders have often been so pressed in the struggle for sustenance as to forget the beauties with which Nature surrounded them.  As a result behold their offspring frequently with little sense of the aesthetic.  In just this manner has the poetry of music been left to die from lack of exercise?  Music in the public school strikes EVERY child, and when their children have been rocked from infancy to the accompaniment of a lullaby sung from the depths of a mother's heart, they come to our school ready to be taught their mother tongue and not to learn a foreign language.  I another century we will become a musical nation, and this will be largely due to the teaching of music in the public schools."  

Sterrie A. Weaver - March 1895 - Torrington, Connecticut