Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1862
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Last summer we were coming home from bathing. All of us were feeling very gay. A peasant lad, the very one who had been enticed by the domestic peasant lad into stealing books, a wide-cheeked, thick-set lad, all covered with freckles, with crooked, knock-kneed legs, with all the ways of a grown-up muzhik of the steppe, but a clever, strong, and gifted nature, ran ahead and sat in the wagon, which was proceeding in front of us. He picked up the reins, cocked his hat, spat to one side, and burst out into a dragging muzhik song oh, how he sang! with feeling, with repose, with the full power of his lungs! The children laughed: -
"Semka, Semka lo! how cleverly he sings!"
Semka was perfectly serious.
"There, now, don't you interrupt my song!" said he, in a pause, using a peculiar and purposely hoarse voice, and then he went on with his song sedately.
Two very musical lads took their places in the cart and began to take the tune and join in. One chimed in now with the octave, now the sixth, the other -in thirds, and it went admirably. Then the other boys joined in, and they began to sing
Kak podyablone'i takot?[55]
and to yell, and there was a great noise, but disagreeable.
From this evening the singing began; now after eight months we sing Angel Vopiyashe and two cherubim songs, Numbers Four and Seven, the whole of the ordinary mass, and little choral songs. The best pupils only two of them write down the melodies of the songs which they know, and almost read the notes. But, so far, whatever they sing is far from being so good as that song of theirs was which they sang returning from the bath. I say all this without any arrtire pensee, not to prove anything, but I simply state a fact.
Now I will tell about the process of instruction, with which I was comparatively well satisfied. At the first lesson I divided all the words into three parts, and we sang the following chords:
We succeeded in this very rapidly. And each one sang what he wished, tried the discant and went to the tenor, and from the tenor to the alto, so that the best knew the whole chord do-mi-sol; some all the three parts. They pronounced the names of the notes in the French. One sang mi-fa-fa-mi; another do-do-re-do, and so on.
"See how sweet, Lyof Nikolayevitch! It already begins to hum in our ears; try it again, again."
We sang these chords both in school and out-of-doors, and in the park and on the road home, till late at night, and we could not stop or rejoice sufficiently at our success.
On the next day we attempted the scale, and the more talented ones went through it perfectly, the duller ones could scarcely reach to the third. I wrote the notes on the staff in the alto key, the most symmetrical, and I called them in French. The succeeding six lessons went just as merrily; we sang new chords minor ones and modulations into the major gospodi pomilui,[56] "Glory to the Father and the Son," and a little threepart song, with piano. One half of the lesson was occupied with this, the other with singing of the scale and exercises which the pupils themselves invented: do-mi-re-fa-mi-sol, or do-re-re-mi-mi-fa, or do-mi-re-do-re-fa-mi-re, and so on.
I very speedily remarked that the notes on the staffs were not learned by observation, and found it necessary to substitute figures for them. Moreover, for the explanation of intervals and the variability of the tonic, figures are more useful. After, six lessons some were able to strike whatever intervals I asked of them, attaining it by an imaginary scale. Especially pleasing was the exercise on the fourths do-fa-re-sol and the, like, up and down. Fa the sub-dominant especially struck them all by its force.
"How healthy that fa is!" exclaimed Semka. "How it cuts through."
Unmusical natures all fell behind; but with the musical ones our classes used to last three or four hours. I tried to give them an idea of beating time by the received method, but the thing seemed so hard to them that I was obliged to separate the tempo from the melody, and having written the notes without measure, to read them; and then, having written the measure that is, tempo without sounds by beating to read one measure, and then to unite the two processes. After a few lessons, having taken into account what I was doing, I became convinced that my method of instruction is almost the same as the method of Cheve, [57] which I had seen under trial in Paris a method which was not immediately adopted by me, simply because it was a method.
To all who are occupied with the teaching of singing one cannot too highly recommend this work, on the cover of which is printed in large letters Repousse a r unanimity though now it is distributed in tens of thousands of copies over all Europe. I saw in Paris striking proofs of the success of this method under the instruction of Cheve himself; audiences of five or six hundred men and women, some of them forty and fifty years old, singing in one voice a livre ouvert whatever the teacher indicated to them.
In Cheve's method there are many rules, exercises, and prescriptions which have no significance, and which every sensible teacher will invent by the hundred and by the thousand on the battlefield, in other words, in the class-room; there is a very comical, and perhaps also convenient, process of reading the time without the sounds; for example, in four-four time the teacher says ta-fa-te-fe; in three-four time the teacher says ta-te-ti; in eight-eight time, ta-fa-te-fe-te-re-li-rL All this is interesting as one of the means whereby music may be taught, interesting as the history of a certain musical school; but these roots are not absolute, and cannot constitute a method. This is the very thing that forms the fountain-head of the errors of methods. But Cheve has ideas remarkable for their simplicity; and three of them constitute the essence of his method: the first, the ancient, having been enunciated by J. J. Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique, is the idea of expressing musical signs by figures. Whatever the opponents of this way of writing may say, every singing-teacher can make the experiment, and can always convince himself of the immense superiority of figures over the scale, both in reading and writing. I gave ten lessons on the scale, and one only with figures, saying that it was all the same thing, and the pupils always ask me to write in figures, and they themselves write in figures.
The second remarkable idea belonging exclusively to Cheve" consists in teaching sounds apart from tempo, and vice versa. Any one who once applies this method of instruction will see that what presented itself as an invincible difficulty will suddenly become so easy that the only wonder is that such a simple idea never occurred to any one before. How many torments would have been spared the unfortunate children taught in the Episcopal "chapels" and other choirs, reformed and the like, if the regents had tried this simple thing to compel the beginner, without singing, to beat the time with his finger or a stick according to the notes of the phrase; once for quarters, twice for eighths, and so on; then to sing the same phrase without the time; then again to sing one measure, and then again combining them. For example, this phrase is written:
The pupil first sings - without tempo do-re-mi-fa-sol-mi-re-do; then he does not sing, but, beating on the whole note of the first measure, says: one two three four; then he beats once on each of the notes of the second measure, saying one two three four; then on the first note of the third measure he beats twice and says, one two; and on the second half-note he also beats twice, saying three four, and so on; and then he sings the same thing in measure, and beats the time, and the other pupils count aloud.
This is my method, which, just like Cheve's, it is impossible to prescribe; it may be found convenient, but it is possible that many others still more convenient may be discovered. But the secret is simply to separate the teaching of tempo from that of notes, while there may be a countless number of methods of doing this.
Finally, Cheve's third and great idea consists in popularizing music and its instruction. His method of instruction completely attains this object. And this is not merely Cheve's desire, and it is not merely my hypothesis, but it is a fact. In Paris I saw hundreds of horny-handed laborers sitting on benches under which were laid the tools which they had brought with them from their work, and they were singing from notes, and they understood and were interested in the laws of music.
As I looked at these workmen, it was easy for me to imagine Russian muzhiks in their places, with Cheve speaking Russian: they would have sung just as well, they would have understood in the same way all that he said about the general laws and rules of music. We hope to speak in still greater detail about Cheve and particularly of the significance of popularized music, singing especially, in the revival of decadent art.
I pass on to a description of the course of instruction in our school. After six lessons the goats were separated from the sheep; only musical natures were left the amateurs and we went on to minor scales, and to the explanation of intervals. The only difficulty was to find and distinguish the diminished second from the second. Fa had already been called healthy; do seemed to them likewise a noisy fellow [58] and so I had no need of teaching them they themselves felt the note into which the diminished second resolved^ therefore they felt the minor second itself.
Without difficulty we ourselves found that the major scale consists of a succession of two whole tones and one half tone, three whole tones and one half tone. Then we sang Slava Otsu [59] in the minor key, and by ear reached the scale which seemed minor; then in this scale we found one whole tone, one half tone, two whole tones, one half tone, one augmented whole tone, and one half tone. Then I showed that you can sing and write a scale starting from any note you please; that if a whole tone or a half tone does not occur when it is needed, it can be sharped or flatted. For convenience' sake I wrote for them a chromatic scale after this fashion:
On this scale I made them all the possible major and minor gamuts, beginning with any desired note. These exercises thoroughly absorbed them, and their success was so striking that two of the classes entertained themselves by noting down the melodies of the songs they knew. These pupils often hum the motives of songs, the names of which they cannot remember, and hum them delicately and prettily, and they repeat the principal part the best; and they do not like it at all when many join in, screaming the song together coarsely.
There were barely a dozen lessons in the course of the winter. Our study was spoiled by our vanity. The parents, we, the teachers, and the pupils themselves wanted to surprise" the whole village to sing in church. We started to prepare a mass and the Kherubimskaya songs of Bortnyansky. It seemed as if this would be jollier for the children, but it proved to be the contrary. In spite of the fact that the desire to go into the chancel supported them, and that they loved music, and that we teachers insisted on this object and made it paramount to others, I was often pained to look at them and see how some darling[60] of a Kiryushka, in ragged leg-wrappers, would practice on his part:
Tdino obrazu-u-u-u-u-u-yu-yu-shchej
and would be compelled to repeat it a dozen times, and how at last he would go wild, and, beating his fingers on the notes, would insist that he was singing it correctly.
We went to the church one time and our success was great; the enthusiasm was prodigious, but the singing suffered: they began to tire of the lessons, to shirk them, and when Easter came it was only with great difficulty that we collected a new chorus. Our singers became like those of the Episcopal "chapels," who often sing well, but in whom, in consequence of this act, all taste for singing is destroyed, and in reality they do not know their notes though they imagine they know them. I have often noticed how those that graduate from these schools themselves undertake to teach, not having any comprehension of the notes, and show themselves perfectly incompetent as soon as they begin to sing anything which has not been dinned into their ears.
From this trifling experience which I had in teaching the people music, I have drawn the following conclusions:
I. That the method of writing sounds by means of figures is the most convenient method.
II. That the teaching of tempo apart from the sounds is the most convenient method.
III. That in order that the teaching of music may leave its effects, and be willingly undertaken, it must be taught as an art from the very beginning, and not merely as a way of singing or playing. Young ladies may be taught to sing the exercises of Burgmiiller, [61] but it is better for the children of the people not to be taught at all than to learn mechanically.
IV. That nothing is so injurious in the teaching of music as what is like the knowledge of music the rendering of choruses at examinations, ceremonies, and in churches.
V. That the aim of teaching the people music ought to consist solely in giving them the knowledge of the general laws of music which we have, but by no means to fill them with that false taste which is shared among us.