THE ETUDE JUNE, 1920 Single Copies 25 Cents VOL. XXXVIII , No. 6 What the World Needs Most JUNE, to some teachers, means the tag end of the busy season. Just why the music teacher in the public school, who works five hours a day for five days, and occasionally gets up to eight or nine hours a day for short stretches of time, should feel entitled to three months' vacation, is difficult to tell. Teachers everywhere have been insisting upon more money, and the first thing that the business men on the school boards point to, is the fact that the teacher's job calls for only twenty-five hours a week for five-sixths of the year, whereas they ex-pect their employes to work for twice as many hours for all the year except during a week's or two weeks' vacation. Of course the teacher's work is highly specialized and very exact-ing. Teachers usually show this in their appearance after they have been teaching a few years. Many teachers with pedagogical zeal work ten or twelve hours a day se^ven days a week, instead of five hours. Music teachers during the busy season do not stop at eight hours a day. They do, however, make the great mistake of wasteful vacations. It has become the custom, however, of many of the best known teachers of the day to teach all Summer, not merely at the summer schools but in our great cities. Chicago and New York are crowded with music students in the Summer. What the world needs most at this time is work, work and more work. One of the astute English politicians, when asked for a motto or slogan for a political campaign, of workers, replied that the greatest slogan of the time was "For God's Sake—WORK!" He said that he used the slogan seriously and reverently. The people who are clamoring for shorter and shorter hours and more and more money, should stop for a moment to think that the greatest men of our times—the Edisons, the Roosevelts, the Lloyd Georges, the Clemenceaus—the greatest money makers of our times, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Rothchilds, the Schwabs, etc., have all been sixteen and twentj--hour men, rather than eight-hour men. Ruin and chaos follow any nation in which the workers do as little as they can instead of as much as they can. No man should be oppressed or underpaid, but because he is oppressed and underpaid is no reason why he should not, under proper conditions, labor to his utmost normal capacity. This is not the year for music teachers to stop working during the summer merely because some have made unusual incomes. During June, plan to do all the teaching you pos-sibly can this Summer. If you conduct your work right your summer will be far more delightful. The student who "lays off" for two or three months every year stands a small chance of ever becoming a Paderewski, an Ysaye or a Galli-Curci. What the war-exhausted world needs most at this time is armies and armies of constructive workers to repair the damages of waste. The Religion of work for the best of man-kind is the Lord's Religion. Mistaken Wiseacres WHE N Verdi went to the Milan Conservatory it is re-ported that Basily, the principal, after a thorough examina-tion, decided that the boy had not the requisite talent, and accordingly rejected the greatest Italian master since Pales-trina. Indeed, it often seems to be the weakness of highly schooled conservative academicians to be stone blind to real talent. There are innumerable instances in musical history of teachers rejecting or discouraging young men and women who have afterward become far more celebrated than the teachers who turned them down. Garcia at first turned aside Jenny Lind, and the following incident from Mr. David Bis-pham's highly interesting book A Quaker Singer's Recollec-tions indicates how the able and experienced Sir (Jeorge Henschel might have robbed America of her greatest baritone if Mr. Bispham's ambition had not been unconquerable. After an examination by Henschel, who was then conducting the Boston Symphony orchestra, Mr. Bispham says: "After full inquiry into my experience and capabilities he told me, to my keen disappointment, that he thought them inadequate as a basis for professional work, for what I had done had been done entirely as an amateur and without serious study. I was listening to an accomplished pianist, composer, conductor and singer. I could not play the piano. I had never conducted. I could not compose, but I thought I could sing. Henschel, however, told me that though I had a good natural voice, my inability to play the piano made it fairly impossible for me to learn even a little of the music I must know if I wished to take up a singer's career with any reason-able hope of success. Disappointed as I was, I nevertheless determined from that night to be a singer." Musical Rebirth MUSICA L history is full of instances of men and women who, in early life, showed little of the greatness which the world was only too glad to recognize when it became manifest. Their friends in youth were often inclined to laugh at their dreams and aspirations. Nor could the friends be blamed, because many of these people doubtless did not then possess * the powers that they dreamed about. They came later into possession of them through hoping, dreaming, working. What they have done you may do in your own music if you hold your ideal zealously enough before you all the time and con-stantly keep working toward it. First of all, you must convince yourself that it is possible to be reborn through the will. You must know that not only the mind, but the body, is affected by thought in a most mar-velous manner. Dr. Arthur Holmes, distinguished educator and psychologist, in his well-known work, Principles of Char-acter Making, instances three famous cases of stigmatization. Stigmatization is the term applied to the unmistakable physical markation due to the action of the mind. He first quotes the case of St. Francis of Assisi, born in 1182. "In 1224, on Mt. Alverno, St. Francis saw appearing before him a vision of the crucifixion. Upon this he meditated deeply and profoundly, until in an ecstasy of prayer for the meaning of this vision, the marks of the crucifix as he had seen them in the vision appeared on his own body—the nail wounds on his hands and feet and the spear-thrust in his side. These remained until his death two years later, and the marks are attested by Pope Alexander the Fourth, St. Bonaventura and other witnesses who saw the wounds, both before and after his death." Dr. Holmes then cites the case of St. Catherine of Sienna, who lived one hundred and eleven years after St. Francis and was similarly marked as a result of great religious emotion. The sceptical will, of course, regard these as cases of mediaeval imagination, but what can be said of the identical case of Louise Lateau, a poor Belgian peasant girl, born in 1850, and died in 1883? 365
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