Habit of Music
From the Alveary Team
In an age of specialization, we can easily miss beautiful parts of the human experience by pigeonholing ourselves. We limit ourselves to our expertise and fail to cultivate in ourselves and our children habits in new avenues. For example, an engineer may say, “I’m just not a musical person” and deprive herself and her children of music lessons or composer study.
In Home Education, Miss Mason says: “As for a musical training, it would be hard to say how much that passes for inherited musical taste and ability is the result of the constant hearing and producing of musical sounds, the habit of music, that the child of musical people grows up with.”
For millennia, whether singing while working or singing as worship, attending a musical performance or playing a musical instrument, the only way to enjoy music was live. In the 19th century, music in the parlor entertained guests, music in the concert hall entertained patrons, and music in the cathedral or church guided worship. Over Mason’s lifetime (the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th), the phonograph, graphophone, and gramophone began to change the way the Western world listened to music. The value of a musical education was on the decline. As Mason lamented, “It is a pity that the musical training most children get is of a random character; that they are not trained, for instance, by carefully graduated ear and voice exercises, to produce and distinguish musical tones and intervals.”
Though the musical world of Mason’s day was vastly different from ours, we face the same challenge of developing musical “taste and ability” in our media-saturated world. Make space this year for yourself and your children to develop an appreciation for the great composers, to build up a repertoire of songs and hymns to sing, and to learn to play an instrument. Let the habit of music bring beauty, joy, and calm to your home or school.
Notes
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