THE PLACE OF MUSIC EXAMS – Charles Pearce

Undoubtedly it is a great and helpful thing for a child to have an incentive to work by knowing that on a certain date in the near future he or she will be called upon to exhibit the skill acquired by long hours of patient study and practice in the presence of a sympathetic listener such as one of the examiners of a recognized Institution. To expect children merely to love music and to work for the love of it in the vague hope that they may be good musicians some day in the far indefinite future – when they are grown up, when perhaps their parents may be dead, and so on – is evidently to expect too much. The child wants to know now how he is getting on, what progress he is now making, how much more hard work lies before him in the future, and so on.

And as long as human nature is human nature, so long will music examinations hold their own. They have come to stay. Does any person suppose that as long as examinations play the important part they do in all other branches of general education, music is likely to become the one subject exempt from examination tests? The teacher who thinks so must surely take a very low estimate indeed of his art. And if he thinks so, his pupils will think so too; and then they will all find themselves dropping out of line with the teachers and pupils in other subjects of general education. And in these days of active competition this sort of thing will never do. Music may be, and is emotional; but it is also an intellectual study which effects the head as well as the heart. Of that there can be no doubt. And as long as brain-culture, as well as emotional-culture, can be taught, so long can both be examined.