Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843 by Various
page 89 of 340 (26%)
page 89 of 340 (26%)
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presence--a piece of music they had never seen before was placed in
their hands. The first attempt to execute this at sight was lame, and halted terribly; the second was somewhat better, but as we moved about, from one pupil to another, to ascertain, as far as possible, the individual accuracy of the class, we heard many voices, in a subdued tone, making a number of admirable guesses at their part, but the owners of which could not, by the utmost courtesy, be considered to be singing at sight. The basses missed many a "distance," the tenors were interrupted by the master, and worked, in the defective passages, separately from the rest of the class for a while, _by ear_!! A third attempt was made with somewhat better success, and the piece was accomplished in a rambling uncertain manner. During the whole of this trial, the trebles were led by the master's apprentice, a sharp clever boy, who retained a voice of peculiar beauty and power to the unusually late age of sixteen, and who had commenced his musical studies six or eight years before. We considered this experiment a failure; it may be said the fault lay in the teacher, not in the method; true, the master was not Mr Hullah, but he was one of the "certificated," and the partisans of Mr Hullah, in the language of the lawyers, are _estopped_ from asserting his incompetency. We have known pupils, not deficient in general ability, who, having attended the greater part of "the course," during which they paid great attention to their studies, were unable to read more than a few bars of the simplest music, beyond which they were lost and confused. Without naming the notes _Do, Re,_ &c., they were utterly unable to proceed at all, and it appeared to us that, by seeing those syllables written on paper, they would have gathered a more correct idea of the music, than by attempting to read from music written in the ordinary manner. This is the result of the invariable use of those syllables in exercising the voice. In the best continental schools, they have long been obsolete for such a purpose. Still, the |
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