Our grandfathers and our grandmothers were drilled in vocal music in the church or neighboring singing-school.  In that day—­and for twenty-five years later—­almost every household possessed and made frequent use of the Boston Academy, the Carmina Sacra, the Shawm and other collections of vocal music adapted for the use of societies and churches.  Nearly everybody sang by note, and she was dull of ear or wits who could not bear her part at sight in any simple church tune.  The pianoforte took the place of our grandmother’s spinet and harpsichord, and every girl in every family was taught to play upon it after a fashion.  She who had not taste or talent for music gave it up after her marriage.  In this particular she was no more derelict than the “performer” of our times, whose florid flourish of classic music costs thousands where her grandmother’s strumming cost hundreds.

The musical education of the girl of that period hardly deserved the name.  The national ear for music, like the national eye for painting and sculpture, has made marvelous progress in fifty years.  The singing school has gone to the wall along with the volunteer choir and the notion that every boy and girl can and ought to sing.  Once in several whiles you find a “music-mad family,” of which every member plays upon some instrument and studies music with expensive professors.  Or one child displays what relatives rate as musical genius, and is educated to the full extent of the parent’s ability.  This done, the proficient becomes, in his or her own opinion, a privileged prodigy.  Critical from the outset of his musical career, he grows intolerant of amateur work and disdainful of such compositions as the (musically) unlearned delight to honor.

“Don’t you suppose,” said the late Mrs. Barrow (the dearly-beloved “Aunt Fanny” of a host of little ones) to me at an evening musicale, “that seven out of ten professed disciples of the Wagner cult here present would, if they dared be unfashionable and honest, ask for music that has a tune in it rather than that movement in something flat or sharp to which they have seemed to give breathless attention for the last fifteen minutes?”

“A tune in it!” repeated a bystander in intense amusement.  “Dear Mrs. Barrow, tunes are musical tricks, not true art.”

This dogma, and others like unto it, are putting all our music-making into the hands of professional artists and hushing the voice of song and gladness in our homes.  The one musician of the household is accredited with perfect taste and unerring judgment, and usually becomes a nuisance to his circle of acquaintances.  He shudders at a false note; the woman who sings sharp is an agony, the man who flats is an anguish, and the mistakes of both are resented as personal affronts.