Sir Arthur Somervell on Music Education: His Writings, Speeches and Letters (review)

Each one of us must find his/her place in life. By and large we do this through a combination of innate ability, the love and care of parents, the helpfulness of friends, relatives, and teachers—a process permeated by many thousands of years of human thought and experience. There would appear to be universal understanding of what it means 'to grow up': of how to make sense of existence in both the smaller and the greater scheme of things. Is it not, then, surprising that, when it comes to formal schooling, the methods we devise to facilitate learning often create controversy and animosity? Even the words we use characterize the debate—'education', 'instruction', 'training': should teachers be drawing upon children's natural awareness and sensitivity, or should they be passing on 'accepted' facts and techniques?

Arthur Somervell was a composer fired with enthusiasm to improve the status of music teaching in schools because he believed that 'responsiveness to music is the outward and visible sign of inward sensitiveness to the rhythm of all things, and is, therefore, the greatest of humanizing and harmonizing influences' (p. 44).

In an excellent and substantial introduction to Somervell's life and work (pp. 10-40) Gordon Cox comments on the composer's 'idealised and euphoric view of childhood', reflecting 'Pestalozzi's emphasis on the importance of sense impression as the foundation of human knowledge'. Yet from this belief there stemmed 'a split between reason and feeling, knowledge and expression, science and art...[that] reads oddly from one so concerned to demonstrate the unity of things' (p. 25).

Somervell served as Inspector of Music in training colleges and schools from 1901 to 1928. In recognition of his work for music education he was knighted in 1929, and throughout his retirement he remained an influential figure. Much of the character of that influence can be sensed through this sympathetically edited and annotated collection of his writings: his views on music in the life of a nation; on musical competitions; on the public school and what came to be known as 'a classical education'; on the 'educational ladder' from school to university; on the world's traditional stories and the deep-seated truths they encapsulate; on the distinctions between folksong and national song; and, above all, his

educational vision of the power music might achieve in schools [encompassing] a philosophy derived from Plato and Aristotle; the rhythmic arts; a view of childhood which stressed the instincts and the emotions; the importance of the link between music and moral values; the essence of music as rhythm; the opposition of feeling and knowledge; the centrality of national songs.

(p. 28)

Somervell was a paradoxical figure. Audiences enjoyed his music, but critics felt that he might have become a more original and influential composer had he not been so much involved with the practicalities of education. But had he not been a composer he would almost certainly not have achieved as much as he did. Surely it was his own musical inventiveness that caused him to insist on the importance of music in schools. Curiously, however, he seems to have been unable to forge a direct link between his work as a composer and the musical activities he advocated for children. Rather he was content to focus upon singing:

Song is the easiest and the earliest possible way of beginning to train the senses to rhythmic and orderly, instead of non-rhythmic and disorderly, response. It is, as far as I know, the only way by which a very young child can satisfy the creative instinct by the creation of a perfect thing because not only is no apparatus required but to all intents and purposes no skill is required.

(p. 46)

Singing, he maintained, was a 'response to rhythmic expression': 'a formative process [that] becomes evident as imaginative perception. Something in the child has by the music been...