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The Dachau School of Music for for Orchestral Instruments of 1905 ANDREAS PERNPEINTNER1 48 In the autumn of 1902, the year of his appointment as church musician to the church of St James in his home town of Dachau, Aloys Fleischmann founded a choir school, also termed school of singing,2 in order to provide a sound training for new church choristers and to teach them the basics of musical notation.3 Classes were held in the boys’ primary school in a room allocated by the town council. Though lessons were at first given free of charge, at the end of the following year Fleischmann sought permission from the council to take a monthly fee of ten pfennigs per pupil in order to set up a choir library and purchase a harmonium. The participation of the pupils in the Dachau nativity plays was a significant achievement of the choir school. For the pedagogical context, it is striking that in these plays Fleischmann had trainee singers perform together with professional musicians. In 1905 Aloys Fleischmann set up a further institution: the Dachau school of music for orchestral instruments.4 He presented a detailed concept in the local newspaper, the Amper-Bote, which makes it possible to discuss the school in the context of early twentieth-century music pedagogy. In founding the choir school before the school of music, Fleischmann followed traditional practice, as the music schools of Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna show.5 This concept of beginning instrumental training after an initial period of choral training was still advocated in 1921 by the distinguished music pedagogue, Leo Kestenberg, in connection with the establishment of music schools for adult education, in his book Musikerziehung und Musikpflege [Music Education and the Cultivation of Music]. Kestenberg suggests founding the school first as a choir school, subsequently setting up an instrumental department – as Fleischmann had done almost twenty years previously.6 It is also striking that in the Dachau school of music all orchestral instruments were taught: students could learn all string, woodwind and brass instruments, as well as percussion.This was by no means generally The Dachau School of Music 49 the case in other music schools. But keyboard instruments were not included, although in the nineteenth century the piano was the main instrument studied by children, and in particular by girls, and constituted an essential element of domestic music-making. Institutions such as the piano academies of Johann Bernhard Logier had a decisive influence on the teaching of music. But as it was Fleischmann’s declared aim to found an amateur orchestra in Dachau, his breach with the tradition of piano teaching was quite consistent.7 The teaching was not to be limited to practical skills but to encompass music theory. This, too, is consistent with the tradition in nineteenth-century schools of music of combining theory with practical training. But the re-evaluation of singing teaching in favour of teaching all aspects of music as a specialised subject also stood at the centre of school music pedagogical research in the early twentieth century.8 Fleischmann’s position on this was therefore consistent with the tradition of the music conservatories as well as corresponding to one of the main requirements of contemporary music teaching. Pupils in the Dachau school of music were taught in groups selected according to standard: there was an elementary class, a department for advanced students and a theory class.9 Practical classes were given in groups of no more than three (as was customary in Munich’s Royal Academy of Music), whereas the theory classes were taken by all students together, though there was separate tuition for adults. This system corresponded in principle to a plan propagated in 1810 for the establishment of music conservatories in Germany.10 However, the question of group tuition became an issue in the pedagogical reform movement of the early twentieth century, though Fleischmann’s model was clearly the traditional form of teaching. The quality of teaching was high, as three members of the Munich Court Orchestra joined the staff: Anton Riebl, Oskar Hieber and Franz Meier. With Fleischmann himself providing the theory and elementary tuition, the school of music of the small market town had a staff of four outstandingly well-qualified teachers.11 Similar institutions in previous decades had of course also had teachers with appropriate qualifications: for instance the school of music of Passau’s Music Society or the Fröhlich Musikinstitut in Würzburg. Such schools were often able...

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