Music is an essential element in social life and social culture, and our times have few better movements than the increasing introduction of vocal music into popular education. The higher kinds of music might be included in all the higher kinds of education for men as well as for women. Milton so teaches in his great tractate; and so the Greeks practiced, in whose training no faculty was wasted or overlooked. The music which is now most wanted, however, is music for the common heart. If education will give us the taste for such music, and give us the music, it will confer upon us a benefit, a blessing. It is not desired that music in the home, or in the friendly circle, should never wander out of the sphere of the home or the friendly circle, only let not these spheres of feeling be without any strains peculiarly suitable to themselves. Let the theatre have its music; let the camp have its music; let the dance-room have its music; let the church have its music; but let the home and the friendly gathering also have their music.
We have for the cultivated, music of rare powers and in great abundance; but we need a music for the people—and no music can be music for the people, but that which answers to simple and direct emotion. It is a most important need. The music of the opera, granting it were ever so pure, and had no resistance to encounter, can be had only in cities, and can never reach the scattered masses of the population. The music of the oratorio must have a limitation even still more restricted. Popular music must be domestic, social music. We have it not; therefore we are a silent people, and our writings have no lyrical inspirations. The finer and deeper elements of popular life have no true medium of exposition. These subtle, delicate, wordless idealities of the soul, which the rudest have, are without music; that alone, which can take them from the confining bosom, and give them to the vital air. Our rural life is gladdened by no song—is the subject of no song; and our social life is almost as silent as the rural. National music we have none: and our political songs are, generally, a shame to doggerel, and a libel upon tune. Complaining on the want of social and domestic music, will not, I am aware, supply it; and yet it is no less a want. We want it on the summer’s evening, when our work is done, to rest the spirit as we rest the body; and while the eye is filled with visible beauty, to bring the soul into harmony with invisible goodness. We want it in the winter’s night, by the winter fire, to cheer us while the hours pass, and to humanize in amusing us. We want it in our friendly re-unions, not for delight alone, but also for charity and peace, to exclude the demon of idle or evil speaking, and to silence the turbulence of polemical or political discussion. We want it in our churches. Christianity is the home-feeling and the social-feeling made perfect. The music of it should be the home-feeling and the social-feeling consecrated. As it is, our Protestant churches at least have either a drawling psalmody with the monotony of a lullaby, or they have patches of selections that want unity, appropriateness, or meaning. A music is wanted in our Protestant churches such as Christianity ought to have; a music, simple yet grand—varied but not capricious—gladsome with holy joy, not with irreverent levity, not sentimental, yet tender, solemn but not depressing—not intolerant to the beauties of art, and yet not scornful of popular feeling. If a true and natural taste for music should spring up and be cultivated through the country, not in cities only, but in every village and district, it would be an auspicious phenomenon. It would be a most vital and a most humanizing element in social life. It would break the dullness of our homes; it would brighten the hour of our meetings; would enliven our hospitality, and it would sublime our worship. “Let who that will make the laws of a people,” some one said, “but let me make their songs;” to which a great and patriotic composer might add, Let who that will supply the words of a people’s songs, if I shall be allowed to give these words to music.