The Story of a Musical Life; An Autobiography (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 Excerpt: ...to know chords through the ear before writing them. There had been, as I thought, too much eye harmony--deciding that certain harmonies were wrong because they did not look right. Pupils had received the kind of training that leads to condemning the consecutive fifths that a skillful composer might use, because, to the eye, they violated a rule. I had also observed that many harmony papers that had been given to pupils to fill out with proper chords were so much Greek to them, so far as hearing in their minds the chords they were writing; not but that the teacher might have played the lesson to them as it should be, but there was no such ear training as made the harmony a part of the musical life of the pupil. I found that twenty or thirty could hear and answer as well as one alone, so I played and they listened until they could tell promptly and accurately what they heard, beginning, of course, with the simplest combinations. In this training they had nothing to look at, and they wrote only what had entered their musical minds by the proper avenue, viz., the ear. I think the idea of working in this way came to me from teaching the blind. I found they knew and enjoyed harmony far more thoroughly than seeing pupils did, and the result of my experiment was very satisfactory. Instead of getting tired of harmony and giving it up because they could not understand it (really because they did not get it), the class grew more and more interested in their harmony lessons. I do not remember any approval of Dr. Mason and Mr. Webb that gave me so much satisfaction and pleasure as that which came to me on account of this work. Both were pleased that harmony, which had been a dull and heavy study, now promised to be a bright and cheery one. It was interesting to observe ...