This basis, to which I refer, is both actual and ideal. Many great composers have used actual folk-melodies. The chorales in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” for example, are based on traditional melodies. In Haydn’s instrumental compositions folk-songs are often used _verbatim_, and the total number of them to be found in his works is very great. Notable examples may be found in Beethoven--as in the “Rasoumoffsky” quartettes, and the Seventh Symphony--while Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikovsky used folk-melodies freely. Dvořák and Grieg are essentially national in their idiom and style, and folk-music may be said to be the basis of the music of each. Ideally the debt of music to folk-song is greater still. Any typical, _Adagio_ of Beethoven (such as that in the so-called “Pathétique Sonata”) springs from folk-song, and, in spite of the long process of development through which music had passed, reflects--in a more mature form--the same sentiment one finds in the original. How could it be otherwise? Is there any art, or any other intellectual activity of man, of which the same thing cannot be said? Were not Keats and Shelley waiting to be born of Coleridge and Wordsworth? Is there such a thing as a fruit without a vine; a blossom without a stem; an end without a beginning? There have been composers, poets, and painters who have lived detached from the common consciousness--like those strange organisms in nature that float in sea or air and draw nothing from the earth’s native soil; but all the greatest minds have been rooted in the past and have drawn their inspiration from common human experience. Keeping in mind, then, that our object is to train the taste of children so that they will love the best music, let us examine what is actually taking place in the teaching of music to children.
The most common fallacy in our teaching consists in putting knowledge before experience, or theory before practice. Children are taught _about_ music before they have had sufficient experience of it. They are taught, for example, to pin pasteboard notes on a make-belief staff; they are told that one note is the father-note and another the mother-note (one supposes the chromatics to be irascible old-maid aunts); all sorts of subterfuges are resorted to in an attempt to teach them what they are too young to learn and what, in any case, can have no significance whatever except when based on a long process of actual experience. One might as well try to satisfy a hungry child with a picture of an apple as to show a child notes before it has dealt with sounds.