A PLEA FOR HOME MUSIC by Margaret E. Sangster

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 29, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 22.

A PLEA FOR HOME MUSIC.

By Margaret E. Sangster

“Play something for us, Maude.”

“O mother, don’t ask me. I’m out of practise. I haven’t touched the piano in a month.”

“But any little simple thing will please your father, child. He likes to hear his old favorites, the tunes and variations you knew before you went away to study. Often since we’ve been alone he’s looked at the piano, shut up there cold and dumb, and said, ‘It won’t be like that when Maude comes home.’”

The young girl shrugged her shoulders irritably, a trick she had learned from her music master, and answered positively, “I have forgotten those silly jingling things, mother, and I wouldn’t play them if I could. As soon as I’ve gathered myself together and feel that I can do myself justice, I’ll play, but not just yet.”

The mother sighed. She and her husband had made many sacrifices that Maude’s musical education should be complete. The cost of her lessons, of keeping her in town, of buying her the new instrument, and furnishing her not only with music but with opportunities to hear great performances, had been a severe tax on their resources and on their strength. Now she was acknowledged to be an accomplished musician, wonderful for an amateur, aspiring to be a professional, yet Mr. Burrows shook his gray head sorrowfully as he confided to his wife: “We never get any good from it at all. Seems as if Maude doesn’t get any good from it herself.”

At prayer-meeting, the week after her return from a year’s absence, it happened that the pastor’s wife, who usually played the hymns, was absent. The minister asked whether some of the young ladies would not take her place for the evening, and had pointedly addressed Maude, after a pause of silence and waiting: “Will you not help us, Miss Burrows?”

Maude had declined, to the deep disappointment of the old people, to whom it appeared incomprehensible that after all her study she should not be able to render so small a service. Fortunately, the pastor played a little himself, and was not, therefore, entirely dependent upon others; but he said to his wife later, and she agreed with him, that he thought any young woman who played at all might learn to play simple sacred melodies so that at a moment’s notice, if the occasion arose, she could be of use in a Gospel meeting. In this opinion the minister does not stand alone. There are many who share it with him.

A thorough musical training, with its discipline of ear and hand, its marvelous technique and its intellectual breadth, need not wholly exclude the less while it gives the freedom of the large. The girl whose own refinement of taste is satisfied only with classical music may still, if she chooses, give rare pleasure to a homely audience of her own people and her neighbors to whom the harmonies she prefers are an enigma to which they have no clue.—Margaret E. Sangster.