Old values, some ahead of their time.

I found the reading on “Macmillan’s Magazine in the Grove Years” pretty interesting. Although I am familiar with Grove, the name, I always thought of Grove, the person, as some mystical figure somewhere out there in music land that gathered all of this information and published it online for my personal use.

But anyways… I just found this chapter to be quite telling about the role music played in the lives of the Victorians. Part of the chapter seemed to be describing the roots of music therapy. Music was used to bring people together and keep them out of trouble, for example, the ways in which choirs were used to teach young kids, or to keep unmarried women from being alone and getting into the “wrong sort of behavior.” But music was also used to help calm the criminally insane and help improve the health of those suffering from physical diseases.

One aspect of the book I found particularly funny, was the section that mentioned how wonderful and useful music is as part of a woman’s education; how it allows her to express her feelings, because women are soooooo emotional. However, a man playing the piano or singing was viewed as too feminine, and therefore inappropriate. It was the role of the woman to entertain the guests at parties with her piano skills or to express herself musically while the man goes off to work and do other manly things.

Despite how utterly ridiculous I found this thought process to be, it is what it is and those were the ideals of the time. However, there is such a deep regard for music in this time that it’s hard not to feel, at least for me, that as a society we’ve lost that. Music was honored and cherished in the Victorian era, and that’s not to say that it is no longer special, but the value of music seems to get lost today. Every time I hear of a music program being cut or underfunded and people complaining about other countries being ahead of the U.S. in math and science, it’s these same countries that still value and encourage the learning of music. Can we get some of this back?