Active Listening

An American Musician’s Story. By Olga Samaroff Stokowski. W. W. Norton. $3.00
What to Listen for in Music. By Aaron Copland. Whittlesey House. 12.50

I have not read Mme. Olga Samaroff Stokowski’s The Layman’s Music Book, but I mean to do so without delay; for I found the chapter of her autobiography wherein she tells of her experiments in trying to make “active listeners” out of musically illiterate laymen the most engrossing part of this very readable book. Although she gives no more than a hint or two of the principles on which she bases her method—her great reliance on the phonograph, for example, which she calls “the practice instrument of the listener”—she discusses the broader aspects of the problem fully. Her views may be summed up as follows: Radio and phonograph, with all their limitations, have made a greater amount of good music available than there has ever been in the history of the world. The supply exceeds the demand, not so much materially as aesthetically. High aesthetic pleasures are within easy reach of an enormous public of limited discrimination. Should not the aim of general education be to prepare more and better soil for receiving this abundance of available seed? Mme. Samaroff has no thought of discouraging people from making music themselves, but feels emphatically that two things should be avoided: “One,” she writes, “is the type of music study that is eighty percent manual labour, leading to negligible results that are out of all proportion to the time, effort and money expended on them. The other is the psychology fostered by so many well-meaning musicians that a poor performance is better than none and should therefore be considered a good thing. In other words, when a person has only a small amount of time and talent to devote to music, it is better for him to spend it on learning to become a good listener rather than a bad performer.”