Of all musicians, organists have always had the greatest difficulty in getting regular practice on their instruments. Electric organ blowers were first used about 1900 and up to this time big church organs were usually blown by human power. One, or more often several men, called the “calcantores” or “calcants,” had to do this hard work. A big organ built at Halberstadt in 1361 had twenty bellows and ten men were needed to tread them. The church engaged these calcants for the services on Sundays and festival days. Organists had not much opportunity to play the organ except during services; they were always badly paid, could not afford to hire calcants, and, moreover, the Church did not encourage practice on what was probably a costly instrument intended only for use in the worship of God. So organists had to practice at home. In the fourteenth century some of them possessed small organs called positives. Perhaps a kind wife or other member of the family did the blowing, but hardly to such an extent as to make regular practice possible. A still smaller organ was the portative. This could be carried about and was often blown by the organist himself. As one hand was used to work the bellows, playing with both hands was not possible.

It was in 1842 that John Curwen, a Congregationalist minister aged 26, began his life's work as one of the most notable pioneers of popular musical education. For fully fifty years his was the dominant single influence on music in the state schools of England, Scotland and Wales, and hence upon the large mass of the community. Even today, at the end of a period of more than twenty-five years during which the trend of musical education has tended to discredit his teaching, his figure still broods over the teaching of vocal music, and quantities of school songs continue to be published with the Tonic Sol-fa ‘interpreting’ notation along with the standard Staff notation. Nevertheless, except in Scotland, the true essentials of his teaching are no longer an effective force—a fact which makes possible an attempt at an analytical re-statement of his principles today in a less controversial atmosphere than formerly. Curwen's own writings will be examined in an effort to get behind the numerous adaptations, modifications and dilutions which his method underwent before being discredited.

I shall begin my survey of the relationships between music and psychological medicine by considering two important theoretical questions.

First, what is the meaning of pure music? Your President' has happily described music as having completely digested the experiences of human life and nature that could only be crudely and vaguely expressed in words.

Secondly, why should music have a stronger immediate effect on most people than the other arts?

All those who cultivate the ancient and beautiful art of playing keyboard instruments must for ever be indebted to a generation of craftsmen and technicians who in a very short space of time carried out most of the essential research and experiment which made possible the development of the fine and sonorous piano of our own day. These men had their own problems to solve, and they produced for their generation very perfect musical instruments, but perhaps without knowing it they set the course of development for many years after their day. I hope to show here how in the course of a single lifetime the pianoforte emerged from the stage of being only a modified harpsichord into a musical intrument of power and expressiveness, scientifically designed to work efficiently and to continue to do so. This development took place between about 1770 and 1830, and it has never been exceeded in rapidity by the development of any other musical instrument.

Most of you will already be familiar with the mediaeval idea of the carol as a strict, metrical form. To others it may come as a surprise to discover that the bravely all-embracing definitions of modern editors are, for the late Middle Ages, superflous. To poets and musicians of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries a carol was not ‘a song with a religious impulse, simple, hilarious, popular and modern,’ but simply ‘a song on any subject, composed of uniform stanzas and provided with a burden’; this burden, a distinct formal unit, starts the piece and is repeated after each verse.

Most of us have experienced, in one form or another, the feelings of that Frenchman who read the writings of Seneca a few years before the French revolution and found them to be fantastic and absurd. But reading them again when France was under the terror, and his own head was no more safe than it would have been in the days of Nero, he found them to be reasonable and true.