The Discovery Of The Child

HA P T E R XXII

THE BEGINNING OF MUSICAL ART

THE briefness of the reference to musical education which is made
in this book is not due to disparagement of the value of music in
education, but to the fact that with the child of tender age music
can only have a beginning; it has its development somewhat later.
Besides, success is bound up with the need for the production of
plenty of music around the child, so that there is set up an environ-
ment calculated to develop musical sense and intelligence. To
have available a good musical performer, or to possess simple
instruments adapted to children like those which Dolmetch makes
today for the equipment of his marvellous children's orchestras,
.are things which we cannot lay down as being absolute essentials
in a school which has to be accessible to all. In the model
Montessori schools, however, musical education is cultivated in a
serious manner, trying to leave to the child free choice and free
expression, as in aE branches of its development.

Already Signorina Maccheroni has made some beautiful ex-
periments, published in part in my book L*Autoeducazione (The
Advanced Montessori Method, II); and after some time, Lawrence
A. Benjamin, with the help of distinguished music teachers in
Vienna and London, has made important contributions to the