one measure, and then to unite the two processes. After a few lessons, having taken into account what I was doing, I became convinced that my method of instruction is almost the same as the method of Chevé,[1] which I had seen under trial in Paris—a method which was not immediately adopted by me, simply because it was a method.
To all who are occupied with the teaching of singing one cannot too highly recommend this work, on the cover of which is printed in large letters Repoussé à l'unanimité, though now it is distributed in tens of thousands of copies over all Europe. I saw in Paris striking proofs of the success of this method under the instruction of Chevé himself; audiences of five or six hundred men and women, some of them forty and fifty years old, singing in one voice à livre ouvert whatever the teacher indicated to them.
In Chevé's method there are many rules, exercises, and prescriptions which have no significance, and which every sensible teacher will invent by the hundred and by the thousand on the battle-field, in other words, in the class-room; there is a very comical, and perhaps also convenient, process of reading the time without the sounds; for example, in four-four time the teacher says ta-fa-te-fe; in three-four time the teacher says ta-te-ti; in eight-eight time, ta-fa-te-fe-te-re-li-ri. All this is interesting as one of the means whereby music may be taught, interesting as the history of a certain musical school; but these roots are not absolute, and cannot constitute a method. This is the very thing that forms the fountain-head of the errors of methods. But Chevé has ideas remarkable for their simplicity; and three of them constitute the essence of his method:—the first, the ancient, having been enunciated by J. J. Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique, is the idea of expressing musical signs by figures. Whatever the opponents of this way of writing may say, every singing-teacher can make the experiment, and can always convince himself of the immense superiority of fig-
- ↑ Émile Joseph Maurice Chevé, 1804–1864.
