'World of Music': Mostly Trivia

G. Wallace Woodworth, James Edward Ditson Professor of Music, has managed to include some sound suggestions for raising the status of music in America in an otherwise rather trivial survey of various aspects of the American musical world.

His book seems aimed at that middle group of music listeners who do not take music very seriously or think much about its importance; the book could arouse such people from semi-indifference. But this is not a book of broad interest. The reader who knows nothing about music will be uninterested in the specific problems of music teaching, music reviewing, and musicology which Woodworth tackles. And the serious listener will find himself bored, perhaps insulted, by Woodworth's not very eloquent statements telling him now music can uplift his soul and how he should be tolerant of twentieth century dissonances.

Specific Proposals

Woodworth is at his best in The World of Music when he makes specific proposals for improved music programs in schools and colleges and for more federal support of the arts.

In particular, he advocates broadening secondary school programs to include courses in listening and in musical literature, instead of just performing groups. He presents some specific recommendations for the content of these courses. Those in literature, he says, should not be surveys of everything from Gregorian to twelve-tone music, but should deal with a more specific group of compositions, emphasizing listening assignments rather than a textbook. Listening courses should study the sonorities of instruments, the texture of chamber music, and composers' individual peculiarities of style, and should stress the difference between program and non-program music. Woodworth also applies some of James Conant's ideas in pleading for more and better music teachers.

In his "Arts and Government" chapter, Woodworth outlines (unfortunately, only briefly) a few of the modest bills on aid to the arts which have met Congressional apathy or hostility and urges their passage. He advocates expanding federally-backed musical performances to include college and conservatory musicians, with more emphasis on domestic programs instead of only "cultural exchange." Another proposal is a federal Department of Education and the Arts, splitting up the present Health, Education, and Welfare Department.

Too Much Trivia

These ideas are not quite as controversial as the dust jacket suggests, but Woodworth should have included more detail about them, and omitted some of the trivia that fills up the rest of the book. Some trivia: a chapter cataloguing the well known abuses of music by restaurants, advertisers and radio stations, another offering unimportant comments about music in churches, and a third summarizing the trends of modern music and urging his readers to be curious about them.

Poor Illustrations

The next-to-last chapter comments well on the role of a music critic ("a reporter, a teacher, a philosopher, and a champion of music in his community") but the illustrations Woodworth has chosen are such atrocious specimens of writing and reporting they nearly invalidate his points.

And a word about professorial metaphors: the reader does not expect flowing and melodious prose in a book of this kind, but he could request Woodworth not to write sentences like "Local companies need not espouse either horn of the dilemma..." And in making a very simple point on page 96, Woodworth uses an extended metaphor which includes cores, roots, flowers, fruit, tangents, shooting stars, and satellites.