‘A Music School for Workers’ by Ashley Pettis from New Masses. Vol. 14 No. 3. January 15, 1935.

THE Workers’ Music League of New York has announced the formation of the Workers’ Music School.

The economic crisis was not required to disclose the manifold weaknesses of bourgeois schools of music. Most of these schools have been founded as a result of the interest in music of some wealthy individuals, motivated by a desire to become “patrons” of the arts on the basis of large endowments. They have sought to lure students with the prestige that comes from studying with world famous artists, and with a pot of gold and a distinguished “career” as incentive for their efforts. These rich institutions were obviously not organized for profit, since their endowments underwrote any deficits. But this fact has not made them available to a wide enrollment of whatever economic or artistic status. The entrance requirements closed doors to all but those whose obvious qualifications promised quick development into a kind of musical brilliance which would reflect glory upon the institutions which nurtured them. They have granted scholarships and student aid in ever increasing proportions in order to attract students of talent. But a false pretension has always existed in this encouragement of embryonic musicians for professional careers. For years opportunities for musicians have been narrowing. With the exception of a handful of names, no concert artist has received any consistent remuneration and in pedagogy the private instructor has found himself less and less able to compete with the heavily endowed schools.

Even the faculties of our leading schools have become reduced to more and more exclusive cliques, largely of imported musicians: Russian emigrés, English dandies, etc.–any and all except Americans–unless these were from the ranks of products of the leading teachers graduate students hired as “secondary” instructors.

Even in the music schools associated with universities where entrance requirements demand a certain number of academic credits, there has long existed an indiscriminate scramble after a degree that sine qua non of the teacher in all our accredited universities where music is taught. It never seems to be taken into consideration, either by endowed music schools or higher institutions of learning, that the field for which they are madly preparing artists and pedagogues is narrowing to the vanishing point. With the smaller conservatories, many of which have folded up during the crisis, the efforts to create professional musicians for non-existent careers, may truly be characterized as obtaining money under false pretenses.

The Workers’ Music School aims to avoid all the pitfalls and pretensions which exist in bourgeois schools of music. Conducted by a group of musicians who are specialists in their respective fields, the curriculum will include: theory, music appreciation, choral singing, and instruction in piano, violin and other instruments. These classes have been planned with a view to practical work in the revolutionary movement. And there are to be special courses in music criticism from the Marxian viewpoint.

Music history is to be studied with the historical economic and political background taken into consideration. A group of specifically trained teachers will conduct a special department for children.

The nominal fees make the courses available to those workers and their children who are seriously interested both in preserving authentic musical traditions and in building a new musical world which will survive the collapse of an outmoded social system. The development of professional virtuosi, completely separated from the realities of the present as well as from important new musical developments, is far removed from the aims of the Workers’ Music School.

Details of organization and registration are available from the Workers’ Music League, 799 Broadway, New York.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v14n03-jan-15-1935-NM.pdf