Emily Patton: An Australian Pioneer of Tonic Sol-fa in Japan

Abstract

The nineteenth century produced some outstanding figures in music education. One of these was Emily Patton (b. 1831) who propagated Tonic Sol-fa at Yokohama (Japan) from 1889 until her death in 1912 as well as in Shanghai (China) at various periods from 1901. Her principal reason for migrating to Japan was a "distaste" for Australia following the deaths over a three-year period of her father, husband and son. (Sadly, her daughter, who accompanied Patton to Japan, died soon after their arrival.) At Yokohama, Patton promoted the Tonic Sol-fa method through singing classes for both adults and children (including a highly successful Juvenile Tonic Sol-fa Choir). Patton also introduced Tonic Sol-fa to Julia Moulton, the music teacher at Ferris Seminary in Yokohama. As a result, Tonic Sol-fa was adopted as the sole music teaching method at Ferris until the early 1920s and, as such, demonstrated the successful transfer of this Western music pedagogy to the Japanese cultural setting. During 1894, Patton with an Australian colleague, Ada Bloxham, was appointed to teach Tonic Sol-fa at the Tokyo Academy of Music but her appointment was short-lived due to the increasing influence of the German "conservatory" approach to music education. Later in life, Patton went to Shanghai where she established a music teaching practice. Patton returned to Yokohama and died there at the age of eighty. This article discusses not only Patton's work at Yokohama and Tokyo, but also attempts to place her achievements within the broader context of music education in Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.