Some years ago, a
woman told me about her participation in a master class. The master teacher was
known for having had direct contact either with Debussy himself or with
musicians who had known him—I can’t remember which. Another young woman who
played in the class had evidently, in the view of both the teacher and of the
storyteller, exuded considerable arrogance, apparently detectable in the manner
in which she presented herself. The master teacher evidently blasted her
playing, showing his disdain by accusing her publicly of failing to understand
Debussy’s score and of putting her own personality ahead of its most essential
requirements.
The story I heard may
well have revealed more about the storyteller than the master teacher, but
whatever exactly happened, it was clear that the former embraced wholeheartedly
the entire scenario of setting up master classes with gurus possessed of first-
or second-hand knowledge of the composers they teach. Even at the time of her
telling the story, when I shared her values relatively unquestioningly, I
remember that her description struck me as a cautionary tale about a sort of
wanton woman who had put her own pleasure ahead of the highly spiritual values
of a great man’s music—and never mind that sensuous pleasure is embedded in the
textures of that very music. The hapless class participant may well have been
arrogant, but this doesn’t really explain why the teacher might not have
adopted other attitudes in hearing her play, for example, that she might in
some ways offer the listeners her best if she (and he) cast aside fixed notions
of how to play the music. That the public humiliation was deemed appropriate by
the storyteller was, as far as I can see, based on a punitive system of rank:
Debussy’s importance dwarfed that of the master teacher—after all, the latter’s
mission there was certainly not to act as proponent of his own music!—which, in
turn, dwarfed the student’s.
This is how classical
music pedagogy is supposed to work: the great composer passes on the golden key
that unlocks his masterpieces, which his students absorb over years and then
uncompromisingly teach themselves. In the mind of a contemporary American
musician like the teller of this story, I presume that what entitled the old
world European teacher to yell at his students and tell them how stupid they
were was that his impatience was an act of humility; he was much smaller than
the composers whose music he taught. He or she is the supposedly self-effacing
priest (or nun) who testily tries to get the little louts to appreciate divine
grace. If we peek at footage of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s master classes, she at
times indicates her own struggles with certain things. Still, even asserting
her own smallness was in the context of attempting to satisfy the demands of a
higher power, the flawless genius of the composers whose music she sang. My use
of the term ‘higher power’ matters, I think, because the heroes of the Western
musical tradition have been seen essentially as gods possessed of
incomprehensible perfection in their talent, enlightened beings—placed, like
Orpheus, in the firmament of heaven upon their deaths. The ‘master’ of the
flute class story and Schwarzkopf have been among the mediums negotiating
between the world of the dead and the living.
Such stories are
legion; frequently noted performers in master classes have cut young people
down to size for presuming to think that they had any business ‘expressing
themselves;’ rather they must see that they have been charged with the sacred
task of expressing the composer faithfully. Well, I love to both feel and
express reverence and I think there are a lot worse things for young people
too; still, we have to be a bit curious about whether or not, in our worshipful
attitude toward the great composers, we will reverently express Wagner’s
maliciousness and anti-Semitism, or Beethoven’s sanctimony as he worked to
wreck the lives of others less Moral, or the younger Stravinsky’s admiration of
Mussolini. Should we assume that someone foolish enough to admire Mussolini—and
it’s not that I’m claiming immunity to foolishness—is nonetheless such a pure
genius that tampering with his creations should be unthinkable?
It is as if the
painfully obvious has never occurred to my storyteller—and by implication, much
of the classical music community: that the young woman who played at the master
class may have been brave as well as arrogant, that she was willingly
participating in a music class (not a
pyramid scheme or real estate conference), and that it is rather absurd to
invite a young person who has studied her instrument for years to get up and
share music composed by another human being for a musical community without
showing respectful interest—even if it is critical
interest—in her interpretation. Reverence needn’t be accorded primarily to
artifacts, like scores; in many far less text-oriented musical traditions of
the world, reverence is at least as fundamental to the musical attitude as in the
current practice of Western classical music. Instead of always to a document
that can’t fully encompass every realization of it, reverence could be extended
to the learning experience, to the abandoning of the ego in the musical
process—forget about the composer!—and to a good teacher and the other living
humans with whom we musically interact. My storyteller, who is undoubtedly a
liberal Democrat, a feminist, a believer in liberation of the oppressed around
the world, spoke with great admiration for the Master and utter contempt for
the student.
This still goes on
today within a larger sub-culture noted both for its widespread advocacy of
liberal democracy and for much preaching about hearing young people out. For my
own part, I know that I can influence most students I’ve encountered to play or
sing with greater sensitivity and awareness without debasing them, but then I
haven’t helped them enough to realize how wretched and trivial they are. Is it
any wonder that, as I mentioned above, some students manifest great caution
with even long-sanctioned expressive gestures, when that caution grows directly
out of the tight controls imposed in the very teaching of the music, not to
mention the possibility of humiliation along the lines of the young woman at
the flute master class? Avoiding making a spectacle of one’s self means running
less risk of such humiliation; playing music with a sort of generic
“musicality” can feel a hell of a lot safer.
How I believe kids
should be educated is ultimately not the central issue. What I think is usually
missing from even critical theory that questions the assumptions of classical
music training is the use of more anthropological
thinking about Americans—and I do mean Americans of many ethnic origins—of the
late 20th- and early 21st centuries. My narratives about
jazz and folk rock students—in my previous post—are small examples of the
anthropological mindset to which I’m referring. Schwarzkopf was doing master
classes a mere couple of decades ago, but her own anthropology must have been a
vastly different matter—she was born just as monarchies were unraveling in
Central Europe. As a young woman she joined the Nazi Party, presumably because
she had to in order to continue working in Germany. (She also sang in occupied
France in the early 1940s.) While I think that there is considerable evidence
suggesting that Schwarzkopf did not subscribe to Nazi thinking, is it not
utterly logical that a musician with her history and place in the world would
feel at home working stringently to satisfy the highly specific demands of
“great” musicians, and that she would eagerly obey autocratic conductors like
Karajan—another Party member? (She also sought to follow the dictates of
another evident autocrat, her husband and record producer, Walter Legge.) What
of the huge chasm between her cultural identity and that of an American born in
the last fifty or sixty years? Why should any current American singer, for
example, expect to share any intrinsic cultural sense with Schwarzkopf?
Then again, do
contemporary Americans have entirely different standards about autonomy and
freedom than those lured by Fascism or Bolshevism, or would such a notion
simply constitute prejudice? Most Americans have been willing to sit by as
aggression was committed abroad, even in recent years. The U.S. has encouraged
torture by handing prisoners over to regimes that we know practice it; one
could argue that, as commanders-in-chief, our president continues to be, in a
sense, autocratic when it comes to the waging of war. We also continue to be a
nation of immigrants, and many of those immigrants fled from autocratic or
totalitarian regimes. On the whole, is our national experiential norm really so
different from the monarchies and autocracies we associate with those who
unhesitatingly taught the primacy of the Western European traditions?
The answer might be
both no and yes. A smug assumption that we, unlike Europeans born before the
Second World War, have passed some kind of magic threshold of liberty is silly.
But, despite lingering injustices, an American does now have at least the possibility
of trial by a jury of something close to her peers, does see increasing numbers
of women in increasingly high places, and lives with an African-American
president; indeed, we have a younger generation remarkably less concerned than
their parents about whether people are gay or straight. We’d certainly be foolish
to maintain that these improvements infuse all areas of our lives, or, more
devastatingly, the lives of those others on whom the American way of life has
impact. Nonetheless, many Americans and certainly a large number of those
heavily oriented toward the arts have social values that should render the
concept (for example) of a person—still generally a man—musically in charge of
as many as a hundred people, many of whom he can dismiss on a whim,
disquieting, to say the least. (An American CEO has the same power, some of you
will object. But how comfortable would the illustrious and sensitive Artistes
in front of orchestras be with the comparison?) The classical music audience
applauds his power to decide nearly all of the musical details for often very
sophisticated musicians without any discussion. Generally, a conductor teaches
obedience—not how to make essential
musical decisions from the violin, or cello, or trumpet section, but how to more
perfectly follow.
This is another
example of how obedience and classical training are enmeshed. Enormous numbers
of those kids lucky enough to receive musical training get it marching in
musical lockstep; in the case of marching bands, literally, but also
metaphorically, in orchestras, concert bands, and choruses. A participant
begins young, when she is presumably most malleable, and is directed by a
leader who, though only one person in the room among many, has more power than
all of the others in combination. To demonstrate this, he or she dresses
differently from them in performance, while they attempt to appear identical.
(I am well aware that some of the groups I refer to do not limit their
repertoire to strictly classical music, but I would argue that the inclusion of
the other music drains away much of its
vitality as surely as in the case of the “classics.”) They are taught above all
to blend, that is, to obscure their individual identities, and eschew their own
ideas in favor of the leaders. Discussion of the social implications of such a
way of growing up musically is not only generally discouraged, but, in fact,
often regarded as absurd. To be fair, such blending is, in one sense, analogous
to my example from previous blogs of the actor playing Hamlet by seeking to
become him rather than the reverse; by not overvaluing our own identities, we
do learn about the identities of others and share in something that is
communitarian. The leader can bring her own ear, experience of running
rehearsals, and sense of phrase to the learning situation, and students benefit
from these—my own musicianship students who have sung in choirs or played in
orchestras listen better. But there is still the inevitable disruption that
ripples through our musical society because contemporary musicians, especially
young ones, insist that Hamlet must also adapt to them, and they reject
classical music culture as rendering them slaves to a pre-existent text.
There are those would
argue that I am making a straw man, that performers and teachers of classical
music these days are no longer so worshipful of composers of the music of the
current Western canon. There is a kernel of truth to this view, but ultimately,
I think we function far less independently than we believe. The same classical
musician who defiantly expresses distaste, for example, for Chopin waltzes is
nonetheless more likely to go to performances of them than to a wonderful
concert of Chinese erhu music or to a club with an excellent DJ; she is likely,
if she finds herself teaching one of the waltzes, expecting ‘adherence’ to most
of the specific musical details in the score rather than to hope that these
pieces she dislikes will be brought to life with imaginative departures from
the score; when she explains her lack of regard for the pieces, she will
compare them unfavorably not with the best Beatles tune she remembers but with
the finest of Beethoven or Bach, rendering Chopin not quite deep enough for her
advanced sensibilities—not classical enough! If her attitude and those of other
musicians toward the music of the Dead White Guys were really open and
speculative, classical music culture would simply not continue as it does,
genre-segregated, hermetically sealed. It is true that it was probably more
fashionable to express unreserved reverence for certain composers when my
teacher David Sheinfeld, who was born in 1906, was young, than it is now. But,
as with other issues concerning current music, the changes are mostly
cosmetic—one wants to appear unseduced by the reputation of famous music; one
must seem a bit rebellious.
Fairly recently, I
attended a performance presented by a large Bay Area ensemble that plays
Balinese gamelan music. In the initial set a number of group members sat at, or
even on, bamboo instruments called jejog, and played, often making pointed eye
contact while rocking or gyrating, a performance demeanor associated by me with
American blues and pop music. I have attended enough gamelan performances from
various parts of Southeast Asia—not to mention having attended gamelan
performances in Bali—that I could momentarily adopt a bit of a superior
attitude about how “un-Balinese” it is to rock out like that—though the people
on stage know much more than I do
about Balinese music! But, after thinking a bit, I remembered similar
situations when I heard, and, in a few cases, participated in, performances of
Renaissance music that employed period instruments and were presumed to be
historically informed, yet a good deal of similar swaying and winking were in
evidence.
This starts to get at the
issue of anthropology and music in a slightly different guise. Ethnomusicologists
have argued that it’s often less crucial to an ethnic group exactly what music people play than how, under what circumstances, and with
what cultural assumptions. One feature of American music-making
today—undoubtedly adopted in part from a number of other sources—is a conscious
challenge to the artifice of formal performance. This particular breakage, if
you will, through the fourth wall takes place through movement that consciously
acknowledges the exertions and feelings that, in reality, often go along with
the playing. Movement and eye contact both say to the audience that the
musicians need and want to be openly in contact with one another; rather than
playing together seemingly by accident, they want all those present to perceive
that they work hard together and that they want to feel the phrases and rhythms
of the music sympathetically, yet without precise choreography. The musicians
want to achieve togetherness, but in the distinct perspectives associated with
their distinct tasks. And the place one is most likely to be pressured to eschew
all of this and to appear sternly controlled is in the world of classical
music. (Witness my initial response,
as a musician with classical training, to the gamelan group!)
This is as much a
challenge to myself as to others; recently I heard a fairly young violist play
Bach and some of his own music at an event. In his behavior onstage, he challenged
the conventions of modern classical-music performance by quite distinctly
pacing forward (and back) almost confrontationally, by looking out at the
audience in a manner virtually suggesting that he was staring the audience
down, and by ‘taking liberties’ with Bach that would normally be considered not
only unconventional, but a bit illogical. I found myself looking down at the
floor, especially as he moved forward or looked out. I told myself momentarily
that my embarrassment was for him, but I quickly realized that it was for
myself. I saw that I wanted to be passive and in some way untouched by his
presence, so I forced myself to stare back at him.
This musician was, I
think, genuinely manifesting the traits of American music-making, and my experience
of him tells, in turn, of the need for experiencing traditional music
personally. Some approaches would not have worked so well in the gamelan
performance, free improvisation in particular. While improvisation is not a
prerequisite to this realm of self-expression, the imposition of the present on
pre-existent material is a critical factor of it that classical pedagogy
usually tries to avoid. A jazz musician’s take on an old standard or a rocker’s
cover of a familiar song both exemplify how the transformation of older music
is the method by which younger generations of musicians keep it alive.
Theatergoers are not shocked when The
Merchant of Venice is set in the present day or with an all-black cast, or
even is significantly edited—but play Schumann too far above or below the
notated tempo and face pillory among ‘the experts.’
Why write about this?
Isn’t the best response to a problem in the artistic arena to make new art that
either transcends or bypasses the difficulty? Sensible enough, but in this
instance, I don’t believe it will happen without a formal discourse—and, in
fact, when people engaged to some extent in the canon take a stand on the
issues. There are several reasons for this. When both pedagogy and additional
practices that stem from that pedagogy are so heavily institutionalized, it is
very difficult to make space for alternative educational ideas. Specific
needling is required; we already have all manner of interesting musical
alternatives, but rather than displacing current pedagogy, those ideas become
increasingly segregated from it. Given how important education is, we need to
be concerned that our own anthropology with regard to music is one extremely
important component of our music-making. This is not because I regard our
society on the whole as very healthy, but because such an attempt at
self-denial is always a losing battle. Not because all music on the street is
coming from the ‘right place,’ but because music is intrinsically social and
also because listening to it should tell us as much as possible about the
people who are filling the air with it.
If writing on this
subject is an attempt at social engineering, consider an analogy; I heard a
pundit on the radio a couple of years ago express concern that the choice of
Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor reflected a set of gender and ethnic
imperatives: he stated that she should not be nominated simply because she is a Hispanic woman. The
speaker spoke as if he had no idea that, for many generations, only men of
European extraction were chosen, and that this surely must be a matter of gender and ethnic imperatives (he only
alluded to new imperatives however!). It was clear that the speaker views white
men as somehow a neutral category; i.e., if the president had chosen a white
man, this pundit would not question the significance of his gender or
ethnicity. Yet he implied that the choice of Sotomayor might reflect an attempt
to engineer social change. Similarly, to teach Mozart in the same old way is
seen by those who teach classical music as neutral, as the sensible thing, and
doing anything else is defined as eccentric and forced. A teacher who wants to
help a student to break through a cultural wall by approaching the work
unconventionally faces being accused of failing to prepare a young person
correctly for what she may face in the future—auditions, master classes,
further study, etc. Yet the things I’ve written here should clarify that the
decision to teach in the usual way is as ‘engineered’ as the conscious decision
to do something else.
It is for similar
reasons that I think we need to engineer a change in the values of our
pedagogy. Bach will not be banished, nor should he be; nor should Schubert or
Stravinsky or Ligeti—indeed I’m writing this because I’d like in some tiny way to
help save their music from oblivion! There is also great value, I think, to
teaching our students what we know about the original performance practices and
social contexts of the music we teach. But if we still love some of the
European classics, we have to stop desperately trying to protect them from the
powerful and sometimes diluting impact of our own time and culture; by facing
this challenge, we may paradoxically preserve something in them. A performance
of the Well-Tempered Clavier by a big
band or a synthesizer with drum sounds, or a Well-Tempered hip-hop mix doesn’t
have to render harpsichord performances of Bach superfluous. Recognizing the
possible viability of a performance of Brahms at something other than the
notated tempo, dynamics, phrasing, and even notes and rhythms doesn’t mean that
we have to give up on the specifics of the notated score either. But making
room for the possibility for especially young musicians not only to find
themselves in the music, but to insinuate themselves in it, to stamp it, to
leave it forever changed—is my only hope for their ever drawing nearer to it.
And if we don’t care whether or not most can
draw near, then we are no longer interested in real, vital musical experience,
because little classical-music pedagogy addresses most young people’s desire to
make music in the first place.
If we’d listen, Hamlet
could teach classical—and perhaps some non-classical—musicians and teachers how
to travel through many generations, frequently changing not only its clothes
and hairstyles, but also more intangible aspects of its multiple identities. It
is the young prince’s willingness to adapt, more than the presumed
“timelessness” of his play, that allows us still to see him today not as a
wizened 500-year-old but as a teenaged boy.
MSO
