Make Their Own Kind of Music? Part 3

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 20^th- and early 21^st 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