Perpetual Grad Student

It didn't seem so then because of my doubts about getting a job in the field afterwards, but my time as a doctoral candidate in musicology at McGill University in Montreal was a very happy time in my life. It was a time of intellectual and aesthetic exploration unconstrained by economic factors. I had a full scholarship which paid for tuition and I was given employment in the form of teaching courses to non-music majors.

I did leave before writing a dissertation for other things, but I really enjoyed the seminars. For me education is about learning, not about certification. A number of years ago I was asked to give some pre-concert lectures in our local chamber series, one on Chopin and I realized that my many years at university had actually taught me almost nothing about Chopin except for brief discussion in a 19th century music history course. So I undertook to give myself a graduate seminar in Chopin based on ones I had at McGill on DuFay, Shostakovich and comic opera. It was great fun and I think the talk was successful. But the big reward was that I discovered I could give myself a course in anything I wanted.

Right now I am mostly through giving myself a course in Ludwig Wittgenstein. I first tried to read the Philosophical Investigations many years ago (fifty to be exact!) with no discernible success. Subsequently I have taken a couple of runs at the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus with even less success. But my complete lack of comprehension has actually led me to want to try harder and last year I read the whole of the Investigations coming away with an understanding of perhaps, oh, 4 or 5% of the text. Then I decided to give it a more serious try and read the Tractatus again in a couple of different translations and watched some videos on it by a Dutch professor. Ok, faint inklings. So I just finished Anscombe's introduction and I'm reading Hülster's introduction which is actually quite clear. Then I think I will read the Tractatus again. After that I will read the Routledge Guidebook to the Investigations and maybe try to write a summary. Oh, and I have also been reading the Monk biography of Wittgenstein which is pretty mind-boggling in itself.

My Wittgenstein shelf

And here is that biography:

What has this to do with music? Well, there is a potential connection. I've been chewing over my thoughts on the problem of musical structure and I think that Wittgenstein's picture theory about the representation of reality could actually be very helpful. I talked about the problem in this post: Musical "Structure" in which I made the point that music does not have "structure" which is a spatial concept, rather it has "flow," which is a temporal concept. In any case, once I have finished my Wittgenstein seminar I will return to the problem, with, I hope, more intellectual tools to bring to the table.

Some listening: Henri Dutilleux, The Shadows of Time.

My next seminar will be on the Mozart operas for which I will be reading Charles Osborne's book The Complete Operas of Mozart. I also have the marvelous box of DVDs of the complete productions at Salzburg in 2006:

How I Teach Music

This comes out of the article on AI and the arts. Reading the bit about how students copy their teachers I realized that this may be a common understanding--in the article they mention nothing else--but it is 180° away from how I always taught. Let me give some context first: I taught at the conservatory and university level for twenty years in four different institutions. My primary area was private instrumental instruction in classical guitar though I also, from time to time, taught music theory, chamber music and music appreciation.

For more context, my teachers, in order of importance*, were José Tomás, Oscar Ghiglia, Pepe Romero and, briefly in master classes, Manuel Barrueco and Leo Brouwer. They come from different traditions, of course. Tomás was a student of Segovia as was Ghiglia, Pepe Romero comes from the Tarrega school descending through Daniel Ortega and Pepe's father Caledonio. And Barrueco and Brouwer are really their own schools.

When I taught private students I never tried to instill the details of how I played, instead I taught the basic principles of technique and tried to encourage the development of musicality--not my musicality, but musicality in general. My goal was for each student to develop their own approach and competencies. I always recall the words of a wonderful voice teacher I had: she interrupted my singing of a Schubert lieder to say "now do something with it," i.e. shape the phrase in some way. That is always what I said to my students. Not "do this with the phrase" i.e. play it the way I would play it, but rather "find how you want to play the phrase."

Sometimes I would take an unusual approach. I had a student once, technically gifted but a bit stolid musically. He was playing the A minor Fugue by Bach. After he finished I just said: "play it again." And then again, a few more times. I could see he was puzzled and a bit frustrated by this as I wasn't saying anything. I was waiting for him to discover something in the music other than just the notes. And, after a while, it started to come. I didn't tell him how to play it and he certainly wasn't copying me as I didn't even play it for him. But he was learning--or rather, teaching himself. I was just providing the occasion.

Of course, one takes a different approach with each student. I once had a student ask me what I was going to teach him and I said "I have no idea!" I don't know what I should teach any particular student until I hear them play. I have to hear where they are technically and musically. What are their technical strengths and weaknesses? Where are they musically? And so on.

I don't think any of my students ended up sounding like me. I hope they sounded like themselves.

Here is a previous post on my book on guitar technique that includes a clip of my playing Recuerdos de la Alhambra:

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2017/08/my-book-on-guitar-technique.html

*UPDATE: I should hasten to add that I meant just their importance in my development, not their artistic importance, or importance in the guitar world!! 

Re a disappearing conservatory

Over at Slipped Disc Alexis Hauser, the artistic director of the McGill Symphony Orchestra weighs in with a fierce rebuttal to the closing of the McGill Conservatory. SSoM stands for "Schulich School of Music" at McGill.

I must express my shock about the foreseen imminent closing of the McGill Conservatory, to say nothing about how it was communicated.

I know many of the 66 Conservatory instructors, all of them immensely dedciated, one of them my wife with 55 (fifty-five!) students, nearly all of them resp. their parents have already indicated their definitive plan to continue their studies with her, with or without a Conservatory.

The motives in the letter are completely false, with no numbers given, no previous talks/warnings ahead, nothing but a fait accompli of the exiting Dean of SSoM. “With heavy heart”…I agree:, heart of stone! Its contents is in total contrast to the facts:

Regarding space:

As professor of the SSoM faculty I was always willing to share my studio with Conservatory professors, and so did several colleagues of mine. Besides, I cannot understand that the classes must take place in the Strathcona Music Building which indeed suffers with space, but everyone familiar with McGill’s total amount of buildings, rooms etc. in different parts of the city, cannot take the space claim seriously, certainly not with instruments which can be brought to the lesson by teacher and student ( = all Instruments except keyboards). With a bit of research, good will and endurance, this “problem” can be solved!!!!

Number of students:

I cannot speak for other instructors than my wife, but as mentioned, supportive letters of nearly all her students/parents have already poured in, protesting the decision, speechless over its short term (!!!) and assuring that they want to continue the lessons.

When some years ago, the existence of some Conservatoires within Quebec was threatened (except for Montréal and Québec City), not by a politician, but by a Conservatoire insider (!), I was one of many who wrote a protest note to the Minister of Culture, arguing that Quebec would seriously harm its position as the distinct province, ruining its exceptional cultural reputation within Canada. Fortunately, the crisis then was eventually solved positively.

Now we experience the same with the McGill Conservatory, a disastrous decision signed by two insiders, an exiting and an incoming Dean (none of them, by the way, with any closeness to performance!) with obviously no concern for the long term negative effects:

– Many Conservatory students moved on to professional music studies, won prizes and even performed in special programs in New York’s Carnegie Hall

– A large part would go into other professions, but because of their early-in-life musical education are/will/would be future enthusiastic concert goers, genuine melomanes.

– SSoM, by far the most important music faculty in Canada and well known internationally, is (has been to the brdt of my knowledge the only one with the inclusion of a Conservatory, an excellent method to secure a rich cultural life on all levels, on stage and in the auditorium (in Asia, Universities start even with music kindergarten!). It is/was again something that made Québec the one distinct province, far above all other provinces, the only one, I for one and several other international colleagues of mine, feel (felt) proud to work here and not anywhere else within Canada.

I dare say that no Dean with a direct background/link to Music Performance would have ever allowed that to happen (this I know as a fact and can elaborate on it). But a slimy letter like this, with false claims, fatal and not thought through in all consequences, tarnishes the good McGill name internationally of our beloved institution, ruins with one stroke what has been built over many years with enormous care and enthusiasm by dedicated teachers who have been made jobless from one day to the next, while their instigators are moving on (one of them simultaneously even receiving an award….!) “Strategic Planning”: eliminating an immensely important pedagogical institution with catastrophic consequences for so many instructors and frustrations/protests from numerous students/parents, all this with vague excuses saying nothing concretely.

In what world are we living??? Nothing can convince me that no other ways would be possible for a solution, acceptable for the teachers and the students/parents alike. Therefore, all facts, numbers, room options (and for Heavens’s sake including outside the Strathcona Music Building, in one or more of McGill’s countless buildings all over the town), should be brought forward and turned upside down for evidence and strategic thinking which deserve the name to secure the good name of McGill. What we have right now is a huge disgrace!

Hoping for a very constructive Townhall Meeting,

Sincerely

Alexis Hauser Artistic Director, McGill Symphony Orchestra Montréal

Here is the maestro conducting the McGill Symphony in the first movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Tchaikovsky:

What's Wrong with YouTube Music Education?

In another forum I would word that differently as simply "YouTube Music Education," but on the internet you have to have titles with punch--and actually that's one of the problems. But let's start with a neutral stance and just have a look at music education on YouTube.

Of course, this is not a formal kind of music education, but there is a surprising amount of educational music videos on YouTube. Let's look at some categories.

Composer's Videos

One prominent figure with a lot of clips is David Bruce who has his own website that describes his music as follows:

Often witty and always colourful, pulsing with earthy rhythms, Bruce's music has a directness rarely heard in contemporary music, but also contains an emotional core of striking intimacy and sensitivity.

I wonder who wrote that? In any case, let's look at a couple of clips:

That's actually very helpful, with a lot of good advice from someone with lots of experience. Here is an interesting clip that deals with the question of the relevance of contemporary music:

That is an answer to the composer Samuel Andreyev whose videos tend to be more analytical:

Music Appreciation

This is a much bigger category and one of the leading lights is Rick Beato who talks mainly about pop music but with some excursions into classical and jazz:

Here is a more typical one:

Learning Music

Here is an example of another category: basic videos about music for beginners.

A lot of this is a loss leader designed to encourage you to sign up for a more extended course. That was a 30 minute infomercial. This fellow does it in half the time:

This is a little more complex: how to compose first species, note-against-note, counterpoint:

The locus classicus of this is Johann Joseph Fux (1660 - 1741).

And I'm sure there are a zillion others, many devoted to learning specific instruments or specific solos in pop songs.

I have to confess that I usually avoid music education videos, but let me explain why, as it might not make sense for you. I find that usually I know what is being pointed out already. That's the curse of being over-educated in music. Also, especially with the more motoric presenters, I find the pseudo-certainty to be rather annoying. No, these are likely NOT the five greatest pop songs ever, or the greatest guitar solo, or the most brilliant concert ever played. I prefer to listen to people with just a bit of humility!

While straight music videos on YouTube are an astonishing boon to all music lovers, the ones with a lot of talking tend to waste time--at least for me. I would prefer an actual text that I can browse at my own speed.

Another thing that you might find annoying is the effort to pump up the enthusiasm that is undoubtedly related to the need for more clicks. Rick Beato always acts like whatever he is talking about is the Greatest Thing Ever. Even first year music students tend to be just a bit jaded.

But all that might not matter at all to you. For probably most people, YouTube videos contain a great wealth of very valuable knowledge about music--and with real sound examples.

Anyone have any thoughts on this, or more examples?

An Argument for Music Education

This article is from American Scientist:

 Musicians dedicate their lives to focused, disciplined, and repeated practice. Moreover, playing music offers an unlimited capacity for improvement: Musicians constantly strive for nuance, defter technique, and better synchrony with their ensembles. Articles implying a link between musicianship and brain plasticity started to appear: Violinists had enlarged motor brain areas dedicated to the hand; expert musicians made finer judgments about sounds that differed subtly in timing or pitch.

We suspected something more might be going on with music. Playing music could affect more than our ability to process melodies and rhythms; it might trigger much broader cognitive and sensory changes. With our colleagues Gabriella Musacchia, Erika Skoe, Patrick Wong, and Mikko Sams, our lab decided to investigate. We recruited a cohort of college students, half of whom had been avid musicians for several years and the other half were musically naive. We then measured electrophysiological responses to speech and music—brain waves that tell us the integrity of sound processing in the brain.

In a pair of papers published in 2007, we reported that the musicians had heightened responses to the subtle acoustic details of speech, suggesting that music training generalizes to language. Indeed, the musicians’ brains could encode acoustic details of Mandarin speech too subtle for most English speakers to detect, suggesting that music training might enable a listener to be a more precocious language learner.

There is a lot more there, so read the whole thing.

We quickly discovered that music training forges a remarkably similar brain signature across all ages. Musicians’ brains more quickly and accurately encode certain ingredients of speech sounds than do those of nonmusicians. Music training improves the brain’s ability to process speech sounds against a noisy background, such as the din of a busy restaurant. This neural resilience made sense, because musicians also had a superior ability to understand speech in a noisy environment. Moreover, they had stronger memory and attentional skills than did nonmusicians. Although there were developmental variations, with certain aspects of brain function being fine-tuned later in life than others, music training seemed to have a strikingly consistent effect across the lifespan.

Some of the most surprising results came from musicians in their sixties and seventies, who showed stronger memory, attention, and hearing abilities than did contemporaries who had never participated in music training. We also found direct evidence for differences in brain function between older musicians and nonmusicians. Neural responses to speech generally slow as we age. Not so in lifelong musicians: A 65-year-old musician’s neural responses are indistinguishable from those of a 25-year-old nonmusician. The responses of a 65-year-old who played music as a child but hadn’t touched an instrument in decades fell in the middle: faster than those of a peer who had never played music but slower than those of a lifelong musician. Musical experience early in life imparts lifelong neuroplasticity.

And I suspect that there are lot of other, not easily measurable, benefits. Take for example, the learning of the disciplines of practice, of delayed gratification through slow practice, of developing the skills to communicate mood and atmosphere to listeners and a whole bunch of other things that are hard to find words for. 

The Enemies of Music Education

 I haven't come up with any conspiracy theories lately, have I? No, I didn't think so. But I'm leaning in that direction. Here is the situation: from many discussions we have had here it seems clear that the best solution to the problems of classical music in terms of widening the prospective audience, comes down to improved music education. So why is it so difficult to improve music education, not for the gifted elite who are pretty well-served, but for the ordinary amateur player or listener?

Some things that we have observed is that the use of music examples in music notation have been nearly completely banned from all materials in general circulation. You find them in professional music journals and books for music professionals and in little niches like this blog, but in general publications they simply never appear. Music education programs in public schools have been a target for a long time as music has consistently been classified as inessential.

But I just found a new phenomenon: what is preventing the expansion of high quality music education online? Well Rich Beato has a rant that points out one of the major problems: you can't use any copyright material as an example without losing two thirds of your revenue or being simply banned. Let's let him explain:

That's pretty dire. In music courses at university we are constantly using musical examples to illustrate all manner of musical ideas. In a music course, if you were talking about the mixolydian mode you would hand out a sheet illustrating it, maybe write out the scale on the blackboard and possibly play a musical example--maybe even from a pop song like "She Said She Said." And you would never get into trouble with the copyright holder. Professors often assemble whole anthologies of materials with excerpts from books, papers and copyright scores--all approved by the copyright holders--to use in teaching. This has been the long-standing practice. But the situation now is that, on YouTube at least, copyrights are enforced with a vicious intensity as Rick illustrates.

So you are not going to be able to do any educating it that way. But how about what I do? I use embedded YouTube clips all the time, don't I? Yes, and with the exception of my own compositions and recordings, they are all posted by others so there is no revenue involved. Also, most of my own clips are not actually on YouTube at all. I have avoided setting up my own YouTube channel because, frankly, the revenues seem so miniscule as to be not worth the trouble.

Is there some kind of conspiracy to prevent the education of the populace in music? Maybe not, but there are certainly a nasty set of situations and incentives that seem to serve the same purpose. And one of the key ones is simple greed. As Rick says, I have no problem either with the pop stars making a lot of money. That's their thing. But I don't see why exceptions cannot be carved out, as they were traditionally done in academia, to at least allow people to teach this stuff using musical examples without the "bogus" consequences Rick mentions.

Here is where I would put a musical example. But not today!

Learning vs Certification

 The idea of certification never loomed very large in my consciousness when I was younger. The situation today seems to be quite different: Thanks to coronavirus and Zoom, we’re looking at the end stages of college as a commodity.

To a large extent, students have become customers. And professors should acknowledge their own role in getting us to that point, because the commodification of higher education is a direct byproduct of the transformation of college into the entrance examination for America’s middle class, something the professoriate has cheered on.

Sure, students are buying a complex bundle that’s rarely described as a “product.” But if you doubt colleges are selling, you need look only at the glossy marketing campaigns. And if you think they’re mostly selling learning, consider this thought experiment from economist Bryan Caplan: If you had to choose, would you rather have four years of Princeton University classes but no diploma, or the diploma, but no classes?

I have the answer to that: all of the highest levels of education that I received were diploma-free. These include ten months of intensive private instruction with José Tomás in Alicante, Spain, possibly the finest teacher anywhere in the world at that time. One month of master classes also with Tomás at the Instituto "Oscar Espla" in Alicante. Two one-month master classes in The Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta with Oscar Ghiglia, another great teacher whose full time job was at the Conservatory in Basle, Switzerland. One month master class with Pepe Romero at the "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Austria, probably the most respected music school in the world. The last one at least offered a diploma, but I never bothered going by the office to pick it up. And to the best of my knowledge, the others didn't even offer any kind of certification. You learned stuff, that was your one and only reward.

Another side effect of the coronavirus is that all that has been swept away, temporarily at least. Will it all come back? Perhaps. But the bigger question is, are the credentials offered by universities and colleges still worth the ever-increasing cost? The "customers" seem to be questioning that. Perhaps next they might question the actual value of what they are being offered other than the credential: by that I mean the actual content of what they are learning. I spent eight years in university classes, but that is certainly not where I learned to play guitar. That was about equal parts learned from private lessons and master classes and for the other half, my practice studio.

Perhaps history and economics are different. But how much history and economics are college students actually learning? As opposed to blinkered ideology, that is.

Let's have a little music. This is my recording of Las Abejas (The Bees) by Barrios:

A Plan For Listening: Week 2

Last week I got you started with a listening plan. Have a look at that post for the basic idea. Here is what I suggest for week 2.

Two more composers: this time from slightly later. Bach's dates are 1685 - 1750 and Mozart's from 1756 - 1791--yes, he died young. This week we are going to listen to some Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) --good heavens, that means that this year is his 250th birthday! and some Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828 ) --he died at only thirty-one. Both Beethoven and Schubert were mostly active in Vienna, Austria, as was Mozart for that matter. For the better part of two centuries this was the musical place to be. Beethoven was hugely famous and a big success with the upper classes. He took up where Mozart left off and essentially expanded and developed what is known as the Classical Style, music that is characterized by clarity, elegance and expressivity, though he took it to a more intense level. Here is a justly famous piano sonata by Beethoven, nicknamed the "Moonlight" Sonata. The first movement is typical of Beethoven in that it seems to grow from the most simple and fundamental musical essence. The pianist is Claudio Arrau.

I said Beethoven lent greater intensity to the style and an example is the furious finale to his String Quartet, op. 59 no. 3. This is the Borealis Quartet with a video presentation that helps you follow what each instrument is doing.

As that amounts to twenty-five minutes already, I am going to leave Beethoven for now and move on to Schubert. Unlike Beethoven he was almost completely unknown during his brief life. One of his most loved symphonies was not even performed until forty years after it was written and long after he was dead when Robert Schumann stumbled across it in a drawer at the symphony society. Between the ages of seventeen and thirty-one, when he died, Schubert wrote a thousand pieces of music, including six hundred songs. Let's listen to one of those songs. The poem is by Goethe and Schubert set it when he was only eighteen. Follow the link for the text and background. Here is a performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau who recorded every one of Schubert's songs. Lieder and opera can be difficult genres for people today to get into, because of the unfamiliar way they use the voice. You should read the poem before listening to the performance.

Schubert wrote piles of music in every genre, including the symphony. His "Unfinished" Symphony is in only two movements instead of four like most symphonies. But in those two movements he achieves a depth of expression we rarely hear. He once said to someone at a soirée who complained that his music was sad that "all music is sad!" This is the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Trevor Pinnock:

A Plan For Listening

Back when I started this blog a lot of it was devoted to music education in one form or another. I realize that in recent years I have wandered away from this kind of thing and perhaps I need to bring it back. A lot of readers might benefit from this kind of information.

So let's start with something basic: a listening plan. As I recently demonstrated to myself, you can get a lot done with a little planning. The exact opposite of a planned investigation of something is what we do on the Web: just surf around randomly. When you do that you tend to fall victim to the Web hucksters and bait and switchers. Have you noticed that YouTube recently has become dominated by them? Just about every clip offered up is deceptive to some extent. Top ten this, worst that, most embarrassing the other. It is like a kind of evil carnival of crap.

I think the solution is to not be a feckless wanderer, but to plan things out a bit. If you were going on a vacation you would most likely do a little planning: book a hotel, arrange a flight, decide where you would most like to visit. Only a few of us would just jump in the car and start driving (though that can be interesting on occasion).

So here is a basic plan for listening that should take you from acquaintance with the fundamental kinds of music with the emphasis on classical music, to an appreciation of some of the more challenging varieties. Let's organize it by weeks assuming that you can set aside one hour a week to just listen. Hey, one benefit is that it will get you into a peaceful, possibly meditative, environment for a short while at least. And if you are still trapped at home, at least it will give you something to do.

What you will need: a private place free from interruptions. That means no phone, no messages, no WhatsApp. Somewhere you can shut the door and just be by yourself. If you want a partner, that's fine as well. But listen, don't talk. Next, you need a decent sound system. These days that means either a good set of speakers for your computer or a good set of earbuds or headphones. Please don't try and do your listening with your built-in laptop or iPad speakers. For one thing, they really don't have any bass. The good news is I don't have to send you out to your local record store to buy anything because a) there is no local record store any more and b) everything is on YouTube. Yes, I know I was just dissing YouTube, but if you are searching for something in particular it is quite good--just not for random browsing.

Ok, now that you are all set, where do we start? Classical music is huge and I'm not going to restrict the listening to just classical. What do I mean by huge? One thousand years of notated music compositions by thousands of composers. That's a million pieces of music at least. But, thankfully, they are not all equally significant, great, important or delightful for the listener, however you want to think of it. You can listen to one fugue by Bach and get more out of it than listening to a hundred fugues by his contemporaries. So let's start week one with a mini-survey of a few pieces by some of the composers who really stand out from the crowd.

Week One: J. S. Bach. Well, yes, this obscure Saxon organist in the 18th century somehow manages to get himself at the top of every list of great composers. And it's not through adroit marketing as he never had any. He just writes really wonderful music. I'm going to pick three pieces to give you an over-view. He wrote a set of pieces in all the keys for keyboard, largely for the education of his sons. If you want to know about keys, here is a good Wikipedia article. But let's get right to the music. Here is the Prelude and Fugue in C major from book one (yes, he wrote two books) played by Friedrich Gulda:

Here is a piece for solo violin, the Siciliana from the Sonata No. 1 played by Hilary Hahn:

At the other end of the spectrum here is his Magnificat for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra with the Netherlands Bach Society conducted by Jos van Veldhoven.

The whole piece is twenty-eight minutes long, but you can listen to just the first two pieces which are a bit over five minutes total.

Next composer is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart whom I am sure you have heard of. Amadeus was an excellent film about him from the viewpoint of his rival, Salieri. Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria and became famous from age nine when he went on a two-year tour of Europe with his father and sister. There is likely no more famous child prodigy in any field than Mozart. He received his first opera commission, from La Scala in Milan, when he was only fourteen! He wrote lovely, graceful and dramatic music in every important genre from the piano sonata to the string quartet to the symphony and opera. Let's listen to a little divertimento he wrote when he was only sixteen. There are three movements, quick, slow, quick and the second one has some of the most beautiful harmonic clashes you will ever hear. Ton Koopman conducts the Amsterdam Baroque Orchesta.

Near the end of his life Mozart wrote three great symphonies in one summer. The last of them, Symphony No. 41 in C major, ends with a finale movement that I don't think anyone has ever topped for sheer transcendental joy. He combines several different themes in a way that seems to rise into heaven. The rumor is that the angels in heaven, when they wish to praise God, play Bach. But when they just want to have fun, they play Mozart. Sorry, Blogger won't embed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoJTJMv2iNY

That only comes to forty minutes of listening, but it is hard to find anything to follow that finale! So let's stop there for this week.

Education as Consumption

I just ran across the oddest idea. In a debate between two economists as to whether higher education should be free or not (as proposed by more than one presidential candidate in the US), one writes as follows:

Suppose you strongly desire to drastically increase the amount of education that people consume.  What should you do?

The obvious answer: Make education completely free of charge – and have the government pay the the entire cost.

I say this obvious answer is obviously right.  As I explain in The Case Against Education, I favor extreme educational austerity, because I think the education system is a waste of time and money.  Nevertheless, given the goal of drastically increasing educational attainment, completely shifting the cost burden from consumers to taxpayers is highly effective.

What word there is incomprehensible to me? "Consume"--the idea that education is something that people consume seems utterly wrong to me. Is this misunderstanding because the debaters are economists? That hardly seems likely. Even they can't conceive of education, vice "learning" as I understand it, as a pile of some material that students come to class and consume. But I don't even think that education is a service that universities provide to their student-clients, though it almost seems like that. No, education or learning is a process that students go through and it is one that is largely self-administered. Some of us are life-long students. If you decide you want to learn something then you set out on a journey of sorts. You don't consume a journey and a journey is not exactly a service. Mind you, other people can provide certain services to you that can aid your journey of learning.

Strongly desiring to increase the amount of education or learning that people consume is like pushing on a string. You have the causality all wrong! You can provide opportunities for those people who wish to learn such as professors, courses, programs, libraries and so on. But there is absolutely nothing you can do that can ensure that anyone actually learns something. The quantity of learning that occurs is really only a function of two things: the student's desire or propensity to learn something and their ability to do so. Government can have all the strong desires it wants, but that will have very little effect on how much learning takes place.

Does anyone else find this very peculiar?

Professionalization and Credentials

I am reading a monograph on Arnold Schoenberg by Malcolm MacDonald published by Oxford in the Master Musicians series. Right from the beginning there are some interesting paradoxes, which is not too surprising in the life of a very paradoxical man.

Arnold Schoenberg

Here is the odd thing: this hugely important figure in 20th century music never actually had any formal training as we would think of it today. He was musically gifted from an early age and learned to play the violin, viola and cello, but he never became a student at a music school. Yes, he did study with Alexander von Zemlinsky, whom he met through an amateur orchestral society, but Zemlinsky was a near-contemporary, only three years older than Schoenberg. It was through him that the young composer was exposed to professional musical training and standards, though at second hand. Zemlinsky had attended the Vienna Conservatory. Schoenberg absorbed music through his skin, it seems, not only from Zemlinsky, but from playing in amateur chamber groups and from composing for them and for whatever ensemble was handy. He also was friends with a wide range of artists and writers in fin-de-siècle Viennese society. Another early mentor was Oskar Adler who gave Schoenberg some early lessons in elementary harmony and ear-training. They were friends from boyhood, Adler being only three months older than Schoenberg.

Most musicians, even a hundred or more years ago, were the product of music schools. We might look at the examples of Stravinsky or Shostakovich. Stravinsky was a private student of Rimsky-Korsakov, but Shostakovich followed the formal course of studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In both cases, they were instructed by leading members of the musical establishment of the day. This was not true of Schoenberg who even though being born in Vienna, the heart of musical conservatism at the time, was always a contrarian.

And here is another odd thing, this iconoclastic figure was one of the few composers in the first half of the last century to write important textbooks on harmony and composition. On my shelves are copies of his Structural Functions of Harmony, Fundamentals of Musical Composition and Style and Idea. Though never sitting at the feet of any established pedagogue, he became one himself.

Today a hundred schools of music churn out a thousand credentialed musicians and composers. So let's not forget that the foundations of modern music were laid down by people obviously unqualified for the task as they had no credentials!

Here are Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, played by Di Wu:

Mute Inglorious Miltons

My title refers to the famous poem by Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which is perhaps the finest tribute to the ordinary, uncelebrated people that make up most of every society. There is a contemporary echo in the Wall Street Journal this weekend in the form of a column by Peggy Noonan: Kids, Don’t Become Success Robots. It is likely behind the paywall, but you might be able to access it by googling the title. Here is a quote:

I came away from Tennessee Tech thinking what I always think when I see such schools: We’re going to be OK.

And now, because you’d be lost without it, my advice to students still considering college in the year 2019. Avoid elite universities if you can; they’re too often indoctrination mills anyway. Aim at smaller, second-tier colleges, places of low-key harmony, religiously affiliated when possible—and get a real education. Every school has a library. Every library has books. That’s what you need.

You’ll be with a better class of people—harder-working, less cynical, more earnest. First-generation college students who are excited to be there and committed to study. Immigrants who feel grateful to be there. Home-schooled kids with self-possession and dignity, who see the dignity in others.

Do not network. Make friends. Learn about the lives of others.

She is responding to the Ivy League admissions scandal that came out this week where dozens of people were indicted for fraudulently obtaining access to elite universities by paying remarkably large bribes. This is all about networking and getting valuable credentials: it is NOT about becoming educated. As she says, a lot of elite universities are "indoctrination mills." The very valuable point she makes is that a lot of smaller, lesser-known schools are emphatically not indoctrination mills but places where you can still get a good education.

I was reading a column in Canada's National Post on the admissions fraud where the writer, the usually reliable Colby Cosh, writes:

This all reflects on Canada in a complicated way. We congratulate ourselves as Canadians on not paying much attention to where grown men and women attended university. It matters within some professions — law or medicine or journalism — but only temporarily, upon entry, even in those fields. We just don’t have socially dominant or “elite” institutions of higher education, and pride ourselves on not wanting them.

This is, at best, a half truth. Yes, Canadians are not nearly as obsessed with elite credentials as Americans seem to be, but the idea that Canada does not have elite institutions is hilariously wrong. Two come instantly to mind: Upper Canada College and McGill University. The reason Canada tries to ignore these schools is likely because we are embarrassed by things like wide differences in quality and prefer to not acknowledge them. Evidence? Well, you might just have a look at the differences between the classical studies program at McGill and at the University of Victoria, for example. For a musical example, consider that candidates for graduate degrees in performance at the University of Victoria never are failed in their graduating recitals while the failure rate at McGill while I was there was about 50%. No, it is not that McGill had less able players. It is that you are not going to get that degree unless you give a very good recital.

I've talked about how I am impressed that McGill, among other places, has not become an indoctrination mill, but continues to preserve high standards of academic quality. All we seem to read about in the mass media is about those places where the mob has taken over or where everything is doctrine and propaganda. But I suspect that a great deal of scholarship remains of admirable high quality.

For example, I just got a book this week that illustrates this. The publisher is the venerable Oxford University Press.

I miss the older royal blue covers with gold letters, but in every other aspect this is up to Oxford's high standards. Thanks, by the way, to a commentator who recommended this book a while back. It is a fine piece of scholarship, looking at the subgenre of the minor key symphony that began in the 1760s and extended to the great 40th Symphony of Mozart written in 1788. The author delves into the whole context of the minor key symphony in examples written not only by Haydn and Mozart, but also by lesser-known composers of the time like Wagenseil, Gassmann and Vanhal and discusses such intriguing features as the mediant tutti, the extent of contrapuntal treatment and their distinctive stormy energy. One index to the kind of discussion is the other authors quoted who include William Caplin, my theory professor at McGill and author of an excellent book on formal function, as well as Charles Rosen and others of their level. Read this to learn the deficiency of referring to this repertoire with the phrase stolen from literature: Sturm und Drang!

Not so mute, but certainly Miltonic.

Our envoi really has to be Haydn's first symphony in this subgenre, the Symphony No. 39 in G minor, composed in 1765.

Hard College Courses

I just ran across this fascinating description of a hard college course:

In the fall of 1941, as a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan, the poet W.H. Auden offered an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope, entitled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature.” We know little about the origins or trajectory of this remarkable course: how it was conceived, how it was taught, how it was received.

Seventy-one years after the course was taught, a faded, marked-up copy of Auden’s original one-page syllabus was unearthed in Michigan’s archives by the literary scholar Alan Jacobs. He then posted on the internet for all to see. Soon it was circulating widely, eliciting a surprising amount of commentary.

The course was enormous. It was as if Auden had put together an idiosyncratic and mainly literary version of a Great Books curriculum and compressed it into a single semester.

Beginning with the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, the course covered the Roman poet Horace, then St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, a bouquet of Shakespeare plays, Pascal, Racine, Blake, Goethe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, Eliot, and other certifiable greats, tossed in some then-classic scholarship about culture (including Ruth Benedict and C.S. Lewis), then washed it all down with the bubbly delights of nine opera libretti.

All in a single semester. Who could digest such a feast?

Sounds like a great course. But something like this would never appear in a college curriculum today, right? I'm not so sure. Let me describe a course I took when I was taking doctoral seminars in musicology at McGill. One was on the Shostakovich symphonies. This was in the 90s and scholarship on Shostakovich was still at an early stage. There were articles in the Musical Times covering the UK premieres of the symphonies but other than that, almost no secondary literature. If you look at the literature on Shostakovich, most of it dates from the last twenty years, not earlier. So the first thing we had to learn (and were quizzed on) was the Cyrillic alphabet because the edition of the complete works of Shostakovich in the library was a Soviet edition all in Russian. You had to know Cyrillic just to find the volume with the symphonies. Here you go:

My favorite letter is the "z", the one that looks like a squashed bug. Ok, so alphabet learned, each week we had to present a symphony in the seminar based on our original research. There are fifteen symphonies and about the same number of students in the class so we did one each. I had the Symphony No. 2. We had to find the score, listen to the symphony with the score and dig out any articles published on the symphony. There was a scarcity of musicological literature on Shostakovich at that time, the most interesting of which was by Richard Taruskin, a Russian specialist. He had written a paper a few years earlier, in 1991, titled "Public lies and unspeakable truth: interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony" (given at  a conference at Ohio State University in October 1991 and published in Shostakovich Studies CUP 1995).

Some preparatory assignments were to read that Taruskin paper and listen to the immediate symphonic predecessors: Mahler, Sibelius, Beethoven (Symphony No. 9) and so on. We were marked on our presentations, of course, but the main mark was based on a rarity in graduate school: a final exam. The professor argued that as we were mostly studying the symphonies directly and not secondary sources, we should strive to be as familiar with them as possible. So the final exam would be a listening test! He would play brief excerpts from the symphonies, fifteen of them, a total of around sixty movements, and we had to identify the symphony and movement. In order to do this we had to listen to the symphonies many, many times. We had to become familiar with all the themes from all the movements. Each movement might contain two, three or more contrasting themes. These are not short movements! One of the most famous, the Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad" is about an hour and twenty minutes in length. The first movement is almost half an hour! I can remember thinking to myself that "this could be very easy, or it could be very hard" depending on what excerpts he chose. He went on to add that we might be expected to identify the context of the theme: was it in the exposition or recapitulation? Agh! I got together with another student in the class and we managed to thoroughly depress one another. We were both pretty good students and were able to pick sections so sneakily that we could stump the other quite regularly. When we got to the actual exam we found that he had picked very obvious examples and were able to ace the test. That reminded me of a listening test in undergrad at the end of a course on 20th century music. That one had me worried a lot until the first example, the beginning of the Lyric Suite by Berg. Easy example!

But make no mistake, doing enough active and analytical listening to be able to walk into one of these listening tests with some confidence is not easy. Why don't you give it a try? Listen to all the Shostakovich symphonies enough to be able to identify all the themes from all the movements. I will wait right here...

A couple of envois for you. First, the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich:

Next, the Lyric Suite by Berg:

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the source of the quote. I also forgot to mention that three professors at the University of Oklahoma took up the challenge and recreated a version of the original Auden course. Every time they have offered it more and more students have clamored to take the course. Must be their irresistible advertising slogan: "This is the hardest course you will ever take!"

Teaching Music

My typical advice to a young aspiring musician is usually to find a good teacher. It certainly was a huge help to me. A couple of years after I decided to devote myself to the classical guitar I realized that there was no-one in my immediate surroundings that I could continue my studies with. I was commuting to Vancouver for weekly lessons and after several months my teacher suggested that I go to Spain and study with his teacher there. This was José Tomás in Alicante and I spent the better part of a year taking private lessons with him there. It made a huge difference in my playing and put me on a course to be a leading performer.

But let's dig into this a bit. The work I did with Tomás was critical in my reaching a fairly high level of accomplishment. But when I think back I can't remember a lot that he said. He would assign pieces for me to learn and would teach, basically, by playing passages from them. Occasionally he would play with me. But I don't recall him talking about many details. He would give a context and point a direction. When I think back I realize that other crucial elements were my commitment, the very fact that I would travel to Spain--I had never been out of Canada before, never been east of Saskatoon!--the fact that I would practice five hours a day, month after month, the sheer dedication to mastering the instrument. It also helped being part of a community of students, thirty or forty from all over the world, who were also dedicated to the instrument.

I remember a conversation with a flute-player who said that anyone who has mastered (no, it is never perfect mastery, of course) an instrument has at some point sat down and devoted all of their energies for a year or more to the single-minded pursuit of solving the technical problems. That is what I was doing in Spain and for a couple of years after. Most people are simply not going to go to that effort. Assuming you are, a good teacher can be a real help in, if nothing else, illustrating a standard or ideal. But he or she is not going to teach you how to play. You are going to do that yourself! I would sometimes perplex students by telling them that: "I can't teach you how to play guitar, only you can do that!"

Turning to composition, it is even more true. I was at a little cocktail party yesterday and fell into conversation with a visual artist, a women of fairly advanced years. She does a lot of teaching and so I casually mentioned that I don't think that you can teach how to compose music. Sure, you can teach skills and knowledge like orchestration (did you know, for example, that trombones can only glissando between certain notes?), notation, formal structures, genres, music history and theory. But all those things are peripheral. The one thing you cannot teach is how to compose a new piece of music. Schoenberg in his book on Fundamentals of Music Composition takes a pretty good stab at it, but what he is doing is showing how to imitate some features of the style of Beethoven. That may engage you in thinking "musically" but only insofar as it shares an aesthetic space with Viennese classicism. This is true of whatever compositional method you envision. There really isn't such a thing as a compositional "method." Every composer develops a particular methodology for particular pieces. It is the particularity that is important. Teaching is always about standard practices. You can teach certain things about, for example, guitar technique, or principles of orchestration, or sonata form.

But you cannot teach someone how to write sonata, symphony or quartet movements like Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven because they did not use a standard method. Outline any definition or description of sonata form and I can immediately point out multiple examples by those composers that fall completely outside that definition or description. Each composition is unique in important ways. Sure, some theorists and scholars can, long after the fact, point out some underlying principles that are often used, but that will get you very little way to being able to write a piece yourself in that style.

That blank piece of manuscript paper is terrifying to any composer because it represents the unknown. Every new composition, unless it is a mere rehash of older styles, is a journey into the unknown. It will involve the discovery or invention of some new idea or technique or principle. Or perhaps several of these. And each new idea will have consequences for the structure, the harmony, the rhythm. And you have to figure out what these consequences are and how to shape them into a structure.

I am writing all this because I just finished revising (meaning rewriting over half of it) my new piece Dark Dream for violin and guitar. The last thing I want to do is talk about what I actually did in the piece, so I am talking about teaching composition instead! No, I don't think you can teach anything important about composition. You can teach a lot about those peripherals, but that's all.

We are recording Dark Dream for violin and guitar and Chase for violin and piano in Toronto in early December and I will put up posts about that project as it happens.

I think I wrote Chase as a kind of encore for violin and piano. It was written very quickly for an upcoming concert of a couple of friends and later expanded. I had been listening to Hilary Hahn's lovely album of twenty-seven encores that she commissioned and I think this is what I would have written for her if I had been asked. Here is one of the pieces from the album, Mercy by Max Richter. It is rather more elegiac than most encores, but the album is full of unconventional encores.

Attending a Chamber Music Concert

Saturday evening I am taking some friends to see a chamber music concert with the Fine Arts Quartet. Here is the program:

Mozart: String Quartet No. 19

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 11

Debussy: String Quartet

I often go to these with a violinist friend, but on this occasion I am also taking another friend and her two children, aged eight and ten. So that will be a bit different. Usually I sit with a musician crony and we mutter to one another about how they are over-shaping the dynamics or  something. On one occasion three of us (myself, a violinist and a cellist) were listening to a bassoon trio play a piece that was not on the printed program, nor had they announced it. At the end we all looked at one another and said in unison: "Hummel!" You know, I think it actually was Hummel.

But at least three of the attendees on Saturday will be both less familiar with the repertoire and certainly a lot less catty! So I was thinking, what might I say to my friend and her kids about the music? While certainly cultured, I don't think she is a chamber music aficionado as when I said that the Fine Arts Quartet was playing she said, "oh, good, a fine arts quartet." No, I replied, the Fine Arts Quartet. Which sounds unutterably pompous, I know. But hey, I worked hard to get this pompous.

So, ok, time to put my musicology, or at least my teacher, hat on. Listening to this music is like taking a journey--not to a strange and unfamiliar land, but to a strange and unfamiliar mind and time. It is to enter into the inner person of someone who lived in a different place and time. Let's start with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who lived in the 18th century. He was one of the most unusual people who ever lived. Every time you hear something about a really gifted child today, someone who astonishes us with their ability, they are really following the example of Mozart. He is the first famous child prodigy in music history. We may marvel at a young singer who can sing opera arias at age twelve, but by age twelve, Mozart was already famous throughout Europe and had already written two operas! Oh yes, and many, many symphonies, piano sonatas and so on. He had to hurry as he was going to die quite young, at thirty-five. He started composing at five years old. He lived in Austria, first in Salzburg, a not very big town about the size of our town, where he worked for the Archbishop, a very powerful fellow. Then he moved to Vienna. He also traveled a lot with his father, to Germany, England, France and Italy where he was commissioned to write an opera for the big theater in Milan, La Scala. The string quartet we are going to hear, so famous it has a nickname, the "Dissonant" Quartet, was written when he was just short of his twenty-ninth birthday. It is called "dissonant" (meaning with notes that clash in the harmony) because of its very adventurous harmonies in the slow introduction. It is so unusual that when he sent it to an Italian publisher they wrote back and asked him to fix the "misprints"! Here is the Hagen Quartet, playing in Salzburg.

We go to an even stranger place with the second piece, the quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich. He lived his entire life in what was the Soviet Union, now Russia. Russia is a country with a very strong creative tradition in music, just think of composers like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, but times were very difficult between the Revolution of 1917 and 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and became Russia once more. Much of Shostakovich's life was under the horrific rule of Joseph Stalin who persecuted, starved and executed millions upon millions of his own people. As music was so important to the Russian people, Stalin took a particular interest in the career of Shostakovich, who was the leading Soviet composer. Shostakovich's music was condemned on a couple of occasions which meant no performances and no commissions for quite a while. He lived in constant fear of being shipped off to a Siberian concentration camp. He had lost in-laws in that way and even had friends in the theatre world simply executed. For years he kept a packed suitcase by the door in case the secret police came for him in the middle of the night. His Quartet No. 11 was written in January 1966 which  puts it between two of the best albums from the Beatles: Rubber Soul and Revolver. What we hear in the string quartet is the experience of fear and paranoia somehow transcended through music and Shostakovich's unique sardonic humor. And we experience this from the inside! This is the Allegri Quartet.

The music of Claude Debussy is quite different. While Mozart is all elegance and charm and clarity and Shostakovich is all dark, threatening moods, Debussy's music is diaphanous (meaning delicate, airy, like translucent fabric), lustrous (meaning filled with light) and colorful. He uses the instruments to create landscapes of beauty. Debussy was French and lived in a world of aesthetic refinement when Paris was the artistic center of the world towards the end of the 19th century. His main struggle in life was against the ingrown conservatism of the French musical establishment, typified by the Conservatoire where students had to follow a formidably academic course of instruction. Once past that hurdle (he spend eleven years at the Conservatoire) he blossomed into a very fine composer, much loved by audiences ever since. This is the Esmé Quartet from South Korea playing in Norway.

Reflections on Education

I think I posted this clip by Jordan Peterson a while back. It is really short, just four minutes, so have a look. Just ignore the little bit towards the beginning where they are trying to decide where his "rubric for essay writing" was posted. He gets right to the basic issue, which is, how to teach people to think:

I was reflecting on my fairly long (about thirty years) career teaching music and I realized that what I typically did was something quite similar to what he is talking about. Most of my time was spent giving individual instrumental instruction--guitar lessons in other words. I remember once being asked by a fairly bright student what it was I taught exactly. My answer "whatever you need." He found that a bit unsatisfying! But it was quite correct. Every time a student walked in the door I was presented with a variation on a single problem: what does this student need? For many it was simple technical instruction: how to hold the guitar, the best hand position, how the fingers should approach the strings, how to make a good tone, how to make different tones, and so on. Slurs, arpeggios and scales. But immediately following these issues were the musical ones: how to make a phrase, how to balance a chord, how to handle different tempos and how to do accelerandi and ritardandi. Then there is repertoire which brings with it questions of style and performance practice. Really, there are an almost infinite number of things to know and to know how to do. But each lesson was simply a response to what the student needed at the time. And yes, extremely labor intensive since the instrumental instruction model in music involves one professor and one student in a small room for one hour each week.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Peterson is talking about, I think. Sure, there are differences. For one thing, I rarely encountered a performance in the studio where there was nothing to say except, "A, good job." Every lesson was basically a taking apart of the performance and examination of the details with an eye to correcting faults and improving things. Apparently, while we still do this in music lessons, we, that is, universities (and before them public schools) have given up entirely on the idea of teaching people how to write. Peterson subtly implies that this might be a kind of conspiracy to rob people of the ability to think critically. He might be right. Or, on the other hand, maybe it is just incompetence and laziness.

I think that I have some writing skills. Where did I get them? Not from a classroom, at least, not that I recall. When I arrived at school for Grade One (there was no kindergarten where we lived) I already knew how to read. I don't recall how I learned, but I guess it was my parents. The basic idea of how to write I just picked up from reading. About the only thing I remember from all those years of English classes was in Grade Five or Six, I wrote a little thing in which I was using quotation marks to show dialogue and the teacher said something about how I was doing it wrong.

When I got to university there was an entrance exam where you had to sit in a big room and write an essay for an hour. Those who were bad were assigned to a remedial course. I passed and was put into an English literature class. They did assign a research essay, so I guess that was teaching us how to write. But I honestly don't recall the critiques I received.

I think I taught myself how to write by writing letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail when I lived in Canada and was under-employed for a year or so. You had to come in under 800 words, the subject had to be topical and you had to make an interesting point. I got so I could get about 40 to 50% accepted.

And, of course, writing this blog is another extended course in how to write.

Jordan Peterson's grim conclusion about universities is that, since they charge you a great deal of money and fail to actually teach you the most important things, like how to write, they are really instances of "indentured servitude" with students graduating $100,000 in debt. He doesn't use that phrase in this video, but it is in another one.

In the music department, I suppose we are more honest and do actually try to teach people how to play, performance majors at least. We just kind of gloss over that part where, when you go to the audition, there are two hundred other people auditioning for the same position.

After all that blather we really need an envoi. I just watched the new video, shot in the Louvre, by Beyoncé and Jay-Z called "Apeshit," but it is so astonishingly pretentious and narcissistic and so uninteresting musically that I think we should just ignore it. Instead let's have something by a really first rate musician. Mozart is the only composer I know of who wrote virtuoso concertos for himself to play on two different instruments, the piano and the violin. That guy was just way too talented. This is Ayako Uehara accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Fabio Luisi playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No 22 E flat major K 482:

Only 580 views on YouTube!

The Real Recompense

I was standing in the doorway to my office the other day when a guitarist, passing by, stopped to greet me. It took me a minute to remember his name, Antonio. He teaches guitar at the local music school and a few years ago he came to see me for two or three lessons because he was having trouble with his right hand. Due to using the muscles in an odd way, he had developed severe tension in his hand to the point that it was nearly immobile. I worked with him on rebuilding his right hand technique and he seemed to be improving. I hadn't seen him in years so I asked him how his hand was. He thanked me effusively and said I had saved his guitar-playing! We talked a bit about what he was playing these days (Villa-Lobos etudes and preludes). He said again, "gracias, maestro!" and took his leave. "Maestro" in the context he used it, means "master."

A few years ago I helped out two other professional guitarists with similar problems and they too ended up rebuilding their technique and credit me with saving their ability to play. It is often the very enthusiasm and dedication to the instrument that gets musicians in trouble because they practice even though their body is trying to tell them something is wrong. I remember a video of Isaac Stern one time saying that every hour you practice incorrectly takes a couple of hours of practicing correctly to fix. Sad, but true.

I'm not sure exactly how I figured out guitar technique, but starting on the electric bass guitar might have had some influence. I was fifteen or sixteen when I finally got interested in music. I wanted to play the drums but my mother, after visiting the local music shop, came home and said "we can't afford to rent drums for you, they cost $10 a month!" Let me hasten to say that this was 1965 and my mother got paid about $250 a month. Our mortgage was $80 a month. Long time ago! You could rent a bass guitar for only $4 a month so that's what I started on. As my mother said "the bass guitar is also in the rhythm section!" She was a fiddler, by the way. So, apart from some abortive piano lessons when I was eleven, the bass guitar was my first instrument. Four very big heavy strings that you play with your right hand index and middle fingers. Pretty demanding for your left hand as well--you need lots of muscle.

Soon after I took up the six-string guitar as well and a few years later switched to classical guitar. I have a photo of myself taken in 1973 just before I went to Spain to study with Maestro José Tomás, so this is me before high quality instruction:

I'm playing a cheap student guitar, but the interesting thing is my hand position. For both hands it is quite good, no over-extension or obvious tension. There are a host of things that go into being a good player, but one of them is some basic physical aptitude, what my mother called "touch." She was a naturally good fiddle player and she used to say that so-and-so had a good "touch" on the instrument. That's a quality of string players and, I guess, keyboard players as well. I suspect it is something you really can't teach. Another element that is important is your sense of timbre. How aware are you of the exact kind of tone color you are producing? I have had students that were good in every other aspect, but they just could not seem to make a good sound. Another element is your sensitivity to the phrase. This is a purely musical element, of course. How you feel and direct the flow of a phrase comes directly from how you feel the music. On a higher level it is how you handle the structural flow of the piece.

With great musicians all the elements are present and reinforce one another. With pretty good musicians they have a lot of them and have to work on whatever ones they are weak on. So being able to analyze your own strengths and weaknesses is a crucial skill because you really can't count on anyone else, even a master teacher, to do it for you. And that's about all I have to say on the matter!

Here, by way of envoi, is Carora - vals venezolano by Antonio Lauro in my recording:

Training is Expensive

A friend of mine who happens to be a seasoned orchestral string player and I attended a concert by our local youth orchestra on Sunday. The concert began with two isolated movements from different Mozart symphonies and continued with a movement from a Haydn symphony. At that point we left. Yes, we were horrible people, not giving these young musicians and their conductor a chance. But, believe me, the aesthetic pain was considerable!

So we should talk about how young musicians become capable performers. The short answer is: a great deal of painstaking work. This is also expensive work because students need a great deal of supervision by highly-capable teachers. I recently ran across a video clip that is a very good articulation of how this works. Over to Jordan Peterson, who explains how to teach people how to think:

As he says, marking a good essay is easy: check, A. Marking a bad essay is unbelievably difficult because everything is wrong. Well, that's the way it is with young music students. With very, very, very few exceptions everything they do is wrong: they hold the instrument incorrectly, they don't play in tune, their rhythms are shaky or soggy or just wrong, they miscount the rests, they play with an unpleasant grating tone, sometimes they play the wrong notes. What every one of the players in a youth orchestra needs is intensive private instruction from highly-capable teachers who have spent many years being trained themselves.

Some youth orchestras have gotten this kind of attention and one example is likely the students that have come out of El Systema in Venezuela and other places. I am not sure of the details of how they managed it--I suspect that if you have some pretty good devoted teachers and a very broad intake of thousands and thousands of candidates you can likely filter them down to a core of pretty darn good student players.

But the problem with our youth orchestra is that they are just getting started and I suspect that there is little quality private instruction available. There is probably limited rehearsal time as well. A very important intermediate step between weekly private lessons and orchestral performance is the sectional rehearsal where, for example, all the first violins get together and rehearse their part, ironing out differences in tuning and bowing so that they come together as a group. Every section in the orchestra needs this same attention and the leader of each section, the concertmaster in the case of the first violins and the principal players in each section needs to have the capacity and authority to lead and rehearse the section.

When we get to the full rehearsal it is the concertmaster and the conductor who need to be unambiguously in charge. The problem is that hiring capable concertmasters and conductors is very expensive and this youth orchestra, at least, simply can't afford it. My friend rather unkindly described our local conductor as someone who does not actually conduct, but rather does a kind of "interpretive dance" expressing what he feels about the rhythms. Amusing to watch, but not very helpful to the players.

My friend and I attended the first concert by this youth orchestra a few months ago, in the fall. Unfortunately they have not improved to any great extent. What they need to do is rigorous, disciplined work and they have to remove the less-capable players and seek out better ones to replace them. Or they can continue on as they have, which is more likely. I'm sure they will receive support from the local community.

As we were leaving the concert I said to my friend, that, you know, we really cannot beef about the performance because we, who are capable of helping them improve, are not actually doing so. We should probably be making a contribution. Unfortunately, there are turf issues here. The conductor, who has been growing this orchestra from scratch, likely does not want to hear our critique, nor accept our assistance because the first thing we would do is demand a much higher commitment to precision and accuracy as the sine qua non of any real progress.

I am reminded of a student I had when I taught at university who had come to us after a couple of years at a community college: he was an intelligent and motivated student, but, alas, he had a very sloppy technique that had not been well grounded. So for the first four months he studied with me I insisted he do nothing but play simple scales, slurs and arpeggios very slowly and only work on the very simplest of pieces. He had to take several steps back to go forward. This is what needs to be done with the youth orchestra. They need to understand that, no they really can't play a Mozart symphony. Not yet. They need to spend months or years learning how to play the very basic components that down the road would make up the elements of a Mozart symphony. If you can't play four notes in tune then you certainly should not be trying to play one hundred notes.

Unfortunately, every hour you spend playing with bad technique will take several hours to undo. There is no getting around this very hard truth. I would like to help the orchestra, but somehow, I suspect they would not welcome my help.

But, if you work hard for perhaps thirty years with a great deal of support from the surrounding society, you can get to some amazing results. As proof, here is a performance from the 2007 Proms by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela conducted by the charismatic Gustavo Dudamel in a remarkable performance of the Symphony No. 10 by Shostakovich:

Uncommon Sense

So often on the Internet one starts to read something that appears promising only to realize partway through that it is the same old, same old with a clickbaitey title. How rare it is to read something that gets better and better and ends with something actually worth reading. I offer for your consideration this surprisingly interesting article from The Spectator: Class prejudice is keeping talented children out of classical music. It begins well enough:

Musicians have always had an uncertain social status in England, the traditional reactions varying from amused condescension to mild repulsion. The former was the old class-based judgment on men who had chosen to take up a profession which at best was associated with society women and at worst seemed menial; the latter directed towards brass players from rough backgrounds whose lips juggled pint pots with mouthpieces and not much else. The most respectable practitioners were probably organists, often referred to as ‘funny little men’, but taken seriously. As evidence of the class-based comment, this was Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son towards the end of the 18th century: ‘If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light…Few things would mortify me more, than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.’

But the real gem is the last paragraph which describes classical musicians rather better than the usual stereotypes and clichés:

Professional musicians remain a difficult body of people to classify. They are not posh; they are not detectably from really poor backgrounds; they have known how to work drillingly hard at one thing, sometimes against the advice of their families; they do not expect to earn a fortune but fight tooth and nail for what they do think they are worth. They tend to be plain and undemonstrative, difficult to gauge though easy to get on with, which may explain why they have proved easy targets for people to pin their petty theories on to. What I keep coming back to is the number of talented children, rich and poor, who have been denied the opportunity to develop as musicians, because their talent one way or another has not been taken seriously.

To someone who has spent most of his life in their company, that seems a fair description.

Let's listen to some of these plain and undemonstrative, but deeply capable people. This is Julia Fischer playing the Violin Concerto No. 2 by Bohuslav Martinů with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by David Zinman:

Shoehorning it in

I've been so critical of the folks over at Musicology Now that I lean towards trying to find something nice to say. I mean, there have to be some good posts, right? I did just run across an interesting one: Building a Better Band-Aid by Gwynne Brown. It is about the difficulties of teaching a music history survey course. Of course, survey courses come in various guises. I remember one professor bemoaning the ever-increasing difficulty of his survey course--20th Century Music--because when he started teaching it, in the mid-70s, the century was a whole lot shorter. Every year, it got longer (needless to say, this was a while back).

Now, what with the demands that music survey courses be "de-centered" away from purely classical repertoire so as to include jazz, world music and popular music, the task has suddenly become much harder:

I was daunted by the logistical challenge, but also excited to teach a class that combined virtually all of my favorite things. I divided the semester into thirds. The first, on art music after The Rite of Spring, concluded the prior two semesters’ overview of classical music history. The second unit attempted a concise overview of the “official version of jazz history” so ably identified and fileted by Scott DeVeaux in “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography” (which I assigned).[2] The third provided a swift introduction to the field of ethnomusicology, followed by a taste of Shona mbira music and South Indian vocal music, chosen largely because these were of particular interest to me. 

Since the catalog had promised that the course would include popular music, I shoehorned it in. There was obviously no point trying to survey every major pop style in three class meetings, so instead I explained that our goal was to sample some of the different methodological approaches in pop music scholarship. I assigned three readings that ranged widely both in their authors’ scholarly perspectives and in the music under consideration. We had particularly lively and worthwhile discussions of Jeffrey Magee’s revelatory song biography of “Blue Skies” and Peter Mercer-Taylor’s dazzling and eccentric analysis of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People.[3]

On the whole, that first semester went smoothly, but by the end it was clear to us all that we had plowed through jazz history, pop music scholarship, and two non-Western musical traditions at an almost comically accelerated pace. The students were openly critical of the disproportionately lavish amount of time the music history sequence had bestowed on Western classical music. My new third course, designed to improve the inclusiveness and diversity of our music history curriculum, had rendered unmistakable that curriculum’s ongoing imbalance—not to mention its overwhelming whiteness.

Well, yes, overwhelming whiteness is certainly going to seem a problem. It is not, however, a problem exclusive to classical music. I watched a really interesting history of mathematics the other day and, guess what, every single figure mentioned, from Pythagoras to Euclid to Descartes to Leibniz to Gauss to Gödel was, you guessed it, not only white, but male. (I have to qualify this just a tad: Arabic and Hindu mathematicians were mentioned, largely because that is where our number notation comes from.) I can hardly wait until math survey courses start figuring out how to change their curricula for the sake of diversity and inclusion.

The solution musicologists seem to be drifting towards is to make it all about them and their methodology:

When I abandoned comprehensive stylistic survey as a realistic goal, I discovered the advantages of calling my students’ attention to the diverse values, goals, and tools that musicologists bring to their work on the music they care about. I have made this “meta” perspective a unifying theme for the semester. Major styles, canonic repertoire and recordings, and important individuals and groups remain important, as one would expect in a typical music history survey. However, when students consider questions like “What kind of evidence does the author use?” and “What relevant topics does this scholar leave out?” they gain additional knowledge: that music history is constructed, brick by brick, by individuals with particular priorities, strengths, and limitations.

The great advantage here is that because you are prioritizing the methods and interests of current musicologists, who are a pretty diverse bunch, you can mostly ignore the embarrassing fact that the great classical repertoire of Western music is, like the history of mathematics, almost exclusively the creation of white men.

So far as I can see, the students who come out of this course are going to know a bit more about jazz, world music and popular music, and a whole lot less about classical music. I guess that's ok with them.

When I took a music history survey course myself as an undergraduate, the professor took all of the fall term to get to Monteverdi. In January she began with the post-Monteverdi Baroque and she had to tack on an extra class at the end to cover the 20th century: Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky all jammed into one class! And, of course, she didn't even mention jazz, world music or popular music. That you can explore on your own. So for our envoi today, we will listen to the Magnificat by Claudio Monteverdi: