Tuesday, October 30, 2018

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.


6 comments:

  1. This might be a slightly provocative question but I assure you I ask it quite innocently. A great many people seem to study composition at college/university -- what do they learn, is it useful?

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  2. Actually I think it was my post that was provocative! Your question is right on point, of course. You go to university and study composition for a host of reasons. You need to learn all those peripheral things in order to position yourself so if you stumble across a musical idea you will know what to do with it. You also need to meet other composers and performers who might play your music. You need to make connections so you can find out about competitions, grants and so on. You need to be somewhere where you can get your music performed. But will your composition teacher actually teach you how to compose? Doubtful. Nevertheless, this is where you likely need to be. It is a bit like fishing. You can fish anywhere, but you will catch more if you choose carefully where to drop your line. On the other hand, it might be the case that the best thing for you to do, perhaps later on, is to completely isolate yourself so that you will be most receptive to those musical ideas floating around the universe.

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  3. my own impression over twenty years of being a hobbyist guitarist and composers (although I've got exactly one work published officially), is that there's a distinction that can be made about teaching composition and teaching a rounded and grounded musical mastery. Leonard B. Meyer had a comment in one of his books about how so much of music history and musicology was focused on innovation and lineages of innovation it overlooked the realm of choice. Somebody has to make decisions and makes them within constraints. In the sense that nobody can make your decisions for you no one can teach you how to compose anything because that's all a question of, or matter of, what you actually decide to do. But a thorough musical education and training can give you a clearer sense of what KINDS of decisions you get to make.

    My idea of a fun compositional project is writing fugues with triple counterpoint for solo guitar. If I hadn't studied counterpoint, guitar, or voice I couldn't have taken up a project of writing guitar fugues or writing about them. Not that I have done any of that in months ... but the idea is that education can help us recognize what kinds of musical decisions we can make and think about even if, as a saying has it, we can't be taught how to compose music. I'm glad, as I've gotten older, that nearly all of my music education came from singers, organists, conductors, clarinetists and just a few guitarists ... and in a way one of the best things my guitar teacher did was partly through what she didn't do, which is repeat lines I've heard from guitarists over the years who say that sonatas and fugues are just not suited to the guitar. My teacher said what she was aiming to do for me as a guitarist was to teach me enough so that I could continue to teach myself. I feel she did a good job of that.

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  4. Some very good points, Wenatchee. Music education is a double-edged sword. It gives you a whole musical tradition, well-rounded as you say, a context, a host of constraints and techniques. But at some point, the aspiring composer simply has to do something or come up with something that is not part of the tradition, context and techniques. That's the bit you can't really teach.

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  5. I see. All very interesting, thanks. This post gave me the urge to try some more composing last night. And it seems to me, as a mere hobbyist, that I start out with the infinite -- endless improvisation, essentially, either on the guitar or in my head -- then I gradually start to narrow it, to give it form, and an idea emerges. After that the whole process is pretty fast (my understanding of harmony, style, form etc., such that it is, serves to fill in much of the piece). It is annoying how, when discussing this subject, it's impossible to express oneself in anything but the most abstract terms, though it proves your point.

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  6. Talking about composition is like holding water in your hand: it just flows away. Of course, I tend to have rather an Asian view of aesthetics. We can talk about the particulars of various compositions, like the bassoon solo that opens the Rite, or the shocking snap pizzicati and glissandi in a Bartók quartet or the simplicity of an off-set solitary beat that begins Steve Reich's Drumming. Each of these brilliant ideas came from nowhere...

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