jwilzewske: Eph Ehly: Averted Gaze, Fiction, and Pedagogical Method

F oremost, the conductor must be able to communicate and inspire.”
— Eph Ehly, 1991.

CMT: I have recently been reading Eph Ehly’s memoir ‘Hogey’s Journey’. Dr. Ehly is Professor Emeritus at the Conservatory of Music, University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he taught for twenty-seven years. Dr. Ehly’s awards for outstanding musicianship include the Luther Spade Choral Director of the Year Award. He has studied and conducted in the Soviet Union, Poland, Germany, England Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Brazil. More than ninety doctoral and one hundred master’s students graduated under his supervision. He has conducted more than 600 Festival ensembles, and he guest-conducts in Carnegie Hall several times each year. He has conducted over 80 all-state choirs, and over 500 festival ensembles. And he studied with Jean Berger, Julius Hereford, Warner Imig, Louis Nicholas, Lynn Whitten and Vincent Persichetti, among others.

DSM: Ehly is a firm supporter of the solo voice, but this Hogey ‘novel’ is something of a departure from Ehly’s earlier emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual voice within an ensemble. This book is about family—family as a social unit; family as a context for discovering the meaning of ‘community’ and ‘self’; family as a context for expression. Artistic expression, that is, with each minuscule act construed as a work of art worthy of attentiveness. The life well-lived and worth living is not only an ‘examined’ life, according to Ehly. It is life lived deliberately, with aforethought. Ordinary life, lived as though the entirety of it were on-stage. You must prepare yourself for each downbeat.

CMT: Expressiveness isn’t always about ‘disclosure’, of course. There are masking and cloaking and sublimating aspects, as Ellen Harris addresses in her book on Handel’s Chamber Cantatas. And, likewise, there are passages of Ehly’s memoir where he is very circumspect—where discretion is nine-tenths of valor.

DSM: There’s a story about George Szell departing a pub after a happy-hour with Cleveland Orchestra members. “See you on the downbeat,” one of the players called out to him. Szell replied, “No, see you on the preparation!”

CMT: The essence of good conducting—and, in fact, the essence of effective synergy between members of a good chamber ensemble without a conductor—is to signal the speed and manner of the next notes you are going to play or sing. The downbeat is too late for cognitive processing and kinesthetic action. The key is the preparation, the anticipation—some tens to hundreds of milliseconds before the downbeat. The players or singers need to know what kind of energy they should use to begin a phrase. They need to accurately predict where the arc and emphasis of that phrase will be, and what resolution to it they will have to provide at its end. You have to have the mental image of that in your head at least one beat in advance, really. Ehly is, in ‘Hogey’s Journey’, asserting that that principle applies not only to musicianship but also to any life well-lived.

DSM: Ah, but orchestra members don’t watch a conductor’s face much. Not nearly as much as vocal ensembles do. And small ensembles’ members are able to catch only parts of the facial expressions of their colleagues in their peripheral vision, due to the practical realities of chair and music stand positions. So passionate facial expressions in general can’t have much impact in an orchestral or instrumental chamber ensemble. Concise and meaningful head and arm movements are essential.

CMT: So there’s no real difference between a good instrumental downbeat and a good vocal downbeat then?

DSM: No. There are idiosyncrasies that ‘work’ for some conductors, of course. And idiosyncratic signals that develop overtime in a chamber ensemble, too. But I think there’s no fundamental difference between the quality of a good instrumental downbeat and a good vocal downbeat.

CMT: But, for a choir, you coach and rehearse your singers to produce ritards and accelerandos at particular places in the music. Fermatas, too. By contrast, if you’re going to get a ritard or accelerando, you’re going to have to conduct it—or signal it to other members of your ensemble if you’re conductor-less.

DSM: Singers, who generally have scores that display all the vocal parts, tend not to scrupulously count measures of rests. They learn the music and come to know precisely when their next attack will be. But instrumental players see only their own parts, and they absolutely have to count bars, unless they have the entire piece memorized.

T o me, a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”
— Helen Keller, quoted in Ehly, Hogey’s Journey, p. 4

CMT: Reading this memoir and taking note of the epigrams that he chooses to decorate it, we may think that Ehly is not looking for subtlety. He’s a pious person, but he’s also, I would say, a radical hedonist. No, really! He goes for dramatic range of expression; he abhors timidity. That’s fine. But I wonder about his interpretations of compositions that have all sorts of pent-up repression in them, or that have a deliberately constricted emotional range, composed that way to achieve a desired political effect—Shostakovich, for example. I know Ehly hates all ‘isms’, but I wonder whether he’s ever considered that his valorization of dramatic range is a kind of hedon-ism . . .

DSM: You’re saying Ehly’s rejection of categories or ‘isms’ is ironic? Sort of like following the maxim ‘All things in moderation’ [except moderation] is immoderate and therefore ironic?

E very waking moment is an adventure in living.”
— Eph Ehly, Hogey’s Journey.

CMT: Well, I think he is unquestionably a dear human being. And I doubt that the ironies go unnoticed. He’s just a bright teacher who prefers not to dwell excessively on ‘analysis’. He’s analytical to a point, but not beyond the point where analysis would interfere with art, would interfere with spontaneity. He’s clearly belovèd by his many students and by the choirs he has conducted. And it’s the force of his adventurousness and hedonism and drama that has endeared him to so many.

P eople who are ‘burned out’ have never been ‘on fire’ in the first place.”
— Eph Ehly, Hogey’s Journey.

DSM: But I think he may not have an adequate understanding of clinical depression. Or maybe some of his expressions are chosen for rhetorical effect, and don’t fully reflect the sensitivity that he does possess.

T heir performance may lack finesse and technique. Nonetheless, their songs have educational and spiritual merit. It’s this latter—rather than the former—that measures up to a kind of success that realizes a worthy ideal.”
— Eph Ehly, Hogey’s Journey.

T o encourage a student, Hogey usually called a poor performance okay. Something good became fantastic, something better was out-of-sight, unbelievable or sensational. Some call this hyperbole and think it foolish to exaggerate. Hogey believed in the power of exaggeration. Exaggeration is indicative of the power of one’s imagination. Exaggeration motivates.”
— Eph Ehly, Hogey’s Journey.

CMT: I think that, as pedagogy goes, I prefer the harsh, scary masters I’ve had. Even as a child and young student, I thought that. So Ehly’s memoiristic writing that condones grade-inflation and institutionalized ‘affirmations’ bothers me. It bothers me even though I understand the teaching context, the context where he is recommending applying this technique.

DSM: He is, without saying so, addressing the deteriorated condition of the educational system and the erosion of truthfulness over the past thirty years or so. The majority of students arrive today ill-prepared—not technically, but socially ill-prepared. And, realist that Ehly is, he takes the protoplasm that arrives, recognizes the limitations as well as the strengths, and chooses this evangelistic path . . .

Y ears of experience taught him that you can lead a man to music but you can’t make him sing. Being able to merely sing the song guarantees neither an appreciation nor an understanding of it. Force-feeding doesn’t work any better on people than it does on horses. Persistence trains a horse better than coercion. A good teacher does not force-feed. A good teacher encourages thinking. Even though you can’t teach someone to be musical, you can teach one to think musically.”
— Eph Ehly, Hogey’s Journey.

C onfusion is a state of learning.”
— Eph Ehly, Hogey’s Journey.

G od knew what He was doing when He made fewer tenors. One tenor is worth five basses, ten altos and twenty sopranos.”
— Eph Ehly, Hogey’s Journey.

CMT: Ehly’s ‘autobiography-cum-memoir-cum-novel’ is one of several such books recently—books by senior teachers at the college/conservatory level, books that are nominally ‘fiction’ but in fact are autobiographical and freely admitted to be such. James Jordan’s writing is like this, for example. And, hailing from non-musical fields, so too are the recent novels by Bill Leiss at University of Ottawa and Peter Pouncey, who used to teach Classics at Columbia University.

M usic-making is constructed of correct notes, correct rhythms, dynamics, and articulation. But the mortar of music is human trust (of self and others), belief in self and others, and love of self.”
— James Jordan, Musician’s Soul.

DSM: Pouncey’s ‘Rules for Old Men Waiting’ is less a novel than a collection three inter-related short stories. The day-to-day story of the principal character’s dying frames the overall narrative. A second story is built around that character’s memories of Margaret, the wife he learned to love too late, and David, a long-dead son who died in the Vietnam war. A third story is the “novel within the novel” where the principal character, MacIver, enacts his self-imposed rule to finish a novel recounting an incident set in World War II. ‘Rules for Old Men Waiting’ also contains extended excerpts and epigrams, much like Ehly’s and Jordan’s and Leiss’s books do.

A conductor does not ‘conduct’; he, by the nature of his being, causes people to sing. He evokes sounds that, hopefully, are reflective of each person’s individual life experiences ... Soulfulness is a hard thing to talk about and teach.”
— James Jordan, Musician’s Soul.

M any musicians do not realize that they must make a conscious decision to ‘deepen’. They do not realize that they need to constantly work at making their lives deepen in order to arrive at and ponder the most important issues. Those issues are different for each one of us. But it is most often that these basic life issues are the ones that are expressed by composers in their music. If one has not made deepening journeys into oneself, then it is difficult if not impossible to recognize the journeys that are contained within the music.”
— James Jordan, Musician’s Soul, p. 56.

O nly he who turns to the other human being and opens himself to him receives the world that is in him. Only the being whose otherness, accepted by my being, lives and faces me in the whole compression of existence and brings the radiance of eternity to me. Only when two say to one another with all that they are ‘It is Thou’ is the indwelling of Present Being between them.”
— Martin Buber, quoted by James Jordan in Musician’s Soul, p. 69.

O ne cannot force oneself to love. But love presupposes understanding, and in order to understand, one must exert one’s self.”
— Igor Stravinsky, quoted by James Jordan, Musician’s Soul, p. 107.

R emember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power. You must build your life as if it were a work of Art.”
— Abraham Joshua Heschel, quoted in James Jordan, Musician’s Soul, p. 136.

CMT: Just as War is ‘the continuation of politics by other means’, these ‘novels’ constitute ‘biography by other means’. The large number of epigrams and the crystalline phrases that Ehly and Jordan put in their characters’ mouths—these remind me somewhat of the aphoristic writing of Elias Canetti.

DSM: The readership of each of these volumes may be quite broad. But we get the sense that the audience that Ehly—or Jordan, or Leiss, or Pouncey—had in mind when writing was actually the members of their immediate families. These are each in their own way meditations—meditations with averted gaze; meditations that are meant for others, but meant not to ‘preach’. Just as astronomers say that the best way to detect and observe faint objects in the night sky is by averting your gaze—by not focusing directly on the celestial object and instead apprehending it in your peripheral vision—so too these senior academics prefer to convey their recommendations obliquely. These are quasi-novels, not biographies. Distilled insights, ‘keys’, epigrams, proverbs. Rhetorically, they are like psalms—but not as elegant or lyrical.

H ide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble;
Incline thine ear unto me and, in the day when I call, answer me speedily
for my days are consumed like smoke and my bones are burned as an hearth.
My heart is smitten and withered like grass, so that I forget to eat my bread.
By reason of the voice of my groaning, my bones cleave to my skin.
I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the desert;
I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.”
— Psalm 102

A ll my life I’ve struggled to be an honest musician—and now you want me to be a conductor.”
— Paul Hindemith, quoted by James Jordan, Musician’s Walk, p. xxv.

T he purpose of Art is not the momentary release of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
— Glenn Gould, quoted in James Jordan, Musician’s Walk, p. 16.

T his deeper human value is compassion, a sense of caring and commitment. No matter what your religion, and whether you are a believer or a non-believer, without them you cannot be happy.”
— Dalai Lama, quoted in James Jordan, Musician’s Walk, p. 69.

O r the waterfall or music heard so deeply
That is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, action.
The hint half-guessed, the gift half-understood, is Incarnation.”
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 3: Dry Salvages (Selvages)

CMT: Ehly and the others all assert that a person’s life ideally shouldn’t move forward in a straight line. For Ehly, a linear, uncomplicated life would make your music superficial or short-sighted. Better that your life move in loops and spirals.

DSM: Hmmm. Well, how then to explain the profound musicianship and deep understanding of some child prodigies? . . . Kids who have not yet acquired the scars of life. I do agree, though: conflicts and setbacks and mistakes and suffering are opportunities for reflection and growth, deepening our understandings and our humanity. If we successfully surmount them, they can inform our musicianship with dimensions that we might not have known or appreciated before, which in turn enables us to express new things and communicate with others in society who might previously have been outside our kenning.

CMT: Ehly has an anti-competition, anti-ambition streak in this book—a valorizing of thrown-ness and chance. He glorifies the little things; inconsequential moments with small children become profound. To those who know him, that is maybe not a surprise. But considering his esteemed position in choral pedagogy and conducting, it’s a bit surprising to me . . .

DSM: In performance, many musicians are focused primarily on themselves. But the best ensembles are comprised of musicians who acknowledge the worth of ‘ensemble’—acknowledge that the group must be vibrant, not just individuals within it. The Church likes to talk about the ensoulment of an individual. Well, there is such a thing as the ‘ensoulment’ of an ensemble. This is at the heart of the satisfaction that comes in ensemble performance. It’s a radical creativity and a transcendent wonder, rare in any human life—something that, for normal people, otherwise tends to occur only with childbirth or between people falling in love. Unusual, unless you’re a mystic or a psychotic.

CMT: There’s a heightened awareness of self and others that’s necessary for creating value through music. ‘Necessary’ for authenticity but not sufficient for it. Performance situations are naturally evocative of heightened awareness: you are presenting yourself in a public space, after all. But, regrettably, many of us live our musical lives—and day-to-day lives—without being fully awake, without such awareness. We lack an inner radiance. There is that Zen-like or mystical aspect to what Ehly—and Leiss, and Pouncey, and Jordan—are saying in their memoir-like writings. The novelistic attention to small things, to everyday life, to all persons regardless of their credentials or stature, and to the phenomena of childhood—this is just a way to assert the importance of awareness of self and others. This is ‘musicianship-as-community’.

DSM: What else? Ehly is moved by tragedy—it shows up as a plot element in several parts of ‘Hogey’s Journey’. Jordan is also moved by tragedy—specifically, the 9/11 attacks and a story of two strangers who jumped from the tower at the same moment and, as they fell to their deaths, were seen holding hands. Ehly is moved by tragedies that unfolded in his family. Leiss, likewise. Their motivation in writing is mainly to promote an understanding of deeper human value, a value for them that has been calibrated by the tragic and by the joyous.

CMT: The genuineness of these teachers as human beings, and the profound ‘goodness’ of their authorly motivations, are enough to cause us to overlook the rough edges and faults of their ‘first-novel’ writing craftsmanship and focus instead on what they are saying. In the instance of each one, I do wish that each would find a good biographer to engage in a series of interviews, and capture more of what they have to say in a normal ‘biography’ format. Tracy Kidder is the ‘icon’ for the type of inspired biographer I have in mind.

jwilzewske

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Eph Ehly: Averted Gaze, Fiction, and Pedagogical Method

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