jwilzewske: Mentoring the Inner Chamber Musician

I t just doesn’t seem that long since those days of not knowing what young musicians should or shouldn’t be able to do. Having had a ‘little more’ experience now, I am amazed that you and your classmates were able to play, pretty well, charts that were written for pros.”

— Bruce Pearson, reminiscing in 2007 about his early teaching in the late Sixties

CMT: It’s hard to know what someone should or shouldn’t be able to do at a particular point in her/his artistic development!

Angela Myles Beeching, New England Conservatory

DSM: Well, the fact is that you never know until you try. The brave thing involves enthusiastically “pushing the envelope” —both the teacher and the student are ideally doing this. Is there ever a teacher so wizened and hoary that the process with this student is not throwing off sparks of new pedagogy? I don’t think so. Every person is so open-ended and so different from every other person that the teaching or mentoring process is perpetually new and unique.

Danel Kvartetti, in sauna, in Kuhmo Finland, 2006

CMT: Unless burn-out or hubris sets in. With music especially—which, like mathematics and a few other virtuosic pursuits, is to a large degree a young person’s realm—there really ought not to be preconceptions as to what a person ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be able to do. No, you don’t want to put together young ensembles whose members’ abilities are light-years apart and frustrate them by putting literature in front of them that is at the level of the least-able lowest-common-denominator member. Nor do you want to frustrate them by giving them literature that’s at the level of the one prodigy in the ensemble. It’s truly an art: finding literature that adequately stretches the capabilities of each member, and then evolving that literature as the complexion of their abilities changes over the passing months together.

DSM: If there’re one or two reallly gifted players in the group, the lessons to be learned are a bit different for them than they are for the others, aren’t they! The issue becomes more one of balance and adaptation, accommodating one’s own playing to the realities of the notes around you. The elements of musicianship then have more to do with interpersonal communication. The stronger players, ideally, become sub-mentors—in some ways like the principal chairs in an orchestra. It’s very like the idea of ‘induction’, which has some cachet lately in the scholarly teaching/pedagogy journal literature.

CMT: Well, as Bruce Pearson says, there’s the [population epidemiology] of technic—an empirical distribution of abilities that one can reasonably expect in a given class. You’re delighted when you encounter abilities and synergies that are above the median. But you have no right to feel disappointed when you encounter deficiencies and dissension that are below it.

DSM: And, of course, it’s a matter not only for members of ensembles who are experiencing personnel changes, or for teachers or leaders of ensembles in an education setting, but also for the composers who are composing or arranging pieces. Music, like any other kind of literature, either finds its natural readership or else it doesn’t. The practical composer has, just as much as any good author, a clear sense of the epidemiology of technic—a clear sense of who is going to be able to play what she/he is writing; a clear sense of who is going to want to perform it, given the difficulties and risks that the composer builds into the piece. If you’re composing and are oblivious to this, you’ll be composing for a very small market—maybe a market of zero.

CMT: Regardless of the ages of the ensemble’s members—and regardless of the natural norms for what middle school, or high school, or college students may generally be expected to do—I think chamber music is, like jazz, one of the genres most congenial to exploration. There are social supports and incentives in a string quartet, say—supports that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a one-on-one mentoring relationship with a viol master. Your failures are very visible, yes, but you are bathed in the empathy of the other members. And your successes have a tremendous immediacy and are shared in a way that is far more nourishing than the drier, more abstract appreciations that come in solo work or in larger orchestras. That was one of the lessons I learned from Bruce Pearson, back in the late Sixties.

jwilzewske

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Mentoring the Inner Chamber Musician

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