jwilzewske: pearson

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Sunday, April 29, 2007

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.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

My Lives / Writing as Resistance: Journaling Classical Music

W riting autobiography allows me to open up a vein of self-scrutiny, to peer through the slippery veil of what you call ‘character’—to define my own peculiar subjectivity.”
— Patricia Foster

CMT: A writer’s always preoccupied with gathering and prioritizing the material that will be retained in what she/he is writing. If there’s a nucleus of this, it inevitably permeates the writer’s world. It’s like beach sand—it gets into everything, no matter what the Editor’s instructions are. These things become virtual necessities, inevitabilities. Necessaries.

DSM: It’s a hammer looking for a nail. It’s in the DNA. It just has to come express itself. Your peculiar fascination with Deleuze and Lacan and Derrida—I’m sure you can’t help it. Is that what you’re saying?

CMT: I’m just saying: there are latent ideas and resonances, and these conversations we have are just triggers for them. These conversations are just occasions for synthesizing the observations that are, up until the moment they emerge from our mouths, just glimmers, little scintillations. They happen regardless of whether we’re together. But I’d never remember them if we didn’t set ourselves to conversing and making these little transcripts for each other.

DSM: Well, thank you. Gratifying occasions—to capture some sparks that might kindle something bigger, in someone else who happens to see them online. Maybe something more for us, as well. The minor chore of assembling the lists of links as we do here is at least potentially useful to others. Even when we don’t necessarily receive comments on a piece, we can see the click-throughs to the Amazon and Arkiv and other links at the bottom. We have a pretty good idea of what readers are finding interesting or useful . . .

CMT: For me, the moment when I realized what my favorite conception of art was, was in December 1995, a month after Gilles Deleuze died at age 70—young. I had read his several books long before then. But it was the occasion of his dying that led me to re-visit what I knew of him and his philosophy of music. I recognized immediately that he was the embodiment of my subject. In adopting the stance that he had put forward, I could at last be dealing with the material and the priorities that were ‘necessary’ to me. And I was grateful that he had bothered to write as much as he had.

DSM: And Derrida was and is like that for me. He lived to 74 years of age, young still—died in 2004. The world has moved on quite a bit, moved on very quickly. His writing, for me, was a wonderful tapestry, a web of loyalties and enmities. He became my vehicle and my guide to what had always been waiting at the back of my mind. He didn’t especially write about music theory, yet his philosophical writing consistently served as a prism through which my own thinking about music was—and is—refracted.

CMT: Writing is always about problem-solving. Whether in fiction, biography, memoir, scholarly exposition, whatever—certain questions have to be resolved. I have never written fiction, and essays or memoir may be as close as I ever get to it. No more than a biography or a novel is memoir true-to-life. Because life is just one thing after another. The writer’s job is to find the narrative shape in unruly Life and tell the story. Not to serve the Truth, but just to serve the Story. There really is no other choice. A reporter is in service to the Fact. A eulogist is in service to the Family of the Dead. But, in general, a regular writer serves only the Story. There really are no other competing claims.

DSM: That’s a ruthless perspective! You make it sound cold or detached, commodified.

CMT: Well, no. A writer who cannot separate herself/himself from the charaters in the narrative and see them within the full spectrum of their human qualities degenerates into sentimentality. If you’re writing about music, you degenerate into uncritical promotion. Bathos does no honor to anybody, and it sure doesn’t sell papers! It surely doesn’t attract repeat visitors to a blog!

DSM: The right voice in which to write—the voice in which I talk to you—comes to me from my music teachers. It comes to me from Bruce Pearson, Dick Whitbeck, Herb Pilhofer, Dan Tetzlaff. None of them interested in exotic theory. But each of them tenacious about detail and nuance.

CMT: But you’re extemporizing with me on topics that can’t be informed by anything you did with those people 35 years ago! You’re not spinning memoirs in these conversations!

DSM: What is it that we learn, though, from other people? I inherited from them a tenacious, curious disposition. I absorbed their pedagogical approach and made it my own. It’s not ‘memoir’ but autobiography, what we’re doing here. The moment we put fingers to keyboard, the essential nature of Life—the random one thing after another—is displaced. No matter how ambiguous you try to make the conversation/story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, no matter how faithfully you capture our oral detours and dead-ends—in print it’s still an objectified thing, packaged, decorated.

CMT: Everything that happens between us is not in the stories in this blog. How could it be? Memory is selective; storytelling insists on itself. Even the long, diffuse posts are only a poor simulacrum of the real deal. There’s nothing in these posts that didn’t happen. They’re edited, but they are all true.

DSM: Shades of true anyhow. Your truth; my truth. The provocation’s legitimate, so long as we don’t interfere with or libel anybody. The process we follow may be a bit chaotic, but it’s not unlike Eric Newby or other travel writers. We respond to the events, writing, performances, and recordings we encounter, such as they are—and to each other. If the ideas about music that occur to us had instead stayed in our heads or in a drawer, what value would they have? None. So, instead, we indulge ourselves here, engage in some constructive resistance, discover some new paths, reveal some of what’s necessary to our inadvertent autobiographies or travelogues, and find new friends and kindred spirits along the way. We don’t have the privilege of making a living writing about music like professional critics and reviewers and academics do. But this is a passable substitute!

CMT: In a 2005 study, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 11 million Americans have created blogs, and more than 25 percent of Internet users read them. The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed material to the online commons. And that was 2 years ago! Netroots infancy!