Stealing Students

[unknown-user]

Thanks so much for that eloquent post Victor…come to Tasmania and be my pupil! (joke)

[Tacye]

What I am thinking about most from this thread is the importance of explaining why you are asking a student to do something, or being able to do so if it seems necessary.

[Victor Ortega]

And thank you, Rosemary, for your words of encouragement and for sharing your thoughts and perspective.

[unknown-user]

Thanks for that both Victor and Tacye. Yes, I agree that it is

[Victor Ortega]

Rosemary, I never thought of you as even a partial ogre, much less a complete one… we all have our quirks, and I’m with you on being big on art and music.

[Elizabeth Volpé Bligh]

Victor, you bring up an interesting point! “If you want to know how good a teacher is, don’t examine the teacher, but his or her students”: You would have to see all of the students to get an overall view, because let’s face it, all of us teachers have had a few students who really don’t represent our teaching. Either they had such a mind of their own that they play completely differently than you taught them to, or they didn’t listen, or they went to so many different teachers, etc., etc. It reminds me of the story about a famous violin teacher (Kreisler, maybe?) who heard a piece of his being played very badly by a busker. He went over to the man, took his violin, saying,”No! You idiot! It goes like this!” and played it correctly for him. The next day, he walked by the busker, who now had a huge sign beside him, with the words “PUPIL OF KREISLER”.

[carl-swanson]

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Elizabeth, I laughed so hard at that. Well gosh, I should put on my resume then that I studied with Vera Dulova(one lesson, but a real one), Hans Zingle, and I don’t know who else.

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Gee, what generation have I turned into now? I am the younger generation, or at least I was until these last two or three have come along with their “unique
point of view. I am old enough to have a hard time remembering why the war in Vietnam had any impact on any other country but ours and France, and Canada as a haven.

I guess what this all boils down to is that students will hear what they want to hear, regardless of what or how the teacher says it. And then they’ll probably repeat it to someone else. So go reputations. If they would just be more open to learning. I hear it over and over from professors, nobody asks questions, nobody has any curiousity.

Does teaching require control? Some of you seem to question this. Well, a teenager came for a lesson, and she starting talking about her frustration and anxiety, and before you know it, she turned an hour-and-a-half lesson into more than an hour of chat, and very little lesson, all because she really didn’t want to work on that particular piece. Well, I have to control the time and how it is spent, and if he or she is going to compete as my student, I am responsible in part for his/her preparation, so I have to make sure the lesson is spent practicing that piece, if nothing else. Miss Lawrence was always in control, you did what she wanted, and you had better be prepared or face real embarassment. Did that make her a monster or ogre? No, it made her a truly great teacher, and the quality of her students has proved it over and over. A teacher has an agenda if they have thought about what they are teaching. I want to determine what harpists my students are listening to if they are in a formative stage of learning what the harp is, what its literature is and how it should sound. Students are very vulnerable for many years until they reach a reasonably complete conception of the harp and how to use it. Miss Lawrence excelled in teaching how to use it artistically, how to sculpt the sound, to control every bit of its color, to have a fulsome tone. For example, listen to the sound clips on Faye Seeman’s website, kitharatrio.com. You may hear a familiar piece, but there is so much more body and definition of detail in her playing. This is the result of her teaching. If you go to someone who studied elsewhere, you will hear a very different result in many cases. The harp is terribly difficult to make real music on. It is constantly in a state of diminuendo, which you have to work against to make crescendo. You have to simulate legato and other qualities of touch and articulation. You have to be very rhythmical because of the constant ringing. You have to know how to play arpeggiated chords very rhythmically, which you can hear a lot of harpists don’t do well. It is very difficult to play a piece in one tempo and to break the chords within the beat in a whole other subdivision, changing from beat to beat from five notes to seven, to eight or more.

[unknown-user]

Yes, I’m not sure when I turned into a granny either….as i’m not that older than Victor! I wasn’t meaning that we were old, but that the

[carl-swanson]

Good heavens, this thread is longer than the Academy Awards show! I have read some of the posts(I’ll read them all tonight) and skimmed others. I do have one comment though. A serious student who goes to a serious teacher has to lay himself/herself at the teachers feet and tell the teacher at the first lesson that he/she will do whatever that teacher wants. Any good teacher can only teach what works for them. The student, during the time that they are with that teacher, has to do without questioning whatever that teacher says. Once that student has left that teacher, then he/she can decide what is to be kept and what is to be discarded. Picking and choosing, and particularly arguing with the teacher is an enormous waste of time and is counter productive. One very inportant teacher in the USA hates and detests teaching American students because they spend so much time arguing. Her foreign students do exactly what she says and as a result make enornous progress.

At my first lesson with Pierre Jamet, I told him that I was there to overhaul my technique and that I would play whatever he wanted me to. I said that my only request was that I not work on any pieces that I had already done. I wanted a fresh start. He absolutely loved that, and he told me that so many American harp students had come to him over the years and put the Danses on the stand, saying that they wanted to learn them from him. He would then have to tell them that if they were not willing to do the technical work first, that he could not teach them.

There is blame on both sides of the equation. Teachers at all levels(including college) who can’t teach keeping students, sometimes for years, and doing more harm than good. Students who argue, don’t listen to the teacher, or insist on playing repertoire that is beyond them.

To the student I would say, are you making progress with your current teacher? Are you playing noticeably better now than you did this time last year? Are you working on, and learning pieces appropriate to your level? How long does it take you to learn a piece? If you are working on a 5 page piece for 10 months, then the piece is not right for you and the teacher is showing bad judgement. My general rule of thumb is that any piece should take about 2 weeks per page of music to learn. 5 page piece? 10 weeks. If it is taking significantly longer, you need another, easier piece, and perhaps another teacher.

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Thank you, Carl. It is very difficult to try to help a student if they continue doing what they have already done. It is a muddled atmosphere. I have a problem with a student who says they want me to be their master, and then reject everything I do, or accuse me of being controlling, not indulging them, not being “sensitive” enough.

This brings up another question, which I will post separately.

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