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Elizabeth- I’m finishing up reading a book called WHO KILLED CLASSICAL MUSIC? by Norman Lebrecht(published by Carol Publishing Company). The sub-title is MAESTROS, MANAGERS, AND CORPORATE POLITICS. If you read this book you will NEVER look at classical music again the same way. You simply cannot imagine how managers and impressarios manipulate the classical music scene. After reading this, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever give another dime to a performing arts organization.
Diane- I think that career success, financial success is a totally different issue from artistic success. Most of the great artists in history, and particularly the painters, lived and died in poverty. But they were geniuses and more often than not knew it. A few years ago a woman in her 80’s got a Nobel prize for scientific work she had done in her 30’s. A reporter asked her if she resented the fact that for so many years her work was either ignored or disparaged. “No,” she said,”none of that matters when you know you are right.” That comment may sound to some to be arrogant, but real geniuses usually know they are right.
Elizabeth- I’m reminded of a conversation I had last year with a harpist. She told me that when she was a child, she studied with a teacher who had a large number of children studying with her. There were student recitals from time to time, so all of the students and their parents were pretty aware of how each child played. There were two students at the time, ages 6 and 8, who were obviously quite talented. The 8 year old was extroadinary. Very musical, learned music very easily, etc. The 6 year old was also talented, but had to work harder. This harpist told me, “At one recital where these two girls played, my mother pointed to the 6 year old and said, ‘SHE’S the one who’s going to make it. She’s persistant.'” Both girls became professional harpists, but it was the 6 year old who grew up to win an international competition, got a major symphony job and a major teaching post. Persistence without talent will get you only so far. Talent without persistence will get you only so far. But talent and persistence together? Now that’s a winning combination!
Julienne- I just looked up the word arrogance, and it is defined as ‘unwarranted pride and self-importance.’ What hit me was the word unwarranted. Maybe Schumann picked the wrong word, or the translator mis-translated. But I think that many geniuses come across as arrogant because they have one clear vision of the world and that is their’s. Great composers were more often than not very intolerant of other great composers, not, I think because of jealousy, but because they felt that their way of composing was the only ‘right’ one. I would speculate that many high level performers are intolerant of other high level performers on their instrument because they have such a clear idea of how they feel that a piece should be played, and they don’t tolerate any deviation from that.
Julienne- You really expressed the intangible that seperates the great artist from everybody else. Good job.
Several years ago, at I think it was the Philadelphia Conference, Susan McDonald gave a lecture on teaching the gifted student. It was a wondereful talk. She seemed to be reading from a prepared text the whole time, and I really felt that that text should be published as an article in one of the harp magazines. One of the main points she made was that the gifted student imposes higher expectations on him/herself. She told about teaching a gifted 12 year old who played each lesson like a finished recital, with absolutely no pedal noise, no buzzing, etc. She told about gifted students who, the night before one stage or another in an important competition, stayed up practicing literally the whole night to ‘get it perfect.’ She told about a gifted student of hers who had won an important competition, calling her the night before an opening recital for an AHS conference and telling her that she had just finished playing the whole recital in her head. The self-expectations of the gifted student are so much higher than they are for the average, even good student.
Elizabeth- I agree totally with both your posts. Talent won’t go any where without hard work, but with hard work, talent will go much farther than less talent making the same effort. We all know people who can learn music faster than you can put it on the stand. We all know people with a finger agility and speed that no amount of practicing by a lesser talent can match. We all know people who can memorize a page of music in 10 minutes, or who can relearn a piece learned years ago in a few hours. Even a person with all of these extroadinary skills will not become a great musician without hard work, and if that person does not have musical understanding, then all those extroadinary skills don’t mean very much. But if you are talking about the most extroadinary musicians on any instrument, they definitely have natural abilities that a lesser musician, no matter how hard he works, will never have. Robert Schuman said,”Talent makes slow and steady progress up the mountain, while genius stands at the summit and looks arrogantly around.”
I’ve read or heard about several studies over the years in which the researcher concludes that there is no such thing as talent. That anyone can achieve the same results. The studies are ALWAYS done by non-musicians, and I usually find that they are collecting the wrong data!
ann Marie- What have you been doing in Paris for 4 years. I lived there for three years many years ago. I try to get back once a year, at least.
Laura- Everything you say is true. And the pearl of wisdom from Alice is wonderful. The point is, we as teachers are all trying to accomplish the same thing where practicing is concerned. The problem though is that habits are very ingrained and difficult to change. The various little ‘tricks’ that we have all been suggesting here are to help the student break out of those old habits that don’t work. I think that once the student sees the better results that come from using these little tricks, he or she will be motivated to think about practicing in a completely different way, which is what you’re talking about. But if it takes a little game, a practice board to isolate a problem measure, a practice journal, or whatever to get the student on a different track, then the little trick has accomplished it’s purpose.
My point was not that the people in their 40’s didn’t climb the acropolis because they were lazy or out of shape, but that their (younger) age was no guarantee that they would be healthier than older people, making their age irrelevant.
Dearest Esmeralda- There’s a line from, I think, Auntie Mame, in which someone asks someone else how old Auntie Mame is. “Somewhere’s between 40 and death” the person responds. My own personal philosophy is: You’re either here or you’re not. You’re either healthy or you’re not. ‘Young’ and ‘old’ are irrevelant terms. I took a trip to Greece a few years ago to see some of the archeological sites, most of which are up on acropolises above the towns. There were two women in their early 80’s who climed up every acropolis, and there were people in their 40’s who stayed at the bottom because it was too strenuous for them. (By the way, I, in my late 50’s, and my 68 year old friend, climed all of the acropolises!). I know from your vantage point the terms ‘young’ and ‘old’ seem very important, but as you grow older, you’ll see how unimportant it really is.
Do any of you teach your students to make what I call ‘variations’ on the trouble spot? ‘Variation’ means anything that is different from the way it is intended to be played. A variation can be as simple as playing the left or right hand alone, playing arpeggios (as in the Hasselmans La Source) as chords, running sixteenth notes(as in any Baroque piece)in uneven rhythms or accenting every other note or every third note, etc. I think that most students have difficulty grasping the value of ‘variations.’
I really like Diane’s method of getting the student to focus on the problem areas(where she has the student cut the grand staves into strips, etc.). A vaiation on that might be to make a photocopy of the piece to mark up, and to put a box in red pencil around the exact area that the teacher feels is the problem area. The student would then be told to practice only what is inside the box until it is learned, and then incorporate that into the surrounding measures. The student could also be told that at the next lesson, the first thing you the teacher wants to hear is the part inside the boxes. This exercise might help the student to see the piece, and the learning process, in the piecemeal way we have to see it to learn it.
I think that, in order to get students to practice more effectively, they need to understand what the ultimate goal should be. That goal should be: getting the piece to performance level. That means: 1) no wrong notes and rhythms, 2)up to tempo, 3)memorized, and 4)musically expressive. I realize that that is a very tall order, but that’s the goal, whether there is a performance coming up or not.
I’ve told my current student(with very limited success ;( ) that each lesson should be thought of as a performance, and that when he practices, he should look at a measure, line, page, or the whole piece, and ask himself what it is that seperates the way he plays it now from performance level. Maybe that thought is the preamble to any further discussion about the nuts and bolts of fixing problems.
Kim-I agree with everything you say. The fundamental problem for teachers is that, whatever the student repeats the most(i.e., plays a passage wrong over and over again), that’s what they learn. So the challange is to get them to start off on the right foot at the begining of the learning process on a piece so that they don’t have to unlearn the wrong way of playing it. I’ve scolded my student several times by saying,”You’ve played this passage wrong for a week, and now you played it right once. Which way do you think you learned?”
Kim- Your 10 penny idea is great and reminds me of something I heard many years ago. A vocalist friend of mine went to New York to work with one of the top vocal coaches there. The coach did the same thing with the singer, using I think marbles, and moving them from one bowl to another if the singer made a mistake. The singer told me that at first he thought it was ridiclous, but quickly learned that it sharpened his attention to what he was doing.
