Conservatory Days

For one reason or another, I spent the weekend pondering the education of classical musicians, since at one time that was what I wanted someone to do to me, and at another time, it was what I had to do to myself.

Here was the standard thinking: Music was a demanding art, requiring the highest discipline, and very, very few of us would do much of anything except, if we were lucky, manage to get into an orchestra. There, we would scrape away or toot away or bang away (can’t forget the percussion guys) for forty years at the standard repertoire, which meant that we would have memorized Beethoven’s Fifth. All of this for the delectation of blue-haired ladies who had dragged their husbands—all yearning for the golf course—to the concerts.

So it was a schizophrenia that was almost ordained. We were being trained for something that we would never be. We spent enormous amounts of time in practice rooms, where we learned pieces that almost none of us would ever play. I have memorized, for example, over 10 concerti, each one lasting about 30 minutes. So that’s five hours of music, but how many minutes in my life have I played them with an orchestra?

Forty minutes, since I won a concerto competition in high school.

So we were learning pieces that we would almost certainly never play in careers that we would almost certainly never have. That bad, but hardly the worst of it. The real problem was that our teachers were professionally obliged to stifle any innate kindness or altruism, and instead assault us in ways ranging from the subtle to the outright abusive. Why? To toughen us up, since it was a dog-eat-dog world out there, and only the tough survived.

And of course, to us it made sense. We had practiced five hours, but Betty? She had done six, and that last hour would make the difference…or so we thought. And perhaps it did, if Betty believed it, and if it made her more secure for the competition, the recital, the concert or—especially and most dreadfully—the audition.

So Betty would sail into the audition, sit behind the curtain—that essential if make-believe pretense of impartiality, since everybody knew what Betty was playing, as well as what everybody else was playing—and perform magnificently. She had done her work, she had braved her teacher, whose preferred way of receiving whatever Betty had brought into her lesson was to sit in utter silence for one or two long minutes, after which he would light a cigarette (you could do that then), and tear into her.

I now know—he was probably an unhappy man, this teacher that we all (perhaps most of all himself) put on a pedestal. In my case, the teacher had been one of a family of musicians, had performed early on with the Chicago Symphony, and then had gone—without a degree—to teach at the university. There he had stayed for forty years or so, turning out students, only a few of whom had made their careers in music.

No, I suspect he wasn’t a very happy man, because here’s the thing about classical music: For some reason it’s OK to be a good doctor or a good lawyer, but a musician who is simply good? Who is a serviceable cellist, but not Yo-Yo Ma or Rostropovich? Well, he’s second best at best—often he’s just a hack.

So he was unhappy, and he was teaching us as he had been taught, which was to play despite an unceasing flood of negative commentary. Which meant that for a student to be “good,” he had to be hard on himself. For an overachiever like me, that meant variously swearing at myself or biting myself. Oh, and curiously, I had this little problem breathing: I held my breath until anoxia forced me to gasp. Nice metaphor—right? I was being strangled, though only my body knew it at the time. My brain thought I was just being weak.

Right—so into this mix was added the instruction: If only I would “relax,” I would play so much better! So the “work” then became to “relax,” and what was wrong with me, since I was trying really, really hard to get those shoulders down—they had been tickling my ears for a decade or so. Anyway, I was working so hard on the shoulders that I was actually forcing them down artificially low, which was causing its set of tensions, so that accounted for my own thin, strained sounds, whereas Betty—well, she seemed immune to any tension whatsoever, and her sound? Rostropovich would have melted!

It wasn’t Betty, of course. Or rather it was, since she was a girl, and girls didn’t come in for quite the same level of toughness that boys did. Since I was going to have to make my living, but Betty? Guys, this was the 70’s, but even now it’s the same. She could have a career, yes, or she could play chamber music and let her lawyer husband support her….

And we all knew—Betty had an instrument to die for: Not a Strad, but a gorgeous Italian instrument from the same period. So she was rich, which is a nice cushion for the arrows that might come her way, as she made her way through the forest primeval. So Betty had never quite got the toughness the rest of us got, and she had that ease of dealing with people that people with money have.

Betty went on to do well: I did not. Or did I? Because at last, I conquered the inner voice, I learned to “relax,” which was just the opposite of what I had been trying to do. And along the way, I had been a nurse, been a teacher, repaired antiques, done construction work for a summer, moved to a foreign though domestic land, learned another language, and written a book. To a classical musician this is dilettantism, the most awful face of amateurism. But is it?

He had a technique I’ll never have, that teacher of mine. He undoubtedly had the skills to pass the auditions I never could pass. And now, he is old, a professor emeritus even without a degree. He has, in short, gone far beyond me.

Or has he?