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?
