Hey, remember high school orchestra chair auditions? That gladiatorial arena that pitted instrument against instrument in a clawing, biting scramble to score a seat two feet closer to the conductor, the same person you were auditioning for and who you’d known for up to four years, thus stripping away that cool and steadying wall of anonymity that might have otherwise supported you?
Right, so I was in one of those, my sophomore year (a trying year for me, orchestrally, but we can talk about that later), and I was visibly nervous, because that’s what happened to me during auditions: a neon light flashed above my head like a raincloud in a cartoon or a prism above a Sim, and the sign read NERVOUS. And O’Bryan, the conductor, told me to chill out. “Be like Elizabeth,” he said, referring to the first chair violist. “When she makes a mistake, she just says ‘Sorry!’ and keeps right on plugging, totally cool.”
Well, folks, Elizabeth happens to be one of my best friends, so I was able to ask her about this admirable attitude recently. “The only reason I was like that,” she told me, “was because I knew there was no possible way I could be demoted.”
It’s true. Elizabeth was a solid violist backed by a troupe of shaky violists. If she had been removed from her post the whole structure would’ve collapsed in the ensuing violaquake.
I just want to ask you guys about the orchestra (and by implication, band) culture, here. Concertmaster and assistant concertmaster and first chair are all prestigious titles to be sure, and it’s good that musicians have a seat to aspire to. But how much emphasis do you place on them? And beyond that, how much emphasis do you place on every chair after?
In all the school orchestras I ever participated in, your chair was permanent and a de facto indication of where you stood in your section. Anybody ahead of you was better than you, definitively, and if you had to move up you had to challenge your better with a face-off re-audition.
In professional orchestras, however, I understand that aside from the first two chairs, everybody rotates, the idea being that anyone who’s made it in is darn good and a place closer to the sun, as it were, should be afforded to everyone.
Of course, in many schools, music isn’t auditioned, so the logic is flawed. But do you think the rotational system could work in a school orchestra setting? What impact do you think it would have on the ambiance? Or is that cuttthroat culture all in my head?
I had Mr. Wong for third and fourth grade art. I loved his class; he gave us all sorts of fun assignments and on one memorable occasion a party with soda (I don’t remember why we had the party, but I remember we had soda).
I’m not entirely sure the why of this — I think it was that time we made a self-portrait trading card type thing, and we were making “stats” for the back — but at one point our art assignment was accompanied by a survey of sorts, asking for items like favorite color, favorite food, etc.
One of the categories was “favorite musician or band.” Third grade me labored over this one a bit, decided to take some creative license, and wrote down “Tchaikovsky.” Musician, band, composer — practically reads like a thesaurus, no?
All the kids in the class went up one at a time to read our answers (a popular trope, the getting up and reading in front of the class; I think now this is less about education and more about teachers killing time). When I got to Tchaikovsky, Mr. Wong didn’t challenge me. He just raised his eyebrows and said, “Interesting.”
Maybe he was a Tchaikovsky snob? Maybe he was surprised that a third grader could spell “Tchaikovsky”? But I ponder now not his reaction but my answer to his question. It seems that in third grade, I thought Tchaikovsky was the bee’s knees.
And I still think Tchaikovsky is the bee’s knees, just not the queen bee. For awhile there I was desperately, hopelessly in love with Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. Now I think the adagio cantabile from Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata might be my favorite. For now.
My point is: tastes change. Obviously. Now cast your mind back to third grade you. Who was your favorite?
I can’t say I particularly enjoyed my college experience, but there were a few shining lights in the institutional mist, and the brightest was Dr. McColl, the finest professor in all the land.
He taught art history, and my bent is (prepare for a shocker) more toward the aural arts, but he was so enthusiastic and funny and genuinely excited to hear your thoughts on his subject that I took three electives with him.
So he and I are the main characters in this story. The setting: the end of the fall semester of my sophomore year. The fall orchestra concert was Tuesday. Today is Thursday. I pass McColl on the way out of class.
McCOLL: Oh, Jenn, I really enjoyed the concert on Tuesday.
ME: …………. you did?
McCOLL: [fending off a sudden attack of honesty] I… thought it went pretty well?
ME: Really? I didn’t.
Okay, that was probably a little overly blunt of me. I should’ve smiled, accepted his thoughtful compliments, and kept on walkin.’ (This is a directive I do not follow nearly enough.) In my defense, this was after the dreadful concert with the great Hindemith fiasco, and I my morale was low.
But we can debate whether or not I’m a jerk at another time. My question right now is this: if the concert sucked, what do you say?
Some people are self-deluded enough that no matter how crappily they perform you can tell them they rocked your socks twelve ways to next Tuesday and they will believe you. Most, however, are not that lucky. If you tell them they were good, they will know you are lying. And if you half-ass it and say something sorta nice, like “That was great how you all started together” or “I like how you wore matching outfits” or something, they will still know.
What do you say? I am especially interested to hear the thoughts of teachers and parents on this matter.
And now for another Controversial Opinion — for what is a blog but a means of airing personal grievances?
For I have a likely controversial point to make, and in so making I shall air a personal grievance. Purely for point making purposes, of course.
Follow me back, back, back, to middle school, when I was a wee violin student and began taking lessons with a private teacher. Let us call him Mr. Worthless, because you’d be surprised how well it works.
I don’t know when the tide shifted. I don’t know when Mr. Worthless and I became wary sparring partners. I can only assume it wasn’t from the first moment we met, or we probably wouldn’t have committed to lessons. I can tell you, though, that I don’t remember a time when we did get along. We traded veiled barbs and I hated every lesson.
Look, I know what you’re probably thinking — I bet you were a little snot. I bet you were a brat, tough to teach. And you know what? You’re right. I wasn’t trying to meet him halfway. But hold with me just a moment.
I specifically remember the week in school we got Bach’s second Brandenburg. This is a nice piece, ubiquitous enough that many are sick of it, not exactly ground-breaking work. It’s pretty easy to play but it’s fast and has a lot of runs, and I became obsessed with it. I was not a happy practicer — I used to waste time adjusting the metronome and fine-tuning the strings to eat up the allotted our — but I remember spending that entire hour playing the Brandenburg over and over and over, trying to get through a completely perfect run. Eventually my mom came in and pointed out that I should probably turn my attention to something else, which I did, so I did time-and-a-half that practice day.
We went to lessons that week — I say “we” because my brother had recently begun playing the viola, the instrument in which Mr. Worthless specialized, and we had an hour and a half blocked out for both of us in total. I always made my brother go first as the first person in generally wound up with the longer lesson, the second left with whatever remained of the 90 minutes.
I was so excited about the Brandenburg that I almost — ALMOST — volunteered to go first. Luckily I squelched this urge. But I wasn’t dreading it as per usual, and I went up to the music room on the second floor willingly. Even though it was a school piece, I whipped out the Brandenburg, eager to show him how well I had mastered it. I had gone through this piece for hours, after all, and that was a big deal for a non-prodigy such as myself.
So I played the Brandenburg, pretty well. Not perfect, but he must’ve seen my zeal. Couldn’t he see my zeal? I had found — of course I found it in Bach! — I had found at last some passion. I had played something for him, for the first time, that I wanted to play, and I wanted to hear his feedback, to improve upon it, to make it truly my own.
And Mr. Worthless sat quietly in his chair, the usual fighting smirk on his face. He looked at me, and he opened his mouth, and he gave me a lecture. He reamed me out for working so hard on the Brandenburg for school instead of the etude and Suzuki he had assigned me. What I had done, he said, was disrespectful and inappropriate, like slapping him in the face.
Go ahead and argue it — he was right. I should’ve concentrated on his pieces. I shouldn’t have taken that surly attitude to begin with. You, too, are absolutely right on all counts.
But here is where I insert my controversial thought: in the case of teaching, it is up to the teacher, not the student. Or to say it in Horace Mann’s far more eloquent words: “A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring in the pupil a desire to learn is hammering cold iron.”
I was cold iron and he the hammer, but with the Brandenburg I handed him the coal to light the fire. I came to him and said here — here is something that has made me care. Help me shape it. But he wouldn’t help me shape it, because I wasn’t using the material he had given me. (You can relax now — the metaphor is over.)
Again — the argument is a valid one that I shouldn’t have been so difficult. And again, my argument is that as teachers, the onus is on you.
There are different styles of teaching. Some are gentle and kind; some are harsh. My mother knows a trombone teacher who uses agitated gestures and angry words as motivators, and for certain types of people this method works. This would not work on me. Mr. Worthless tried to fight me, but mine is the sort of nature that, if faced with negative reinforcement, will simply shut down all attempts — for why should I reward you with my success?
Point being, that no single teaching style works on every student. And as a teacher, it is up to you to either discover the way to get through to your individual student or direct them to someone who will. You do a disservice to the both of you if you do not.
Why is it not also the responsibility of the student to bend to you? Well, ideally they would too, but it takes another kind of personality. Fact is, you are a music teacher — I hope — because you love music and you love playing your instrument. Hate to break it to ya, but the same can’t be said for all your students. We are handed instruments as kids and told to play. (See: Eddie Izzard.)
I, for example, love music but hate playing, because I find it unbelievably frustrating to hear the wrong notes come out. Some kids don’t even love music. Some kids love both but are driven by other forces to rebel. Some are perfect and come in and play perfectly –lucky you. But if every kid deserves a fair shot at learning — and if you don’t believe this you aren’t meant for teaching — then you must seek out the Brandenburg in every kid and nourish it.
If a kid that had shown little interest and/or has been troublesome comes in with something that excites them, be it a basic scale or a piece you never assigned, encourage them. Follow them for just a minute. Release the freakin’ butterfly and just see where it goes for a minute. Then use that insight to gently head the kid in the direction he needs to go. If you can’t, give him to another lepidopterist who can better understand this breed of butterfly. (This metaphor is now also over.)
Okay. Go ahead. Rant about all the bad kids you’ve had to teach. Not saying you haven’t suffered some little hellions. But I’ll say it again and if you ask me it’s the truth: as the teacher, the onus is on you.
Here’s another one of my music-in-literature-that-isn’t-about-music discoveries, or should I say rediscovery because I’ve read Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn like eight thousand times. If you haven’t read it, you are dismissed from the human race until this situation is rectified.
Done? Okay, good, you may come retake your place as a citizen. Now cast your mind back to the bit where Smith describes Mr. Morton, the music teacher who comes around to the public schools of Brooklyn in the 1910s once a week…
He drew notes on the blackboard; he drew little legs on them to make them look as though they were running out of the scale. He’s make a flat note look like humpty-dumpty. A sharp note would rate a thin beetlike nose zooming off of it. All the while he’d burst into singing just as spontaneously as a bird. Sometimes his happiness was so overflowing he couldn’t hold it and he’d cut a dance caper to spill some of it out.
He taught them good music without letting them know it was good. He set his own words to the great classics and gave them simple names like “Lullaby” and “Serenade” and “Street Song” and “Song for a Sunshine Day.” Their baby voices shrilled Handel’s “Largo” and they knew it merely by the title “Hymn.” Little boys whistled part of Dvorak’s New World Symphony as they played marbles. When asked the name of the song, they’d reply, “Oh, ‘Going Home.’” They played potsy, humming “The Soldier’s Chorus” from Faust which they called “Glory.”
And now I invite you to think about all the good music teachers you’ve had, both in a school and in private, of your instrument and of music as a whole. The ones that loved music so much they gave it to you like an infection. The ones that didn’t just make you try harder; they made you want to try harder.
Think about them and tell me about them now, because tomorrow I’m going to rant and rave about the bad ones. Oh yes.
Raise your hand if you secretly kinda like listening tests!
No? Just me then?
Oh, come on. It’s like a game! A GAME THAT REQUIRES YOU TO STUDY, hence the “secretly kinda,” but all the same. (This is probably unnecessary, but just in case you don’t know: a listening test is when your professor or what have you gives you a set of pieces to which you must listen, and then for the test he plays a series of very short clips that you must duly identify. The specifics of how many clips and how long they are vary, but my music history professor Dr. Parcell always gave us ten ten-second long clips out of anywhere from eleven the first semester to… I think we topped out at twenty-four.)
My music history teacher had each select of pieces for the semester’s listening test on separate CDs, and I used to slap the whole thing on my iPod and work out to it. This was a good, but not fool-proof, way to study. Take, for example, the very first semester of History of Western Music Part I, which covered Gregorian chants. Okay, seriously now, have you ever tried to differentiate between sections of a high mass with only a ten-second clip? Well, given my audience, maybe you have, so you know: it’s HARD.
There were usually a couple gimmes on a given test: the spoken dialogue from The Beggar’s Opera was a dead giveaway, EIIIIIIINN!!! from Carl Maria von Weber’s The Freeshooter cannot be misheard, I know Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring like the back of my pagan-ritual-hand (left). But some of them were harder, like when we had several different piano sonatas at once. I like piano sonatas, sure, but if the professor decides to pluck a nondescript bit five minutes into the piece it can be a rough one. I once got a clip right only because it sounded minor-y and another girl in my class had mentioned just before the test that a certain piano concerto in a major key had a minor-y sound at one point.
Of course, there are Don’t Panic secrets when you hear a clip and have NO FREAKING CLUE what it is. Narrow it down, Parcell always said. Write down all the pieces you’ve been studying and then go through them. What are you hearing? A string quartet? Well, how many are on your list? If you’re lucky, just the one. If not — well, is it major or minor? Does it sound like one of the composers in question? Alternatively you can try bursting into tears and making your paper too soggy to grade, but I [brag]never got more than one wrong on a given listening test, so hah![/brag]
Whaddya say, Ain’t Barrocos? (I decided I like that one best.) Did/do you share my triumphant fun in the personal little game show that is a listening test? (Ooooh, someone should make a listening test game show!) Or are they the bane of your existence? What’s the roughest clip you’ve ever heard, or given? And what are your tricks for figuring it out when you just don’t know?
Hi! Allow me to tell you a story of my childhood.
When I was in, oh, I think it was fifth grade, my music class took a field trip to see a children’s matinee at a symphony; it might have been the BSO, actually (in which case, please remember that my issue in this tale is not with the musicians. Love ya, BSO!). On the program that day was Copland’s Rodeo, or at least the finale.
Since no one can put together a children’s program without inserting some kind of hook, an artist was brought out before the Rodeo segment. She had a great big easel over which was thrown a big pad of black paper, and assorted chalks. It was announced that, as the orchestra played, this artist would draw what she saw in the music. I distinctly remember thinking: oh, this should be interesting!
It was NOT interesting. It was LIES.
The orchestra played Rodeo, which, if you aren’t aware, is a ballet about cowboys and cowgirls. The artist drew, in various traditional Old West scenes, cowboys and cowgirls. So what you’re telling me, artist lady, is that what YOU see in the music just happens to coincide with the precise plot of the orchestrated ballet? Lies.
I am STILL bitter about this, and here’s why: even as a fifth grader, I was not an idiot. I knew when I was being patronized. And yet somehow, at every children’s concert I attended, I felt like the organizers couldn’t tell the difference between fifth graders and idiots.
I’ll admit that the fact that I was brought up with classical music probably colored my perspective on these matters. I didn’t need actors making up some stupid story to correspond with Beethoven’s sixth to love it, but then I already knew it — maybe others needed the story to hook their interest.
We talked last week about whether and why classical music is dying, and many hit upon the question of how to properly interest younger generations in the genre. If the adults in charge are still talking down to the kids in the audience, I don’t know what good it will do. But then maybe the quality of children’s programming has improved. Or maybe I’ve always been oversensitive and it’s fine the way it is. Somebody educate me!
Today I would like to conduct an informal poll of sorts.
I have really good relative pitch. Once during my college music theory class I was the only person who took down a dictation correctly because I recognized a tricky note as a sharp instead of a whole step. But whoopie for me — perfect pitch is where it’s at. When you can identify a note out of the air without scale context, you’ve got it made, right? If you haven’t got that, well, you’re hardly screwed, but you’ll never be… perfect.
Or is perfect pitch the x factor after all? I ask because of something my mother has said. My brother has perfect pitch, so dictation tests are easy as hell for him — he doesn’t need a base note to work from or even to pay attention to anything but an individual note at a time. And that, says my mother, is precisely the problem with perfect pitch: because he doesn’t need to make the connections between notes to arrive at the correct answer, he has never had to recognize the sinew that holds them together, never had to weigh notes against each other to see how they fall together on a given scale. Being forced to work relatively also forces you to find the thread that runs through a piece; notes are never lonely floaters.
So… what say you, musicians? What say you, music teachers? Does perfect pitch have a crack in its flawless armor after all? Or is this a debatable, even laughable point invented by us relative pitchers (like relief pitchers but with multiple innings) to feel better about ourselves?
It is times like this that I wish I were an elementary school music teacher. This would be the best project EVER. Let’s all move to Japan! OCARINA DESU!
(The rest of the time I am sane.)
At the BSO season opening Gala concert, the music was interspersed with video clips on the BSO OrchKids program, wherein BSO musicians teach children at a local Baltimore school to play musical instruments. I figured this might be a good time to highlight that work with a brief video (if you’re disappointed that this week’s video isn’t rife with hilarity, I have a very special viola joke for Thursday that should right your universe again).
Learn more about OrchKids here.
