I'm getting ready for another clinic trip in just a few weeks, this time to visit some great high school orchestras in the Houston area. While there, I will undoubtedly work with outstanding student musicians performing professional level repertoire at a high level. And as always, I will encounter other students diligently working on intermediate-level repertoire.
I find that some music teachers may tend to blush or demure when they talk about this repertoire. Have you seen this? Have you maybe participated yourself? Casually joking about the lack of value, or more sincerely trying to express humility about a "grade 2" work for young musicians. I know I have!
I myself do this with the levels of repertoire I more frequently work with, when talking with the conductors who I view as working with more sophisticated repertoire than I do. Seeing it in myself helps me see two things:
It’s an understandable impulse.
It’s possible to feel this way, regardless of the innate musical value of the repertoire.
And we should all collectively knock it off.
But how to stop it?
So long as the repertoire we select is (1) musically rewarding (2) level-appropriate for our students, we need to appreciate the deep inherent value of that music in every interaction we have with our students and the community we serve with our performances.
I think the tacit assumption runs something like this: "simpler repertoire is not as musically interesting and there is not much to do besides teach notes and rhythms."
I disagree. I think that our calling as musicians and music teachers requires us to do two things:
Use cognitive empathy to perspective-take: imagine what it's like to be a young mind who is learning not just this music, but learning this music for the very first time.
Use our musical skills, imagination, and diligent preparation to find a narrative - a Big Story of the music, for our students to grab hold of and believe in.
Simon Sinek's hit book Start with Why emphasizes the persuasive power of purpose. Many teachers use competition and gamification to create a sense of purpose. Many teachers do fantastic work by developing a larger narrative around character skills like listening, espirit de corps, teamwork, hard work, and other transferable skills outside the orchestra.
But there is at least one more extremely valuable way to build a shared sense of purpose, and that's through the achievement of musical goals derived directly from the music!
Even the most simple and repetitive pieces, if they are good pieces of music, have a story that the composer is trying to tell. Our job is to find the story and teach our students to tell it.
Any time you listen to a practitioner write to other practitioners, there is the risk of virtue-signaling. I don't make any claims that I'm personally gifted at finding and telling the big story. But for better or worse, I do start from the belief that it's important to try.
I don't think it is through a lack of musical knowledge or skill on the part of teachers. Nor do I think it has to do with a lack of imagination. (Lack of adequate time in a hectic school environment, on the other hand, absolutely!)
But to those who may not be in the habit of developing a story in their music-making, I think that it is often the curse of expertise. We actually know too much, and while knowledge is power, it's also an occasional liability in teaching. We know so much about more sophisticated repertoire, that it sometimes becomes harder to appreciate and vibrate with music written for less experienced musicians. We were told for years to go visit the local orchestra and be inspired by the warmth, the finesse, the nuance, and the intricacies of Brahms, Schumann, and Debussy. And while so much of that can be transferred back into our classrooms, there is also a risk that when returning home, our students' repertoire can appear to us to be dull and even opaque to us.
I'm currently finishing Jenny Odell's 2019 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The title may obscure one of the book's central aims: to cultivate and secure our attention from the forces of distraction. She describes encounters with art in film, poetry, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Oakland Rose Garden as she makes a case for aesthetic encounter as a balm for life in our distracted world. Describing a visit to the SF Museum of Modern Art, she writes:
Recently this sort of encounter actually stopped me in my tracks. Killing time before a meeting with someone at SFMOMA, I was wandering through the different floors and ended up in the exhibition Approaching American Abstraction. At some point I turned a corner and saw Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Green Black Red, which is exactly what it sounds like: four separate panels of one color each, about the size of myself. At first, I wrote this off as quickly as anyone might, not thinking it was “about” anything other than abstraction (whatever that might mean). But when I got closer to the first panel, I was completely caught off guard by a physical sensation. Although the covering was consistent and flat, the color blue was not stable: it vibrated and seemed to push and pull my vision in different directions. For lack of a better description, the painting seemed active.
I can’t stress enough that this was a bodily feeling...I realized I needed to look at every single panel, spending the same amount of time on each one, since each color vibrated differently, or rather, my perception of the color did. Strange as it sounds to call a flat, monochromatic painting a “time-based medium,” there was actually something to find out in each one—or rather, between me and each one—and the longer time I spent, the more I found out. Somewhat sheepishly, I thought about how someone across the room, too far away to understand, would see me: a person matter-of-factly staring at one after another of panels with “nothing” on them.
These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long.
Note that she is dealing with what first appear as undifferentiated stationary blocks of four basic colors. If anything could ever become inert and stagnant in the mind, it would have to be a giant monochromatic panel. And yet, Odell is deeply affected, or rather, the work deeply moved (vibrated) her.
To me, there is a valuable lesson in this book for musicians and teachers of all stripes:
When we give the gift of "unmixed attention" to our students and the musical journey we've chosen to take them on, suddenly, the room can come alive with meaning and purpose. Suddenly, it matters that, in the mind of a young violist, I really need to move my elbow to successfully make the low F♯, or that I need to make sure to imagine the pitch, set my embouchure, breathe, and come in on top of the beat for a young French horn player. These technical details are critical to good teaching but they have very little to offer our students if they do not ladder up to some type of larger purpose.
The largest purposes involve community and character. But the very large everyday purposes must derive from the music in front of our students.
Expertise can cause two opposing tendencies in grade 2 literature:
1. The technical details of the music can become totally transparent - I can effortlessly supply needed advice to every level of musician.
2. The musical meaning can become totally opaque: this music is so easy relative to my own skill that it's hard to see its inherent value.
I hope I have convinced you that we have to dig deep in our score preparations in order to find the story in order to help give students a why - in order to turn the opaque into the transparent. I hope I have shown how our expertise actually works against us in certain cases.
What I haven’t even begun to do is show how I try to get at the story the music has for us, and how I try to do that with even relatively “simple”-seeming music for young students. That will have to wait for a followup!