I haven't written a new blog post in nearly a year, and part of the reason for this was the chilling effect
of a job interview. About a year ago I was being considered, along
with over 100 other candidates, for a teaching position at a
university with a fine, though smallish music department. In the end
I was not offered the position, which spared me having to make a
difficult decision (the position was thousands of miles away from
where I live and work now). Fortunately for my professional growth, I
was able, some months afterward, to get some feedback about my
application. As this was a university and not a conservatory, the
search committee wanted to insure that their choice could not only
teach piano (where my qualifications are not in question) but also
academic classes, like music history or theory. Although I have
taught a number of academic courses (Piano Literature and Piano
Pedagogy among them) at a college level, I do not have a doctorate
that officially would certify my knowledge of academic subjects.
Some members of the search committee
apparently looked at this blog and felt that it did not exhibit the
level of academic rigor that they were looking for. But I am assuming
that no one reading a blog is expecting (or wanting) an academic
thesis! I certainly don't think of this anything other than an
opportunity to voice my opinions and to hear others'. But as you can
imagine, I have felt a bit paralyzed by the fact that someone – a
potential future employer – might be reading this blog and finding
examples of lapsed scholarship and statements made without citing
sources.
It leads me to a subject that has been
on my mind recently. Do music schools stifle creativity? This would
certainly be a problem if true, and I think the general public tends
to assume that arts schooling fosters and encourages creativity. But
I think that for better or for worse, music schools (and perhaps
other institutions about which I am less qualified to express my
opinion) can be bastions of tradition – both a positive and a
negative.
For example, I recently had two
troubling conversations with students in a course I teach at Boston
Conservatory. In one of the Piano Literature courses I teach, we have
been discussing Mozart. During a recent class, I talked about the
Fantasy in D minor (K. 397), which lacks a proper ending by Mozart –
traditionally performers play eight measures written by someone named
August Muller, though these were for many years thought to be by
Mozart. The ending has always seemed unsatisfying to me, at least,
and while most people play this ending, Mitsuko Uchida, one of the
great Mozart interpreters of our time, plays a different ending using
some of Mozart's music from earlier in the piece. (For a very
interesting – and academically sound – treatment of this subject,
read this DMA thesis by student at Indiana named Ephraim Hackmey:https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/14414/Hackmey_Ephraim_2012.pdf?sequence=1)
The troubling thing to me was a
question a student asked me in class: “But will I get in trouble if
I play a different ending than the traditional one?” Mind you, this
“traditional” ending is not written by Mozart, and really sounds
abrupt and unsatisfying. But this student was concerned with what a
jury of pianists – at a competition, at a music school entrance
audition, at end-of-the-semester exams – would say if he played a a
different ending. And truthfully, I understood why he was concerned.
While individual musicians can be open-minded and interested in new
ideas, it often happens that when you put a bunch of them together,
the conservative ideas win out. There are right ways and wrong ways
to do things, or so it seems when you get a group of pianists
together.
In a previous meeting of the same
class, we listened to a number of cadenzas to Mozart Concertos
written by other composers. (Mozart wrote cadenzas for the majority
of his piano concertos, even writing multiple versions for some, but
several of the most frequently played, such as the D minor, K.466, C
major, K.467, and C minor K. 491, require performers to find or
compose one on their own). For the D minor Concerto it is most usual
to play Beethoven's cadenza, but we listened to cadenzas to a
variety of Mozart Concertos by Brahms, Alkan, Dinu Lipatti, Fazil
Say, and others. I have not heard it but I believe there is a cadenza
by Phillip Glass, which would be fascinating to hear. As a college
student I wrote my own cadenza to the D minor Concerto, but it was
definitely a student work and not quite good enough for my
professional use nowadays. Still, it was a good exercise (and I did
play it once as soloist with a student orchestra at Harvard when I
was a sophomore).
After class, having discussed the
myriad options for cadenzas, a student asked me which cadenzas were
“permissible” for use at a competition. The official answer, of
course, is that any cadenza is fine – but this student and I both
understood, sadly, that the unofficial answer is that a competition
jury will not always look kindly on an off-the-wall cadenza. Yet a
concert audience might enjoy hearing something fresh and novel. In
that way, the competition jury is not in sync with the kind of
creativity or out-of-the-box thinking that is desirable in the “real
world” of concerts. And it is troubling to think that while
audiences crave and appreciate creativity (understandably), neither
competitions nor music school entrance committees are always open to
it.
There is, of course, a difference
between being creative in a meaningful way, and just being
“different” for the sake of being different. There is, for
example, a male musician I have heard of who makes a career of
playing relatively standard repertoire, but who dresses in women's
clothing and wears his hair in a colored mohawk. I'm not sure how
this aids or serves the music of Beethoven or Brahms more than
wearing a tuxedo would.
I wonder whether these tendencies to be
concerned with what are the “right” cadenzas for Mozart are also
a function of the fact that we performers have become more and more
divorced from the compositional process. Long ago, performers were
composers and composers were performers. That is still generally the
case in rock or jazz. But in classical music we have become
specialists to a large degree. The performers job consists, in part,
of accurately recreating music that someone else has written, and we
engage in this process aided by an ever-increasing awareness of
historical performance practice and the way earlier performers have
played the same music on recordings. Of course any performer knows
that there is a great deal left to us to interpret. Nevertheless, I
think the preoccupation with being “correct” in our performances
can cause us to miss spontaneity, spark, and excitement. It is no
wonder that an audience can be bored by an orchestra that has spent a
very limited amount of expensive rehearsal time primarily on insuring
that the ensemble is together and in tune, and that the balance is
good – but having no time left over to take risks, to try new and
unexpected things. This is partially a result of finite money to pay
for rehearsals, but I wonder if it isn't also part of a reluctance by
classical musicians in the year 2013 to do something that might be
considered “wrong.”
Please share your ideas and thoughts on
this this subject. I'd love to hear from you!
