Paternal Teachers

I saw my old composer friend Dan Worley a good while ago, and he reminded of a conversation we’d had about the word “paternal” applied to composition teachers. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

His use of the word “paternal” in describing a composition teacher had outraged a student of his—I believe because it came too close to “paternalistic,” which has such a negative connotation, as “patronizing” seems to be lurking in there too close-by for comfort.

If we choose instead to speak of “fatherly” teachers, then that will mean (for some) "domineering and controlling", maybe even "abusive and violent." If you choose to speak of “motherly” teachers, then that will mean (for some) "smothering and overly protective" (and for others it might mean "domineering and controlling," maybe even "abusive and violent.")

“Parental” seems like an uncontroversial choice for an adjective to describe our caring older teachers, but why do we want to describe the student-teacher relationship in terms of generational family relationships anyway? The age difference between teachers and their charges often makes brother-sister parallels a stretch, and of course I’ve had students who were older than me too—am I then the son?

I think the answer lies in the operative truth that we all show up for our music lessons with pretty deeply ingrained reaction patterns to authority stemming directly from our relationships with our parents.

I saw another former student recently who wanted to apologize to me for some of his past behavior, explaining that it had more to do with his parents pushing on him as a child than it did to my teaching. I told him that this was par for the course, and that no apology was necessary, because while I could tell he was struggling in the lessons, and I certainly had to try to work with and around his resistances, he at least wasn’t rude. All the rest can be forgiven as normative.

I think it’s inescapable: many of us just need to work out some issues from our early lives that may be related very closely to our reasons for composing and making music in general. These motivations can be very sensitive to the ways in which we relate to authority however it may be expressed, and those sore points definitely come up in composition lessons. Sometimes I think that finding ways to modulate those relationships might be the real content of our study with a teacher, and that all the tips on how to develop craft might be secondary.

I simply don’t see any way for the process of teaching composition or performance to be a merely technical interchange. Feelings and reaction patterns are inherently involved. It may be that one of the main roles of a creative mentor is to help us break free from the way we were parented by offering a similar but safely different and less crucial relationship that is limited to our musical lives.

While its true that many of us could frankly use a little re-parenting, or perhaps a little continued parenting, there are others of us who might really need instead to enter the vast loneliness of ourselves to try to find something that can’t be coaxed forward with a parent, (even a supportive metaphorical one) standing there watching. (As a teacher, allowing this to happen could also be seen as helping to renegotiate an ingrained parental dynamic, of course...)

But once that something been discovered and coaxed out into the open, we could all use some help and support in creating a shape for that vision from a sympathetic and knowledgeable elder. Every one of us does truly live and work and make music in community, in relationship with others, and not solely in the isolation of the smithy of our souls…even if we might sometimes want to tell ourselves otherwise…

Amateur Blessings

My wife teaches piano—this fact is a great blessing on our house. Our home is already blessed by a lot of music, since between the three of us who live here we have two song writers, a classical composer, two violinists, a fiddle player, and two pianists; the list of additional instruments we play goes on to include accordion, tin whistle, banjo, guitar, and bodhran. There also is a great deal of unrestrained singing of all kinds.

So we have no lack of musical joys.

And to cap it all off, most weekday afternoons there are children here for lessons, all between five and eighteen years old, all of whom are growing up with music as a companion.

My wife’s main goal as a teacher is not to turn out future soloists, or formidable technicians, or hot-shots of any kind; her teaching is aimed at helping people who want to make music for the love of it: true amateur musicians. She concentrates on developing a relationship between her students and music, between new musicians and the piano, working toward building a lifetime of love in making music with their own hands. It’s an entirely non-professional endeavor. Yes, she is being paid to teach, but she’s doing it for the love, and she’s passing that love on to her students.

I think that increasing love might be the most important thing that music offers us. I don’t mean that we should make ourselves more desirable or marriageable by being schooled in the finer points of cultured life, as in Elizabethan England. If music does make us more attractive, then it’s a side benefit achieved by making us kinder and more tender. There’s also a huge difference between love and monomania—an obsessive focus on music-making isn’t the same thing as cultivating through music a heart that softens and fills with emotion. Music can bring us into contact with our urge to share, to participate, and to open to those around us. Regularly engaging in music-love can help us learn to let the fire of enthusiasm rise up in us, to follow it into concentration, and then further into the disciplined abandon through which we can burst into sound.

That’s why I feel blessed by all those little ones tromping through my house and interrupting my workdays—it’s the fact that through the practice of music, love is being nurtured in our house, spread like seeds, and grown like a crop.

Sound of Life

I was asked recently "What is the sound of life?" I noticed that the questioner did not say "human life."

One truth is that we live surrounded by countless non-human presences and the sounds of their beingness.
(please read The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram.)

I've often wondered if bees can hear the sound of their own buzzing–the constant thrum and disturbance that accompanies their activity. It makes me wonder if we have our own buzzing noise imprint that accompanies our going and our doing in the same way–a disruption of the sonic world we might be too engaged in pollen-seeking to notice, to perceive. At least, there are the vast buzzing sounds of the technology we've extended ourselves into. But below that there are the patterns of energy in space that we make with our activities (doing email, rushing to appointments, driving). The flashes of electrical energy in our brains are also similar energy-traces, of course, and by acting on them and perceiving, we both create and are affected by their shapes and vibrations in the world. We make patterns of energy in space just by being–and of course, that is exactly what sounds are: patterns of energy in space.

If we can still ourselves, stop croaking our names like Emily Dickenson's famous frogs, and quiet our external buzzing, we can begin to attend to the many other kinds of non-human being-energy around us: the foxes in the woods over there, the deer and hawks and the milkweed–they all have their pattern of energy in space. Even each place along the earth has its own rate of vibration, resonance, and being-texture.

If we can still ourselves, and quiet our pollen-gathering buzz, we can become attuned to the sound of life and being of the natural world in our own place, that which we are part of. And one of the oldest human activities is to fill ourselves with the wonder of that experience, then open our mouths and hearts and bravely sing our own song.

administrative gardening

I think about my work as an administrator and teacher in a University School of Music–(fostering community, building trusting relationships, continuing ideals)–as something akin to an organic gardener or farmer's relationship to the land. The short-term gains to be had from treating the land or the institution as a set of resources from which to draw personal gain (the equivalent of jacking the whole operation up on chemical fertilizers) are outweighed by the long-term costs of such exploitative extraction. Instead of taking everything we can get from the soil of our institution(s), we need to work to enrich the land, build up the layers of fertile topsoil with care, attention, kindness, generosity, and attention. With love and commitment, even. I'm not sure about a metaphor that matches hard caring work in a University with compost, but there it is. Stewardship and selflessness enrich community and continue institutions. Selfishness, elitism, hierarchy, prestige-mongering, and grandstanding destroy them.