Klarinet Archive - Posting 000447.txt from 1998/10

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: RE: [kl] 1234/2341
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 15:51:39 -0400

On Sat, 10 Oct 1998 13:41:51, hickling@-----.Net said:

[snip of many wise words]

> But seriously, folks, all the best teachers I've had, and I believe
> all of the very best anywhere, teach with an instrument in their
> hands, or at a keyboard. They have to. I believe there is no way that
> discussion alone, mere talking, can teach someone to be an expert
> performer, once the beginner level is passed.

This is absolutely true.

But notice: one of the things that is also true is that how to play
music is an open secret. They play for you! All you have to do, to
emulate a wonderful player, is to do *what they do*. And actually, I'd
say that until a student understands that, no amount of teaching, even
with an instrument in your hands, is any help. In a way, nothing can
teach a student to be an expert performer. They need to do it for
themselves.

The difficulty students find is to capture for themselves in a useful
way *what they do*.

What we may need to engage with is what turns our ability to hear and
appreciate the expertise of a wonderful player into the related but
different ability to use that hearing in order to improve our own
playing.

I have been putting forward here an abstract characterisation of the
difference between one way of looking at phrasing and another. Now, I
happen to believe that the point of view I have been urging is useful,
and I shall go on urging it (I have some more things to say about it)
for a bit longer -- until I need to go out and work for my living. But
even if someone here doesn't agree with me, I am hoping to have made the
choice involved more real for them, so that they may understand more
clearly what a player they hear in the future is doing, or is not doing.

Because until you have a sufficiently rich set of models, you can't hear
what someone is doing. And until you can hear what they are doing, you
can't do it, or not do it.

I don't really know whether this is the right community for this
discussion. There is a sort of *reverence* here that I find disturbing.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE
tel/fax 01865 553339

... You are only young once, but you can be immature forever.

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