Klarinet Archive - Posting 000458.txt from 1998/10

From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
Subj: [kl] Models
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1998 02:08:00 -0400

Among other telling observations, Tony Pay said

>... 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 feel this strongly with my beginning piano students. The closest thing to
what I consider music, with which they are acquainted, is songs from Walt
Disney movies. They lack models. That means they have to learn everything,
not merely how to play an instrument and read music, but what music is. (If
that sounds snobbish and elitist, perhaps it is. I am impenitent.)

>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.

I think I've felt that "reverence," too, and been a little put off by it.
But one has to allow for the high proportion of students on the list, for
whom it may be appropriate at this point to feel a certain amount of
reverence. In music, as in writing, which is my other craft, one begins by
acquiring idols whom one imitates slavishly. Eventually, one sees their
flaws and limitations, puts them away in the souvenir drawer and begins
slowly to become one's own person.

On balance, this is the best of the seven or eight mail lists to which I
subscribe. A number of its members are well-informed on almost anything
relating to clarinets and the clarinet literature, and are an invaluable
resource. Some are experienced teachers, and I have learned a lot from
them. Perhaps klarinet-l's greatest virtue, though, is that, by and large,
its subscribers know how to disagree like civilized persons--and when some
immature newbie calls someone an ass, for instance, several people tell him
to knock it off and grow up.

If you read, as I do, several of the mail lists for journalists, you would
be bored and irritated to the point of nausea by the shallow, pointless
dialog and venomous and ad-hominem attacks, usually on topics that are way
off-topic. Klarinet, by comparison, is a paradigm of polite and literate
discourse. If there's ever been a real, raging flame war here, I don't
recall it in the year I've been around.

Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.net>

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