Klarinet Archive - Posting 000241.txt from 2002/06

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] 'Pushing' and 'leading'
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 18:08:03 -0400

It's probably true, as Dee Hays writes, that,
>Afterall you don't need to know what an augmented 7th
>chord is if you just want to play in a community band.

Yes, but learning that sort of thing isn't a waste of time, whether or not
someone goes on to earn money with it. IMHO, nearly any musician can benefit
from the solid grounding in theory and basic clarinet repertory that a
professional needs. But *withholding* that information and repertory
*guarantees* that a student won't go far.

Dee wrote,
>The budding professional should be pushed as hard
>and far as the teacher can take them. [snip] The person
>who is aiming at lifetime amateur or indicates that they
>have no interest in being a professional should be
>approached from the joy of music outlook.

That sounds reasonable (I won't take the cheap shot, because I know you never
meant to imply that the aspiring professional *shouldn't* "be approached from
the joy of music outlook"), but at what point does the student or the teacher
*know* who's the budding professional and who's the lifetime amateur? Who
makes the decision and why and when?

The main problem I have with sending students down a clearly defined amateur
track or professional track from an early age is that once the kids are
labelled, it takes them about eight seconds of comparing notes to figure out
that the winners get Mozart while the losers get something with a
juvenile-sounding title that translates to Muzak for Dummies. Kids
instinctively know garbage when they smell it. They're not going to open
wide and slurp it all down. So the amateur-track kids quickly get bored and
discouraged by the crap they have to play while the teacher accuses them of
laziness for not practicing said crap. Meanwhile, almost none of the
pro-track students will end up as professionals. And nearly everybody's
dissatisfied; and for every happy amateur on the klarinet list who somehow
avoided this trap, probably a hundred or a thousand other ex-students don't
play any more. If they think about music at all these days, they go
schlepping around, whining theme and variations on, "I coulda been a
contender, but I'm a bum."

If the kids who end up as amateurs will never need to recognize an augmented
7th, or will never play a concerto with an orchestra, or will never play it
particularly well, so what? Is it a waste of time for someone to learn, say,
the Mozart concerto if he or she will never play it with an orchestra? I
think not! With the piano reduction, or even with no accompaniment at all,
it's still the kind of music that's rewarding to practice, the kind that
makes all the hard work worthwhile, the kind that can inspire the occasional
late-blooming student to achieve far above the level that a complacent,
pigeon-holing teacher might have thought possible; and it's the kind of music
that makes students of any level want to come back for more.

I say, encourage all the kids who *want* to learn to achieve as much as they
can. And be careful about assuming you know what a child's ambitions might
be. Kids don't always tell their teachers all their dreams. It's easier to
deny a dream than to defend it against adult skepticism.

By the way, in school, Albert Einstein wasn't much good at math. He didn't
play the violin well enough to become a pro musician, either, but music made
him think about intervals and wave lengths and things like that. He began
working out his theory of relativity during spare time from his job as a
patent clerk. Aleksandr Borodin, a professional scientist, was an amateur
musician. Charles Ives, who owned an insurance company, wrote his music in
his spare time.

Lelia

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