Klarinet Archive - Posting 000423.txt from 2003/08

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] The Lure of Certainty
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 16:57:01 -0400

Tony Pay wrote,

>Here's an analogy. Years ago, we used in England
>to call the blood blister that you sometimes get by
>nipping your finger, a "black man's pinch". This
>terminology was learnt and used in all innocence, and
>the notion that it might be offensive was met initially
>with incredulity by almost everyone. Yet now, we
>see the point.
>
>I suggest that the idea that there are 'great' teachers who
>have the power to insist on absolute criteria irrespective
>of people's physical attributes is likewise an idea whose
>time has passed.

I agree, although in practice, I find that I have to discipline myself to
*listen* to those people anyway, and to learn what I can from them, even
when their old-fashioned, autocratic attitude is off-putting. The "great
pedagogue" pose was more acceptable and much more common in the 1950s and
1960s than it is today. As a child and young adult, I studied (not
clarinet, but other subjects) with several teachers of that kind. My
instinct was to dislike unreasonable people who pushed me around, to rebel
against them, and to push back in whatever ways would annoy them the most.
I would do the exact opposite of whatever the autocrat ordered me to do,
sometimes for no better reason than just to *show him,* or (in the case of
the sixth grade teacher who gave my friend Janis and me a D on a play we'd
written, because we gave ourselves male roles, and then gave me a D in
Handwriting because I omitted serifs) *her*. I did have considerable fear
of authority, and so, in a truly threatening situation (more threatening
than, say, fear of getting a D in Handwriting...), I would rebel by
imitating the Good Soldier of the Czech fable: pretend to meekly obey while
subverting the senseless instructions.

The sixth grade teacher was a wacko, of course. Deep down, surely she must
have known that serifs don't much matter. People like that are control
freaks. What she really cared about was not serifs, but conformity and
blind obedience. She and Harry Potter's Professor Umbridge would have
understood one another perfectly (although two people like that can't
coexist peacefully: one of them would have murdered the other). I can't
say that I missed learning anything of value from Miss ("Mad Hatter")
Hatton, except, of course, some lessons in how to appraise and subvert a
destructive martinet. But often, in other classrooms, my automatic,
unthinking rebellion was a form of autocratic attitude or control
freakishness, too, and I had to unlearn it.

The devil is that sometimes somebody who's cracked on a subject is *right*
about it, or at least right about some aspects of the subject. Banish the
cranks to outer darkness and a lot of valuable insights would disappear
with them. A lot of sane, normal people have little areas of crankishness,
and sometimes exploring those areas illuminates a subject in wonderful
ways. My sane, normal piano teacher, for instance, would not assign me any
Baroque music, although I desperately wanted to play Bach, because playing
Bach on a piano was *wrong* and I had no harpsichord -- but I'm glad I
stuck with his lessons throughout my late childhood and teens (and played
Bach in private despite him), because he was a prodigious teacher of music
history and music theory who eagerly taught me where to go to find out
more. I'm not saying he was the only one who ever could have taught me
those things, but he was *there* at the right time for me to learn that
material, when nobody else was teaching it to me. I've also got him to
thank for a keyboard technique that allowed me to practice many hours at a
time for many years, without ever damaging my tendons. If I'd quit his
lessons to study with his jealous rival who lured many of his rebellious or
outcast pupils, I probably would have ended up crippled, like most of her
students, who played brilliantly and fearlessly in public but developed
carpal tunnel syndrome one after another. My teacher's attitude about Bach
and a lot of other things annoyed me, and I rejected many of his opinions
then and still reject them, but they were powerless to *damage* me.

I think that maybe the most important thing I learned in too many years of
school was to make up my mind to learn something from everybody. Naturally
I would love always to have the teachers that suit me best in the world,
but the ideal is not always available (or affordable). If I go away from a
situation convinced that the teacher had nothing to offer and that I've
learned nothing, then I, not the teacher, failed.

Lelia Loban
E-mail: lelialoban@-----.net
Web site (original music scores as audio or print-out):
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban

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