Friday, October 28, 2005

Humming Along with the Masters

As I lift the lid of my laptop, my fingers hover over the keys, like a pianist at her instrument.  Staring at the blank screen, waiting for words to come to me, I wonder what it would be like to be able to sit down and summon melody out of the air, to compose or perform a complex score.

Classical music is a bit of a mystery to me.  Like any other denizen of the taupe-toned experience that is Starbucks, I can recognize Vivaldi’s Four Seasons half way down the block, and thanks to my father’s enthusiasm for Beethoven, I might be able to spot a phrase from the Pastoral symphony at twenty paces.

But beyond that, it’s all a bit of a blur.  Keys and movements and tempo elude me.  My musical training at school was perfunctory:  When it became clear I wasn’t especially talented, I and my teachers gave up on me.  I recall an afternoon when I was maybe twelve, when the music teacher forced every student to audition in front of the whole class.  Mortified by the prospect, my throat closed up.  The teacher played a note. For one golden moment I believed I might make the choir, then I croaked out a flat, and the iron doors clanged behind me.  I accepted the verdict that I just wasn’t musical and my musical education ceased.

When my students complain about reading philosophy, I know what they mean because of my relation to classical music. My students say: I can get what each line says, but I can’t keep track of where it’s all going.  They understand each word and line as they read them, but they can’t see how each line plays a role in building an argument.  They can’t tell a premise from a conclusion, any more than I can hear the difference between an overture and a finale.  I know that classical music offers an architecture of sound to be understood as a whole, but I just get lost between one room and the next.

It’s a healthy thing for a teacher to be put in the role of student from time to time.  It’s easy to forget what it’s like not to know how to start, not even be able to say what it is you don’t understand.  Learning engages not just the intellect but one’s sense of competence, one’s personal history, and, ultimately, one’s way of being in the world.  So it’s a risky business.

Recently, a friend of ours talked my husband and me into spending an evening studying up on Bach and the Goldberg Variations.  A group of us had bought tickets to a concert by Andras Schiff in Chicago.  Our friend is herself an excellent teacher of science and an avid learner who has lately resumed taking piano lessons.  She suggested that, to get the most out of this concert, we all should do our homework on music theory.  I was a bit apprehensive:  the others included a music professor, a piano teacher, and three people who knew how to follow a score.

But it turned out to be a splendid evening.  Our friend had checked out a lecture series on video from the college library.  The lecturer was an old-fashioned, handwritten notes on canary notepad, kind of a guy.  No group work, no PowerPoint, no clips of the cultural context of Bach’s life, just chalk, talk, and a guy with a piano.  It was great.  I had forgotten the pleasures of being a student: the sense of a field of ideas opening up, a confident guide urging me on to experience things differently.

Between videos, our host plied us with homemade sorbet and wine.  Buzzing with just enough sugar, I started to grasp the lecturer’s chalk diagrams of the 30 variations.  Ah, so I need to listen for patterned triplets of dance, toccata and canon.  So that’s what a canon is!  Half way through the second video, I could hear the French Overture as an opening to something new.  Maybe I was starting to get this stuff at last.

A couple of weeks later, giddy as high-schoolers on a field trip, dressed in our best, we sat in a row of seats high up in Chicago’s Symphony Hall.  An ordinary looking guy walked to the piano.  Schiff was seated, and he began to play, hands crossing the keyboard with impossible precision and dexterity, even playing with the fingers of his left hand threaded between those of his right.  Afterwards, my colleagues sagely discussed Schiff’s performance and compared it to Glenn Gould’s.  I was just happy to have had a few moments when I could hear something beyond one darn note after another, when a larger sense started to emerge for me.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on October 28, 2005
Arts & Entertainment • Education • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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