At 08:00 AM 6/22/02 -0700, Linda Worsley wrote: >So here's my question: (at last) Faced with this daunting task, what >would you do?
I've been following this for a few days, because I had a student exactly like this -- very successful in another field (law), motivated, self-starter, etc -- with a great ear, ability to play anything he's heard, and able to write in the styles he loves (mostly 19th century). I tried the traditional routes as you did. He was insistent on doing it his way, and did not understand scoring. He had taught himself entirely using Cakewalk, and could read piano roll style notation (so well that *I* had to learn how to read it). I found a few things that were keys to his lock: 1. I could never give him traditional notation and pretend it was logical. I had to admit that it was only traditional, and like other fields (his), had grown out of a shared body of knowledge. His biggest issue with traditional notation was that it was not spaced correctly (vertically). It is not spaced correctly, but we all get used to accidentals, even though we know they misrepresent the actual position. Piano roll notation doesn't, and so the squashed, irregular nature of notation made him angry. He also found the same with rhythmic notation -- it wasn't ever properly descriptive of the actual timeline. Again, he was right. Also, traditional notation does not include a true timeline of expressions; this was perhaps the most confounding. Where was the notation to indicate precisely how tempo changed? He could do it in Cakewalk -- why not in notation? So the admission (to him, the lawyer) of the illogical and sloppy nature of standard notation was important ... all psychological, but crucial. 2. He had to understand that his decision was to be a composer for people or a composer for electronic devices (sometimes both, but he had to choose one or the other for a given piece). I assured him both were valid, but he had to make the decision. And I gave him a month to think about it -- no lessons, nothing. It wasn't any fun to foresake the income, but it was necessary for him to understand that if he was to go ahead with instruction, he would have to accept as an article of faith that I knew something about both, and he know something about only one. He decided to learn to write for 'real people'. He had to sing his stuff line by line (that was a lesson in itself), and we recorded overdubs so he could feel what singers would struggle with. 3. We worked on what he had already created, and I presented options, always options (exhausting!). We reworked his thick stuff for string quartet. We were still in piano roll notation, as he was fluent in that, and we used notation as a separate learning track. To have him notate his complicated pieces was demeaning. So we worked on small things, new things, in notation. This was *composition* study, so it was supposedly the most important part of his learning. But he could never, ever be humiliated by notational traditions, and his composition had to leap out of what he had done. Tricky. And he rejected *all* textbooks. It had to be one-on-one. That was his style, all personal. (It's also why I had to learn to read piano roll notation -- he expected me to be up to *his* standards in all respects.) 4. We talked over and over about what it meant to work with real people. That meant having him try to work with players, which he found extraordinarily frustrating. He begrudgingly came to understand that player and conductors who didn't want to do his material would do it badly, and he needed to offer a greater reward than payment. That was tough for a guy used to having his own way. So he worked for two years, and ultimately learned enough to work on his own (that's all he wanted) and be able to hand his material to real players. I learned a great deal from teaching him -- most of all that I had to meet his standards before he would respect my instruction. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
