At 3:56 PM -0400 9/28/12, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > >It strikes me that the 'teacher' is the plethora of recordings -- a kind of >crowdsourcing of learning. A teacher can do a personal critique, but what is >wrong with a vast array of possibilities for any student? I certainly >encourage performers of my music to listen to previous performances as well as >demo versions. Learning every piece from scratch doesn't seem at all practical >today. > >Dennis
This conclusion assumes that notation is music, and that it includes enough to guide an informed performance. This is no more (or less) true than the idea that the script of a play contains the play. The only danger in using existing models (recordings) to inform the learning process is if the student only uses one recording, or if the student is an extraordinarily gifted mimic. The idea of learning music without using examples of other people's performances is as small minded and intellectually flawed as mindless mimicry would be. Where, indeed, do we imagine interpretive ideas come from? Musical personalities arise as an accrual of our listening experiences. How can anyone suggest not listening as a protection from external influence when those influences are the very building blocks of our own personalities? There must be a balance here, and a history of listening precedes the formation of any coherent performance. Chuck Chuck Israels Now THIS has suddenly turned very interesting, and thanks to both Dennis and Chuck for their thoughts. Dennis seems to suggest that "crowdsourcing" is a legitimate source of learning, even in the absence of the guidance of a more experienced teacher. Chuck points out that learning interpretation is much more than imitation. Both are, of course, largely correct. As you may have noticed, I tend to take an historical view of these things. For millennia music was learned by ear, passed down by ear, and ultimately lost to history, and for a very long time the only notations available were no better than mnemonics to remind someone of melodies that had already been learned by ear and committed to memory. Guido d'Arezzo quantified this for us in the early 11th century C.E. One of his monkly duties was to teach the choirboys under his care all the chants of the Mass and Office they needed to know, by ear, and he tells us that it took him about 10 years to do so (a typical period for an apprenticeship). Because he developed the first consistently and accurately readable notation for chant we call him a music theorist, but actually he did so as a music educator, and tells us that it cut down his teaching time from 10 years to only 2 or even a single year once his students learned to read from the page. This was clearly a very practical educational goal. But he sold the idea to his Pope on a very different basis, pointing out that just as the liturgy could be standardized throughout Christiandom through written texts, so the chants of the church could be standardized once they could be written down and read at sight. Neither approach by itself has ever been completely sufficient. The notation is NOT the music, just a guide to help reproduce the music, sometimes relatively exact, other times relatively inexact. And that's the key. The introduction of notation did not do away with either learning by ear, improvisation, or the passing down of musical traditions from one generation to the next. But what it DID do was permit the preservation of music, SUBJECT TO INTERPRETATION, past the lifetime of the composer or even of the last living person to have learned it by ear. Nineteenth century conservatories taught strict adherence to the page, putting the composer in sole charge of the music for the first time in history rather than sharing that responsibility with the performer. Some kinds of 20th and now 21st century music have reversed that trend and returned improvisatory or aeleatoric elements to favor. And unfortunately very little improv is taught in either schools or conservatories today, outside of the limits of jazz (and church organists!). There may well be a place in SOME musical styles for "crowdsourcing" (as in "let's vote on the notes"), but I prefer to keep a lot more control over what I write while freely admitting that someone else may very well be better at interpreting what I've written than I am. But the problem with learning music strictly by ear (which every teenager does easily and automatically every time a new chart makes the "Hot Hundred"!) teaches that there is one and only one way to interpret ANY piece of music, and that simply isn't going to be true as long as music remains both a creative and a re-creative art. Thanks again for the discussion! John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music School of Performing Arts & Cinema College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences 290 College Ave., Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[email protected]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "Machen Sie es, wie Sie wollen, machen Sie es nur schön." (Do it as you like, just make it beautiful!) --Johannes Brahms _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
