Bearer is also a composer who studied with the French composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger. “She was very, very focused on the musician’s mind,” Bearer says. “To study with Boulanger meant that you learned to use those unconscious parts of your mind that respond to music, that dream of music, and you learn to bring them to the conscious state where you could take a pencil and write them down.”
Going through the training with Boulanger, Bearer says, “I can say through personal experience that music does not live in the same part of my brain as my science."
Going through the training with Boulanger, Bearer says, “I can say through personal experience that music does not live in the same part of my brain as my science."
I came across this just after leaving a comment on this post on Julia's Horn Page. She's talking about Jeff Smiley's work (which I most recently posted on here) and says:
As your lips learn to do new things, the things that work better are gradually and unconsciously incorporated into your current embouchure.
Maybe it's my background in the psych field, but I find the astonishing vituperation Jeff's work can bring forth from music educators about as fascinating as the work itself. It's my intuition that it's this opening up to and working with the non-conscious aspects of the mind that's so upsetting. If you're dedicated to reducing the activity of music making to a set of rules and concepts, it seems to me you're setting yourself up to paying more attention to the conscious mind than all the rest of it.
I find the astonishing vituperation Jeff's work can bring forth from music educators about as fascinating as the work itself. It's my intuition that it's this opening up to and working with the non-conscious aspects of the mind that's so upsetting.
ReplyDeleteThat might be part of it, though musicians of all people ought to be aware of the fact that what they do and how they do it cannot easily be reduced to words.
I suspect the greater part is that instrumental pedagogy has a long tradition behind it, and this tradition hasn't particularly been subjected to scientific scrutiny. We apply science to instrument design and manufacture, but are reduced to awestruck and uncritical respect when we come across teachers who say "This is how Farkas told me to do it".
Players consider themselves the inheritors of that tradition, and teachers consider themselves as having the privilege of passing that tradition to the next generation. BE is a decidedly non-traditional approach to the embouchure.
Personally, I'm neutral towards BE. I haven't investigated it, for the simple reason that I've had no particular reason to. I don't teach, and the standard of amateur playing I engage in is such that my technique serves me well as it stands now.
Because I have a skeptical and scientific aspect to my background and education, I'm not prepared to dismiss BE out of hand the way some people do. On the other hand, I also suspect that some of the more extravagent claims made for it are unjustified, and it may be that some of the anatomical explanations are incorrect. It is certainly true that some people have found BE helpful to them.
Jonathan -
ReplyDeleteThe traditions of pedagogy are like the lineage element of Buddhism - can be very helpful or constricting depending on the particular tradition and the mindset of the pedagogue.
The lack of scientific scrutiny mirrors the lack of evidence for music therapy back when I started, but that's starting to come in now. So you're left with doing what you can with what you've got, hoping to do your little part in increasing awareness and maybe helping the researchers formulate questions they can answer with current technology.
What so fascinates me is that rather than taking a dispassionate stance as you've outlined for yourself, some pedagogues seem to go all Spanish Inquisition wanting to root out heresy. That says more about them than BE to me, and I have to will myself not to slip into armchair psychiatry.
I will note, though, that Julia in the post linked above responded to my comment with the word "stubbornness" to describe some pedagogues.
What so fascinates me is that rather than taking a dispassionate stance as you've outlined for yourself, some pedagogues seem to go all Spanish Inquisition wanting to root out heresy.
ReplyDeleteScientists accept that they don't know things, and therefore are devoted to what Richard Feynmann used to call "the pleasure of finding things out".
On the other hand a minority of teachers think in terms of the fact that they know lots, and in particular they know more than their pupils, which is why they are teachers.
For that minority who think this way, some new approach which might undermine some aspect of "received wisdom" can seem awfully threatening - it suggests that they might not know as much as they thought they did! The argument over BE is a perfectly characteristic example of this phenomenon.
Part of the problem of the internet is that it tends to amplify such such loud, hostile and threatened voices. As a result, we quite probably get a distorted idea of how many such people there are.
Another Feynmann fan!
ReplyDeleteJonathan - as a regular reader you probably understand just how important this discussion is for me on all kinds of levels - Thanks.
"On the other hand a minority of teachers think in terms of the fact that they know lots, and in particular they know more than their pupils" - a world of truth in that, and in part it sort of reinforces my idea that they're over concerned with conscious aspects of learning. I think somehow, as you've said, because they've got one area of it all so tightly nailed down, they can't appreciate there are other areas.
I also think they're more than likely natural players and don't have a clue as to how people not good enough to pass an audition are approaching music making.
As an example - for you horn is a second language learned in childhood. In what teaching you've done, do you think you fully appreciate the number and depth of ways novices with no special talent don't "get" how to go about making music in a humanly natural way?
Another thing entirely - that I haven't seen mentioned, that is probably part of it is that the physical outlandishness of the exercises are undignified in that all hints of your social persona are erased in these clown like/ crazy person / facial contortions. Anyone overly blessed with amour propre is going to have issues ;-)
I've done very little teaching at all on the horn, I've just taken an occasional section colleague to one side during orchestral courses we've both been on and offered a bit of help and advice. So I really don't feel qualified to comment on novices "not getting it".
ReplyDeleteCuriously, I have done a good deal more teaching on the piano, particularly of novices. The piano is completely different, you can see what is happening, you can explain why its necessary to have the fingers appropriately curved, and the mechanics of pressing the keys is so obvious that the pupils almost immediately get it.
But in the course of doing that teaching, I did find myself developing ways of getting points across - about good practice, about good hand position, about dynamics and expression I found a range of things that worked for me. But if one approach wasn't working with a particular pupil, I'd back up and approach it from a different direction.
Similar with teaching music theory. An awful lot of pupils find it very hard to get why 6/8 time has 2 beats in a bar. So I learned to turn the question round.
First I would explain simple time signatures, what the top number stands for, what the bottom number stands for (i.e. the number of that kind of note which would fit into a semibreve). gave examples of tunes where the beat was subdivided into three rather than into two.
Then we discussed what sorts of notes can easily be divided into threes, and discussed the relative merits of triplets and dotted notes. I would explain that composers are terribly lazy and don't want to bother with writing triplet signs everywhere. This would reduce younger children into fits of giggles.
Then I would explain that if you have two dotted crotchets in a bar, that ought to be 2-over something. We would look at the possibility of 2 over 2 2/3, and decide that the numbers would be too small to read. Then we would try 2/2.66666666, and decide that just looks silly. Then I would explain that a dotted crotchet is three quavers, and so is 3/8. 2 of them is 2 x 3/8, or 6/8. And they get it! They might forget occasionally, but it doesn't take many repetitions of the question to the get the knowledge secure in their minds - even amongst children of 5 or 6 years old.
You just have to put yourself into the way of thinking of the other person.
Jonathan -
ReplyDelete"But if one approach wasn't working with a particular pupil, I'd back up and approach it from a different direction."
"You just have to put yourself into the way of thinking of the other person."
Both of those points mean paying attention to the student and how they're responding and doing what's needed to keep them engaged. Part of being a music educator is weeding out people, so if people don't get it, it's their fault and they're let go. Educators are usually in the position of not having near enough time for individuals, so working out tailored approaches just isn't in the cards.
One thing that's amazed me about working with the girls is just how quick they are to catch on things, whereas older folks who've been trained up in a particular way seem to have greater difficulty thinking about things on a conceptual level like your time signature discussion.
On another topic - if you'd care to turn your wonderfully analytical mind to explaining what exactly is happening with that involuntary grin you mentioned in your Fringe post, I'd love to read what you have to say. Do you think it's at all connected to flow, or something else entirely?