Episode the First
Admittedly, I am pretty young in my career as a teacher of young composers. Nevertheless, call it the time of year—the wistful (read: seasonally-affectively-compelled) reflection on the past year and past years—I find myself assembling a collage of faces and personalities before my mind’s eye. I scroll through the memories of those faces from the recent and distant past—faces of young composers that passed in and through my studio at some point in their formation as artists, adults, and citizens who will hopefully spend their mature years voting, picking up after themselves, and yielding the right-of-way. Each face conjures an impression replete with accompanying reminiscences. Oddly, the depth of recollection pertaining to each former student has nothing to do with any innate talent they had or didn’t. Perhaps this supplies further evidence that teaching composition is ultimately about more than forming a complete artist, but rather a guided exploration of one’s most intimate creative self, writing music being more than about music. One might ask: “what could be more intimate than creativity?” Alas, that is a topic for another day. No, at this writing I embark on the first of several intermittent entries recalling students I have had (names will be changed to protect the unsuspecting) and my impressions of our time together, and maybe, the broader archetypes they represent as composers taking their first steps toward Parnassus.
My first job was a visiting appointment at a small regional campus in a large state school system. The student population in the music program (numbering about 50) was an unusual mix of local kids with few other options, extremely bright kids bemused with the ironies of conforming to the requirements of larger institutions, the financially strapped, and older students with sordid and sometimes tragic pasts attempting to re-script a new future. Juxtaposed with this mix was a group of largely international students studying piano in a widely renowned studio—the true standout program on our campus. Yet, the beauty of it was that ALL the students, regardless of background or talent, banded together without stratification, bound to each other like one compact island in a stream. At the core of this unity must have been the shared sense that each was a stranger in a strange land—whether that “strangeness” was a function of language and culture, or that America’s institutional culture could not resonate with hearts and minds tuned to a different key replete with unknowable histories and indiscernible memories. Here we all were together, teachers and students of art music, an alien discipline indeed. We refused to hear the paternal voices warning us that making music was not a useful way to contribute to society. Not once did I receive a visit from a suspicious parent, wondering what their child would be able to “do” with a music degree, much less a degree in composition. No, none of us were predisposed toward any kind of ‘usefulness.’ Neither were we a haven for society’s exiles, marooned to the arts building as a last resort. We rather embodied the essence of desperation for substantive conciliation with the forlorn choreography of modern life, music becoming a means to that end for so many.
There is no question that the world needs its major conservatories and universities to provide the technical training for the gifted and facile. One cannot underestimate the wonder of a perfectly wrought phrase propelled by efficient voice-leading and counterpoint. Those of us who love this art form demand the rigorous construction and articulation in our music, and I hope it will ever be so. At the same time, let that not thwart the nourishment of the spiritually hungry as they study the placing of one note beyond the other. If to such an individual construction is ultimately artifice in the erection of sonic Towers of Babel, then let them come and revel anyway in the experience of laying the bricks—as workers in the discerning throes of compositional labor, ever exploring and unearthing. This is a work for laborers irrespective of talent, indicative only of an ethic to live more deeply, more profoundly. When the air clears and the last note decays into oblivion, these are the tunes I will be humming, the lingering alien anthems discerning the gulf of experience between those who have souls that hunger, and those who don’t. Those are the portraits I will remember most.
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