My Take on Modern Musical Education

It was a bright, burning day in Florida. In fact, it was the second day of my long anticipated trip to Naples. I was visiting a private school at that time, and was given a schedule on the first day, however, I resolved to disregard it because I felt that it restricted me from attending all of the interesting classes the school has to offer. Thus, on the second day, I found myself heading straight for the administration office asking for the complete course schedule for the day. After quite a bit of pondering, I narrowed down my list of classes I wanted to attend that day down to seven, and left the office satisfied. One of those courses was Orchestra. I was not quite sure what to expect. I studied piano and music theory in the Central Conservatory of Music in China as a beginner for 2 years, then moved to Thailand where I was introduced to the magical, metallic vibrato of the flute. Then, just a year ago, having aced the highest possible non-professional exam for piano, I familiarised myself quickly with the violin. I had no idea what the average skill level was in this school, but I had seen their pictures online, and they seemed to have a strong music program.

The music classrooms were on the top floor of the library building, separated by a few hundred meters from the rest of the school. As I set off towards the building, there was no protection from the blazing light that was hurled at me from high above and almost seemed to physically push me flat into the white hot cement. I walked as fast as I can through the deserted grounds and ducked gratefully into the air conditioned library. A slow elevator ride took me to the top floor, and I came out onto a corridor built around a series of music classrooms arranged to form a hexagon. The floor was covered with a blue carpet, and the bright light coming in from the glass panes in the slanted ceiling threw bright, irregular spots of light onto the carpet and the walls. It was quiet. There were railings on one side of the corridor, peering out onto the lower levels of the library. The place smelled very familiar: indeed, all music practice rooms smell the same, no matter what country you are in. My ears suddenly perked up when I heard an out of tune A string being plucked in a classroom at the far end of the corridor, and I strode purposefully towards the heavy looking wooden double door. I pushed the door harder than I should have, and it bursted open and swung inwards until it hit the stopper on the floor with a rather loud thud. I did not break my stride as I took in the surrounding: three violins, five cellos, five basses, and one double bass. A grand piano in the back of the room, and an Asian female teacher looking at me with mild surprise. I sat down on the piano and played an A that pierced through the silence of the room, and said:

Someone was flat.

The 1st violin was the first to recover, and played his A, quickly adjusting his string. The rest of the room followed suit until there was an unbroken drone of perfectly in-tune A played at different octaves. I now directed my attention towards the teacher: she was a woman in her 40s, with a slight hint of grey in her otherwise jet black hair, a rigid set face and small but fierce eyes. I asked her:

Do they tune in perfect fifths or by the tuner?

She answered pleasantly in a very slight Chinese accent that they tuned their instruments according to her tuner because they had instruments that did not play in the concert pitch. She then promptly asked me if I was Chinese, and on my affirmative answer, a conversation that sounded like gibberish to others thus followed:

You seem to know what you are doing.I have a LRAM (London Royal Academy of Music) grade 8 certificate in piano, grade 5 in flute and violin, and grade 8 in theory.Do you conduct?Yes.Come over here, please.

I walked around the chairs to the front of the class, where she had a score laid out on a stand. I sped through the pages, hearing the melody in my head, and after a minute, looked up, and raised my hands out in front of me, and the row of musicians raised their bows to their instruments.

Under tempo, from the top.

From the sound of it, I could tell that they were about 80% through mastering the piece. I stopped at a few points to make suggestions, and one of those was directed towards the 2nd violinist, who seemed to be struggling with an unexpected change of key signature at one point in the piece. I pointed to the sheet, and asked him: what key is this piece in?

F major.What note is this?C natural.Now look at this bar: what note is this? C sharp.Play me a D minor harmonic scale, ascending.He played it, and then I could see in his eyes that something had started to dawn on him. What was the second-last note you played? C sharp. What does that mean? The key of this bar is D minor.But why? Why not any other minor keys? I could see he knew why, but he could not find the word for it, so I spelt it out for him. D harmonic minor is the relative minor of F major, it is the scale of F major started on its submediant note and played with a raised 7th, in this case, the C. In this bar, the piece modulated into D minor.

The 2nd violinist, for the rest of the lesson, did not make any other mistakes at all, and the rest of the band played exceptionally well, according to Mrs. Sicheng, the music teacher. At the end of the lesson, I played a piece for them on the piano as a treat, and being three days out of practice, I did not play as well as I would have liked. In the end, everybody applauded, and the room cleared slowly. I made for Mrs. Sicheng, a question in mind.

While I was conducting the band, although everybody was playing very well, I had a feeling that something was missing, and that I, as the conductor, could not bring myself completely into the sound of music. I expressed this to Mrs. Sicheng as we were walking slowly through the deserted blue corridor after the end of the lesson.

Its like, they were playing, but they dont seem to UNDERSTAND what they were playing.

She looked at me and said: Thats exactly the point. They were simply playing the notes, they do not have the necessary apparatus to understand the musical ideas behind the pieces. Its like listening to a computer program play music. There is no emotion. I spent countless lessons trying to get music theory, ideas, vocabulary and appreciation into their heads, but they just want to play their instruments. They dont know how important it is to be able to understand what is it that the composer intended. They think I am teaching them irrelevant things, brainwashing them.

Her words, I knew with all my heart, were painfully true. Most instrument players now have a tendency to think that manual dexterity and execution is more important than musical expression. Put in simpler terms, they believe that being able to play fast enough to impress the audience would be enough. Music, on the other hand, is a form of expression no different from a poem, and the correct delivery of the poem is almost as important as the poem itself. In the case of music, since most people cannot read it for themselves, they rely on musicians to read them the poem. If those musicians play the piece without any understanding of the musical context and the intention

of the composer, then a machine would do a better job than them. Human have emotions, and that is what makes the great performers unique. Technique is important, but most people would rather hear a simple, melodic piece that hardly requires any technique but is performed with the most sincere expression than a perfectly executed virtuosic piece that is banged out like a typewriter.

So how do we understand the music? Music had taken such a turn in the past few decades that people do not know any longer what to make of it anymore. There are so many genres of music, and infinitely many possibilities. Yet they build upon a very simple system, one that was used by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn... The system, along with its own set of vocabulary, is the key to musical thinking. The 2nd violinist (not that Im picking on him) clearly demonstrated that he lacks the intuition to recognise a modulation to the relative minor of the tonic key, and the necessary vocabulary to describe what he had in mind. This is the truth that most non-professional musicians are faced with: their musical knowledge is limited to reading notes and playing the instrument, or mechanically playing according the articulation marked by the composer without knowing their reasons. The importance of the emotional understanding of music is very essential, and it requires research and discipline, which is the main aim of music theory. This is the reason for which all instrumental exam candidates of the LRAM have to also be certified with music theory. It is an essential part of being a performer.

Now it might look like that I am putting technical practice out of the picture, but that is not the case. Techniques are also fundamental to a good performer. With sufficient exercise, the fingers obey the musician, and they can move perfectly to the commands of the musician. Obtaining this kind of manual skill is no small challenge, and CANNOT be rushed. My first two years of piano study comprised of solely technical exercises, drills, scales and arpeggios. My piano professors rule of thumb was: if you can dent a ping pong ball with the force of only your middle finger, you have sufficient skills to play most pieces thrown at you. I achieved this after two years.

As a piano performer, I spent countless hours getting each of my fingers to become independent of each other. The index and middle fingers are the easiest, followed by the pinky. The ring finger is the hardest to break loose from the rest of the fingers because there is a tendon connecting it to the surrounding fingers. Despite all of the exercises, I cannot say that I have anywhere near the manual dexterity of a professional player. It is also tricky business, because overwork yourself, and you will have an injured muscle. The exercises are usually dull and tiring, but the reward almost unforeseeable. That is the reason why many people dont bother with their techniques, and just get straight to the pieces. Whenever I hear a piece being played, I would listen for the occasional mush of sound created by the glued together 4th and 5th fingers as a result of the lack of practice. When I conducted an experiment on my fellow piano playing students, most of them could not even make a loud rap on the table with their middle finger. I cannot imagine what a struggle playing a piano piece would be without the necessary power and agility in their fingers, and when I see how tense their hands are when playing a piece that I pray for the health of their arm tendons. They are struggling at every turn, every arpeggio, so even if they understand the music, how are they going to play with emotion when it was all they could do to play the right notes? Remarks aside, this is precisely the importance of a good foundation in the techniques.

There is only one way to become a good performer: the understanding and appreciation of music and the techniques are the fundamental building blocks of a well balanced musician. Take away one of these, and a performance will either seem long and boring, or painful to listen to and watch. The balance between those parts are impeccable, with the former giving the performer the musical understanding to express the will of the composer, and the latter providing the performer with a mean of conveying that emotion effortlessly. So the next time you see a video of a child prodigy playing a seemingly impossible piece, think about it: is it really necessary? Does he really know what hes playing?