Music teachers

The pianist who plays for the choir I conduct - the Choristers - has been cleaning out her house. She handed me a twenty-six-year-old newspaper cutting today: it was something I'd written for the weekly column, Column 8, back in November 1991. It's a little negative to start with, but improves as it goes on.

Here it is:

A group of heroes work in our city show conditions would make most wharfies pale. I'm talking about music teachers.

And I speak from experience - for a few years I taught piano from three till whenever, after spending a frenetic morning as a postie. I must have been mad.

Utter dedication is required of anyone who decides to take on this job as a permanent career. (I didn't.) The frustrations from pupils who don't work combined with the frustrations from those who do work but will never play anything with the slightest hint of musicality, have to be experienced to be believed.

One in a hundred pupils may have the spark of musical life in them; the sort of spark that makes you think they may achieve something. The other 99, however earnest they may be, will fall by the wayside, and during their mid-life crises will gloomily say, 'I wish I'd carried on playing the piano.'

Or worse, 'Why didn't Mummy and Daddy make me practise?' Have you ever tried to make a child practise? Their attention manages to be focused on everything but the keyboard.

I recommend the 1953 fantasy movie, The 5000 Fingers of Dr T, to anyone who doesn't know what I mean.

Music teachers sit for hours in the same room, often seeing only an endless stream of children. It's like being a solo parent. The occasional adult pupil may or may not be a bonus, depending on their reason for learning.

When everybody else is out socialising in the evening, music teachers are teaching. When other people are having a leisurely meal at home with their family (something we still haven't achieved - the leisurely part, I mean), music teachers are teaching.

When other teachers are enjoying up to eight weeks' paid holiday per annum, music teachers are forced to spend those same weeks unemployed, eking out the income they've earned during the rest of the year.

And in spite of using new material as it appears, the basic details of what they teach hasn't changed much in decades: there is no New Music to go alongside New Maths. Scales are scales are scales. They have to be learned. However much most pupils may dislike them, (I used to enjoy them actually, but then I'm a bit unusual), no musician worth his salt can afford not to learn them.

I write with a sense of awe to think that one of my former music teachers has been teaching for nearly 60 years.

Originally she lived and taught in Sawyers Bay. She commuted to Port Chalmers to teach as well, but being without a car (of course), she had to walk. Usually it only took half an hour. It took somewhat longer in the Big Snow.

Later she rented rooms in town, and still later, during the war, had a room in the Glenpark Presbyterian Hall. When she calls it the 'dug-out' or 'dungeon', you have a pretty good idea of what it was like.

Mice were frequent visitors. Boy pupils had to empty the mousetraps, to their disgust. (I'm pleased to say I was still a twinkle in my father's eye when the war was on.)

By the time I was her pupil, she lived in a pleasant house in Mornington. The comfortable music room was built over the garage; moving the two pianos up there must have been a nightmare.

Sounds like music teaching pays after all, I hear you say. Well, maybe it does, if you're prepared to put in endless hours of dedicated and concentrated work, you only contact with the outside world being your pupils.

So all hail to music teachers - they never go on strike. Many workers who do hardly know they're born.


A few notes: The teacher's name was Olive Perry. She never married, and her mother lived with her until she died. Olive herself has been dead for a number of years. Her house was actually in Maryhill, only two minutes walk away from where I now live. 
The Glenpark Presbyterian Hall was replaced at good while ago, perhaps fifty years. The new one has no dungeon, and probably fewer mice. 
At least one of the two pianos in that upstairs room was a grand. 

A short letter to the Editor was attached to the clipping. Unfortunately there's no indication as to who wrote it. 

In his column today, Mike Crowl has some nice things to say about music teachers and some less kind things to say about the job itself. Perhaps it's not really so bad. The one thing I've noticed over the years is how many music teachers keep on going to a ripe old age, many well into their 80s. Is it a 'soft' lifestyle that allows this, or is it the daily challenge of taking each of their pupils just one stage further that keeps them alert and active?

The pianist who gave me these two clippings commented that she has been teaching for nearly 70 years. Another teacher in the city, a man, has only recently retired: he's in his early 90s. Miss Perry herself certainly taught for a long time. 
I wrote Column 8 for around five years in the early nineties. 

Guest post: Beem Weeks

Continuing a month-long focus on authors from RWISA:

the Rave Writers International Society of Authors. 

Throughout August we'll be showing extracts from the work of these authors. 

For more information about any particular writer click the link under their photo. 

Wordless by Beem Weeks

“What’s that word say?”

“That’s an easy one, Daddy. Just sound it out.”

Levi Bacchus can’t read. 36 years old, and he’d never learned the meaning of a single sentence.

“I just ain’t cut out for this, Jamie Lynn.”

The girl’s countenance dropped in disagreement—just like her mother, that one.

“So, you’re a quitter now?” she bellowed, sounding too much like the woman who’d walked out of their lives two years earlier.

Levi took offense. “Mind your manners, Missy. I ain’t never been called no quitter.”

Beem Weeks

“Reading is something everybody should be able to do, is all I’m saying.”

“It’s easy for you,” Levi argued. “You’re just a kid, still in school. You have teachers telling you what to do and how to do it. I’m just too old for learning.”

The girl narrowed her gaze, jabbed a finger into the open book. “From the beginning,” she demanded.

His heaving huff meant he’d do it again—if only for her sake.

Words formed in his head before finding place on his tongue. Some came through in broken bits and pieces, while others arrived fully formed and ready for sound.

Jamie’s excitement in the matter is why he kept trying. Well, that and the fact he’d long desired the ability to pick up the morning paper and offer complaint or praise for the direction of the nation. All those people in the break room at the plant held their own opinions on everything from the president to the latest championship season enjoyed by the local high school football team.

“That’s good, Daddy,” Jamie said, patting her father on the arm. “That’s really good. You’ll be reading books before too long.”

A smile worked at the edges of his lips, refusing to go unnoticed.

“I’d like that, Sweet Pea.” That’s all he’d say of the matter. If it came to that, well then, he’d have accomplished something worth appreciating.

Levi harbored bigger notions than merely reading books. When a man can read, he can do or be anything he wants to be. His own father often said a man who can’t read is forever in bondage. How can a man truly be free if he cannot read the document spelling out the very rights bestowed upon him by simple virtue of birth? No sir; being illiterate no longer appealed to him.

Of his immediate family—father, mother, two older brothers—only Levi failed to attend college. Oh, he graduated from high school. Being a star quarterback will afford that sort of luxury. But when those coaches from the universities came calling, low test scores couldn’t open doors that promised more than a life spent in auto factories.

He’d seen a show on TV about a man who’d been sent to prison for five years for armed robbery. While there, this man learned to read, took a course on the law, and became a legal secretary upon his release. Eight years later, he’d earned a law degree and opened his very own practice.

Levi didn’t see himself arguing cases in a court of law—defending criminals most likely to be guilty just didn’t appeal to his sense of right and wrong. What he did see, however, is the need for a good and honest person to run the city he’d forever called home.

“Think I could be mayor?” he asked his daughter.

Jamie Lynn always grinned over such talk. “Everybody has to have a dream, Daddy.”

It’s what she always says.

Everything begins with a dream.

She gets that part of her from her mother.

“Once I can read without stopping to ask questions,” he mused, “maybe I’ll throw my hat into the ring, huh?”

“There’s nothing wrong with asking questions,” she answered, weaving wisdom between her words.

*      *      *

She’d been a girl scout, his daughter—daisies and brownies before that. It’s the other girls who bullied her out of the joy that sort of thing once offered. Straight A’s have a way of making others feel inferior, even threatened.

But Jamie Lynn isn’t the type to pine or fret. She chose to tutor—and not just her father, either. Kids come to the house needing to know this and that among mathematics or English or science. Her dream? To be a teacher one day.

And she’ll accomplish that much and more.

Her mother had that very same sense about her as well. She knew what she wanted in life, and cleared the path upon which she traveled.

High school sweethearts they’d been, Jamie Lynn’s mother and father. She’d been the pretty cheerleader, he’d been the All-American boy with a cannon for an arm. She went to college, he didn’t.

But she returned to him, joyfully accepting his proposal for a life together. Her degree carried her back to the high school from which they’d both graduated. This time, rather than student, she became teacher—American History.

Levi went to work building Cadillacs in the local plant. It paid well, offered medical benefits and paid vacation time. Life settled into routines.

Then came their little bundle. This didn’t sit well with the newly-minted history teacher. No sir. It’s as if Levi had intentionally sabotaged his own wife’s career in some fiendish plot to keep her home.

Words of love became “stupid” and “ignorant” and “illiterate ass.” She walked out one evening and never came back to the home they’d built together.

A former student, he’d heard—five years her junior. They’d ran off together, supposedly making a new home somewhere out west.

Levi didn’t challenge it. He received the house and the kid in exchange for his signature on those papers he couldn’t even read.

Jamie Lynn, she’s the light that shined in his darkness, showed him there’s still so much more living to be done. And learning to read, well, that just added to the adventure.

*      *      *

The night came when he read an entire chapter from one of Jamie Lynn’s old middle school books—straight through, unpunctuated by all those starts and stops and nervous questions. By the end of the month, Levi had managed the entire story—all 207 pages.

“We have to celebrate, Daddy,” she insisted.

It’d been the silly draw of embarrassment that twisted his head left and right, his voice saying, “No need to make a fuss, Sweet Pea.”

But fuss is only the beginning. “Dinner and a movie,” she ordered. “Then we’ll stop off at the mall and pick out a few books that you might like.”

There were stories he recalled from his boyhood; books other kids clutched under their arms and took for granted. Stories that stirred so much excitement in those young lives.

They’d belong to him now.

“You’re finally blooming, Daddy—just like a flower.”

And so was his daughter.

A teacher in the making.

Thank you for supporting this member along the WATCH "RWISA" WRITE Showcase Tour today!  We ask that if you have enjoyed this member's writing, to please visit their Author Page on the RWISA site, where you can find more of their writing, along with their contact and social media links, if they've turned you into a fan. We ask that you also check out their books in the RWISA or RRBC catalogs. Thanks, again for your support and we hope that you will follow each member along this amazing tour of talent. Don't forget to click the link under the author's photo to learn more about him.

Rubato

I'm currently teaching one of my granddaughters to play the piano.  At this stage you spend a lot of time getting the pupil to play in time, that is, making sure they understand the relationship of each note to another in an almost a mathematical sense.  One crochet has to be as long as another crochet, a semibreve has to be held the length of four crochets and so forth.  It's all very relative.  With a fast piece the crochet is shorter than it is in the slow piece, and as a longstanding player of music, you take this for granted, often failing to realise that it's not as obvious to a pupil as it is to you.

And as time goes on, and children play more complicated music, you begin to teach them that the first crochet isn't necessarily quite as long as the second crochet, or vice versa, because you give more emphasis to one than the other.  And that one bar may be stretched out longer than the previous one, even though they're both strictly speaking the same length.  I've just been practicising a piece for the Brass Band competitions with a cornet player, and of course there are different 'speeds' for different sections (meaning that the crochets, for instance, aren't the same length in the fast section as they are in the slow) but even within the sections, notes are stretched, sped up and generally twisted according to the mood of the piece at that point.  Music is actually hugely fluid, and this is a difficult thing to teach. 

I saw a film years ago, a documentary about Isaac Stern going to China after the Cultural Revolution, called From Mao to Mozart.  There were plenty of young Chinese musicians after the Revolution, and they were playing Western music, but they had no sense of the feeling, the rubato, the shifting of pace that is common to this kind of music. Western influences in China during the Cultural Revolution were banned, and the musicians lost touch with the way the music was played.   They played strictly in time, and of course, it sounded like clockwork.  There's a time and place for this in music, but it's rare by comparison with the normality of pulling music about like plasticine.  You get to a stage in life where you never think about this, you just do it. 

As a footnote to that movie, I remember a pitiful scene in which a music teacher told us how he'd been locked in the equivalent of a cupboard for some long time during the Revolution; the Red Guard did horrific things to artists.  In spite of that, after the Revolution's worst excesses were over, he continued to teach. 

Upskilling

Having a (newish) daughter-in-law who's in the medical line of business (she's a Physician's Assistant) I'm a little more aware of the wider world of medicine than I was when I was purely a patient.  Not that I've been a patient very often - at least as far as being in hospital is concerned.  I've only ever stayed in hospital twice in my life, once when I was 21 and once in 2009, by which time I was 64.  

And my daughter-in-law now has some very funny stories to tell about medical experiences - although when she tells them they seem much funnier than when I try to repeat them.  We were on Skype to her and my son yesterday (they're in the States) and she was telling us about how she was treating a Spanish patient in the ED where she works.  He spoke no English, so there was a translator involved as well.   My daughter-in-law had hiccups while she was examining and questioning the man, and suddenly he said something in Spanish and then went BOH! at her.   She was a little puzzled, especially when he did the same thing again.  Finally it was explained: he was doing to her what he would do to a child who had hiccups: giving her a fright.

This isn't the sort of thing you're likely to learn in medical school, and it's probably not something you'd use very often.   And I'm not sure if my daughter-in-law wants to go learning anything more at the moment: she's been studying for what seems like forever, and has some student debt to catch up on.  

However, for those who feel the need to catch up on some extra credits, or to upskill, there are a variety of courses available, courses that once upon a time wouldn't have been dreamed of: it was assumed that when a doctor was trained, that was it.  But these days there's a sense that a doctor's training needs to keep going, and not just in catching up with the latest developments in medicine.  Consequently there are all sorts of courses available, such as a medical teaching course or a medical management course.  These are especially useful for those who already do some training of other staff themselves, and who need to make sure they have the requisite skills.  It's a bit like the assessments students do of their lecturers; if the latter don't come up to scratch, then some updating of their teaching skills may be necessary.  Not every University- trained person automatically makes a good teacher.   In the medical field you can even attend a teach the teacher course (I sometimes think some school teachers and lecturers could do with something similar!)  And if you're in the administrative department of a hospital you might even attend a consultant interview course.

Of course, you might not want to keep attending courses!  Fitting these into an already busy medical life may be something you'd want to put off.  However, from my experience as a patient, I can assure you that the more informed the medical staff are the better.  For some doctors a 'treating the patient as a human being' course would be a good option.  I note that this kind of thing is now being included in the six-year course that doctors go through.  Thank goodness!

Further learning

I was just reading this morning about one Polybius (in a book entitled Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) how he, along with many ancient writers, regarding the written word as less instructive than an eyewitness account, or reading a manual less helpful than a teacher speaking about his subject.

Certainly that's still often the best way of learning: face to face with a teacher (a teacher, mind you, rather than a lecturer). Just to be disagree with my own argument, however, both the varsity courses I've done in the last couple of years have been primarily online, and both of them were perfectly satisfactory in that form. For me.

However, to contradict myself again, I note that there are online degree programs in music available. I'm struggling a little to understand how that could work satisfactorily, music being such a hands-on art, to me. I think Polybius and I would be on the same wavelength with this one. Of course, the theory of music on its own is teachable away from an instrument (up to a point), but music is much more than theory. I guess you can focus on the history, or on form and so on, and these could be done reasonably satisfactorily online - probably more than satisfactorily. Nevertheless, I think music is something that needs to be taught face to face.

I have been wrong before...

There are online Courses on everything under the sun, these days - art, art history, film, photography, fine arts (another subject that sounds less doable online) - the list goes on. If you click on this link - http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ -you can find out more about what's available, whetting your appetite for more learning, slavering over the possibilities.

Having been brought up in a family environment where learning per se wasn't highly regarded I used to be of the school (pardon the pun) that thought learning for the sake of learning was a pointless exercise. Now, after having been around the world for a little time, I'm much more of the opinion that learning for the sheer enjoyment of it is something we humans thrive on. Too many of us fail to get our teeth into something new as we get on in life, just because it means work, or taking up time from other things, or...whatever your excuse is. Some of us even think: what's the point of learning more? I'll be dead soon enough.

Yup, you will, and possibly sooner than you imagine. But I think the ability to learn is a God-given gift, and something we should all grasp while we can...

A little promotion...

The other day I rang Elizabeth Bouman, one of the music teachers in town, about the dates for the next lot of singing competitions. I needed to know so that my up and coming concert didn't clash with them.

As a result of this conversation, I was invited to contribute a piece to the NEWZATS newsletter (NEWZATS, as you'll already know, being a widely-read audience, stands for the New Zealand Association of Teachers of Singing. Not Singing Teachers, you'll notice, since that would have wound up with the acronym: NEWZAST, which apparently doesn't have such a good ring to it.)

This piece of self-promotion was seemingly quite acceptable to the editor of the newsletter, although I tried not to make it sound too much like one long advertisement. Hopefully, it will let singing teachers apart from those I already know in Dunedin hear about my songs, and hopefully I'll get a chance to sell some copies!

You can see a revised version of the article here, along with the ad for Evony which borders on the erotic, and certainly distracts the reader more than a little. (I tried to find a photo on Flickr.com which showed a singer, but all the ones available have people using microphones. NEWZATS pupils sing without mikes, in the good old-fashioned way.)

TV in Korea

Korean tv isn’t any better than tv anywhere else. Ads are just as mad or bad, game shows are as awful or as good, and soaps are soaps. But there was one difference: last night we watched the latter part of The Lion in Winter, with Glenn Close and Patrick Stewart. (It’s very well done, by the way, and Close is brilliant in an excellent role.) At one point there was an ad break, an ad break to end all ad breaks. It took the form of an infomercial, but don’t ask me what they were selling. There were two utterly enthusiastic presenters, as well as other bodies, and occasional ‘dramatised’ scenes. There was a great deal of banging and crashing of numbers on the screen, and little bell noises as numbers came up. Apparently whatever they were selling was only going to cost 21,000 won.
All this would have been okay if it had been presented once, but it was presented for some eight minutes. It wasn’t just the same thing repeated exactly, but the same material was shuffled and reshuffled until it all became terribly familiar - and mind-bogglingly awful.
On the other hand, this afternoon there’s been a children’s language program on - teaching English to Koreans, and doing it very well.