Jun 2009
Neal Zaslaw Helps My Self Esteem
08:35 AM June 13 2009
Colvin and Zaslaw’s writings (as they relate to Mozart, Colvin only discusses him for a few pages) are both fundamentally about how we’ve romanticized Mozart based on a widely read letter that leads to a perception of Mozart as someone who receives his compositions out of the blue and could conceive of them whole in his mind, as if he had a direct line to a creative source.
Mozart, according to Zaslaw, wrote at the pianoforte (as most composers do) for specific ensembles, commissions and performance opportunities. When he was younger he wrote for his father (Colvin compares Mozart, not unfairly, to Tiger Woods) and when he became older he wrote to make money for himself, as Austria slid into war and recession and he was unable to subsidize his upper middle class lifestyle (yet also unwilling to fire his servants). His music is undeniably great, and yet his compositional process was not what it is commonly made out to be.
Colvin’s point is Mozart worked really hard from a young age with expert coaching, and Zaslaw raises the point that Mozart (while undeniably a skilled composer) composed using fairly traditional means, and if he was born rich he may have not composed at all.
The perpetuation of these kinds of myths (in this case the myth is of the composer as a passive instrument from God) as they relate to the creative process is everywhere. It relates directly to a basic problem for people practicing craft in the arts, which is that personal narrative helps sell an artist, and there are really common narrative archetypes we use over and over again.
These archetypes are more often than not related to the mythology of what it’s like to be an artist and how the creative process works, and usually this kind of mythology at best puts people off of creating stuff and at worst gets used as justification for all sorts of jerky behavior.
The idea of being able to access a source of inspiration (whether divine or cosmic or whatever else the source is attributed to) is not in and of itself a bad thing, the problem is that the idea of the artist as a passive instrument is a bad thing, seeing that most people have been working really hard at this music thing for quite some time.
Hopefully these kind of revelations about Mozart (although not really revelations, the discovery of the forgery of the letter stems from Otto Jahn’s biography of Mozart circa mid 19th Century) will help people how much of music is craft, because I think ultimately stories like this are discouraging to people trying to write and perform music.
I think it would be better if people knew Leopold wrote letters to Wolfgang in his twenties calling him lazy and disorganized. Those are qualities I can relate to.
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Teaching the Mob
09:02 PM June 03 2009
Regardless, this brings up a lot of stuff relating to music education (and just education in general, see also:team sports) and why kids in high school jazz programs get to play in a big band when I know of only handful of groups with 7 plus members that play jazz locally. When you teach music to a group you have to get the group involved, and give them something to do that they sort of like, so they don’t realize that there are more of them than you and turn on you.
In keyboard classes they usually have a bunch of kids at keyboards with headphones, so that it becomes a large-scale individual practice session, which serves to remind me that unless you’re the Beatles recording “A Day In The Life”, no one wants to hear a bunch of pianos play a D major chord simultaneously. My theory (not mine really) is that at a certain age (teenagers) there are ways to motivate kids that are fear-related, but not in a “learn this music or I’m going to lose it” way (my piano and guitar students aren’t scared of me anyway), and that usually involves the prospect of failure in front of people they know. This can involve duets (in smaller settings) or public performance. The problem for piano is that due to portability and amplification issues, it’s tough (though not impossible, I know) to get a group of kids playing at the same time on piano. So what’s the answer?
I played jazz, which allowed me to play with a drummer and feel more like a rock star than playing Bach did, but the theoretical learning curve of jazz is challenging for most kids. One thing that excites me is that as kids are consuming music more through video games, there is an opportunity to get them exposed to jazz and classical music more because the licensing fees are cheaper, which may drive more interest in ensemble playing, which may create more of instrument-based ensemble classes for all instruments. Then everyone will have the opportunity to be afraid of failing in front of their friends.