I’ve been reading the comments on my post about El Sistema and new music, and truly I’m surprised. I criticized El Sistema for (if my information is correct) not teaching composition and not including new music in the music its students play.
And people reacted as if I’d said they shouldn’t teach traditional classical music at all. Douglas Laustsen put it very simply in a comment he posted yesterday:
I think all that Greg is suggesting is that in addition to a core classical training, the kids are given the experience of music written in their own time. I don’t think he’s suggesting they trash the entire repertoire, but include another ingredient or two.
Now, Doug works with me on my blog site, maintaining the “Solutions” page. So maybe he’s biased in my favor, but I think he’s telling a very simple truth here. All I asked for, in my post, was for El Sistema to teach classical music the way it’s taught in North America and Europe, with an emphasis on old repertoire and the old tradition but with new music included in the mix.
Did I need to spell that out? Wouldn’t anyone likely to read this blog know how classical music is generally taught? I’m truly baffled. When I said, at the start of my post, that I might spark some controversy, I thought people might protest — and maybe not unreasonably — that El Sistema does such enriching work that it shouldn’t be criticized for a lapse with new music.
Or maybe some people think that new music is really painful, and ought to be avoided. I’d disagree, but at least I’d understand why they disagreed with me.
Or else my critics might have gone after Emilio Mendoza, the Venezuelan composer whose despairing remarks about El Sistema I quoted. My critics might have asked whether he’s just an angry malcontent, whose opinions other Venezuelans, even composers, don’t share. (And in fact I don’t know anything about him, apart from what he put online.)
But instead what I got (and very vociferously) from some people, was this — that when you teach classical music, you have to teach the older styles. Because they’re what everything else is founded on.
And so, once more, I’m baffled. What I’ve just summarized has no relation to anything I said. Or at least none that I can see. Of course the tradition should be taught. Especially since the older styles are still with us. We hear them every time the older (pre-20th century) masterworks of the repertoire are performed. Of course students should learn what these styles are about. They should learn the music theory underlying them, they should learn standard harmony and counterpoint, they should learn music history, they should learn to play Beethoven and Brahms.
So what, exactly, are my critics urging? What makes them hug the classical tradition so closely to their hearts, even when I haven’t threatened it? Are they happy that El Sistema doesn’t teach new music? Do they want new music ripped out of the curriculum at music schools all over the world?
There isn’t any contradiction between teaching older styles and teaching new ones. Look at Schoenberg, who of course, in his time, was a radically avant-garde composer, and also a famous composition teacher. He founded his teaching on traditional harmony, form, and counterpoint, and insisted that his students learn those things vigorously. Though they also — simply by their association with Schoenberg — were plunged into everything new about music that was going on at their time. How could that have hurt them?
Well, someone might say, his students were adults. Kids — who of course are the greatest part of the students El Sistema teaches — need to learn differently. They need to learn the older music first.
But I don’t see why that should be so. I’m thinking now of Jon Deak, the former associate principal bass of the NY Philharmonic who goes around the world conducting workshops — inspiring workshops, deeply admired — where he teaches children to compose. Is he doing something bad? Should he be stopped?
Or, back in the ’70s, when I worked at an arts day camp and taught 10 year-olds to compose, was I misleading these kids, diverting them from the true musical path, contributing (so to speak) to the musical delinquency of minors?
That makes no sense to me. If anything, the kids i taught learned to understand old music better by composing pieces on their own. I worked out a way for them to compose cooperatively, with each kid taking charge of a particular part of each new piece. They all lquickly decided that the one who had to write the ending had the hardest job. Will anyone believe that this didn’t help them understand what composers of the past accomplished when they wrote exactly the right conclusion to their pieces?
And how about ASCAP, which each year at its awards ceremony honors young composers, ranging from elementary school kids to college students? Is ASCAP doing something reprehensible? The kids they honor — excerpts from whose music they pay — are tremendously accomplished. Many of them, even some of the young ones, have the compositional technique of professional composers.
And in general, from everything I’ve picked up, they’re musical omnivores drinking in music in every known style. So learning to compose doesn’t take them away from the cherished repertoire of the past. And even if it did, the quality of their compositions shows that composing hasn’t deprived them musically. They know their stuff.
If I look back to the past, I’m even more baffled. Should Prokofiev, in 1936, not have written Peter and the Wolf? Was it bad for kids back then to hear something new? Should they have been listening to The Toy Symphony instead? Or Eine Kleine Nachmuisk?
Or I could ask the same question about Britten, and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Was that a bad piece for him to write? Should British kids in 1946 have been listening to Purcell?
Or think about Britten’s delectable opera Noye’s Fludde, written for the musical resources of an entire town. Beginning violinists have parts with all the music written only on open
strings. Teenage girls play the women Mrs. Noye gossips with. The littlest kids take the parts of the smallest animals. (When you see the opera done, the sight and sound of these little ones, coming onstage and squeaking “Kyrie eleison” in the highest voices they can muster, is unforgettably adorable.)
Does anyone think this damages the kids who take part in it, because they should have been putting on The Magic Flute?
Are boy sopranos distracted from their proper musical training when they star in Amahl and the Night Visitors?
Was Bartok doing something bad when he wrote Microcosmos, a multi-volume course of instruction on the piano, starting with pieces simple enough for kids to play at their very first lesson, but always using the dissonances we hear in his string quartets?
Is Jennifer Undercofler, who runs the Special Music School in New York — part of the NY city public school system — wrong to organize a new music ensemble, in which kids of high school age play all kinds of new classical music? I’ve heard them. They’re fabulous. And they love the music they’re playing. Should Jenny be reprimanded? Should the kids ignore new music until — well, when? Until someone decides that they’re old enough to resist whatever contagion might be festering inside a piece by David Lang?
I’ll stop here. But truly I’m baffled. Would one of my critics care to explain what he or she really meant?
Well said Greg! El Sistema has done an incredible amount of good – and I hope it will carry on doing such things. However, new music has to feature, or getting the students ‘composing’ is essential as it is just another way of getting closer to really understanding how the music works.
The little education I have done has really shown me that young children and teenagers love new music and lap it up. I was doing Vivier’s Lonely Child last month (pretty out there with micro tones and a soprano using extended vocal techniques) and we invited 60 15 – 18 year olds, they were so positive about it after the concert. Before the concert we held a workshop for them and they had a really good stab at Cage’s Living Room Music. I was really taken aback and impressed how these guys tackled what is in many ways a challenging piece with quite a few difficult concepts, so quickly!!
A little bit of New Music each day – keeps the doctor away!
F
Greg, scrolling through the comments, I see you’ve certainly stimulated a lively discussion! I think you’ve drawn out of the woodwork all kinds of people who are passionate about classical music… and, by definition, how that is being introduced to young people. They seem to include people from both camps; some are defending the inclusion of new music in a child’s introductory experience. Some of the others might be having a knee-jerk reaction to the title of your post (“El Sistema — troubling”) without having done more than skim through it. Alas, some people (in general) take things in via broad strokes and tend not to bother with details and subtleties. Don’t take it personally.
I don’t think lovers of classical music who read your blog are necessarily acquainted with how classical music is taught today; they may be remembering their own experience. And they may be assuming that introducing children to new music along with the old is what’s endangering classical music now … when, in fact, it’s fostering a growing audience that’s just not old enough to buy tickets yet. You’re so right about the fact that kids who develop an understanding of how music works from the inside out (either by composing it themselves, or playing the music of living composers and interacting with them in rehearsals) become the best champions of classical music.
Remember when folks used to argue that jazz was too sophisticated to be appreciated by young audiences or played by young performers? Now look how things have changed … and a few decades ago, we nearly lost jazz as an art form because of that attitude!
http://elsistemausa.org/el-sistema/venezuela/
“El Sistema introduces its students to both internationally known classical composers and Latin American composers and Venezuelan folk musicians.”
Is this not really the case?
I had to really stop and think of my own reaction, and the assumptions underlying it, but I’ll try to lay it out in as organized a way as I can.
1) First off, I think I was reacting to the fact that this is a program that takes kids from drug and poverty-infested slums and may in some instances save their lives, and at least give them something to work very hard at an excel in. Hitting that for not supporting one particular type of niche music felt as if you were going up to someone who was administering free AIDS drugs to starving people and demanding to know why they weren’t wearing recyclable shoes. 🙂 El Sistema isn’t just introducing music to generic young people. It’s introducing a lifeline to kids who could very well be dead in a couple years if not for the program.
2) I also think it was a case of definitions crossing — my use of the phrase “niche music” above is an example. I’m making an assumption there that is related to one I made about your post, which is why I left it in instead of going back up and editing it out. 🙂 “Why isn’t there more new music?” can mean anything to anyone, just like “Why so much old music?” That can mean anything from “Why so much music in a major scale that assumes equal temperament?” to “Why only dead white guys’ music?”
I’ve seen conversations lately run aground multiple times on precisely these shoals. In fact, I was probably projecting more out of my own annoyance with a few of these — apologies for that. It gets predictable after a while to respond to the demands that one must only avoid 20th century music because one is a stuffy, conservative afraid of innovation; yet, when I reply, “I like plenty of 20th century music and new composers, how about Elton John?” it becomes obvious that’s not what the original questioner meant.
“Modern” and “20th century” becomes synonyms for dropping stuff inside the piano and eschewing major and minor scales or anything built on a diatonic structure at all. “Modern composers” means John Cage and not Stevie Wonder.
So when you — who does dearly love a lot of the out-there stuff — say, “Why aren’t they doing new music and teaching composition?” it can be taken as teaching slum-rescue six year olds about tone rows or else being labeled reactionary. 🙁
And even if you do feel that they should teach that stuff … I still do feel that the common practice stuff should come first. After all, the out-there stuff was created in many ways in reaction to it, so in order to grasp its place, one does need to encounter the old dead white guys first.
Anyhow, I think that’s where I was coming from, and where I perceived you as coming from.
“And even if you do feel that they should teach that stuff … I still do feel that the common practice stuff should come first. After all, the out-there stuff was created in many ways in reaction to it, so in order to grasp its place, one does need to encounter the old dead white guys first.”
Why not take it even further? Shouldn’t all musicians have a solid grounding in Renaissance music? In Perotin? In Troubadour songs? One can make an argument that the central cannon (late Baroque through late Romantic) is all derived/developed from this earlier repertoire. Yet does the average conservatory musician–unless they are specialists in early music–have very deep knowledge about Gregorian chant? Can they name the modes? Does your virtuoso pianist need to be able to hum sequences from the Graduale Triplex in order to play the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos?
What about learning Russian folk music before playing anything by Stravinsky?
The fact is, while it’s wonderful to know the historical precedents, and knowing such may in fact improve a musicians understanding of any piece, it is only one facet of the music. Discovering Stravinsky in the vacuum itself brings a different relationship, and perhaps even freshness, to the music.
There’s really no reason why one has to go from Bach through Schoenberg to understand or even appreciate Xenakis.
I find this chronological/historical approach to classical music deeply troubling…and a rather annoying barrier in how we present the repertoire.
(Again…I love history…but this approach is so pointless…)
Clearly your “systema” is different from “El Sistema.” There is no true way to teach anyone, child or adult, instrumentalist or vocalist,about music. There are good teachers and there are teachers who are not so good, and much of the good teaching, like teaching a group of kids to write music, is done because the person teaching gets a kick out of teaching the particularly activity at hand. Perhaps one in ten kids will retain something useful from the experience.
I think that it is important to teach beginning string players to play in tune and make a nice sound. My “systema” charges that giving students pieces of music that they like, and and music that has the potential of sounding good on their newly-embraced instruments is the best of all possible worlds. My “systema” tries to connect students with their instruments, and attempts to give them a sense of pleasure, accomplishment, and community out here in my Midwestern neck of the musical woods. I teach them “old” music: tried and true teaching pieces.
Bach used the “Minuet in G” as a teaching piece. He put it in his Notebook for Anna Magdelena (he didn’t write it himself) because it was a good teaching piece, and it ends up being a good teaching piece for many instruments in addition to keyboard. Being able to play something competently allows for a budding composer’s imagination to get fired up.
Traditions, 20th century and otherwise, are important to learn after a kid learns to put bow to string, finger to key, mouth to reed or mouthpiece, and/or stick to whatever. An interested student will seek out interesting music, and many students love being part of a tradition, something that so many American kids feel that they lack in this ever-changing youth culture.
Making music inspires people to make music. And these fortunate recipients of training under “El Sistema” will be writing music that we adults could never even imagine.
“There’s really no reason why one has to go from Bach through Schoenberg to understand or even appreciate Xenakis.”
There’s also no reason why this program that does such good work has to conform to what seem to me like very academic and specialty tastes held by people a half a planet away.
It’s very disturbing to see something that is doing such good — musically and socially — called into question by people for not conforming to the tastes of a highly educated elite. This is an excellent program, and to your average poor-to-working-class kid in that environment, you just can’t say “But Mozart’s been done to death.” It hasn’t, to them. Like it or not, the preferences of the educated American musical elite are just not central to this program.
It’s also worth noting that, while people have been somewhat dismissive of Dudamel, calling him the El Sistema “poster boy” and other things, he’s been doing a damn fine job with the LA Phil, engaging it with the local audience and being exactly the sort of charismatic, visionary music director that people who want classical music to survive claim to want.
This is a part of the revolution. No, it’s not the whole thing. It’s a part. But it’s a part that your tastes are not central to. There are parts where your tastes are at center stage. One program does not have to be all things to all people, nor can it.
That’s a straw man and you know it Janis. What I’m advocating for is hardly academic. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of how a good number of academics usually advocate for, esp. in music history pedagogy. BTW…I hope you’re not implying Xenakis’ music is academic and can only reside in the walls of academia.
Furthermore, I don’t think Greg has ever been dismissive towards Gustavo Dudamel (but I can’t speak for him…only from what I can recall from his posts). Nor have I. I very much appreciate what he’s been doing. He is clearly someone with very catholic tastes in music, and clearly likes lots of different types of music in spite of learning the more conservative repertoire performed/studied through El Sistema.
With that said, I’ve also seem how more conservative teachers and teaching practices have stifled creativity, and instilled irrational hatred/indifference to all music post 1920. First hand. So saying that anything is better than nothing, is problematic. Sometimes the something becomes a dominant model and can and may cause unintended consequences.
Sure, we can all go and make a different system, start a program more to our own liking…but I also don’t see what’s wrong with criticizing the flaws (as apparent to me, but perhaps unimportant to another person) of a (mostly very good and very worthwhile) program.
Did he really say that? If so (and it sounds perfectly plausible to me), that explains everything.
ACD
Care to elaborate, AC?
He doesn’t like Steve Reich or the minimalists. Whatever. No one cares.
Greg,
This has been an excellent, probing discussion, and it’s forced me to put into words some pre-verbal attitudes I’ve had for a long, long time–and for that I’m very grateful.
I have two points to make, which I think sum up everything I’ve had to say so far on this topic:
1. Janis, when you made your comment about the AIDS hospice worker’s eco-un-conscious footwear, I had the following thought: teaching those kids to compose could help them in ways you can’t possibly imagine–unless you’ve done it, as I have. I’ve done arts outreach teaching in post-Katrina inner-city New Orleans for the last two years with a group of Juilliard students, and the hunger those kids have to *create their own art* is insatiable. They can take the difficult things they’ve seen, and experienced, and by their own power create something beautiful and transcendent from it. Or they can leave it all behind and escape it entirely through the power of their imagination. It is the single most empowering thing a child in those circumstances can do. I have been both a composer and a performer, and performing doesn’t do that. It does many other wonderful, valuable things, but it doesn’t do that. Only composing does.
Knowing that, El Sistema’s (or any program’s) refusal to teach their students how to compose their own music is less akin to an AIDS hospice worker’s poor choice of footwear and more like the worker giving her patients some pretty good drugs, but not the best ones.
2. There is a tendency in the classical community to view composition as a luxury, an extra, something to be added once your training is solid. Composers ourselves have contributed heavily to this view by erecting high barriers to entry into the field, and we must take some of the blame for it. Any discussion of training performers to compose is inevitably colored by this attitude–Composing for Non-Majors is an elective at Juilliard, not a requirement–and the discussion among commenters here has borne that out.
The reason for my admittedly snarky quip (my apologies; it was simply irresistible) was NOT that I don’t like Steve Reich’s music, but, rather, that Reich doesn’t write – even, perhaps, is incapable of writing – music. What he writes may, like the alluring tinkle of sleigh bells, be musical, but that does not music make. As I’ve a number of times written previously (on S&F), music, to be music, requires, from beginning to end, a sustained, coherent, and perceptible musical narrative (that is, perceptible in the hearing, not just on the page) absent which there is no music, merely sound. That’s the lesson the legacy of some 600 years of music – Western, Eastern, and all points in-between – has taught us. Reich, like any number of other contemporary composers, is besotted by and obsessed with process and sound per se, and consistently and repeatedly confuses means with ends, process and sound being merely the means to the end – music. And the most accessible and comprehensible works of that 600-year legacy of music, comprehensible even to non-Western ears, are the masterworks that constitute the Western classical music canon. And that’s why it’s they that must be the starting point for all so-called New Music. One cannot create new music – music, not merely an agglomeration of sounds – ex nihilo. As I wrote in my comment in the comments thread to your first post on this business, one must first understand where one’s been before one is competent to decide where one is going. First things first, after all.
ACD
Re: the above, TROLL. (troll (n): one who comments in an exclusively negative, dismissive manner, and who never has anything constructive or helpful to say.)
Which is to say, if you hate Greg’s aesthetic so much, why don’t you go somewhere else?
So now let’s talk about the person from India, possibly apocryphal, who thought all western music had only a single emotion, nostalgia. What — assuming that he’s real — could we learn from him? I might think, well, wow, that’s an extreme case of noncomprehension. But then how well do I understand Indian music? Can I even begin to perceive the emotions people in India hear in it? No way. I can’t even sense the emotional temperature of the various ragas, which in western terms would be like saying that major and minor keys sound the same to me. And don’t even get me started on the rhythms of Indian music, which I don’t know how to comprehend, or even to count.
So then, AC, to return to something you raised here earlier, wouldn’t it be perilous for me to decide that western art is better than nonwestern? Here we have what seems like a valid test case, western vs. Indian music. I can’t hear Indian music well enough to make any judgment. I can’t hear its profundities, if (as people from India think) it has them. And, equally, if some completely impartial and supremely well-informed judge should conclude that Indian music is trivial, compared to Bruckner — well, that’s something else I can’t hear. I can assume it, if I want to be careless. But no way can I hear it.
Nicely put, Greg!
Jeremy Howard Beck, on most of your points here and in the other thread, I pretty much agree. Which probably shouldn’t surprised anyone here that have read my responses to things.
Nicely put, Greg!
Jeremy Howard Beck, on most of your points here and in the other thread, I pretty much agree. Which probably shouldn’t surprised anyone here that have read my responses to things.
apologies for the bad formatting in the previous quote!
Because the corrupt, postmodern thinking of people like yourself compel me to the conclusion that my work is most urgently needed here.
See how that works?
ACD
Corrupt, postmodern thinking of people like me? Postmodernism was dead when I was a teenager, dude.
Yawn.
Oh good, I was hoping this would come back around to a digression on the relative merits of different musical styles and cultures. I was too late to join the party for the last post, and I’ve been itching to point out that the greatness of Mozart and/or the incompetence of Reich cannot be empirically demonstrated. By saying Mozart is great, you are merely asserting that a) you think Mozart is great, b) everyone you know thinks Mozart is great, or c) there is an overwhelming societal consensus that Mozart is great. Any of these statements may be statistically verifiable as true, though the wider the net is cast the more dubious the statistics become. (Societal consensus? Which society, pray tell?) None of these statements have anything to do with the music itself; the facts which can be gathered about a composition or a body of work can be used to justify one’s opinion of what matters and what does not, but they do not prove anything. Ultimately, Mozart is great because everyone believes he is. (Not that the opinions of others particularly matter.)
This is not post-modernist thinking, this is LOGIC, which I’m pretty sure is comfortably pre-modern.
(Now for the subject of the post itself….)
I’ve been pondering at length the idea that “building an audience for the classics” and “building an audience for new music” are two separate endeavors. El Sistema is an interesting case study because they had the opportunity to tackle both at once, but chose only the former. The fact that they made this choice reinforces my suspicion that the two audiences do not significantly overlap at present, and if anything are moving in opposite directions. What I can’t figure out is whether or not this is actually a problem.
People often claim that shrinking orchestra audiences are the result of the repertoire growing old and stale Why, then, do ticket sales spike for performances of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler? Likewise, I’m not sure that living composers need the orchestra any more than the orchestra needs them — contemporary music is thriving in “alt-classical” locales, and attracting a significantly younger audience than symphony concerts do. Why not just admit that these are two completely different types of concert experiences? Everything is a niche market now — you don’t see Carrie Underwood agonizing over how to attract Metallica fans, or vice versa. El Sistema may have missed a chance to rejoin the two streams, but as things currently stand, perhaps orchestras and modern composers might have an easier time finding their proper audiences if they stopped worrying about combining forces and embraced their niches.
Dear Greg:
I think your idea of teaching more composition skills early in their musical development and exposing kids to ‘new music’ idioms is very interesting. I didn’t have teachers who either had the expertise or took the time with me as a young musician. They did not really understand enough about how young ears process music to know what to do with me when I did share something I composed. I spent more time just practicing my instrument.
I think maybe I saw some of the urban nucleos engaged in playing the compositions of their peers in a video. It didn’t sound impressive but the students where finding out what happens when you put music together and try to play it.
I am under the impression that it takes some level of expertise, musical confidence and resources to teach such classes. The teacher has to be comfortable working students through a process that does not have any right answers and be willing to let them struggle with that.
Please explain, how you would do teach composition in classes of 40-80 students. The size and density of some of the nucleos I am learning about is impressive given the number of fully trained teachers available at each location. Some of the more remote nucleos have a few teachers traveling to a number of distant sites. The Abreu Fellows visiting some of these locations have not been able to get on line as often as they would like in the last month to update their blogs.
Perhaps what makes El Sistema remarkable is that due to the lack of fully trained professional music educators it depends on a fleet of young mentors, surprisingly young mentors in some cases to do much of the teaching and coaching. When you have such a young teaching staff they do tend to focus on things like mastery as apposed to analysis or innovation required of something like composing or using one’s imagination for new music.
Some of this has to do with the way the human brain develops. As creative and skillful as they can be there are something that don’t occur to an adolescent, because of the way they process things.
As El Sistema matures and fills out with more available talent perhaps there will one day be enough confident and visionary music educators to take up the cause of composing and ‘new music making’ with future young people.
This is a well-written and thought-provoking article.
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