I have been doing some work at the university as a chamber music tutor... I guess that makes me an academic of sorts, but a sort of practical one rather than a theoretical one! Recently, over the last couple of weeks, we have been in the final stretches of preparing the student groups for their assessments.
Honestly, I often find it to be the most nerve-racking thing to be watching students go through the slightly weird ritual of assessment! Most of my life, I have just been a performer of music... and so, I only have encounters with the stage in a direct and personal way. For this situation... I am seeing the students get up on stage... and I'm so nervous for them! I really want them to do well, and I know that they can. I know their potential (or sometimes the limits of it...), and I really want them to showcase everything that I know that they are capable of! In some cases, they might even surprise me... and pull together something on the day that surpasses what I thought that they were capable of!
It is that sort of weird feeling... that you know that they have been prepared as well as possible... and that the are now on their own to fly. And with something that happens in real time like a concert performance... things can easily go well... or bad. Especially when I am encouraging them to take the risks, and to push themselves... it means that I would rather that they play on the edge of danger rather than the relative mundane safety of a tepid performance.
... I also know that many other colleagues have different balances on what they view to be important... sometimes, I wonder if they err too much towards emphasising the technical at the cost of interesting. As I have listened to many student ensembles now, I start to think that they are being driven away from the danger and towards the safety. Of course... you always need a balance between order and chaos... but too much order and safety means that music (classical in particular...) loses that communicative and entertainment edge... and just becomes meaningless and inoffensive mush. Sadly... I think that that is already what most audiences and the public at large have come to expect from Classical Music... and that is why we are losing our audiences.
Anyway... enough of that side of things...
... I also had to sit on panels for auditions and assessments. And I have noticed that I definitely tend towards being the dissenting voice on the panels. I tend to prefer the ensembles that have character in performance... even if they are a little scrappier on the technical side. Meanwhile, sometimes I have found that there is a preference for the beautiful... which I tend to describe as meaningless mush.
Again... I am not advocating for complete chaos and lack of technique... but I do think that the balance (especially at higher tertiary study... and even more so in the Classical fields) has swung out of alignment towards the technical.Do we want Classical music to be just inoffensive mush???? I don't think it should be... but maybe I'm in the minority. But I feel like we are training our future colleagues (the students) to favour that sort of thing... just to get a good mark.
On the other hand... maybe this is the training that you need as a student (as I once did...)... and AFTER you leave the confines of study... then you develop that other part? The counter argument to that... well, I see too many professional musicians NEVER developing that part!
I guess that every teacher in a student's learning life will have something different to offer and different ideas about what to focus upon... and that in the end, the student and proto-musician will find their own individual balance. I guess I will be the one that offers my own personal view on what is important in music... and it will be up the young ones to discover what ends up fitting best with their own formative ideas.
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