Naive and Sentimental Musicians
Nathan Madsen, Director of Conservatory Admission
The American composer John Adams is mostly famous for his operas. He likes to set contemporary ideas and events to music, and, especially when paired up with the visionary director Peter Sellars, he makes a big splash. Instead of Vikings, Gods, or Kings, his characters are Chinese Communists, Atomic Bomb Scientists, and Palestinian Terrorists. (Did I mention he made a splash?)
But for my money his most distinguished and durable work to date is the 1998 orchestral piece “Naive and Sentimental Music.” I believe we have every right to expect it to be the first work in almost 60 years to join the permanent orchestral canon — the last two additions being Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony (1953). There is so much to this piece that merits such distinction. If you hear that it’s coming to an orchestra near you, go and indulge yourself. The piece certainly speaks for itself.
Now you know how I feel about John Adams. So I’ll get to the point already:
Teacher selection.
Huh?
Yes. Teacher selection.
That all-important component in the school selection process for musicians: What kind of teacher will be the right “fit” for me?
Other possible factors — the cafeteria food, the dorms, the practice rooms, the concert hall, the gym facilities, campus architecture, even the library — pale in comparison. (Fortunately Bard stands out on all of these points, so here you can have your cake and eat it too). The only comparable criterion for evaluation is the overall peer level of the music school, as it is difficult to excel if the standard of performance is low, even if the studio teacher is amazing.
And so prospective conservatory students fly around the country, taking sample or advice lessons with teachers on their instruments. Others kill two birds with one stone and take a master class or attend a summer program with faculty that also happen to be on the roster of a school they are considering.
Having a lesson in advance of an audition may prove useful, but it certainly is not essential. It in no way puts the applicant on the “fast track” to admission. If anything, it can have the opposite effect: a 15-minute audition of music prepared over a nine month period of time can, on occasion, make a person sound more fabulous than they really are, and a 60-minute private lesson can uncover more extensive flaws in technique, and show the student to be a very slow learner, and really not up to the rigorous performance demands of highly selective music schools.
Lessons after all the auditions have finished can be critical for making that final decision, once the letters have all gone out and it’s down to one or two or maybe three possibilities. Schools that current Bard Conservatory students have had to choose between include the New England Conservatory, the Juilliard School, Rice University, the Universities of California-Berkeley, Indiana, Michigan, and Southern California, and other dual-degree programs at Peabody/Johns Hopkins, Oberlin College & Conservatory, and Lawrence University. Each of these schools are outstanding institutions, and making a choice between them and the new conservatory here at Bard can be difficult. Many accepted students return to Bard’s campus after their audition to weigh what we had to offer against other possibilities, and a lesson with a member of the faculty frequently casts the deciding vote.
So my advice would be to determine first what kind of musician YOU are, and then take that knowledge with you in your search for a teacher that fits your temperament.
And this is where John Adams comes in. Not only is this a great piece of music, but its title refers to a long chain of aesthetic thought that connects all the way back to Freidrich Schiller (yes, the Ode to Joy guy). Adams writes
“Naive” and “sentimental”: I use these two terms knowing they may at first be misunderstood. I mean them not as we commonly interpret them but rather in the sense that Schiller used them in his essay “Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung” (”On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”), a once-influential essay from 1795 which has by now been all but forgotten. Schiller saw essentially two types of creative personalities: “those who are not conscious of any rift between themselves and their milieu, or within themselves; and those who are so concious.” (I quote from Isaiah Berlin, who so succinctly summarizes Schiller’s point of view.) The “unconscious” artists are the naive ones. For them art is a natural form of expression, uncompromised by self-analysis or worry over its place in the historical continuum. “They see what they see directly, and seek to articulate it for its own sake, not for any ulterior purpose, however sublime.” Schiller cites Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes and his own contemporary, Goethe, as examples of the naive. Opposed to this is the sentimental poet whose art “comes about when man enters the stage of culture where the primordial, sensuous unity is gone…The harmony between sense and thinking , which in the earlier (naive) state was real, now exists only as an ideal. It is not in a man, as a fact of life, but outside him, as an ideal to be realized.” The sentimental voice arises when the unity has been broken, and the poet (or composer or painter, etc.) seeks to restore it or, going to the opposite extreme, parodies or satirizes it. In Isaiah Berlin’s words, the sentimental artist “looks for the vanished, harmonious world which some call nature, and builds it from his imagination, and his poetry is his attempt to return to it, to an imagined childhood, and he conveys his sense of the chasm which divides the day-to-day world which is no longer his home from the lost paradise which is conceived only ideally, only in reflection.” For Schiller the poet “is either himself nature (and thereby naïve), or else he seeks nature (and is thereby sentimental).”
It’s clear that in addition to his gifts as a composer, John Adams can also write a decent essay. See? First Year Seminar does come in handy for musicians! It pays to be smart.
So are you a Naive or are you a Sentimental musician? This certainly goes beyond the act of composition into the realm of performance and interpretation. As a cellist, say, did you come to the instrument “naturally,” having started playing before you could ride a bike or write your name? Has playing music always seemed “as natural to me as swimming,” as James Levine once said? Does your interpretation of music come from some inner intuition, developing un-self-consciously? If so, you may consider yourself a Naive musician.
Did you first see or hear someone else play the cello, and the IDEA of it captivated you, leading you to beg your parents to get you a 1/2-sized instrument? Perhaps you saw Yo-Yo Ma on one of his Sesame Street appearances and that’s how you got hooked. And now, you gaze over to your record collection (or, more probably, into your iPod’s playlist) and you see you own the entire standard cello repertory as recorded by Starker, Casals, Fournier, Rostropovich, Ma, du Pre, Harrell, Mork, Bylsma, and Isserlis. You can speak at length on the difference between Fournier’s elegant and Casals’ rustic Bach suites, or the Dvorak concerto as interpreted by all of the above. And your creative life is informed by this tension you feel between the artists of the past and yourself (will ANYONE be able to play Elgar “right” again, since Jackie has claimed it forever as her own?) If so, perhaps you are a Sentimental musician.
Obviously, no one is better than the other. They are different paths to achieve the same ends.
Taking this awareness with you in to the practice room can help you develop better learning habits. And, most importantly, it will help you know the right teacher for you. Some teachers are extremely analytical, they break things down into the smallest particle of knowledge. They may even compose a treatise to explain their method in painstaking detail.
Other teachers actually want you to “perform” for them in the lesson. They want you to figure all the nitty-gritty (breathing, articulation, bowings, fingerings, phrasing) out on your own, and bring something in that’s polished, and near-performance ready. They then talk overall structure, philosophy, interpretation, the Big Picture. They may have a thing or two to say about technique — try second finger here, or have you considered going to the b-flat horn two notes earlier? — but it’s certainly not the focus of the lesson. These kinds of teachers may even employ teaching assistants to handle the technical work, giving them the freedom to focus on that Big Picture.
Many — most — teachers blend some elements of the Naive and Sentimental. Later on in his essay Adams warns
Like all dichotomies Schiller’s can be taken too far and become strained, even ridiculous. But as a novel way of looking at artistic behavior and at the creative process his distinction is a provocative one and for me more illuminating than the more familiar polarities we so often encounter at concerts and art openings: “Classical vs. Romantic”, “Apollonian vs.Dionysian”, “Modern vs Postmodern”, and so forth.
But there is some use to applying the Naive/Sentimental dichotomy to your own identity as an artist and as a human being. And, when considering teachers, an awareness of these artistic tendencies can inform your own search for that perfect “fit.”