Music Education

In the heat of the recent events, I lost sight of one of my most important hobby-horses: music education.  My main heroine, Helen Nordstrom, is a professor of music at a (fictitious) Pennsylvania college.  She discovered a wonderful contralto (a mezzo-soprano, actually) on CD, and one Christmas, had been surprised to find herself on the same stage as this woman, Natalia Zemanova, a Czech settled in Paris.  Helen and Natasha become firm friends.  It just so happens that Natasha agrees to sing in a major musical event that Helen has mounted at her school: the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Natasha is singing contralto, and Helen is conducting (to the disappointment of Natasha, who wants Helen to give up this silly conducting, and sing.)

Anyway, during the days preceding the big performance, Natasha finds time to sit in on the classes of Helen and her friends.  Here are a few paragraphs from this episode.

Helen’s class was a revelation.  What Natasha had learned with diligence and hard work at the conservatory in Prague, Helen made simple for these youths.  They took it for granted that the material would be easy, and occasionally complained when it wasn’t obviously so.  In each instance, with infinite patience Helen questioned the student until the idea was clear.  She used the piano, recordings, the chalkboard, everything at her disposal, and by the end of the hour, had convinced the class of the easiness of what she was trying to convey.

Afterwards she confessed that it had been a harder day than usual.
“You work so hard!” said Natasha sympathetically.  “In my conservatory, they would discourage the less talented ones.”  She smiled.  “If you had to teach my classmates and me, it would have been easy for you!”
Helen laughed.  “But out of these unresponsive, complaining lumps of rock will come musicians, parents of musicians, congressmen, senators, voters . . . I need every one of them!  In this country, Tasha, Music can afford no enemies.”

And so it is with everything we teach.  This is why some teachers seem to think that their lives depend on the work they do.  The teacher is the invisible part of the larger picture, the part that everyone loves to vilify.

Kay