Thursday, July 25, 2013

THE BOND: Examining the special relationship between music student and teacher

BY ADAM PARKER

By the time I earned my undergraduate degree in music performance, I was pretty much committed. The next step was conservatory. I auditioned at four of them and was accepted by three. I chose the Manhattan School of Music, in part because of its location, but mostly because a renowned voice teacher, Margaret Hoswell, had expressed interest in adding me to her selective studio.
Hoswell was in ill health at the time (this was 1987), and she gave lessons at her home on West End Avenue, a 25-minute walk from the school.
I considered myself lucky. I worked hard to please Hoswell. I wanted to prove to her that her selection of me was justified. Besides, she was the gatekeeper, the person who could open the door to the world of professional music-making and push her students through it. She wielded terrific power.
Imagine my distress when, halfway through my first semester, the 57-year-old Hoswell suddenly died, leaving her students in the hands of an assistant. The assistant was talented, but he did not possess the key to the door that led to a performance career.
Unhappy at the school, I took a semester off to think things through, then re-entered the program in January 1989 as a vocal student of Theodor Upmann, a Metropolitan Opera baritone who had famously performed in Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd” years before but was now unequivocally over the hill. He was not a very good teacher either. And, it turned out, he, too, did not possess the key.
I relay all this in an attempt to convey the importance to a young musician of a certain kind of teacher, one who regularly performs — or at least once had a flourishing career — and occupies that rarefied space between academia and the professional world. Students intent on launching a career as a performer seek out these teachers first and foremost.
The three-way relationship between teacher, student and school is complex and unusual. For we are not discussing a typical course of study here — biology, say, or engineering, or comparative literature. For musicians, relationships are everything; and they often are long-lasting and multifaceted, fraught with emotion and subject to the fluctuations of loyalty, attitude and studio dynamics.
In the wake of the Enrique Graf imbroglio, in which the famed piano teacher and performer resigned from the College of Charleston amid allegations of sexual harassment, it is helpful to understand how this world works — the use (and misuse) of power, the unusual terms (often unofficial) by which schools and teachers abide and the special student-teacher relationship, unique to musicians.

Finding the right teacher
Performers encountered over the years, and several interviewed for this story, all have emphasized the importance of the teacher as someone who provides not only musical instruction but personal and emotional support.
“I take it for granted that the teacher will be intimate and personally involved,” said Pedro Uceda, a pianist who teaches at Charleston Academy of Music and has studied with several important teachers in the U.S., France and his native Peru.
Most of his teachers were “motherly” or “grandmotherly” or paternal, Uceda said.
Eunjoo Yun, director of the Charleston Academy of Music, came to Charleston to study with Graf. He made an effort to get to know Yun and assist her in many ways, from finding housing to getting through non-music classes successfully, she said. He also helped secure travel money for her when she had a chance to study abroad and, later, played an important role in developing her music academy.
This kind of involvement is not uniform among teachers, but it is common, these and other musicians said.
Music is the only field of study that requires regular and extended one-on-one interaction between student and teacher. Other kinds of professors might work with a student for a semester or two, and almost always in the company of others.
When it comes time for a serious music student to attend university or a conservatory, finding the right teacher is usually the most important priority.
Micah McLaurin, an 18-year-old Charleston pianist who Graf had taken under his wing, is now off to the Curtis Institute, one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world. McLaurin auditioned for three other schools — New England Conservatory, Juilliard and the Cleveland Institute — all of which have excellent piano faculty. In the end, he said, he chose Curtis because of its reputation, the full scholarship it offered him and, mostly, the teacher he would study with, Robert McDonald.
“I knew I wanted to work with him,” McLaurin said, adding that finding the right teacher is the most important imperative when assessing a school.
The teacher-student bond is unlike most academic relationships.
“If they like you, you start to develop a close working relationship, because both rely on each other to help each other,” McLaurin said. Teachers open professional doors (and increase their own prestige when their students succeed). “Sometimes a teacher will really fight for you, try to get opportunities for you.”

Special relationships
Because well-known teachers lend their name and fame to the institutions with which they are affiliated, those schools often grant them special dispensation. In exchange for the rise in institutional prestige and the gain of talented students drawn to the school because of the faculty member, famous music teachers are treated differently than regular professors.
They are expected to maintain a studio of private students first and foremost, not teach in the classroom. Sometimes they are often granted tenure more quickly than others. They can be exempted from extensive committee service, especially at conservatories. They are encouraged (or at least permitted) to travel and perform, even during the school year. They are offered opportunities to bring special guests to campus, to start concert series and to collaborate with community groups, often in very public ways.
The benefits go both ways — teachers can bolster their reputations through such affiliations and have access to valuable facilities and resources; they get job security — but it’s the school that stands to gain the most, according to those interviewed for this article.
My teacher, Hoswell, never set foot inside the Manhattan School of Music. She taught only from her apartment, and to my knowledge did nothing else for the conservatory.
The special relationship between teacher and school contributes to an environment in which power is regularly put to use, often well, sometimes inappropriately. Fame is synonymous with power, and to maintain one’s reputation, it is inevitable that celebrated teachers will exercise their influence in order to reinforce their favored positions.
It is not inevitable that that power will be abused, but preventing such abuse, when it happens, can be challenging given the unusual dynamics involved and the inherent leeway granted teachers by the institution.
Robert Jesselson, a cello professor at the University of South Carolina, participates actively in his department’s administrative activities, “doing all kinds of nitty-gritty work running the school,” but he knows many colleagues, especially part-time instructors, artists-in-residence and conservatory faculty, who don’t, he said.
In some ways, teaching music at a university is harder than teaching other subjects, Jesselson said. The professor must provide personal instruction and maintain a performance career. There are no graduate students to fill in.
“In order to fulfill our professional duties we need to be out there performing,” he said. “That means being away sometimes.”
The student-teacher relationship is based on trust, he said. “It’s a special kind of old-fashioned relationship” that involves one-on-one teaching and is based on the mentor-apprentice model.
“It gives opportunities to the student to have all kinds of exposure to professionals in the field,” he said. “It also gives opportunities to the teacher to get to know students really, really well. So I’m more than just a cello teacher to the students. I’m a mentor, a guide. Various young people go through growing situations, even crises, that they need help getting out of.”
Jesselson said he has only 20 students, unlike many professors who might lecture to hundreds.
“I feel very fortunate to be able to teach in this kind of a setting,” he said. “And students are very fortunate to be able to have this kind of interaction with someone further along in his career and able to guide them.”

Hungry for experience
It may be impolitic to admit, but artists can be moody, insecure and emotional, perhaps more so than your average, say, banker or architect. Musicians must cope with terrific stress, and they depend on others to achieve any sort of success. That dependence can lead to questionable behavior in a world defined by intense human relationships.
I remember in college asking my piano accompanist out on a date only to discover a short time later that the reason she demurred was because she was dating my voice teacher. I recall, too, the dubious reputation for sexual exploits of the opera workshop teacher at my conservatory.
Young music students are hungry for experience and often emotionally needy; they turn to their teachers for support and help. They share their insecurities, expose raw feeling and struggle to achieve.
Once, in opera workshop, a soprano broke down in tears in the middle of an aria. She had touched an emotional chord, pulled up some painful memory that wouldn’t allow her to go on. The teacher was full of enthusiasm. “Yes! Yes!” he proclaimed. “That’s it! Go with the feeling!”
Music is all about that: plumbing the soul and expressing emotion. That’s what makes it personal. That’s what enables it to convey the full range of human joy and pain.
A certain vulnerability is essential if the musician is to communicate anything honest and real. Teachers know that. And they must persuade their students to believe it and let go.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Book review: 'Wash' clears view of America's greatest sin

BY ADAM PARKER
 

"WASH." By Margaret Wrinkle. Atlantic Monthly Press. 405 pages. $25.

Among America’s biggest problems is its failure to come to terms with its greatest sin: slavery.
We know the wound is insufficiently healed. We see its legacy every day in the way forms of racism persist. And we watch, often too passively, as some among us act to prevent healing — exemplified most profoundly by the common attitude that “the past is the past,” that the great-great grandchildren of slave owners cannot be held responsible for the actions of their ancestors, that blacks should just get over it already.
We know, of course, that these arguments are attempts, sometimes deliberate, sometimes subconscious, to evade the truth. And the truth is: We need much more of it, along with a lot of reconciliation. Maybe this can eventually happen. Maybe not. Meanwhile, the wound festers. Consider the Trayvon Martin case.
So it comes as a terrific surprise — a shock really — to read Margaret Wrinkle’s novel “Wash,” which is all about slaves and slave owners in the early years of the new Republic. It is a graceful book filled with the brutality of slavery and the humanity of those involved. It does not avoid the truth. It does not cut corners.
It presents people in full dimension and in context, showing how slavery was a complicated and perverse phenomenon that easily educed the evil in some people, but could not simply be dismissed as a mere distortion of history. An entire economic system, a whole culture depended on it. If you were unfortunately enough to be born into this system and culture, whether black or white, you were pretty much stuck.
This is not to say that the abolitionist pursuit was either misguided or futile (Wrinkle touches on it in her novel). Many thoughtful people fought against slavery, and that opposition succeeded in chipping away at the institution, at instilling doubts among its believers. Eventually, it won the day.
Let’s admit right off that writing novels about slavery is a difficult endeavor indeed. Few have succeeded in conveying the nature of the system while simultaneously presenting believable and sympathetic characters, and I can’t think of any written by a white person that have managed this feat.
But this did not stop Wrinkle, a native of Birmingham, Ala., who grew up with an intimate knowledge of unresolved racial issues. The title “Wash” reflects the name of its slave-protagonist, Washington, but it also might be an allusion to the writerly effort to scrub the grime from the issues so they may be seen clearly. The story is set in the early 1800s, in Western Tennessee, which saw an expansion of the domestic slave trade as settlers ventured forth into the country’s heartland, and it presents characters engaged in a particularly distasteful aspect of slavery: human breeding for commercial purposes.
Wash is the child of a captured African woman purchased in Charleston by the soldier-landowner Richardson. He lends Mena to his friend Thompson, a humane recluse who takes the young African with him to a remote North Carolina island, where he chooses to live out his remaining days.
Mena, it turns out, is pregnant. On the island she gives birth to Wash (named by Thompson) and steadfastly holds onto her culture and heritage, passing her knowledge slowly and surely to her young son. Thompson tolerates the “mojo,” affording Mena and Wash plenty of slack.
His interest in Mena is colored by affection. In one particularly lovely sequence in which Thompson discovers her pregnancy, he teaches her how to swim:
“Soon as she lay back, soon as her dark billowy dress lay drenched against her front, I saw her belly for the first time. It reared up so round, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. She was good and pregnant. Five months by my best guess. My mouth dropped open as she lay there floating in my palm but she kept her eyes on the clouds. Wouldn’t look at me but she started breathing shallow just like I’d showed her. When I took my hand away, she floated on her own.”
Eventually, the old man dies. Mena and Wash are claimed by Thompson’s two brutal sons and put to work on a Tennessee plantation.
Wash finds the adjustment very difficult. He has grown up to be a hard-headed outsider, unwilling to forfeit his “African” or forget his ancestors. He is tall, dark, handsome, mysterious, and he strikes fear in his fellow slaves who hug their Christian bible and worry about anyone too reluctant to cast his eyes downward in the presence of whites.
This gets him a load of trouble, and Wrinkle renders it with all the violence and cruelty it demands, but without excess, always attuned to the context and history of the time.
The story is told from the differing perspectives of its main characters; Wrinkle writes mostly in the first-person, shifting quickly from one to another, but she also inserts sections written in the third person. It’s a testament to her achievement that this mashup unifies into a cohesive, flowing narrative. The reader is pulled along, eager to understand what is going through the minds of each of these fascinating people. It is perhaps first and foremost a sweeping psychological portrait, a lesson in how people under stress adapt, how they connect with one another even when forces beyond their control regularly tear them to shreds.
“It’s always the dead who got to stretch out to the living,” Wash says. “You get so you can read a living man’s mind. See straight into his heart. But what you got to tell him ain’t always what he wants to hear, and the living can be some kind of hardheaded, acting blind to us even when we could save em some real time and trouble. But some things stay slow to learn and I know it can seem easier to slog on the hard way. I remember making that exact same choice myself.”
We learn about Richardson’s ambivalence toward slavery, his dependence on Wash, both for commercial gain and human interaction. We learn about African traditions and how they were tenuously conveyed to the U.S. and into the hearts and minds of those able to listen. We learn about the dysfunctional dynamics among slave communities and between whites and blacks. Above all, we enter the minds of Wash, Mena, Pallas and Rufus, each clinging hard to their African identities in the face of overwhelming odds.
To read about how the young Pallas, destined eventually to become an accomplished medicine woman and companion of Wash, was sequestered in an isolated cabin for the purpose of providing sexual relief to the young sons of a slave owner, how she emerged nearly dead inside but somehow found the strength (and the help) to reclaim her soul, is to come face to face with just one of the terrible legacies we have yet to confront fully as a society. It is a particularly heartbreaking passage in this remarkable book, yet full of hope and humanity.
Or there is the story of Rufus the blacksmith, who takes the young Wash under his wing. After the woman he loves is sold away, he descends into a pit of alcoholism and depression, never to emerge whole again.
And there is Wash himself, confused by the changing circumstances into which he has been thrust, yet eloquent and insightful at the same time. The character is fully-formed, endearing and sympathetic. He grows and learns, sometimes fretfully, “falling back into the grip of his story,” sometimes with such grace and poetry the reader is left trembling.
“It was pretty soon after that day when my time came for me,” Wash recounts. “I guess living full on like I did wore me out. I’d learned not to let my anger light me up so bad, and Pallas stayed steady helping me smooth my edges. But still, my day came much sooner than I thought it might. ... It came right on me out of the clear blue sky. Didn’t have no time to fight it. Felt myself lifted up out of myself, like I’d felt plenty of times before, but I could tell this time was something different. I could tell this time I wasn’t coming back, so I turned my eyes to Pallas.”
The reader, privy to the immense psychological and physical abuse Wash must endure, is left marveling at how his mind and soul can have remained intact. In the end, it was his heart that gave out.
Wrinkle renders all of this with a carefully simplified language that somehow rings true. She is concerned less with capturing the precise nuances of actual speech and more with finding a way to reveal authentic thoughts, ideas, expressions. Her special vernacular is perhaps the key that unlocks this Pandora’s Box without permitting the furies of slavery to fly off in all directions. Instead they swirl and churn before us, contained by the intelligence of the writer and the beauty of her novel.
It seems to me that “Wash” achieves something extraordinary: a full-fledged confrontation with one of the most difficult aspects of our nation’s history. With a careful, thoughtful application of her pen, Wrinkle has given us an honest and important expression of hope. She has illuminated the darkness of slavery and invited us to explore it as the accomplices we surely are.
With “Wash,” Wrinkle has given us a firm foothold that leads in the direction of truth and reconciliation. We would do well to take this step. And to thank her for her help.