Taken from the old website. Original post date: August 15, 2005
Curiosity is a virtue of paramount importance for the musician. Unfortunately, many schools teach the opposite. Many schools stress the importance of knowledge or the act of appearing erudite in an otherwise ignorant world. However, it is curiosity which enabled us to learn thousands of new words per year as children, it is curiosity which fueled our dreams of becoming wealthy and powerful as teenagers, and it is curiosity which led to the achievement of some of the greatest inventions of mankind.
When I finally decided that I had enough of the conformist establishment and packed up all of my belongings and moved to California, I discovered just the power that curiosity can have in the learning of music. It is like the bee that wallows in its nectar, or the nightingale that sings into the darkness of the night.
For example, instead of approaching a new piece of music with a head-on, no-nonsense mentality, why not take a week to just get intensely curious about the first few bars? What is it that we hear between each note, what are the possibilities? If the composer was alive right now, what could he tell us about this work? When we visualize the first few notes being played in our head, is it soothing, comforting, or nerve-wracking and tumultuous?
One of the most inspiring biographies I have ever read is that of Alfred Brendel. Now here’s a man, who took the courage to stop taking piano lessons at an early age and was primarily self-taught. Undereducated – the professors would immediately presume? Anything but. Instead, he created some of the most mature interpretations of Beethoven Sonatas that most university professors could only dream of doing.
Particularly disastrous is hiring a super-star-fleet-commander piano professor who regards himself as the greatest musician alive since the invention of the piano. Many are even fantastic musicians and possess flamboyant, charismatic personalities.
However from my experience, extremely overwhelming teachers should only be used for masterclasses or periods of short time as they have neither the skill, motivation or encouragement to step down from their ‘throne’ and adjust themselves to the particular needs of each student.
A student is almost like a child that needs room to grow and breathe. A child needs a nurturing environment where he can discover his wings for himself, and fly away into the world with his own unique personality – or “poisonality” as they say in New York.
