I'm supposed to be thinking forward to retirement. In an orderly world, eight years from now I would be delivering a sappy speech at a faculty dinner then, engraved punchbowl in hand, making a beeline for the golf links at Rossmoor. All those projects I always meant to do but never had time for—Calculus, founding a sweet and charming little retired-folk chorus, brushing up on my Shakespeare, that sort of thing. As of 2012 I should have my retirement plans pretty well in order, 401K cruising along the last miles towards maturity, my Rossmoor deposit made.
Nuts to all that. My life in music has taken a sharp left turn over the past decade, so instead of sliding gently into tribal-elder status, I find that I need to be more flexible, more absorbent, more able to take on new challenges, than ever before. Undergrad and grad school were nothing compared to the intellectual demands of the present. No slacking, no sitting back with the self-satisfaction of a reasonably successful and mostly past-tense career. Nope. I'm living pedal to the metal, challenged and exhilarated and not allowed much in the way of vegetative time in my middle-aged garden.
Those of us who have been in the teaching saddle for a good long while know how easy it is to sink down into the absolute security of knowing every word of our chosen textbooks, of evaluating every conceivable solution to every problem in our workbooks, of possessing fat reams of teaching materials that free us from ever having to cough up another handout, should that be our pleasure. The questions may be new to our kids, but we've heard them all before. Our mental carpetbag filled with tried-and-true, taste-tested and foolproof answers, we've got life at the front of the room down pat.
The time for acquiring significant amounts of new material is long past for most teachers in my age group. We can teach sonata-allegro form from rudiments to subtle tonal distinctions using our decades-long experience with our chosen Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn and Schubert movements, enough to last for years. We've got our chosen First Rondos and Second Rondos and Sonata-Rondos that we know like the back of our hands. Variations, ostinatos, fugues, canons: got 'em all, right here in this notebook. Bonafide unarguable urlinie descents from ^5? Let's start with the Sarabande from the D Minor French Suite, shall we? Examples of Neapolitan relationships, common-tone diminished seventh chords, thirds relationships, hidden serial techniques, octatonic passages, bitonality, quartal harmonies? That's the blue binder with the half-torn red sticker on the top-left corner. Why are we learning fixed-do solfège instead of moveable-do? Flip through mental Rolodex…here's Answer No. 1, and here's Answer No. 2, and here's Answer-Expressed-As-a-Riddle No. 3. I'm a singer, so why do I have do part-writing? Mental Rolodex again…let's see here…oh, yes: there's the one with the Dumbass Singer Questions.
And yet: I'm absorbing and acquiring new music by the handfuls. That's the upshot of my sharp left turn into a secondary career, the one I call my commentarial career. Looking back I realize that I sowed the seeds of my alter ego years and years ago, once I accepted an offer to teach Music 27: Introduction to Music for UC Berkeley's Fall Freshman Program. That was in 1989, Gott in Himmel. The fellow who suggested me as his replacement figured that I would do what he had done, which was to teach the class for a few years and then move on. But I stayed on. I loved the whole shebang and still do. I learned, I stretched, I experimented, I left my dumb-jock pianist persona behind.
Eventually came my current 'other' life of writing about and speaking on vast gobs of music. Often the assignments push me into areas of music that I may not have explored, or into works that I wouldn't have approached on my own. Sometimes I have wondered if I were up to the challenge, say when the necessity arose of giving a general audience a useable introduction to the Bruckner Fifth Symphony—all ninety some-odd minutes of it—within a half hour. I succeeded. My association with the wonderful Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra has sent me scurrying into previously unknown areas of music history and, given the nature of the orchestra and its well-informed personnel, any slipshod research on my part is swiftly and mercilessly exposed.
That last brings up the common disease Professorius Omnisciens in which a senior faculty member wields such intimidating authority that only an utter fool or fearless warrior would dare to correct said omniscient professor about anything. Working with folks at the PBO and the San Francisco Symphony has done wonders to cure me of what might have wound up a nearly incurable case of an all-too-common ailment. I've been obliged to rethink, retread, revise, rewrite, revoke, rescind, and revisit my statements on a regular basis. Embarrassing sometimes. But therapeutic. Really, really therapeutic.
So I keep on sprinting, constantly learning and absorbing, creating materials and coming up with ways of communicating music to folks of all ages and degrees of experience. It's way cool and has proven surprisingly remunerative as well. But more to the point, it keeps me on my mental tip-toes 24/7. No fluffing my mental couch pillows and dispensing long-rehearsed pearls of sage wisdom from my unassailable perch.
So no faculty dinner and—most importantly—no punchbowl. I'm not about to retire. Not in eight years. Not ever.