There’s a critical scene in the well-loved movie Dead Poets Society in which the schoolmaster of Chelton Academy, played by veteran character actor Norman Lloyd, counsels the young English Lit professor John Keating (the irrepressible Robin Williams.) It seems that Keating has been going overboard in encouraging his young charges to view the study of literature as a gateway to personal transformation, and to take extensive emotional and intellectual risks along the way. All of which seems inspirational enough, except that high school students are too young and inexperienced to handle all that risk-taking wisely. “Freethinkers at seventeen, John?” asks the headmaster. “Prepare them for college, and let the rest take care of itself.”
Even if headmaster Nolan is presented as an overbearing fuddy-duddy who embodies repressive tradition, in this case he’s bang-on correct. Keating’s approach is not only ill-informed but dangerous. The film marches courageously into darker realms when one of Keating’s students, distraught over his father’s heavy-handed micro-management of his life, commits suicide. Although Keating is not directly responsible, it’s clear that without his influence, the boy would still be alive. Thus Keating becomes the sacrificial lamb and is dismissed from his position.
I found that last part of the film to be leaden and unconvincing, even preachy. But up to the moment of Keating’s quietly civilized yet menacing debate with headmaster Nolan, Dead Poets Society deftly illustrates that young minds must grow naturally and gradually, without undue disturbing influence. The lion’s share of a teacher’s job is to stand back and let your students sail their pedagogic ship of state, while you hover nearby, your hand always poised to grasp hold of the tiller. It’s much like being a parent, allowing enough leeway, freedom, and encouragement blended with enough discipline, boundaries, and non-negotiable responsibility.
Which brings me to my underlying idea, or thesis as my seventh-grade English teacher would say, which is that young musicians—especially composers—must acquire abundant amounts of basic technique from the onset, even if they howl, scream, and struggle the whole way along. It is disingenuous, even irresponsible, to encourage them to develop a personal style or a distinctive voice while they’re still in the musical equivalent of short pants. The personal style comes after they can write a decent phrase, a decent song form, a decent rondo and sonata-form movement and fugue. Or, to be more precise, they have written a lot of decent phrases, song forms, rondos, sonata-form movements, and fugues. After that, they need to write plenty of examples in octatonic, pentatonic, and synthetic modes. They should learn to handle serial techniques with at least a semblance of grace, and cough up a minimalist work or two that doesn’t sound cobbled together on GarageBand. They must write all manner of technique-building stuff, all under the firm guidance of a teacher who will insist on impeccable voice-leading, correct chord spellings, and sturdy structures. Your cadence is unconvincing. This phrase expansion isn’t working; why is that? The stem goes UP. This chord is spelled C-Eflat-Aflat. Do NOT spell it C-Dsharp-Aflat. You’re trying to write a real answer when you need a tonal one. And perhaps most important: This one’s OK but you can do better. Put it away and start a new one, in fact two new ones; here are the fugue subjects and bring me your completed fugues by Friday.
No piano teacher with half an ounce of skill would ever dream of skipping a student’s technical development. Scales, arpeggios, finger exercises, and plenty of études are primary requirements. Generations of keyboard teachers know that need all too well, with a panoply of technical studies available as a result: Pischna, Clementi, Czerny, Hanon, Cramer, Moscheles, Phillippe, and Joseffy, not to mention those loftier regions inhabited by the études of Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy. It’s all there and it must be used. Every piano teacher knows that, and every piano teacher does that.
The compositional world has its own versions of Czerny et al. Old texts such as the Gradus ad Parnassus of Fux might have been supplanted by newer tomes, but the materials are there to be used. The progression is time-honored and familiar: counterpoint starting with basic species, moving through canons and choral works, then into inventions, sinfonias, and fugues. All by the yard, and all until thoroughly mastered. Basic structures: 4-bar phrases, 8-bar periods, 16-bar periods, proper two-part song forms followed by good three-part song forms. Then into the larger homophonic forms: three-part Rondo, five-part, sonata forms, sonata-rondo forms, hybrid forms. But only after each stage in the process has been mastered. You still can’t beat the old Percy Goetschius books for those, exhaustive and prescriptive and bitchy though they are. Use ‘em; master ‘em; memorize them.
But instead we have students writing what they feel far too soon, students trying to develop a personal idiom far too soon, students cast adrift in the overwhelming vastness of contemporary music and its broad acceptance of anything and everything, their very ability to discern between quality and shoddiness deeply compromised by the traumas of the twentieth century and the academic lockstep of the post-WWII era. Teachers are so anxious to find something good to say that they aren’t willing to proclaim that this kid needs to go back and learn how to write a decent 8-bar period. The abiding fear of the contemporary academic composer is to be viewed as out of step with the free-wheeling exuberance of the present.
Which is a shame, because that contemporary academy is producing functionally illiterate composers. All the digital magic in the world cannot cover up sub-par technique, nor can all the fancy descriptions, nor can all the world-music imports, nor can all the glitzy instrumental sound effects. Technique is technique is technique and its lack shows in something as simple as writing a D-sharp instead of the appropriate E-flat. Get that right first, and everything else that needs to be gotten right first, then get on with the business developing a personal voice. Learn to write before you get all hot to create.
Freethinkers at seventeen, indeed. Or twenty-one, for that matter.