1.4 The Heresies – Dangerous Words and Ideas
The Truth/Heresy Conflict
My motive for this book is to offer advanced horn students and horn teachers a contrasting and possibly useful perspective in their search for truly effective learning and teaching tools, as well as strategies.
Why? Because, over the course of my life as a hornist and teacher, I have been confronted—with ever increasing frequency and with an ever-increasing sense of the unavoidable—by the fundamental paradox that the way it’s “supposed to be” is rarely, if ever, the way it actually is. The way the horn is taught is too frequently not the way the horn actually needs to be played.
Huge amounts of traditional horn pedagogy are often misunderstood and misapplied, not only by students but also by their teachers, and what numerous successful professional hornists teach their students is frequently not even what they themselves actually practise. To make matters worse, too frequently neither students nor teachers recognise and admit to the situation.
This problem is particularly relevant for the advanced student and young professional. For beginners and intermediate horn students, addressing this paradox may seem less urgent, as they are most commonly interested in simply making technical progress and tend to see their teachers’ authority and knowledge as irreproachable. Nevertheless, as they advance and mature, these young beginners will encounter the paradox soon enough.
In the course of my teaching over many years I have attempted to address these issues. It has not been enough simply to try to provide students with the tools to teach themselves. I have tried to confront them with the necessary challenge of accepting ultimate responsibility for their own development, of empowering themselves and freeing themselves from the authority of their teachers, even freeing themselves from the support and inspiration of their mentors, accepting that finally they have to be able to work it out for themselves.
The contents of this book are therefore a distillation of the sorts of things I have been telling horn students around the world in private lessons and master classes over the past 35 years or more. I describe “truths” which I myself have been forced to accept about the learning and teaching of the horn, “truths” which however frequently conflict with conventional or “received” thinking and assumptions. For many readers then, these ideas may indeed appear to be heresies.
I therefore chose “Horn Heresies” as my working title, with the specific aim of trying to be at least a little controversial, and with any luck, this will also turn out to be something more than just a simple polemic—or rant.
My goal is to instigate, to provoke, to invite a new discussion, a re-examination of traditional and conventional horn pedagogy by both teachers and students. Some may feel that I shall be aiming a lot of criticism at a lot of people in the horn world, but I fully expect criticism to come my way too. That will be only natural and fair, and ideally, will be part of what I hope may become a useful and productive debate.
If we look first at the word education, whose roots are found in the Latin ex ducare, “to lead out”, then we shall see that all we teachers can, and indeed really should aspire to is to help our students discover what is inside them and to provide them with useful tools for their journey of learning.
Although I have made every attempt to escape being seen by my own students as any kind of “guru”, I have also had to accept the fact that many students seek exactly that in their teachers. I believe that the most constructive and at the same time benign role a teacher can assume in response is one that is also imbued with enormous responsibility, namely that of mentor.
Furthermore, we must accept that even though we are motivated by real concern for horn students and their future, we teachers are in the end fallible and none of us is more than partially qualified.
Ultimately, it will be up to the student himself to decide whether or not he succeeds and how he chooses to do it. I could not agree more with the noted Spanish trombonist Ricardo Casero who put it: “All successful players are, in the end, self-taught.”
You must BLOW YOUR OWN HORN!
Why Do We Need Teachers?
An interesting memory comes up if I cast my mind back to those halcyon days of childhood when I would return home from my weekly horn lesson and meet up with my two younger sisters who had just had their ballet class. Our mother would ask us what we had learned that day. I remember how the girls could always name a new movement they had learned and then attempt to demonstrate it, whereas I sat somewhat confounded, unable to come up with anything more coherent than, “today I learnt NOT to....”
It seemed to me that the business of learning the horn was more an UN-learning, a process of intuitive discovery of the essentials, a kind of reduction, like peeling an onion or unwrapping a present to get inside at the contents. Learning backwards? I loved music and I loved playing tunes on my horn. This way of learning did not conflict with that great, simple pleasure, and it seemed easy.
Later however, as a teenager, I abandoned this childish innocence and sought to learn the horn in the grown-up, logical, mechanical (forward?) mode of learning we are taught in schools. I came into contact with other young horn students and, collectively we yearned to “build up” our techniques. Although we never lost our passion for the music, our technical obsession seemed to divorce us from music. Sure, we loved attending live concerts, we collected LPs obsessively and our horn-playing heroes enthralled us. But we all began to believe that musical fulfilment was only achievable through technical prowess, which in turn seemed to be a strange, magical mix of athletics and sports science. Unfortunately our teachers could not (or would not) convince us otherwise and it all became much more difficult than it had to be.
Student and Teacher: Who is Who?
The healthy human infant develops spoken language ability without any conscious, intellectually based, pedagogical effort on the part of surrounding adults. He does not “learn” but rather “acquires” language. Certainly little about language is “taught” until the school years begin. So is the infant his own gifted teacher, or is he a phenomenal student?
Language acquisition by children (up to perhaps 3 years of age) requires the parents talking to and looking at them. Speaking naturally, as well as story telling, demonstrates to them a sense of intonation and sentence structure. They mimic this and begin to develop the ability to communicate with their language.
However learning a new language in an academic manner (“book-learning”) actually results in inhibited speech ability and results only in a kind of “book-speaking”. Comprehension ability exceeds communication ability.
With respect to classical music and young students, concentrating first on their technique at the expense of making music, is like “book learning” and achieves at best merely competent instrument-operation and mere music reproduction, NOT musical communication. Young musicians taught this way are in danger of not developing the ability to communicate in the language of music, and mastering their instruments becomes much more difficult than it need be.
I imagine that in an ideal world there would be no need to actually “teach” the horn. Youngsters would simply watch and listen to their “teachers” playing their horns, acquiring the new language and all of the necessary motor skills by the same processes they used to acquire spoken language: listening and imitating.
Assuming that the “teacher” really can play the horn both well and musically, has enough stamina, and that both he and the student have enough time, I wager not one word need be uttered in the course of the lesson. Only when the need to read music notation occurs—if it occurs—would the parallel to becoming language-literate pertain. At this point conventional “teaching” might indeed have to begin. Note, though, that I refer here to music literacy and not horn technique. (The number of successful and creative but music-illiterate rock and jazz musicians is enormous. And what of the uncounted folk musicians across the planet, technical masters of their particular musical instruments and accomplished performers but who are unable to read music notation?)
The young toddler making his first “self-taught” efforts in language learns by experiment, by trial-and-error, listening acutely to vocal sounds, gradually identifying their functions in their communicative context, while attempting to control his own air and manipulate his own mouth to re-create these same sounds. He is able to use only his own ears to judge how close he gets to the “real thing”. Children who are born deaf encounter enormous difficulties trying to acquire language skills, precisely because they cannot hear. They can neither hear their role models nor can they judge their own efforts.
Unfortunately my experience as a student, player and teacher of the horn forces me to admit the sorry fact that we simply don’t listen closely enough to what is coming out of the bell of the instrument. If we did, we would actually have all the information we need. But since we don’t, can’t, and often are not allowed to listen, we turn to others for help: to teachers. In so doing, we surrender our most potent learning tools, our own ears, and become dangerously—yes—dangerously dependent on these, our teachers. And we actually handicap ourselves.
Horn methods at best shouldn’t be truly necessary and at worst can be outright confusing, if not damaging. All of them—including this one—should be seen as suspect.
Philip Farkas, one of the most influential American horn teachers of the last fifty years, said late in life—and only half-jokingly —that he thought he might have done more damage than good with his famous books The Art of French Horn Playing and The Art of Brass Playing. Although he laughed ironically while making this statement, Farkas was also obviously quite sincere. He was pointing to what is perhaps the most intractable problem in teaching the horn, the fact that too many horn students are dangerously good horn students. They are too ready to obediently swallow everything teachers dish out as truth.1
And what if these truths are only opinions?
The Three Blind Wise Men and the Elephant
There is a wonderful fable that is common to many venerable Asian cultures, whether Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim. It is the story of the three learned, wise, but blind spiritual men who encounter an elephant for the first time, and who argue amongst themselves about the true nature of the beast.
The first teacher touches the trunk and pronounces that in truth an elephant is most like a python. The second touches an ear and claims that the elephant is like a giant fan. The third touches the leg and is convinced that an elephant is like a tree. In some versions of this fable, the learned men actually descend to fighting over their differing points of view.
The lesson is in fact, that they are all three correct, but only as far as their own individual perceptions go. And all three learned but blind wise men are unable to “see” the big picture, the totality.
This is the fate of teachers.
We try to do our best. Whether we only suggest to our students, or ideologically insist, we do so from a personal, subjective and limited point of view. None of us can ever describe “the whole picture”.
I fear it may indeed be true that we horn teachers and method writers generally can do more damage than good. But having said that, I hasten to add that it is of course not the teacher’s fault. It is not amateurish, flawed theories and unqualified teaching that ruin young hornists. Ultimately it is the students themselves who permit it to happen!
Now to be fair, the reverse corollary should of course also apply: whether they like it or not, successful students will owe less to their teacher(s) than they would like to be true.2 And while the students must ultimately bear the responsibility for their own development, it is the teachers who should probably shoulder the blame for preventing their students from doing just that.
We horn teachers may contradict and be hostile to one other. We may be abusive to our students. We may tell them to their faces that they will never make it as hornists and eject them from our studio. Some of us will even admit that we have no idea how to help our students. But virtually no teacher will actually try to PREVENT his students from progressing on the horn.
We teachers like to think we know what we’re talking about and students also like to believe we know what we are talking about. Well maybe we do and maybe we don’t. After all, we are only human.
Students trust us too much. They constantly hope that the next teacher they visit will be the one with the “magic bullet” that will fix all their problems. If their own discoveries reveal something that impugns the authority of their teacher, even if the idea works, they are prone to doubt themselves first. After all, they are only human.
And yet, although a thousand different teachers will describe it a thousand different ways, we still all play the horn basically the same way—and it is not at all complicated. The more students have contact with different teachers, the sooner they will see this.
Nevertheless quite a few teachers actually discourage their students from taking lessons from different teachers, arguing that they will become confused.
About what? About whom they “belong to”?
If we never cease trying to “sing”, to phrase on our instrument, and if we use our own ears to honestly compare the sound(s) we are making with “the tune in our heads”, we shall discover that we can in fact take charge of our own learning.
We shall then be in a position to take advantage of all the ideas, suggestions and critiques available to us from all those actually very useful resource people, people otherwise known as teachers. And rather than being confused by conflicting pieces of helpful advice, or dogma, we shall be able to start making the necessary connections for ourselves, we shall cease “not seeing the forest for the trees”.3
Permission and Authority
A Warning to Students:
If it is important for you that the authority and credibility of your teacher should remain intact, if you believe your own observations might be suspect (whether or not they seem to produce results) if they reveal something that impugns the authority of your teacher(s), then there will not be much point in reading further. You are not going to be comfortable with my opinions.
If you believe that horn technique can be successfully separated into constituent parts and that careful, deliberate, technical analysis and diligent practice will lead to the sequentially successful build-up of a complete technique, then you should stop here. I am going to seriously frustrate you.
If you believe that one first needs to acquire sufficient technique before attempting to make music, then this is not for you. Yours is still a flat earth.
When asked once what single attribute an aspiring writer should possess, Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have answered, “a good crap detector”.4
The famous American author’s impertinence and irony are important and anybody travelling the road of inquiry and discovery, not just the would-be writer, will sooner or later find relevance in his answer. Hemingway’s sardonic response also points the way toward some important truths for our subject, the learning and teaching of the Horn.
He challenges us in two ways. In the first, more direct sense, he tells us not to flinch at the prospect that Truth may not always be so self-evident, that we’ll have to dig around a bit, perhaps get our hands a bit soiled with untruths before we’ll be able to tell the difference.
In a second and profoundly more important message, Hemingway warns us that we shall have to do this dirty work ourselves, that there is no higher authority, no final arbiter of truth. Truth passed down “from on high” should be, by nature, suspect and we are going to have to assume the responsibility for making our own discoveries.
Then there is social critic Neil Postman’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity.5 What a title! Five words that speak volumes (and for my purposes the title alone suffices) about the inherent unreliability of “received truth”. The author contends that the only morally justifiable and pedagogically effective form of teaching will be one that encourages the student to ask questions rather than memorise answers; to actively question the status quo, not to dutifully accept it. This places the responsibility for learning in the hands of the learner, not the teacher. A well-chosen title!
None less than Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to have claimed: “It is the student’s duty to surpass his master.”6 This is a fairly straightforward but unsettling statement which, if properly understood and taken to heart, will ultimately require the student to insist upon his own independence and grow away from his teacher, perhaps finally rejecting him and/or even admitting the possibility of competition with him.
And finally, somewhat sombrely but no less wisely, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet mentions an ancient Buddhist teaching: “our enemy can be our greatest teacher”.7
Each and every one of these wise men is actually encouraging us to grow up, to grow out of a subservient “apprentice” mentality, to take charge of our education ourselves, and to become proactive, inquiring, individual explorers. How noble, how encouraging and how inspiring it all sounds.
Why then is it so difficult to restructure the student-teacher relationship and so heretical to dare students to become more self-taught?
We need to start with the fact that many music students, as well as professionals, actually seem to enjoy working in an authoritarian environment. Why might this be?
Perhaps it begins at an unusually early and vulnerable age when many aspiring musicians give themselves (or are given by their parents) into the charge of instrumental teachers who are accorded such unquestioned authority that they often assume quasi-parental status. For children, parents are gatekeepers to a family-based world of values and “truths”. For music students however, a part of the natural relation to their parents can be replaced in some way by the new relationship with the music teacher. And it is these teachers to whom students then turn for authority and answers. The teacher as Über-Father?
It is particularly unhealthy for a student to become too disempowered within such a relationship. The danger is great that he may not fully develop the ability to judge his own individual efforts objectively and independently. While he may easily learn to hear “his master’s voice”, he may never learn to hear his own voice.
Perhaps therefore it is the “lucky” student who ultimately recognises that his teachers don’t actually have all the answers, and who is thus more easily able to break free and move on to establish a more independent way of learning. But how much more difficult must this break for freedom be for the student whose teacher does appear to have the answers! This is particularly relevant in cases where the teacher is also famous.
The successful hornist requires not only psychological toughness and spiritual strength but also independence and almost roguish self-sufficiency. Sooner or later the aspiring hornist must “kick over the traces” and move on, without or even in spite of his teacher.
And regardless of how revered or respected they might be, the highest goal of any teacher should be to achieve his own redundancy.
I am concerned however that much conventional horn-teaching achieves exactly the opposite, namely the production of hornists who are not only identifiable “offspring” of their teachers (not in and of itself necessarily bad) but who also remain dependently bound to their teachers. The least developed or tested part of these hornists’ artistic personalities or outlook may well be that which differs from their teacher’s point of view—and yet it is exactly this part of their personalities that will be such a source of strength and be so vital for a successful life in music performance.
It is of course extremely difficult for students to take the lead in establishing independence of their teachers all by themselves. Trying to seize the steering wheel of a moving car from the driver while sitting in the passenger seat would seem exceedingly reckless and steering from there would certainly be very difficult. Very dangerous also would be opening the passenger door at speed and leaping out.
It falls therefore to the teacher to encourage the student to assume more of this kind of responsibility. Teachers must begin to see themselves not so much as “masters” of their students, but rather as their “advisors”. (Sometimes I think that a good role model for a horn teacher is in fact that of a driving instructor. They have to do it from the passenger seat.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, very few students and even fewer teachers are actually comfortable with this kind of relationship.
Some very powerful forces can influence teachers:
1) Economics:
A hornist who aspires to a teaching career, at for example a university, needs his students to be consistently successful and identifiably similar in style (to the teacher’s). The student must fit the mould because ultimately the teacher’s reputation depends not only on his students’ professional success, but also on limiting divergences from his “school” of playing. In addition, of course, there is the sense of pride and legitimisation all of us experience when one of “our” students succeeds.
For career advancement reasons (particularly invitations to auditions) it is often vital that a student’s C.V. show they have studied with one or more name-teachers. A drawback of this practice however is that it tends to strengthen the hierarchical relationship already endemic between teachers and students. 8
2) Ideology and Ancestor Worship:
Hornists are not alone among musicians when it comes to loyalty to a “school” of playing, and they can become just as chauvinistic or jingoistic as any other instrumentalists when their style of playing is even remotely called into question. There is therefore a frequent tendency to be rather closed-minded and intolerant in these matters. This rigid conservatism can also be a mask—concealing an actual ignorance of why the hornist plays in the way he does. “Did I ever choose this style of playing myself? Was it decided for me? Are there any other styles that appeal to me? And am I in fact free to choose?” Huge numbers of hornists take great pride in their “horn-lineage” and are themselves loathe to depart from the traditions of their horn-playing forbears, let alone to tolerate, aid or abet in a divergence by one of their own students.
3) Pedagogical Insecurity:
I consider this fundamental: it should be remembered that very few horn players set out originally to be horn teachers as such. Nevertheless, as they study and progress, perhaps even achieving some professional success, they eventually find themselves with at least a few students. Not entirely clear if, and how, they had solved their own horn problems, or if not they themselves, not clear about who had solved these problems for them, they are now in turn being looked upon by their own students as “Guardians of the Truth”, “Keepers of the Great Secrets” —something at the same time both flattering and unnerving. Some may even feel a little parent-like.
The most common first reaction is to simply regurgitate everything they can remember from their own now long-ago lessons— after all something must have worked back then for the beleaguered new teacher. Surely it was the work of his own teacher(s), which should therefore be replicated. “Now if only I could remember exactly what that was …. “.
Pedagogical insecurity can in this way result in an unnecessary and counter-productive dogmatic rigidity on the part of an otherwise well-intentioned teacher.
Memory fragments of his own “historic” lessons are often applied to students irrespective of whether they are actually relevant, necessary or appropriate. Furthermore the teacher’s own playing may in turn have acquired completely different aspects to the school he still professes to represent. Blind and deaf to this reality, he might very well not be able to acknowledge any contradictions. His subliminal message will be: “Do as I say, not as I do”.
4) Pedagogical Lethargy
Teaching can be exceedingly tiring, particularly when every student needs individual treatment and support. It simply takes less energy to teach according to a fixed system. The teacher doesn’t have to invest himself so much in each lesson.
An Encouragement to Students:
If you find your thoughts converging with those of teachers (like Hemingway, Postman etc.) who hold the student’s rather than the teacher’s interests to be of ultimate importance, and that it will be unavoidable that the reader seek to establish “an open, flexible, experimental state of mind—a state of curiosity and excitement,” 9 then you must seek out teachers who will let you take back the authority to decide for yourself, to question the status quo, who will help you begin to wield your own “crap-detector” and help you give yourself permission to register your own successes and failures—permission to learn.
Only so, can you the learning hornist begin to listen with your own ears and only so, can you begin to teach yourself to play the horn.
And that will be the time when teachers will be truly challenged: as carers, expert advisors, trainers, musical guides, research sources and mentors.
The Heresies: Dangerous Words and Ideas
So, having already confessed to being a heretic, what specific beliefs of mine are so heretical?
To start with, there are five things I can identify immediately, which are generally accepted as fundamental elements in the pedagogical canon. However they are so often misunderstood and misused that I actually try to avoid them as much as possible. In my own teaching I call them—and only partly facetiously—”The Five Forbidden Words”.
This of course should make a discussion of horn pedagogy exceedingly difficult: how on earth can one talk about horn playing and teaching strategies without addressing such basic fundamentals? Indeed, in simply questioning the legitimacy of these five subjects and attempting to ignore them, I shall, in the eyes of many, already be committing horn heresy.
The chapters in which I deal with them at greater length are indicated in brackets:
And I don’t stop here. I also challenge a further five truisms that unquestioning teachers and students accept as axiomatic. Here, however, I am not quite as isolated in my scepticism and concern. I am comforted by the increasing number of teacher who share my doubts about what we could refer to as five “controversies”.
Here too I indicate the chapters in which they are each discussed at greater length:
1 Discussion with Wilhelm Lanzky-Otto, Eugene Wade and the author, Stockholm 1979. See also 5.1.d “Chops”.
2 There is a cynical but accurate saying that goes: “The teacher takes credit for his student’s success; the student takes the blame for his teacher’s failure.”
3 See 2.6. ”Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees”
4 anecdotal, unsourced
5 Neil Postman et al, Dell, 1974
6 Source unknown
7 Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile—Autobiography—Harper San Francisco, 1991
8 This can also lead to C.V. inflation—pages and pages listing all the famous hornists/teachers the student has visited, often only once—which can lead to a lose/lose situation for the student. Listing either too many, or too few teachers can awaken suspicion on the part of orchestra or audition committees.
9 Ristad, A Soprano on her Head p.6