by WILLIAM ANDERSON
UNDERSTANDING MUSIC
CREATION'S infinite wisdom saw fit to favor mankind with an equally infinite number of talents, and one of the strangest of them was dropped on a friend of mine.
He not only had perfect pitch, but could identify by name, at the drop of a stylus, any piece of music he had ever heard before-no time limit, and once was enough. Though unexploited, the gift made him a natural for Clifton Fadiman's old Information Please radio show, TV's later $64,000 Question farce, or any college music department's "Music Appreciation" exam. Perhaps, in the infinite "survival-value" scheme of things, this wild talent was not totally wasted, even though it was paired with an almost complete indifference to music-there was no "appreciation." Charity compels me to say as much for "music appreciation" courses themselves: they may, in the end, be doing some good that is not apparent to me even though all their graduates seem to burst through the doors when school's out militantly unappreciative and deter mined never to subject themselves to the torture of Beethoven again.
My own experience has led me to conclude that music appreciation courses are, in the educationist jargon of the moment, "counterproductive": rather than teaching people to love music, they teach them to despise it. But pedagogues must love challenges, for they quite often find themselves trying to teach subjects that cannot be taught to students who are incapable of learning them. Principal among such subjects, I believe, is "appreciation" of the arts, whether it be of painting, sculpture, poetry, music, or dancing. Though educators would not (I hope) encourage the clumsy to seek a career in ballet, the color-blind to paint, the tone-deaf to compose, or the inarticulate to enter politics, the egalitarian imperative does apparently impel them, against all evidence, to keep right on plugging indiscriminately when it comes to the lookers and the listeners.
All the evidence I have ever seen (or heard) argues to me that there is a hierarchy of talent in the arts, starting with the creators, down through the performers, and ending with the appreciators (since there are hierarchies within hierarchies, critics good critics, that is-will be found at the head of the appreciators). The operative word, as indicated, is "talent": we cannot create a Beethoven or a Schnabel by mere pedagogy, and we cannot create someone to appreciate them either. Which is not to say that a particular talent-composing, performing, listening-cannot be both discovered and developed; merely that it cannot be made to grow where it is not. This, I think, is what "music appreciation" courses try to do: the whole freshman class is compelled (is Mus. Appr. ever elective?) to memorize a definition of sonata form, the first measure of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (together with key signature), and the "surprise" in Haydn's 94th (in G, of course) to prove, at course's end, that they have learned to "appreciate." Was ever anything more fiendishly anti-musical devised by the mind of man? We are gathered here in a rather special classroom: we meet once a month, there are (so far) upwards of 375,000 "students," and the course is entirely elective. More significant, however, is the fact that, though the subject is music, we are not here to "appreciate." That we already do, in our various ways, for Music has already discovered our listening talents, is already filling us with her unique pleasures. ,For some, those pleasures, unexamined, are enough, and they are here merely to discover where and how they can lay hands on more. The impatient minds among us, however, are looking a little beyond that for some insight into how Music's pleasures are created, how her effects are accomplished. It therefore gives me a great deal of pleasure to inform them that STEREO REVIEW'S own Guide to Understanding Music, produced for us by David Randolph, Music Director of the Masterwork Music and Art Foundation, is now available. It has been several years in the preparation, and we think it does a difficult job splendidly. Read all about it on page 122.
------------
Also see: